#This is not particularly original merely a reflection on a fascinating concept (particularly in the older Superman comics I think

[violent138]

I wonder how many arguments a week Lois "the truth at all costs" Lane and Clark "fabricates interviews with himself" Kent had about journalism and the inherent issue of being someone that uncovers the truth while purposefully deceiving people. About the ways that "truth, justice, and the American way" representative Superman violates the rules and ethics regarding evidence, hearsay, bias in the news, and anonymous sources.

Or how many times Clark has tried to get her to bury a story (a few times at least canonically), and Lois had to consider it because he told her the fate of the world relied on it, or that it maximized public good.

[misstallulah]

The Sacrifice of Love: Beyond Memory and Identity

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

In the context of a narrative rich in symbolism and meaning, such as that of Good Omens, a suggestive and purely theoretical interpretation emerges: what if Maggie and Nina were an ex-angel and an ex-demon? Imagining them as supernatural lovers who sacrifice their divine and demonic origins to live a love in human fragility opens the door to a profound reflection on the themes of sacrifice, memory, and identity. Without memory of their supernatural past, the two would be drawn to each other by an invisible bond, surviving the loss of powers and origins. This bond, while lacking conscious memory, manifests itself through an intense and irresistible emotional connection, like two souls destined to meet.

It is fascinating to think that even the protagonists Crowley and Aziraphale might one day decide to live as ordinary human beings, freeing themselves from celestial and infernal duties. This analysis focuses on a hypothesis that invites symbolic and theological reflections, enriching the vision of Maggie and Nina as figures who embody love and sacrifice in a mythological and spiritual dimension. Their story becomes a narrative of search and discovery, in which the absence of memory is not an obstacle but an opportunity to explore and build a new identity together.

The Sacrifice of Maggie and Nina: Renouncing Divinity to Live Love as Humans

Maggie and Nina, when considered under the hypothesis of being an angel and a demon, represent rebellious love and sacrifice. In the supernatural system of Heaven and Hell, any romantic bond between divine and demonic beings is unacceptable and punishable. However, this theory assumes that Maggie and Nina have voluntarily chosen to deprive themselves of their supernatural nature to embrace humanity. This act of self-emptying, or “kenosis,” is a Christian theological concept found in Philippians 2:7, where Christ renounces His divinity to incarnate as a man. The kenosis of Maggie and Nina would symbolize a profound act of love, akin to that of Christ, demonstrating that the choice to abandon power can be a gesture of great humanity.

The connection between Maggie and Nina could be viewed as a spiritual residue of a love that transcends the barriers of time and awareness. Although lacking conscious memory, their bond becomes a symbolic manifestation of the "memory of the soul"—a calling beyond the material world and divine constraints. This memory is not merely a recollection but a deep intuition of love that renders their attraction inexplicable and inevitable.

The Story of Anna Milton in Supernatural: The Angel Who Chose Human Life

Anna Milton, an angel created by God before the birth of humanity, is a striking example of how the choice to live as a human can express the desire for a deeper connection with the emotions and experiences of mortal life. In the series Supernatural, Anna served as the superior of angels Castiel and Uriel, and she was particularly close to Castiel. However, her long observation of humankind led her to develop a deep love for earthly life, desiring concrete experiences such as chocolate and sex, and coming to believe that angels lacked genuine emotions.

To live a fully human life, in March 1985, Anna painfully renounced her grace, a painful process. Anna and her grace fell to Earth separately, appearing to humans as meteorites. This fall can be seen as an act of liberation, allowing her to discover the power and beauty of human experiences.

Reborn as Anna Milton, daughter of Richard and Amy Milton, she found herself fully human. However, from childhood, Anna exhibited a deep unease and some confused memories of her angelic life, so much so that her parents had to take her to a child psychologist. Over time, Anna gradually repressed the memories of her angelic existence, convincing herself that she was simply human. However, the influence of her angelic origin manifested again in 2008, when she began to hear the voices of angels. This crisis led her to a psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, demonstrating how repressed memories can resurface in unexpected and destabilizing ways.

Connection with Maggie and Nina: Human Life as a Conscious Sacrifice

The story of Anna Milton offers an interesting parallel to the speculative theory about Maggie and Nina. If Maggie and Nina also voluntarily chose to abandon a presumed supernatural nature to live as humans, they might carry traces of that bond and those memories, just like Anna. Anna's choice to renounce her angelic state to experience the authenticity of human emotions becomes a powerful metaphor for sacrifice and love, allowing us to imagine Maggie and Nina as figures who, for love, might have given up their divine or demonic past.

In this view, the sacrifice of Maggie and Nina does not negate their identity but rather allows them to discover a more authentic form of themselves, liberated from the divine structures that separate them. Like Anna, who, while human, experienced inner conflicts related to her angelic identity, Maggie and Nina might also live through a similar tension. Their mutual attraction, without an apparent cause, becomes an echo of the soul, an invisible thread that unites them beyond awareness.

Memory and Attraction: A Love Amnesia as a Call of the Soul

In Christian theological analysis, memory is crucial for identity and consciousness, as suggested by Saint Augustine in his Confessions, where he describes memory as a "house of the soul." If Maggie and Nina were truly an ex-angel and an ex-demon, their choice to abandon their supernatural identity could embody a total emptying of their essence, allowing them to experience love within a human context. Their mutual attraction would thus be a manifestation of divine love, reflecting the concept of "unity" expressed in Matthew 19:6: "What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate."

The bond between Maggie and Nina stands as a symbol of love that persists beyond the limits imposed by consciousness and memory. Even in this interpretation, their union seems to survive as an attraction that exists beyond any material bond. In this context, the themes of amnesia and memory evoke profound questions about identity and the meaning of love.

The Fall as an Act of Liberation: A Love that Redefines Identity

In biblical tradition, the fall of Lucifer represents not only rebellion and separation from God but also the complex theme of freedom. Imagining Nina as an angel, her path of descent could embody a rebellion with a profound purpose: the possibility of living a human love. During the great war between angels and demons, Nina, driven by her love for Maggie, decides to renounce her grace to join her, aware that an angel and a demon cannot coexist in harmony. Her “descent” becomes, in this scenario, a conscious choice for love, transforming her angelic identity into that of a demon.

On the other hand, Maggie, who does not rebel and maintains her position among the angels, experiences inner conflict: she yearns for Nina but knows that their union is impossible according to heavenly laws. For love, she decides to sacrifice her grace and descend from her angelic status, embracing human fragility to be with Nina. This decision would represent a symbolic inversion: the fall as an act of liberation rather than damnation, an act that allows her to discover the power of love that transcends both divinity and demonhood.

Gabriel and Beelzebub: The Choice to Remember and to Love In Good Omens 2, the relationship between Gabriel and Beelzebub presents a compelling narrative arc that explores the complexities of love beyond memory and identity. When Gabriel loses his memories, he finds himself in a world that feels both alien and familiar, yet it is his encounter with Beelzebub that awakens something deep within him. Their connection, rooted in an ineffable bond, transcends the usual constraints of awareness and the norms dictated by their celestial and infernal origins.

This love story unfolds in a unique way: while Gabriel initially does not remember his past or the nature of his relationship with Beelzebub, the very act of seeking her out reveals an intrinsic desire to reconnect. This longing illustrates that love can flourish even in the absence of conscious recognition. It becomes a universal force that binds them, hinting at the idea that true affection does not solely rely on memories or experiences but can also emerge from a deep-seated instinct to be with one another.

The symbolic gift of the fly that Beelzebub gives to Gabriel serves as a profound metaphor for their relationship. This seemingly simple gesture carries immense weight, suggesting that love can manifest in small, significant ways, even when individuals are not fully aware of its origins. The fly, a creature often associated with transformation and rebirth, represents the threads of their connection that continue to bind them together, even in the face of forgetfulness. It is a tangible sign that love has its own path, one that transcends conscious choice and societal expectations.

As Gabriel regains his memory, the dynamics of their relationship shift. Unlike Maggie and Nina, whose love is grounded in the exploration of identity without the baggage of their pasts, Gabriel and Beelzebub's love matures into a conscious decision to embrace one another despite the implications of their respective roles in the cosmic order. Their choice to stay together, to defy the expectations of Heaven and Hell, becomes a bold act of rebellion. In a world where angels and demons are typically seen as adversaries, Gabriel and Beelzebub’s union stands as a testament to the power of love to subvert traditional narratives.

This choice embodies a deeper message: it illustrates that love is not merely an emotion but an active commitment to one another. It is a decision to prioritize their relationship over the dictates of a predetermined hierarchy. By choosing each other, Gabriel and Beelzebub assert their agency, creating a new narrative that values personal connection over celestial duty.

In this light, their story becomes a rich tapestry that weaves together themes of love, identity, and rebellion against cosmic norms. Gabriel and Beelzebub emerge as champions of a love that is courageous, resilient, and above all, human in its essence—demonstrating that even beings created from light and darkness can find common ground in the embrace of love.

Conclusion: Love as a Power that Breaks Down Barriers

In conclusion, the speculation about the identities of Maggie and Nina as an ex-angel and an ex-demon offers a fascinating interpretation that invites reflection on love and sacrifice. Their story symbolizes hope and resilience, showing that love can break down the barriers of identity and memory. Just as Anna Milton chose to live humanely in search of the profound meaning of existence, Maggie and Nina—despite lacking memory of their past—would demonstrate the power of love, allowing their souls to shine in a new identity.

The idea of love existing beyond awareness and memory becomes a celebration of life and human relationships. Through their union, Maggie and Nina might illustrate that even in the absence of memories, love has the capacity to fill voids and provide deep meaning to existence, transcending time and origins. The narrative of Maggie and Nina's love thus transforms into a tale of exploration and acceptance, resonating in the hearts of all who seek an authentic connection, even amidst the chaos and confusion of life.

Imagining a future where Aziraphale and Crowley, after thwarting the second Armageddon and the Second Coming, choose a similar path allows us to glimpse an even deeper narrative. The Second Coming, in Christian tradition, refers to the return of Christ to Earth, a moment of great apocalyptic significance and transformation. After facing such catastrophe, Aziraphale and Crowley might opt to relinquish their roles as an angel and a demon, abandoning their memories and divine essence to live as humans.

This choice, distant from their celestial nature, would enable them to build a life together, free from the pressures and expectations imposed by their respective worlds. Even stripped of memories and their supernatural identities, their bond would be stronger—a natural and irresistible call to reunite. The connection between Aziraphale and Crowley, rooted in love that transcends divisions and categories, could guide them toward a new existence where, like Maggie and Nina, they would discover that love can exist and flourish beyond memories and origins.

Similarly, the relationship between Gabriel and Beelzebub could evolve in this context. After experiencing quiet, gentle, and romantic moments together, both Gabriel and Beelzebub, deeply influenced by their bond, might also choose to give up their roles in the Great Plan, opting to live as humans. Free from the expectations and conflicts between Heaven and Hell, they would have the opportunity to discover the beauty of love in its purest form.

Imagine Gabriel, with his affectionate and caring nature, and Beelzebub, with her strong yet sensitive disposition, embarking together on a human life, reconstructing their identities in a context that celebrates their relationship. They could become symbols of unity and acceptance, demonstrating that love can overcome any barrier, even those imposed by a long history of rivalry.

Their story, parallel to that of Aziraphale and Crowley, could emphasize the power of the bond formed when two souls choose one another, transcending every conflict and their divine essence. In this scenario, both Aziraphale and Crowley, as well as Gabriel and Beelzebub, would become emblems of eternal love that, even in the void of memory, continues to shine as a guiding light.

Their narrative would represent a powerful message of acceptance and personal growth, demonstrating that love, in all its forms, has the ability to transform and give meaning to life, making the world a brighter and more hopeful place.

And as Buddy Holly said: 'Everyday, it's a-gettin' closer, Goin' faster than a roller coaster. Love like yours will surely come my way.'

[jasminewalkerauthor]

Deep dives into folklore: Goblins

Goblins, mythical creatures of folklore and literature, have a rich and diverse history that spans across cultures and centuries. These elusive beings, often depicted as mischievous and malevolent, have undergone a fascinating evolution in the realms of human imagination. From their origins in ancient folklore to their prominent roles in modern literature, goblins have shaped and been shaped by the ever-changing narratives of human storytelling.

The concept of goblins is deeply rooted in the folklore of various cultures, each imbuing these creatures with unique characteristics. In medieval European folklore, goblins were often portrayed as small, grotesque creatures with a penchant for mischief. They were believed to inhabit dark, hidden places, emerging at night to create chaos and play tricks on unsuspecting humans. The English word "goblin" itself has Germanic origins, derived from the Middle English word "gobelin" or the Old French "gobelin," both referring to a supernatural creature.

As literature began to flourish, goblins found their way into written works, taking on new forms and roles. In the 17th century, goblins made appearances in fairy tales and plays. Notable examples include Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," where Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, embodies the mischievous nature often associated with goblins. As time progressed, goblins became fixtures in fantasy literature, gaining complexity and diversity in their depictions.

The Romantic era saw a resurgence of interest in folklore and fantasy, leading to the inclusion of goblins in the works of renowned authors. E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" introduced the character of the Goblin King, who played a pivotal role in the story. Hoffmann's portrayal of goblins reflected a nuanced understanding of these creatures, blending elements of menace and fascination.

The Victorian era marked a significant period for the revival of interest in folklore, and goblins continued to capture the imagination of writers. George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin" (1872) presented goblins as malevolent beings living beneath the earth, plotting against the human world. MacDonald's work influenced subsequent fantasy authors and contributed to the evolving image of goblins in literature.

In the 20th century, fantasy literature experienced a renaissance, and goblins played integral roles in many iconic works. J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth saga, particularly "The Hobbit," featured goblins as a formidable and malevolent race. Tolkien's influence resonated throughout the fantasy genre, shaping the portrayal of goblins in subsequent works by authors like J.K. Rowling, who introduced goblins as a distinct species in the "Harry Potter" series. The mix reviewed 'Labyrinth' created by Jim henson and starring David Bowie also comes to mind when considering notable portrayals of Goblins

In contemporary literature, goblins continue to evolve with the changing landscapes of fantasy. Authors explore the complexities of goblin characters, presenting them as more than mere tricksters or villains. Some stories delve into the cultural and psychological aspects of goblin folklore, providing nuanced perspectives on these mythical beings.

The evolution of goblins in folklore and literature is a testament to the enduring power of myth and storytelling. From their humble origins in ancient folklore to their multifaceted roles in modern fantasy, goblins have adapted and transformed, reflecting the cultural, social, and literary contexts of their time. As long as human imagination continues to thrive, the evolution of goblins will persist, ensuring that these mythical creatures remain an integral part of our collective storytelling heritage.

Taglist (reply or reblog to be added):

@axl-ul @crow-flower @thoughts-fromthevoid @alderwoodbooks @harleyacoincidence @tuberosumtater @sonic-spade @theonlygardenia @holymzogynybatman @nulliel-tres

[ezoterika23]

Exploring the Mysteries of Esotericism: A Journey Beyond the Seen

Esotericism, or ezoterika is a term that refers to a body of knowledge, beliefs, and practices that are typically hidden or reserved for a select few. Rooted in mysticism and spiritual exploration, esotericism spans across many ancient traditions, religions, and philosophies. It often encompasses ideas and teachings about the inner workings of the universe, human consciousness, and the nature of existence. But what makes esotericism fascinating is its emphasis on uncovering the deeper truths behind the material world—a journey that seeks to transcend ordinary understanding.

The Roots of Esotericism

Historically, esotericism has been linked to various ancient civilizations. It is believed to have originated in early Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek cultures, where mystery schools taught sacred knowledge to initiate members. These mystery schools often revolved around rituals, spiritual exercises, and the pursuit of wisdom, offering insights into the metaphysical aspects of life. One of the earliest forms of esoteric teachings can be found in Hermeticism, a spiritual tradition based on the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient figure believed to possess divine wisdom.

The teachings in these early mystery schools were intentionally veiled in secrecy to protect the sacredness of the knowledge from being misunderstood or misused. Only those who were deemed spiritually mature and capable of handling the insights were initiated into this hidden wisdom. This tradition of secrecy remains a key feature of esotericism today.

Common Themes in Esotericism

Though esoteric traditions vary widely across different cultures and historical periods, several recurring themes unify them. One of the most significant is the belief in the existence of hidden knowledge or truths that go beyond the physical world. This knowledge is often seen as transformative, capable of elevating one's spiritual or intellectual understanding.

Another common theme is the concept of duality. Esotericism often explores the idea that there is a deeper, spiritual reality beyond the apparent physical world—a notion of dual realms: the seen and unseen. The material world is perceived as transient and illusionary, while the spiritual world represents permanence and truth.

In addition, many esoteric systems of thought emphasize personal transformation. Esoteric teachings often stress that spiritual growth requires not only intellectual study but also inner work, such as meditation, self-reflection, and the cultivation of virtues like humility and compassion.

Esotericism in Modern Times

In modern times, esotericism has evolved and branched into various schools of thought, including Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism, and modern occult movements. These systems continue to explore the mysteries of the universe, drawing from ancient traditions while integrating contemporary philosophical ideas.

Despite its ancient origins, esotericism remains highly relevant today, particularly for individuals seeking meaning beyond the material world. In an age dominated by science and technology, many people find solace in the introspective and spiritual dimensions that esoteric teachings provide. These teachings encourage a holistic view of life, one that considers both the seen and unseen aspects of reality.

The Path of the Seeker

Esotericism invites the seeker on a personal journey of discovery. It is not merely about accumulating knowledge but about transformation—of the self and one’s perception of the world. Through symbols, rituals, meditation, and contemplation, the esoteric path helps individuals tap into the mysteries of existence, unveiling a more profound understanding of life.

In essence, esotericism reminds us that the world is far more mysterious and interconnected than we might perceive on the surface. By exploring these hidden dimensions, individuals may find themselves on a transformative journey that deepens their understanding of the universe, their place within it, and the boundless potential of human consciousness.

[anasraza25]

Unveiling the Scientific Miracles in the Quran: A Profound Exploration with Surah Al-Mulk

Introduction:

The Quran, the holy book of Islam, is revered by Muslims worldwide not only for its spiritual guidance but also for the profound wisdom and knowledge it imparts. One fascinating aspect that has captivated the attention of scholars and believers alike is the presence of scientific insights within its verses. In this exploration, we delve into the scientific miracles embedded in the Quran, with a special focus on Surah Al-Mulk, unraveling the harmony between religious teachings and scientific understanding.

Surah Al-Mulk: A Glimpse Into Cosmic Realities

Surah Al-Mulk, the 67th chapter of the Quran, is a contemplative journey into the magnificence of the universe. Its verses invite believers to reflect upon the creation of the heavens and the earth, recognizing the signs of a Creator's grand design. As we embark on this exploration, the divine wisdom encapsulated in Surah Al-Mulk harmonizes seamlessly with scientific discoveries, offering a compelling narrative that transcends the boundaries of time and knowledge.

Cosmic Order and Astrophysics: Surah Al-Mulk begins with the proclamation that God, in His infinite wisdom, created the heavens and the earth in flawless proportion. This assertion aligns with modern astrophysical understanding, where the universe is recognized for its intricate balance and mathematical precision. The concept of a finely tuned cosmos finds resonance in Surah Al-Mulk, elevating it from a mere ancient scripture to a testament of divine knowledge that transcends time.

Protective Layers of the Atmosphere: The Quran, in Surah Al-Mulk, describes the protective layers that shield the earth from harmful external elements. Modern science concurs, acknowledging the existence of the atmosphere's multiple layers that serve as a protective barrier against cosmic radiation and other potentially hazardous components. The correlation between the Quranic description and scientific findings underscores the prescient nature of the Quranic revelations.

The Dynamic Earth: Surah Al-Mulk emphasizes the dynamic nature of the earth, highlighting its rotation and orbit. This depiction aligns with contemporary scientific understanding, where the earth's rotation and orbit contribute to the cyclic patterns of day and night, seasons, and a harmonious ecological balance. The Quranic verses serve as a timeless guide, resonating with the intricacies of our planet's celestial dance.

Origin of Life and Water: Surah Al-Mulk draws attention to the fundamental role of water in the creation and sustenance of life. Scientifically, water is acknowledged as a prerequisite for life, and the Quranic verses eloquently articulate this fact. The correlation between the Quranic emphasis on water and its pivotal role in the biological processes underscores the coherence between religious teachings and scientific observations.

Conclusion:

In the interplay between faith and science, Surah Al-Mulk stands as a testament to the Quran's timeless relevance and divine wisdom. Its verses, echoing through the corridors of time, offer a perspective that transcends the limitations of human understanding. As we unravel the scientific miracles within the Quran, particularly in Surah Al-Mulk, we find a tapestry woven with threads of cosmic order, protective atmospheres, dynamic earth, and the essence of life itself.

In the pursuit of knowledge, believers and scholars alike can find solace in the convergence of religious teachings and scientific truths. Surah Al-Mulk beckons us to ponder the mysteries of the universe, urging us to recognize the signs that point to a Creator's divine handiwork. Through this exploration, we not only deepen our appreciation for the Quran's profound insights but also embark on a journey that transcends the boundaries of human comprehension, inviting us to contemplate the miraculous harmony between faith and scientific understanding.

[passionate-reply]

Great Albums is kicking off Pride Month with a special feature on one of the weirdest and wildest queer artists of the New Wave era: the one and only Klaus Nomi! Combining glam, synth-pop, and opera, of all things, Nomi’s tragically short career is nothing short of mystifying. Check out the video or read the full transcript, below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! In this installment, I’ll be looking at the self-titled debut album of one of the most unique, incomparable, and unforgettable artists in music history: the one and only Klaus Nomi. What is it that makes Nomi so noteworthy? Perhaps the most obvious thing is his background as a classically trained opera singer. While a lot of pop vocalists have some degree of classical training, it’s rare to find one who worked so hard to bring ultra-mannered, literally operatic lead vocals into an otherwise pop context.

The other thing I should mention is that Nomi’s voice part was the “countertenor,” giving his vocals an even more unusual dimension. Countertenors are men who sing in a high range usually covered by women, and even in the operatic tradition, they weren’t necessarily all that common, particularly since the rise of opera coincided with that of the infamous castrati--male singers who were castrated to preserve their prepubescent voices. The combination of partially electronic, New Wave compositions with these bizarre, but ultimately “traditional” vocals results in something that sounds simply otherworldly.

Music: “Total Eclipse”

“Total Eclipse” is probably Nomi’s best known track, due in part to being featured in the seminal concert film Urgh! A Music War, which sought to capture the diversity of the early 80s New Wave scene. Like a lot of classic songs of this era, it tackles the subject of nuclear annihilation, albeit with a nearly depraved, gleeful tone, that makes it feel like more of a party. For the verses, Nomi adopts a sort of rhythmic speak-singing, which was much more par for the course for “New Wave” music, only to shockingly explode into a powerful operatic rendition of the refrain. It reminds me a bit of how, in musical theatre, tension builds through spoken dialogue, before characters are so emotional they feel compelled to burst into song--or, of course, how recitative blossoms into arias in opera. In the context of this particular track, it’s easy to interpret it as an embodiment of how “cold wars” can suddenly burst into flame. While “Total Eclipse” was a new composition, written specifically for Nomi by Kristian Hoffman, this album also features several covers of past hits, such as “You Don’t Own Me.”

Music: “You Don’t Own Me”

Nomi’s covers of the Midcentury pop ditties “Lightning Strikes” and “You Don’t Own Me” repeat the structure of “Total Eclipse,” showing that this signature pattern of increasing tension leading to increasingly mannered vocals is just as effective when retroactively applied to pre-existing compositions. What’s also significant about “You Don’t Own Me” is that it was originally written for a woman, Lesley Gore, and its defiant assertion of self-confidence has long been associated with women’s liberation. Being openly gay, Nomi sees fit to leave the lyric “play with other boys” just as it is, and could be interpreted to be deliberately emphasizing that last word, intentionally queering his rendition of the song. Nomi’s ability to sing in a traditionally female voice range, combined with his eccentric, gender-bending personal aesthetic, makes the interrogation of traditional concepts of gender an integral part of his art. Some of the other covers on the album are even older than the Midcentury, coming from the golden age of opera, such as “The Cold Song.”

Music: “The Cold Song”

Also known by its opening lyrics, “What power art thou?”, “The Cold Song” is a rare operatic aria that was actually designed for the countertenor voice part. It was written by the English composer William Purcell, a noted fan of countertenors who lived outside the influence of the Italian castrati, for his 1691 opera King Arthur. Well, King Arthur is actually what’s sometimes called a “semi-opera”: not all characters sing, and those who do often tend to be supernatural entities. “The Cold Song” is sung by a winter spirit called the Cold Genius, when reluctantly awakened from icy slumber by Cupid. His lines are sung so as to stutter, as he shivers from the freezing cold of his surrounds. Unlike the pop covers on the album, the arias are actually played pretty straight, almost as if they serve as evidence of Nomi’s actual chops doing traditional opera the old-fashioned way. “The Cold Song” is certainly a great fit for Nomi’s unique stage persona, which presented him as a fey or elfin non-human visitor from some mythical Otherworld, or perhaps an extraterrestrial from outer space. This theme is addressed most directly by the one track on this album composed entirely by Nomi himself: “Keys of Life.”

Music: “Keys of Life”

“Keys of Life” is the album’s opening track, and perhaps serves as Nomi’s personal introduction to the people of our realm--a sort of musical “we come in peace” message. Its lyrics seem to portray Nomi as a benevolent visitor, but one with a dire warning for mankind: we need to get our act together soon, for our actions now are of great import, as we humans “hold the keys of life.” Perhaps Nomi’s mission is to prevent climate catastrophe on Earth, or, given the context of “Total Eclipse,” a nuclear apocalypse. With its warbling synthesiser backdrop, and Nomi singing fully in the operatic style throughout, “Keys of Life” is arguably the most experimental piece to be had on the album, and putting it as the very first track certainly pulls no punches.

It is, of course, difficult to fully address the significance of Nomi’s persona without getting into his visual identity. The cover of Nomi’s self-titled debut features his most iconic outfit: an oversized plastic tuxedo, with hugely exaggerated shoulders, and a pointed hairstyle with a bit of Streamline Moderne flair. I mentioned earlier that Nomi’s work seems concerned with gender, and in that context, I’ve often interpreted this look as a sort of caricature of masculinity, parodying men’s formalwear and calling attention to Nomi’s receding hairline. There is certainly something absurd about a high-pitched, perhaps feminine-coded voice emerging from a ludicrously masculine sort of character. The use of thin, shiny, reflective plastic, and the aforementioned Midcentury feel of the hairstyle, make me also consider interpreting it as less of a parody, and more of an alien’s bad attempt at adopting the appearance of an “ordinary,” upstanding, conservative human male in attire, using space-age materials to cobble it together.

The oversized, geometric appearance of Nomi’s garb reminds me of the great Dada poet, Hugo Ball, founder of the legendary Cabaret Voltaire. Ball was the inventor of what he called “sound poetry,” and enacted lively readings of poetry that consisted of entirely nonsensical words. He did this while wearing a strange, cylindrical-shaped cardboard suit, said to restrict his movements so much that Ball needed to be ceremoniously carried off stage when he was finished reciting. Given their shared German heritage and cabaret avant-gardism, I can’t help but wonder if Ball’s striking costume was something of an influence on Nomi here.

This album is, of course, self-titled, but that, too, is an artistic choice that can be analyzed. The artist was born Klaus Sperber, but adopted the stage name “Nomi” for his creative endeavours. In the context of the track “The Nomi Song,” the name is often used punningly in comparison with the English phrase “know me.” Nomi’s choice of stage name is almost a dare or a challenge, a request for us to attempt to know and understand this seemingly inscrutable being before us. As with many other portrayals of queerness as alien or otherworldly, the messaging here seems to be that Nomi may seem different at first, but his intent is ultimately benign, should mere mortals like ourselves be kind enough to give him a chance.

Nomi’s follow-up to this debut album was 1982’s Simple Man, an album which is much more similar to its predecessor than different. It has a wider variety of contributing musicians and different instruments employed, but it’s got a similar overall feel, and mix of tracks. You’ll find more covers, like “Falling In Love Again” and even “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead,” more original compositions, like the Hoffman-penned sequel to “Total Eclipse,” entitled “After the Fall,” and even some more arias, like this stunning rendition of another work of Purcell’s. Referred to here as simply “Death,” it comes from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, and is sung by the titular Carthaginian queen, Dido, as she prepares to commit suicide. Also called “Dido’s Lament” or “Thy hand, Belinda,” its darkly descending melody is as captivatingly ominous today as it was when it was written, over three centuries ago.

Music: “Death”

Sadly, Nomi became gravely ill at around this time, and his own untimely death was just around the corner. He died of complications of AIDS in 1983, at the age of just 44, leaving behind an unfinished opera of his own creation, Za Bakdaz, which would go unreleased until 2008. That, and a posthumous live album released in 1986, would be the only other works under Nomi’s name. As with all artists who die tragically young, we will always be left wondering what else Klaus Nomi might’ve accomplished in the ensuing decades. I find it hard to imagine a timeline in which this sound ever became particularly mainstream, but anything else Nomi came up with would have undoubtedly been fascinating.

My favourite track on Nomi’s debut is “The Twist.” Yes, this is indeed Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” another one of those Midcentury covers that Nomi was so fond of. But compared to the rest of Nomi’s covers, this one is much more of a deconstruction, perhaps even a “piss take,” featuring a sparse instrumentation, centered around a lethargic bass guitar, and the overall pace is slowed to a crawl. Add in Nomi’s piercing vocals and some nearly demonic, chittering laughter, and you’ve got a track that turns a fun, light-hearted dance craze into a surreal nightmare. As difficult as it is to be the strangest track on an album like this, I have to give that honour to “The Twist.” That’s all for today--thanks for watching!

Music: “The Twist”

[fallenrepublick]

Ma’am. I just discovered your work on accident and kriff I’m obsessed. If possible could you do something along the lines of Obi Wan being his flirty self in front of maul and making him super jealous? Sorry if that’s a lousy request 😅

Nah, that’s a great request! It turned into... something I wasn’t expecting it to turn into so let me know how you felt about this

Also I had no idea where this could fit in continuity-wise so I just created a situation that doesn’t exist, because I have zero (0) percent creativity

Warnings: None

The town square was particularly beautiful that morning, cobblestone pathways reflecting the sleek light of the noontime sun. With a small amount of time on your hands, you had wanted to while away a few hours by the large fountain that sat right in the middle. Book in hand, you sat yourself right at the edge of the water, periodical droplets poking at you like blunt embroidery needles to make sure you weren’t totally lost in the inky world in front of you. The time spent alone wasn’t to last, though.

An ill-defined silhouette slid over the pages you were open to, causing you to snap out of your trance and tilt your head up to your intruder. Your first thought was that Maul had managed to pull away from the endless piles of work that only seemed to grow bigger as he picked away at it. This was not the case.

Before you was a young man, reddish hair and beard covering angular features. Kenobi. His head was tilted and his arms crossed in front of him as if he were trying to see what it was you were so focused on.

“I haven’t had time to read much lately,” he began, coming to sit down beside you, light creamy robes draping off the stone edge. “It was mostly my master who enjoyed books, though I do appreciate a classic every so often.”

Oh boy.

The good news was, he clearly didn’t know who you were. “Actually, I haven’t been reading much lately either. I’ve been so busy…” You smiled at him, his blunt friendliness feeling nice after a while of being surrounded by less-than-friendly people.

He swung his arm behind him, leaning back onto it, but tilted just enough towards you that you noticed. “What might the book be about?”

“It’s a really old one.” Your voice perked up at his question, choosing to ignore his movement. “Mainly about centuries old wars, before Jedi or Sith or anything like that were really established. I’m sure a lot of it is embellishment, but the concepts are fascinating, and I think the timeline goes up to the Order’s eventual origin on Tython.”

He seemed surprised at your answer, as if he were expecting you to go on some tangent about fairy tales or romantic adventures. All of those things were exciting, no doubt, but it is also beneficial to know one’s history.

“And this is all of your own volition?” he asked, chuckling lightly. “You’re not being forced to study?”

“Trust me, if that were the case, I’d be locked up in my room sulking like a moody teenager.” You both laughed, the light mood brightening nearly everything you said. Though you knew he was technically an enemy, the way he spoke to you was nothing short of kindness, and it was a strange feeling that crept into you as you wondered if he might even be a friend.

Since the day was relatively peaceful, the two of you spent much more time than you had expected sharing stories and laughing at the worst situations you had found yourselves in.

“I told him, ‘Anakin, you must protect the senator with your life,’ and what does he do?”

You nodded sagely. “He gets them both captured.”

“He gets them both captured!” He was gesturing widely, surely letting out years of contained frustration and mild embarrassment. “We could have been eaten!”

“I’m sure that was a very fun conversation with the council,” you added, snickering.

His hand was on your shoulder, wide grin now diminished into a smirk. “It was, but I learned that day that there are many things the Council doesn’t need to know.”

Merely a few metres away, you heard someone clear their throat.

Oh. Nice.

Hesitantly, you turned your head. Maul stood in front of you, hands on his hips and brow furrowed, lips tightly pursed in annoyance.

“It’s been thirty minutes.”

You stood up immediately, smiling nervously, yet trying to make it look like you weren’t guilty. “Maul! Uh, how long have you been standing there?”

“For at least a quarter of it.”

“Hold on,” Obi-Wan said, standing up and filling the space between you and Maul. “You’re,” He pointed at you. “With him?” He pointed at Maul.

Maul rolled his eyes and spun around. “We’re leaving.”

Unsure of what to do, you turned to Kenobi, mumbled a quick “Sorry…” and rushed to catch up with Maul’s quickly diminishing figure.

People passed you by often, and though they paid no mind to you, you were terribly aware of them, keeping your voice low in case you accidentally caught their attention. “I think you think that was something it wasn’t…” you attempted, wishing it came out more eloquently than it did.

“I know exactly what that was,” he said, not bothering to look back down at you.

Taking a moment to think, you asked finally, “You’re not… jealous… are you?”

Hearing that, he pulled you into an empty alley. “Why would I be jealous?” he snapped, spinning around and glaring at you, clearly defensive. “What have I to be jealous of?”

You crossed your arms and leaned forward accusingly. “I know how you get. You always start getting pouty and upset when I talk to anyone who isn’t you.”

“Well, maybe I like being the person you want to talk to and not some Jedi.”

“I do talk to you. Besides, you know where my loyalties lie, right?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes narrowed instead as he stalked closer to you, backing you up against the cold wall of the building. “Perhaps… But I think that you need to be reminded.”

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Game of Death (Clouse, 1978)

In 1972, Bruce Lee came up with an idea for the movie called The Game of Death, where he would play a martial arts master forced out of retirement by a gang planning a heist of a pagoda. The film would be a culmination of sorts of his philosophy of martial arts, wherein he would defeat his enemies through his superior adaptability. He shot three fight scenes that would form part of the climax, where he goes up different levels of the pagoda and fights Dan Inosanto (Lee’s sparring partner and previously known to me for his involvement in Steven Seagal’s best movie, Out for Justice), Hapkido master Ji Han-jae, and finally Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who at the time had been Lee’s student). Before Lee finished the movie, he left to make Enter the Dragon and died before the latter film was released and became a massive success and his own popularity shot through the roof posthumously.

In the subsequent years, people decided to cash in on said popularity and start churning out movies which claimed to star Bruce Lee, starred people who looked a bit like Bruce Lee and sometimes had similar names, were about Bruce Lee himself or merely placed him in outlandish premises. A handful of these films I have seen and at least one I have enjoyed (Challenge of the Tiger, starring Bruce Le, who played the martial arts instructor in Pieces, and Richard Harrison, who yelled into a Garfield phone in Ninja Terminator). Eventually Golden Harvest, the studio behind the films Lee made when he was alive, decided that they also wanted to make some of this money now that he was dead. They got back Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse, dug up the original footage and “completed” the movie, by which I mean hobble together that footage with a completely unrelated plot. (A few years later they released a “sequel”, Game of Death II, that is quite a bit of fun outside of a questionable first act. I mean, how can you go wrong with a man in a lion suit, a villain played by Hwang Jang-Lee and action choreography by Yuen Woo-Ping?)

Game of Death, as the finished film is called, is the official Brucesploitation movie in a way, and its most interesting qualities stem from that. The plot, about an underworld syndicate trying to strong arm Lee’s character so they can exploit his fame, echoes not just Lee’s original story idea, but also the production circumstances, with Golden Harvest looking to exploit Lee’s image in as crass a manner as possible. Their methods of bringing Lee back on screen range from amusing (giving Lee doubles Kim Tai-jong and Yuen Biao beards and big sunglasses or hiding their face in the shadows) to outright laughable (a picture of Lee’s face pasted on a mirror over the reflection of the real actor’s face) to completely shameless (using footage of Lee’s open casket funeral). The film almost becomes a metaphor for this idea, and ends up acknowledging that it’s a self-defeating one. No matter how well the manufactured Lees ape his fighting style and body language, there’s no competing with the real deal, and the original footage, even in its heavily truncated form, are exhilarating and deflate the preceding sections by contrast. (The Criterion release includes a longer edit of the footage, better fleshing out Lee’s ideas around superiority through adaptability. The fight scenes in their longer form let us bask in his charisma even more, give the scenes a sense of strategy and real triumph that are missing in the released film.) In an age when dead actors are being exhumed via CGI to be put in blockbusters and dead musicians are playing Coachella in hologram form, not to mention the prevalence of deepfakes, the movie resonates in this respect.

It’s those qualities that make the movie particularly fascinating, but as I went into it with low expectations (most people I know who’ve seen it find it utter trash that doesn’t do justice to Lee’s memory, a not unfair assessment), I found it reasonably diverting. Robert Clouse may not be a great visual stylist (much of the fighting in Enter the Dragon is shot in a flat, demonstrative manner, although it worked in that movie as it was tasked with selling the concept of martial arts cinema to American audiences), but he does give this movie an attractive travelogue quality with its Hong Kong locations. The rousing theme music by John Barry makes the movie feel much classier than it is. Out of the “new” supporting cast, Dean Jagger looks very happy to be here despite playing a villain, while Colleen Camp plays the hero’s singer girlfriend and sings a song that plays at the end. (If you, like me, sometimes play the game that actors play the same character across different movies, this fits in pretty seamlessly before her role as a country singer in They All Laughed.) And of course, seeing Abdul-Jabbar fight Lee is seeing two formidable bodies move in sublimely choreographed concert.

The fight scenes are choreographed by Sammo Hung doing an approximation of Lee’s style, and while the construction is at least a little slapdash due to the need to pass it off as the real Lee, the camera is pulled back far enough and the cutting conservative enough that the scenes are easy to follow and relatively engaging. There’s one action sequence involving a couple of bikers in a warehouse where the prevalence of slow motion makes it indirectly capture the staccato rhythms of Lee’s best fight scenes. The bikers don tracksuits and dehumanizing face-covering helmets that give the scene an almost metaphoric quality, as if they, like Lee, are being objectified through the film’s exploitation. Of course, this is also the scene where Lee puts on one of the tracksuits (perhaps the most famous one in the movies) with a pair of yellow Onitsuka Tigers to match, and only a star of Lee’s magnetism could make an outfit this ridiculous look cool. The king is dead, long live the king.

[reanimatedrenaissance]

The Renaissance Used as a Foundation

When it comes to animation and the Renaissance, there is no greater love interest to these artists than the works of William Shakespeare. Numerous derivative narratives have been created out of his works, and as such there is also a variety of adaptations from close comparisons to mere shadows of the original play.

Disney Animation Studios is quite possibly best known for their 1994 animated film, Lion King. It was a huge success at the box office, making $968.5 million at the box office when their original budget was only $45 million. This came as a huge shock to the studio when it outshined the film they expected to be a bigger cultural hit, Pocahontas, released just over a year after Lion King. However, there may be a bigger underlying reason as to why Lion King was so popular among the vast majority of audience members: a close tie to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

There has been such a widespread acceptance that Lion King was inspired by the plot of Hamlet that artists, critics, bloggers, and more have created articles and graphics to showcase the similarities of the two (Cuthbertson, “9 reasons why The Lion King”).

Graphic by Stephen Wildish

Lion King’s similarities to Hamlet are indeed quite interwoven, and because of this it is clear that audiences are engaged by more than just the visual appeal of the animal characters. More than likely given the comparisons, many viewers may have seen this film as a creative reinterpretation of this classic play, and therefore were compelled to engage more with it as it no longer was a stereotypical play put on with modern people put in Renaissance-looking attire. During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s Disney was producing one successful film after another, so much so that after awhile fans termed the decade of 1989-1999 as the “Disney Renaissance.” Even this term implies a similarity and symbolic connection to the historical era. Because of this, it is clearly important to current culture that the concept of the Renaissance being a time for creative rebirth live on, and they felt as though Disney’s animated films of that decade deserved such a title.

Disney is known to create other works which have a foundation of Shakespearian literature as well, which could be said to provide both a simplified, educational understanding of Shakespeare’s work, as it is written in modern English, as well as give a new creative twist to it. One such example is one of their short animations in the TV series House of Mouse in which they have a modern English retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream starring Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, and Daisy Duck.This animated short was made as episode eleven of a series of shorts made under the title Mickey Mouse Works (1999) which was then later incorporated into House of Mouse (2002). The premise of Mickey Mouse Works was to allow Disney’s many characters to have their own opportunities to star in animated segments of their own, without developing extremely deep plots. In this way it is very similar to the format of children’s television with quick plots running from 8-11 minutes in length.

House of Mouse, episode “House of Scrooge” (Walt Disney Animation, 2002)

By providing a new visual twist in the animation format, Disney has been able to provide audiences with a new way to enjoy these classics without feeling as though they are watching the same exact play over and over. Not only this, but by changing the language to reflect the speech of the present Disney is also allowing themselves the creative license to add a few extra jokes and visual gags which give these already established personalities listed above their time to shine. Such work showcases how Disney is able to appeal to a wide age range in their audience as it helps to introduce young audience members to Shakespeare’s work and simultaneously provide adult audience members with something visually new and different than a traditional retelling of this play.

But this is not a special case, and has been a successful model for creation since the early 1920s. Artists have long been using elements from the Renaissance as a foundation for modern adaptations, spinoffs, and other derivative works that inspire further creations. The earliest example available in animated format is a work from 1920 entitled Love’s Labor Lost based on a Shakespeare play of the same name.

Love’s Labor Lost, dir. Vernon Stallings (Bray Productions, 1920)

What this seems to imply is that although the works of William Shakespeare were created hundreds of years ago, the present culture of the twenty-first century still finds this material to be both “timeless” and continually entertaining. In fact, it is often easy source material to use as many elementary and high school institutions require reading works by Shakespeare as a fundamental part of Western education. Because of this, animators can assume that audience members have at least a basic understanding of Shakespeare’s famous works. What becomes new is the ways in which these classics of the Renaissance are reinterpreted to fit the themes and cultural desires of the present. However, one of Shakespeare’s works is by far the most notorious for having tons of reinterpretations in modern media and animation: Romeo and Juliet.

Perhaps the most recent and culturally prominent of the animated interpretations of this play is Gnomeo and Juliet, a 2011 film created by Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary branch of Disney Animation Studios. Listed below is the trailer, showcasing the basic creative licenses the artists take which are seen throughout the film.

Gnomeo and Juliet, dir. Kelly Asbury (Touchstone Pictures, 2011)

Right from the beginning, this film establishes that although this is based on the classic play, it has changed the cast from humans to garden gnomes, the families from Montagues and Capulets to Red and Blue caps, and the tone from one of drama to one of comedy. By making these creative decisions, the animators found a modern way to connect with their younger demographics’ interest in comical, cartoon-y media which is advertised in their trailer as well as give them an educational gateway to Shakespeare’s original if they have not encountered it previously.

On the other end, the anime series Romeo X Juliet, dubbed by Funimation and animated by Gonzo Studios, takes itself very seriously and is closer to the work it reflects. Below is the first episode of the series.

Romeo X Juliet, episode 1 (Gonzo Studios and Funimation, 2007)

These two seem to be thematically polar opposites of each other, and as such they are also a great indicator that they are meant for different audiences. Gnomeo and Juliet is a work which is meant to entice, entertain, and even educate the public and younger audience members in general to Shakespeare’s Renaissance works. Romeo X Juliet is then a gritty, dramatic retelling aimed at older audiences who both enjoy this tale but are also not afraid to see the violence heightened to more realistic (or even sometimes unrealistic) proportions.

Regardless of the genre, it is clear that works from the Renaissance, and particularly the works of William Shakespeare, continue to be a valuable foundation for creative reinterpretations that capture the minds and hearts of 21st century culture. This significance in culture will likely continue so long as popular culture continues to see a beneficial use for the material. Thus the societal fascination with the Renaissance period suggests that this kind of derivative media will continue to be created for many years to come. Who knows what the next animated interpretation may bring to entice audience members next?

Sources:

Cuthbertson, Galen. “9 reasons why The Lion King is Basically Hamlet.”

Mari, Elia. “Mexican Children and American Cartoons: Foreign References in Animation.”

Omar, Mohd and Ishak, Sidin. “Understanding Culture Through Animation: From the World To Malaysia.”

[ultraenglishnerd]

Part One: ^^^

Part Two:

Shipka’s arguments made me consider greatly what it was I wanted to represent. I do use my sewing machine or my PS4 quite frequently, but I felt after reading what Shipka’s students did and understanding that I need to think beyond text and invest myself more in the process than in the final product, I changed my mind and decided to bring my dress form into play. This was based heavily off of her discussion of the environment and the technical tools around me that influence my work and life on a daily basis. I see my dress form every day in the corner of my room and it constantly makes me think about what to do next, what projects I have waiting in my closet for me to work on, and about the time and setting that those compositions require me to have. For example, even creating this minor multimodal composition, my environment was a nightmare, as my adorable demon cat kept attacking the dress form and the measuring tape I draped around its neck. I was also highly concerned about dropping the sewing pins all over the floor and not being able to find them, so I had to work extra carefully. While I do not have the time at the moment to do a 20 page statement of goals and choices (nor do I think such a small creation could fill 20 pages), Shipka did make me think deeply about why I was doing what I was doing. I did not want to create just another voice over video or sticky note collage to represent how nearly every piece of technology I engage with enhances and challenges my creativity, so I instead focused on how my sewing tools allow me to explore and complicate my creation process. This also led me to placing it in a video and adding music (which is a mashup of Persona 5’s “Life Will Change” and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures Part 3 Theme; I have made and worn costumes for both, so it felt fitting). My mini project overlaps quite well with some of Shipka’s examples, in that it is physical, it engages with more than just text, and while the final product is quite simple, the process of coming up with the idea, executing it, and turning it into a video resulted in changing my goals, original design, and final presentation and explanation.

Part Three:

Chapter One

Composition and writing, while interchangeable in the discipline at times, do not necessarily denote the same things. Composing is the more fitting term because it includes the act of multimodality, even without direct reference to the technology around us, such as lights and floor tiles. The method of instructing composition in the classroom should be different than the traditional English classroom because it ought to involve cooperation with communication studies, like psychology and philosophy among others. Finally, limiting writers to the term of “students” and their writing to just what comes out of their heads eliminates consideration of the place and space within which they write and instead places them inside a written text based box.

Chapter Two

This chapter focused on discussing Wertsch’s concept of individual(s)-acting-with-mediational-means. There were four primary points of discussion, those being 1) using the meditational means framework, a text-based work cannot truly be judged as monomodal because the process of the text might have included outside sources and influences upon its creation. 2) this viewpoint challenges our concepts of technology as only being whatever recently modern creation we use. 3) the framework forces us to acknowledge the psychological and technical tools that go into composition and how the tools we choose to use affect our physical bodies. 4) The framework denies us the ability to see each reader or writer as an individual in composition because of the changes that certain mediational means require. The final point of note in this chapter is about how technology will fade into the background and become transparent when it is working properly as a part of our daily lives. This also has an effect on how we view text based compositions because it forces us to consider the mode in which we compose and how what we choose to write or create with is a technology with its own specific demands.

Chapter Three

The explanation surrounding Muffie and her body/dance based text was fascinating to someone like me who drastically prefers written word to body language. It felt significant that much of the chapter was dedicated not the writing process so much as the location in which it occurs, such as in the beginning of the chapter when a student ran into complications of distractions while making their t-shirt composition. When it came down to the various places and stages Muffie had to go through to get to her final product, it made me think about my own environment when I write, which is normally either complete silence in my room, listening to the Carole and Tuesday soundtrack, or forcing myself into Starbucks to not be distracted by my kitten Darcy. Finally, it was increasingly significant in this chapter, seeing how the author built it up to this point, that the final product is not necessarily the most important part of composition because much of what is multimodal about certain texts is the path and tools used to get there.

Chapter Four

This segment of the book was incredibly interesting and informative because of how the author explained the goals and processes of the two students’ projects. Particularly, the intent of each project informed not only the topic, but the form that the end product took (in this case the goal was to get their audiences to explore the frustration and pain they had gone through in producing a multimodal composition). I found it helpful that the author showed how multimodal assignments do not make things easy or unacademic, as some believe, but rather require different thought and consideration than an essay about a word from the OED might. Asking students and teachers to reevaluate their text based academic worlds is beyond imperative to the ever expanding field of composition and its relationship to technology. This chapter was significantly informative to me because of what I am considering for my final project in this course. (I shall not reveal it yet, but it will be physical multimodal composition).

Chapter Five

As we discussed in class last week, grading and finding criteria for analyzing multimodal compositions is a challenge. The author appears to propose as a solution to this problem that student’s write a statement of goals and choices that is highly detailed and extensive, such as the 20 page example she mentioned the student of the Lost and Found journal wrote. It is this extensive self reflection that opens up a way for instructors and audiences to understand decisions and aims of the project and be able to compare it to the final product. This connects back well to the rest of the book, in which the focus is once again placed upon the steps taken to get to the end rather than looking at the product on its own.

Conclusion

Composition must go beyond writing to include other forms of meaning making, or risk educating students to hold a narrow viewpoint of what writing is. We must also learn to value texts that are not merely linear and traditional and work towards an accepting writing community that will not dismiss a text based solely on appearance. Finally, acknowledging and creative spaces for academic composition to mix with creative and multimodal positions is imperative to spreading and teaching proper, modern composition skills.

[rabbitindisguise]

oooo my phone died, killing the possibility of me doing my Daily Assigned Task (I only have one because aside from staying afloat with food and stuff that’s all my brain can cognitively handle. Yes, I also do this doing the school year. Yes, I know that sounds absolutely bonkers) right this moment so while I have my boredom captive in this textpost, let’s ruminate over the nature of humanity some more ignore me I’m talking to myself 

it is also very extremely weird and by “very” I mean “not at all” and “extremely” I mean “minimally, if anything, actually not super weird in any of the senses of the word” and weird still just means weird because otherwise the previous things I just said would no longer be accurate BUT

let’s just say it’s totally expected 

that people find These Weird Things That I Do generally, absolutely fascinating in fiction. Like, my original works for example are steeped in weirdness. Rolling with abnormalities. Boiling with oddity. And so on. And I don’t pull this out of my ass! Oh no. This is all like . . . gosh, inspired stuff. From things I saw and liked and felt reflected my very soul in fiction. 

But they’re totally hated in meatspace 

I wonder 

Anyway, it’s also really strange to see posts about this Weird Things That People Do on tumblr and to read people complimenting them and to feel a warm glow of pleasant optimism about the state of humanity, and hear the very same audience of tumblr people absolutely go nuts over the strangest bullshit I have ever seen or heard or conceived of in my entire life. Like I get weirdly tense and fraught subjects. I get really tense and pissy if someone headcanons a character as binary trans when I headcanon them as non-binary when I’m a nb trans it literally doesn’t matter aside from my emotional attachment to the concept. I’m not proud of it! But I get it, is my point. I understand. It makes sense to me. 

But what just doesn’t quite click, doesn’t snap into the convoluted logic of my brain meats, is HOW exactly SO MANY people have the same weird gripes of this obscure stuff that should be totally okay if people are accepting the activist principles of ableism as nonsense and weirdness not being bad. Many others who are probably smart have said it is simply, nay, merely hypocrisy and I’ve met a human or two in my time alive, I can see the potential for that sort of thing to happen. However, considering that Herd Mentality is what it is, I don’t think it’s possible that the plague is actually “being widely inconsistent in the execution of your beliefs to fit in to society” when that’s so stigmatized but actually that being angry about the same things is good for some reason. 

This is important! It’s important because Reasons. Because if you say “hypocrite!” when there’s a fire, I don’t think anyone will understand or listen to the concern. If the answer is anything but hypocrisy, talking about it generally pisses people off and makes them yell at you- a near identical response of an actual hypocrite, confusing everyone further. So I don’t think it’s unfair to talk about hypocrisy, of course not, there is nothing I enjoy more than finding logical inconsistencies because it means the world can be improved etc etc that’s not the problem. The problem is most definitely that if the problem isn’t even hypocrisy than the solution isn’t the solution to hypocrisy.   

If my theory is right, or semi-right, or at least not wrong, then approaching a bunch of people yelling about a thing to encourage others to yell in tandem is not going to be won by yelling something opposing to that, especially if it makes them angrier and also makes them feel wronged. Instead, calmly being like “nah, dude, I don’t feel the same way, but it’s chill” is way better. Not only because it makes them look ridiculous for having an out of proportion reaction to someone being weird in public (the horror, whatever shall we do about ~being weird~ and doing it ~in public~) but there’s no defensive position to get on. There is no “debate tactics” to use. There’s absolutely not a disagreement about ableism or politics or intersectionality. Rather, it uplifts a contrary option that is confident and secure and this is exactly the same rhetorical device that Centrists or whatever they’re called, use all the damn time. People have talked At Length about jeez, idk, it being exhausting to constantly talk to a person that’s not as invested and doesn’t see it as the Serious Issue It Is- but from the perspective of when they’re actually talking about serious issues, rather than complaining that someone referenced a tumblr meme in public or plays mc and oh, no, how cringey 

This is of course blatant emotional manipulation but as the fairness complaint generally goes, they did it first. Multiple people weighing in on a topic with angry voices telling someone not to do something doesn’t work because they have secret actual good reasons and that shines through, it’s because there’s a number of angry people and they’re trying to subdue someone’s Weird with force. Emotional force, but there’s nothing about consent involved in this exchange. No personal boundaries. Shame is a mode of control. Power, even. Which is why I hate those second hand embarrassment fics and avoid them like the plague because it’s icky to me and makes me feel gross and I guess one of my personal triggers is someone feeling bad for doing something Shameful in public 

Which brings me to Weird Humanity Musings part II (III? I can’t do math) that have taken a weird non-activist and highly personal turn for the worst: 

I don’t think people notice how often emotional manipulation plays a part in subtle power plays that go on in human interactions every day. Humanity made dominance ffs. Humans are the ones that get upset and feel challenged with eye contact- not dogs. Dogs use sustained eye contact all the time for a bunch of reasons. Humans too. But it’s humans that recontextualized that behavior as exclusively dominance, a wholly human concept, and, whatever I’m not going to spend too much time on this because I don’t actually particularly care about it. But the point is actually just that humans went out of their way to create this thing, and it plays a part in social interactions. Mothers and daughters and siblings and friends all have scripts of code that basically go for the emotional center of the other person to get them to obey. Most people can’t recognize it because society has that whole “if everyone does it THIS must be the baseline of normal” be as well All Know, normal doesn’t even exist so that reaction is bullshit before it’s even analyzed in any meaningful sense. 

Example time because I highly doubt I can just say that off the cuff and actually get people to follow that train of thought to completion (unfortunately, I’d rather not have to write this post at all because it means one less problem in the world and that’s a good thing). 

Anytime someone says “I’m your mother!” it’s to reinforce the authority of the child that this person probably have financial, social, physical (such a medical) and emotional control over for almost two decades of their life, or however much it actually was. This is often used to make the child of the mother Do Something, like maybe they’re questioning her judgement or smth I don’t know I get this one a lot and it’s lost all meaning to me by now 

Whenever someone says “thank you” it generally plays into the social script where they do the whole dance of “I got this service from you, I say thanks, you say you’re welcome.” This works as a subtle manipulation (not necessarily negative! these examples aren’t Get Mad and Force Conformity examples, just How It Works examples) when someone doesn’t feel like they’ve done something for someone else, so saying “thanks” shows appreciation for the effort and can force an acknowledgement of that effort by expecting a “your welcome” or “no problem” from the other person. This gets shitty and creepy when someone doesn’t take silence aka “I’m not doing the dance because I don’t agree” to a degree where they’re like “oh? are you not going to say you’re welcome?” aka are you gonna be a conceited shithead that thinks they’re better than saying “you’re welcome” the most common social nicety that supposedly always costs nothing? Which does nothing to make the person to feel better and everything to leverage the situation and make them preform social interaction for the other person’s amusement. 

“Good morning” is another example. It doesn’t actually matter if the morning is good or not, but it establishes rapport and focuses on the positives- one of those things called “small talk.” (Never heard of her.) This is something someone can actually observe better at the cultural level- someone says “good morning” in english, in another language they say something else. Both show ideological underlying beliefs of the culture Because That’s How Culture And Language Work because it’s a sneaky not-liar that can’t hide its true feelings about things. 

I’m not actually all that good with the line between “what is acceptable emotional manipulation in a social context when the fundamentals of the english language rely on subtle power exchange to function [and holy shit would some people hate knowing That] and the unacceptable abusive emotional manipulation” and I generally err on the side of stuff that people seem to be explicitly asking for and prompting but I don’t always succeed and I don’t know that I’m doing the best method but that’s the most chaotic good thing I could come up with  

But it still remains that calling things emotional manipulation is both true and a misnomer because in some ways, they’re necessary to exist in society without being considered a jackass (as a self proclaimed “I was called a jackass using many different words that all basically mean jackass” that mostly doesn’t participate in these social nicety dances because I don’t like my brain yelling at me that I’m doing the same bullshit I hated as a Youth and I don’t like disappointing myself) and in others, they’re totally unneeded and artlessly cruel. I mean, heck, going through this internal debate every time someone says “good morning?” Who does that? (I do. This is why people think I’m a dumbass lmao. Jokes on them unfortunately,) 

Regardless of what people actually DO about it though, these things are the underlying mechanics of how emotional manipulation works. It’s a concoction of societal expectations, situational contexts, personal histories, selective pressures, and a bunch of other things in smaller amounts. Most of the time it’s “normal” social stuff but with a ton of exaggerated features (I almost used my own handle from a different Social Media and that my friends is having a lot of issues and self hatred due to abuse! and also anxieties over becoming abusive ofc but who doesn’t have those these days). Which is why I think it’s so important that it’s expansively defined so much because otherwise people are really thickheaded about emotional abuse specifically. They think it’s impossible to do in some cases and in others, think it’s exclusively the realm of insults and humiliation. 

Those exaggerate features are even harder to spot if someone doesn’t even recognize the interpersonal dynamics of language in the first place. It all just becomes nonsensical and no one can tell what came from where or what this particular question is abusive and not this other one. The logic gets poked with holes easier and abuse survivors get dismissed. 

Of course, expanding that definition to reshape thinking might just go along the same direction as representation, where even alluding to the truly abusive mechanics of actual, you know, emotional abuse, is seen as abusive. Everything, literally, would become problematic. There could be callout posts about any human interaction in any context with anyone ever. I’m confident in holding myself to a higher standard than the rest of society but I Cannot overstate that being bullshit to the nth degree that I couldn’t even put up with myself telling myself to keep to it as a standard. It just doesn’t work. I’ve tried it. That way lies the nonsense form of madness as in the non-nd kind. That, along with purity culture and censorship and doxxing and death threats and so on: I don’t fully want to release this theory out into the world in practice because I’m afraid society will just use it as fodder to be cruel to people but I’m also equally afraid that not saying anything will just cause people to, I don’t know, keep accidentally causing suffering to others. So I’ll stuff it under a read more and hope that keeps the impact minimal but not non-existent. 

But yeah this whole post is a demonstration that just because someone’s behaving weirdly doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad people. Even if they do something that seems downright mean. I read a post that was basically “there’s no such thing as asshole disorder” but there really is, and it’s whatever I have. I get so compelled to Do the right thing by my ethics and morals that I go through above *gestures* and take longer than neurotypicals do to respond to “good morning” and I don’t mean anything by it so I assume that people can tell because I assume the best in others, and others are free to assume the worst in me so they do. 

I’m not upset by it but I also wish that there were a better system to screen assholes than assuming that non-compliance with normality is a sign of evil, because that’s the system we seem to have. It might have a high reward in the brain via confirmation biases and whatnot, but that doesn’t seem worth the risk of basically knocking down any and every mental illness symptom that’s unpalatable. Because they’re all unpalatable to someone, somewhere. That’s what makes them symptoms. We don’t have any “glowing green hair” as symptoms because that’s just sick as fuck and I want some. People who have working with their symptoms and turned them into something beneficial have largely challenged societal ideas about what is “good” and “natural” to get there, and that type of work isn’t someone everyone is cut out for. 

Many physically disabled people are all medical model, all the way because they’ve been largely neurotypical their whole lives, and I’ve read their grieving posts like people recommend that I read and I just don’t see how I can help them empathize with me as a person that doesn’t give a shit if my clicking pen annoys people if it helps me focus. That’s an Asshole move if any has ever be determined by society, but at the same time, a common fundamental symptom of many disorders, and as such, I don’t feel bad about it and I don’t know that I could, ever, be made to feel guilty for existing. I’ve never seen myself as a drain on society. I’ve never felt like a freeloader. And I’ll never feel bad for being disable or neurodivergent. Does that make me the bad guy? Or the weird cool antihero from fiction? My impulse is to say “yes” to both ‘cause what people like in fiction is not always what they tolerate in real life 

It’s kinda weird and paradoxical that I can feel bad about not feeling bad but not feel bad about being disabled at the same time but w/e I’m an abuse survivor we, collectively, excel at stuff and things that most people may not understand so I guess that’s all the explanation I need 

[riusugoi]

PRE FACE: Or How to Begin at the End - Amy Ireland

http://ah-journal.net/issues/01/pre-face-or-how-to-begin-at-the-end -   As in a woven image or pattern, the course taken from discrete threads to the emergence of a represented, recognisable object or product, is a nonlinear one. Once enough threads have been put into place, a motif emerges, but it is always in terms of a retrochronic legibility, premised on a process that is necessarily primary: the construction of the hardware and the programming of the software that execute the patterns of intrication presiding over the warp and weft of the threads which form the image. The lesson—one which would fascinate Plant—that can be taken from this is that recognition, conceptual identification and negation are always secondary. In this sense, the primary process of weaving is a future coincident with the present’s past. The moment of identification and appearance always arrives behind the functioning of the process which assembles it as its object—whether this is an industrial product, a historical phenomenon, or indeed, a self. Ada Lovelace’s writings testify to an intuitive apprehension of this fundamental delay. Rebuffed from admission into the Royal Society of London because of her sex, but convinced that her pioneering work would one day be understood for what it was, she did not even bother to append her name to the Menebrea footnotes, confiding to Babbage, ‘I do not wish to proclaim who has written it’.5 In both the conscious maintenance of her anonymity and her contribution to the technologisation of the processes of production that would link computation and weaving together, Ada Lovelace conspired with the primary process immanent to all representation—invisible, patient and quietly anticipating the long term effects of her work, lagging far behind their imperceptible, perpetually futural, initiation.

Women and machines, Plant argues, have historically shared the ghostlike position of the intermediary. They are nonetheless ‘the very “possibility of mediation, transaction, transition, transference”’.6 Man’s ‘go-betweens’, the ‘anonymous editors, secretaries, copyists, and clerks’, those who

took his messages, decrypted his codes, counted his numbers, bore his children, and passed on his genetic code. They have worked as his bookkeepers and his memory banks, zones of deposit and withdrawal, promissory notes, credit and exchange, not merely servicing the social world, but underwriting reality itself. Goods and chattels. The property of man.7

Apocalypse or salvation only appear as legitimate endpoints to a subjectivity premised on integral stasis and an inherently binarising logic that is dialectally subsumed into a temporal linearity produced via a double reference to an inaccessible origin and a fear of death (united in the word ‘matrix’), both of which must be appropriated, mastered and overcome. To usurp the position of authority and channel—through obfuscation, anonymity, intelligence and cunning, the weaving of a coded message or a riddle—the course of history, via the technology of prophecy is also, in its disturbance of telos, a practice of weaving time.

‘Women have always spun, carded and weaved, albeit anonymously. Without name. In perpetuity. Everywhere yet nowhere,’ writes Plant.11 To prophesy is to complicate, pleat, loop or fold time. One is said to ‘weave’ a spell or a charm, knotting a virtual future into the obscure unfolding of the present and its written past. There is a connection, emphasised by Plant, between weaving, magic, prophecy and secrecy, who notes (quoting Mircea Eliade’s Rites and Symbols of Initiation) that, ‘The moon “spins” Time and weaves human lives. The Goddesses of Destiny are spinners.”’12 When Eliade looks at the traditional tribal ‘seclusion of pubescent girls and menstruating women, often the occasion for the spinning of both actual and fictional yarns’, she continues, ‘he detects “an occult connection between the conception of the periodical creations of the world … and the ideas of Time and Destiny, on the one hand, and on the other, nocturnal work, women’s work, which has to be performed far from the light of the sun and almost in secret’.13

As the link between the ancient, feminised labour of weaving and the dawn of accelerating computation technologies, Ada Lovelace is a cyborg, and a prophet. She is in good company. Among such figures always, significantly, feminised, trans- or poly-gendered, are the many, mad monstrosities of mythology and cultural history. These pathologised and frightful seers arrive consistently from outside and approach Read Only Memory history simultaneously from what it understands as a before and an after, the past and the future, always and at once infiltrating from beneath and from afar, like the Sphinx, Tiresias, or the Eumenides that haunt the narrative of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays. The sphinx is a cyborg or a hybrid—part woman, part eagle, part lion—who dispatches a prophecy concealed in a riddle (What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?) to which Oedipus, thinking he has solved it, responds with the answer ‘Man’.16 Tiresias, a transgendered prophet, figured in T.S. Eliot’s indictment of a tragic modernity, The Waste Land as ‘blind / throbbing between two lives / Old man with wrinkled female breasts’ is, according to a footnote, the poem’s ‘most important personage’.17 It is Tiresias who ‘perceives the substance of the poem’ (the seer’s role in the text emerges, interestingly, in relation to the scene concerning two feminised labourers: the secretary and the clerk), and who delivers to Oedipus, in Oedipus Rex, the terrible prophecy of patricide and incest that, precisely in trying to avoid, Oedipus unwittingly fulfils.18 The Eumenides, Erinyes or Fates, ‘daughters of the earth, of the dark!’ preside over Oedipus’ death or disappearance in the enigmatic final scene of Oedipus at Colonus in which, fated to expire in the Eumenides’ sacred grove, Oedipus vanishes, with only the king of Athens and a confused messenger looking on, the latter proclaiming as he returns from the mysterious site, ‘Oedipus is dead! But no short speech could explain what happened’, an utterance reprised moments later in the question of the Chorus, ‘What? What happened?’19 The Fates are traditionally goddesses of time and, infamously, weavers—like Ariadne who is connected with both the weaving and unweaving of the Athenian labyrinth, particularly enigmatically in Nietzsche, as Deleuze points out in Nietzsche and Philosophy, claiming that, ‘Ariadne is Nietzsche's first secret’, the double of Dionysus, who recursively completes nihilism in affirming the Dionysian affirmation.20 The etymology of ‘Sphinx’ in ancient Greek derives from the verb σφίγγω (sphíngō), meaning ‘to squeeze’ or ‘tighten up’ (Plant: ‘[K]nitting is a matter of making loops. At its simplest, it is done with a single, continuous thread, which loops around and intricates itself’) and as Robert Graves recounts in The White Goddess, ‘Sphinx means “throttler” … in Etruscan ceramic art she is usually portrayed as seizing men, or standing on their prostate figures’.21 The concept corresponding to fate in Anglo-Saxon culture is ‘wyrd’ (Shakespeare renders the Greek Fates as the—again, transgendered—Wyrd Sisters of Macbeth), its Norse cognate is Urðr, connected to the Norns, or weaving female deities who control the destinies of men, and both words are derived from the root wert, ‘to turn’, ‘to spin’ or ‘to wind’.

What is it about this fearful link between women, weaving, and temporal power that transforms them into such sick and monstrous creatures in the collective imagination?22 Is it the fact that they are always either partial or multiple—‘at least two’—and thereby intractable to the rules of identity, straddling both sides of being, the transcendental and its objects?23 Or that they index—for the identity that comes to reflect upon them—a primary alienation, from the 'matrix', matter or ‘mother’ that begets it? Representation is always in the thrall of something monstrous it cannot perceive. For Oedipus, for Babbage and his colleagues, for those who speak the language of history, the unrepresentable arrives first, but also last. These threshold beings of the future and the past, presiding over the fragile threads integrating life and death inhabit both edges of time and enfold everything within their trap, secreted in the present. They are at once the secret ‘origin’ of an obscure—because nonlinear—production, and the prophetesses of the ‘end'. ‘There are only two answers to the question “which comes first” and both of them are female,’ writes Plant, 'the male element is simply an offshoot from a female loop’.24 Zeros + Ones itself closes with the casting of a prophecy. Plant writes of the processes she has been describing that they are ‘a code for the numbers to come’.25

En "The Infra-World", un pequeño tratado sobre lo imperceptible en el arte y la cultura, François J. Bonnet resalta un raro fragmento en prosa titulado ‘Heracles 2 or The Hydra,’ encontrado en la obra de Heiner Müller de 1972, "Cement".

‘Heracles 2 or The Hydra’ narra las vicisitudes de su protagonista, guerrero y masculino, Heracles, a medida que se adentra más y más en una jungla desorientadora en busca de una bestia mítica y feminizada que habrá de confrontar y matar en batalla, la Hidra. Mientras persigue al animal que cree estar cazando, siguiendo un rastro de sangre, [...] el abundante follaje de la retorcida vegetación le impide ver el cielo, su única fuente para la navegación temporal, y se encuentra con repeticiones de configuraciones de ramas particulares que alteran y distorsionan ya por completo su impresión de estar avanzando en el espacio. Llevado por un sentimiento de creciente desesperación, Heracles acelera su paso pero no puede distinguir si camina más rápido o más despacio que antes. Peor aún, la jungla parece estar animada por algún tipo extraño de consciencia y él comienza a creer que está poniéndole a prueba. Se olvida de su nombre y comienza a disociarse de su propio sentido de auto-consciencia y de su sentido de integridad corporal.

A medida que el espacio de la jungla cambia a su alrededor "solo él, el innombrable, se había mantenido igual en su largo y costoso camino a la batalla. ¿O era aquello que caminaba sobre sus piernas en el cada vez más rápido suelo danzante también algo diferente a lo que él era? Todavía estaba pensando en ello, cuando la jungla, una vez más, lo atrapó".

[...] Lentamente, lo que queda de Heracles, se da cuenta de que el rastro de sangre que ha estado siguiendo es la suya propia, y que la bestia mítica que creía estar cazando no es otra que la jungla misma:

"No avanzó más, la jungla le seguía el ritmo… y él entendió, con creciente pánico: la jungla era la Hidra, hacía tiempo que la jungla que creía estar atravesando era la bestia, era quien le llevaba en el ritmo de sus pasos, las ondas del suelo eran su jadeo y el viento su respiración, el rastro que había seguido era el de su propia sangre, de la que la selva, que era la bestia, se llevaba buena parte (¿cuánta sangre tiene un ser humano?); y también entendió que siempre lo había sabido, aunque no pudiese nombrarlo".

[...] Mientras él intenta combatirla, se da cuenta de que los golpes se vuelven hacia él, en una confusión entre usuario y herramienta (la separación que permitía su maestría), la compostura y el control se desangran entre los restos en descomposición del suelo nauseabundo de la jungla. [...] Heracles se ha encontrado con la forma del secreto

[tomasorban]

Did the ancients somehow know about DNA?

Conventional history tells us that the double-helix structure and base-pairing characteristic of the DNA molecule was not "discovered" until the twentieth century, based upon the work of scientists Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Erwin Chargaff, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s.

Erwin Chargaff (1905-2002) in particular was responsible for the insight that DNA molecules contain roughly equal proportions of adenine and thymine (one of the "base pairs" in the DNA molecule) and of guanine and cytosine (the other "base pair").  Since that time, high school students everywhere have had to memorize the letters A-T and G-C in conjunction with their introduction to the molecular structure of DNA.

It is fascinating to note that the first four signs of the zodiac wheel after the ecliptic "crossing" of the celestial equator at the spring equinox (shown in the diagram above) are Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer (readers who astutely note that the motion of precession has long ago "delayed" the sky and moved the constellation Pisces into the heliacal rising position once occupied by the constellation Aries during the Age of Aries should note that in astrological terms, the "signs" are considered to remain in the positions shown above, for cogent reasons that are beyond the scope of this particular post).

Is it mere "coincidence" that the base pairs of the DNA molecule begin with the same four letters as the first four signs in the zodiac (A, T, G and C), and that they actually "pair" in a manner consistent with the order of the zodiac signs (A with T, and G with C, just as Aries is next to Taurus and Gemini next to Cancer)?

Of course, skeptical readers will note that the names for the DNA nucleobases were generally given by different researchers operating in different decades during the mid- to late-1800s, and that their names almost certainly were not chosen in order to relate in any way to the zodiac signs (adenine, for example, was named after the pancreas, from which the first samples in which adenine was isolated were taken and which organ in Greek is named aden, while guanine is apparently named after the word for bird droppings or guano).  And so it would seem on the surface that the connection between the zodiac and our modern understanding of the DNA molecule and its structure and base pairing is purely coincidental.  

Nevertheless, even if no plausible argument can be made for an actual connection between the letters A-T-G-C in the DNA molecule, and the letters A-T-G-C in the first four constellations of the zodiac cycle, it certainly seems to be a singular example of serendipity, synchronicity, or the collective unconscious working itself out over the course of thousands of years.

Further, while the letters A-T-G-C may not be among the evidence which argues for ancient understanding of the DNA molecule long before the work of Franklin and Gosling, Watson and Crick, and that of Erwin Chargaff, there is in fact other evidence which suggests that the ancients did in fact display flashes of insight which make us wonder whether they might somehow have had inexplicable knowledge of the importance of the DNA molecule, and even the structure of DNA.

One oft-cited example is the fact that the ancient symbol of the caduceus features two intertwined serpents very reminiscent of the double-helix structure of DNA.  Further, some ancient art including the images from ancient Sumer and Babylon depicted on this page (disregard the discussions of "Nibiru," "Planet X," and the "Annunaki" as outside the scope of this particular post as well) clearly seem to be very suggestive of modern understanding of the structure of DNA.

Jeremy Narby, author of Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge has an interview on the web located here in which he discusses a theory which attempts to explain how the mankind may have acquired knowledge of the importance of DNA and its helictical structure long before the advent of "modern science."  He believes that it is very possible -- and that in fact there is evidence to conclude -- that shamanic techniques can give human beings access to knowledge which modern scientific methods only confirmed much later, in recent decades.  In fact, he notes that shamans regularly describe visions involving intertwining serpents, and associate these serpents with something shared by all the multifarious life-forms in our world. In the interview, he makes the assertion that:

Both shamans and molecular biologists agree that there is a hidden unity under the surface of life's diversity; both associate this unity with the double helix shape (or two entwined serpents, a twisted ladder, a spiral staircase, two vines wrapped around each other); both consider that one must deal with this level of reality in order to heal.  One can fill a book with correspondences between shamanism and molecular biology.

Note that in an image about four-fifths of the way down that long web page, Dr. Narby includes an image from the tradition of western alchemy which he believes has clear resemblance to chromosonal DNA, and which certainly predates the work of Franklin, Gosling, Watson and Crick by centuries.

There is other evidence, particularly from ancient sacred traditions and mythology, which strongly suggest that mankind somehow knew far more about the importance of DNA than we moderns have been led to believe. This evidence will be addressed in my next book.

This evidence has nothing (directly) to do with the synchronicity involving the letters A-T-G-C and the first four signs of the zodiac, although the ancients clearly taught that mankind reflected the cosmos on a "microcosmic" level, a concept discussed in previous posts such as "

The extra-zodiacal decans in macrocosm and microcosm," "

More on macrocosm and microcosm

Human internal organs connected to solar system planets?

Okeanos

The judgement of Paris

Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600

If each strand of our DNA is composed of base pairs whose initials reflect the initials of those first four zodiac signs (each of which is considered the "leader" of a grouping of three other signs, categorized as the Earth, Air, Fire, and Water signs of the zodiac), then we can truly say that -- however the serendipitous confluence came about, the naming of the DNA base pairs symbolizes on a profound level the fact that each of us embodies a tiny cosmos.

addendum:

DNA has the geometry of ten interpenetrating dodecahedra spiraling along the helix. It requires ten Phi spirals to create the top view of DNA. The basic geometry of DNA is that of a dodecahedron. Since Daniel Winter assumes that the universe is one huge super hologram and that everything in the universe is connected with everything else by means of Golden waves, he believes that DNA is electro-magnetically coupled with the Earth grid and the Zodiac by means of the fractal dodecahedron shapes of energy.

[bnfbc]

Being Mortal - by Atul Gawande - December 2021 - selected by Gabe

Andy: “Wonderful and thoughtful text about the end of life. This book and its ideas have left a lasting impression on me.” A

Gabe: “I really liked this book. I thought the author did a great job of describing the different approaches to aging throughout history as well as tracing the evolution of the nursing homes and assisted living facilities. I also really appreciated that he wove his own personal experience with an aging parent into the book, and the idea of empowering the elderly to make decisions for themselves is something I think will really stick with me.” A

Jachles: “Thought-provoking while reading and led to a great discussion. Despite the depressing and sometimes uncomfortable subject matter, I thought it was really well done and gave me a lot to think about. The section on nursing homes was particularly eye-opening and made me realize that there are so many better alternatives for how we treat people at the end of their lives. I loved his approach towards treatment of diseases like cancer, which focused more on allowing people to enjoy their final days rather than aggressively prolonging life at all costs. A really good book on an important subject that I recommend for everyone, no matter your age.” A

Paul: “A book about dying that is very much about living. Gawande skillfully interweaves the recent history of medicine’s approach to end of life questions with the personal story of his own father’s end of life, while also reflecting on the evolution of his own approach to these issues as a doctor. Full of heart and written with clarity and warmth, this book definitely changed my outlook on and understanding of these issues. Was also a nice set-up for certain sections of our next book, a combo I’ll lovingly refer to as “we’re all gonna die and that’s okay!” A-

Tommy: "Gawande presents many thought-provoking ideas on society's various approaches to death. He seems to argue that a major problem with our system is that it's built to prolong life at costs that typically far outweigh the benefits. Additionally, the individual whose life is extended very often lacks autonomy over that extension. It's not merely the financial burden society bears on keeping people alive that's the problem, but more importantly it's the lack of quality of life many people experience. Gawande's thoughts around letting the individual decide how they want, or don't want, to live feels so intuitive it makes one wonder how society ever wrested that power away. Gawande notes that medical professionals are there to repair health and are far less concerned with or capable of addressing a person's feelings of self-worth. Unfortunately, these medical professionals often dictate the terms at the end of life with a focus on the quantity of life in place of quality of life. The book completely changed my perception of hospice care and the workers in that industry. The history of independent living facilities for the elderly and how the original conception morphed into an extension of the medical system was fascinating. The book fully succeeds in showing how important it is for us to all consider the wishes of others at the end of life." B+

GPA: 3.80

[athyrabunlord]

LLSHP 9 - Christmas Banquet

Arc1: [Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6] [Chapter 7]

Arc2: [Chapter 8] [Chapter 9] [Chapter 10] [Chapter 11] [Chapter 12] [Chapter 13] [Chapter 14]

Arc3: [Chapter 15 -  Under The Black Lake (TBD)]

Interlude: [Carbonado (1)] [Carbonado (2)] [Of Feathers and Wind] [Delphinus (teaser blip)]

[Brief note about School Term] [other LLSHP AU stuff] [YohaMaRuby concept arts] [ChikaYouRiko concept arts] [KanaDiaMari concept arts] [Hogwarts Staff]

[FFN link] (finished the interludes!) [Pixiv Link]

A/N: (ง •̀_•́)ง Yup still keeping up this update schedule of 1 chapter every two weeks! Still slowly editing previous chapters though XD; Anyway, this feels more like a long filler chapter tbh, but it’s full of fun stuff! I enjoyed writing it, so I hope you’ll enjoy reading it too! Words: 8,073

Yoshiko grins at her reflection in the mirror.

How can anyone look so flawless? So utterly bewitching? How can such a perfect human being exist? Ah, no mere mortal could be this beautiful, that is the truth. She, the great Yohane, is a fallen angel after all!

For the umpteenth time, she smoothes the non-existent crinkles of her raven-black velvet dress, her silk gloves brushing over the grey ribbons and white frills. The dark magenta rose imprint along the hem only accentuates how majestic the wearer is.

She is so, so ready for the Christmas Banquet!

Chuckling huskily, she takes one step towards the grand ornate mirror and lightly touches its shiny surface. The last time she used a full-body mirror, the Mirror of Erised, she was filled with unpleasant sense of inferiority and downright confusion of her own identity. But now, this ordinary mirror shows her who she truly is, and she is pleased with herself.

Why desire to be a pristine angel, when her current self is even better?

All the challenges she's faced and the possibility of her soul being damaged only make her stronger.

That incident with the colony of Acromantula caused her to become wary of even the tiniest spiders for days, but since then she has been faring better in those practice duels against the older witches. Her improvement was the only reason why Dia lifted the tickling Jinx she set on Mari. Still, the blonde is banned from coffee and lemon pie until further notice, much to her horror. Taking pity on her, the rest of the group manages to convince Dia to disregard this rule just for tonight's feast.

The Christmas Banquet is an end of the first term celebration where esteemed guests from outside the school would attend as well. The astounding feast, prepared by House Elves and staff members together, is actually not the main attraction of this event.

The spotlight is the Yule Ball, which was originally part of the famed Tri-Wizard Tournament that used to take place between three magical schools. Nowadays, it is a ballroom dance competition that was started by some of the professors back when they were still students. Considering Hogwarts' long history, this is a fairly recent tradition that's been gaining popularity over the decades. The dancing pair not only have to be the best in their waltz, tango or other types, but also boost the flair of their performance with magic. Yoshiko heard rumors of explosive fireworks, dancing leprechauns and even actual storms in the past.

Chaotic, yet incredibly thrilling. What better way to end a term with a blast?

Of course, she did consider entering the competition and enrapture everyone in her fallen angel charm, but there is one teensy bitsy setback she just can't seem to overcome.

She's horrible at ballroom dancing.

And also, she has no partner.

Alright, not one but two setbacks in total. Her confident grin slips into a scowl. Before Hogwarts, she's been an avid follower of Muggle hip-pop, rock and rap, and she knows all the various choreography by heart.

However, ballroom dance is a whole different matter. Riko had been kind enough to try teaching her, but she's stepped on the older girl's feet one too many times. After she fled the Room of Requirement in mortification, it took Hanamaru and Ruby a lot of convincing for her to even attend the Banquet at all.

Yoshiko shakes her head. Her two best friends are correct - all she has to do is look pretty and enjoy herself. There's no need to force herself to waltz or whatever!

Now that her confidence has returned, she steps out of her room to join the rest of her Slytherin housemates so they can head down to the Great Hall together. Whispers of praises and even friendly greetings make her tilt her chin high. While she isn't particularly close to any of them, they've all been civil to her and respect her wish for privacy.

"Nice dress, Tsushima-san!"

"Ku ku ku, I made it myself! I hand-picked all the materials and accessories~"

"That is fascinating! And the ribbon in your hair matches everything so well."

"Oh and your earrings..."

Truth be told, Yoshiko is rather taken aback by all the attention she's been given. Is it because she's dressed all fancy and could probably pass for a noble Pureblood? Or, perhaps, they have truly acknowledged her as a true Slytherin seeing how her grades have improved leaps and bounds under Dia's tutelage? Yoshiko hasn't really paid much attention to her housemates the past few months, so focused on her training and spending time with her friends.

She makes a mental note to be nicer to them. It doesn't hurt to make more allies, especially amongst those who share the same House as her. She searches a crowd for a familiar face, and quietly asks a wizard nearby.

"Erm, does anyone know where Dia-san is?"

The Slytherin prefect, whose aristocratic features imply he must be from an ancient Pureblood family, informs her that Dia is currently with the staff and guests, as the Kurosawa's representative.

Yoshiko pouts. Since she does not have a 'date' or partner, so to speak, she is hoping that she could stick to Dia's side until they reach the Hall at least. Alas, it looks like she'll have to make it there on her own. The rest of her Housemates look like they have partners already, and she isn't comfortable with the idea of accompanying someone she isn't close with anyway.

She quietly trails after the other Slytherins, glad to be distracted from her thoughts by their praises and curious questions about her fashion. Hushed murmurs then reach her ears after they step out of the Dormitory, and she blinks in surprise when the people in front of her part ways to allow a familiar girl to get through.

Yoshiko can't help but whistle in wonder. "I almost didn't recognize you! I thought I'm supposed to meet up with you and Zuramaru just outside the Hall?"

Ruby smiles shyly, clearly uncomfortable at how every pair of eyes seem to be on her. The shorter girl is clad in a dress robe of ebony and ivory hue, though the cape is adorned with the Hufflepuff bronze. With her hair tied in a ponytail, she looks rather dashing yet retains her characteristic cute aura.

"Um, Hanamaru-chan said she'll meet up with us later… she's having some trouble with her outfit, but when I tried to stay and help, she asked me to pick you up," Ruby twitters. "Hehe, you look so pretty, Yoshiko-chan!"

"Hnff, of course, it's Yohane-sama you're speaking with." As someone who enjoys the spotlight, Yoshiko is starting to find all those whispered conversations around them disconcerting. "Let's go then?"

As if understanding her intention, Ruby nods and holds out her gloved hand in a chivalrous manner. It is at such moment that Yoshiko has to remind herself that, no matter how harmless and critter-like Ruby is, she is still a Kurosawa Pureblood who has a different upbringing than her. Either way, the gesture endears the shorter girl to her even more.

"Heh, it's like you're a knight in shiny armor-," Yoshiko's grin twitches. "Well, I probably shouldn't use the word 'shiny', ugh. But really, why the dress robe? You look really good in it but I'd expected you to wear a dress?"

"Oh, that was my plan but last night, I received a parcel from m-my family. This is the formal attire I used to wear back then during important events. See? These colors represent the Kurosawa family," Ruby's smile softens, prompting Yoshiko to gently squeeze her friend's hand in comfort. "It's the first mail I've received from them since the night we got Sorted. I see they're trying to reconcile with me, so of course I'm more than happy to try as well."

"That's good. I mean, they should've long accepted you but at least this is better than nothing. Although, the Hufflepuff color-?"

There's a mischievous twinkle in Ruby's green eyes. "Hehe, I modified it myself. I'm proud to be a Puff and I'll always be."

Yoshiko chuckles fondly at her friend. "And I'm proud of you, Ruby. How about Zuramaru though? Please don't tell me she's also in dress robes or some… high-class samurai outfit or something."

It may sound ridiculous though she has no problem imagining the brunette wearing that. Hanamaru does love literature, especially romance fiction set in certain historical periods. Or, she could be draped in fancy ribbons and flowy dresses, not knowing how to put it on, while murmuring 'mirai zura' in admiration.

Ah, Hanamaru will probably smack her if she says that to her face. She can try, Yoshiko smirks, tonight, the great Yohane shall not be tamed by a mere little demon's whims!

"You'll have to wait and see, Yoshiko-chan. I promised Hanamaru-chan not to say anything to you because she wants to see your reaction," Ruby's steps gain a bit of a bounce as they walk down the hallways.

Yoshiko doesn't get a chance to protest because a pair of familiar orange and silver pounce on Ruby the moment they round the corner. Unlike her, the Gryffindor duo is quite vocal about their adoration of the handsome little Hufflepuff.

"Piki!"

"As expected of our Ruby-chan!"

"A real noble! A real prince!"

"Look at the fabric, look at the design! It's the real deal! Ahhh do you mind if I borrow it tomorrow? For research?"

"Hehe, you and your costume obsession, You-chan~ Still, both of you look so ikemen~! Kya, aren't we lucky, Riko-chan?"

Yoshiko allows her gaze to sweep over the three Third-Years, amazed by their respective appearances. Riko has chosen a conservative gown of amaranth and wine hue that's decorated with sakura petals along the hem, a perfect outfit that matches the pretty wearer's personality. Simple and elegant, the Ravenclaw chuckles daintily at her friends' antics. No doubt the voted campus beauty will be surrounded by suitors vying for her hand in a dance.

Chika is as cheerful as always, though there is now an inexplicable grace added to her charisma. Her hair is straightened with the signature braid adorned with a white rose. As opposed to her usual bright colored clothes, she is wearing a dark indigo cocktail dress embellished with white satin belt. Admittedly, if it weren't for her familiar laughter and fawning over Ruby, Yoshiko would have thought she is a refined guest from some upper-class family!

"Ehehe~ You-chan styled my hair!" Chika twirls around and winks at Yoshiko, who grins back in spite of herself. Yup, that's still the spirited Beater alright. "Can't thank you enough, Captain Watanabe!"

"Ha ha, 'twas my honor, First Mate Takami!" You salutes back, this characteristic gesture now rather suave given her outfit. Unlike her buddy, the Seeker is dressed in a formal suit that is probably made from pricey material, judging from the way it gleams at just the right angle. The popular witch, combined with her attractive smile, will most likely be chased by her fanclub the whole night.

Noticing Yoshiko's questioning gaze, You chuckles heartily. "I was going to wear a dress too, but ahaha our Housemates kinda bullied Kanan-chan and I into wearing a suit… they prepared this outfit for me, and I can't resist! I'm so going to research the fabric and its origins later! I mean, look at this tie! The gradient color is so pretty!"

"Well, you both look quite nice. Are you each other's dates?" Yoshiko smirks. Even after witnessing the duo's impressive teamwork and display of powerful magic, her opinion of them as dunderheads hasn't changed. Nowadays though, it's more of an affectionate nickname than having any derisive connotation behind it.

"Nope," they reply simultaneously. "We're Sakurauchi-hime's escorts tonight!"

Riko, who is standing several paces behind them, squeaks in surprise when she's promptly sandwiched between the two. It looks comical really, if Yoshiko doesn't know the history behind the three. While the self-proclaimed bodyguards playfully tease their flustered friend and Ruby, two more witches join their gathering.

"My my, everyone looks so gorgeous~!"

Mari, for some reason, is also wearing a tailored suit, her usually wavy golden hair straightened for the occasion and styled at the back with a few emerald clips. Combined with the azure bowtie, dark jacket with peaked lapels, turquoise waistcoat and more, she is fully decked for the Ball. She would have passed for an European gentleman if it weren't for her generous chest area, which just couldn't seem to be hidden.

As if reading her thoughts as always, the blonde smirks at her and puffs out her bosom even more. Yoshiko despairingly glances down at her own and grumbles. "Hmnnff, don't you look excited for the feast."

"You bet I am! I'm dying for my precious lemons," Mari purrs sweetly as she tugs on her date's arm. Yoshiko is pretty sure the implication has flown over the others' heads, and she groans inwardly at the realization that she is corrupted enough to know the Ravenclaw's double meaning.

Mari's lovely date appears just as exasperated. The tall witch has long cascading indigo tresses as dark and flowing as the ocean itself. The gradient plum and purple color of her silken mermaid dress complements her hair and eyes, while the translucent violet shawl gives her an overall mystic quality. Although, she looks familiar for some reason.

"Kanan-chan! How could you! You were supposed to wear a suit with me!" You puffs up her cheeks in dismay.

Yoshiko's eyes almost bulge out of their sockets. Come again?

"Ahaha sorry You," that laidback tone of laughter definitely belongs to the Gryffindor Lions' Captain. "We flipped a coin and I lost, so I had to wear the dress."

Yoshiko could only stare.

"Oh oh oh~ You've ensnared the lil'kitty here in your charms, Kanan~" Giggling, Mari rests her chin on her partner's shoulder.

"What!? No! It's just that, I've never seen her without that whip of a ponytail!"

"She hisses~ Maybe she'll scratch too~"

Yoshiko indignantly snarls at the blonde, almost blurting out that she's the cat Animagus, not her, but manages to remember last minute that You and Chika are present too. Her irritation subsides a bit when the others also agree that they've never seen Kanan with her hair down either.

"Anyways, Kanan and I will so win the Ball this year! We've had four years of practice, it's our turn to finally shine!" Fire blazes in Mari's eyes, though her expression couldn't remain serious for long as a Cheshire grin breaks through.

"But how about your arm?" Yoshiko squints at Kanan's supposedly injured arm, which looks unblemished.

"Mari cast a glamor Charm on it, and for the duration of the dance, I can do this," the older witch taps her bracelet and momentarily reveals strings of magic that blend in with her hair. "This enables me to move my arm as per my thoughts."

"Remember not to overuse it." Riko clearly doesn't seem too happy that Kanan isn't letting her injured arm rest.

"Don't worry, Rikocchi~! That's why I'm the lead, yes?" Mari winks at her junior. "I'm wondering though, none of you are entering the competition?"

Chika waves her hand. "Welp, I'm interested, but not with you two as rivals! Besides, we're keeping Riko-chan away from nasty suitors! Also, protecting our Ruby-chan."

At this, the Gryffindor duo smothers the startled Hufflepuff in a hug. Yoshiko rolls her eyes. "How about this one? I still remember how scary your fanclub is, You-san."

You points to herself, blinking naively. "But I'm with Chika-chan and Riko-chan?"

"So? They'll still try to get to you. Since you don't have a partner, many will try to make you dance with them," Yoshiko explains as patiently as she could. Could this dummy be more dense?

"But Chika-chan and Riko-chan are my partners-?"

Yoshiko groans and facepalms.

"Did you hear that, Rikocchi? Just enjoy yourself tonight," Mari's voice is light and teasing, though Yoshiko could understand the underlying meaning. Riko does appear tense from all the affection You and Chika have been showering her with.

"But I-"

"No buts! Fallo e basta~ That means no Disillusion Charm either." Tutting, Mari holds up her finger like an older sister chiding an unreasonable sibling. "It's a banquet, a feast, a celebration! Come on, Dia must be dying to see our lovely faces inside the Hall already."

"It'll take a while before we can rescue her from those guests though," Kanan smiles as her partner leads her inside, followed by the playfully bickering You and Chika who take Riko by the arm on each side.

"We're gonna wait here for Zuramaru," Yoshiko calls out after them, determined to ignore her growling tummy at all the delicious aroma wafting towards her nose.

She glances at Ruby, whose hair is a tad disheveled from all the hugs she received earlier. She helpfully holds up a pouch mirror as the shorter girl fixes her bangs. "So? Who're you gonna dance with later? Chika-san? You-san?"

"E-Eh? But you said you're not going to dance right? Then I can't just leave you alone," Ruby says firmly.

"Oh I just assumed you gotta dance as a Kurosawa. I overheard from my Housemates that many of them are expected to dance, to present their family or something. Then again, you don't have to, since you're here as Ruby, simple as that."

Ruby returns her grin. "Well, I do want to dance with Hanamaru-chan and you, if you don't mind, Yoshiko-chan."

"... you saw how I stepped on Lily's foot didn't you? She was nice enough not to say anything but I'm sure she had to use potions to make the bruises go away."

"That's because you were under pressure. It'll just be us three, so you'll be fine!"

Yoshiko finds Ruby's smile infectious. "I just gotta do my Rubesty huh?"

"Yup! Starting right now!" Suddenly, the shorter girl turns her around and pushes with strength unexpected of her.

Yoshiko feels her breath caught in her throat at the sight of Hanamaru, who gives her a bashful little wave. The brunette is wearing a traditional kimono of amber and gold shades, extravagant in its floral motif and intricate designs fitting for festive occasions. Even then, the whole attire somehow emphasizes Hanamaru's unique aura of humility and serenity.

She is beautiful.

"Sorry to keep you two waiting zura… it's been a while, so it took me some time to on the obi," the brunette sticks out her tongue sheepishly, gesturing at the elaborate sienna sash around her midriff.

Yoshiko is still zoned out while the two Hufflepuffs giggle and fawn over each other's attire. She only snaps back to her senses when Hanamaru reaches up and prods her forehead.

"Ow! What did you think you were doing, you disrespectful little demon!"

"Because you weren't paying attention zura!"

"No, I'm over-paying attention, Bakamaru," Yoshiko mumbles in embarrassment, hoping her cheeks aren't red.

"Zura?"

"Nothing, and stop giggling already Ruby! Geez, what's with the little demons tonight. It's mutiny, I say!"

"Yoshiko-chan is easier to rile up tonight, ne, Ruby-chan?"

"Mari-san called her a kitty cat earlier, Hanamaru-chan~"

"Oooh, that fits her zura~"

"Grrrr, shorties don't get to talk." Miffed, Yoshiko ruffles their hair using her slightly-superior height, grinning in satisfaction at their protests. "Why the kimono though? You're gonna stand out since everyone's wearing western-style clothing."

"Not true zura. Professor Koizumi is wearing a kimono, so is Professor Sonoda," Hanamaru pouts, "Besides, I don't have any dresses zura, and it's what my grandma sent me when I Owled her that we're having a banquet."

Thank you thank you, may Satan bless your soul, Grandma Kunikida. Yoshiko chants in her head while outwardly appearing as nonchalant as possible. "Whatever. At least you're wearing contacts and not wearing those granny glasses. Let's go in already. I'm starving!"

"Me too," Hanamaru attaches herself to Ruby's offered arm, giggling. "Hehe, we're like your dates ne, Ruby-chan?"

In response, the dashing Hufflepuff bows to Yoshiko like a gentleman and holds out her other hand. The Slytherin rolls her eyes at their expectant gaze and curtsies before accepting it.

Though flustered, Yoshiko finds herself giggling with her friends as they enter the Great Hall together.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

"Again, that's Miss Ohara and Miss Matsuura with their spectacular performance. Please give them a round of applause!"

The Charms Professor has already used the Sonorous Charm to do announcements, but even then her voice is drowned by the student body's thunderous cheers. Yoshiko finds herself clapping just as hard as everyone else, amazed by what she has witnessed.

Magic really brings a simple ballroom dance to a whole new level, doesn't it?

The waltz started normally like ones Yoshiko had seen in older Muggle movies, with the two witches moving in tandem and in sync. Never would she imagine the jokester Mari and jockey Kanan to twirl and sway so gracefully along with classy music. They were obviously well-rehearsed, but their years of friendship probably enabled them to read each other's movement to make everything flow.

Then their pace picked up, morphing seamlessly to a tango while the sparks and whirls of fire lit up the center stage. With a mixture of levitation charms, aguamenti and most likely some advanced magic Yoshiko knew nothing of, a screen of water enveloped the pair like a dome. Mari and Kanan seemed to be competing, fervently swimming around the arena as conjured marine creatures, the seal and dolphin Patronus Charms, and Transfigured creatures joined their acrobatic dance.

Needless to say, they finished with a literal bang, glitters and all, skating down the icy slope which dissipated into cottony snow flakes.

Yoshiko has to admit, that is one shiny performance.

"Yup, I'm glad I didn't try to enter the competition, at least not this year!" Chika's eyes are practically sparkling. "I'd rather watch the performances! Hehe, and watch Riko-chan playing the piano of course."

The Ravenclaw is seen smiling behind her grand piano, surrounded by Elves and other student members of the orchestra. In a way, Riko is shielded from possible suitors and the majority of the audience's attention during the Yule Ball, which is probably why she accepted the position in the first place.

Yoshiko sips at her strawberry punch, thoroughly enjoying the banquet so far. After the mouth-watering Christmas feast, the long tables in the Great Hall were then rearranged to make space for the Yule Ball in the center. High tables full of desserts and drinks were lined up against the walls while attendees mingled and simply enjoyed the show. The translucent ceiling was charmed to show snowflakes gently drifting in the evening sky, even though it didn't snow at all today.

At the front, the usual staff tables have been replaced by round ones for the various guests. Ruby had discreetly pointed out to her two Muggleborn friends some of the important figures, such as Heads of certain Departments from the Ministry, representatives from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, and even the illustrious wandmaker from Diagon Alley.

The Professors appear to be familiar with many of these guests, judging from the friendly and relaxed manner of their conversations. This encourages the older witches and wizards to introduce themselves and network among these influential people. Yoshiko notices many of her Slytherin Housemates already making impressions with the Ministry employees.

The most distinguished one is the Head Girl. As the Kurosawa heiress, Dia is dressed in full regalia of ebony and ivory, with the Slytherin cloak charmingly donned over her left shoulder. Various medals and trinkets decorate her garment, while her lustrous long hair, pulled in a fishtail braid, is draped elegantly over her right shoulder. With her austere demeanor and confident smile, she blends in well with the other adults. Yoshiko has almost mistaken her as a guest, a royalty even, and once again she is struck by the weight of being a Pureblood.

Dia isn't here just as herself, but as representative of her family.

Ruby appears antsy as well, unable to go help her older sister since they have to maintain the image of estranged sisters in public. They have no idea who the enemies are, and there is a possibility that they could be among the attendees right here in this very Hall.

Yoshiko downs her beverage and reaches for a different drink. Ruby's anxiousness is rubbing off of her, so she is relieved to see Mari and Kanan heading for the front. Surely, the two would rescue their friend as they had declared earlier. Oh, the pair has stopped to greet a bearded blond man. Judging from the familiar way they act and his uncanny Cheshire grin, he must be Mari's father. It's easy to forget that the quirky Ravenclaw came from a prestigious family too, since she doesn't act like one.

"Aren't you drinking too much zura?"

Yoshiko shakes her fingers at the frowning Hanamaru and takes another sip of her candy cane cocoa. She furrows her brows and puts the drink away before reaching for another one on the table, this time an eggnog coffee.

"Not this one either?" Ruby asks with an exasperated smile.

"Nope. At least, I don't feel any different," Yoshiko glares at the mug. "Just where could it be?"

Earlier, right before the Yule Ball, the Deputy Headmistress had announced that the Potion Professor prepared a surprise - the Felixis Felicis potion was randomly added to one of the many drinks. Yoshiko is determined to find that Liquid Luck. Being plagued by misfortune all her life, she wants to experience how it feels to not be unlucky for once, no matter how temporarily.

So far, no success.

"Maybe I should just go for those-"

"No," Hanamaru pulls at her arm before she could head for the cocktails and wine glasses on the other side. "You're still underage zura! Professor Sonoda stressed that it is for everyone, so they wouldn't have mixed the potion with drinks that aren't accessible to the younger students zura."

"Hnff, what would a mere Zuramaru know-"

"Oh, the next performance is starting!" Peacemaker as always, Ruby gestures at the center where another pair strolls through the floor just as confidently as Mari and Kanan did earlier. Since Yoshiko's feeling quite bloated, she decides to take her friend's advice to give up and enjoy the rest of the Yule Ball.

By the end, Yoshiko finds herself agreeing with Chika, that the competition is quite fierce. Mari and Kanan were good, but so were the others. It would probably be down to technicalities and the popular vote to determine which pair gets to be winners.

"Ok, so what now?" Yoshiko looks around the Hall, puzzled by how no one seems to be leaving. "Isn't the Banquet over?"

"Pfff, this is where the fun starts!" As if on cue, different sort of music starts playing and many students flood into the center stage to dance. Chika opens her arms dramatically. "Come on, who wants to start? Heh heh, Ruby-chan, how about you?"

"E-Eh? I-" The younger witch is gently but firmly pushed towards a confused Hanamaru, who is also nudged by a grinning You.

"Go on, enjoy yourselves!" The Gryffindors say in unison, which seems to give Ruby the courage she needs to ask the brunette for a dance. Both giggling, the Hufflepuffs enter the dance floor with their postures relaxed. This isn't like a performance where practically everyone is watching you, so the two girls are able to dance normally without such pressure.

Admittedly, they look adorable, and Ruby is a good lead! Chivalrously, she twirls the brunette around and her steps are unhurried for the latter to follow. Hanamaru's kimono sleeves twirl with her movements, the ribbon in her hair fluttering a bit as she try to match Ruby's pace. If only there's a camera!

An annoying prod to her side jostles her out of her observation. "What do you want?!"

"Don't you wanna dance too?" Chika pouts, one arm draped around her buddy You. "Come on, ya gotta save You-chan from her fangirls~"

Yoshiko peers over their shoulders and flinches at the sight of many witches staring their way, their bodies tense as if ready to spring into action the moment You steps away from the safety zone of expensive champagne glasses nearby. "And throw myself into a pack of rabid beasts? I think not!"

And besides, these dunderheads are quite transparent. They keep glancing at Riko's direction every few minutes, obviously waiting for the right moment to ask her for a dance. The Ravenclaw is currently occupied at the front, conversing with some of the Elven musicians.

"Yoshiko-chan, would you like to dance with me?"

"Ruby? You've finished dancing with Zuramaru?" Relieved to get away from the Gryffindors just for a while, Yoshiko hurriedly takes Ruby's offered hand.

"Oh, she's dancing with Kanan-san right now-"

"What?!"

Miffed, Yoshiko searches the crowd for the ridiculously tall-and-short pair. Indeed, the two are smiling brightly as Kanan attentively complements her movements with the younger girl. At least, the pair looks more like siblings than a couple, unlike the others around them. Gah, why is Bakamaru giggling so much? Is it really that fun!? What's with the blush?

Yoshiko takes a deep breath. Nope, she is so not jealous. The older Gryffindor has done a lot for them, and she's grateful for her help. Nuh-uh. Not jealous. Zen mode.

"I thought Kanan's supposed to be retrieving your sister from those guests?"

"Yup, Onee-chan's not trapped at the front anymore," Yoshiko follows Ruby's finger and sees Dia and Mari conversing on the side, surrounded by various prefects and students. It would be awhile before they could make their way to where Chika and You are. "Fine, whatever, let's get this started!"

"Okay, so first you- piki?!" Before Ruby could position them in the standard waltz stance, Yoshiko drags her friend around and twirls rather aggressively.

"Ku ku ku, I ain't gonna abide by silly ballroom rules! This is a free for all, Ruby! The music is kinda upbeat too, so I'm gonna do it my style!"

As much as she could in this dress anyway. It is really too bad she can't breakdance, or she's certain that she could impress many fellow students with her awesome techniques. Some of the Muggleborns are familiar with her moves and even cheer her on, while the Purebloods just stare at them blankly. There's curiosity in their eyes though, so Yoshiko happily pulls the squeaking Ruby along with her flow.

"That's pretty wicked, Yoshiko-chan, didn't know you could dance!" You is grinning while Chika welcomes an exhausted Ruby back to their midst. Yoshiko poses proudly, adrenaline rushing in her veins while a brilliant idea occurs to her.

Maybe she should ask Hanamaru for a dance?

She isn't given the opportunity to ask, for You excitedly pulls her onto the dance floor before she could react. Cold sweat trickles down Yoshiko's neck when she hears furious murmurs and disappointed grumbles from the pack of hungry wolves... no, fangirls.

You-san, you dense idiot! You're too close! Yoshiko couldn't help but blush when the older witch pulls her close, so close that their cheeks are practically touching. There are some screams or maybe cheers around them, she couldn't tell the difference, but out of instinct she clings to her partner as if this could save her from fangirls' wrath.

"Eheh, hang on~ Yousorou!"

"Wha- yeeeek!" Suddenly, You picks her up and throws her into the air!

She automatically tries to cover her fluttering dress, but she discovers that she doesn't have to. You must have conjured dancing feathers that hover around her, to block any viewers from seeing her underwear while she is airborne. Several brooms appear out of nowhere, and You tap-dances her way into the air, laughing and bowing as she approaches the slowly descending Yoshiko.

Strong arms easily catches her when You frog-leaps over the assembled tower of brooms. The athletic Gryffindor spins her around for several more paces before gently setting her back on her feet. The spectators' deafening applause overcomes the fangirls' protests as You rubs the back of her hair and hesitantly waves.

Yoshiko breathes raggedly, trying to comprehend what just happened as she leans against the older witch's shoulder.

"That was pretty good! Maybe we could refine it and enter the Ball next year- ow!"

Yoshiko scowls ferociously and smacks You's arm hard.

Again.

And again.

And once more.

"C-Chika-chan! She's punching me!"

"That's just a form of affection zura~"

"What-! Watch what you say, Bakamaru!"

Her ears feel like they are burning when she notices the rest of their group chuckling at their antics. At least, Hanamaru has returned from her dance with Kanan and is now stuffing her face with various desserts. Good, that's the Zuramaru she's used to. Be good and stay there. Keep feeding.

"That was amazing! What about it? Like You-chan said, you should form a duo, maybe called 'You & Angel?" Chika's previously tamed ahoge has sprung back up, swaying eagerly as the girl gives them a hug.

"No! And g-get off! I'm sweaty," Yoshiko pries the exuberant Gryffindors off of her person. Is this what Ruby feels all the time, being crowded by the baka duo? Although, it doesn't feel that bad, it's nice actually, because she can sense that the two witches are sincere in their hugs- no! The great Yohane shall not fall for their charm so easily!

She retreats to the side, huffing and puffing, and rummages through the tables for a drink she hasn't tried before. She glares at a glass of mikan juice, filled with pulp, for a good full minute. Taking a deep breath, she grabs the beverage and gulps down the content in noisy slurps.

Tearfully, she sticks out her tongue and waits for something to happen. Nope, other than a disagreeing tummy, she doesn't feel any special. Still no luck in finding that Felix Felicis potion. She glances back at her friends, noting that Chika and Hanamaru are now busy examining some sort of mikan dessert while Ruby happily eats a cup of pudding. Riko has finally joined them and is nibbling at a sandwich that You brought for her from another table. Kanan and Dia are several paces away, surrounded by admirers and younger students who must be taken by their respective outfits.

Hmn, where's that shiny cat Animagus?

She finds her answer a moment later when something reels her back onto the dance floor. Her vision is momentarily obscured by a top hat, which she scrambles to pull off. Half filled with annoyance and resignation, she blinks at the blonde witch holding out her gloved hand.

"Shall we dance~?"

Her lilting tone is a pitch lower than Yoshiko is used to, compelling her to accept the offer. Grinning, Mari begins to lead her around the other dancers, spinning her away and pulling her back at the right moment. Due to their height difference, Yoshiko is forced to peer up at the smirking witch, whose endowed bosom are rather distracting in an irritating way.

"Why do you want to dance with me anyway? Go back to your partner already." And keep that said partner away from Zuramaru, cheh.

"Why not? It's fun to dance with my cute little kouhai~ Besides, everyone's dancing, no?"

Yoshiko dares to glance around, noticing that Chika and Ruby have entered the center stage as well. You has somehow retrieved Kanan from Dia, who waves off her friend and is still occupied by the other students. It looks like the Gryffindor duo have failed or haven't tried asking Riko for a dance. Hanamaru is keeping Riko company as the two girls exchange accessories. True to her name, the sakura hairpin looks good on Hanamaru, while the saffron ribbon seems to make the hue of Riko's hair richer.

"Worried about Rikocchi, are we?"

"Well, yeah. Since that day with the Acromantulas, I've been watching her and the other two. It doesn't seem like Lily knows about the rumors, but those two bakas should be less obvious!"

"Hmm? Like how obvious you are towards Hanamaru-chan?"

"Yeah, exactly that! Wait what?! No! W-W-What are you talking about!"

Snickering, Mari tugs Yoshiko close and muffles her indignant shrieks against her coat. "Calm down~ Rikocchi is smart. She probably knows already, but doesn't want to believe it, understandably so."

"I see… what do we do then?"

"Now now, don't you worry about her. Just leave it to Kanan and I! We've got it worked out. You just focus on getting your girl~"

Mari smothers Yoshiko against her chest again before she could protest. "You'll see soon enough. It took a lot of convincing earlier, but Kanan and I cracked her down. There's no way Rikocchi would say no, teehee~"

Yoshiko scowls in the embrace and reluctantly relaxes. The hug does feel nice and comforting. While a part of her still doubts Mari due to her wacky ideas, she does agree that the senior is dependable whenever the occasion calls for it.

By the time they return to Riko and Hanamaru, the other pairs have finished their dance as well, while Dia has finally extracted herself from admirers. Yoshiko looks at every single one of her friends, pleased at this little bubble of nine. Her eyes meet Hanamaru's, and she freezes in self-consciousness. Puzzled, the brunette tilts her head and smiles adorably. A small splash of whipped cream is stuck to her puffed up cheek, which Yoshiko exasperatedly wipes away with a napkin.

"Aren't you eating too much, Butamaru?"

Frowning at the teasing nickname, Hanamaru punches Yoshiko's arm.

"Ow, that hurts!"

"Hnff, it'd better hurt zura!"

Yoshiko rolls her eyes. "Whatever, like you said, that's just a form of affection, ku ku ku~"

To her surprise, Hanamaru appears flustered and scoots away, placing a bewildered Ruby between them. Huh, that didn't go well. Time from Plan B.

"Okay, Yoshiko-chan, wish us luck," Chika and You suddenly whisper near her.

She hastily grabs hold of their arms before they could head towards Riko. "Wait, you're gonna go for it-?"

"Well, you're the only one we've told our little secret to, Yoshiko-chan," Chika fiddles with her fingers while You lets out a forceful chuckle. "Yeah, Chika-chan and I figure, it's now or never. We'll see which one of us Riko-chan picks, and we can move on."

"But-" Yoshiko helplessly glances at Mari, whose fiery eyes are focused elsewhere. Likewise, Kanan seems to be holding her breath, her expression intense as she stares in the same direction. Curious, Yoshiko and the two Gryffindors turn to look for what's holding their attention captive.

"Riko-san, may I have the pleasure of dancing with you?"

Dia's posture is slightly tense as she extends her hand towards the dazed girl. Riko's lips are parted in soundless surprise, her eyes wide as she glances between the gloved hand and Dia's earnest gaze. A pretty blush crawls up Riko's neck and cheeks as she daintily accepts the offer. Both smiling, one pleased and one coy, the pair slowly makes their way towards the dance floor. Many pairs of eyes are focused on them, most likely just as taken aback as Yoshiko is. She hasn't expected Dia to ask, or Riko to say yes.

Yet, looking at the two witches swaying to the gentle ballad, it somehow makes sense. They look like a match made in heaven, the way they seem absorbed in each other's presence. There's no need to concern themselves with unwanted attention, for they are already in their own world.

Yoshiko sighs quietly. In a way, she is envious. That's the kind of perfect scene she wants to appear to onlookers, with…

She glances at her friends, seeing how Hanamaru is just as mesmerized while Ruby looks happy for her older sister. Kanan and Mari exchange a quiet high-five, both grinning at how it turns out. Now, all that's left are the two possibly heartbroken duo.

Though disappointed, there is also something else in Chika and You's calm expressions. "Well, it's not like we have a chance against Dia-san anyway." "Yeah, it's not surprising that Riko-chan would accept."

Yoshiko scoffs and roughly pulls at Chika's arm, looping it around You's. The two witches blink at her innocently.

"Go on, go dance already. Don't mope here. Didn't you tell me to enjoy myself earlier? Now, it's your turn, both of you."

"Huh? With Chika-chan?" "With You-chan? Eeeh?"

"Shoo, off you go!" Their disbelief is actually heartrending to see, knowing what they used to be, so Yoshiko assertively pushes the two towards the dance floor. You nervously brushes through her hair while Chika awkwardly plays with her braid. After a few moments, their fingers finally interlace as characteristic smiles blossom upon their visage.

"Welp, just as she said, let's just enjoy ourselves, You-chan!"

"Yeah, wanna try an even more difficult stunt, Chika-chan?"

"Oho, you mean with more brooms and possible aquatic additions too, captain?"

"I knew you can read my mind, partner~ Let's consider this a prep for next year's Yule Ball!"

Like a proud parent, Yoshiko folds her arms and gazes after the pair until they blend in with the crowd. Matchmaking success! Whatever happens after is up to the two, but Yoshiko is confident that something good would bloom from this night.

"Hehe, they look cute together, don't they?" Ruby appears just as happy.

"All thanks to Yohane-sama!" Grinning, Yoshiko grabs a glass of water and pretends it's champagne. "Cheers, everyone!"

As they toast to many things, the clinks of glasses and laughter have re-ignited the rush of adrenaline she felt earlier. If the others could pair off so smoothly, surely it isn't that difficult to ask a certain brunette out for a simple dance?

Alas, as decreed by a fallen angel's misfortune, she misses her chance yet again. Hanamaru suddenly grimaces and excuses herself. "I-I need to go to the washroom zura-!"

Kanan blinks. "Oh, I'll go with y-"

"We need to stay to hear the announcement, for the winning pair of Yule Ball," Mari lightly taps on Yoshiko's shoulder. "If I recall correctly, you've drank a lot tonight, haven't you?"

"Y-Yeah, I did. I'll go with Zuramaru then. Ruby, you coming?" Though a little confused, she does agree it's better to go with company instead of alone. For some reason, Ruby shakes her head and makes a Rubesty pose.

"Huh? But-"

"Just go already, Yoshiko-chan!"

Still not understanding Ruby's encouraging smile, Yoshiko shrugs and hurries after Hanamaru. In contrast to the boisterous Great Hall and its glamorous decor, the corridors appears rather desolate and even sinister. Candles valiantly light up the path as she walks past some of the straggler students and into the courtyard. Her heels crunch quietly on the thin layer of frozen snow, leftover from days before, and her breath comes out in fleeting white puffs.

Hanamaru is standing in the middle of the garden, seemingly entranced by the bright quarter-moon and the glittering stars in the night canvas above.

"Hey, are you okay? I thought you're going to the washroom?" Yoshiko hesitantly approaches her friend.

"Hmm? Yoshiko-chan?" The brunette glances at her before returning her gaze towards the scenery. "I was… I felt quite dizzy earlier, so I thought it was something I ate zura."

"Pff, you did eat a lot…"

Hanamaru furrows her brows, though her expression relaxes a moment later. "Anyway, as it turns out, I just need some fresh air. I feel a lot better now zura."

"That's good at least. With the way you ran out earlier, I thought you were gonna hurl, heh," Yoshiko then slaps herself inwardly. She needs to stop making fun of the brunette or else she'll never be able to get that dance she wants!

Thankfully, Hanamaru seems to be too engrossed in this tranquil atmosphere to get upset. "What do you think, Yoshiko-chan? This feels like an illustration from storybooks zura. Isn't it beautiful?"

Yoshiko has always found nature to be otherworldly, an abstract concept to be admired and nothing more. The most she can do is immerse herself in the peace that nature offers. Yes, the icy snow appears to blanket the ground and any vegetation in an artistic manner. Yes, the cloudless sky allows the viewer to search among the constellations for possible shooting stars. Yes, the night breeze, while frigid, is also fresh and cleansing.

She glances at the smiling brunette by her side, savoring how the moonlight gently envelopes her form. "Yeah, beautiful."

"Right?" Hanamaru remains oblivious of her companion's gaze as she spreads her arms. "Sometimes I still can't believe it, being here in the world of magic and being able to use magic."

"Uh-huh, I'm with you on that. Hogwarts is… amazing." Yoshiko reaches out and gingerly takes hold of Hanamaru's hands, turning the shorter girl towards her.

Hogwarts never fails to take her breath away even though she has been here half a year already. From time to time, she would find herself admiring her surroundings, whether it is the Aviary, the towers, the forest, or even her own Dormitory. The ancient and austere magical presence makes her humble, makes her feel so incredibly tiny and insignificant.

But that was the same back in the Muggle world, wasn't it? She was just one of the many faces that passed by the shops, walked down the streets, and simply trudged through each day. She was unable to accomplish anything meaningful, and that had depressed her even though she carefully buried such feeling.

And so, this is the one difference between here and the Muggle world. Here at Hogwarts, she is given the ability to make a difference in people's lives and even her own, no matter how little it seems at first.

The adrenaline from before has calmed down to something soothing, like whispers of encouragement from Lady Luck herself.

"Well then, allow me to make this special scene even more fairytale-like."

"Zura?!"

Yoshiko gallantly tugs her companion against her, slipping her arm around the latter's waist. Due to the proximity, the shorter girl could only nestle her head against the crook of Yoshiko's neck.

"Dance with me, Hanamaru."

The brunette makes an incoherent mumble, her ears reddening. Yoshiko could feel Hanamaru's heartbeat against her, so she's certain that the latter could feel hers as well. Though embarrassed, she's also elated to have finally taken this step. Furthermore, unlike her previous experiences, she has not stepped on her partner's foot, has not lost her wits from unexpected movements, and has not carelessly taken control of the dance with her own style.

No, this is a simple slide and glide dance where the pair sways along the melody. The courtyard may be silent, but Yoshiko can clearly hear the music in her pounding heart.

"Y-Yoshiko-chan, you know how to waltz zura-?"

"Heh, the great Yohane learns fast. You're not bad yourself either."

"... I-I'm just following your lead," Hanamaru mutters shyly, leaning into their semi-embrace even more. Yoshiko stiffens and inadvertently stops the dance, with both of her arms wrapped around Hanamaru's waist to steady her.

Neither move from their position, enthralled by this mysterious ambience that encompassed them.

"So, pretty good year so far I'd say. We got to come here, learn magic-"

"- and I got reunited with you, and we've gained so many good friends zura."

"Right. Fantastic banquet, isn't it?"

"It is. Everything about today is… well, it's been magical zura."

Yoshiko nervously pulls away just a little so she could look at Hanamaru. The brunette's flushed cheeks probably mirror her own, encouraging her to do what her heart yearns.

"The perfect way to end the perfect night."

She leans down and smooches Hanamaru's cheek before backing away. The warmth and softness of the brunette's skin lingers on her lips, so tantalizing that she is tempted to kiss her again.

Should she push her luck? Is this too much?

Blushing, Hanamaru appears shell-shocked, staring at Yoshiko with wide, innocent eyes. Though mortified, Yoshiko returns the gaze earnestly to show that she isn't fooling around.

Hanamaru swallows hard, glancing to the right and then to the left while her arms remain loosely wrapped around Yoshiko's waist. As if making up her mind, she places one hand on the taller girl's shoulder and tiptoes.

Their lips meet chastely, once and again.

"Merry Christmas."

[jafreitag]

Jazz Is… #8: Sun Ra

The inimitable (and endlessly quotable) Miles Davis, after hearing a Sun Ra song in a 1968 blindfold test:

“That’s gotta come from Europe. We wouldn’t play no shit like that. It’s so sad. It sounds funny to me. You mean there’s somebody around here that feels like that? Even the white people don’t feel that sad.”

At that time, Miles was still helming his famed second quintet, which featured Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. That ensemble played what was still recognizable as jazz, so it’s not surprising that Miles thought Sun Ra’s music sounded strange. Sun Ra was strange. (Check out that header image.) But he was not sad, as far as I know, and he was not from Europe. He was from Saturn.

Yep. Saturn. He wasn’t born there.

Herman “Sonny” Blount was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914. From an early age, he exhibited prodigious musical talent, sight reading and composing at age 12. His school peers considered him good-natured, but quiet, and he was an excellent student.  In 1936, he accepted a scholarship and attended Alabama A&M University to study music education, but dropped out after a year.  Around that time, he had a vision. As he later described the experience, a bright light appeared, and

“My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up… I wasn’t in human form… I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn… they teleported me and I was down on a stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop attending college because there was going to be great trouble in schools… the world was going into complete chaos… I would speak through music, and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.”

In pursuit of that goal, Blount immersed himself in books and music, reading voraciously and writing songs for his fledgling namesake orchestra. He and his band quickly gained a positive reputation around Birmingham.

Blout was drafted into the military in 1942, and declared himself a conscientious objector. The local draft board rejected him claim, and he appealed to the national draft board. Eventually, he was approved for alternative service. When he failed to appear at the Civilian Public Service camp in Pennsylvania to which he had been assigned, he was arrested and sent to jail. He ultimately went to the camp, where he did forestry work during the day and played piano at night.

Around 1945 with World War II ending and the so-called “Second Great Migration” of southern African-Americans beginning, Blount moved to Chicago. His recording debut happened the next year, backing blues singer Wynonie Harris. He soon became the pianist and arranger for Fletcher Henderson’s band, and later played in a trio with saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins.

Blount legally changed him name in 1952 to Le Sony’r Ra, or Sun Ra for short. By then, he had formed a new band, The Space Trio, which featured saxophonist Pat Patrick. When Patrick left Chicago for Florida, he was replaced by saxophonists John Gilmore and Marshall Allen. The Sun Ra Arkestra was born. Ra’s music during that period combined swing and bebop with chanting about voyages beyond earth. Check out two Chicago-period records, Interstellar Low Ways and We Travel the Spaceways.

While the Arkestra’s music may have sounded somewhat traditional, its appearance was far from it.  The Sun Ra Wiki (a primary source here) explains:

“Sun Ra and his band began wearing the outlandish, Egyptian-styled or science fiction-themed costumes and headdresses for which they became known. These costumes had multiple purposes: they expressed Sun Ra’s fascination with ancient Egypt and the space age, they provided a distinctive uniform for the Arkestra, they provided a new identity for the band onstage, and comic relief. (Sun Ra thought avant garde musicians typically took themselves far too seriously.)”

Sun Ra and his musicians moved to New York City in 1961. They lived communally, rehearsed relentlessly, and pushed the boundaries of what jazz could be. The increasingly experimental sound of Ra’s Arkestra divided opinion, but it received high praise from two of the architects of bebop. Dizzy Gillespie encouraged Ra to “keep it up,” advising that critics “tried to do the same shit to me.” And Theolonious Monk agreed that Ra’s music was far-out, but added that still “it swings.”

Sun Ra was always prolific, but his explosive early ’60s output is the highlight of his discography. Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, and Other Planes of There, which he released on his own label, El Saturn, are fantastic. In truth, they merely set the stage for what remains some of the most challenging music of the jazz idiom. In 1965-66, Ra recorded The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra for a new label, ESP-Disk, started by lawyer and esperanto enthusiast Bernard Stollman. Marshall Allen described the sessions like this:

“Sun Ra would go to the studio and he would play something, the bass would come in, and if he didn’t like it he’d stop it; and he’d give the drummer a particular rhythm, tell the bass he wanted not a ‘boom boom boom,’ but something else, and then he’d begin to try out the horns, we’re all standing there wondering what’s next…

“I just picked up the piccolo and worked with what was going on, what mood they set, or what feeling they had. A lot of things we’d be rehearsing and we did the wrong things and Sun Ra stopped the arrangement and changed it. Or he would change the person who was playing the particular solo, so that changes the arrangement. So the one that was soloing would get another part given to him personally. ‘Cos he knew people. He could understand what you could do better so he would fit that with what he would tell you.”

Heliocentric was originally released in two parts: Vol. 1 in 1965 and Vol. 2 in 1966. It was later supplemented in 2005 with recordings from the same sessions. Here’s the project in its entirety.

If the Chicago-period music could have soundtracked Ed Wood sci-fi movies, the New York-period music, and particularly Heliocentric, could have soundtracked Tarkovsky’s  Solaris or Kubrick’s 2001. Heliocentric is music for deep space – the blaring saxophones, the untethered piccolo, and the jittery percussion bring to mind the lonely dread of massive bright ships dwarfed against a dark sea specked with distant stars.

To my ears, there’s also some Edgard Varèse to Heliocentric. Compare, for example, the French composer’s 1927 composition Arcana with Ra’s “Outer Nothingness” from Heliocentric Worlds, vol. 1. The Varèse Wiki informs that his

“conception of music reflected his vision of ‘sound as living matter’ and of ‘musical space as open rather than bounded.’ He conceived the elements of his music in terms of ‘sound-masses,’ likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that ‘to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise,’ and he posed the question, ‘what is music but organized noises?'”

Sun Ra would have agreed. (A 1980 documentary about the Arkestra was even called A Joyful Noise.) Ra disliked the moniker “free jazz,” and insisted, “My music is the music of precision. I know exactly the rhythm that must animate my music, and only this rhythm is valid, I have in my mind a complete image of my work.” Organized noise, right. John Szwed’s 2000 biography of Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (a title shared, confusingly, with an extremely strange 1972 movie, in which the Arkestra plays live, and a 1973 Arkestra album), offers insight into his process:

“By the 1950s commercial recording companies had developed a classical style of recording which assured that the recording process itself would be invisible… but Sun Ra began to regularly violate this convention on the Saturn releases by recording live at strange sites, by using feedback, distortion, high delay or reverb, unusual microphone placement, abrupt fades or edits, and any number of other effects or noises which called attention to the recording process. On some recordings you could hear a phone ringing, or someone walking near the microphone. It was a rough style of production, an antistyle, a self-reflexive approach which anticipates both free jazz recording conventions and punk production to come.”

After New York, Sun Ra relocated to Philadelphia, where the Arkestra’s rough edges smoothed a bit. Check out the excellent 1978 album Languidity.

Sun Ra continued touring internationally until his death in 1993. Gilmore took over the band until his death two years later. The torch passed then to Allen, who still leads the Sun Ra Arkestra. Last fall, I was fortunate to see them perform at Chicago’s Art Institute. The show was one of the most beautiful musical performances that I’ve ever seen. (A pic from the third row – Maestro Allen is in the middle of things.)

More soon.

JF

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