#also we love featuring the secondary face claim my girl!!!!

[drekkavac-moving]

❝ I'm done answering questions. Now you answer on of mine. ❞ ❝ Where is he? ❞

[w0rmdahl]

the snow ; day two — ilyily

gif ©: earthgif, theseulgis

film: i love you i love you (au)

synopsis: after successfully evading the lunes who'd been hot on their tails through the night, samir and yuna awaken to a shocking discovery and find themselves against an even tougher set of odds during their second day.

word count: 5.1k

featuring: (oc) yuna min, (oc) samir devgan, oc secondary characters

warnings: descriptions of animal mutilation (sounds horrible i'm sorry but that should be it for this one!)

a/n: whew this one just kept going idk what happened anywaysss here is day 2! not proofread before posting because i took a melatonin gummy sorry <3 but also today (5/20) is my birthday so i wanted to make sure i got something out :) hope you enjoy!

yuna was the first to wake. the sweet birdsong of day warbled outside the confines of the cave as she lifted her head from its perch on samir's shoulder and turned to check the world separate from themselves, eyes immediately squinting at the sunlight beaming off of the pearly white snow. if not for the sleepy squeeze around her waist revealing the aching muscles in her back, yuna would have believed they truly had perished through the night, with the blinding light beckoning them into the peaceful heavens. but as she blinked away the sleep from her eyes and groggily moved to sit up from the hunched position she'd slept in all night, it became apparent that they were still very much alive, a groan emitting from her throat as now she felt the painful buzz in her feet.

"prin—yuna" sam stirred awake now with a gravelly voice, probably disturbed by the loss of warmth due to her movements. his fingertips danced over her spine as he too readjusted upon waking his sore muscles and looked up at the grimacing girl in his lap.

"good god, my back," she grumbled and braced her hands on his collarbones to straighten out "i think we missed first light."

samir whipped his head to make the same fatal mistake as yuna had just a second prior, a yelp bouncing off the crystalline walls whilst he turned back to her with eyes squeezed shut.

"at least we survived" he'd mumble as he rubbed the blur from his vision. yuna painstakingly pushed herself off his lap and onto her back against the harsh stone with a content sigh.

"could've done without the pins and needles, though."

"i agree with you there," he wheezed as he reached for his toes "my feet are asleep."

yuna sighed more exasperatedly this time, her top lip snagging to the side as she whined "and now we have to walk alll the way back home." she couldn't see the smile on sam's face before he'd pushed himself to his numb feet, edging toward the cave entrance and brushing his curls from his eyes with a jovial chuckle.

"maybe you could give me a piggyback ride — since my feet are numb, and all."

"you're hilarious." the princess now begrudgingly pushed herself up to follow behind him, the cape around her neck trailing behind while he lent a hand to aid her step into the outside world. "if anyone's getting a piggyback ride it's me — with your new big muscles and all."

sam statued the moment the words left her mouth, eyes sparkling in the snow instantly going wide as he stared down at her with the faint outline of a smile imprinted on his lips. she seemed to realize what she'd said only after witnessing his astounded reaction and, chuckling nervously as if to hide the obvious blush blossoming on her cheeks, gave him a soft shove to the shoulder she'd claimed as her bed last night before turning away to face the tree line. samir couldn't stop the grin that then had his own face feeling hot, contemplating on what to say for only a moment before stepping forth to reassume his place beside her.

"what about half and half?" he teased, almost hurt by the lack of response from the princess as she continued staring forward, nodding shortly to whatever had caught her focus.

"look."

as prompted, samir redirected his gaze according to her gesture and felt the fuzzy warmth in his chest run cold upon the sight of a dead deer in the snow. not just dead, however; decapitated — windpipe and vertebra visible as its stiff bloated body lied in the blood-soaked snow that surrounded, a discernable path of crimson trailing their journey home. the most alarming, however, was not the haste in which this mystery person senselessly killed the deer, but the discernable footsteps that had been plotted up to where they stood now. sam's hand instinctively grabbed hers to take a step back.

"we should go."

running hand in hand and red nosed as they ducked through the trees, samir and yuna yanked each other back to their feet after one stumbled in the snow, further venturing into the wood and away from the castle. they could still hear the hammering feet behind them as clear as when they'd first noticed it; far too close for comfort and yet not close enough to locate through the natural sway of the earth around them.

samir helped her down as they came to a drop-off in the dirt and quickly surveyed the new ground before picking a new direction and running with it. with this new path before them they could see the end of the tree line waiting before them with a great wide-open expanse of light to better locate their pursuer. all they had to do was make it — just continue pushing a little bit further than they already had — just a little bit longer.

the trek back home hadn't started this way. originally they decided to embark on the longer path home following along the outskirts of the tree line with their guard high, sam's fingers brushing the pommel of his sword at each and every bump in the woods. but the further they went on their journey to avoid whatever had visited them during their time in the cave, the larger this gnawing feeling of something being off grew. yuna had a rock in her stomach the longer they walked through the woods, and eventually, she started to mask this eerie sense of danger with insignificant babbling.

"ooh! or," yuna and samir both checked over their shoulders before their attention was back on the other "we could grab a pint from the tavern and try to see the constellations from the north tower. i've always wanted to find the big dipper."

a wide-eyed look of disbelief had his brows raising as he surveyed the red, peach fuzz laden skin of her cheeks. "you can't see the constellations?" he asked with a smile creeping to his lips.

"you can?"

then, before he could respond, yuna would walk headfirst into an indistinguishable brown form dangling unseemly in the middle of their path that left a red blotch on her temple. further examination of this malformed object she'd unwittingly bumped into revealed the gruesome sight of a decapitated deer head hanging from a noose tied in the branches above. they only had the time to connect the dots before sudden crunching of snow under rapid footsteps had samir yanking her in the opposite direction as they took off into the woods.

the unfortunate pair now emerged from the trees with hope in their eyes on the new scenery other than the wide expanse of the ellyn forest they'd been lost to for the last hour. but, to their dismay, this treeless stretch of earth was no easy feat, nor a safe haven for them to pause and catch their breath in wait of whatever was in the woods; it was the frozen briar lake.

samir looked down breathlessly at the similarly panting girl beside him, "well?" he asked. she shook her head.

"i don't think this is a good idea."

"it'll hold."

"you don't know that!"

he edged closer toward the ice despite her pull in the opposite direction. "we'll go slow. all we have to do is get across."

"it's not that easy, sam" yuna whined, her features falling into an anxious frown as she dug her heels into the solid dirt below "if we fall in—"

"i'll go first." samir blurted with his toes already edging onto the ice "i'm heavier."

the perturbed princess now stepped closer to him and subsequently the frozen river below, her fingers clamping down on his whilst he treaded further onto the ice without another glance — like it had already been decided. so, with a disgruntled whine escaping her throat and obvious stress creasing her features, yuna would step onto the ice using sam's steady hand to keep stable. the slick ground under her boots brought her jaw into a tight clench before she pleaded once more through gritted teeth.

"please," she trailed off, unsure of what exactly she'd wanted in substitute. sam would conjure the most utterly reassuring smile he could while extending his arm to build distance between their weight on the ice.

“it'll be okay, yuna."

he spoke knowingly, tenderly as he slowly released her hand.

"trust me."

it came out like a plea of his own.

and so; she did. yuna suspended her disbelief and placed her trust in the soft brown eyes encouraging her now as she eked forward, shoulders tensed and back rigid as if to lessen the impact on the royal blue ice. the incessant wind biting at their noses hissed across the lake like a devilish laugh-track to the divine comedy these inept teenagers found themselves starring in, roaring louder at the pounding footsteps in the snow growing in proximity. yet sam remained steadfast in his comforting exterior for the tense girl tailing behind his meticulous footsteps.

"that's good," samir cooed, taking sliding steps backward with his eyes only on hers, working one foot at a time toward the midway point. "just like that. you got it." his heart would ache at her short nod despite the anxiety in her brow growing more apparent.

"just a little further, okay?"

she'd respond like a child fighting tears; voice high and wavering as her eyes bore into his. "okay..."

the pounding steps behind them grew to be near deafening in their ears as it perpetually inched closer and closer, instigating the heavy thrum of their weary hearts though neither would even dare to peek as the other side of the shore waited only a few more steps away — just a few seconds longer of feigned bravery and it would be over.

"we've almost got it yuna, just keep your eyes on me."

his only reply would be the restrained whine caught between her lips pressed tight together.

and then, while shifting his weight onto his left foot just a tiny — mere — few feet from safety, a ghoulish groan seeped through the sliver of a crack under sam's boot. he stilled instantly in order to quickly assess the situation they'd found themselves in, but as this tiny splinter in the ice began to crack outwards around him, he found himself stuck in place without any idea of what to do next.

crack.

sure, he could probably save himself, but yuna was really the only thing on his mind. what about yuna?

crack.

should he move? should he toss her to safety? could he even execute that?

crack!

knocked like a bulldozer in the ribs sam gasped in anticipation for the numbing waters that lurked below — but, instead, found himself gasping at the impact against his back into unforgiving dirt. his fingers would fist the snow below as he sat up to find a hole in the ice where he once stood that revealed the hellish black depths lurking underneath the frozen lake, the silhouette of yuna gone and replaced with the animal hunting for them on the other side.

there, wide-eyed on the shore from which they'd came, stood a bestial man adorned in lune-style armor heaving with the bloody axe in his white-knuckled grip. a taunting smile grew as his eyes made contact with the knight-to-be and he would offer samir nothing more than a hoarse chuckle before turning away and disappearing back into the wood.

"yuna!"

his focus was back on her in an instant. samir dove chest-first into the edge of the shore to plunge his arm into the water, icy depths searing the flesh up to his bicep when his fingertips carded through a cascade of hair, now submerging himself further until the numb met his shoulder. suddenly he was clamping down on the cloth meeting his palm, and then he was dragging her out by the wrist, pulling her soaked form into him while simultaneously throwing themselves back ashore.

upon looking down at the princess tucked into his side, samir would find yuna's skin to be alabaster white, lips purple and wet eyes struggling to focus as she shivered. if not for the dire circumstances they'd found themselves in she could've been mistaken as the world's greatest art piece — like a greek sculpture; with monotoned skin akin to stone that displayed her perfectly-sculpted features in the bright midday light. but the short, labored breaths just barely raising her chest would work to spur samir back into action as he hooked his arms around her shoulder blades and under her legs to lift her. "i'm so sorry, yuna."

he was already pleading, with the princess or the gods — he wasn't sure.

"just — just keep your eyes open," braving the wood once more he pushed onward with shuffling footsteps through the snow and past the thick trunks that surrounded, puling over the abrasive sound of the crunching ice. "i'm gonna get you warm, just keep your eyes open. can you do that for me?"

yuna's complete and utter lack of response was more than enough to pick up sam's pace. at this rate he needed to find a solution — and fast. the subject of his lifelong devotion was actively running out of time with each second that passed and the longer it took to get her warm only brought the heavens closer to reclaim one of their angels. this thought made his stomach turn in tandem with the swirling anxieties in his mind and urged him further to pick up the pace, his frantic eyes scanning for anything and everything that could be of use.

it all looked the same, to his dismay, but as he searched through the nearly identical landscape of ice and trees around him, he could see what looked like another clearing in the woods. the fearsome yet courageous boy seemed to be offered hope once more as he now broke out into a full sprint — or as much of a sprint as he could muster considering the circumstances — and held the frozen girl tighter as if to hold on to this hope.

'it'll be different this time,' he thought 'it's going to be different this time.'

samir always did have a way of willing things into reality. yuna used to say that he had magic inside of him that brought his wishes to fruition — though she stopped saying this after one of the nuns became suspicious. the point is; strange phenomena had occurred around sam all of his life as long as he believed, so he snuck up on the second clearing with undying optimism housed in his calloused palms.

and there it was; the relief to the harshest struggle he's ever had to face. like an answer to his prayers, samir stumbled into the clearing to find nothing more than an innocuous looking house whose chimney was already billowing with grey clouds, a middle-aged woman sitting inside the window looking down at something.

"fair lady!"

although he was too far to be heard and likely seen as well, samir didn't waste time in willing his way to get help from this red-haired woman in the house, walking all the way up to the front steps before she'd noticed him. he'd watch with wide puppy dog eyes put forth as her eyebrows furrowed, then turning to say something over her shoulder before she moved to open the door.

"hello there." she said cautiously. the mysterious woman stood at a meager height in the doorway closed against her side, obviously on guard and yet still strangely warm towards the amateur adventurers on her doorstep.

"i apologize for disturbing you, fair lady, but the princess is in dire need of aid. i'm afraid she may freeze soon if not warmed up."

suddenly the door would open further, a large hand wrapping around the wood above the mysterious woman's head to reveal a much taller lady hidden behind her. she did not read as kind or welcoming as the first, with her furrowed brow and lips pressed into a thin line at the sight of these two teens. and yet, the ginger woman would offer a short nod as she analyzed the celebrated princess in the arms of this lanky, floppy haired boy before her.

"alright, but leave your sword at the door."

samir nodded fervently. "of course. here," turning the stained metal on his hip towards them, he offered the blade with a tightening grip around the princess in his arms, watching as the shorter woman went to grab it before the latter stepped in front of her. she made direct, intimidating eye contact with him as she took the pommel in her hand, unsheathing the sword to then place it against the wooden wall.

"follow her."

the ginger woman now turned on her heel for sam to follow after, his full attention on the broad lady shadowing his heels while they passed the kitchen to enter the den. a strong fire crackled in the hidden corner of this room where a comfortable and home-y looking lounge chair sat, motioned to by the ginger woman.

"lay her here."

samir obliged instantly and carefully laid yuna down on her back, only now noticing her sickly color. she looked like nothing he'd ever witnessed before — like a being from nowhere that had blue-hued skin and icicles for lashes. a firm hand landed on his shoulder.

"listen," said the short woman, "i need you to go upstairs and find clothes that would fit her. we need to take off the wet clothes."

sam's guard began to raise again, shaking his head at the request from the mysterious woman he'd deemed as asinine. "no, i have to stay with her." now the curly-haired lady spoke up from behind him.

"you're needed elsewhere for this, devgan. upstairs on the left."

there was a moment where he nearly turned — almost instinctively reached for the sword missing from his hip — but the kind green eyes of the frail woman before him made him pause. of course they knew who yuna was, everyone in elora had to know their royal family, so when the divine day of her birth came it had been announced far and wide for all to hear. — but him? that he wasn't so sure about.

the kind woman nodded back towards the stairs they had passed with a reassuring smile, "she's in good hands. women's linens are worse than a maze. i'll have amina call you down once we're done."

it was only then that samir understood why exactly they wanted him out of the room, not because he had something to worry about, but because they worried about him. with a short breath he'd inhale the musky fire smell to settle the lingering pit of suspicion in his stomach before conceding to the task laid out before him, ultimately abandoning yuna with these peculiar strangers to explore the second story of the home in search for fresh clothing.

their house was rather incredible to be quite frank. not only had the wooden walls been built tall enough to accommodate the broad woman, amina, but the tables in the den had actually been made accessible for the shorter of the pair. it seemed that they had been the ones to build this home in the middle of nowhere, surrounded only by the thick foliage left formerly un-adventured by the ellyn wood natives, yet almost perfectly cleared into a circle of short grass around the home. it was like a kingdom of their own, really.

by this point, samir had spent countless hours analyzing the space around him as he sat with yuna beside the warm fire, noticing even the smallest of details like the worn-in footsteps leading to the garden. every so often he'd look up again to check on the sleeping beauty who'd been swaddled in a wool blanket by the ladies of the house, and a smile would curl his lips once more as he reminisced on the summers they'd spent watching butterflies emerge from their cocoons.

fortunately, the princess's natural color had come back by now, and though their kind hosts said that she would likely be fine by morning samir still couldn't sleep until he saw that she was okay. so here he was; well into the darkest hours of the night just waiting for the beloved girl to wake.

which is why he nearly leapt from his seat on the floor when a hand met his shoulder. if he hadn't been a little more careful he swore his skeleton would've jumped right out of his skin. samir whipped his head over to look at the owner of the hand — only to find the groggy looking eyes of yuna staring back. he was turning to face her in an instant.

"hey," he cooed with a tender smile, fire-warmed fingertips reaching to touch her rosy cheek. "hey, yuna. how are you feeling?"

after a few more slow blinks her brows would furrow as she noticed the room around them, the sturdy wooden walls far homier than the cave they'd slept in last. she'd groan and grumble for a moment while squirming in the blanket before finally unraveling it around her waist so she could prop herself up on an elbow. "where...?"

samir readjusted to help un-cocoon her legs from the wool as he explained, "it's okay, we're safe here for the night. the two generous ladies of the house said we can leave with their map in the morning."

yuna was now pushing herself to sit up, aided once more by the gentle hand on her spine and attentive eyes on her every feature. she took just a second longer to really survey her unfamiliar surroundings with narrowed eyes before then looking back to samir on his knees before her, dark circles under his eyes despite the blithe smile on his lips. she reached out to grab his shoulder again.

"are you okay?"

"am i okay?" the tired-eyed boy would chuckle "you're the one we're worried about, yuna. how are you feeling? any numbness? cold? confusion?"

yuna sighed and pulled away to rub her eyes, "no, nothing...well — confused about how we got here. and where we are."

samir's lips would part just before he began to fill in the gaps, but the soft tapping of footsteps on the other side of the room would catch the princess's attention, subsequently pulling his own gaze to peer over the side of the couch. from the doorway separating the den and the kitchen stood the red-haired woman from before with a steaming bowl in her hands, the motherly smile on her face emphasizing the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes under the fire light.

"you're just a few miles south of the kublai river, your highness. this is my home."

the frail woman would dutifully tip her head towards the princess in a short bow before taking careful steps closer to offer the bowl in her hands. "amina and i prepared a hearty stew for your quick recovery." her warm grin would grow brighter as yuna accepted the dish, "it's a pleasure to meet you, your highness. i'm orla."

the now-embarrassed princess offered a meek nod in return, both hands clutching the warm bowl as she thanked the kind woman stood at the edge of the lounge chair. her lounge chair.

"thank you very much, orla. i'm glad to make your acquaintance — and i appreciate your generosity."

"oh, no matter" orla waved her off with a jovial chuckle "i'm delighted to be of help. you can finally put our guest bed to use."

yuna would hum offhandedly and mutter "you're very kind" in passing, only to be met with an overwhelming intentness within the older woman's response. it was the most off-putting samir had seen since their initial meeting with the way her smile fell and her brows raised, her tone so matter-of-fact he would've thought it was a popular saying.

"you can accomplish by kindness what you cannot by force, your highness."

the teens seated before this peculiar ginger woman, orla, would share a not-so-subtle look with one another before either decided to speak. and when samir's lips would part just prior to his follow-up question, 'is that a publilius syrus quote?', orla would speak again with a resumed motherly glow in her eyes.

"the two of you have a long day ahead, so i'll leave you to it. please don't hesitate to knock if you need anything. i hope you rest well, your highness."

and once again, in the manner she always had when growing up with an image to uphold, yuna would thank her graciously with a genuine smile on her face that met her sparkling brown eyes. orla offered the final tip of her head before exiting the den and the puzzled pair now whipped to look at each other.

"that was...odd..."

sam nodded in agreement, "yes. yes it was."

yuna would then shrug as she fished the spoon from the bowl, always pointing out the silver lining in every situation. "still got some stew out of it, though." she was honestly thrilled just to have something in her stomach after not eating for a full day — even if it was mostly liquid. so much so, in fact, that she wouldn't notice the fond eyes watching her every movement; notably massive mouthfuls of stew being ingested. it was only when she finally felt it hit her stomach that she looked up to find samir's loving gaze on her, cheeks growing red as she wiped the broth dripping down her chin.

"want some?" she offered to cover the embarrassment she felt. sam would simply shake his head. "no thank you, i ate already."

he'd watch the princess nod politely before looking back down into the bowl — away from his eyes — and giggle sheepishly to herself while she scooping another spoonful. then, just as she began to lift the utensil to her mouth, yuna looked back up at him.

"so, how'd we get here, again?"

sam smiled. "i'll tell you before bed."

"she kept the pot boiling just for me?"

sam tossed the comforter over the mattress. "yep. i told you; orla has only been extremely kind. i would've expected that stunt from amina if anything." he then traveled to the foot of the bed to tuck the blanket in, the view of the back of his head unfaltering yuna's questioning as she stood by the doorway wrapped in the wool.

"but why? what does it mean?"

samir, though exhausted and running entirely on fumes to continue providing her with answers, then turned to motion to her now-made bed. "i'm not entirely sure yet, yuna, but i think a good nights sleep may help."

the princess, who stood barefoot in a nightgown only covered by the blanket around her shoulders, would giggle as she picked up on his totally subtle hints. she'd offer a short nod in acceptance of bed time and ambled to the left side of the bed before climbing on top of the covers — a movement that kicked samir right back into autopilot. he'd tip his nose to offer their version of the customary bow for royalty and turn on his heel to exit her 'chambers,' stopping only when yuna called his name.

"where are you going?"

sam turned back with his lips in the shape of an 'o' indicating that he, too, was puzzled by this compulsion of routine. though, expecting to lie in bed with the princess was...impossible — presumptuous, even. he didn't even stop to consider it being a possibility, so as naturally and nonchalant as he could muster, samir pasted on a chivalrous smile. "i'll just be downstairs. sleep well, yuna."

he wasn't given the chance to move even an inch before she was responding, "wait — why? that's a horrible idea."

"huh?"

"you're gonna sleep on the lounge? so you can be strangled in your sleep by whatever beast is out there looking for us?"

sam's shoulders slumped inward on himself. "you think i'd let that happen?" even from his disappointed stance by the door he could see yuna as she sat forward to catch his eye before responding in a sickly sweet tone that made his ears hot under the dark strands of tousled hair.

"i think you're tired, sammy."

sammy. it nearly made his knees weak — though that could also be the impact of the day finally taking its toll. no one had ever called him that, not his father nor anyone else in elora, it was always the proper and prudent samir. only sometimes did he get called by sam, though the vast majority of those times were from the one and only yuna who'd began when they were 11. but this one was special — why? he didn't know — but it made his insides warm and gooey, and his lips sweet like candy as his tongue darted out to wet them.

"i'm well rested." she continued with a sweet smile on her face like she knew his current ailments. "i could keep watch for a while."

sammy couldn't help the nervous chuckle that had a goofy grin on his flushed face. "your hi — yuna...what are you suggesting?" her quiet giggles in the silent home would only have his cheeks growing darker.

"we're not in the castle, the rules don't apply here. remember?"

honestly, he did not. by now he could barely keep his eyes open so it wasn't far fetched to believe he just forgot what he'd been calling the princess, though the wonderful thought of sleeping beside said princess was heavily outweighed by the anxieties of having laid with the princess. if the king found out —

yuna spoke up again. "sammy." she called. his attention was back on her. "it's alright. come on. it's my turn to take care of you now."

and so, with a breath caught in his throat and his heart hammering against his chest, samir would apprehensively walk to the right side of the bed before taking off his shoes. he'd undress his outer clothing with a nervous gaze locked on the princess sitting patiently in her own undergarments, finding her eyes to be looking up at the ceiling until the moment he slid under the cool covers. she'd then do the same with a beaming grin.

"see? you didn't combust into flames or anything!"

sam chuckled and looked over at her through the dark lashes of his heavy lids. "i think i'm already in heaven."

yuna paused. 'he must be really tired,' she thought 'he probably didn't even mean to sound that fond.' with a chaste pat to his chest the princess would feign ignorance and swallow the feelings welling in her throat.

"get some sleep, sammy."

[ffamranxii]

Okay folks, I am all caught up with Tokyo Mew Mew Au Lait chapters 1-3 and Tokyo Mew Mew 2020 Re-Turn chapters 1 and 2 so I am Doing A Thing! Buckle up, bitches!

MASSIVE SPOILERS IF YOU’RE WAITING FOR THE OFFICIAL ENGLISH RELEASES (whenever the hell those will be). Thanks to @berrychanx​, @hikayagami​, and @ribbonstrawberrysurprise​ for the scans, English translation, and hard work putting the translation onto the manga so neatly.

LEADERS

MOMOMIYA ICHIGO AND SHIBUYA AOI

Honestly this is the biggest difference between the 2020 Re-Turn reboot/original series and the magical boy tribute. Aoi is in no way like Ichigo once you get past that they’ve both been injected with Iriomote cat DNA. Whereas Ichigo is cheery and bubbly and cute, Aoi is withdrawn, suffers from low self confidence, and sort of breaks the fourth wall during nearly every fight, freaking out at how catchphrases and such just seem to burst forth from him after he transforms. (It’s honestly a funny highlight.) Their respective crushes are also treated differently, with Aoi falling hard for Anzu (though of course saying nothing) almost immediately, almost a love at first sight sort of deal, and Ichigo already having this crush on this boy when we start vanilla TMM and already deeply committed to him in the reboot. In civilian form, (using vanilla Ichigo here, it’s not fair to compare Aoi to 2020 “been a magical girl for years” Ichigo), Aoi is a lot more unsure of himself, and seems almost to be in this Mew Mew thing for Anzu, whereas Ichigo immediately had a “I’ll do my best” acceptance mindset from the start. (Both freak out over their cat ears appearing at random moments, even Ichigo in the 2020 reboot, and I think I can finally give poor Aoi a point over Ichigo here. It makes him uncomfortable but he just wears a hoodie and hopes no one notices. It makes Ichigo freak out more lol.)

THE LOVE INTEREST / DUNGEON NAVI / SECONDARY PROTAGONIST

AOYAMA MASAYA, HINATA ANZU, SHIROGANE RYOU

Anzu is a precious peach and she occupies such a weird role here that I almost couldn’t make her a neat little graphic. She doesn’t fit neatly into a “oh, they’re a genderbent so and so” like nearly everyone else, and it’s fascinating. On the one hand, several panels in the first chapter of Au Lait make it clear that the writers are setting her up to be Aoi’s love interest. Every magical girl anime has a love interest, so why wouldn’t a magical boy manga? But that’s where she diverges. Unlike Masaya, who is a very clear tribute to Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask (with the exception that he’s a cute bean as a civilian, he’s nearly the same person. No past, gets kidnapped, magical form to protect the magical girl, evil form to fight the magical girl [this happened in PGSM, and he’s been brainwashed several times]), who has always been a secondary character, Anzu actually starts the Au Lait manga. She wasn’t even featured on the promo images, so when I opened the first chapter in a zip file I thought I’d downloaded the wrong one. My rudimentary Japanese confirmed I hadn’t, but I was like “well who tf is this chick?” I waited for an English translation to be sure and yup - Anzu is being treated almost like a secondary protagonist. Well that’s new. It’s as if the Au Lait writers smashed together the characters of Ryou and Masaya and named their love child Hinata Anzu. She’s intelligent, she knows more about this project than she should, and, like Ryou in vanilla, she’s out and about and helping the boys, not just as a civilian, but in every battle. She doesn’t have powers (that we know of), but her smarts and knowledge of animals have served them well time and again. Au Lait seems more like, as one reader put it, Anzu And The Dork Squad than Aoi’s team. 

Masaya in 2020 Re-Turn is adorable. He is at odds with Quiche over Ichigo (or more like, he dislikes just how much Quiche likes Ichigo), and in a moment of panic he uses his leftover remnants of Deep Blue’s power to... change his clothes. I’m not sure what actually happened there. (Note: Thanks ribbonstrawberrysurprise: Deep Blue manifested to float the chimera anima/train and its passengers to safety.) But I love that he was so concerned for Ichigo, who at that moment desperately needed help, that the being who created his body and didn’t like Ichigo wanted to protect her. Ryou was his standoffish self, but even he seemed to have a hint of a lingering crush. He organized a party for the Mews and then took over in cafe duties so Ichigo could meet her man at the airport, unable to quiiiiite meet her eye while saying so. I always did like Ryou/Ichigo.

THE SASSY RICH BITCH

AIZAWA MINTO AND YOYOGI SHIZUKA

First of all: SAILOR JUPITER TAUGHT ME THAT PINK EQUALS FLOWER HURRICANES AND CAN I JUST SAY THAT I AM DISAPPOINTED AS FUCK THAT SHIZUKA ISN’T PLANT BASED AND CAN’T DO FLOWER HURRICANES THAT IS ALL.

Admit it. When we saw the promo image, we assumed certain things. One of those things turned out to be true: Aoi would be the Iriomote cat, because of course he would be Ichigo’s counterpart. Shizuka is wearing glasses, and his costume had the little tail, which meant he must have been a fish or a marine mammal and therefore Retasu’s counterpart, right? RIGHT. But also very, very wrong, my friends. Shizuka is indeed water based like Retasu - he’s an Amazon river dolphin (the pink ones!) - and that’s where all his similarities to our gentle green girl end. Instead of making everyone exactly the same but gender flipped, Au Lait is going in a slightly different direction, and I really like it. Shizuka is actually the most similar to our resident princess Minto! They both attend prestigious elite schools and generally act better than everyone else, but the real gem here is their interactions with their leaders. Shizuka has some truly snappy one-liners - such as discovering Ryuusei (”that’s the power of an idiot”) - and his reactions to Aoi are gold. He considers himself a genius, and indeed he’s very intelligent according to Natsume (and his school seems to be for smart people, it’s not prestigious for music or anything like that), and he makes little quips at Aoi all the time about how Aoi isn’t. I could totally see him spending an entire shift reading a book at Cafe Mew Mew while Aoi does all the work, only for him to stand up and someone to scream “HOLY CRAP, SHIZUKA’S UP, SHIT’S ABOUT TO GO DOWN.” 

Minto is also full of snappy quips at Ichigo in the reboot, mostly about how Ichigo should handle the biggest, strongest enemies since she’s the leader, and can’t Ichigo even keep them in place so Minto can shoot them down? (And yeah, someone totally said the above comment ^ when Minto stood up at Cafe Mew Mew.) Minto was always one of my favorite characters, and I love that we saw a lot of close ups of her in the reboot, and that she seemed to be second in command.

THE CHILD

FONG PURIN AND KANDA RYUUSEI

Oh my god these two. I refuse to believe they aren’t related. I know Purin is Chinese but you cannot take this headcanon from me. 

Purin is my favorite character in OG Mew Mew and Ryuusei claimed my heart the second I saw the Au Lait promo. NEITHER OF THEM DISAPPOINTED ME, I AM SO IN LOVE.

While I WILL say that I in no way care for Mew Pudding’s redesign (I hate literally everything about it. I miss her jumpsuit. I hate the little pigtails at the top of her head. I hate the ribbon. At least she still has her fingerless gloves), I love that she got an entire panel of just her being badass. She stood in the middle of some train tracks, facing a runaway speeding train chimera anima, with that ^ fucking look on her face, and was like “where you going, na no da?” Purin from like, ten years ago wouldn’t have done that. She has matured so much, but she’s still the young, goofy little acrobat monkey who provides for her tea-themed siblings (who criminally do not make an appearance) and I just love her so fucking much, you guys.

RYUUSEI. Guys. He’s an idiot. Oh my god. He’s a cute lovable idiot. “What’s a gomodo dragon? What’s a kodomo dragon? What’s a condo dragon and why does it need a house?” Anzu was in love with him for like five seconds until she learned he’s a dumbass, and Aoi was jealous as fuck, and no one ever told him what his damn animal was, and I laughed my ass off through his entire last couple pages. He also had his jacket hand embroidered with the kanji for dragon, BUT IT’S MISSPELLED. It’s missing a stroke! XD 

Ryuusei is the KOMODO dragon (which is Anzu’s favorite animal), and komodos are badass. He also either always had weird animal powers, or just never noticed that he suddenly got super smell. Komodo dragons, by the way, can track their prey for literally MILES by smell alone, for DAYS. It’s absolutely terrifying (thank you for the nightmares, Wild Thornberries), and Au Lait made it fucking comical. I can’t even. HE CAN SMELL THE RED DATA ANIMAL ON PEOPLE. I love it. He’s super strong and super cute, apparently lives with his grandparents, and is Purin’s counterpart in every single way, except I think SHE might be more mature than him. I love him. He is my baby. 

Yellow is my favorite color and yellow never disappoints. 

THE FAMOUS

FUJIWARA ZAKURO AND ROPPONGI AYATO

Zakuro had next to no presence in the reboot. She occasionally made some panels look pretty. She twice had a half page to herself, one per chapter. I am sad. I love my wolf lesbian. In semi-related news, I feel I have solved the mystery of Zakuro’s red data animal, something that has plagued the TMM community for years. The grey wolf is not endangered at all, yet Zakuro is injected with one, right? I read somewhere (either in a TMM blog or a conservation blog) that there is a subspecies of grey wolf that IS critically endangered. I believe it’s the Mexican grey wolf? I headcanon she was injected with DNA specifically from a Mexican grey wolf. 

Moving on. In Chapter 3 (which was a DELIGHT), we met Ayato. Chapter 3 was the most frustrating chapter because let me tell you, Au Lait marks the first time I have ever read a manga chapter by chapter as it was being released in Japan. So I’m waiting Nakayoshi to publish the chapter, then I’m waiting for someone to scan Nakayoshi, then I’m waiting for someone to translate it, over and over and over, and omg I can’t believe this is what people DO. I’ve waited for full volumes before, but CHAPTERS? This is torture. Ayato, I haven’t had enough TIME with you!

Ayato seems to be an actor (in a really... really weird stage play), and has very few lines in his first appearance. I’m not sure what I make of him. He says about six sentences, which is actually a lot for a character introduced on a cliffhanger, but... I can’t decide if he’s said them in a mysterious Sailors Neptune and Uranus way or a flamboyant Sohma Ayame way. I ALSO DON’T KNOW WHAT ANIMAL HE IS AND I AM VERY ANGRY. BB Ryuusei said he smells like yakitori (a type of grilled chicken), which confirms he’s a bird. But. WHICH BIRD, DAMNIT? 

CHAPTER FOUR WHERE ARE YOU?

THE FUNDING

AKASAKA KEIICHIRO, HINATA NATSUME, SHIROGANE RYOU

Hello again, Ryou! The boys here were wallpaper (though cute wallpaper) in the reboot. Natsume is 100% a troll. I love her. She admits in chapter 3 she literally just injected hot boys for her Mew Mew project. Even Ryou wasn’t that blunt. I mean, if you gotta save Earth and stare at people while you do it, they better be cute, right?

IF FOUND, PLEASE CALL THE FANDOM

MIDORIKAWA RETASU, SHIRAYUKI BERII, AKAI RINGO

Aside from her two half panels as a Mew Mew per chapter, this is the only good cap of Retasu as a civilian in the reboot. D: I believe Hiroo Taichi will be her counterpart in Au Lait.

I never liked Berii. There, I said it. She got TWO animals. She was some random newbie and she got to be leader just like that? And she was clueless and dumb and the writing in A La Mode wasn’t great. But I really like 2020 Berii. She’s cute, she seems more rabbit than cat, and she seems more intelligent and less of a blonde Ichigo clone. I don’t know if she’ll have an Au Lait counterpart.

WHERE IS RINGO? THE REBOOT WAS THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY TO PUT HER IN THE STORY FOR REAL AND SHE JUST... WASN’T THERE?! THIS IS BLASPHEMY. RINGO IS THE BEST MEW MEW. BEST GIRL. JUSTICE FOR RINGO.

THE RELATIONSHIPS

MASAYA & ICHIGO VS AOI & ANZU

ZAKURO & MINTO VS AYATO & RYUUSEI

Nearly all of 2020 chapter 1 focused on Ichigo seeing Masaya again. I’m guessing this took place after he left for London. Ichigo left with him after A La Mode, and some time between then and Re-Turn came back to Japan, and now Masaya is back. They are still as lovey as ever, but not as sickeningly cute as Tsukino Usagi and Chiba Mamoru or anything. Phew! Their counterpart in Au Lait seems to Aoi and Anzu. (Look at that height difference! Poor Anzu, her poor neck.) Aoi already has a massive crush on her, but Anzu, bless her, is oblivious.

AND NOW FOR THE GAYS.

I think Zakuro and Minto is probably one of the most popular TMM ships and holy lesbians, Batman, they were well fed with this GORGEOUS panel at the end of chapter 2. Look at it. Zakuro had literally no panels, save for her two intros, to herself, and barely any panels at all in the reboot, and then BA-BAM, this beautiful ending shot. I swear Ikumi did it on purpose. Speaking of gays - is Ayato/Ryuusei the new Zakuro/Minto? Ayato seems to be at least bisexual (he also hit on Anzu), but this was literally his second panel. He is in a (terrible, TERRIBLE) play, and the actors are walking in the audience looking for the villain. Ayato walks into the audience and HITS ON RYUUSEI. His first goddamn words are “Do you want me to keep you, my cute little puppy?” to Ryuusei. He says fuck this acting shit, I see a SNACK. I think I ship it. I think I ship it hard.

THE STORY

*Au Lait is just getting started, so typical magical girl boy anime manga: Let’s find the others! Shenanigans! Some fillers! It’s cute, I love it, go read it.

*2020 Re-Turn is actually REALLY GOOD and chapter 2 reminds me of just how unique Tokyo Mew Mew was and still is among not just magical girl series, but animanga as a whole. Quick, what was the last environmental series you remember? Mine was Captain Planet - in the 90s. Preachy, in your face, after school special about things like pollution and endangered species and littering and honestly it was really cool, but very much a product of its time. Even now, magical girl animanga is still focused on bad guys, but bad guys are generic and represent something created for the series. Here, the bad guys are US, other human beings, who traffic animals, who endanger them, who wreck our planet enough that animals are barely clinging to life. There’s a very poignant scene featuring the adorable snow leopard up there (who’s the secondary protagonist of the reboot) ^, showing his mother being shot and himself being snatched by poachers, and he’s terrified, and has no idea what’s going on or where he is, and Ichigo is terrified for him. We need more series like this - not just of the magical girl genre, but of ALL genres. To make it accessible in this way, for people of all ages, something enjoyable, that people can fangirl over and love and its creators clearly put a lot of love and thought into. We need another Captain Planet, but less preachy, less after school special-y. We don’t want to be like the aliens (who remember, are descendants of humans who fucked up Earth so badly they had to leave it). 

Behind all the cute of this manga and its reboot, and its new spinoff, Tokyo Mew Mew has a powerful message that we should all be following. It’s not even subtle. Get yo shit together, peeps. 

[starstruckteacup]

Cottagecore Films (pt. 11)

A Little Princess (1995)

starring Liesel Matthews, Liam Cunningham, Vanessa Chester, Eleanor Bron

synopsis

I was extremely disappointed in this film, to put it lightly. The story itself was beautiful, but that is thanks exclusively to the novel on which it was based. The movie itself utterly failed to convey the magic and timelessness of the book. The acting was flat, emotionless, and forced at every point, from every actor (except for maybe Cunningham, but he was absent for half of it). One would think a gaggle of girls would have some form of natural chemistry, whether pulling them together or apart, but not a single child actor portrayed even the remotest semblance of a relationship to another. (Note: I describe in my review of Pan’s Labyrinth what quality acting from a child looks like, for reference.) Even Matthews and Cunningham could not pass a believable father-daughter relationship, despite the story being about that. As far as emotional acting, the adults were just as bad as the children. They couldn’t even feign a single moment of joy, sadness, or anger, regardless of the context. I actually laughed for the entire scene during which Sara nearly died because of how bad the acting from the adults was. At least Chester seemed somewhat worried; Bron and the nameless police officers stood around so vacantly it looked like they forgot what was happening. I really was appalled by the abysmal acting, especially when so much was handed to them in the story. I want to preface my next point by saying that yes, I know computer animation was still a work in progress in the 90s. But this was horrifyingly awful. I have never once, not in my entire life, seen CGI as terrible as the monster in Sara’s stories. I nearly gave up on the entire movie within the first five minutes because of that monster. And it kept showing up, which absolutely ruined whatever favor I tried to hold for this movie. If you don’t have the budget, which this film clearly didn’t, don’t try to animate a monster. It’s that simple. I wish I had more words for it but it was truly so atrocious that I’m at a loss. Any good will I hold for this movie is due to my fondness for the story (no credit to the film), the settings (while not exceptional, they were fairly pretty), and Liam Cunningham’s acting. 2/10

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

TW: blood, mild gore, torture, racism against indigenous people

starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, Jordi Mollà, Samantha Morton

This film is the sequel to Elizabeth (1998) (see part 10 of my film reviews), which continues the story of Queen Elizabeth I as her rule progresses. Tensions between Catholic Spain and Protestant England grow ever greater, escalating to treasonous plots and assassination attempts. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and King Philip II of Spain conspire to depose Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne, restoring Catholicism as the national religion. Even as these events lead to war between the two superpowers, the court provides no sense of stability as new faces and new stresses surround the Virgin Queen. She forms a strong friendship with the pirate Walter Raleigh upon his return trip from the New World, where he seeks to establish colonies under the English flag. However, his stay is extended greatly when Elizabeth’s selfishness and pride take over, and are only broken down in the face of battle when she puts him at the forefront of the British navy. Outnumbered, Elizabeth will need Raleigh’s loyalty and cunning, along with the unwavering loyalty of her people, if they wish to survive the Spanish onslaught.

While still a drama, this film proved to be much more war-oriented than its predecessor, but I’m not sure it did either as well. I liked the deeper look this film gave us into the Elizabeth’s mind, especially with her social and emotional conflicts. They remind us that she is still human, despite the somewhat cold appearance the first film gave her at the end. She is more mature, and even more prideful, but there’s still a limit to what she can take as a person. I think the first film gave a better portrayal of her complicated mind, but this was a solid continuation of what years of ruling can do. I also liked how much detail they put into Raleigh’s character, which the first film didn’t do as well with its secondary characters. We got to know more about him, even if he did still feel somewhat surface-level. I think the dramatic aspects could have felt more high-stakes than they did, especially for the characters who were actually in danger. Even though so many characters were actively committing treason, I only felt that level of tension with one: Mary Stuart. Her death was particularly elegant and laden with symbolism, and even though I knew the outcome historically the scene still delivered the anxiety it was meant to. The others simply didn’t have the same delivery. Even the assassination attempt didn’t project any kind of concern, regardless of one’s historical knowledge. The war focus was a fairly different take than the first had, which I appreciated. The film established a strong balance between the tensions in England, Scotland, and Spain, and did a good job making the stakes very clear for each group. Given the uncritically positive stance on England that this film takes, I would have expected the film to villainize Spain a little more to form a stronger dichotomy between the two rulers, but Spain was presented rather neutrally to the audience. The Spanish ruler and nobles didn’t have much character, despite being the antagonist. As for that uncritical positivity regarding England, I do have a bit more to say. Although to an extent it makes sense that the film would lean in favor of England, given its content and the point of view from which the story is told, it became overbearing at times. England could do no wrong in this film, despite children dying in battle, indigenous people being humiliated and dehumanized for show, talk about slavery, and a complete disregard for the suffering of non-white and non-Protestant groups. In contrast, the first film heavily criticized England, from Mary of Guise shaming Elizabeth for sending young children to war, to Elizabeth frowning upon Walsingham’s torture methods (granted she never stopped them, but she didn’t approve as readily as she did in this film), and so on. Although England in truth did all of these things without rebuke, the film could have handled it more gracefully and came across less like propaganda, at the very least. 5/10

Loving Vincent (2017)

TW: suicide (action offscreen, death onscreen)

Sensory Warning: movement of the impressionistic paintings can be very disorienting for those with sensory processing difficulties. I had to break from watching multiple times so as not to become ill.

starring Douglas Booth, Eleanor Tomlinson, Jerome Flynn, Robert Gulaczyk

This fully hand-painted animated film follows Armand Roulin, a young man with a severe temper, on his way to deliver Vincent Van Gogh’s last letter to a living recipient. When he reaches the town where Vincent died, he begins speaking to a variety of villagers with their own stories about the artist, and their own theories about how he died. Armand tries to piece the puzzle together, wondering if the death was not a suicide as claimed, but rather something more sinister.

This film was spectacularly breathtaking. The amount of work that went into painting every scene was awe-inspiring, and definitely sets the bar high for any other films of its kind. The team of artists that created this film represented Van Gogh’s unique art style exquisitely through their loving application of oil-based paints, and truly brought to life the emotion he put into his works. I wish I hadn’t struggled so much with the constant movement, as I feel I would have been able to appreciate the film in its entirety better, but as it was I struggled to pay attention to the story because the art style consumed too much of my sensory processing capabilities. As for the story, I thought it was interesting, but I found it lacking despite the incredible artwork. Foremost, after some cursory research, I discovered that the homicide theory on which this film was based was only acknowledge by one individual, and spurned by hundreds of others. Although the film leaves the verdict open-ended, both to Roulin and to the audience, the story itself seemed to lean into the homicide theory, then completely give up on it with no resolution, so it came across as fairly noncommittal. I won’t argue for or against the theory, as I don’t know nearly enough about Van Gogh to assert an opinion, but I’m somewhat unsettled by the amount of weight it gave to it without any kind of evidentiary support, only to dump it as if the writers changed their mind themselves. The pacing was also slow for a murder mystery, which is basically what the story turned out to be. I would much have preferred the film to cover Vincent’s life, or even the days/weeks leading up to his death, instead of only featuring him in other people’s flashbacks. This kind of existential impressionism should capture the life of its creator, not the mundane views of people who didn’t understand him or even hated him. There wasn’t anything wrong with the film, per se, but I wish the writing was given as much love as the art was. 7/10

Part 1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7 // 8 // 9 // 10

[meditativeyoga]

How Yoga Can Disrupt the School-to-Prison Pipeline

This is an interview with B.K. Bose, who began the non-profit Niroga Institute with a few yoga students in 2005. Niroga was asked to assist work with a team of delinquent girls in an alternative high college in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also from the very first yoga class the Niroga instructors might see just how these trainees took to the conscious activity, breathing and focusing (the ABCs) like fish to water. They appeared to attach with a place inside themselves that was safe from all the dysfunction around them.

Today, Niroga carries out over 100 yoga exercise courses a week in 40 websites throughout the Bay Area, serving over 5,000 children, young people, and grownups annually, in mainstream as well as different colleges, adolescent halls and jails, rehab centers, and also cancer cells healthcare facilities. It likewise performs trainings for numerous teachers, psychological health and wellness specialists, and violence-prevention authorities nationwide. In these trainings, individuals get aid with personal sustainability (stress monitoring, self-care, and also recovery from vicarious injury), which also has a favorable impact on their professional technique. Niroga shows Transformative Life Abilities (TLS: conscious yoga, breathing methods, as well as meditation).

Rob: What initially inspired you to do this work as well as exactly what continues to encourage you? Just how, if in any way, has that inspiration transformed over time?

I learned yoga as a kid, yet my technological training was in computer technology. While I was working as a researcher in Silicon Valley, I saw the ravages of persistent tension around me. It was affecting the wellness, partnerships, efficiency, and also worldwide competition of numerous people and companies. I understood about an ideal solution!

So I came to be a pupil of persistent anxiety and also its pervasive influence on people and areas. I learned that stress and anxiety is not only a risk factor for the majority of persistent illness (which are accountable for 75 percent of our health-care budget), however it impacts all of us the means down to our DNA, speeding up aging and also modifying our genetics maps (switching on disease-causing genetics). Chronic tension is additionally a common impact of every significant social determinant of health and wellness (e.g., income inequality, institutionalized racism, as well as the breakdown of traditional household structures). I additionally gained from the current injury research study that we hold chronic stress, traumatic stress, and post-traumatic stress in our bodies along with our minds. An incorporated mind-body strategy is essential for optimal healing.

How could yoga come to be a game-changer in stopping institution failure as well as minimizing adolescent delinquency

Approximately one in 2 young people is quiting of our inner-city colleges. About a million youths are dropping out of college annually across the United States ... When a youth leaves of school it is really most likely that he or she will be entailed in criminal offense and violence.

Many of the kids and young people who go to biggest threat of institution failure come to school not all set to find out. They are handling the injury of abuse and also disregard, crime and physical violence, weapons and gangs, medications as well as fatality. We rush to show them, failing to remember that we need to heal them first.

If we can bring ideal trauma-informed programs such as mindful yoga exercise, breathing methods, as well as reflection to adequate youngsters enough times, I believe we can reach a powerful tipping point. An efficient as well as affordable method to doing this is by training the adults that are around these youngsters (e.g., teachers, counselors, and also moms and dads) in these methods. This would have a twin benefit: It would certainly help the adults with their very own anxiety administration, self-care as well as healing from additional injury, as well as also allow them to produce communities of method in their colleges as well as homes.

Why should wellness professionals and college administrators find out about Transformative Life Abilities (TLS)?

The most current neuroscience study reveals that chronic stress interrupts our ability to hold focus as well as manage our emotions, neuroscience additionally shows that mindfulness practices can alleviate these very results. [1-4] Scientists have actually currently established that self-constraint is a forecaster of scholastic accomplishment, which low self-constraint is in charge of a wide variety of individual and interpersonal issues. [5], [6]

Independent scientists studying the result of Niroga's TLS amongst thousands of young people in urban schools have actually revealed that TLS lowered anxiety, enhanced emotion policy, enhanced school involvement, as well as transformed attitude toward physical violence. [8] I think this has multi-dimensional impact on our school-to-prison pipeline, along with on education equity as well as the accomplishment gap, considering that many of the youth leaving of institution and also winding up in adolescent hall are kids of color.

In addition to the studies you point out above, is there an evidence base for your program in particular? What is the return on investment?

As I claimed, there is engaging clinical study revealing 1) stress and anxiety influences self-control, as well as self-control predicts academic accomplishment, and also 2) yoga/TLS reduces tension as well as increases self-discipline. So it is rather feasible that yoga/TLS will affect academic achievement, and this needs to be investigated. It will require getting yoga/TLS to a great deal of youth arbitrarily picked to get TLS adequate times (sufficient frequency and also duration), as well as following their trajectories for numerous years. We are simply starting to obtain passion from entire school districts to examine just this.

Of course, we see circumstances of change on a daily basis in our straight solution programs in the area. When a young man is able to let down his armor of hyper-vigilance, when a girl in a homeless shelter claims that her continuous psychological pain is relieved with the method, when opposing gang members have the ability to close their eyes and also loosen up next to each other at the end of a session, when a high-risk teenager graduates from a different high school and joins our instructor training program to ensure that she can assist draw her close friends out of the mire of sadness, we consider these triumphes bread for our journey!

It expenses less than $1,000 to saturate a youngster or young people's life with TLS. If we used TLS throughout our institutions, and also if the graduation rate can be raised by just 1 percent, the math is simple and clear-- we would certainly get our money back often times over!

What is the best challenge you face in bringing TLS to those who require it most?

There are so many misunderstandings around yoga exercise. Despite 20 million people doing yoga in the United States, it is frequently viewed as socially elite. It is additionally often presented as a fitness trend for versatility, or simply as stretching.

So we call our program Transformative Life Skills (TLS), abilities that nudge us in the direction of healthy and balanced actions as well as healthy way of living options, also as they change us from the in out. Secured in mindfulness, connecting with our breath, we arise in activity, to ensure that the entire technique ends up being dynamic, symbolized mindfulness-- mindfulness in movement, or removaling reflection. It is an universal, secular transformative technique, which anybody can do anytime, anywhere.

Awareness regarding the power and possibility of these transformative practices requires to expand among instructors, health-care experts, and also violence-prevention authorities. Idea leaders in these interconnected major domains of social function are just beginning to recognize that these reliable techniques are evidence-based, validated by cutting-edge research study in several disciplines. Long-lasting funding dedication is needed, to make sure that detailed research study could be carried out to develop system influences, such as secondary school graduation price and the recidivism price in adolescent halls.

What are 2 vital features of your strategy to decreasing stress and anxiety and also enhancing self-constraint and resilience among at-risk youngsters as well as youth?

We think that every child and every youth has limitless capability for self-awareness and also self-mastery, to act rather compared to simply react, to attain their greatest potential.

We also think that we are not aiming to take care of or aid any individual, simply to offer them with love as well as empathy, unselfishly as well as unconditionally. Doing so is our opportunity. We are happy to those we offer, because each of them provides us with the opportunity to expand in lots of ways.

What are several of your concepts regarding or expects the future of 'service yoga exercise' in America in the next decade?

I desire about the opportunity when a lot of individuals in neighborhoods across the United States as well as past have access to these profound and powerful techniques, so that they can act with self-awareness and also self-mastery a lot of the time. Such gain access to will change ourselves, help recover our communities, and also aid make our vulnerable planet much more lasting for generations to come.

None of us could do this alone. We will certainly need all our enthusiasm and also compassion, vision as well as creative imagination. Yoga specialists will should extend their method past the limits of their floor coverings, bringing it from people to institutions, from classrooms to companies, from jails to juvenile halls, building healthy and balanced as well as dynamic neighborhoods one breath at a time.

[sebthesnipe]

The Dreamer by Whatwashernameagain an Analysis? Chapter 2! Part 2

All portions:

Chapter 1: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4

Chapter 2: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4

The Dreamer

@whatwashernameagain

As always, Spoilers under cut.

To jump right in we start off with Roman’s father. Eva writes: “Astonishingly, his father hadn’t scoffed at him as he’d passionately pleaded his case. The paper in his hands had been filled with speculations about the black clad silhouette barely caught on camera. The elderly republicans rightfully arguing against him had been banished to page eight, pushed aside by the intriguing puzzle the anonymous terrorist presented” (Whatwashernameagain).

We get a bit of more insight into Roman’s father, though he’s not nearly as flushed out as Logan or Roman, with good reason. He is, after all, a secondary character. First off, as with many works, the things that aren’t said are just as important as what is. Eva mentions that the front page focus’ on the Utilitarianist, with the Republicans are pushed to page eight. We know that Roman’s father is apart of the Republican party and as such this means that he is pushed aside by the public in favor of the Utilitarianist. And the fact that she mentions the paper at all, being held in Roman’s father’s hands shows that he is invested in the issue. A man who works in politics obviously would be quite upset when such an upstart outshines him in the media especially if he is in the middle of a campaign. So, the mention of the paper in general brings attention to the man’s ambitious nature and self-centered nature.

As for Roman, well, we gain a bit of hope for the man when the work mentions that his father didn’t turn up his nose at the other man’s passionate pleading. We know that at this point Roman’s only aspiration in life is to gain his father’s approval. Despite the fact that we consider this venture misguided, the reader is invested in Roman’s well being and happiness after Chapter 1 so, we can’t help but hope that he has achieved his goal. Because we love him.

“He’d looked at Roman as if he’d never truly seen him before. As if he was something of value. For the first time in years, the young man had his father’s full attention. It was like being in the spotlight he’d secretly dreamed of – bright and warm and exhilarating” (Whatwashernameagain). Poor, poor Roman… My baby… This once again, paints more of a picture of Roman, than his father. This is Roman’s POV after all. We see Roman’s father looking at him as if it were for the first time. Which implies that the attention Roman has always yearned for was never there in the first place. Sure, this had been implied before, but it hasn’t been truly pointed out until now. Roman’s father has done nothing but neglect and ignore him. Its no wonder Roman is starved for attention and understand; it’s no wonder that he is so naïve. His father has barely acknowledged his existence his entire life because Roman has never been particularly useful. I mentioned during my analysis of Chapter 1, Logan’s analogy of a ‘thorn in his shoe’ when referring to Roman but that analogy would not fit for Roman’s father… A thorn would give Roman far too much of an actual presence. No, Roman to his father is far less than a thorn. He is gravel on a warn path. He is meant to be stepped on in favor of pursuing his ambitions, only acknowledged when it makes enough noise to catch the attention of the person walking. His only purpose is to smooth out the road to success and nothing more.

This also brings attention to Logan, by simple contrast. Logan is supposed to be the cold unemotional villain of this story, but he doesn’t pull it off… at least not really. When Roman eventually grows close to the logical man, he no doubt sees a bit of his father in Logan. They are both distanced and calculating, they hold their heads up high and seem to criticize the world, they both are ambitious and driven. This comparison is no doubt attractive to Roman. He has wanted his father’s attention and affection his entire life, has seen him as a great man. When he meets Logan and truly begins to understand that Logan has a good heart deep down, I believe he begins to truly compare the two whether consciously or not. The difference is that Logan truly /is/ good at heart. We saw it at differing points throughout Chapter 1; his relief when Roman saves that girl, his compassion for Roman, himself, the fact that he had saved him from his captor before. Roman has seen first hand that Logan truly does care but never his father. All he has to ‘prove’ his father’s good heart is the man’s words which honestly doesn’t amount to much.

This also brings me back to something I mentioned in Chapter 1 as well: We, as humans, define things through comparison, without bad we’d never understand what good is and vice versa. We don’t know what Red is without comparing it to other colors. Roman’s father is bad, plain and simple, but he does not know this… not yet anyways. Its not until he sees the parallel between his father and Logan that he begins to see what could be… What a man with his father’s demeanor who actually cares can look like. Logan provides him with the hope he has always looked for in his father, the acknowledgment. Sure, Logan acts as if Roman is beneath him, which Roman is use to, but at the same time he provides Roman with the attention he has been starved for, attention from a man Roman respects. Despite Logan’s claims of seeing Roman as beneath him, Logan has treated him as an equal, going toe to toe with him, arguing with him… Roman has never had this; we see proof of that by his lack of self esteem and the way he talks about how he asks stupid questions or makes ignorant suggestions. No one has ever treated him as valued or taken him, as a person, into consideration… until Logan. Logan is his hope. Even the public, after he becomes The Dreamer, doesn’t see him as person but as celebrity. He is valued, yes, but not as himself, only as the persona he is taught to be; granted The Dreamer is apart of him, a big part, but he is more than just the name.

This also might be why Roman is so focused on the individual rather than saving the masses. Being accepted and appreciated by a large group of people feels less personal than the acceptance and love of an individual. If I had the choice to be loved by millions or loved by a few I would probably choose the few, though that is just me. My point is, by focusing on the individual Roman provides them something he never had; attention, affection, acceptance, value, and protection. The next line helps underline what I mean: “It was like being in the spotlight he’d secretly dreamed of—bright and warm and exhilarating” (Whatwashernameagain).

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

“He felt worth something for the first time as his father rose and walked around him, taking in his tall frame, filling in well from the workouts he tried to burn frustrated energy with, the sparkling green eyes, the luscious curls, the strong cheekbones and attractive features. There was no denying that Roman was handsome. A figure to be displayed, as long as he kept his mouth shut” (Whatwashernameagain).

Okay… So… I’m really conflicted with the rest of this paragraph. Its just… I have so many feelings. First off, The imagery here is beautiful: Roman’s father is circling him, examining him as if he were some show dog in a competition and in a way he is. Roman’s father only has time for things he considers useful and up until now, Roman was not useful. However, as a show dog he could be quite handy, and his father is realizing this now. The cold calculating gaze Eva describes as he examines his son provides that image. It is skillfully done which is why I am conflicted. On one hand, the talent she shows her makes me love the passage; on the other it also makes me hate Roman’s father even more. Roman is not some show pony to be placed on display and tossed aside once he completed his performance… We are meant to dislike Roman’s father and she has accomplished that goal.

The story moves on describing Logan’s movements; stating that they grew more frequent, showing the media’s support for The Utilitarianist. We’re reminded at a certain point that we are still in Roman’s POV, however, with “The liberal media was lapping up [Logan’s] speeches, stilted and uncreative as they may be” (Whatwashernameagain). This provides the reader with the reminder that at this point Roman still wasn’t very fond of the man. It also brings back the fact that Roman is a bit over the top; calling Logan’s speeches ‘stilted and uncreative’. This line also provides a contrast between the villain and hero. In fact, this line is a direct parallel to Logan’s words about the Hero’s speeches: “The worst, however, were the speeches. He knew very well how much the media loved him with his uniform accentuating his broad shoulders and his lush, caramel hair, his blinding smile and perfect, tan skin. He was a nuisance, is what he was trying to say” (Whatwashernameagain).

The direct comparison is nice and so subtly done (though I’m not sure she meant to do it… idk) that it is beautifully executed. Once again, the reader’s attention is pulled to the stark contrast between the two men. Logan’s thoughts on The Dreamer’s speeches are obviously molded towards glamor and aesthetics… which is in part The Dreamer’s purpose. Its obvious that Logan views the man as air headed and just a pretty face which is what Roman’s father is, in fact, using him as. While Roman views Logan’s speeches as cold and uncreative, lacking the glamor Logan obviously has a distaste for.

This also provides a glimpse at the contrasting tones between the POVs which I have continuously praised Eva’s talents on. Logan’s thoughts are far more aggressive in tone, almost angry, which really suits the Utilitarianist’s persona. Someone who is willing to do just terrible things to right the world no doubt has quite a lot of anger residing in them. While, Roman’s view points are more gentle and needy. He needs affirmation, affection, acceptance. His criticism on the villain’s speeches are not very harsh in the least, which is not surprising coming from such a kind soul, but at the same time, they are as harsh as Roman gets really. In essences he is calling Logan’s speeches ‘tacky’ which is a huge insult to a man like Roman even if they seem gentle to the rest of use. The aggression from Logan and the gentle insults from Roman make the two such perfect opposites that it is both endearing and heartwarming. I love it.

We also see in the next few lines the implied influence Roman’s father has on him. Logan’s destructive agenda threatening to ‘destroy the moral of the good society and plunge them all into anarchy’ and the people of ‘the greatest country in the world’ showing their resolve. As children we are taught to believe what our parents want us to believe and that is obvious the case for Roman as well. He believes these things but for those of us living in the U.S. we recognize the same regurgitated words that the Republican party uses every year. Roman is no doubt so driven to please his father that he doesn’t stop to question if these are his beliefs or his father’s. At least… not yet…

Something that Roman says does catch my eye; he states that “A revolution was on its way” (Whatwashernameagain). Could this be another foreshadowing? I would say so. We know that something happened at the end of Chapter 1 to injure Roman in such a horrible way and the fact that he said that he didn’t know where else to go implies that he didn’t trust his father. A revolution is surely coming but not in the way the Roman thinks here. He has his own revolution he is going to have to deal with and the country isn’t going to be the one to help him.

The story moves on describing how Roman’s father had created a community of wealthy ‘caring’ American patriots ready to sacrifice everything for their ‘traditional values’. Once again, this feeds into Roman’s delusions about his father and his father’s values. It is obvious that his naivety is still securely in place if he sees these things as brave or heroic. He talks about experiments on soldiers that are meant to fight for America’s future… How could that be alright? But Roman is blinded by his love for his father and his need to be valued to he steps up to the plate and volunteers.

The next para however, pulls us back to the optimistic Roman we know and love and the presence of thought that will no doubt be the cause of his revolution and the very thing that is used against him to make him the tool his father needs:

“They needed someone his fellow citizens could look up to. Someone who would stand up to the terror caused in these insecure times. Someone kind and strong and good to give them hope for a better future. A future Roman believed in with all his heart. Humans were amazing creatures! The feats they had accomplished awed the young man and deep down, he believed they could solve their problems together. He trusted their combined creativity, love and unity to save this planet in the end” (Whatwashernameagain).

This is the image Roman wants to be, the image he believes he can be; the person he does not see himself as right now but yearns to make of himself even if it is just a persona. The fact is, however, he is already this person he just needs to be strong enough to embrace it, something he is currently incapable of due to his obsession with his father’s approval. I don’t know about the rest of you but I learned a while ago that every individual has the power to change the world and it is not as hard as they would originally think. It takes a kind word or action to inspire the next and the more you provide the world the more it gives. The catch is… More often than not… you’ll never see the plant that your seeds grow into. All you can do is plant the seeds and how that what ever comes out of them is good. A single word can save a person’s life. A single action can change a perspective. We as people just have to be strong enough to face our own demons and decide to say that word or do that thing. /That/ is not easy. /That/ might be more difficult than you can believe but once you’ve decided to try then every step afterwards becomes easier. The only thing that holds us back from being the change is ourselves. People can make a thousand excuses as to why they don’t do something and typically it is blaming someone or something else but, in the end, … The only power someone else has over you is the power you allow them to have. Someone hating me isn’t going to affect me unless I allow it to. My car breaking down isn’t going to ruin my day unless I allow it… I am not saying that this mentality is easy its not. It’s the hardest thing in the world to force yourself out of your own way… but after you do it once… twice… Three times… Eventually it becomes second nature and there is nothing stopping you from becoming the person you’ve always wanted; becoming the change; becoming the light.

**Note: This is not belittling Mental Illness or any other issues. This is a very simplistic version of this train of thought.

Roman in this case is the only thing standing between himself and the person he wants to be is himself and his need for acceptance from his father. It is sad to see but it is obvious that his heart is where it needs to be, he just has to get over the hurtle, the need for that acceptance. The need is reinforced as Roman talks about his father’s complaints about ‘hostile foreign countries’, ‘leftist propaganda and lying media dividing them’ … Once again, it is something a lot of Americans here from the political parties and honestly I’m impressed by how accurately Eva captures this when considering that she does not live in America.

In the same para we turn back to Roman’s views; Roman wanted to unite the world, to give them something to believe in, to fend off fear, to sew trust rather than fear. It provides a beautiful contrast between the man Roman is and his father, despite the belief’s Roman holds. We also see the uncharacteristic self confidence that he don’t see in regular Roman: “Peace was a possibility if they only believed. And he knew he could give them this belief” (Whatwashernameagain). Once again, we get brief snippets of The Dreamer that we know is inside Roman but haven’t seen much of in the Chapter as of yet.

Now we move onto the rough part of Roman’s past. The experiments begin. “For months, he subjected himself to test, procedures and surgery with no complaints. He saw no daylight for almost half a year as his father’s and his partner’s scientists, the people who worked for the Conglomerate, did their best to make him worth putting their faith in” (Whatwashernameagain). We see Roman’s astonishing resolve as he puts himself through these things ‘with no complains’. We see his lack of self esteem as he describes the scientists as ‘doing their best to make him /worth/ putting their faith in’. It really makes me want to scream at him but… Lets move on. This also gives another insight into just how horrible a father Roman’s dad really is. What kind of father would put his son through such torture? The kind that is just using him for his own gain and truly doesn’t give a damn. This cements that Roman is nothing but a tool to the man. Roman, however, in his sweet naivety views the process as ‘glorious’ despite his agony because it is something, he believes will gain him his father’s praise… his pride… his acceptance… Poor, poor naïve Roman.

My anger jumps once more with the next line: “As he saw him again, months after being sent to the research facility” (Whatwashernameagain). No! Fuck that! This bastard just sent his son off to be tortured and experimented on and didn’t even drop by to check on him. I get that you love him Roman but you’re an idiot and I love you for it. As soon as he was able to walk without appearing to be in pain they began to groom him for the media, implying once more that image is everything and to Roman’s father, it is.

Her is a young man that would do anything to gain his father’s approval, gain the world’s trust. He’s willing to be tortured in order to make the world a better place for everyone. This is a true hero. Even before The Dreamer is created Roman is an inspiration and no doubt when Logan finds out about all this Roman is going to have one hell of a time convincing him not to slaughter his father and everyone else involved. Even after all of this torture Roman is eager to do his father’s bidding and go after Logan, and the ‘psychological damage’ he as inflicting on Roman’s precious country. It is noble and says quite a lot about Roman’s perseverance and care. Honestly it reminds me a lot of Patton. Both of these sides are capable of so much love… Patton is just more open about it while Roman expresses it in a more prideful manner.

“Roman humbly accepted the choices of those smarter than him. He worked hard on his enunciation, his posture, his all-American accent, so they would deem him ready faster. The terrorist was growing more and more dangerous every day. His acts were growing more sophisticated, his public appearances increased from flashes of a tall, slender form caught by cameras, to manifestos read in a passionate, though clearly untrained voice over the internet. And now, he’d killed for the first time” (Whatwashernameagain).

Once again we are faced with Roman’s lack of self confidence though I’m just going to touch on that and move on because the comparison between our favorite hero and villain is back again. Roman is filling out his persona as best he can, working on his accent and posture, getting himself ready for the big leagues. Logan is doing the same, though in a different way. The villain doesn’t put much weight into public appearances, so these things do no matter to him. No, he’s moving up in the world by improving his strategies and going bigger and bigger. The pinnacle of his work being his first kill while Roman’s is being camera ready. It just goes to emphasis the difference between the two once more. Roman’s team are more focused on appearance rather than substance while Logan is getting his hands dirty…. Once again two sides of the same coin but their difference are no doubt mean to feed the revolution Roman is no doubt about to face.

*****

Alright children, I meant to write more but I am off to work. See you in part 3

  Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: a Practical Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.

Whatwashernameagain. “The Dreamer - Chapter 1.” Hello Guys Gals And Non Binary Friends, 8 Sept. 2019, https://whatwashernameagain.tumblr.com/post/189407228487/the-dreamer-chapter-1?is_related_post=1.

 Whatwashernameagain. “The Dreamer - Chapter 2.” Hello Guys Gals And Non Binary Friends, 8 Sept. 2019, https://whatwashernameagain.tumblr.com/post/189407228487/the-dreamer-chapter-2?is_related_post=1.

[kumkaniudaku]

Meet the Parents: Three

A/N: FINALLY finished with this. My midterm paper was taking over my life. I have a few more prompts to do before I start working on spooky stuff for Wednesday! I hope you all enjoy. Also, the face claim for CoCo’s dad has changed.

Word Count: 4488

The journey through post-secondary education has its ups and downs. As much as an institution can be a site for cultivating and molding the minds of tomorrow’s leaders, it also serves as an arena for young people to navigate life’s challenges and triumphs. From making friends, leaving with enemies, passing classes with flying colors and falling flat for the second time, college provides an opportunity for growth.

For you and Chadwick, not only had both of you grown as individuals but also as two souls forever bonded by the Howard University experience and the quiet beginnings of a long friendship.

Sadly, all great experiences must end. The freshmen that hit it off in 1996 by accident were now semi-adults preparing for their last hoorah before real life started.

Chadwick sat at the foot of your bed, engrossed in the basketball game on the television, while you flipped through your photo album and reminisced.

“Oh my goodness, look at Tanisha,” you laughed. “I don’t know who told her that dressing as a cigar was a good Halloween costume, but I’m glad they did. This shit is hilarious.”

“It was probably the girl standing beside her dressed as the most low budget Lola Bunny that I’ve ever seen.”

“Shut the hell up Mr. Too Cool to Dress Up for a Halloween Party. I was cute that night.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t cute. I said your hand drawn jersey and dingy bunny ears looked low budget.”

Using the fact that his attention was elsewhere as an advantage, you flung a throw pillow at the back of his head. “I really can’t stand you. Go home.”

“I want you to act just like that during graduation this weekend. Don’t let me see one tear or I’m clownin’ you at the celebration dinner,” he answered as he leaned back to lay on the bed. “Speaking of the celebration, your folks eating with mine or are we doing two separate things?”

You thought for a moment, using the fringe on your pillowcase to distract you from the brown eyes peering up at you. You’d passed the Mr. and Mrs. Boseman test with flying colors, and your family was all but ready to marry you off tomorrow after only a few meetings with Chadwick. Separately, you both got along with each other’s families. But, you weren’t sure how situations would play out once the Greene and Boseman clans united.

“You think they’ll like each other? Our families?”

“Why wouldn’t they? My parents like you and your parents love me. We’re extensions of those that raise us right? It should work itself out.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll go get carry out together and eat it back at my place. It’s no big deal.”  

“Everything is no big deal to you, Aaron.” Chadwick smirked and shrugged his shoulders. His nonchalant attitude about things not involving his work either infuriated or calmed your nerves. Today, it soothed your worries and helped you to make a concrete decision.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

Chadwick’s eyes shot from the television to your face to get confirmation of what exactly you were planning to do. “What’d you just say?”

“I said let’s do it!”

“Right here? Right now? I mean it’s kind of soon, and I was hoping it’d happen way different than this, but if you want, sure. Let’s do it!”

“Great! I’ll call my mom and dad and tell them we’re combining our parties! Should we match outfits? No, that’s too much. Red velvet or pound cake?” Your rambling became a background murmur in Chadwick’s ear once he realized how close he’d come to make an ass of himself.

After thanking God for saving him from an awkward mishap, he watched and listened to you plan the final get together before the inevitable separation occurred. You were taking a job offer to intern with the Hornets in Charlotte and Chadwick had long made the decision to pursue directing and writing in New York. For much of the Spring semester, the conversation about continuing the friendship long distance had been avoided. Neither of you were ready to think about life without the other.

Still, time can not slow down or be replaced. The days of the week began to blend together between parties, senior week activities, and graduation practice. Separate familial activities kept you and Chadwick away from each other Friday afternoon, leaving little room for serious conversation during a wild off-campus graduation party.

While you and Chadwick prepared for the grand entrance with fellow members of the Howard University Class of 2000, your separate groups of parents prepared for a meeting orchestrated by God himself.

“Where is Chadwick,” Carolyn asked, craning her neck around to look over the upper quandrangle housing the commencement ceremony. “First he wasn’t home this morning, and now I don’t see him here. The ceremony starts in ten minutes.”

“Then it makes sense why you wouldn’t see him out here then, right? The graduates aren’t just hanging around.”

Shifting her attention to her husband, Carolyn’s mouth opened to speak but closed as a family of three shuffled past her to take the last open seats in the area.

“Gerald, where is Tasha? The ceremony starts in eight minutes and she is nowhere to be found. She wasn’t at her apartment and she has yet to page me back. I will return that car to the lot the moment we get back home if she isn’t here.”

“Baby, the graduates don’t wait in the open before the ceremony,” Gerald answered. “C’mon, now. You’ve been through this before.”

Elaine’s mouth opened and closed, realizing that what her husband was saying was true.

“Don’t you hate when they’re right?”

Elaine whipped her head around to acknowledge the stranger, breaking into a small smile at the comment. “They never let you live it down. I guess that’s what happens when you’re wrong nine times out of ten.”

The women shared a laugh for a brief moment, helping each other to let go of some of the tension pent up from nervous energy.

“What’s your baby’s name?”

“Tasha Greene. She’s graduating from the School of Business.”

“So you’re the woman my son says I need to meet,” Carolyn laughed. “Now that I’m looking at you, I definitely see the resemblance.”

“I’m sorry, am I missing something,” Elaine asked with confusion taking prominence on her soft features.

“My son, Chadwick, talks about your daughter all the time. The beautiful ‘Miss CoCo’ is the topic of every conversation. Even when she doesn’t fit.”

The light bulb connecting names with stories illuminated Elaine’s mind, “Oh...my God! Chadwick is your son? Sweet little Aaron that ate my burnt meatloaf to be nice when everyone else criticized it? Girl, I owe you a thank you for checking in on my baby the way you do!”

“Owe me? I owe you! Lord knows my boy will eat you out of house and home if you let him. That week in Atlanta must’ve cost you a fortune.”

“Oh, girl, I’ve been raising two athlete daughters while married to a Marine. Trust me, he fit right in.

“So you know the struggle of keeping food in the house. I raised three boys and almost lived at the grocery store.” When the short bout of laughter subsided, Carolyn gave Elaine a small smile. “May I ask you a question? Mother to mother?”

“Absolutely. Unless it’s about Tasha’s manners. She takes after her father.”

Carolyn laughed and shook her head, “She’s been nothing but mannerable around me. My question is about our kids. Be honest with me, is Tasha...interested in my son at all? He thinks the world of her and I don’t want him to be hurt if she doesn’t feel the same way.”

“She is interested, but she’s afraid. If you ask her, he’s not looking to be in a relationship. I think she’s ignoring the signs to protect her heart. Again, she takes after her Daddy.”

“You know I can hear you right, Kitty,” Gerald interjected. “I’m sitting right here.”  

The beginning of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ sounded around the outdoor area, alerting the guests to the arrival of the honorees. Sharing a knowing look, the two women put their conversation on hold to prepare for the arrival of their graduates.

                                             ------------

“Tasha Nicole Green, Magna Cum Laude. Chadwick Aaron Bose-,” last names and accomplishments were drowned out by the combined applause of both families despite the request to wait until all names were called.

“Look at our babies,” Elaine smiled through misty eyes. “They’re growing so fast.”

“Mhmmm. Growin’ and drinkin’ before they have to walk across the stage. I bet all the money in my husband’s wallet that Chadwick doesn’t think I can tell.”

“They never think we know anything. Tasha is wobbling in those shoes like a baby deer and it ain’t because I didn’t teach her how to wear a pair of heels. I’ll let her slide for now, though. It’s a big day and she’s grown.”

In the center of the action, you caught wind of the overwhelming hooping and hollering from the stands, tapping Chadwick on the bicep to pull him away from the moment and direct is attention to the section you were looking at.

“Looks like our mamas found each other without our help,” you laughed, pointing to their spot in the audience and earning a wave from the pair.

“I guess so. Saves us a lot of trouble. What you think they talkin’ about?”

“Probably how cute I look in these shoes. You can’t even tell I’m still a lit-tle bit drunk.”

“CoCo, everyone can tell you’re a little bit drunk. You haven’t walked in a straight line since we’ve been here,” Chadwick scoffed, stepping to the side to let you into the row to take your seat.

“Ah, shut up, hater.” A wobbly step before reaching your chair caught you by surprise and sent Chadwick into a fit of hushed giggles. He was right. You were still noticeably intoxicated despite your best attempts to eat and hydrate your body into sobriety. Turning to your best friend, you pulled your sunglasses down to reveal a horrified expression. “Oh my God, my mama is gonna kill me!”

“Relax. I’ve been drunk in front of my mama too many times to count, and she’s never noticed. Just follow my lead.”

“Last time I followed your lead I drunk four cups of hunch punch to chase the two beers you gave to me.”

“But, did you have a good time?”

You thought for a moment, the memories of the night prior making you smile. “Yeah.”

“Okay, then. Follow my lead. We’re all good.”

                                           -----------

Sitting in your apartment free from the stuffy graduation robe that held you hostage in the late spring sun, you were beginning to realize that things were not “all good.” For the one-hundredth time since your mother and Mrs. Boseman had teamed up to lecture you and Chadwick on the dangers of excessive drinking, you cut your eyes at the man sitting beside you.

“And I know you think we don’t know, but you two aren’t good at hiding anything. We know a lot more than you think we do,” Carolyn ranted with Elaine adding a “mhmm” behind her.

“Right now, you don’t understand, but you will when you’re parenting your own kids and have to deal with them acting a fool in public.”

“Their dad can handle that. I’m gonna be a cool mom,” you mumbled.

“Chadwick, are you ready to handle that since this one will be a cool mom,” Elaine questioned.

“Me!? What do her bad kids have to do with mine?”

“Woah, Woah! My kids will not be bad! Let’s not forget that I’m the one that keeps us out of trouble.”

Carolyn and Elaine watched their offspring argue about potential parenting styles with broad smiles and a twinkle in their eye. Mothers have a way of seeing beyond the current moment, and though neither of you were privy to the knowledge they possessed, their shared intuition confirmed what they already knew.

In the kitchen, Leroy and Gerald were dealing with headaches of their own as they listened to Kevin and Tiana argue over nothing in particular. Tired of the bickering, and the rumbling in their stomach from the thought of eating after the draining ceremony, both men were prepared to put an end to the commotion around them.

“Alright, alright.”

“Hey!”

Talking ceased at their separate outbursts as both men looked at each other with surprised expressions.

“You go first, brother. I wasn’t tryin’ to interrupt you,” Gerald insisted.

“No, no. You go on ahead. This is technically your house.”

Gerald nodded before turning to the group across the apartment. “Now look, we done sat here and listened to y’all lecture these two grown ass people about drinking, and I’m tired of it. I’m ready to eat and I’m ready to eat right now, Kitty.”

“So they’re supposed to be able to do what they wanna do? Is that what you’re saying,” Carolyn asked with Elaine offering her nonverbal support with a glare at her husband.”

“Let the kids have fun. That’s what college is about. We ain’t ate since breakfast. Let it go!”

You and Chadwick shared quiet snickers at the notion that the chastisers were now being chastised. In a way, Mr. Boseman reminded you a lot of your best friend. His stance, laid-back yet oozing authority, made you think of the times he had “put his foot down” in situations where you unnecessarily argumentative. Chadwick’s mind simultaneously took in your mother’s demeanor and smiled at the near-identical posture. Elaine’s knuckles pressed into her sides with all of her weight on one leg took him back to moments when you *thought* you were scolding him for not listening while you spoke to him of leaving his shoes in the middle of the floor.

An intense battle of glares made the air thick between the parenting duos on each side of the argument until the mother’s relented with exasperated scoffs.

“Fine, Leroy! Just let the boy do whatever, I don’t care. We got a reservation to makes anyway.”

Turning on her heels, Elaine took a look at her husband and shook her head, “You spoil her, you know that? I expect you to pay the bill since she can be a drunk in public.”

“Now, Kitty-”

“I don’t wanna hear it. I have your checkbook anyway. It’ll get paid.”

Leaving Gerald stunned and Leroy in a silent fit of laughter, Elaine followed Carolyn out of the door and to the car. Gerald found the presence of mind to figuratively pick his jaw up from the ground before turning to address you and Chadwick.

“Y’all owe me.”

“You owe both of us. It doesn’t stop here. We’ll have to hear it long after y’all are out and getting drunk. Again! C’mon and get in this car before your mama blows the roof off of it.”

                                                ---------

“To the graduates,” Kevin exclaimed as he thrust his red plastic cup into the air to begin his toast. “May your careers be fruitful so you can take me to Cancun on your dime.”

“Kevin!”

“Sorry, mama,” Kevin apologized before shooting a wink your way. “We’ll talk, T.”

A careful tug to his jeans by Carolyn brought Kevin down from his standing position on the picnic table bench and back to his seat.

When your parents told you they had something special planned after your graduation dinner, you weren’t sure what to expect. Your mother hated everything about the outdoors other than her beloved sunflowers in the backyard, so desert at a nearby park was the last thing you thought you would be doing. What you assumed to be a quiet after party with close friends and family turned into a carefully planned scavenger hunt to reveal one of your graduation gifts: a used, all black Jeep Grand Cherokee with heated seats and 10 disk CD changer. Your excitement could barely be contained, though you wondered how the car would factor into the news that you still needed to share.

“Alright, Mr. Cool, it’s your turn to make a toast,” Gerald laughed, directing his comment to Chadwick who was lazily leaning against your shoulder and using his spoon to pick the pecans out of your ice cream like he always did. He knew you hated them and would take the time to make sure they “didn’t go to waste.”

Smoothing out his t-shirt, Chadwick took a moment to stand and raise his cup into the air.

“Uh, I guess I’ll start with a toast to my parents, both biological and adopted. Thanks, mama and daddy for helping me get through this with all the prayers and encouragement.”

“And money. Don’t forget all the money you cost us,” Leroy added.

“Yeah, and money.” The table shared a healthy laugh at Mr. Boseman’s interjection before Chadwick could continue. “Mrs. Elaine and Mr. Gerald, thanks for looking out for me when you could. I really appreciate it and promise to at least send a Christmas card every year, Maybe even stop by if I’m ever in the area.”

“You can’t just DeeBo my parents, Aaron.”

“Oh, hush, Tasha,” your mother answered as she waved off your comment. “Stop by anytime, Chadwick. There’ll always be some biscuits for you if Gerald doesn’t get to ‘em first.”

Your mother had been smitten with Chadwick from the night she met him, so it didn’t surprise you that she had no issue with inviting him over despite being notoriously reluctant to have guest outside of family and a select few friends inside the home.

Chadwick mirrored the way you stuck your tongue out like a child before turning his full attention to you. “Last, but not least, I wanna say thank you to my best friend in the world, even when she’s trying to tell me what to do. Without you staying up all times to help me finish projects or just making sure I had food to eat when I couldn’t always afford it, you’ve been a big part of my journey, and I wouldn’t trade you for anything. Except for some Braves tickets.”  

After lightly shoving his side, you let Chadwick pull you into a hug once he took his seat. The heat of the late Spring sun paled in comparison to heat rushing to your cheeks. Your bronze skin prevented the scarlet hues below the surface from peeking through, but not enough to your feelings from the adults around the table. Parents and siblings shared knowing looks across the table, aware of the bubbling feelings between friends.

“Alright, alright, enough hugs, you two,” Gerald announce. “Pumpkin, it’s your turn.”  

The group watched you stand and nervously run your sweaty palms down the sides of your summer dress. Chadwick paid special attention to the way your legs seemed to run for miles and thicken in the right places. He needed to remember all of his favorite parts of you to hold him when both of you split up to chase individual dreams. Charlotte, North Carolina was miles away from Harlem, and he wasn’t sure when he’d have the chance to see you again.  Kevin clearing his throat and shooting him a playful glare brought Chadwick back to reality.

“I promise not to be long winded like Reverend C. Boseman over here,” you joked, earning an eye roll from Chadwick. “Thank you, Mommy and Daddy, for everything you’ve done to help me to this point. I love you guys so much. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Boseman, for being my parents away from home and liking me more than Chadwick.”

“Ma, tell her that’s not true!”

“Hush, boy. Don’t be rude. Continue, CoCo.”

Again, Chadwick rolled his eyes, earning a light giggle from you. “Aaron, even though you get on my last nerve, thank you for always being there when I needed you. I can’t wait to tear up the city with you in a few weeks.”

Chadwick’s eyes widened at your revelation, matching the bewildered expression on your parent’s faces.

“Is Chadwick moving to Charlotte?”

“He sure as hell better not be,” Leroy mumbled as he took a sip from his cup. “His ass is going to Harlem.”

“Leroy!”

“Leroy, hell!”

“Tasha, what are you talking about? Explain yourself.”

Taking a deep breath, you turned your attention to your mother, “I am...no longer taking the internship in Charlotte. I decided to take a paid entry-level position in New Jersey with the Nets. I’ll be 20 minutes away from Manhattan and closer to you.” Your explanation ended with a smile at Chadwick that he gladly returned.

You were two weeks away from packing your car in preparation for a new life in Charlotte. The lease was set to be signed in three days, and your parents had already reached out to family and friends in the area to provided you with a safety net for when they couldn’t be around. The plan was in motion, and up until a week before graduation, you were excited about the new journey. But, when the opportunity came knocking for an immediate opening with an organization in desperate need of new ideas and an entry-level assistant complete with an above average salary and a relocation package, you answered the call. The idea of being closer to the man you were secretly in love with was an added bonus.

Chadwick could no longer contain his excitement as he bolted up from his seat to wrap his arms around you and lift you from the ground.

“Oh my, God, Co! Are you being a jackass or really telling the truth?”

“I’m telling the truth,” you answered while giggling at the way he playfully tickled your sides. “I was gonna tell you this morning, but I figured I’d let everyone know at the same time. I hope you’re not mad mama and daddy.”

Elaine and Gerald stared at each other, occasionally looking across the table at Carolyn and Leroy who were just as confused.

“Well, I ain’t mad,” Tiana exclaimed to break the tension. “Can I come stay with you for Spring Break, T?”

“No!”

“Yes.”

Tiana looked between you and Chadwick for a concrete answer to her question. “Are y’all gonna do me like Mom and Dad? I’ll just stay home if it’s gonna turn into all that.”

“You can’t tell her she can stay at my place, Aaron. Let her stay at yours if you want her to come so bad!”

“Stay at home. Tiana. That nigga is broke already and he ain’t even moved yet,” Kevin answered.

Chadwick opened his mouth to respond before being cut off by your mother.

“Tasha, while I’m excited for you, I’m a little worried. Where will you live? You don’t have any family that far north. How will you adjust on such short notice? Do you even know exactly where you’ll work?”

“We just want you to be safe, Pumpkin.”

“I understand, Daddy, but I have it all figured out! The team has found me housing that I think you guys will approve of, and they’ve committed to five months of relocation. I’ve spoken to my direct supervisor and they’re excited to have me on board. As far as family, I have Chadwick and Kevin. They’re like family, right?”

Silence hung in the air as your parents attempted to process the new information. Reaching over the table, Carolyn gave Elaine’s hand a squeeze.

“We’ll make sure she’s alright. You don’t have to worry.”

“If it’s one thing I taught my boys, it’s how to stick together. They’ll take care of her.”

With reassurance from newfound friends, Elaine and Gerald turned to you with a smile.

“Well, alright! My Pumpkin is moving to the city. I don’t know how we’ll get a damn car that far North, but we’ll figure it out!”

The brief moment of commotion at the table allowed Chadwick to pull you away from the table inconspicuously to walk toward the nearby fountain.

Chadwick stole glances at you along the way, sporting a goofy smile that you didn’t notice until you turned to speak to him.

“What are you smiling about, Ashy?”

“You specifically told me the North was way too cold for you. Six months later, you’re moving to New Jersey. You were gonna miss me too much, huh?”

“What,” you exclaimed, feigning confusion. “I moved to work with my favorite team!”

“You hate the Nets. You called Scott Burrell a fucking bum the other day.”

“I did not!” Chadwick quirked his eyebrow at your blatant lie, waiting for you to come clean. Dropping the act, you let out a short laugh and looked away. “Okay, so, yeah, I would miss you a little bit. A lot, actually. But, this was also a better opportunity! Who knows the places I’ll end up with this type of experience?”

“You’ll go wherever you want, Champ. I’m happy for you.” Chadwick used his fist to nudge your shoulder before taking a seat beside you on the edge of the fountain. Extending his arm, he pointed toward the picnic table to direct your attention to the conversation between both sets of parents. “What you think they’re over there talking about?”

“Knowing my mama, she’s talking your mama’s head off about me and you being together again and all the trouble we might get into.”

“She’d be correct, then.” A sly smile slid across Chadwick’s face, worrying you with what was going on in his overactive mind.

“Oh, no. No. Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is no.”

“C’mon! Give me a second to explain!”

While Chadwick attempted to pull you into one of his plans for a fun outing in New York, conversations of the future transpired between the Boseman and Greene families. In a way, Chadwick was right. They were discussing your futures together, but in a wildly different context.

“So, who do you think will be the one to own up to their feelings first,” Carolyn asked. “My money is on my son.”

“Really? I’m betting on Tasha. I’m surprised she’s gone this long with her feelings hidden. She usually wears her heart on her sleeve.”

“Whoever says it first, just know it’s tradition for the bride’s father to pay for the wedding.”

“Don’t remind me,” Gerald groaned. “Just make sure y’all tell us about every movie Chadwick writes or stars in so we can add to this wedding fund. If they’re both wealthy, we won’t have much to worry about.”

The table erupted in laughter before all four heads turned to look over at the spirited banter between old friends and budding lovers.

Raising his glass, Leroy proposed the last toast of the evening.

“To family. We’re happy to have y’all on board.”

Elaine and Gerald followed suit with raised cups and proud smiles. “To family.”

                                          __________

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[thelastspeecher]

I’ve been reading the books that the Olympian Falls AU is based on (well. reading the new ones; the earlier ones it would be re-reading).  and they’re so great and it got me all pumped and I wrote more for that AU today.  so here, have Stan and Angie reuniting after not seeing or talking to each other in years.  naturally, their reunion involves knives and punching, bc that’s what the best reunions all have to have.

              Stan silently approached the small semi-circle of demigods sitting around the campfire.  He couldn’t make out any chains or other methods of keeping the kids hostage, but that didn’t mean anything.  Threats could be just as effective as physical bondage.  He carefully tapped on the shoulder of the closest teen.  The teen let out a small yelp.

              “Shh,” Stan hissed.  The teen looked at him with wide, gray eyes.  Stan recognized those eyes.

              A kid of Athena, huh?  Good.  I can explain things fastest to him.

              “I’m here to rescue you,” Stan continued.  The demigod frowned.

              “What?  But-” An arrow zipped by Stan, nicking his shoulder.  He jerked away from the teen instinctively.

              “Leave him alone!” a commanding voice said.  Stan looked around.  He could see a shadowy figure standing a short distance away, bow drawn and an arrow ready to fire.

              “Like Hades I will,” Stan growled.  The person holding the demigods hostage fired another arrow.  This one scratched Stan’s calf.

              “That’s my last warnin’ shot, bud.  If ya don’t leave us alone right now, I’ll start aimin’ more lethally.”

              “Oh, screw you,” Stan snapped, drawing his sword.  He charged at the stranger.  The stranger dropped their bow and drew a dagger from somewhere just in time to clash with Stan’s sword.

              “I hate melee fights,” the stranger muttered.  Stan grinned.

              “Good.  ‘Cause I love ‘em.”  He knocked the dagger out of the stranger’s hand, forcing them to take a step back. “Now, I’m gonna take these kids to safety, and you’re gonna either run away or die.  Doesn’t make a difference to me, really.”  He advanced on the stranger, who continued to back away. There was a faint splash. Suddenly, Stan’s sword was grabbed out of his hand by an unseen force.  Stan blinked. “Huh?”

              “Mighty nice sword you’ve got here,” the stranger said idly.  They were now holding Stan’s weapon, looking it over.

              “Hey!” Stan protested.  “How- how did-”

              “That’s fer me to know, not you,” the stranger said.  Stan gritted his teeth.

              Fine!  I’m better with my fists, anyways.  Stan rushed forward, prepared to punch the daylights out of this hostage-taker, only for his outstretched fist to be caught by the stranger. He froze.  That- that never happens.  No one can catch my punches.  Avoid them, maybe, but stop them?  He could feel water beginning to soak through his shoes.  We’re standing in a puddle.  Gears started to turn in his head.  But before he could finish his thought, the stranger kicked him in the chest, and he went flying backwards, landing on the dirt dangerously close to the campfire. The demigods closest to him scrambled backwards.  Okay.  There’s only one person I’ve ever met who likes to pull that shit.  The stranger advanced on him.  Light from the campfire illuminated their face, flickering in familiar sea-green eyes.

              “Angie!” Stan yelped.  Angie froze. “Shit, kid, if you’d told me it was you-”

              “Stan?” Angie said, aghast.  She let out a short laugh.  “Gods, Pines, yer goin’ to get yourself killed one of these days.”  Stan couldn’t help his grin, now that he recognized the attacker as one of his oldest friends.

              “Yeah.  I hear that a lot,” he said dismissively.  Angie held out her hand.  Stan grabbed it and allowed her to pull him up.  He idly dusted off his clothes.  “Good thing it rained earlier today.  Otherwise I woulda kicked your ass, instead of it being the other way around.”

              “I don’t leave that to chance anymore,” Angie said.  She tapped a canteen clipped to her belt.  “Always keep some water on me, in case I need a boost.”

              “She cheats,” Stan translated for the teen demigods, who were watching Stan and Angie banter.  Angie scoffed.

              “It ain’t cheatin’.  It’s gettin’ the most out of my abilities.  I can control water and get super-charged by it, so I make sure to have some on hand.”  Angie punched Stan playfully.  “Never know when I might run up against a master boxer like you.”  The son of Athena Stan had noticed earlier cleared his throat.

              “Uh, who is he?” the teen asked.  Angie beamed and clapped Stan on the shoulder.  Stan stifled a grin at how she had to reach up to do so.

              She never did get that growth spurt she kept saying she would.

              “This is one of my friends from camp.  Stan Pines, son of Hermes.”  Stan bowed extravagantly.  “I guess you got sent by someone to help escort these kids?”

              “Yeah.  But no one said that they’d already have someone helping them,” Stan said.  He raised an eyebrow at Angie.  “Especially not a girl who claimed she was leaving the whole Greek world behind her to go to ‘college’.”  He put air quotes around the last word to emphasize how he felt about secondary education.  Angie rolled her eyes.

              “Come on, I got you a bit beat up.  Kiddos, keep doin’ whatever ya were doin’ while I get Stan cleaned up.” Angie led Stan away from the campfire, to a small tent.  She ushered Stan inside.

              “It’s dark as fuck in here.”

              “There’s a lantern.”  Angie crawled in and rummaged around.  There was a small click.  Light filled the tent.  “See?”

              “Now I do.”

              “Oh, you.”  Angie opened a small first aid kit.  As she grabbed bandages and antiseptic, Stan watched her.  She looked different from the last time Stan had seen her.  It wasn’t just that she had cut her hair into a short bob.  It was also the way she held herself.  More confidently.  She seemed a bit paler than usual; her always present beach tan was washed out by the harsh light from the lantern.  Angie tucked a strand of caramel-colored hair behind one ear.  Stan realized he was staring.  He cleared his throat.

              “So, uh, how was college?” Stan asked quietly.  Angie shrugged.

              “Decent.  Majored in oceanography with a minor in zoology.”

              “Really?  Oceanography?” Stan said.  Angie glanced at him.

              “Yeah.  What about it?”

              “That’s cheating.”

              “Oh, please.”

              “Your dad is the god of the oceans.  Getting a degree in the study of the ocean is like me getting a degree in thievery.  You’ve got an unfair advantage.”

              “I like to think of it as an innate talent,” Angie said.  “A gift.”

              “If that makes you feel better.”

              “Yer awful rude to the person patchin’ ya up.”  Stan grinned.

              “Nah.  I’m just teasing you, kid.”

              “You’ll have to stop callin’ me that at some point.  I’m in my twenties now, y’know.”  Angie began to dab at Stan’s shoulder wound with a cotton ball.  “What have you been up to?”

              “Not much,” Stan said.  “Got a job and a place in the city.  I help out at the camp whenever I can.”  Angie’s mouth twitched.  “What?”

              “Yer havin’ a rough time movin’ on from Camp Half-Blood, huh?”

              “It’s not like I have much to fall back on.  You’ve got your siblings and your smarts.  All I’ve got is Ford.  And he’s-” Stan cut himself off.  Angie paused.

              “Did the two of ya have a fallin’ out?” she asked softly.  Stan shrugged.  Angie tsked.  “Don’t move like that.  I’m tryin’ to clean ya up.”

              “Right.  Uh, it’s- it’s a long story,” Stan muttered.  Angie didn’t pry further.  Instead, she changed the topic.

              “Don’t ya have yer mom and older brother to spend time with?”

              “I haven’t talked to them in a while, either.”

              “Why not?”

              “They’re mortal.  I don’t wanna put ‘em in danger.”

              “Oh, Stanley,” Angie sighed.  She stroked Stan’s cheek fondly.  “Ya were always a lot sweeter ‘n ya claimed to be.”  Stan could feel a flush starting to spread across his features, starting at the skin directly underneath Angie’s warm, soft hand.  He coughed, trying to disrupt the tension.

              “How’d you get roped into escorting a buncha demigods to camp?  You said you were gonna leave all of this stuff behind.”

              “I did say that.”  Angie’s hand fell away from Stan’s cheek.  “And I meant it.  My senior year of high school and all of college, I stayed out of things.  I didn’t seek anything out.  Only dealt with things what came after me.”  She busied herself with something in the first aid kit. “But after I got my degree, I took a gap year.  I felt like there was somethin’ missin’.  And I didn’t want to get my graduate degree with that feelin’ hangin’ over me.

              “I was walkin’ ‘round campus when I saw ‘em.  A pack of teens, all of ‘em carryin’ weapons of some sort, bein’ escorted by a satyr.  And right behind ‘em was a big ole snake.  Naturally, I intervened.  Sliced that snake ‘fore it could hurt those kids.”  Angie shrugged.  “Ended up joinin’ ‘em to protect ‘em.  And here we are, now.”

              “Here we are, now,” Stan repeated quietly.  “Mind if I join your little group?  There’s a lotta kids here.  Seems like you could use an extra hand.”  Angie smiled at him.

              “I can always use an extra hand, if that hand is yours, Stanley Pines.”

[cromulentbookreview]

Weaponized Jaws

Or: Seafire by Natalie C. Parker!

Action on the seas featuring badass female protagonists? Yeah, I’m definitely going to read that. Very little needed in the way of convincing me to read this book.

Seafire had been advertised before as Fury Road meets Wonder Woman meets the ocean, which makes sense. Though with much less Wonder Woman and way more of Kevin Costner's Waterworld.

Alright, children, gather around while I explain to you what Waterworld was.

Yeah, Waterworld. Not a video game, it was a movie starring Kevin Costner, the world’s only American-accented Robin Hood (hey, I like that movie, Alan Rickman was a treasure and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise). Waterworld came out in 1995 and was massive flop, now a bit of a cult-classic. I remember 1995, somewhat vaguely. God I’m an Old now, aren’t I?

I’ll never be as cool as Steve Buscemi, though.

For those of you who enjoy both Fury Road and Waterworld, then you’ll definitely like Seafire. I love anything that takes place on the ocean - a side effect of my strange Dudes on Boats fixation that I’ve mentioned previously (my apologies to For a Muse of Fire, . Sea stories are kind of my thing. So is post-apocalyptic YA fiction. So this book ticked all the “I need entertainment and want to forget the news exists right now” boxes and worked out perfectly.

Caledonia Styx lives in Crapsack Waterworld, a post-apocalyptic flooded version of our world (referenced occasionally as the “old world”, flooded/destroyed as a result of some unknown calamity). Caledonia has the misfortune to live in an area controlled by Aric Athair, a vicious warlord and sir-not-appearing-in-this-book (since Seafire is the first in a planned trilogy, I’m sure we’ll meet him eventually). Anyway, Athair controls his war boys, called Bullets, by drugging them with something called Silt, made from some sort of weird hybrid poppy-flower-thing. Life in Athair’s territory sucks, so Caledonia’s mom, Rhona, and a bunch of other families have gotten together on the Styx family’s ship, the Ghost, to break through Athair’s blockade and head off to freedom elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the night the Ghost intends to escape, Caledonia and her best friend Pisces (they’re really big on the names from Greco Roman mythology in crapsack Waterworld) are sent ashore to gather some last minute supplies. Caledonia comes across a bullet called Lir, who asks for her help. It’s all bullshit, though - the second Caledonia gives away the location of the Ghost, Lir and his fellow bullets attack, slaughtering Caledonia and Pisces’s families and sinking the Ghost.

Pisces didn’t witness Lir’s treachery, though, and Caledonia, feeling responsible for the deaths of all those onboard the Ghost, keeps that bit where she gave away the position of the ship to herself. That makes sense, considering how guilty it feels, but later, as Caledonia refers to Pisces as her “sister”, the fact that she kept this bit of intel under wraps does become a tad annoying. Especially when Caledonia refuses, multiple times, to clarify why it is she does’t trust Bullets. She’s just like “nope, can’t trust Bullets” instead of “no, that one time I trusted a Bullet, he slaughtered our families.”

Anyway!

Four years after the deaths of their families, Caledonia and Pisces have raised and repaired the Ghost, renaming it the Mors Navis.

(Language nerd sidebar: Mors Navis, by the way, is Latin for Death Ship. Thank you Google translate! No thanks to my 10+ years of German education. Why couldn’t I have picked a Latin language? Noo, I had to go with the Germanics. Mors Navis does sound way more menacing than Totenschiff. Eat it, B. Traven).

Over those four years, Caledonia, acting as captain, and Pisces, her first mate, have collected a crew composed entirely of girls and women, all of whom have no love for Aric Athair and his Bullet army. Caledonia and her crew basically go around the Bullet seas, making life hell for Athair’s people. During one such mission, Pisces is wounded and then captured, only to be rescued and returned to the Mors Navis by a Bullet who claims he wants to escape. Caledonia, who has literally zero reasons to trust Bullets, doesn’t trust him. Pisces points out, reasonably, that he saved her life when he could have left her to die. But Caledonia simply repeats her mantra of “no trusting Bullets” while refusing to elaborate.

Until the Bullet lets it slip that Donnally and Ares, Caledonia and Pisces’s brothers, respectively, survived the massacre on board the Ghost and were pressed into Athair’s drug-addled Bullet army. He knows what ship Donnally and Ares are on, and the route it takes to bring in conscripts (read: children stolen from their families, drugged, and forced into Athair’s army, refusal to comply met with extreme violence, in the usual fashion of a murderous tyrant).

Suddenly, Caledonia has reason to question her strict “don’t trust Bullets” policy. But it’s one of those Meek’s Cutoff situations: the Bullet could be a lying sack of shit and leading the Mors Navis into a trap. Or he could be telling the truth, leading Caledonia and Pisces to their long-lost brothers. What to do?

Well, it’d be a pretty short book if they just shot the Bullet, dumped his body in the ocean and moved on, wouldn’t it?

It took me a little longer to read Seafire than I intended - I’m a slow reader anyway, but while I was reading Seafire, I was also binging on Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard series (which are fantastic by the way - highly recommend the audiobooks, Michael Page is an amazing audiobook narrator) so my focus may have been just a wee bit divided. My biggest complaint is now we have yet another seafaring heroine with red hair. How come all the seafaring heroines have to have red hair? Also, it’s funny you should bring up red hair, because in the world of the Gentleman Bastards, bad things happen to girls with red hair. Seriously, how come all the fiery heroine types have to have red hair? I mean, it’s not like I’m jealous or anything. I mean, it’s not like I should have been born with red hair, but no, it ended up a dull, boring blonde, and hair dye is expensive and smells terrible...

Uhm.

I mean.

Seriously, though, red hair is a rare thing - if Caledonia’s father had dark hair and her mother had red hair, the most likely outcome would be a bunch of kids with...dark hair. Though if her father did have a recessive red-hair gene, then it’s entirely possible for him to have produced red-headed children... So I guess it’s possible. 

Not that I’m annoyed that my hair didn’t turn out red. Even though it should have, goddamn it! I know those recessive genes are in there somewhere!

Stupid lousy blonde hair grumble grumble grumble...

Ok, back to Seafire - it is definitely a highly enjoyable book, lots of nonstop action, but not a lot of resolution because it’s the first in an intended series. I highly recommend breezing through the book in one go, rather than endlessly picking it up and then putting it down in order to find out whether or not Locke and Jean finally kiss (they don’t). 

But yes, jealousy over fictional characters’ red hair aside, the only major complaint I have about Seafire rests with a single line. The thing about reading ARCs, which I think I’ve mentioned before but, again, nobody reads these, so I might as well: ARCs are not finished copies. The final copy of Seafire might not even feature this line, so it seems silly to complain about it, but complaining is fun so I’ll do it anyway.

So the secondary-boss villain, Lir, Caledonia’s sworn enemy as he killed her whole goddamn family, is described as having a “long face with a jaw that looked sharp enough to be a weapon of its own.”

From that line onward I found I was unable to focus on anything except how a man’s jaw could be sharp enough to constitute a weapon. It’s a question that’s been driving me to distraction for weeks now. Is Lir’s jawline sharp enough that it comes to a point, like a knife? What would that look like on a three-dimensional human person? How would one wield their weaponized jaws? Like a battering ram? Or would you just like, wave your head around like a sword? Does this mean his chin comes to a point, too? That one line of the galley proof of Seafire has caused me more consternation than anything else in the book - and this is a book that features lots of violence. Lots and lots of it. And here I am contemplating a man with a weaponized jawbone. 

I mean, of the whole book it’s one line and it doesn’t even matter but...but...gah, I can’t help but picture a guy with knives for a jaw. 

RECOMMENDED FOR: Fans of badass female protagonists kicking ass on the high seas, fans of YA lit who also happen to be fans of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone who takes physical descriptions of fictional far too literally.

RELEASE DATE: August 28, 2018

RATING: 4/5

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR SEQUEL: Lhotse

OBLIGATORY STYX REFERENCE:

[hillariat]

When I’m with you

Tags: Original work, Fluff, Romance, F/F, wlw, Comedy 

Word count: 3,066

Summary: She followed me to my doorstep, and we embraced in a hug that lasted way longer than it should. As she departed, bidding an I'll text you when I'm home -a mere formality in Singapore- I began to wonder.

Did she feel the same?

In which Rachel has feelings for her best friend Jiamin.

Author’s note: This is just something to take note of before reading if you aren’t familiar with Singapore. This story uses some Singlish, mostly in dialogue. Singlish is the colloquial variation of English in Singapore. It has its own unique grammatical structure and slang terms borrowed from multiple different Asian languages. Different people integrate Singlish into their speech to varying degrees. For Singlish terms, I’ve given in text translations in [ ]. 

Also I’ve cross-posted this on Royal Road under the same title and author name.

____________________________________________________________

The first time I felt it, I was at the park with her in the middle of the night. She kept nudging me to try the flying fox. I rebuked that it wasn’t my thing, that it wasn’t appropriate with the skirt I was wearing, that she wasn’t strong enough to push me all the way to the other end.

In essence, I was scared. Yeah, a 15-year-old was scared of a piece of playground equipment that little 5-year-olds rode on a daily basis. Jiamin mocked me in much the same way, as if my reaction were a teleprompt script of my thoughts. I relented and awkwardly attempted to sit on the damn thing. She saw me struggle and halted her sharp remarks, most likely to not dissuade me from my reluctant decision. Instead, she opted for a constipated face, struggling to contain her laughter.

With an effortful push from Ms constipatedface, I was sent gliding across the playground with the whirring noise of cables being my only company. It was....not as bad as I thought. The slight breeze that brushed against my face, the passing scenery of a peaceful night was relaxing, the - yeah I was lying to myself. This was fucking scary. My feet were suspended a meter off the ground, ripping any sense of control I had over this damned thing away from me. I was at the mercy of the imparted force of Jiamin's push and whatever resistance the ill maintained wires provided. Without my calculator and notebook, I had no clue when or where exactly I would stop and not knowing brought upon deep seated feelings of insecurity that I thought I had tucked away under piles of 100th percentiles in report cards.

Fortunately for me, the flying fox slowed down to a stop whilst I was buried in my thoughts. The wires sagged under my weight, leaving my feet within reach of the ground. Jiamin jogged to me with a gleeful expression painted on her features, clearly very entertained by my suffering. I on the other hand probably looked like I came out of the Vietnam war. She asks me how it was, and I groaned. Well, “weh” was more accurate, but I’d like to think it was a groan. She chuckled, her deep voice filling the otherwise empty park. It wasn’t any different from her previous chuckles, but my heart clearly felt otherwise.

It fluttered.

 I mulled over that feeling for several weeks. It wasn’t a foreign concept to me. I’ve heard friends talk about it at the canteen, heard hushed gossip amongst classmates during lessons and dramatized portrayals in media. But why now? Nothing has really changed between us; she hasn’t changed at all. So why now? 2 months ago, I would’ve said her laugh sounded like a dying pig but now I’m not so sure.

I took a glance at her, seated at a table diagonally to the right of me. To the undiscerning eye she was diligently taking notes in class, her face laser focused on what she was producing on paper. But I knew better. She was probably drawing bats and skeletons and anything else that could pass as a villainous henchman in a kid’s cartoon. She never cared much for math, or any other subject outside of recess. She once told me that she didn’t see the point of trying since she wasn’t planning to go anywhere after secondary school. When I pried further, she said “I’m damn stupid. Confirm cannot go anywhere”.

I think the only time I've ever seen her willingly try to study was in primary 5, a year before our Primary School Leaving Examinations. She suddenly became very interested in studying after I told her I wanted to go to Bukit Panjang Government High, a top public secondary school. Maybe she finally realized how important studying was. For that entire year she was buried in textbooks. I swore her head could've become a bookmark. When results came around, everyone thought it was a miracle, some divine intervention from god, that she did as well as she did. But I knew better. She was never one for prayers. We both entered Bukit Panjang Government High and Jiamin went back to slacker mode.

 She turned to me, sensing my stare. We made eye contact, chocolate brown meeting chocolate brown, - yes Chinese kids all look the same – but for some reason I was ensnared.

I felt my face flush red.

I want to die. Please take me now death.

Bewilderment was plastered on her face. A moment passes. Then, as though she was struck with a thunderbolt of genius, her expression turned to a knowing smirk. Death, anytime now please.

She stuck her tongue out at me like the child she is and I, obviously, returned the favor. Because what else do you do when someone flicks their tongue at you? Ok, no death for now.

We shared a quiet giggle before turning back to our work. Well, I tried to. My whole body was consumed by….nice feelings. Warmth that felt like a hug. Butterflies threatening to break from my ribcage. That sort of stuff. It was topped off with starry eyes and a dreamy smile that probably made me look crazy.

I was so glad I didn’t have a tablemate, else I’d be probed on my strange expression. I don’t think claiming that I was merely enjoying the lesson at hand would’ve been believable. If it was it would imply that I was going gooey eyed over first order derivatives. I know I’m a nerd but I have standards. It’s got to at least be partial derivatives in a matrix to get me flustered.

So uh yeah, “mulling” didn’t actually involve thinking about my feelings. More like awkwardly fumbling through the full spectrum of emotions. I should do something about it. Just as I was about to plunge into another train of thought, I received a text from none other than her.

Jiah Lian: Wanna go monti next week?

That’s weird. Monti was a candlelit atas* [Fancy & expensive] restaurant that sat on Marina bay, aka the kind that people bring their lovers to for a proposal and have anniversaries and junk.  I’d been wanting to eat there for months because apparently the pasta is to die for and they cook it tableside (I know, I have spoilt rich girl tastes) but I never really got around to it. I didn’t think it was her kind of thing. If I nagged her enough, she’d probably go with me, but show up in shorts and sandals and complain about spending $58 on pasta.

Trash bag: Sure, but don’t wear shorts

Jiah Lian: Wah, u wan see me naked alr? Pervert

Trash bag: Gross

Jiah Lian: ILY too :)

Trash bag: Wed?

Jiah Lian*: Caaaannnn

[*a pun on the Singlish word “ah lian” which means female gangster]

 Wow. Oh wow. Out of all the things I thought would happen today, seeing Jiamin in a dress was not one of them. To be frank I was expecting her to show up in either shorts or a shirt-pants combo. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleasantly surprised though. She was wearing a spaghetti strapped cocktail dress that hugged her in all the right places, accentuating her slim form. The dress slit went all the way up her smooth, never-ending legs, leaving just enough room for the imagination. It was bare back too. The dress probably showed a bit too much skin considering she came from a conservative household, but I’m not complaining.

In a manner that was so unlike the way she was dressed, Jiamin yelled “Rachel!” and hurriedly made her way across the train station to me. She was like a puppy bolting towards its owner when they came home. Adorable.

She circled me once over, eyeing up my outfit in enthusiasm. Seemingly satisfied with what she saw, she gave a smile that ended at the corner of her eyes.

"Wah you damn chio*"[Pretty] She said, gesturing to my dress. It was a simple, off shoulder, A-line affair.

I nudged her shoulder playfully with my fingers.

“You also”

In response, she gave a goofy, ear to ear grin, her normal go-to reaction to compliments. Though this time I could’ve sworn there was a tinge of red coloring her cheeks. Maybe it was a trick of the light.

We made our way to the restaurant, talking about anything and everything from some idiot in history class that declared that they didn’t need to know about Hitler because, and I quote; “all the Jews are dead” (I don’t know how he got into an elite school) to whether or not caviar and white chocolate would taste nice together. Our hands brushed together once.

“In theory it should work because, according to food science, they have similar flavor compounds, like trimethylamine which has a fishy odour. So they – “

“What the shit! Who the fuck thinks white chocolate tastes fishy?!”

“Science does!” I happily sang. “and it thinks white chocolate would be very good with caviar.”

She cringed.

“Eeeeee, fuck that’s damn gross.”

“Hmm I dunno, now I’m very tempted to try it. Maybe I’ll order caviar later.”

She grasped her chest in relief.

“Thank god, Monti don’t have caviar.”

I gave her the most innocent and earnest smile I could muster.

“Then next time, we’re going to a seafood place and I’m bringing white chocolate.”

She looked at me with absolute horror. “I don’t know you! Who is Rachel?!” She proceeded to wander off in faux abandonment. I on the other hand am cackling with laughter. I loved grossing her out with science.

Once I caught my breath I jogged after her.

 Our dinner was filled with idle chatter and a savored appreciation for the food. There was a moment where I thought she was going to place her hand over mine as she lightly grazed it, but in reality she was just trying to steal my phone. I would’ve thought that after the 10th time she’s failed that stunt, she’d know better. When the bill was settled, Jiamin of course complained about the exuberant price of pasta and my 'atas' tastes.

"I can treat you, y'know as 'compensation' for your company."

She snorted.

"You make me sound like a prostitute." We both chuckled. I continued.

"Legit though, I can treat you if you want."

She dismissed me with a wave.

"No need, hanging out with you is treat enough" She had a smirk and a...blush? Or was that the lighting? Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I've gone into cardiac arrest and I haven’t told my family that I wanted a secular funeral. God bless the dim lighting.

 On our way out, Jiamin's hand brushed against mine again.

Normally I wouldn’t think much of this, but the fact that it’s the 3rd time it happened today and on the same hands mind you,I was a bit perturbed. Jiamin was never shy about physical affection. In primary school she would constantly hold my hand, stating that it felt “nice” or something. I didn’t know why it’d be nice though; I was a sweaty kid; my palms were nasty. A couple months ago she tackle-hugged me because I helped salvage her “hopeless” physics project. In that same timeframe she pinched the crap out of my cheeks after we looked at my old childhood photos when we were at my grandparent’s place. That’s on top of her still holding my hand all the time. Then again recently there’s been a lot less physical affection. Maybe I pissed her off. Eh, she’ll talk about it when she’s good and ready. After all, she’s that kind of person. If you try to crack her open like an egg, she'll call you bitch and stop talking to you for 2 weeks. Trust me, I've tried.

Her hands brushed mine again, though this time she seemed more daring. Her index curled up around my pinky, as if testing the waters. I responded in kind, and she took that as a sign to be bolder. Her fingers cautiously crawled up further and soon our hands were intertwined. My stomach did something that the rest of me could not; a fucking backflip.

 I really didn’t want this night to end so soon and it seemed as though Jiamin thought the same. She suggested that we take a walk along the bay because ‘food coma’. I happily agreed and that’s how we wound up walking along the bay hand in hand.

Her gaze was drawn to the city skyline on the opposite side of the bay, just as mine was to her. Her deep brown eyes hidden among too long messy bangs, petite pink lips and razor-sharp jawline were all illuminated -no- highlighted by the moonlight. She really was something else. I could almost just-

"The view damn nice."

My head snapped to said view. Little boxes glowed with artificial hues of blues, greens, whites and yellows. They peppered the orderly array of skyscrapers, starkly contrasting the night sky. Each building was interwoven with one another, smaller ones disappeared in the shadow of larger ones and the ones that were front and center demanded attention like a whiny 5 year old. Some towered above others in a supposed race to be the tallest, but never in a disorderly fashion. Every tower had its own distinct curves, angles and edges. Shapes that would normally belong in a dull geometry paper were fused together into deceitfully simple artistic hybrids, giving each building its own sense of character. Yet they all managed to fit together nicely into a coordinated group of semi homogenized modernity.

Pristine, structured, and beautiful. Truly fitting for a metropolis.  

 "It’s weird how every tiny box that’s lit has a worker inside" Jiamin gestured to a well-lit office building. She turned to me.

"Do you think our lives are gonna be like that? Working until 8+ in a box then go home and sleep and then do it again?"

I shrugged.

"Maybe? That depends on the job type and-"

"Do you want that?"

My expression furrowed. I’m not really certain of my reply but let it slip anyways. Bad Rachel.

" I-I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far. I mean we're so young and all.”

She quirked her brows.

"Then why you study so hard?" Despite her choice of words, her tone holds no animosity, just genuine curiosity.

"Well, because I like it." Jiamin continued to look at me, expecting more. I took a deep breath and continued. "And also because it gives me security"

"Like it opens up more doors? "

"No. It gives me something..." My eyes searched the ground as though the right words would appear at my feet. I swallowed. "to be proud of"

Jiamin fell silent at that. Her eyebrows furrowed, whether in thought or in sympathy I don’t know, but I hope it wasn't the latter. I don’t need that.

She chewed on her lips, contemplating on whether or not she should say whatever it was that was on her mind. I had half the mind to ask but again, I knew better.

"Sometimes I fail things on purpose."

My jaw dropped.

"What? Why?"

She shrugged.

"People think I damn useless. Like cannot do this, cannot do that. -she brought up her fingers to count - I lazy, stupid, hopeless, cannot make it."

I frowned and knitted my brows, trying to stitch together what she was trying to say.

"So you want to spite them?"

She sighed.

"Maybe. At least I know I'm good at failing"

I fell into silence, letting that sentence stew in my thoughts for a moment. I knew what I wanted to convey but I didn’t know how to convey it right. Neither of us cared much for words of pity after all.

"You know, I heard the best way to say 'fuck you' to someone is to be happy."

"You think I not happy is it?" She growled.

I held my hands up defensively. "No no. That’s not what I’m saying. I'm trying to say that maybe you should consider what does make you happy."

Jiamin paused for a moment, lips pursed in thought. She turned away to look at the skyline again and that was the end of that conversation. There were more words to be said about this topic, but they weren't going to be said today. That's fine with me.

 The journey home was filled with a comfortable silence, the kind that I've always enjoyed with her. Though this time there was an added feeling of warmth and a silly soft smile plastered on my face. I never thought I'd like hand holding this much since primary school.

She followed me to my doorstep, and we embraced in a hug that lasted way longer than it should. As she departed, bidding an I'll text you when I'm home -a mere formality in Singapore- I began to wonder.

Did she feel the same?

 My answer came the next day, when I found a bouquet of flowers carefully tucked under my desk. Attached to it was a handwritten note with an anonymous sign off. I had only read half the note when I realized who my secret admirer was.

The messy scrawl was practically indecipherable to all but the best doctors, but I had seen it far too many times to not know what the squiggles conveyed. I sighed. I told her more than a dozen times that she should've done her handwriting homework, stating that unlike every other mundane piece of work she never did in primary school, this would come back to bite her. Only once had she listened.

It was apparent from the first line of the note. The ‘a’ in dear, in my name and scattered about in every other word that demanded the vowel stood out like a sore thumb. Unlike every other letter which was hideously malformed beyond recognition, the ‘a’s were written perfectly. From the not quite circular tri-pointed body to the tail flick at the end, the ‘a’ was a perfect imitation of the template we were forced to trace over as kids.

I pulled out my phone, shooting my not-so-secret admirer a text thanking her for the bouquet, watching in amusement as her face turned the same color as those flowers.

[ratherhavetheblues]

INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘ FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES’ “Weak people choose strange paths…”

© 2020 by James Clark

   The films of Ingmar Bergman have elicited from his loyalists a bemusing history. At the point where a consensus about the remarkableness of his skills and heart was at full tide, there also began to occur some battle fatigue in face of waves of other demanding presences of his. A pantheon readily arose, by way of influential critics who jumped to the idea that the mother lode had been reached and that the latter flood was secondary and not worth the strain. That Bergman began to produce films by way of television, also seemed a sign of losing it. (Also a sign of the viewers’ easily losing it, was the myopia about films predating 1957, regarded, if at all, as quirkily overreaching.)

For what it might have meant, the television series of Scenes from a Marriage (1973) became a last hiccup before finding other entertainments to go with popcorn. The soap opera (with a difference), in question, displays a couple of patricians and their on-again, off-again liaison, ad nauseam. But Bergman-being-Bergman, he inserts another couple, very different from the silver spoons. The protagonists host a dinner party for their friends, Peter and Katarina, who proceed to humiliate each other. After the hosts are rid of them, they stage a rededication to their superiority. “Peter and Katarina don’t speak the same language. We speak the same language…” Peter and Katarina, played by different actors, in German rather than Swedish, resurface in the 1980 film, From the Life of the Marionettes, in order to elaborate what heterogeneity can look like and feel like. Peter, another silver spoon, manages to remain another Peter Pan. His malaise with a Katarina drawn from one of his staffers, drives him to butcher a prostitute, perform necrophilia upon her and end up in a mental hospital holding his teddy bear. His wife is left to be an adult. Few of the original loyalists would have seen this film. Too bad, because it’s easily as brilliant as Scenes from a Marriage and any of the other films thought to be great.

The immediate shock, so unlike Bergman’s usual sophisticated procedure, signals, I think, a new form of traction bidding to surmount the dilemmas of a perverse planet. Doing something that new, the project would suggest, might occasion a rich departure.

Therefore the film today begins with the savagery meted to an anonymous  (but eventually named) young girl becoming, in a coward’s eyes, an enemy army. The first we see of her is a close-up of her lips having been heavily covered with scarlet lipstick, along with a necklace of cheap tags, resembling a dog collar. (This imagery will pay dividends, later.)  Then the attacker whispers, “I’m tired…”  Long after the presentation of the hooker’s demise, we’re given a second look at the preamble to the horror. She tells him, “I don’t smell anything anymore… When I was a kid, my mother would take me to see her parents in Denmark. I remember how the seasons smelled. Winter… winter smelled like snow, coal stoves and wet gloves. And summer smelled like seaweed and ant hills. Spring smelled like melting ice and snow in ditches… budding Easter catkins and rain. But the autumn was the most beautiful of all…” She notices that Peter’s fallen asleep (that being a familiar “glitch,” when a heart was vividly at its best). She comes over and kisses his cheek. “I wasn’t asleep,” the Lost Boy lies.

   The violence at the shabby brothel speaks to a hatred of nature, in someone letting fear overtake a brave and confused hope. But, as with the victim’s word-choice of “catkins” (a blossom resembling a spike), much thrilling dare and joy anoints her last moments. In his fatigue, she covers his face in a sort of benediction—her grace engaging his errancy. On the other hand, her swatch of black hair cascading over his head discloses a monstrous figure. During the explosion of his attack, small features speak to the ways of primordial action whereby intensities entail a gentle gift. As she struggles to avoid being crushed, a wash cloth appears on a clothes line. Its contours describe a bear cub. She manages to run to the concern’s stage, a vision of blood red, where two paper palm trees on the wall fail to bring a cogent dance. With each tree, however, as so often maintained, a subterranean force is called upon. Here the crazed figures crash between the trees, describing, instead of a harmony, a horror. At this moment, the coloration subsides to black and white, where many thoughts and many feelings bid for truth.

   Though not over the hill like Peter, Katarina has a tiger by the tail which she manages quite badly. Firing up his indiscretion, the body of the work consists of several vignettes regarding his policy of refusal to grow up, and particularly refusing to touch the phenomenon of death. Two weeks before decimating a large percentage of the poetry of Munich, Peter Pan sees fit to pay a visit to a family friend by the name of  Mogens Jensen, a professor of psychiatry. (At another instalment, twenty hours after the murder, that academic was quick to insist, to some kind of tribunal, that, “To be honest, I am deeply shocked. I’ve known Peter Egermann for twenty years. He is an amiable, talented, conscientious man whom everyone likes, as far as I know. He’s happily married to a hardworking career woman. He has a large circle of friends and leads a comfortable, rather modest life. A charming mother, Cordelia Egermann, the actress. His father died a while ago. His family is wealthy. His brother is a consul [in Bergman's film, Dreams [1955], a wealthy  man seeking a miracle is also a consul]. His sister is married to a businessman.”/ “No hereditary depression in his family?”/ “Not that I know of… ” [all speaking the same language, until Katarina crashed the party]. “Peter and Katarina never consulted you?”/ “It was never serious. Nothing Valium couldn’t cure…” [This interplay includes the doctor’s large collection of African sculptures, seemingly the antithesis of classical rational logic.]) Peter admits, “There have been many long nights and too much drinking, recently. Besides, I am very aware of the fact that time is passing.”/ “Fear of death?” the specialist asks. Peter very ill at ease, without mentioning his fear, claims that what precisely bothers him is that he wants to kill his wife. “I’ve been carrying that idea around with me for two years.” The Valium expert, expert at circumventing death, listens to Peter’s assurances that, though both have been unfaithful, “We’re great in bed” [sounding like Johan and Marianne, in Scenes from a Marriage]. Then he reproves the conscientious man for asking, “I want you to tell me my hormones are responsible for my urge to kill her…”/ “Why did you come to me? You don’t believe in your own agony. You don’t believe in the existence of the soul…” [serious matters, but bemusingly pursued]. Peter, far gone in a relapse of bourgeois snottiness, can’t imagine what the family friend could be fussing about. Jensen continues, “Of course I’m angry. Because you have so little respect for your fear” [a paramount fear which the scientist won’t touch].  Concluding their conversation with Peter’s, “Maybe you should prescribe something for me,” the delinquent only pretends to leave the office, and, “letting himself out,” lurks in the darkened foyer, his advantageous cleverness leading him to expect the doctor to speak to Katarina. He’s wearing a woolen scarf, woolens being a flash point of the Anna of the film, The Passion of Anna (1969), who can only tolerate a mundane life and will attack at any chance to butcher carnal unruliness. On one occasion, she expresses her dislike by butchering a herd of sheep. Just before the exit, a Peter, who could feel he’d made an ass of himself, trots out a little homage to Katarina. “I’ve always loved to watch my wife, even when we hated each other. Or when she was revoltingly drunk… I’ve always loved the way she moves.” (Cut to her in their bathroom.) “She watches me in the mirror. She is lost in her own thoughts and she breathes heavily. I’m standing behind her, and I’m holding the razor in my right hand. She watches me the whole time. And now she really sees me. An imperceptible smile hovers around her lips. Now the knife slowly moves toward her throat. I can feel her slight agitation, a slight pulse at the throat…” (She smiles in seeing the now-constant clash this way.)

   While standing in the dark, Peter lines up within a lamp alight on the wall and a pronounced part of that wall. Nothing happens. Katarina, rushing to what Jensen might enlighten her, stages an opening gambit far from impressive, to wit, “Have you got anything drinkable around here?” Completing the triad, the doctor proposes her coming to Tunisia with him, on business, for six weeks. She tries for the high road with, “Why hasn’t a clever man like you realized that I love Peter?” Cut to Peter, superimposed upon three windows, the depths of which might as well be in Tunisia. Giving us a sense of the priorities of that haute couture business she runs as a sidebar for Peter, Katarina exudes studious bourgeois unflappableness. The healer perseveres, “I think it’d be a lot of fun to have an affair with you…” Showing more urgency than the first responder, she snipes, “I didn’t come here to sleep with you, but to talk about Peter… Besides, I have my period…” Neither coitus in the office nor the possibility of someone getting hurt attains to seriousness. But the surroundings themselves lift this misadventure. There are two identical table lamps and one of the pedant’s wild creatures in between. Far, unfortunately, an impressive array. The lady with unstable cares pronounces, “If Peter’s really sick, he needs me.” In that frame of melting solicitude, the caregiver declares, “I don’t know, Kat…  My intuition won’t let go of this…”/ “I also have an intuition,” she chides. Asking her what her intuition reveals, he receives a feeble strain of one-upmanship: [My intuition discloses] “that consciously or unconsciously you’re trying to figure out Peter’s and my relationship.” Despite this self-aggrandizement, she also reveals that the “relationship” is veering out of control. It veers promptly in her “relationship” of the world of classical reasoning, being so cavalierly wielded. “I’ve always been afraid of you…” This window of her intuition” curdles to the cartoonish. “Peter’s a part of me. Don’t you understand that? I carry him inside of me, no matter where I go. He’s inside me [that intuition of kinship being a vastly complex system, not amenable to whimsy].  I’ve never felt that with anyone else… If we had kids, it’d be different. He’s my child, I’m his…” (In the film, Dreams, a fashion careerist hears from a married lover of her’s that he has reached a state of affairs where he is as weak as a toy, “a worn-out teddy bear.” The connections between these two films will blossom throughout.) “No, that’s not true. We didn’t want to be clever or mature. That’s why we fight and hit each other and cry. We don’t want to grow up. But we share the same blood circulation. Our nerves have grown together in some strange, uncanny way. Can you understand that?” Her so seemingly passionate about their closeness of sensibility is far more hope than substance. In fact, her bidding, in painful truth, to be not of the same language as  Peter, carries a danger she underestimates. Her final words with Jensen here, therefore, measure her cowardly incompetence. “Whenever Peter’s not feeling well, the same happens to me. I want to run home to Peter and hold him and say, ‘Now, from now on, I’ll understand everything you say or think… everything you feel…’ I want to hold him fast until he finds me. Why the hell don’t we see each other, although we live together?”

   The next step involves her mother-in-law, a week after the murder, receiving a police investigator at her estate. “Peter was the child I’d always wanted. We were so happy. He had a wonderful childhood. Maybe it was too sheltered… He was a fearful child. He was afraid of the dark. He always wanted the light in the hall to be left on. He was afraid of all sorts of things: dogs, horses, large birds. He was like me. I was also sensitive and somewhat sickly. He was very close to his sister… They’d play with dolls and put on puppet shows. He was a quick learner at school [not, you can bet, a quick learner at what they don’t teach in school]. He always got the highest grades. When he was twenty, he met a nice girl [you can bet a patrician, like him]. They got engaged and planned to get married after finishing college. And then he met Katarina and fell madly in love with her. Katarina had a lot of control over him. She had the say. What Peter’s parents said or thought wasn’t important anymore… I don’t understand anything… I’ve had a good and happy life. Peter came to see me a few days ago. He had a list of things that needed to be dealt with, pertaining to his fixing up an old house for them.” (A rare lingering bit of rebellion. She noted that the roof is badly insulated. In The Passion of Anna [1969], a weak-willed man addresses his rotting roof. Disaster follows. But here, not a complete massacre occurs; therefore, we’re enmeshed into a very complex dynasty, a life of marionettes that, rarely, beats the odds.) Onscreen, many candles surround the old lady. A surfeit of candles. Three lamp lights—two, rigidly, side-by-side: another, way off beam. He stands behind her, being eclipsed by his mother, with only his arms and hands seen at her head (a configuration resembling his threatening knife upon Katarina; and also resembling the precious fashion designer, in Dreams).

   The episode, “Five Days before the Catastrophe,” tests the catastrophic errancy of a woman struggling to navigate a true magic which her vision fails her. The odd couple find themselves at variance, unable to sleep, and they come to the dining room table to table their agendas. He begins a cognac, while raggedly choosing to cover up with a bedsheet. Then he opines that the meal they had that night at another couple’s place was “horrible.” She chooses whiskey. “That relaxes me. And it’s healthy.” He argues, “Don’t drink so much…”/ “I’ll drink as much as I want, my darling. I never go overboard…” That goads him to remark, “You were pretty insufferable last night.” Her rebound is, “Don’t I know it… I was like that on purpose. That’s the way it is. On purpose[making sure she was at an advantage; that being the bane of any hope for that disinterestedness she needs to practice on the way to creativity]. I enjoy embarrassing Martin… He always tries to fondle me in secret. So I get tipsy and fondle him. Openly. That’s a subtle way of getting back at someone, Little Peter.” Subtle! The pressure requires real subtlety. And the pressure for us is to realize that Katarina has embarrassed herself. We won’t get much subtlety from her. But this film has challenged the viewer to provide the vast subtlety she lusts for and fumbles. He, from his sterile decorum, complains, “You’re starting to get loud and nonsensical.” Her, “That’s your opinion… Everyone else thinks I’m terribly nice,” would be a prelude to hating herself when alone and sober. More empty loudness from her, pertains to an argument about his mother, cropping up the following day. When he reminds her that she promised to be present for a discussion of the quirky house, she sneers, “I don’t have the time. Your business friends consider it an honor to eat that grub your awful old mother prepares… She’s a rotten old monument to your [deceased] father’s imperium of oppression…” (Though Peter laughs at that, that we  know now he’s been contemplating her murder for two years, there has to be some quiet rancor.) The tenor of their conflict reaches an unexpected turn for Katarina. “Now I’ll tell you what I actually didn’t intend to tell you. No, it’s nothing special, just a feeling… It happened early yesterday morning. I was in the bathroom drying myself with a freshly washed, rough towel that smelled good. Suddenly, I had an insight, or what it’s called… I saw all these familiar things around me and knew that they soon wouldn’t belong to me anymore. That everything would be taken away from me. None of these things around me would belong to me anymore… That feeling was gone after a minute or two, but last night it came back…” 

Peter ignores this (as he ignored, by sleeping through the prostitute’s insight, she being light years more significant than he). What he doesn’t ignore, however, is the mention, by Katarina, that his friend, Harry, had set up a tennis workout early in the morning. On hearing the reminder, Peter informs her that his friend’s tennis elbow was acting up and that therefore the game was off. This brought to mind (despite her having so recently come close to cogency) a recurrent annoyance about Harry’s smoking habits, which reach 70 cigarettes a day. Her gambit of attending to some form of vitality (which does not touch her alcohol habit) becomes a case of her (ragged) concern for a peculiar sensual force. There is another Harry, the protagonist of the film, Summer with Monika, who, after disastrously attaching himself to a poisonous girl, runs her out of his life. This figure makes plenty of sense here, inasmuch that Katarina is on the hook to ditch a dead-end sensibility. That other Harry becomes adept in work and wider responsibility. But Katarina’s wider responsibility is as hard as it gets. Next morning the rush-hour traffic powers past their flat. Two streams of vehicles, headed in opposite directions, presenting much statement but no links. There are contrasting lights in the German darkness, depending on the direction. At work Peter dictates to a secretary, “We have two alternatives.” Not three. Later he notes, “The problem is that a completely new point was raised…” In an ironic conclusion to this very long instance of pedantry, rounding off a punishing display of mutual disarray, we have Katarina rehearsing the models for her imminent fashion show. The effete impact being a paragon of how not to deliver well.

   Our major protagonist makes good on her threat to be missing in action at Mama’s soiree. At a bar (where she drinks heavily and shoos Peter along to thrill to something she too should care about), one of her colleagues, the major designer of her concern, spirits her away to his art deco gem of a flat (showing two diamond-shaped lamps vertically positioned in the dazzling darkness along with one rounded lamp too far-off be a player), for the sake of lifting her spirits, and becoming, as far as his lights allow, a genuine friend. Tim, the first responder, had mooted, “I have a wonderful idea. Come to my place for a few hours. You can take a nice long bath. I’ll make us a salad.” In face of this handsome proposal, she corrosively claims, “I’m fine where I am.” In standing up she collapses upon his chest. “I feel so bad.”/ “I suddenly had the feeling that you were terribly unhappy,” he perseveres. (She covers one eye with her hand.) Once to Tim’s tidy home, he shifts the subject to that Martin she felt she had to outsmart with “subtlety.” “We were very attached to each other. But as you know, fidelity doesn’t exist. Not true fidelity.” (Tim is shown by a full-length mirror. A twosome.) “When you’re gay, you can’t be faithful.” Pulling himself back to the subject of conviviality, Tim states, “You have to cry if you feel like it.” Then back to political advantage: “Most gay men like women. Not because we’re particularly feminine, but because we’re more in touch with our feelings. I didn’t come up with that. Martin said that. But it could be true.” (One light is on behind her.) 

Tim emotes, “Splits! It’s immeasurable grief… Maybe it isn’t grief at all, but some sort of madness.” (She in the way of a lamp with two lights.) She contributes, not entirely candid, “People like me have never given the soul much thought. Then the soul starts acting up, and you’re helpless. You know?” Tim says, “I understand.” She continues, “Perhaps a few tears are shed at first. A strange kind of crying which then turns into a terrible howl of grief and hopelessness. Then it turns into a blind roar… a roar… a roar…” (Cut to Tim, nonplussed. Is Katarina caught up in Tim’s sentimental menu?) The designer avers, “Everybody breaks down once in a while… I’m pathologically addicted to intimacy!” (Two diamond lights between them.) Then Tim speaks at length about about the horror of getting old.“Two incompatible people… Sometimes I think they all stem from one and the same origin.”  He concludes this rampage of intimacy by asking Katarina to lay her hand against his cheek. She does. But when he asks—“Can you feel that my hand is me? That it’s me?”—she shakes her head. (Katarina joining a host of dullards ignoring what’s up. Can she rally? That’s the heart of the saga.)

  Three days after the murder, Tim, the apostle of intimacy, is summoned by the police due to his being instrumental in Peter’s meeting the victim. After a lot of flim-flam at the expense of a one-track-minded functionary, he declares—what happened to intimacy and more in touch with our feelings?— “I  liked the idea that Peter was cheating on her with a prostitute. But that’s only part of the truth. Weak people choose strange paths. I gradually focused on taking Peter from his wife and making him mine. I saw the coldness in his marriage… I knew  I could save him… People like me have a feeling for such things.”

   A somewhat less predatory scene pertains to a letter from Peter to Mogens, which never becomes sent. It functions as a glimpse of the influence of Katarina. And it confirms that that toss away platitude, “Weak people choose strange paths,” is studded with deadly practices. Peter premises is cri de coeur, by declaring (Tim-like), “What I’m going to describe isn’t a dream in the usual sense.” (It’s, in fact, more a dream like the fervid dreams of the film, Dreams.) “Although I experienced this under the influence of pills and alcohol, the experience seemed more real and horrible than the reality of  everyday life.” Cloaked in a calming fog, there were him and Katarina seen in bed from the vantage point of the ceiling. The documentor struggles to describe the fabric of this action: more than “sensual;” not only “erotic;” “a direct link between my lower body and the intense, sweet-smelling moisture of a woman.” (Katarina’s hair tumbling as she sleeps.) Then a moment showing them nude from a long distance, with over-exposed visuality, insinuating a snowscape. In the vein of “more in touch with our feelings,” Peter gushes, “I moved over a glittering, spacious surface with my eyes closed. And all was very quiet. My contentment was complete. I had a strange urge to tell a funny story.” (Can Katarina’s heights get past the funny story stage?) “There was a little eye on every finger.” (In Dreams, one eye upon a raincoat suffices; here the push to be “big” collapses the traces of remarkable initiative.) He moves to touch one of her nipples. Then he rattles off a formula, where only the deftness of motion can prevail: “If you are death, then I welcome you, dear death. If you are life, then I welcome you, dear life.” Amidst such sophomoric efforts, he does break from tradition to realize, “that it was dangerous to become afraid.” Back to his cruising speed, he imagines consistently to be unable to penetrate her. “I fell into a rage. I withdrew to stop myself from killing her.” Her vigorous countering of his aggressiveness, leaving him holding his head, produces a long glare of intransigence between them. This is followed by her gently soothing his wounds. “It is difficult to describe that particular moment. The very air I was in was transformed… We entered a sudden spirituality without reservations.” That her range puts his to shame culminates in his fantasy of having killed her “in some cruel way.” The missal describing a weakling. No wonder it was never sent.

   The episode, “Two Days before the Catastrophe,” brings the letter to solid action. It begins with Katarina frantically trying to reach Professor Jensen, because Peter is up on their roof contemplating jumping to his death. True to form, the psychiatric flop is not available. Her backup choice is one of his cronies, namely, Arthur, a name (in the form of King Arthur) redolent of maintaining good breeding. (In The Passion of Anna, a weak-willed artisan on a broken roof ends up like a figure in the works of Samuel Beckett. From here on in, it’s about whether Katarina can fare better than that.) Arthur tries to rally the on-again but largely off-again rebel with, “It’s respectable to want to jump, but inhuman to torment one’s fellow man.” He adds, “Someone will see you and alert the police… Can’t I at least get your fur coat?”/ “That would be nice of you,” the not quite desperate enough malcontent replies. (Weak people choose strange paths.) He’s back before Arthur can carry the furs. Katarina attempts to calm the country club regular, but at this stage he shows no interest in their constellation. She drops that hot potato and hopes to find more success with the paragon of easy chivalry. “Poor Martha (Arthur’s wife), we’ve disturbed her.”/ “Not at all,” he tells her. “She had an early operation at the children’s clinic.” In the Swedish Bergman film, Dreams, a woman, named Marta, uses a trump card of children to fend off the protagonist fashion entrepreneur, Susanne, intent  on a weak paramour. Marta is a pretty smart cookie, but not as bright and brave as she thinks. On the subject of hard knocks, Peter, attempting to look somewhat less weak, kicks Katarina backwards from her position of sitting on the carpet by the chair he occupied after doing without his furs. Arthur does nothing noble here. “Come sit with me,” is his policy of law and order. An embarrassed lady of the house chirps, “I’m fine on the floor…” Then both of them begin to glare at each other. She plunges on with, “We had a drink with Johan and Marianne. Then we all went out to that new Italian restaurant near the theatre.” (She drinks. Arthur smokes. Far less overt is her uphill climb to bring her seldom uncanniness to a full fruition and a hope for beating back a horde of cowards, along lines of surpassing those who kick, while keeping in play those who meant something, being held in reserve.) Arthur asks her, “What’s that on your neck?” This brings instant communication from Peter, “Her necklace broke… I got caught in it, and then it broke.” (Peter got caught in Katarina’s audacity. And then it broke.) Arthur remarks, “Make sure it doesn’t get infected.” Peter the Weak blurts out, “Oh, Katarina says she wants to leave me.  I say great. What a godsend. Then she says she can’t live without me. I say I can live better without her. She says I’m important…” (Katarina lies back on the floor.) As the transaction spins crazily, Katarina loses her temper, as she has done may times. But, while she has an end-game, he has nothing.

   During the rest of the humiliation from out of that overt consideration of suicide, the conflict and its results do nothing but confirm that their life together is no more. She snipes, “Shut up, Peter, you’ve had your performance.” But now Peter—terrified in face of his wife’s reckless and valid cares (and occupying  the model of that Anna, the little pedant and coward, emerging from the film, The Passion of Anna)—opts for an eleventh hour return to full bourgeois appetites, including a final “performance” to recompense his treason against his clan. How far apart are they? One indicator says a lot, though no one notices. As Katarina lies back on the carpet, pondering her future as a solo act, we see her from upside down and particularly the collar of her shirt. Two button holes and a button: the two of them no longer in business, but, for her, filling little needs could go far. That she is far from steady enough to see her way through this snake pit may be transparent in the following communication later in the conversation. “Poor Peter, I feel so damn sorry for you.” (That is precisely what the protagonist, Susanne, in Dreams, has to endure, from a prim, nihilist Marta, who believes that no couples ever become magic. That, in the cyclone going on at this point, Katarina becomes a stiff, is food for thought. She set this doomed, underground adventure by way of a degree in charisma. We’d like to discover if she can reinvent (and then some) a new and wider fruition. Out of the pointlessness of tons of clashing verbiage, there is one kernel of might from her: “We accepted the rules  [of skepticism] but had no knack for the game [the play and its good-naturedness].”

   In the episode, “Three Weeks after the Catastrophe,” we find some signs that Katarina is beginning to find a knack. Paying a visit to her grieving mother-in-law, our protagonist counsels lightening up, going on a visit to Paris where the grieving one has a sister. As to being possibly needed by the butcher now ensconced in an institution for the hopeless, the daughter-in-law relates, “I went to see him yesterday. He didn’t seem to be all there…  He’s getting injections to stave off distress.” So prostrated is the mother with the shock, Katarina (surely feeling some irony, which now, though, for her, might have an impact for some good, for some people) suggests Professor Jensen to lighten her load. The offer is accepted. Despite Katarina’s history of hating that lady, she now declares, “I can come to see you every day…” This gambit is promptly shot down by the host’s digging into their troubled relationship. “You think it’s all my fault…” (But Katarina has begun to leave such sterile warfare, while needing to stand up to a history of panzer violence.) The mistress of the mansion argues, “You’ve always been very critical of Peter’s and my relationship.” Having to retort, “You were critical of our marriage,” would simply not be what was on her mind. A better manoeuver, though, would—in face of the woman with no future (like her son), dictating, “I gave birth to him and raised him. He’s a part of my life. You don’t have any children. You don’t understand a mother’s feelings…”—“You’re right. I don’t understand.” Pleased to feel on top, the maternal one speaks through a dynasty. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” The guest in the leopard-skin coat, assures the old lady, “You didn’t hurt me.” Pouring on that favorite insult by those smelling a kill, “I feel so sorry for you,” is met by Katarina’s, “I don’t believe that… I’ve been here for half an hour. All you’ve talk about is your feelings…”Perhaps her parting words forever (but not necessarily), the solo pours out her heart to someone who wouldn’t give a shit. “Full of astonishment, I look back on our lives… on our former reality, and think, ‘Was it all a dream?’ It was a game. Lord knows what the hell we were doing. This is true reality, and its unbearable.”(It could be that being in the presence of Peter’s mother has somewhat rattled the soloist.) True reality is not unbearable to the strong, and Katarina knows it. She also knows that being a soloist is madness. Her being felt on the spot to match the matron’s emotions swings her into a line she’d find ludicrous when composed. “A strange, hard surface. But under the surface I’m crying. I’m crying for myself because I can no longer be the way I was… I cry for Peter. I’ve never been able to put myself in other people’s shoes… But suddenly I think I know what Peter is feeling and thinking….” And even in such a maudlin funk, her better self returns. “But the [exponentially] worst part of it is… that poor woman. I tell myself she was only frightened for a moment… That doesn’t help.” Just before Peter presumes to make his piddling statement for the sake of the “betters,” he learns that the woman knowing catkins is also a Katarina. The guest that day to the mother-in-law was very significantly on a track to touch those worth touching. To more fully disclose Katarina’s distinction in leaving that fortress of enmity, we look back to Peter’s doggerel where his wife (the only thinker that long family tree had ever enclosed) had had her creative heartiness cribbed and twisted into a cheap stunt. “There was a little eye on every finger.” What had the unsteady thinker wasted, on a worthless associate, was her hard won realization that her gentle and powerful proof against inertia  not only opens and drives the fireworks of the cosmos itself, but being gifted by a vast menu of carnal initiatives, by way of which to be truly blessed, truly loved. (The outset of the film, Dreams, with its producing a large set of red lips, like those of Katarina’s, also traces a word for the wise: “One has to say no at some point.”)

 An Epilogue showing Peter’s cell returns coloration. It has nothing to do with him (the exponent of, “no way out” and solitary chess, recalling the cowardly patrician in The Seventh Seal), but that Katarina is in the building, perhaps for the last time.

As this saga has unfolded, we’ve come to a unique need to add to Katarina’s struggle. Bergman’s exceptional skill about problematic drama eschews attending to further steps along this endeavor. The hundreds of montages accompanying the narratives were not only about the “mood” of the stories, but the actions of the viewers. The placements about the mundane, the ecstatic and their harmonics are not precious museum-pieces; but a way of life hugely dissimilar from the dynasties which have commanded fealty for, in one case 4000 years, and, in another, 2500 years. That they are massively wanting is one thing. That their homicidal proclivities exude a pall upon the land may be well seen by the former’s incompetence and arrogance to the point of a world-wide collapse, without so much as an apology. That is the reality which Katarina and we must deal with at a level of difficulty so extreme as to seem, “no way out.” But along with the Byzantine history, there is a stunningly underused resource to foster a “knack” in return. The likes of Katarina, who finds snippets of magical dynamics setting her apart, can, if alert enough, become buoyed by an agency recommending action for the sake of interplays that have no end of joys, but very much end of sentient life. This planet of toxic dynasties, so effective in paralyzing the full range of creativity (delivering a world of marionettes), is far from the only place graced with a creative knack.

[willowlark369]

Today, my Art Appreciation class went to the museum to tour the Egyptian, Roman, and Greek galleries. Because my children were out of school for Good Friday, I took advantage of my professor’s allowance of guests on the museum tours. Several times before we arrived, I explained to my daughters (Bug, age 10, and Bean, age 9) that they had to not be disruptive of the docents and behave while we were there. For the most part, my girls didn’t misbehave.

Unfortunately, I could not say the same.

But I’ll get to that. First, I need to give y’all a bit of background to be able to understand this story and fully appreciate it.

I have been actively pagan for many years—this October will be my 23rd year, in fact. My original patron deity was Bastet so for the better part of a decade, I studied Egyptian mythology and practices extensively before being Called to a different facet of the Goddess that worked better with the practices of my heritage. As an artist (writer) myself, I feel a special connection with the Muses, even if I spend most of my time carefully cursing their fickle & flighty nature. I’m not the only pagan in my Art class—another woman (who studies photography as both hobby and coursework) is a second generation Wiccan and raised her children in an eclectic version of that tradition. Turns out Dr. Pepper [below] is Photographer’s son.

My Art professor is very much a cheerleader for an interdisciplinary approach towards studying art. Knowing the history of a period along with societal aspects of the culture along with their scientific understandings is key to understand the context of a piece along with its meaning. She is also very vocal about Art being a social dialogue that is meant to communicate and/or spark discussions. Bug is an Aspie. I have worked very hard over the years to get her to understand certain social nuances, but even though her ability to interact with others in a positive way has improved, it’s still hit and miss at times. My Art Professor also has a daughter with autism and another classmate has a son. While Professor’s daughter and Bug are around the same age, Photographer’s son is an adult. We’ve all shared stories about knowing that sometimes there’s things they just need to do.

Since this museum is free and Bug has a Special Interest in Art, we go to this museum a lot even though the exhibits rarely change. We even have a list of exhibits that we must see every single visit.

It’s obvious, but I took out direct names, both of people and the pieces. Changing the names to protect the “innocent”?

 Now the story:

The tour started out nice enough. There’s a few new people mixed into the familiar faces of my classmates, but there’s been a few each time since Professor openly encouraged bringing guests so long as they aren’t disruptive. The Docent we got announced first thing that she was excited about give tours to adults as she normally does elementary and middle school tours. Okay, that makes sense because we were supposed to do this tour last week and got bumped because of all the elementary and middle school tours that got scheduled and couldn’t easily be rescheduled like a college class’ tour could. It wasn’t until the first exhibit that I even suspected that this inexperience may be a problem.

Docent: Now you’ve studied the differences between primary and secondary sources of information. Can anyone tell me the difference?

[The students are silent, and even I don’t recognize the terms as they would apply to Art.]

Docent: Does anyone want to guess?

Guy in “I am a Pepper” tee (Dr. Pepper): Primary source would be the source a claim is pulled from and secondary sources would be further reading on the subject which expand upon that claim or offers support of it?

Docent: So close, dear—[completely ignoring the slight bristle of Dr. Pepper at the nickname]—a primary source is the artwork itself while the secondary source would be the placards to the side. Secondary sources cannot always be trusted, because sometimes they contain inaccurate information. For example, this piece here (a “lion” statue that had several obvious divergences from actual lion features which rendered it very close but not really) has a placard which says that the artist had never seen a lion before—which just doesn’t make sense because there was a lot of trading around on around the Mediterranean countries and he would just had to have seen one. It’s not logical.

Dr. Pepper: Actually, it would have been. Lions are not native to Greece, and transporting a live apex predator would have been extremely tricky and rarely worth it. You’d get a few being traded, but you just won’t see a lot of them.

Me: Even hunting them would have difficult and since eating apex predators is almost a culturally universal taboo, it would have been a better use of labor to break a body down in the field and only carry back to be traded those parts which were useful—the fur, the teeth, and the claws. It’s entirely possible for the artist to have never seen a lion in its entirety.

Professor: I think what they’re trying to say is that we’re still increasing our understanding of those time periods and it’s a good idea to question all claims if there’s a chance of a misunderstanding.

 It was an excellent save and we were moved forward on the tour. In the Egyptian section that is dedicated to the artwork rather than our mummy, the Docent strikes again.

 Docent: These two panels were found on either side of the door leading into [Person’s Name]’s tomb. As you can see, they are symmetrical.

Bug [in a confused voice]: But they’re not symmetrical. That means identical. They aren’t identical; they’re mirrored which means they are similar but opposite.

Docent: No, dear, they’re symmetrical.

Bug: But they’re really not—and you shouldn’t call strangers “dear”. It’s not polite. Unless they’re upset. Then you say it while rubbing their back in circles. Circles are symmetrical.

Me [because Bug is starting to get agitated]: Honey, why don’t you go sketch the Djinn? [Bug gives me a confused look before nodding and wandering over the bench before the Sumerian piece in question.]

Professor [trying not to grin]: She did have a point about the symmetry.

 Finally, our group makes it to the Roman section (after a half hour of not moving from the same fifteen square feet and a lecture from the Docent that keeps repeating the same information) and we settle before a tomb piece that has the Muses with Athena and the person whose grave it is on it. It’s truly a lovely piece and even after the centuries of exposure to the sea wind of Athens is still incredibly detailed. It’s also one of Lily’s favorite pieces in the whole museum and definitely her favorite in the Roman section. Thus it’s one of the “must see” pieces for every single visit.

 Docent: We’re going to do ATS.

[Everyone looks at each other in confusion. We have never heard this term. The Docent huffs a breath.]

Docent: Your professor said you know how to do ATS.

Me [thinking that maybe Professor didn’t use the letters]: What do the letters mean?

Docent: “Artistic Thinking Strategy”

 I hear Bug choke on a breath of her own. During Spring Break, we had spent the entire week working on the difference between “noun” and “verb” and so I know that there’s about to be an interjected correction on the usage because Bug is always like that about new information. Luckily, Dr. Pepper comes to the rescue.

 Dr. Pepper: Maybe you can remind us how we do that exactly?

Docent: You look at the piece systematically and break down what you’re seeing into its parts. Then you put the pieces back together to see what is going on in it. [As this is literally the process of aesthetic scanning, something our Professor had repeatedly stressed the importance of, there’s a collective aha moment for our group. Without saying anything, our Professor comes up behind the Docent as she continues in an impatient tone] What do you see here? [silence falls over the group, which just makes Bug’s authoritative whisper to Bean about the definition of a noun seem louder than it actually is]

Me [now desperate to cover up the girls’ whispers]: Okay, I'm going to cheat. It's the Muses.

Dr. Pepper: Oh, if you're cheating, I'm going to as well--it's the Muses but also two others.

Docent [clearly irritated]: Well, someone's been reading the secondary sources and apparently believes them. I bet you didn't even recognize them and probably couldn't identify which one is which.

Me [even knowing that I shouldn’t be raising to the nerd-baiting but too irritated at the woman’s attitude to not answer the challenge]: That one on the end is looking up at the sky and has a hard tablet of the type used in Hellenistic times to record star patterns. She's the muse of astronomy. The one next to her has items associated with games in the same period--she must be Thalia, muse of laughter. The next one on the line has a lyre. She can be either the muse of lyrical poetry which is performed on the lyre or the muse of music but the woman second from the other side has a flute so she is probably music making this one lyrical poetry.

Docent [now scrabbling into her pocket with jerky motions]: Hold on—I have a list. Let me check it.

Me [nodding]: And while you’re digging it out, I can continue. The next one has—

Docent [pointing at Dr. Pepper and abandoning the efforts to pull the list of muses]: You there! You said that there were two figures that weren’t muses. I bet you can’t pinpoint them.

Dr. Pepper: Oh, can’t I? [Behind the Docent, Professor looks like she’s debating interfering, but I can see her working out the scales. This is the most engaged anyone in this group has been the whole visit and really, we’re not being rude so much as slightly antagonistic in response to the Docent’s antagonism. Either way, Dr. Pepper doesn’t hesitate any more than I did in answering the nerd-baiting.] The figure with the spear & helmet is Athena, goddess of war.

Me: Among other things such as wisdom and strategic thinking.

Dr. Pepper: Which is why she's often depicted with the Muses, despite not being one herself and only sketchily related to them.

Docent: So any war done in her name must be just?

Dr. Pepper: Not at all. It just has to be done well.

Me: Athena is just as warlike as Ares, but she's more about strategic planning a war to minimize both risk and the uses of resources whereas Ares is about brute strength and overpowering an enemy. Wisdom doesn't always mean justice or honor.

Dr. Pepper: The other non-Muse is the figure in the exact center holding a scroll.

Docent: And why would that figure be the human? Just because it’s in the center?

Me: They're the plainest. All the figures are the same size, but the muses all have the tool of their domain while Athena looks very intimidating in full armor, but that figure has no extra frills other than the rolled scroll in her hand. She could have been Clio, muse of history, but she's not writing on the scroll, just holding it. She’s acquiring knowledge, not recording it.

Docent: Moving on.

 We’re then herded to the Mummy room on the other side of the Egyptian art section. Since Bug and Bean are growing impatient to begin our after-tour, I pull them a bit away from the group to discuss the pieces in the section. This quickly turns into a discussion with Dr. Pepper about the possibility of unresolved sexual tension between Set and Bastet due to their constant battling in the night. As Dr. Pepper questions how unresolved it might be with the battles taking place at night, I catch sight of the Docent off to his side looking absolutely scandalized while our classmates look fascinated in the same way most twelve-year-olds are with impressive belches. I winced and apologize while Photographer struggles to hide snickers. The Docent reclaims our group’s attention to discuss the myth of Isis and Osiris that was depicted (according to her) on the middle casing of the mummy.

 Docent: So Isis gathered all the pieces and bound them back together.

Me [without really planning to]: Well, almost all.

Dr. Pepper [at the Docent’s confused look]: She missed one part. It’s why he could no longer guarantee the fertility of the Nile.

Me [matter of factually]: She did fashion a replacement out of gold and lapis. It was enough to grant him authority over the Underworld, but he could no longer serve Egypt with the replacement. It didn’t fulfill the same function any more.

Dr. Pepper [with a smirk]: I wonder if she improved upon it any? After all, it did earn him a kingdom.

Me [swatting gently at his arm]: Oh, hush, you.

Dr. Pepper [rolling his eyes]: Yes, Mom. [on the other side of the display, Photographer is less successful at silencing her snickers. It could have been something Bug or Bean said as they play Dots with her, but I have a feeling that it’s really not.]

 The Docent points towards the inner most casing for the mummy along with the chest cartouche. She proceeds to explain how someone had to have made a mistake because while all the artifacts were supposed to be from a single burial, the cartouche on the male mummy had a female name, so “logically” there had to have been a mixup somewhere. Stunned at the implications and the sheer arrogance in her voice, I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Luckily, Dr. Pepper could.

 Dr. Pepper: Maybe we're the ones mistaken and that mummy is actually of a woman.

Docent: There are ways that we can tell just from the bones, dear.

Dr. Pepper [frowning at the return of the “not polite” nickname but clearly channeling it into his tone rather than commenting]: You could tell male or female, but you wouldn't be able to tell man or woman, would you? All the markings indicate a female name, right? "Beloved of her father" is what you said?

Docent: Well, yes—I'm still learning the language but that's the translation they gave me.

Me [after a beat of silence that demonstrates that Docent doesn’t get why this is important]: Egyptian names prior to their being conquered by Rome didn't typically have pronouns. It was considered unlucky, as it would bring the attention of the spirits to a person. There had to be a significant counter to that weight for her to have such a name. A Renaming later in life due to changing gender would have been a worthy reason.

Docent: But if that was true, she would have failed the weighing of her heart because she couldn't say that she never lied!

Me [holding up a hand to keep Dr. Pepper from jumping in as I can tell he wants and speaking flatter in an attempt reign in my temper]: The negative denials would not have unbalanced at that. She was a woman if she had the ceremonies to be buried in this way, under this name. Changing genders through Renaming is not be counted as lying. Besides, if she truly feared it would, she could simply affirmed the claim to save her heart. She would not have been allowed to enter the Underworld, true, but her heart would not be devoured, preventing her from both entering the Underworld and being reincarnated.

Docent [giving a loud sniff before snapping out]: Well, maybe the theology shifted over time because that's not what I read.

Me: The Book of the Dead served as a guide for their beliefs for over three thousand years, until Alexander took the kingdom and infused the underlying culture with the influences of his tiny Greco-Roman country while exporting Egyptian culture out. The 42 negative denials are mentioned in at least 23 different sites throughout all three Kingdoms of Egyptian history. There is at least one confirmed case of a woman being renamed with a male name and depicted as a man from that point onward and three others which are greatly suspected to have switched genders. Moreover, there is a deity in the Egyptian pantheon who is depicted as both male & female and another who is declared as neither. Also, yet another whose sexuality was as fluid as the cats that were her animal.

Dr. Pepper [tone dripping with sarcasm]: But I'm sure they had the same hangups as you.

Professor [clapping her hands as she jumped in front of the Docent]: And we're out of time! I'll be out to talk to you guys in a moment. I'm just going to thank the docent for her time real quick.

 Moral of the Story (01): Do not mess with pagans on our home turf. They aren’t just myths to us—they’re the source of our values and traditions. We study them like Christians study the Bible and probably better than most Christians do that.

Moral of the Story (02): Do not challenge smartasses when unprepared to back up your claims. We get cranky after a while, especially if we’re bored out of our minds.

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Kyrik, Earl Norem, Stormbringer RPG, Denny O’Neill

T.V. (RMWC Reviews): In 1973, Tsuburaya Productions released several shows as part of the company’s 10th anniversary. The first one to see release was Fireman (or Magma Man in some markets), which began airing on Nippon Television on January 7, 1973, running until July for 30 episodes.

Warfare (Aeoli Pera): The typical special forces trainee who passes selection has a higher rank (officers were far more likely to pass than enlisted), at least a bachelor’s degree, high general personality factor with extremely high conscientiousness, no children, and verbally tilted IQs averaging in the 120s. This study looks at Ranger school but it’s true across all special operations services in the Western world. Please note that, except for measuring the ability to do pullups, these exact predictors could be used to select head girls for graduate departments in the humanities and social sciences.

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Interested in superheroes? If you’re reading this post then there’s a good chance you do! But how much? Check out this new bundle of hero books compiled by immortal SF author Kevin J. Anderson. The offer is for a limited time, so don’t miss out! The description for the bundle is as follows: The Up, Up and Away Superheroes Bundle – Curated by Kevin J. Anderson: If reading is your kryptonite, I’ve put together a superpowered StoryBundle—thirteen books with marvelous heroes, supervillains, secret identities, mutant powers, and extraordinary gentlemen (and ladies).

Popular Culture (Legends of Men): Why do these guys virtue signal? They’re saying this type of thing to other readers of S&S and REH and the pulps. The entire readership obviously enjoys these genres with as much or as little diversity as they already have. Past works cannot be changed and what made them popular once is more likely to make them popular again than changing the nature of what they are. So do some readers feel the need to virtue signal to other readers?

Reading (DVS Press): How many times have you seen a movie and though, “Man, the book was so much better,” or had a friend who read the book say the same to you? I can definitely say that the cases where the movie is better than the book are far outweighed by the reverse – probably in the range of 20:1. In fact, the only writer whose work seems to function better on screen than on paper is Stephen King, and even then there are plenty of books in his exceptionally large canon that are much better than their cinema counterpart (anyone remember The Dark Tower? I hope not).

Science Fiction (John C. Wright): Sometimes in this life we see justice done. The Nebula Awards have just honored Gene Wolfe with a Grandmastership. The honor is overdue, and all lovers of literature should rejoice. Gene Wolfe is the Luis Borges of North America. He is the greatest living author writing in the English language today, and I do not confine that remark to genre authors. I mean he is better than any mainstream authors at their best, better in the very aspects of the craft in which they take most pride.

Culture War (Kairos): This is why they hate Japan. This the material manifestation for why they can’t handle the Beautiful and seek to degrade before they destroy; the humiliation is intended as much to assuage the abuser’s amygdala as it is to afflict the victim’s, a “No You, Christcuck!” retort as they rip the beautiful apart before finishing the job. The cruelty is part of the process by design. The shitlords–God bless you all–at /pol/ noticed that this applies to all of the cultural attacks.

Art (DMR Books): When Earl demobilized, he went into magazine illustration, mostly for the “Men’s Adventure” mags. Such magazines have also been called “men’s pulps” and “sweat mags”. Essentially, they were magazines that somewhat carried on from the actual pulps–which died out in the 1950s–but were printed on “slick” paper. A significant percentage of their readers were veterans of World War Two and Korea who were looking for manly stories featuring action and beautiful women.

Comic Books (Diversions of the Groovy Kind): As most of you know, Groove-ophiles, Denny O’Neil, one of the most influential writers of the Groovy Age passed away at the age of 81 on Friday, June 12. Much has been written about O’Neil during the past week, and that’s how it should be. During the 1970s, O’Neil changed the way we would think about Batman in particular and comics in general forever (in tandem, naturally, with artist Neal Adams, mostly, but also with a host of other artistic luminaries from Irv Novick to Mike Kaluta to Jack Kirby to Mike Grell).

Robert E. Howard (Don Herron): Something I didn’t know much about, was a bank robbery that had occurred in the little town of Cisco on December 23, 1927, over 80 years earlier. The so-called Santa Claus Bank Robbery was a story I had heard about, of course, but the Kris Kringle business had conjured up images of a gang comprised of members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Bowery Boys. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

RPG (Black Gate): Chaosium’s Stormbringer! was a licensed product based on Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné secondary world fantasy series. The game engine used modified Basic Roleplaying mechanics; in particular, magic worked very differently in Stormbringer than in Runequest. Characters could come from a wide variety of backgrounds; power-gamers preferred certain back-grounds over others because there was no pretense of game balance between them.

Heinlein (Black Gate): It’s almost impossible to discuss Robert A. Heinlein’s The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel about Parallel Universes without revealing and thus spoiling the plot devices of it and its 1980 prequel/sequel, The Number of the Beast—. Heinlein, first Grand Master of the SFWA, for decades acclaimed as the Dean of sf, no longer pleases everyone. Some readers, especially academic critics, have denounced both books as grossly self-indulgent and even worthless. Others, like the brilliant Marxist professor H. Bruce Franklin (in his important 1980 study Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction) catch the feel of Beast: “a cotton-candy apocalypse — frothy, sweet, airy, mellow, light, festive, whimsical, insubstantial” (199).

Sword-and-Sorcery (Ken Lizzi): I’ve read a few of Gardner Fox’s Kothar books. So when I saw his name on the cover of Kyrik Fights the Demon World I didn’t hesitate to snatch up the book. No one will claim that Fox was a master stylist. Take this paragraph from page one of Demon World. And so Makonnon quested through spatial emptiness into lands that had known him, long and long ago. He sent his mind across unfathomable distances, seeking, hunting, searching for that which so infuriated him.

RPG (Cyborgs and Sorcerers): Vancian Freeform Magic. I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms.  It isn’t.  You’ll see. I love the idea of free-form spell systems because they allow for endless creativity, and for me, creative problem-solving is the biggest source of fun in RPGs.  In practice though, people often come up with a few favorite spells they cast over and over.  This system was designed to prevent that by continually varying the tools in the free-form spellcaster’s toolbox. It’s a noun-verb system like Ars Magicka, except the nouns and verbs are not skills you’re permanently trained in.

Tolkien (Tolkien and Fantasy): The details of Tolkien’s epistolary friendship with the US editor, writer and sculptor Sterling Lanier (1927-2007) are difficult to ascertain, and various accounts differ as to the chronology and extent of their correspondence.  In 1973, Lanier wrote that “it began in 1951” and amounted to some “dozen or so letters we exchanged over the years.” In a 1974 fanzine profile of Lanier by Piers Anthony, it notes that Lanier had had “ten years of correspondence” with Tolkien. In 2016,  a book dealer had for sale six letters from Tolkien to Lanier, plus one from Tolkien’s wife.

Science Fiction (M. Porcius): I enjoyed my recent look at the 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories with Leigh Brackett’s “The Dancing Girl of Ganymede” and Henry Kuttner’s “The Voice of the Lobster,” so, to take a break from my rereading of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, I propose spending some time reading more stories by Brackett and Kuttner from Thrilling Wonder (we might end up checking out some Thrilling Wonder contributions by Brackett’s husband, Edmond Hamilton, as well.)

RPG (Swords and Stitchery): I have used & abused B4 The Lost City adventure & its inhabitants  for years now a venerable pulp  module created by Tom Moldvay.  “”The Lost City” (1982) was the first adventure written entirely for the second edition Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1981). No surprise, then, that it was written by the author of that set, Tom Moldvay. ” Today I’ve been thinking about specifically adapting this module as perhaps a starter to Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea second edition as an introductory module.

History (Outlook India): Tucked into Pakistan’s remote northwestern hills, along the border with Afghanistan, is a cluster of three villages whose residents are still trying to preserve their language and culture in the face of advancing modernity and religious conversion. The tribe, known as Kalash, is said to have descended from soldiers of the army of Alexander the Great who travelled this way in 324 BCE. However, many scholars deny the story even though it has not been established finally yet how these people, their language, dress, and their nature-worshipping culture—in marked contrast to the Islamic culture that surrounds them—evolved and survived through the centuries.

Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): I used to use the words “Pulp-descended fiction” and it was the source of RAGE m a c h i n e Books. I wanted to capture that feeling that good Pulp writing gives you. What that really means is I grew up on authors who wrote during the Pulps and those who followed, they too influenced by those five decades of magazine publishing. The world has since moved on, with television and paperback novels, comic books (now called “graphic novels”). Despite this, Pulp remains with us. Not in the packaging but under the surface.

Sensor Sweep: Kyrik, Earl Norem, Stormbringer RPG, Denny O’Neill published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: Favorite 25 Films of 2018

Once upon a time, Derek Smith wrote: “2017 was a year endured rather than lived.” But all due respect to the past, because here we are creeping into this new 2019 and things are so much better than we thought they’d be! True, the year probably felt like 37 years or whatever removed from Rick Deckard’s squared-off tie and malfunctioning memory. And truth be told, the political crisis unfolding in the gray hallways might seem more honest if it resembled the light-starved, gnarled noir of Blade Runner. At least Schwarzenegger and The Running Man promised that 2019’s only choice would be “hard time or prime time,” even if its presentation of a neon capital, corporate-owned world seemed, you know, subtle. And for all the (dead) kids in cages and bodies bleeding out on street corners here and abroad, Michael Bay and The Island had a perfectly-drooped Buscemi diagnosing our humanist crisis: “I mean, you’re not human. I mean, you’re human, but you’re not real. You’re not a real person, like me.” A lot of people were told they weren’t humans in 2018. This isn’t a writerly evasion or poetic epithet designed to elicit righteous ire/compel you to read another year-end list. Because what else could you call the concentrated attempt by some humans to discourage the freedoms of other humans? Our narrative didn’t turn science-fiction to let us off the hook: these non-humans weren’t clones or replicants or estranged Atlantean denizens returning to claim their kingly right. They just weren’t human enough (or the right kind of human) to matter in the eyes of louder, more powerful humans. All of our past’s proposed images of our worst futures pale in comparison to this denial of basic humanity that we see out our windows. It is unsurprising, then, that cinema, our most volatile cultural mirror, began to show the stretch and strain in its images of our species. But what is surprising is that cinema in 2018 retained nuance and compassion as it mediated the cruelties and depravities of its age. Unlike this slab of prose, movies in 2018 moved beyond mediating good and evil in simple, monolithic terms. They attempted to sketch the boundaries of real freedom in an unjust world (BlaKkKlansman). They investigated, more acutely than ever before, the responsibilities of what it meant to keep (Shirkers) and tell (Madeline’s Madeline) another human’s story (If Beale Street Could Talk), especially in remembrance (Roma). They presented distorted genealogies (Hereditary) and fisheye-lens histories (The Favourite) to track the human body’s motion (Suspiria) in and out of comradeship (Support the Girls) and trauma (Burning). In 2018, we hurled our betrayed humanities up against foreign corpses (Zama), scorched country (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), alien twins (Annihilation), and incongruent voices (Sorry to Bother You). We began to see, in everything, something like a way through the darkness. Why else keep watching the past (The Other Side of the Wind) if not to plot something we’d never imagined before (The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl)? Our moving images in 2018 proposed that real love (Eighth Grade) and genuine care (Lazzaro Felice) could stretch impossibly across time to add up to a life steeped in both nuance and compassion (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). Our love would not look the same (Leave No Trace) nor could it resound in strictly-feasible tones (Mandy), but we would recognize its absence; we could see that sometimes humanness looks like something we’ve never seen before (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). More than anything, as one derelict theory proposed, “Through the negative you could see the real, inner, demonic quality of the light.” In laying the responsibilities of the filmmaker and artist at the feet of a murderer, The House That Jack Built came perilously close to endorsing our worst demons. Those demons shook and raged and hissed at us, urging us to give in to despair and make a world in their image. How did we let it stand? Thomas Merton was a central figure in a figurative, feral lens for our year, and he wrote that “despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.” To levy our humanity so close to inhumanness, suggesting that our better angels are distortions, is dangerous. To know, as these 25 films know, that there can be nothing without despair until there is love is to actually be human. To look, as we did, through our ruinous year and resist the despairs of all our oppressors and lowest urges, to shout, in image and montage and light and shadow, that this is how I deny you is to attain, beyond our humanity and into the future, a new kind of prayer. –Frank Falisi --- 25 Roma Dir. Alfonso Cuarón [Netflix] Roma was Alfonso Cuarón’s excursion into simplicity, a self-imposed challenge that drew back from his earlier, more extravagant films. Cuarón told his simple allegory in a monochrome treatment, but while wearing multiple hats — he also produced, shot, and edited the film. The choice to go black and white not only focused the elements of filmmaking to its barest essentials, but it also emphasized its nostalgic underpinnings. Though it made use of elaborate staging for its more chaotic events, Roma paradoxically found fascination in the quotidian and the mundane. The film was dedicated to the maid that the Cuarón’s family employed when he was a child — realized as the previously unknown Yalitza Aparicio, who brought an indelible humanity to her role — but the story itself was secondary. It was presented more as a series of tableaus, culminating in a climactic sequence at the beach. Here, Cuarón’s camera lingered, unedited, in a harrowing scene that illustrated Aparicio’s undying devotion to the family and revealed the film’s true heart. –Tristan Kneschke --- 24 Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Dir. Morgan Neville [Focus Features] With no dirt to dig up on his subject, director Morgan Neville tended to accent the blue-tinged notes heard throughout the Neighborhood in his Fred Rogers documentary. The director’s seamless cardigan scene-weaving stitched together instances of cluster chords and doubting puppets into a portrait of vulnerability that reinforced one of Rogers’s core motifs: It takes a person, not a hero, to protect children. Not a pie-in-the-face kind of guy, we watched Fred McFeely Rogers ponder in the tall grass in between changing shoes and tackling hard topics like grief, death, and terrorism. Demonstrations of his honesty, inclusivity, kindness, patience, listening skills, and unconditional love revealed the subject as the archetype for a timeless paternal figure. Although his ministry athwart sensationalism took place in the era of broadcast television, we imagined that any younger generation in the history of the world could connect with and feel empowered by his carefully worded and well-tempered mission. –Rick Weaver --- 23 Leave No Trace Dir. Debra Granik [Bleecker Street] Few directors are as curious about or sensitive to alternative modes of existence as Debra Granik, who followed Winter’s Bone and the documentary Stray Dog with this tale of a father and daughter willfully attempting to live off the grid in the present-day Pacific Northwest. Leave No Trace was quiet and deliberate, but not remotely uneventful: Granik showed Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) moving through a handful of makeshift, scrappy, and industrialized communities. With minimal embellishments, Granik made each change of scenery feel at once seismic and utterly authentic. Moreover, she guided her two lead actors through agonizing psychological arcs without a whiff of cliché, as a daughter gradually discovered that her life and well-being will be enriched by community, while her PTSD-afflicted father confronted the fact that he can’t abide by the obligations and niceties of modern civilization. Granik’s film had a Bressonian bleakness, but it was entirely heartfelt and so convincing in its particulars that it couldn’t help but realign our sense of the world. –Christopher Gray --- 22 Support the Girls Dir. Andrew Bujalski [Magnolia Pictures] Your workdays don’t end with you back home ready to decompress; they are your back-home and your decompress. Maybe you slept or something like that (scrolled? drank? had a crisis?), but you aren’t really awake till the first table is seated, and you better leave everything else at the door (lol). Your customers are guests, your wage is nil, and your smile is forced by uninvisible hands. Your coworkers are either No Face or your own flesh and blood, the only ones keeping your head from falling off and bursting into flame at the foot of the heat lamp. They get it! They get you. Or they get the gist, which is about as much of you as you get anyway. Because if you actually stopped to think about… No need to pretend: You hate this place, and you find yourself doing anything for it, for each other, because you all know the conditions are absolutely fucked and fuck that. Your favorite regular is here; you’re in a good mood for some reason. You act certifiable, you scream, you screw your head back on. The POS is down. You’re short. You make it. Your coworker says, “[That manager] can suck my dick.” Or, “I am going to murder this couple.” Or, “Y’all come back now!” You loved her for that. This movie loved her for that, through all of it, and it loved you too. A double whammy: Regina Hall et al. returned the workday to life itself and transformed working class unity into grace (laughter), something we could use. You have nothing to lose. –Pat Beane --- 21 Eighth Grade Dir. Bo Burnham [A24] In an interview with NPR, former YouTube star Bo Burnham said he wanted to make a story about the internet and how it feels to be alive right now. OK, sure, he succeeded in doing that by having 13-year-old Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) create and upload vlog entries on how to best navigate the social anxieties of being a young teen. However, by the end of the film, what this angle really emphasized with great nuance (perhaps unintentionally?) is that children of every generation — regardless of the gap — suffer from the same anxieties, sexual insecurities, and self-blame. Identity has always been a fluid performance; the internet has simply made it more permanent. To star a young girl currently living the same age IRL that she portrays brilliantly in the film is in large part what made Eighth Grade not only one of our favorite films of 2018, but also one of the most genuine coming-of-age films, period. This casting decision made it impossible for Burnham to project his experiences and memories onto the story, which fortunately meant it was not biographical or about nostalgia. Rather, Eighth Grade was simply a present-day story about a complex experience that has always transcended the outlets through which they’ve been mediated. –NB [pagebreak] 20 Suspiria Dir. Luca Guadagnino [Produzioni Atlas Consorziate] In 1980, during Italy’s “years of lead,” Bologna Station, built in neoclassical style during the Fascist era, was bombed by neofascist terrorists — 85 died. Today, despite the coffee-drinking herds pouring through it, the station retains a bleak and melancholy atmosphere. Luca Guadagnino captured something of this in his remake of Suspiria. Set in the German Autumn of 1977 (the release date of the original), the poisonous and paranoid atmosphere of Cold War Berlin, when Leftists turned to violence in the face of failed denazification and a conservative establishment, bubbled in the background. To its cold occult decadence, the film added stylized and unforgettable body horror. The whole built to an over-the-top conclusion, which was perfect both as a nod to the campiness of the original (and the giallo genre) and because Guadagnino’s deft melding of physical and emotional horror was a slow-burn that demanded combustion. It was a wyrd companion piece to surreal works grappling and playing with similar legacies, from Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich (a.k.a. The Revolution Is My Boyfriend) to Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany. The personal was also political: the original was a masterpiece of style and ambiance marred by subtle misogyny, but in Guadagnino’s vision, this became an exploration of the fraught heat and darkness of dynamics between women in their exercise of power and community. Dakota Johnson lacked fire in the belly, as did Thom Yorke’s anaemic soundtrack, but a subplot some thought needless served up the film’s most appalling moment: a sickening portrayal of the pain of lost love regained, then once more ripped away with casual malice. This was more than a memorial suspiria; it was a wholly worthy rebirth of the Mater Suspiriorum. –Rowan Savage --- 19 Lazzaro Felice Dir. Alice Rohrwacher [Netflix] Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature, the Cannes-celebrated Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro), was built on the many tensions it engendered &mdash namely, between a humanistic premise and the layers of dejection it was buried underneath, the timeless aspirations of a fable and a cynically bitter view of modernity, and the rustic realism of its form and the story’s fantastic detours. The film followed the threadline that, like the wolf, men will exploit men in all spaces, times, levels, and situations: A Marquise keeps a group of peasants working for her in near slavery; they in turn abuse and overwork the titular Lazzaro, a young peasant whose innocence and goodness paint him into the archetype of the “holy fool.” He roams through the story in a perplexity recalling the Christ-like dispossessed of classic Italian cinema. His mission on this earth, it would seem, is to prove that even the lowest of the low, the wicked and the perverse, are capable of gestures of kindness. How enduring, truthful, and integral these were to their characters, to the essence of their humanity, was something Lazzaro must discover at his own expense, paying ever higher costs in this beguiling yet disturbingly recognizable modern parable. –jrodriguez6 --- 18 Night Is Short, Walk On Girl Dir. Masaaki Yuasa [Toho] You wake up after a long night out. You aren’t hungover at all — it’s a miracle, truly a miracle. What do you remember from last night? Not names, certainly. Maybe not even places. It’s all like a strange fairytale, one of glowing neon and drinks that tasted better because you didn’t pay for them, of hilarious characters and absurd triumphs. Did that bouncer really let you in, even though you were $9 short of cover? You feel fantastic. This feeling was alive in Night Is Short, Walk On Girl: an insensible, overwhelmingly jubilant, and optimistic perspective on “a night on the town.” Pulling trade tactics from films like Amélie, El Futuro, and A Town Called Panic, the movie was full of humor, bliss, and no pulled punches (friendship punches or not) when it came to devilish winks. With not a single frame lacking in humor or joy, the film left us feeling like hangovers are something we’ve never experienced, like each night is full of mystery and romance, like our next big moment is waiting just around the corner. Perhaps we’ll make this a big weekend — go out on Friday and Saturday? — who knows… –Lijah Fosl --- 17 If Beale Street Could Talk Dir. Barry Jenkins [Annapurna] Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel was perhaps the most aesthetically accomplished and jaw-droppingly beautiful American film in years. It’s difficult to avoid hyperbole or rampant name-checking when confronted with an opening crane shot and a sumptuous autumnal wardrobe straight out of Douglas Sirk, or with a bracingly musical, time-shifting sense of montage that conjured numerous titans of contemporary Asian cinema, or with a swelling score by Nicholas Britell that exquisitely captured the film’s oscillating currents of unabashed romanticism and great melancholy. Despite the film’s sweeping, sexy, earnest depiction of the bond between pregnant teenage shopgirl Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), a sculptor in jail accused of rape, Jenkins’s adaptation was clear-eyed and anguished about how they have to navigate lives of subjugation, a theme brought to the fore in alternately haunted and agonized performances by Brian Tyree Henry and Regina King. As such, Jenkins remade Baldwin in his image, trying with all his might to conquer fury with love. –Christopher Gray --- 16 Burning Dir. Lee Chang-dong [CGV] Deep under the delicate melodrama of a love triangle, the noir-ish mystery of a disappearing woman, and the moody male rivalry that plays out in its final act, Burning was charged with the same currents that power our defining social divisions: rural against urban, men against women, working class against dubious wealth, connected against isolated. Director Lee Chang-dong’s comeback thriller was a Trojan horse stocked heavy with political anguish, a dense, angular ballet of themes erupting just out of sight under a sensitive character drama that forced three young people of clashing identity and privilege into a pressured environment of overlapping interests and dark secrets. What stood out about Burning was how it probed not these ideological struggles themselves, but the existential uncertainty they inspire, as well as the insidious psychological toll they take on the individual. In all its discomfort and beauty — aided by subtle performances and distinctive cinematography — Burning served as both a careful portrait of a quietly revolutionizing South Korea and an uneasy study of the antagonisms and paranoia gradually tyrannizing the youth of today’s globally tainted age. –Colin Fitzgerald --- 15 Madeline’s Madeline Dir. Josephine Decker [Oscilloscope] From the very start, Madeline, and by extension the audience, was told that performance is not identity, that the emotions an actor renders are borrowed from someone else. This warning was not heeded. We met the eponymous 16-year-old (Helena Howard) as she shuffled through roles: a cat, an actress, a daughter, a sea turtle, an assailant, a pig on the run, a prisoner, a confused young woman of mixed race. Some of these identities played out on the stage of her experimental performance troupe, managed by maternal — and directorial — surrogate Evangeline (Molly Parker), though they inevitably bled through to her “real” life and back onto the stage, forming a tight, indiscernible tangle as this feedback loop began to dominate the production. Driven by the tension between the neurotic, controlling impulses of her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the haphazard psychic excavation spearheaded by Evangeline, the film, cut to the rhythms of a psychological thriller and as improvised as the troupe’s performances, unreeled with disorienting, balletic, colorful, and oftentimes invasive cinematography. Madeline’s Madeline was a complex film of blurred and appropriated identities, one concerned, reflexively (as it is in some sense a retelling of how Decker and Howard came to collaborate and make this very film), with self-authorship, self-ownership, and the power dynamics inherent in representation. “I’m really interested in people who are out of control of their circumstances,” stated Evangeline at a dinner party. But what do we owe these lenders of emotion and what does it mean to tell a story that is not ours? As we move through psychic strata leaving our own fingerprints everywhere, inhabit or direct bodies that look and experience differently than our own, what are our responsibilities? Where is the ethic of storytelling? Of course, no film could satisfactorily answer such questions, but Madeline’s Madeline grappled with them in a dense, dizzying, hyper-expressive, sometimes frustrating, and self-castigating manner that spoke to the immense trust between actor and director. –Cynocephalus --- 14 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman [Sony Pictures Releasing] In an arena that seems to be getting more overstuffed with each passing year, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse surprised us just by being the most fun superhero movie we’ve seen in ages. From the second it revved its engines, Into the Spider-Verse hit a breakneck speed as exhilarating as a web-slinging joyride through the city, its mesmerizing 2D/3D graphics illustrating each thought, sound effect, and surreal set piece with an eye-popping neon panache. Each character was sketched with just the right mix of sympathy and self-awareness, whether it was our immediately relatable hero Miles Morales, the cynical, sweatpant-clad Peter B. Parker, or the wounded, monstrously gargantuan Kingpin. Even down to the music, Into the Spider-Verse kept its pace relentlessly fresh, washing us in waves of Swae Lee and Juice WRLD as we journeyed across alternate Spider-Man histories and dimensions in search of a way to once again save the world from destruction. It all somehow added up to a movie as unexpected and experimental as it was unabashedly pop — a classic, trope-skidding superhero tale that you’ve got to see to believe. –Sam Goldner --- 13 BlacKkKlansman Dir. Spike Lee [Focus Features] In BlacKkKlansman, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) was a man caught between two worlds. Too black to be taken seriously as a police officer, too loyal to his duties as a police officer to be taken seriously as a proponent of Black Power. Naturally, Stallworth did what anyone would do in this situation: become the first black detective in Colorado Springs, infiltrate his local Ku Klux Klan chapter by posing as a disgruntled white supremacist on the phone, enlist his Jewish colleague (Adam Driver) to pose as him at Klan meetings, catfish David Duke himself, and foil a deadly bomb plot. The KKK, as portrayed in this Spike Lee Joint, could be best described as a gang of bumbling idiots. Just literal morons who blow themselves up. If the events of the film weren’t based on a true story, they would seem almost too absurd to be true. As racism today threatens to tear the country apart from the inside, BlacKkKlansman did all it could to call out white supremacists and serve them a modicum of justice. But the film also recognized just how dangerous the ideas of these people can be and how imperative it is to keep fighting to bring them down. –Jeremy Klein --- 12 Annihilation Dir. Alex Garland [Paramount/Netflix] There is a common fundamental misconception that Nirvana is either a place, like Heaven, or a state or period, like Peace. In reality, Nirvana means something like “blowing out” or “extinguishing.” Attaining Nirvana, then, isn’t an attainment at all, because it isn’t a summit or a destination or really even a “thing.” It is not, however, synonymous with Annihilation, but just as Gravity housed symbols that could be appreciated as “Buddhist,” Annihilation beckoned us into life’s terrifying glimmer of impartial consequence so that we could assess our way out of it. In The Shimmer, karma accrued, leaving behind not moral threads, but matter in forms as disparate as flowering corpses and a bear made of screams. Locating Buddhist imagery in film is often a sign of clumsy analysis, but witnessing these women worn by this violence of culmination grapple with their own threads of being was like witnessing a hierophany, a horrifying refraction of sacred DNA in a profane plane. It’s enough of a reminder of why we even started making existential art. Awfulness irrupted through Annihilation in that old-school religious studies sense, because it refracted what many of us associate with being human: self-destruction. And whether or not we could explain what we saw when we faced ourselves in that lighthouse, we left changed in a way that only prayer or film could catalyze. –Jazz Scott --- 11 You Were Never Really Here Dir. Lynne Ramsay [Amazon] Adapting a book by Jonathan Ames, writer/director Lynne Ramsay upends the thriller/character study by making a brilliant film about violence without showing the actual violence onscreen. It was a choice born of necessity — the filmmaker didn’t feel comfortable shooting action sequences — but it was completely within the spirit of this bold and haunting look at a man (Joaquin Phoenix) whose sole gift of violence and pain followed him like a heavy shadow. By focusing more on the consequences of violence that weighed deeply on him as he navigated a path of righteousness, Ramsay depicted a compromised world, shattered long ago by a trauma that reverberated louder with every new transgression. The film was angry, mournful, and frightening, but it also pierced through the oppressive darkness without sugarcoating the ordeal. Propelled by Jonny Greenwood’s incredible score, You Were Never Really Here was a gorgeous movie that waded into bleak territory without feeling like tragedy porn, a beautiful tale — even amongst the grotesque — about the inherent need for salvation that drives us forward. –Neurotic Monkey [pagebreak] 10 Hereditary Dir. Ari Aster [A24] Hereditary, the first feature from writer-director Ari Aster was more than just the spiritual descendant of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Psycho. It was not just the latest addition to the A24 family of slow-building, well-crafted horror films. Hereditary was about the unavoidable legacies that our families leave us, and for this it bore an uncanny resemblance to the bleak family dramas of Bergman or Haneke. Annie (played by Toni Collette in a career performance) said and did unforgivable things to her son and husband (Alex Wolff and Gabriel Byrne), and we squirmed. First out of angst, then disgust, and finally fear. And after being emotionally worn down with 90 minutes of this, the film fully committed to its supernatural heritage and delivered some of the best frights of the year. We loved it because it was an assured first step from a new director and a further commitment to excellence from an exciting young distribution company. We loved it because if the first two-thirds were painful to watch, then the last third offered us the voyeuristic release of a horror film. But most of all, we loved it because it married the visceral and the cerebral, giving birth to an unholy experience that stuck with us, like a tick. –Jeff Miller --- 09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen [Annapurna] The last two decades have had their share, but 2018 was a proper trifecta of spirited, inventive Westerns. Audiard’s Sister’s Brothers was the bitter pill rendered unexpectedly sweeter; Damsel was a triumphant anti-romance (a nice thematic companion piece to 2015’s Slow West); and this anthology gave us a perfectly-blended fun, dark, and heartbreaking (namely the beautiful, merciless “Meal Ticket” segment) genre classic. The tone shifted wildly, well heralded by the eponymous opening tale (cartoonishly musical and silly, but cleverly undermined with graphic violence and grim meta-commentary). We had our requisite rich characterization native to a Coen Bros. film, with strong turns from Zoe Kazan, Stephen Root (natch), Harry Melling, Grainger (“DOG HOLES!”) Hines, and Chelcie Ross, for a start (Brendan Gleeson almost does “The Unfortunate Rake” as well as Ian McShane, but not quite). But there was also a curious, world-weary current fusing the episodes, one of exhausted sadness and a dread-dodging sort of hindsight. Life and its lore as a turgid tangle we’re a little too anxious to leave behind. A long goodbye to the “the meanness in the used to be.” –Willcoma --- 08 The Other Side of the Wind Dir. Orson Welles [Netflix] For all the excitement that it stirred, there was a fear among cinephiles that Orson Welles’s final film, completed 33 years after his death, wouldn’t live up to the story of its own production. These fears were unfounded. Suffused with moments of staggering brilliance, The Other Side of the Wind was a dense, multivalent, sometimes maddening film, one that we are lucky to have in any form. Much like Henri-George’s Clouzot’s Le Prisonniere (and its ill-fated precursor Inferno), The Other Side of the Wind evidenced a master filmmaker pushing himself in his late period to fully explore the visual representation of aberrant psychology through abstraction, deconstruction, and exaggeration. Both Clouzot and Welles amplified color to impressionistic, oversaturated heights, but whereas Clouzot’s experimentation was primarily formal, Welles upended narrative, creating a mise en abyme that was at once hagiography and self-assassination. Even what was clearly intended as pastiche (Hannaford’s film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind, was essentially the De Düva of Antonioni’s then-recent work) was utterly riveting, with balletic mise-en-scène that presaged and rivaled the best of Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. Most impressive, however, was the juxtaposition of the aggressively stylized film-within-the-film and the faux-vérité surrounding it — Hannaford’s film was all propulsive jump-cuts on action in a self-consciously auteurist mode, while the frame story comprised a messy collage of film stocks, focal lengths, and framing styles meant to suggest a polyphony of perspectives, or perhaps a fracturing of one’s psyche; editor Bob Murawski, working from Welles’s extensive notes and workprint, sutured it all into a kinetic rhythm both jarring and cohesive. This was absolutely essential viewing, an invigorating testament to the medium itself and a reminder of how much further it can still go. –Christopher Bruno --- 07 Shirkers Dir. Sandi Tan [Netflix] Shirkers was, among other things, a portrait of young creativity, folklore, fragile egos, self-discovery, DIY practices, and the cultural impact that a film can have on a country. The documentary told the story of Sandi Tan, a Singaporean teenager who set out to make the country’s first notable road movie in 1992. With the help of the “established” Western director Georges Cardona, a gang of dreamy-eyed college kids put their lives on hold for the film (also named Shrikers) in an attempt to write their country’s film history. However, in the final stages of the process, the footage disappeared with Cardona. What followed was a decades-long search for a rebellious movie that was supposed to blow Singapore wide open, its creator, and the man plagued with an imperialistic obsession for fame. It was a real-life story that could only happen in a movie. –Sam Tornow --- 06 Zama Dir. Lucrecia Martel [Strand Releasing] Look: Don Diego de Zama has come unstitched in time. He stands at the edge of earth and sea. Waves are undertow, proof that the future is unfolding somewhere. But time has ripped itself up and away from him. He turns from the waves and walks up the shore, still in frame. He pauses, walks back, trapped. He is not entitled to languish; his days are spent running ruined bureaucracies. He appeals to a succession of fat governors to be sent away or home or anywhere else. But he is here. He is casually cruel and pathetically hopeful that he will be rendered reverence. He will not be. Lucrecia Martel, the master, adapted the fevered anti-history of Antonio Di Benedetto’s prose into transformative euphoria. Her cinematography was for freeing bodies. Zama didn’t represent colonialism so much as it canceled the notion that belonging has a place anymore. By pinning her hero to the same useless hope as he decayed through the years, Martel created a world of unwavering indigenous bodies and mocking llamas. She papered over Zama like an unmoved fungus, reducing him back to ephemera to be fertilized. She said no to his hopes. The corregidor, the man who can’t be king, remained in frame. –Frank Falisi --- 05 The House That Jack Built Dir. Lars von Trier [IFC] Lars von Trier’s movies are not easy to watch, but past the gruesome violence, the fucked-up interpersonal relationships, and the heady themes, there’s always something there. Case in point: The House That Jack Built, a pitch-black film in which a serial killer explains five “incidents” from his life to a mysterious companion. And unsurprisingly, with its aggressive depictions of the macabre, the film enjoyed about as divisive a public response as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring did at its riotous 1913 premiere. At Cannes, von Trier’s film reportedly moved over 100 people to walk out; yet, when it ended, it was met with thunderous applause and, indeed, a standing ovation from those who remained. Yes, it was shockingly violent, but it was also incredibly funny, and as its protagonists traveled through their Dantean hellscape, they offered profound and unique meditations on art, time, and history. In other words, the film’s brutality was in service of something, not just an end in itself. Today, people are obsessed with talking about how everyone should and should not behave, what people should and should not think and say. But they’re far less interested in examining the pathological reasons why we have those urges to say or do the “wrong” thing in the first place. Some would argue that this is the exact reason art exists, to examine ourselves at a deeper level. And this film asked big questions: Can destruction be art? Can murder? Is depicting something the same as validating it? If you don’t want to subject yourself to this movie, my opinion is that that’s exactly why you should watch it. If you get through it, you may learn something about yourself. I did. Lars von Trier isn’t afraid to channel and complicate humankind’s darkest, most sadistic desires, and that’s a good thing. In fact, isn’t that one of the essential roles of the artist? –Adam Rothbarth --- 04 Mandy Dir. Panos Cosmatos [RLJE] Words like psychedelic, hallucinogenic, revenge, rage, and insane got tossed around liberally by those attempting to summarize Mandy, the sophomore directorial effort by Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) starring Nicolas Cage in all his nouveau-shamanic glory and then some. But those were understatements. Mandy was a maximalist assault, a new death yarn whose title screen didn’t even arrive until an hour and 15 minutes in, when protagonist Red went hunting for Lysergicenobites and Jesus freaks. Like antagonist Jeremiah Sand, Cosmatos, Cage, cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, and late scorer Jóhann Jóhannsson all weaponized complete sensory overload to mesmerize and capture their audience. But unlike the Mandy character, we could hardly muster a laugh past “Erik Estrada from CHiPs” — we merely watched in wide-eyed, slack-jawed awe at the un(adulte)rated, undefinable phantasmagoria — the bathroom scene, the chainsaw scene. OK, so maybe that wasn’t what Roger Ebert had in mind when he rightly called Nicolas Cage one of the greatest actors of his generation, but then Ebert probably also wouldn’t have imagined the actor spending two nights in his underwear, tied to a fence in a Belgian forest to prep for a scene (apparently, yes, that happened). That’s the point, though. The hype was realer than real. Mandy was a masterpiece beyond what any of us could ever have imagined. –Samuel Diamond --- 03 Sorry to Bother You Dir. Boots Riley [Annapurna] Every day, they take a little bit more. For months, we’ve heard about how Amazon runs its warehouses like sweatshops. A couple weeks ago, it was Facebook selling your private messages. If WorryFree were to step forward tomorrow with a unique, 21st-century approach to living debt-free, would any of us be surprised? For all its detours into the surreal and the absurd, Sorry to Bother You never felt that far removed from the world we inhabit. The questions it asked and dilemmas it presented touched on everything from the changing face of corporate power in the age of tech startups, the challenges of navigating predominantly white spaces for non-whites, and the complicity of individuals in larger systems of oppression. Moving through the world today is an act of gliding from one outrage to the next, and Riley shares our outrage, but he coupled it here with a sense of playfulness and hope that rendered Sorry to Bother You one of the most important films of 2018. –Joe Hemmerling --- 02 The Favourite Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos [Fox Searchlight] Early on, Duchess Sarah admonished her lover, Queen Anne, that love has its limits — to which the queen replied, “Well it shouldn’t.” The story proceeded through a delicious series of political and bedroom maneuvers to prove the queen utterly and tragically wrong. Yorgos Lanthimos has always taken a perverse glee in sticking his movie knife into the banal, received wisdom of Western right-thinking. His trajectory from Dogtooth forward had increasingly tightened the thumbscrews on his audience; The Killing of a Sacred Deer was as muscle-bound and torturous to watch as it was incisive. But The Favourite turned that sensibility inside out, exploding with bright and colorful production design, brilliantly mining 18th-century courtly fashions for visual comedy. Rouged, powdered, and highly wiggy men ponced about like overbred poodles through all the absurd ornamentation, as a raging battle of wills played out among the film’s three towering female protagonists. The script was nastier than Dynasty and invented a patois of 18th-century Queen’s English and contemporary colloquialisms that somehow felt organic, but it had a Shakespearean heft at its core that played out in a perfectly odd and dissonant finale. –Water --- 01 First Reformed Dir. Paul Schrader [A24] 2018 was filled with days when hopping from one social media platform or news network to the next resembled a modern-day Stations of the Cross, with each subsequent click offering something that was somehow more terrifying, depressing, and enraging than the last. With the massive sprawl of readily available information, staying informed was more effortless than ever, yet it could easily, almost imperceptibly, transform from a desire to remain dutifully cognizant of our ever-shifting global landscape into a form of unabated and isolating self-flagellation. In Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, it was this hyper-awareness of earthly perils that plagued Michael (Philip Ettinger), a young environmental activist who believed it immoral for his pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) to bring a child into this crumbling world, when he desperately met with Ethan Hawke’s already jaded, world-weary Reverend Toller for counsel. Despite telltale signs of suicidal thinking, Toller found their discussion not troubling, but “invigorating.” And when Michael blew off his head with a shotgun, the good reverend reacted not with sorrow or regret, but by taking on Michael’s all-too-real concerns of potential global disaster, bearing them like a cross upon his shoulders as he confronted the duplicitous evils that have infiltrated both his tiny, sparsely attended church and the superchurch that funds the relic he was keeping alive after 250 years. In this year’s cinema, there was perhaps no greater metaphor for the failure of American institutions to serve the public in any meaningful way (as many have slowly been reduced to thinly veiled money-laundering schemes for the wealthy) than the fact that Toller was stuck in a historically famous church with a broken organ, forced to hawk cheap souvenirs merely to keep the doors open. First Reformed deftly tackled this notion of the individual vs. implacable global forces, with an acute focus on the unsettling merging of ecclesiastical forces with those of an unbridled and amoral capitalist system. Schrader’s ascetic vision, informed most explicitly by Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Yasujiro Ozu, offered the perfect aesthetic framework through which traditional systems of belief could collide haphazardly with the ruthlessly unfeeling, profit-hungry, hyper-modern business models that dominate both corporate and institutional cultures. Schrader’s camera was almost exclusively immobile, yet this stillness presented a deeply perceptive gaze and compositions as stark as the cold New England winter. It was a vision of the world as unwavering as that of Toller, who lived a life virtually sealed off from the real world, indulging himself with the sort of small rituals we all tend to hold onto to provide a semblance of order and meaning in an increasingly chaotic world. But for all of Toller’s pain (often self-inflicted), First Reformed offered a vision of grace and tenderness in the heavily symbolic Mary, who prevented the film from tipping into the complete and utter despair that Toller found himself in. In one of the year’s most remarkable sequences, Mary arrived at Toller’s office and together performed a ritual that she often did with her now-deceased husband. As she laid on top of the priest, making as much body-to-body contact as possible and matching his breathing patterns, the two achieved a temporary sense of communal transcendence, slowly rising from the floor as they began to travel over vast mountains and beautiful oceanside vistas. But Toller’s thoughts couldn’t remain fixed on utopic ideals for long before visions of city life and landfills of untold sizes took over. Such incessant and uneasy wavering between hope and despair, sensuality and violence, love and rage, faith in the future and the fatalistic acceptance of our environment’s demise filled First Reformed, which stands as the most eloquent yet soul-shattering microcosm of the world that we saw all year. –Derek Smith http://j.mp/2H7Z1Nd

[lonelylionisland-blog]

THICK BEATS FOR GOOD GIRLS (presented by CHECKPOINT THEATRE)

This show is playing in Singapore from 5th - 22nd April 2018 at The Drama Centre Black Box.

This review has spoilers ahead. Read at your discretion.

THICK BEATS FOR GOOD GIRLS is a two-woman show written and performed by Jessica Bellamy and Pooja Nansi, interweaving autobiographical stories about the artists’ childhoods and formative years, and the role Hip Hop has played in their lives.

The show is anchored with dictionary definitions of key Hip Hop terms that reach a five-act structure (this lion thinks? forgets?) but the show itself is two hours without intermission and punctuated by three Q&A sections where the house lights are turned on the audience. The effect of the Q&A segments recalls the classic album The Miseducation of Miss Lauryn Hill with its tracks that featured classroom discussions about autonomy, independence, relationships, respect (a note here that shall be returned to later).

First, Bellamy and Nansi must be applauded on their stamina. There is literally a scene scored to DMX’s X Gon Give It To Ya, where Nansi tells of her work-out regime and determination (while running the entire time) to be strong, successful, winning at life, a salient point in a genre that has sometimes objectified woman with so much unmasked vitriol. The show’s scope is also extremely wide and quite successful in selling the idea of alternative histories of Hip Hop through personal narrative.

However, the show is so ambitious that it sometimes lacks clarity and in some parts seems to deliberately obfuscate the intentions of the performers, hiding them behinds walls of rhetorical question after rhetorical question until this lion doesn’t know where the bass is at.

The 3 Q&A sections are one such example of a structure that ironically weakens the show. They are not ‘real’. They serve to imply audience participation, but the questions are leading and at the expense of the audience, and the magic sense of dwelling and pause for reflection that is in the Lauryn Hill album it references is not present. 

(For explanation: The first Q&A asks the audience to identify a ‘thicc’ beat from a not ‘thicc’ beat. The second feels like a school presentation of P. Diddy (or Love apparently). The third actually asks for any alternative opinions on what has been presented. One wonders what the two would do if actually given one.)

It is impossible not to analyse the approaches of each writer-performer alongside the other in a show like this. The synergy of performance is inpeccable. But it is clear from the start that Nansi’s viewpoint is more anxious; she spends an entire segment justifying her love for Hip Hop amidst its misogyny (and not particularly convincingly). Bellamy, on the other hand, approaches the sexual nature of Hip Hop unapologetically as liberating for the young Jewish girls of her youth.

The reason Bellamy is more effective than Nansi is very much to do with the difference in their attitude towards territory and women in particular. In one segment where she tells of her sojourn to Ireland, Bellamy characterises herself as SBB (standing for Slut Bag Bellamy) and in another, Australia’s Champion Masturbator. Bellamy’s humour and acceptance of different types of women comes from a healthy love and regard for herself. In another segment about youth, she describes how My Neck My Back by Khia allows her friend (mimed by Nansi) to let loose and stare down a ‘good’ Jewish boy she likes over the  lyrics no good girl should dance to (“My neck, my back. Lick my pussy and my crack”). Bellamy speaks of the female gaze on the female body and tells us that in a world so afraid of a woman’s sexual autonomy, she chooses (and encourages the audience) to take a position of support and true love.

Nansi on the other hand is not so generous. There will be nostalgia for some in the details. Getting drunk on home-brought booze or cheap beer in an Ang Mo Kio kopitiam, meeting at the River Valley 7-11 just before cover charge goes up to full price, the annoying exclusivity of a typical Zouk guestlist hence the change of plans to Dbl O. So far so good. Except she insists these spaces are ‘brown’ spaces. While she describes the magic of entering the club for the first time and being let in on a secret, she makes clear jabs at the archetype Chinese girl who find herself in the very same position for the first-time, mouthing along to Kanye and Nelly with ‘Nigga’ and ‘bitch’. 

Nansi claims the right to the usage of Hip Hop’s more aggressive swagger over others is because of her immigrant roots and minority status. But these statements are laid flat and unsubstantiated. It’s also worth noting that Nansi spent most of her life in Singapore and is in many ways, a product of the Singapore school system she alludes to. Most Singaporeans trace their roots to only the past hundred years or less. Immigrant or otherwise, Singapore, and Marine Parade in particular (this being her ‘hood in the show) are hardly ghetto. In a country so inter-ethnic and inter-religious, what does minority mean? It appears to be more of a grappling. Territorialising is natural in a country this concerntrated. But the pressure alone is not enough substance to bolster her frustration. For this reason, unfortunately, Nansi appears petulant through a fair amount of the show, and it is with relief that we are given Bellamy’s humour in the inbetween spaces. 

This may however be entirely intentional. Good cop, bad cop. Salt N Pepa. But the salty writing from Bellamy is without a doubt, tastier. What Nansi really means perhaps, what she mistakes for ‘Chineseness’ (which is the majority racial group in Singapore) in her monologues is class and body image. She claims that no one in her secondary school (Paya Lebar Methodist Girl’s) would be caught dead in clubs like Gotham Penthouse but we have to take her word for it. Plenty of Singapore Chinese people have also been in the spaces she describes (not everyone is crazy or to-do enough to spot the cover to go to Zouk) but acknowledging this would be problematic to the harsh narrative she presents. The show ends with her agony over the sort of women who appear in face whitening commercials and condo advertisements and doesn’t beg as much as insist they leave her spaces alone; a fair request but a rather suspicious (vicious even?) last word to conclude with. One is reminded of an alternate Regina George in Mean Girls, as Nansi literally builds a world in this show for herself in which select people are invited, and one wonders will there ever be peace in girl world? 

It’s particularly frustrating as Nansi also comes forward with the line (this lion is paraphrasing): “The world is a cesspit... Let us lift up the prayers, and what is [wrong] re-write.” One can intellectually understand caginess as a coping mechanism or an approach to dealing with minority status, but it’s not the only one available as Bellamy exhibits. Emotively, one is turned off by this clique-making mentality. The Us vs. Them. It is disturbing (and brave) to see both parts present but one wishes this was articulated better.  It is with great irony then that words like: 

‘feminism’, 

‘thickness’, 

‘swagger’, 

‘good’, 

are Oxford-dictionarily-defined in key points of the show, but not ‘girl’ (gender is briefly explored in a scene in a religious school, but not girlhood as opposed to boyhood).

This lion left wondering: What’s the difference between a girl and a woman? If this show is “a coming-of-age story” do the characters, endearing as they may be running joyously around screaming ‘Lick it, lick it, lick it good’, ever mature? This is not to say one can’t be free and/or slutty. But even Madonna and Tina Turner (who Nansi references) made their freedom and sexuality clear as adults in full control of their destinies. 

Also, while press material will provoke the public with its promise that this show is “the coming-of-age anthem that would never make it to radio”, many of the songs selected have had airplay on national radio (albeit in edited form with DJs suggesting how naughty the original lyrics are which often stirs the curious and the city is very curious!). Perhaps the only content that genuinely wouldn’t make it to radio are the stories of how each discovered – as girls – that their bodies are capable of sexual pleasure and the importance (as ladies) of insisting on gratification. 

These stories (and the show is chockfull of them) are deeply moving and empowering.

Bellamy remarks darkly that the daily prayer for Jewish boys includes the invocation: Thank you G-d for not making me a woman, and for Jewish girls: Thank you G-d for making me as you will. 

Nansi delights us with her first-time masturbating during a bout of chicken pox. 

Bellamy paints a picture of quaint suburban-life beset by secret and well-used erotica featuring Paul Newman, a mustang and oranges. One hopes Newman’s Own Balsamic Vinigerette was not her choice of lubricant, not that one has had the experience thereof. 

The show is extremely likeable.

This lion does not yet have a rating system. 

[blogwhatthef-blog]

Murdered: The Grimes Sisters

On December 28, 1956 15 year old Barbara and 13 year old Patricia went to see Love Me Tender and were never seen again...

...or were they??

The sisters left their Brighton Park, Chicago, Illinois home and went to the theater located about a mile and a half away. The girls went to see a double feature. A friend of the girls' that sat with her own sister behind them in the theater told police that the last time she saw the Grimes sisters' was around 9pm when she left the movie. She witnessed them standing in the popcorn line while her and her sister were walking out.

Barbara and Patricia were planning on watching both films so their mother wasn't expecting them home til around 11:45pm.

Numerous other people said that they saw the girls boarding a CTA bus on Archer Avenue heading east into the city after the screening. They allegedly got off the bus at Western Avenue, about halfway to their home, around 11:05 pm. (Why would they get off half-way home? These witnesses state the girls got off at 11:05pm. This only gave them 40 minutes to do whatever it is they were planning and make it back to their home.)

This next witness report leads me to believe that for some reason unknown, the sisters decided to exit the bus and walk the rest of the way home. I don't understand the reasoning since this was December in Chicago. It must have been cold. I couldn't imagine wanting to get off the bus and walk in the cold, even at 13-15 years old.

Yet the next witness report that adds to the timeline states that two teenage boys said that while they were driving through the neighborhood at approximately 11:30 pm, they saw the sisters heading east on 35th Street, "giggling and jumping out of doorways at each other" near Seely and Damen Avenues. At this point they would have been approximately two blocks from their home.

(I wonder if these two boys knew the girls? This was late at night and cold outside so it may have been hard to see out the windows? How did these two boys know these were the Grimes sisters? The only way I could take this as being a credible witness report would be if these two boys knew the sisters.)

There were more "sightings" of the sisters but I'm going to stop, skip ahead, just to put some things into perspective, and then we will come back to those.

On January 22, 1957 Barbara and Patricia were found lying nude behind a guardrail off of German Church Road. The girls looked like they had just been dumped from a vehicle. They weren't "staged" or "displayed" like some murderers often times do.

The time of death has been hotly debated. The coroner reports that the girls died within 5 hours of their last FOR SURE KNOWN MEAL. He says the sisters died late on December 28, 1956 or early morning of December 29, 1956. (While I agree stomach contents don't lie and I can't find a reason for stomach contents to stay in the stomach longer by some strange means. I do however find the Chief Investigators claims for his idea of time of death interesting. Also, if the chiefs timeline was accurate it could explain how there were so many sightings of the girls after the night of the 28th.)

Chief Investigator, Harry Glos, believes the girls were kept alive at least until January 7, 1957. His reasoning? He pointed to a thin layer of ice found on the bodies of the girls as indicating that they had been alive until at least January 7, since only after that date would there have been snowfall enough to react with their warm bodies and create the ice layer, let alone hide the bodies until their discovery.

(I do agree that it would take warm bodies to make the snow/sleet melt and then refreeze to ice, but couldn't the bodies have been warm from being in a car with the heat on? A dead body couldn't retain the heat, but heat in a car could cause the skin to be warm enough so that when they were dumped whatever their skin touched would cause melting. While I can't find ways for stomach contents to lie I can find ways for a bodies skin to be warmed. The only reason I would prefer this time of death is because of the multiple sightings of the girls into January. But evidence isn't about what I prefer. Its about what's really fact.)

There were no obvious wounds on either girls, and nothing to make the coroner think the girls were drugged, poisoned, or drunk at time of death. The bodies actually had few marks on them, and were described as being "clean". The faces had a few bruises along with some " rodent bites" but overall there was little trauma to the bodies.

Barbara did have a "few puncture wounds to her chest area" and I've seen reports where it was believed those marks were caused from an ice pick. (Since Barbara had the stab wounds but Patricia didn't I would guess that Barbara was who drew the killer to the girls.)

These stab wounds were not what killed her though. They were to shallow to be the cause of death. The coroner also reported that Barbara had evidence of sexual intercourse shortly before her death. He also noted that there were no signs of it being a forcible rape/molestation. (Another fact that makes me think Barbara was who the killer was after. Patricia just happened to be with her sister when all three people came together.)

Another cause odlf debate was the listed cause of death. The coroner determined that the "ultimate cause of death" was "secondary shock" due to exposure to the elements. Over the decades to follow this crime other causes would be debated. One that stands out to me as having some extremely credible reasonings is "strangulation". Those reasons will be given if you keep reading.

I am now going to jump back to "sightings" of the girls. Keep in mind that these sightings supposedly happened after the girls were done murdered, which again, the coroner reported it to be late on December 28, 1956 or early morning of December 29, 1957.

In the early morning hours of December 29, 1956 a security guard on the northwest side believed he was asked for directions by the Grimes girls near Lawrence and Central Park avenues.

In the afternoon hours of December 29, 1956 a classmate of Patricia, eating at Angelo's Restaurant at 3551 South Archer Avenue on the evening of December 29, reported her as walking past with two other unidentified young girls. (I have researched and know how very unreliable witness sightings are. I try to keep that in mind because when the witness actually knows the victim my first reaction is to automatically believe them.)

The night of December 29, 1956 a railroad conductor reported seeing them on a train near the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in north suburban Glenview.

On December 30 at 5:40 am, the owner of the D&L Restaurant at 1340 West Madison said he had seen both girls, with Patricia apparently too drunk or sick to walk without staggering, accompanied by suspect Bennie Bedwell. This location was over five-and-a-half miles from the Brighton Theater. A clerk at the Claremont Hotel, after viewing the bodies at a mortuary, likewise identified the sisters as having checked into the hotel on this date.

On January 1, 1957, the girls were reported aboard a CTA bus on Damen Avenue.

On January 3, three employees at Kresge department store thought they had seen the girls listening to Elvis Presley music at the record counter.

Sometime around January 10, 1957 (the exact date is unknown) a night clerk at the Unity Hotel on West 61st street refused two girls a room because of their age. He believed they were the Grimes sisters.

At the time these reports were coming in police weren't actively search for the sisters. They believed that Barbara and Patricia had ran away to Nashville in the hopes of meeting Elvis Presley. (I'm sure at the time this theory made sense to detectives but I can only think about this and roll my eyes. The girls only had $2.15 between them. To honestly think they would make it to Nashville is ludicrous in my opinion.)

 Because the sisters were thought to be runaways heading to Nashville, reports came in adding fuel to that fire. A woman reported having met them at a bus station there, and accompanied them to a state employment agency to search for work. A clerk at the same agency identified the sisters from photographs and recalled them using the "Grimes" name.

On January 14, 1957 the parents of Patricia Grimes' classmate Sandra Tollstan received two telephone calls around midnight. During the first call, nobody at the other end spoke. Picking up the second phone call 15 minutes later, Sandra's mother Ann heard a "frightened and depressed" voice asking "Is that you, Sandra? Is Sandra there?" Before Ann could bring her daughter to the phone, the caller had hung up. Ann stated she was convinced that the caller's voice belonged to Patricia Grimes.

January 14, 1957 was the end of the reported "sightings" or "calls". On January 22, 1957 the bodies were found.

Bennie Bedwell was the number one suspect in the murders. His coworkers at D&L restaurant even stated they saw him with the girls on the early morning of December 30, 1956. Chief Glos arrested and charged Bedwell with the murders on January 27, 1957. Bedwell upon arrest confessed to the murders. He concocted a story of drinking, sex, and murder. His story however didn't hold up to the actual evidence. Charges were dropped and Bedwell was released. This angered a lot of people, but Bennie Bedwell was a drifter that had limited education, and was illiterate. Its not a shock he falsely confessed when Chief Glos confronted him.

After Bedwells arrest and release Chief Glos was fired. He refused to believe the coroners report about the murders, and continued to go after suspects with only what he believed happened, and not the actual evidence. Even Barbara and Patricia's mother, Loretta Grimes, failed to believe Bedwells confession. After she heard the details Bedwell claimed happened she stated that his confession "was a lie".

January 22, 1957 the bodies are found. Shortly after Loretta Grimes receives a phone call from an anonymous man that described the undressing of the sisters, and detailed the murder. It's reported that he made comments only the murderer would know. Facts that still haven't been released to the public.

Possible link?

On September 22, 1956 Bonnie Leigh Scott left her home in Addison, Illinois at 6:30pm. She would never return.

She was spotted at a diner in Addison and a surplus store around 7:30pm. After those sightings Bonnie vanished.

Like the Grimes' sisters police believed Bonnie ran away. Though Barbara and Patricia had never ran from home, Bonnie had.

A man named Charles Melquist phoned Bonnie's home and told a tale to Jean Schwolow, Bonnie's aunt. Jean immediately called the Addison Police to report it. When detectives confronted Melquist he stated that he was like a "big brother" to Bonnie, and at 8:15pm on the night of her disappearance she had called him begging for help. He claims she said she had "misgivings" about the man she was with. Melquist says he told her "It was her own problem." After that the call disconnected.

He claims he received a second call at 11:00pm that night from an unknown man. The man claimed he and Bonnie got into an argument and he dropped her off at Mannheim Road and U.S. Route 66. He asked thatMelquist get her and bring her home. Melquist said that he went to the spot, but found no trace of Bonnie.

Cops continued to look for Bonnie but found no trace of her or this "mysterious man" until...

On November 15, 1958 some boy scouts made a gruesome discovery in a gulley off La Grange Road -- the nude, decapitated body of a young girl. The dump site was just a few miles from where the nude, frozen bodies of the Grimes sisters had been discovered less than two years before. 

Bonnie's cause of death was from multiple stabbings caused by a large knife. Her head had also been removed.

Detectives called back in witnesses, including Melquist. While Melquist was going over his statements at the station cops were going over his 1956 Chevy Silverado which turned out to be the murder scene. After failing a polygraph Melquist confessed and wrote a 7 page confession.

Melquist told police that he had killed her in the driveway of his Villa Park home. They had been on a date and stopped by his house. When they returned to the car, they were “goofing around” and “wrestling.” Melquist put a pillow over Bonnie’s face and “accidentally” smothered her with it. He had then taken off her clothing, stuffed it under the car seat, and set out to find a place where her body could be hidden where there was little chance it would be found. Driving south and east, he followed to LaGrange Road, about a mile south of 95th Street, where he dumped her body in a gulley where the Argonne forest preserve bordered the highway. He dumped her body over the guardrail, hoping it would be hidden by the brush.

Melquist said he couldn't stop thinking about it so he came back on the Friday after the murder “just to make sure she was there,” and then returned three weeks later with a knife and a pitchfork. He said that he planned to dig a grave. Instead, he cut off Bonnie’s head and kicked it a few feet away. Then, he had “an urge to cut” and mutilated the corpse. He said that he threw the knife and the clothing into the woods, but they were never found. 

In 1959 Melquist was found guilty and sentenced to 99 years. He would only serve 11 before being released.

What's the connection?

Girls roughly the same age.

Girls found nude. Clothes were never found.

Melquist confessed to smothering Bonnie and it's debated that that's how Barbara and Patricia died.

All were dumped in wooded areas on Chicago's southwest side.

Police also discovered that Melquist had the telephone numbers to Barbara and Patricia's neighbors.

Shortly after Bonnie's body was found Melquist called Loretta Grimes boasting about the murders and stating that "he would never get caught". At the time no one knew it was Melquist, that fact would come out later. Loretta had also received calls after her daughter's were found. She state's she knows this is the same man saying, "I will never forget that voice."

Final Thoughts:

While researching this I found some really great articles. There's not a whole lot of information on these cases because of the years they happened in, but what I could find was very detailed and thorough. If you check out the links in my sources there's one that I found extremely interesting. A man, researching the cases for a book, interviewed a woman that would've been 14 years old at the time of Barbara's and Patricia's murder. This woman claims she was with them and was kidnapped to. The details are interesting though I can't tell if it's genuine or not. Why would you not come forward to help catch the man that murdered your friends? I don't understand it.

My opinion is that Melquist was involved in the Grimes' case. How he came across the sisters that night is a guess though. Probably just wrong place, wrong time. So often that's the case.

Melquist died in 2010 so even if it's later proven he will never get to be punished. After he was released for Bonnie's murder he married and had two kids. I would like to think that he lived out his life always looking over his shoulder. We know that that would've been a miserable existence.

Sources:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_the_Grimes_sisters

http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-history-cop/2012/12/new-information-on-disappearance-of-grimes-sisters-chicagos-most-infamous-cold-case/

https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/bonnie-leigh-scott/

http://idnc.library.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/illinois?a=d&d=DIL19581118.2.6

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