#an incredibly fraught transitional period

[tomatoluvr69]

I’m glad Joanna Newsom isn’t on Spotify because The Milk Eyed Mender is so powerfully and painfully evocative of a very bittersweet time in my life that I have to treat it as a rare and expensive bottle of wine that requires a half day’s journey by foot to the wine cellar of an eccentric old man who will allow me to drink the wine, but I may only do so if I sit crosslegged on the earthen floor of his in-ground wine cellar, which he dug by hand, and he closes the wooden hatch over my head and latches it from the outside so I can give the wine and its intricate symphony of notes the proper attention it requires, alone in the dark, and dank, and scent and quiet, and he comes back in a few hours to let me out and hand me a soft cotton handkerchief embroidered by his late wife (he has been a widow for 15x the length of time he was ever married) so I can clean the tears and loam from my cheeks. Aka I have to let it play from the YouTube browser website from my phone and can’t do anything else throughout.

[theanticool]

One of my favorite boxing writers, Malissa Smith, has finally published a sequel to her book on women’s boxing history!

The Promise of Women’s Boxing: A Momentous New Era for the Sweet Science is now available!

The must-read book on the rise of elite women’s boxing

On April 30th, 2022, the first boxing super-fight of the era, headlined by two women and fought at Madison Square Garden, lived up to its hype and then some. The two contestants fought the battle of their lives in front of a sold-out crowd and garnered 1.5 million views through online streaming. It was the culmination of a long, three-centuries arc of women’s boxing history, a history fraught with highs and lows but always imbued with the heart and passion of the women who fought.

In The Promise of Women's Boxing: A Momentous New Era for the Sweet Science, Malissa Smith details the exciting period from the 2012 Olympics through the true “million-dollar baby” women’s super-fights of 2022 and beyond. Rich in content, the stories that emerge focus on boxing stars new and old, important battles, and the challenges women still face in boxing. Smith examines the development of the sport on a global basis, the transition of amateur boxers to the pros, the impact of online streamlining on the sport, the challenges boxing has faced from MMA, and the unprecedented gains women’s boxing has made in the era of the super-fight with extraordinary seven-figure opportunities for elite female stars.

Featuring the stories of women’s boxing icons Katie Taylor, Amanda Serrano, Savannah Marshall, and more, and with a foreword by two-time Olympic gold medalist and three-time undisputed champion Claressa Shields, The Promise of Women’s Boxing offers unprecedented insight into the incredible growth of the sport and the women who have fought in and out of the ring to make it all possible.

[sassycolorgentlemen]

The Border: Arabela's Journey Through Adolescence

"Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it’s teeming with energy and fraught with danger." - Mary Pipher

Mary Pipher's quote captures the essence of adolescence perfectly—this "border" is a dynamic space, alive with both opportunities and challenges. It’s a time of incredible growth, where individuals balance between who they have been and who they are becoming.

Adolescence is a time of transformation and self-discovery. It is the phase of life when we transition from childhood to adulthood, and it is marked by a rollercoaster of emotions, experiences, and growth. During this period, teenagers are in a time of both confusion and clarity. It is a time when we question the world around us, explore our identity, and strive to find our place in society

This phase isn’t just a transition; it’s a journey of self-discovery, where each experience and each emotion contributes to the foundation of adulthood. Every challenge faced during adolescence, every question asked, and every boundary tested all play a role in shaping who they will eventually become.

Arabela, a 17-year-old Grade 12 student at Davao Doctors College. She enjoys drawing, watching anime and reading manhwa, reading books, and writing short stories. She stands out for her authenticity and simplicity. Though she may initially appear shy and reserved (demure), she is genuinely engaging when she shares her experiences. As she navigates adolescence, Arabela openly reflects on the changes and challenges that come with this stage, offering thoughtful insights into her journey of self-discovery. Her ability to communicate her thoughts and feelings highlights her growth and resilience, as well as her curiosity about understanding herself and the world around her.

As she approaches the end of her high school journey, she is navigating the challenges and opportunities that come with being on the cusp of young adulthood. Her studies not only prepare her for academic success but also shape her ambitions and aspirations for the future, providing a foundation for her to pursue her goals with resilience and determination."

Physical Milestone (Puberty, Height/Weight, Exercise and Nutrition and Sleep) 

At 17, Arabela is experiencing the physical changes that come with adolescence, when Arabela was asked about her experiences during puberty, she noted that she has noticed some recent changes in her height and body shape. She mentioned that during her junior high school years, she always sat at the front of the classroom, but now she finds herself seated at the back, where the taller students are placed. Additionally, she shared that her breasts have enlarged. Arabela reflected on her childhood, recalling that she was quite thin and participated in feeding programs due to her weight. Despite these changes, she mentioned that she has not gained significant weight since she was a child, which she attributes to her genetics or heredity from her parents.

When asked if there have been any changes in her appearance, such as her skin, hair, or voice, Arabela replied that her voice has remained unchanged. However, she did experience acne breakouts during this period. In response to a follow-up question about how she handles these changes, she discussed her skincare routine. Arabela emphasized that she applies skincare products to maintain her skin’s health and freshness, indicating her proactive approach to managing the challenges associated with puberty.

Arabela also experiences the challenges of menstruation. When asked about the age at which she first experienced menarche, she shared her experience as part of adolescence that brings difficulties, including the pain and fatigue that often accompany her menstrual cycle.

She described these sensations as sometimes overwhelming and unexplained, making it harder for her to focus on her studies and daily activities. Despite these discomforts, Arabela is learning to navigate this aspect of her adolescence. She understands that these experiences are common among her peers, and she seeks ways to manage her symptoms, such as practicing self-care and ensuring she gets enough rest during her cycle.

Through this process, Arabela is beginning to appreciate the importance of listening to her body and taking the necessary steps to care for herself. While the physical changes of adolescence can be challenging, she remains resilient, knowing that these experiences are part of her journey toward becoming a young adult.

Regarding the physical changes that have surprised her the most, Arabela reflected on the rapid growth she has experienced. She mentioned that her hair, which was once curly or frizzy as a child, now flows naturally as she has entered adolescence. This transformation has allowed her to embrace her evolving sense of self.

Finally, when asked how she feels about the changes in her body shape and appearance, Arabela conveyed that she is not shocked by these changes. While she did not mention any specific aspects that she has come to appreciate, she expressed that she views these transformations as a normal part of growing up. Arabela embraces her experiences as integral to her journey through adolescence, acknowledging that what she is going through is manageable and a natural aspect of her development.

As we asked Arabella regarding Nutrition and Physical Activities at this stage, During the interview, Arabela discussed her weight and eating habits, reflecting on the changes she has experienced. When asked, “Have you experienced any changes in weight or appetite recently? What kinds of foods do you find yourself craving more?” She shared that during her early childhood, her meals primarily consisted of rice and a main dish at every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now, at this stage in her life, she finds herself craving snacks after meals, particularly biscuits, fast food, and sweet drinks. Despite these cravings, she also makes a conscious effort to include fruits in her diet, maintaining a balance between unhealthy and healthy foods.

The interviewer further inquired, “Have your eating habits changed recently? Are there any foods you find yourself craving more, or ways you’re focusing on staying healthy?” Arabela replied that her eating habits have remained relatively consistent, although she is more aware of her cravings.

When asked whether she is more conscious about her physical appearance now than before and how it affects her daily routine or self-care, Arabela responded affirmatively. However, she noted that she has not engaged in any physical activities or exercises.

In response to the question, “What’s one way your physical strength or stamina has changed over the past year? Do you feel more capable in sports or physical activities?” Arabela expressed that she easily gets tired when performing exercises or engaging in any physical activities.

Lastly, when the interviewer asked, “How do you feel about your overall health, fitness, and energy levels these days?” Arabela shared that she feels more productive and healthier than before. In her childhood, she would often fall ill, but now she believes she is better equipped to manage her health and resist illnesses. This newfound resilience marks a significant change in her overall well-being as she navigates through adolescence.

Now in the last part regarding her sleep, the interviewer when asked about her sleep patterns, Arabela described the changes she has experienced over time. During the pandemic, she often went to bed between midnight and 2 a.m. However, now that she is older, she typically goes to sleep around 11 p.m., especially when she feels tired after finishing her workload. She recognizes that when she begins to feel drowsy, it’s a clear indication that it's time for her to rest.

In a follow-up question regarding her sleep pattern, the interviewer asked, “Do you find it easier or harder to get enough rest? What helps you feel rested during this time?” Arabela explained that she has maintained this routine; when she feels tired and drowsy, she prioritizes sleep as a way to recharge from her busy school activities and responsibilities. This commitment to getting adequate rest is crucial for her to manage her workload and maintain her overall well-being as she navigates the challenges of adolescence.

Arabela's physical development during adolescence is characterized by significant changes that mark her transition into young adulthood. At 17, she has grown taller, moving from sitting in the front of her class to the back with her taller peers, and has experienced breast enlargement. While she has encountered challenges like acne, she actively manages her skincare routine. Although her weight has remained stable, her eating habits have shifted; she now craves snacks like biscuits and fast food, alongside fruits for balance. Despite feeling more self-conscious about her appearance, she hasn't engaged in regular physical activities, often feeling fatigued. Nevertheless, she reports feeling healthier and more resilient compared to her childhood, with improved sleep patterns as she prioritizes rest. These changes reflect the complex nature of adolescence, where physical growth, diet, and self-awareness intertwine.

Cognitive Milestones (Formal Operational Stage: Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning, Adolescents Egocentrism: Imaginary Audience and Personal Fable. Cognitive Control, Emotional Decision-Making)

Arabela, as she’s at 17-years-old. She is navigating the complexities of her cognitive development, particularly as she transitions into the formal operational stage. When asked about a time she solved a problem using abstract thinking, she was presented with a complex scenario: “If you had the power to change one thing in your school, what would it be and why?” Arabela took a moment to consider the implications of her decision, outlining how her proposed change could foster a more inclusive environment for students. This exercise allowed her to explore hypothetical outcomes and the reasoning behind her choices.

In another instance, she reflected on a situation where imagining different outcomes helped her make a decision. When presented with the hypothetical scenario of choosing between morning and afternoon school sessions, Arabela weighed the pros and cons of each option. She expressed a preference for morning sessions, as they would allow her to have more time in the afternoon for extracurricular activities, illustrating her capacity for future-oriented thinking.

She understood that proper planning and reasoning are essential to navigate through challenges effectively. She is a very future-oriented person who always makes plans for her future. Whatever happens in the present, she considers how it might affect her future, often making extensive revisions and setting new goals to align with her future aspirations. She frequently states that her future is more important than her current goals, preferring to focus on long-term plans rather than immediate objectives. Adolescents often engage in extended speculation about ideal characteristics—qualities they wish to embody and see in others. Such thoughts lead them to compare themselves with others based on these ideal standards, and their reflections often become imaginative journeys into future possibilities.

However despite her wit and capabilities for critical thinking she also experiences things like the Theory of Jean Piaget about “Adolescent Egocentrism.” As an adolescent, she sometimes feels like everyone is watching and judging her actions. This self-consciousness was especially evident during a painting project where she feared criticism from her peers. Reflecting on this, Arabela acknowledged how her perception of others’ judgments influenced her behavior, demonstrating the concept of an imaginary audience that often accompanies adolescence.

For her Cognitive Control (Cold-Executive function), To cope with distractions while studying, Arabela shared that she uses headphones to block out noise, even without music, indicating her awareness of the importance of focus. She described a strategy for managing interruptions, such as putting her phone out of reach during study sessions, highlighting her development of time management skills this

However she mentioned her vulnerability when making choices. For her Decision-Making (Hot Executive Function), Arabela  illustrated her emotional decision-making skills when giving her a scenario where she faced a strong emotional reaction during a school event. When a friend dared her to participate in a risky activity, she considered the excitement to join the activity versus the potential consequences, reflecting her emotional impulses. She spoke about peer pressure and how it sometimes leads her to engage in risky behavior to fit. 

At 17, Arabela exemplifies the Formal operational stage of cognitive development, engaging in abstract thinking and hypothetical reasoning. Her reflection on potential school changes demonstrates her ability to evaluate outcomes and consider future implications. While she effectively weighs options, such as preferring morning classes for more afternoon time, she also experiences adolescent egocentrism, feeling scrutinized by peers. This self-consciousness is evident during a painting project, highlighting the imaginary audience concept common in adolescence. Arabela employs cognitive control strategies, like using headphones and minimizing phone distractions to enhance focus. However, she admits vulnerability in emotional decision-making, especially when faced with peer pressure, balancing excitement against potential consequences.Overall, her experiences reflect the complexities of adolescence, where cognitive, emotional, and social factors intersect, shaping her journey toward maturity.

Socioemotional Milestones 

Arabela's socioemotional development is marked by a complex interplay of self-esteem, self-regulation, self-identity, spiritual development, family dynamics, and friendships. Recently, she has been grappling with feelings of inadequacy, describing her self-esteem as fluctuating. She admits that she hasn't been performing at her best academically, which contributes to her lack of confidence. However, she finds pride in her patience and intelligence, qualities that help her maintain a positive view of herself even in challenging times.

When faced with stress or overwhelming situations, Arabela employs reading as a coping mechanism, finding solace in books that allow her to calm down and regain focus. Reflecting on her growth, she recognizes a shift in how she manages emotions and impulses compared to her younger self. Unlike before, when she was more open to sharing her feelings, she now prefers to navigate challenges more privately, indicating a maturation in her self-regulation.

In defining her identity, Arabela acknowledges that her interests and values play a significant role. She expresses a desire to explore new experiences, yet admits that she can be easily influenced by the opinions of others. This struggle to assert her self-identity sometimes leaves her feeling uncertain about where she fits in, a challenge she navigates by seeking activities that resonate with her interests and values.

Arabela's spiritual beliefs also contribute to her sense of self. She embraces a “go with the flow” attitude and actively participates in church activities, which provide her with a framework for her values and decision-making processes. These spiritual practices help her ground herself amid the chaos of adolescence.

Her relationship with her family is supportive, although she experiences some boundaries that occasionally hinder her independence. While she appreciates her family’s guidance, she feels pressure to conform to their expectations, leading to occasional conflicts over her time and priorities. Resolving these conflicts can be challenging for her, as she often struggles to find effective communication strategies.

Arabela's relationship with her parents is characterized by an understanding that, while they are supportive, their busy work schedules often leave little room for open communication. Although conflicts arise, they are not typical arguments; instead, disagreements stem from the pressures of time and responsibilities. Arabela recognizes that her parents' demanding jobs mean they have limited time to engage with her on various issues, which can create a sense of distance.

Interestingly, because there are no significant conflicts or arguments in her household, Arabela has not developed specific strategies for resolving disagreements. Instead, she navigates her relationship with her parents by being patient and understanding of their circumstances. She tries to make the most of the moments they do share, finding ways to connect when they can. This approach allows her to maintain a positive relationship with her parents, even amid their busy lives.

Friends play a crucial role in Arabela’s life, providing emotional support and encouragement. She values her friends for their patience and ability to lift her spirits, which significantly boosts her self-esteem. However, she also feels pressure from her outgoing peers, which sometimes challenges her sense of self. Reflecting on her friendships, she recalls a specific challenge in seventh grade that tested her relationships, emphasizing the importance of open communication in resolving conflicts and maintaining strong bonds.

When it comes to dating and romantic relationships, Arabela feels she needs more personal development before committing to a relationship. Although she hasn’t encountered challenges or rewards in romantic experiences yet, she understands that as she matures, navigating these relationships will require her to balance her emotional readiness with her desire for connection.

Overall, Arabela's socioemotional journey reflects her continuous efforts to build self-esteem, regulate her emotions, define her identity, navigate family dynamics, and cultivate friendships, all while preparing for the future that lies ahead.

Challenges, Satisfaction and Lessons

Arabela currently grapples with significant pressures that stem from various sources, including academic expectations, social dynamics, and family responsibilities. The weight of these pressures often affects her daily routine and mental well-being, as she feels compelled to meet the high expectations set by those around her. This constant pressure can be overwhelming, leading to moments of stress and self-doubt as she navigates her responsibilities.

Setbacks and disappointments are part of her journey, and Arabela describes how she handles these challenges with a sense of resilience. When faced with failure, whether in academics or personal projects, she takes time to reflect on what went wrong and adjusts her plans for the future. This ability to revise her approach demonstrates her developing capacity to learn from experiences, adapt, and move forward despite obstacles.

Despite these challenges, Arabela finds pride and satisfaction in her accomplishments. One of her most notable achievements came during her Grade 11 first quarter, where she excelled academically and earned the title of top student in her class. This recognition not only boosted her self-esteem but also served as a reminder of her capabilities amidst the pressures she faces.

However, when asking about her feeling being in her stage, she stated that she’s feeling confused with her life events and choices. Reflecting on her adolescent journey, Arabela acknowledges that this period is filled with confusion and significant changes. She often feels as though she is falling behind in certain aspects of her life, grappling with the complexities of growing up. These feelings are common for adolescents “Erik Erikson Identity role vs Identity Confusion”, this add another layer of challenge to her experience. Nevertheless, Arabela strives to find her footing, learning valuable lessons about resilience and self-acceptance along the way.

Arabela feels that her family's influence on her choices and values is significant, especially as she strives for greater autonomy. However, her parents have expressed doubts about her talents, often telling her she lacks the skills needed to pursue certain interests. This feedback has led her to question her abilities and has made her cautious in exploring new opportunities.

While she values her family's support, their skepticism sometimes creates tension as she seeks to assert her independence. Arabela is learning to navigate this dynamic by reflecting on her own strengths and interests, ultimately aiming to carve out a path that resonates with her identity, despite her family's reservations.

Furthermore, Arabela expresses feelings of confusion during this stage of her life, recognizing that she is maturing and capable of making decisions similar to her friends. However, she also acknowledges that she still possesses a sense of innocence, which adds to her internal conflict. This duality makes her feel uncertain about her choices as she navigates the complexities of adolescence.

As she strives to carve out her own path, the pressure to conform to the expectations of her peers and the realization of her own evolving identity contribute to her confusion. Arabela is in a process of self-discovery, trying to balance her youthful innocence with the responsibilities and expectations that come with growing up, leaving her feeling both empowered and bewildered.

Ultimately, her journey is a testament to the complexities of growing up, as she learns to balance her achievements with the inevitable challenges, forging her path toward self-discovery and personal growth.

During our hour-long conversation, Arabela came across as genuine, cute, and simple. We appreciated her wit, kindness, and friendly demeanor, which made the discussion feel comfortable and open. As she navigates the border between adolescence and adulthood, grappling with her identity and the pressures of growing up, we hope she finds her true path. This transitional phase is filled with confusion and uncertainty, but her authenticity shines through. 

Ultimately, the border of adolescence is a powerful catalyst for transformation. It challenges young individuals to reflect on their aspirations and fears, pushing them to carve out their own paths. For Arabela, and many others like her, this journey is an opportunity to embrace their uniqueness, learn from setbacks, and emerge with a clearer vision of who they are and who they want to become. As they navigate this complex terrain, the hope is that they will find the courage to embrace their true selves and step confidently into adulthood.

“Adolescence is a period of great vulnerability and confusion.” – Louise J. Kaplan “and Adolescence is a time when young people are trying to find their place in the world, and that can be incredibly difficult.” – Mary Pipher

But remember!

“Every man is the architect of his own fortune.” – Appius and “It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.” – Don Delillo

[verticalmomentum1]

No Vision To Visionary: Jerry Brazie’s Journey From Struggle To Success…

➡️Listen: https://anchor.fm/richard-kaufman/episodes/From-Stealing-food-to-Millions-How-Jerry-Brazie-did-it-ekpdpj

My Hot 🥵 Take…

Jerry Brazie's life story is a vivid testament to resilience 💪, determination 🎯, and the relentless pursuit of success 🚀 against daunting odds.

Born into a bustling household with nine siblings 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦, Jerry's early days were fraught with challenges, from financial hardship to a severe eye condition that threatened his sight

👁️. From the tender age of 11, he was already working, learning the invaluable lesson that hard work is directly linked to survival and independence 🍽️.

Jerry's adolescence was marked by his incredible tenacity and resourcefulness. Despite facing the threat of losing his vision, he hustled pool 🎱 at 16 to make ends meet, showcasing his grit and adaptability.

This period of his life wasn't just about personal struggle but also about immense growth 🌱 and transformation, with the streets serving as both his battleground and his classroom.

Embracing entrepreneurialism at 28, Jerry's ventures have spanned over two decades, during which he's bought and sold numerous companies, amassing over $450 million in revenue 💼.

His transition from a youth marred by adversity to a successful entrepreneur highlights the essence of staying calm under pressure and addressing challenges methodically.

Jerry's narrative from poverty to success illustrates how discipline, hard work, and relentless personal development can elevate one from the depths of hardship to the heights of achievement.

In Jerry Brazie's journey, we find a powerful message of hope and inspiration 🌟.

His life reaffirms that our origins don't determine our destinies, that adversity can mold rather than break us, and that with perseverance, the most formidable obstacles can be overcome.

His path from the gritty streets to the executive boardroom embodies the quintessential American dream 🇺🇸, proving that success is earned through resilience, hard work, and an unwavering belief in oneself.

Thank You To Our Sponsors:

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Annette Whittenberger Of A Wild Ride Called Life

Sean Douglas The Master Of Public Speaking.

#entrepreneurmindset #success

[werevulvi]

I hope these show up in the right order. This kinda stuff is exactly what makes me feel lost about my transness. Like I was just trying to be nice and agreed with this person's post. I had no interest in being an asshole or arguing what bio sex, or even what butch, is. I was just declaring myself as a bio female because it felt relevant to the topic and how I relate to it. It amazes me how even the pro self-ID types are against self-ID when someone identifies in a way that doesn't suit their narrative, even when it's a trans person whose identity they deny.

They blocked me and I don't want anyone going after them, I just wanna rant. And not even about this specific post or person, but more so about trying to exist as a gender critical trans person in general. I've been thinking about that for days, weeks, perhaps months or even years already, so it's really not about this specific person. I guess it was just what triggered me to finally start writing.

I guess I feel like both most other trans people and most other gender critical people, view transness as incompatible with gender critical opinions, and like that makes me feel pulled in two opposing directions. But anyone of any ideology can be dysphoric and transition because it helps them cope. I don't think that my opinions, or my choice to hang out with radfems, means that I'm self-hating, or even that I'm going against the needs of my own trans demographic. My own trans demographic is just all too good at confusing wants with needs... generally speaking. I see sex and gender the way I do because it makes sense to me personally, and I don't even argue that it's necessarily the objective truth. I don't think there is such a thing. It's just my truth, my perception of the world.

That I can't make myself see myself as a man for real, despite my dysphoria and transition, doesn't mean that I think it's wrong to transition, or that my body is damaged by it, or that transitioning is useless. Because it's not. I love my transition and everything it has given me. I'm comfortable with my transitioned body. It deserves love, especially my love. And although I still struggle with some insecurities, I feel like I love my body. It's been... incredibly good to me. It's stayed very healthy, and even keeping up a strong immune system despite my smoking, self harm, careless sexual escapades, etc. I may still have a fraught relationship with being female, but as long as I transition, I seem to be managing it fairly well. Except then I have a more fraught relationship with society instead. Can't win, but that's life, innit?

I don't think either my transness or my political opinions are my real problem or ever was. I think it's society's constant fighting about trans people's genders, lives and choices, that makes me constantly cave in on myself. Can't handle the pressure.

It feels like it's only ever getting worse. Ten years ago my biggest concern was people not ever finding me attractive because I was turning myself into some kind of a freak, which luckily I was proven to be wrong about. Five years ago my biggest concern was nonbinary people trying to normalize asking people their pronouns, which made me fear that people would never leave me alone about my gender, unless I forced myself to be hyper-masculine, which I still worry about. Three years ago my biggest concern was having been stripped of my sex-based rights and dehumanized for how I had chosen to treat my dysphoria, which I still worry about as well, and now...

...my biggest concerns are being treated as a third gender, fetishistic predator who should be shoved away into gender neutral spaces, and I fear that one day medical transition will be taken away as an option to treat dysphoria if transness is continued to be rejected as a medical condition. My heart rate is ever increasing. Can I even realistically "just go on with my life" anymore? I feel compelled to do something, but I also feel like there isn't anything I can do. No matter how many people I try to "educate" about dysphoria and why transition is incredibly important, all the while being as humble as I can, I am seriously lacking behind the much faster spread of harmful misinformation.

Thing is, I do not blame gender critical people for spreading some of that misinformation. For example of trans women as fetishistic predators, which people apply to trans men when they still fail to understand that MtF is not the only kinda trans there is, or when we dare to be just a little bit feminine while passing as male. If anything, I blame the true sources of such harmful claims, which slowly increase my anxious heart rate, over years, turning into decades, of living as openly trans. I blame opportunistic men who pretend to be trans women for gaining access to women's spaces, be it prisons, spas, shelters, sports, what have you, when they cannot possibly be dysphoric judging by how happily they swing their dicks around women as if it's no big deal and make no attempt at transitioning, but also who cares if they are dysphoric, no one should behave that way either way. I blame the trans rights activists who say lesbians have to suck dick if it's attached to a trans woman, and those who say that gay men have to be into pussy and date trans men. I blame those who say that trans women are bio female by virtue of identifying as female, and claiming that they can get periods, by virtue of... bowel cramps?! I'd also blame those who try to change female specific language on behalf of shielding trans men from our own dysphoria, in the rare cases we'd end up getting pregnant or manage to drag our asses to the gyno office for a pap smear, which... most of us really don't, regardless of if you call us women or uterus-havers, sincerely, please stop. It makes people think trans women are trying to take over the term "woman" entirely for themselves, which of course they don't.

I could go on, but I won't, as this post is not about these things. It's more so about how estranged I feel from the people who spout these things, knowing that they think they're speaking for me and my supposed needs as a tranny. But I see no point in trying to educate them, as they won't listen any more to me than they would to a radfem, and again, I think this post in my screenshots shows just how unwilling they are to listen to me.

I guess living with my transition on constant display is what's hard, and I guess I just need to vent about that, as it's always judged one way or the other; as either me having made myself into a man, or that I'm a delusional woman who mutilated herself; and it's kinda hard to find a kind and sane middle ground, that perhaps I'm just a victim of circumstances, and trying to make the most of my own life, regardless of what the fuck I am. That social shit, on top of dealing with dysphoria, makes it really difficult to not hate myself, I guess. But I have tried to live stealth and that made it if possible even worse, as it felt like I was lying, keeping a huge secret that grew in me like a spreading virus.

What I want is to just live my life, and for neither my bio sex, nor my transition, to stop me from doing that. I want to work through the worst of my autism, enough to be able to pursue a career in some low-paying labor, blue-collar job; get a car and driver's licence, find a suitable husband to have a child and cats with; I want my own garden, an art studio; I want to build muscle to become strong and even more independent (and perhaps strong enough to carry that husband, but at least to carry myself), and so on. When I picture myself in that potential future, it is with this male-like appearance I transitioned my body into, but it is also as a mother and wife.

And thinking about all of that makes me happy, it makes me smile and feel joy, meaningfulness, hope... While thinking about arguing online with some miserable fuck, who's deadset on arguing semantics and calling me a terf, when all I wanted was to show a little bit of kindness, that "hey, I agree with you, you make a good point here, and I'm not here to fight" only to be spat right back into my face... just makes me feel sad. Whatever happened to diversity of opinion? It's gone, it became labeled as bad, and left people like me with no place to be.

There is no point in arguing with such people, or even trying not to argue. There's no winning in that, there's no reward, no accomplishment. It's better to walk away.

I know I just have to get over this, this inner conflict of going against my transness with my gender critical opinions, and that I'm going against my womanhood with my transition - and be stronger than the political climate that's pulling me into pieces. But if it's peace that I want... I can just forget about it. There's no road there. But I have trouble letting go of that simple dream. The internet is constantly manipulating me into thinking I have an exciting social life, when in fact it's non-existent, and the lie is destructive. With internet vs real life, I'm living a double life. One of those lives has a future, the other one does not.

I'm glad I made this rant. It actually made me feel better, and reminded me that it's still worth it. Being trans, moving forward, focusing on what is good and what can become good in life. And it reminded me that the internet is merely an imitation of life, a substitute for human connection, and can... as with much else, be both good and bad.

[letterboxd]

Under the Stars.

On the UK release of Harry Macqueen’s tender Supernova, the writer-director talks to Ella Kemp about timeless love stories, his favorite screen lovers and working with best buds Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci.

Love is patient and love is kind in Supernova, Harry Macqueen’s tender story of marriage, memory and maps. It’s an autumnal study of a mature, rock-solid love and the unfair illness that threatens to undo it. We’ve seen stories about gay lovers that end in tragedy before, but this one is different: a sense of security and trust infuses the final holiday of husbands Sam and Tusker, as they come to terms with Tusker’s recent diagnosis of early-onset dementia.

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play the couple—a pairing written in the stars, since the actors have been best friends for twenty years—who are traveling England in an RV, visiting places and people they have loved. Sam is a pianist, Tusker a star-gazing novelist. Together, they mine emotions that manifest in everyday care rather than grand, theatrical gestures. Julien describes Supernova as “a marvel of tiny moments that feel so real they register like bullet wounds,” while Lola feels the destabilizing power of these lovers. “I love love,” she writes, “but love is painful, beautiful, heart wrenching, frightening and forever.”

Supernova is the second feature from Macqueen as a writer and director after 2015’s Hinterland, in which he starred opposite Lori Campbell in a contemporary, rural tale of a companionship that spans decades. A London-trained actor, he made his debut in the under-seen Richard Linklater film, Me and Orson Welles. On Supernova, however, Macqueen remains firmly behind the camera.

The filmmaker opened up about the stars in the sky, the ones on our screens, intimacy, pride and more for his Life in Film questionnaire.

Harry Macqueen on location with Colin Firth for ‘Supernova’.

What do you think the connection is between stars—the celestial kind—and lovers? Harry Macqueen: Historically, we’ve always found the cosmos to be both perplexing and inspiring. I suppose there’s a kind of infinite beauty in space that is definitely related to love, and especially for a character like Tusker, who is contemplating his mortality. He’s looking up at the stars and thinking about what they mean, and what he means in that context, and it seemed like something that would be a natural thing to do if you were in that situation.

In terms of the other kind of stars—your incredible actors Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci—how did you find the right people to bring Sam and Tusker’s love to life? I think that what they do in the film is very surprising, in a way that’s beautiful and delicate. But it was also one of the easiest casting processes of any film, ever. Stanley was the first person we sent the script to and he read it very quickly and responded to it in the way that you hope that people will. We were really interested in one of the characters being not British—we felt there was something potentially quite stuffy about having two Brits bumbling around the countryside, so another culture would add a bit of a different energy to it.

Stanley loved the script and we got on really well. I really wanted, hopefully, to get two actors who knew each other and had a shared history for these intimate roles. And he said, “I don’t know whether you know, but my best mate is Colin, and I could get the script to him.” I obviously said yes and he said, “Okay, well, I already have, and he loves it and he wants to meet you.” So it was all a bit of a dream!

Let’s talk about the inception of the script. Supernova is obviously a story about love, but it’s about illness and death and mortality and all of these things, which feels significant in terms of it being a gay love story. A lot of queer love stories in cinema are tragic, but also are often very specifically reckless and youthful, and don’t really linger on this later chapter in life. How early did you know, then, that this film would be about two men? If you’re talking about early-onset dementia, you’re naturally talking about people in their fifties or sixties, so I knew that I was always going to tell a story about romantic love of some kind in that part of your life. I had done a lot of research around that, and I realized I had never worked with a same-sex couple. All the couples and families that I’d worked with, the central relationship had been a heterosexual one. So my initial reaction was to write that story, but then I countered that really quickly and wanted to challenge why that was my initial inkling.

I just thought, I’m writing about really universal themes—love and death and life and trust and companionship—and it seems to me that no one sexual orientation or gender has a monopoly on those things.

And you’re right, LGBTQ+ cinema over the years, quite often for very, very important and understandable reasons, has been about that period of flux, transitioning or coming out, the moment of becoming your true self at a certain time of life, when you’re usually quite young. And that is quite fraught, frantic and a bit grimy sometimes. So I was aware that there was a gap in cinema to present a love story about two people of the same sex who were in this stage of life. That romantic, mature love we don’t talk about very often.

The film also aspires to be the type of story in this type of community that I hope that I live in, even if perhaps I don’t—to tell a story in which the sexuality of the characters isn’t mentioned. It’s just accepted, embraced and loved. The sexuality of the characters doesn’t impact the story or inform anything, it’s just their lived experience in the world. I’m really proud that we did that, because I genuinely think, in its own tiny way, it’s a revelation.

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci navigate love and illness in the Lake District.

This film, materially and aesthetically, is beautiful. The landscapes, the actors, Sam and Tusker’s knitwear. How did you navigate the balance between creating this very cozy world that also understands heartbreak and decay as potent things? What I want to try and do in films generally is wrap an audience up in an intimate world between two people, and hopefully allow the audience to fall in love with those people. That shared history they have meant that all of these things felt quite organic. They’ve got some money, but they’re in a camper van, they’re not loaded. They’re reasonably creatively successful, but they’re not famous, necessarily. They’re just two guys trying to live under quite extreme conditions.

The intimacy in the film is really, really important to me. What degree of romantic intimacy these characters have, how you film that, and how you plonk an audience in there. Because you don’t want to make a dirge—the film is life-affirming because they love each other so much, and because of that, it’s also devastating.

So that informs every choice you make stylistically. It’s quiet, and it’s patient, and it felt like exactly the right way to tell this story, to not intrude on this beautiful relationship, to not impose anything on it, to be very simple, really—which, as I’m sure you know, it’s not simple!

I know that kind of filmmaking is not to everyone’s taste, that avoidance of melodrama, that lightness of touch. I find it beautiful, but others probably don’t.

Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ (1985).

Now, a few Life in Film questions. Who are your favorite gay lovers on-screen? Carol and Therese in Carol, Russell and Glen in Weekend, Marianne and Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Johnny and Omar in My Beautiful Laundrette.

What is your favorite timeless love story? This is so difficult! Maybe Alice in the Cities, Wendy and Lucy or the Before... trilogy.

What is the best film about pride, the definition of which is very much open to interpretation? Jiro Dreams of Sushi—a brilliant film about having pride in your craft.

What should we watch after Supernova? I tend to be a bit controversial and say the couple from Amour by Michael Haneke. Or maybe Life of Brian, or a Studio Ghibli film—but definitely not Grave of the Fireflies.

What was the film that made you want to be a filmmaker? I’m not certain there is a specific one, but there are films you encounter all the time that make you want to be a filmmaker all over again. The two films that made me think it might actually be possible were Old Joy and Katalin Varga—they inspired me before I had any budget or experience. But it could also be any Yasujirō Ozu film, or Taste of Cherry by Abbas Kiarostami. All very inspiring in their own way.

Related content

Queer Love and Desire: a list by the Criterion Channel

The Pride of Sundance: 400 LGBTQ+ films to watch this June, curated by the Sundance Film Festival

101 Must-See Movies for Lesbians: Jenni Olson’s list (including Carol)

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

‘Supernova’ is in UK theaters now, and available to stream on Hulu, or rent/buy from other VOD services in the US.

[overthinkingkdrama]

Exit Review: My Country

Synopsis

This drama is set in the transition between the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties, and follows turbulent friendship turned fraught rivalry between Seo Hwi and Nam Seon Ho. Seo Hwi’s late father was the greatest swordsman of Goryeo, but after being framed for embezzling military supplies he was executed as a traitor, a stain which hangs over Hwi and his sister’s lives. Seon Ho is the illegitimate son of a powerful state official, but due to his mixed parentage he can never fully belong to his father’s world and has an insatiable ambition and bitter resentment toward his father which drives him.

Hwi and Seon Ho have been close since childhood, but when they end up going head to head in the state military exam a tragedy follows that will drive a terrible wedge between them. Eventually circumstances will force them to pick sides between General Yi Seong Gye (the first King of Joseon) an his ruthless son, Yi Bang Won, in the fight which will give shape and purpose to a newborn country.

Review

Story: My Country is a difficult drama for me to review objectively, in part because I loved it so much. Watching this drama was a truly absorbing and gripping experience for me, and it plays to so many of my story preferences. I was unequivocally obsessed with this drama from the premier to the finale, but during the weeks between airings I couldn’t help but feel like I was arm wrestling with the script.

It was characterization more than anything that gave me fits. I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse the show of giving us thin or two dimensional characters. To the contrary, each of these characters has a fully realized matrix of conflicting desires, loyalties and ambitions that inform their choices and alignments. However, it is often difficult to sift through those murky motivations and draw a clear line between a character’s internal desires and their external actions.

This drama starts out with an incredible cold open that raises all sort so questions about who these characters are and immediately invests you in finding out how they ended up in this situation. It’s truly masterfully done, and I probably rewatched it upwards of 10 times through the run. It kept me asking those questions all the way until the pay off. But because the writers were so invested in keeping their cards close to the chest, clear characterization was sometimes lost in the shuffle.

That said, this drama really is one beautiful, tragic escalation after another. Just taking the first two episodes in isolation is quite a ride. I really thought after the first few weeks, or hell, the first half, that the drama would get bogged down in plotting and politics or have nowhere left to go, but to my great joy it really doesn’t let up a single moment until the finale.

Acting: Where to even begin with the acting in this drama? All three of the main male leads: Yang Se Jong, Woo Do Hwan and the inimitable Jang Hyuk are perfectly cast and give inspired performances. Everything from posture to voice to subtle microexpressions is so stunningly on point.

I came into the drama already a big fan of both Woo Do Hwan and Jang Hyuk as actors, having followed them through other projects, so it wasn’t surprising to me that I liked them both here as well. However, what did surprise me was the extent to which they were able to show off their range and talent. As a long time Jang Hyuk fangirl, I would confidently argue that this particular rendition of the Yi Bang Won character is him at his absolute best. I also went into My Country relatively indifferent to Yang Se Jong, or at least not overly familiar with or impressed by his previous work. I’m happy to announce that that is no longer the case, as his performance of Hwi is one of the most memorable of the year for me, and his sheer level of commitment to the role is awe inspiring. There’s a video of him talking behind the scenes about a moment early on where he actually yelled himself hoarse embodying a moment of panic and grief, which made me appreciate the level thought and effort he put into playing this character.

I don’t want to limit my praise to just that trio of actors either, because the entire cast is incredible. I didn’t know much about Seolhyun before this role, but I thought she was really strong as well, though her character doesn’t feature as heavily as one might like or expect from the promotional material around this drama. The villains too are captivating, especially the detestable Nam Jeon played by veteran actor Ahn Nae Sang. Wow, you are really going to love to despise this guy. I just cannot say enough about the performances from top to bottom, because we would be here all day. The acting is really what makes the drama, especially the stunning chemistry between the characters, and more specifically the chemistry Yang Se Jong has with all the other leads.

Production: There is some movie quality cinematography throughout this drama. It just looks very, very good both in the way it is shot and the attention to detail, the props, the costumes the sets. There is a beautiful long tracking shot following Hwi through a battle field in episode 3 or 4 that was just jaw dropping. It really felt like they were flexing, honestly, and it’s refreshing to see this kind of cable quality coming out of South Korea and ending up on American Netflix for people to watch and appreciate.

I love the music in this drama. Some of it can come across a bit camp, like the electric guitar and strings heavy instrumental “My Country” that accompanies many of the sword fight scenes, but I loved Bang Won’s wailing violin theme music every time it showed up, and the OST definitely sets a mood.

One of the more distracting choices the drama made was to allude to certain historical characters like Poeun, Sambong and Choi Young but never have them actually appear as characters, in the present or in flashbacks, opting to address certain important events and philosophies through fictional expys such as Nam Jeon and Seo Geon instead. They even resort to filming certain scenes in strange oblique ways so that we understand Sambong is in the room but we don’t see his face.

The only thing I can figure is the writers wanted to use the audience’s familiarity with these historical figures without chaining the story too closely to the actual flow of historical events. Or perhaps they decided to exclude these characters in order to avoid too much direct comparison to the critically well-received and highly rated drama, Six Flying Dragons, which covers much of the same time period.

Feels: For me My Country watches like a bitter-sweet tragi-romantic melodrama centering on a toxic love triangle with a historical backdrop. And when I say “love triangle”, I am 100% referring to the interplay between Seon Ho, Hwi and Bang Won (my sincere apologies to poor Hui Jae) because that’s how the entire drama is structured. My Country is one of the most purely homoerotic things I’ve ever watched. If it weren’t for a few limp attempts to imply Seon Ho’s romantic interest was in Hui Jae and not his former friend, I would say “unapologetically homoerotic” but alas, South Korea isn’t quite there yet.

The romance between Hui Jae and Hwi never quite caught fire for me, though lord knows they were trying. It always felt like a side dish to the main course that the drama really wanted to serve: namely the star-crossed relationship of Hwi and Seon Ho. (And this is not meant as a dig toward those who liked the Hui Jae/Hwi romance. This section of the review is just about my subjective experience.)

There were moments where I worried, or couldn’t quite tell where the drama was taking us with regard to Seon Ho and Hwi, or where I feared everything was going to end in senseless destruction and they couldn’t successfully bring the plot to closure in just 16 episodes. But for the handful of issues I had with the writing of the drama, its final resolution was poetically, heart-wrenchingly, perfect.

My Country just pushes so many of my narrative and aesthetic buttons and plays heavily to my id. This is a drama that I’m going to be thinking about for a long, long time. I will definitely be watching it again and I will try to get as many other people to watch it as possible. I liked it that much.

Would I recommend My Country: The New Age? Yes, oh god yes. Please watch it. Watch it and then come talk to me about it. Definitely one of the best of the year.

9/10

[esmeraude11]

On Fëanor and Indis

Something that’s always bugged me? Indis and Fëanor’s relationship. Or rather the lack thereof of a relationship. If we go with the canon dates then Míriel died c. 1170 in the Year of the Trees when Fëanor was little more than an infant in Elven terms.

While Indis was Míriel’s closest friend. She was friends with Finwë too.

I doubt that she left Finwë alone during this period. And I suspect that she wouldn’t have left Míriel’s newborn child alone either. Indis might very well have inserted herself into Finwë’s household so as to look after Fëanor. Because something that we can’t forget is that Finwë was devastated by Míriel’s death. Canonically we’re given a hint as to how Finwë must have felt in the passage that talks about his and Indis’ marriage.

This is going to be long. So I’m putting a Read-More here.

"Now it came to pass that Finwë took as his second wife Indis the Fair. She was a Vanya, close kin of Ingwë the High King, golden-haired and tall <…>. Finwë loved her greatly, and was glad again."

That last sentence jumps out to me as particularly important. Especially the last part “...and was glad again.”

Considering that Míriel literally died of depression (general or post-partum, we don’t know) and physical/spiritual exhaustion that bit talking about Finwë’s emotional state stands out suspiciously. I have to wonder if Finwë himself might have suffered from depression after Míriel’s death.

If he didn’t just marry Indis randomly but rather that it was the result of a prolonged relationship of some sort. I suspect that Indis would have essentially moved to Tirion after Míriel’s pregnancy took a turn for the worse so as to offer Míriel her support. Maybe completing the transition after her death. Because Finwë’s alone now. His wife is dead and resting in the Halls. His newborn son has lost his mother and it’s entirely possible that Finwë was in no condition to look after his child here. Indis likely took on the task of raising Fëanáro. She might have even offered what support she could to Finwë here. Helping by taking over the day to day running of the palace’s household. Taking care of Fëanáro’s household as well. Nurses, governesses, etc. etc. Essentially becoming the Acting-Queen/Queen-Consort in absentia while Finwë mourns his loss and struggles/grapples with his grief.

I feel like Fëanáro grew up with a doting and loving but slightly distant father for a few years here (which might have had an effect on a young Fëanáro). Because Finwë more than likely took a few years to begin to recover from his loss. Míriel was gone but her memory never truly faded. Grief is a thing that cannot be underestimated or ignored. Especially in this situation. The elves came to Aman to escape the horrors that hunted them in Cuiviénen. They were supposed to be coming to a land where death among the Eldar would be a historical footnote. Míriel died, however, and became the first and last of the Eldar to (notably) die in Aman until Alqualondë. And elves bond on a spiritual and mental level. Not just physically.

This is something that can’t be underestimated.

Míriel’s death wasn’t supposed to happen.

And if it did? Then their dead were suppose to return from the Halls. But Míriel was so affected by her condition (depression/exhaustion) that she would not leave the Halls. Not even for her husband and young son. She needed the time to rest and recover. She couldn’t or at least was unwilling to subject herself to life while still fraught with the issues that had led to her death.

This is understandable and she shouldn’t be blamed for making her choice. Because it must have been a difficult one to make.

But this left Finwë to deal with the aftermath. And he might not have been up for it. He might have needed help. Indis was there. Indis who had been friends (best friends, even) with Míriel and Finwë. Indis who’d likely joked with Míriel and looked forward to her friends’ child with eagerness. Indis who was the sister of a king and was herself one of the Awakened Elves of Cuiviénen. She’d likely known Míriel and Finwë for a very very long time.

And this is where we come back to Fëanor.

Fëanor likely grew up with Indis as his honorary aunt. Someone who took on a maternal role in his life without explicitly taking on that role in his life. Fëanáro might have called Indis ‘mom’ or ‘mommy’ a few times when he was especially young and she’d have gently corrected him. Indis would have taken care of Fëanáro’s education. Carefully selecting tutors for the young prince from a list of Noldorin scholars and masters. Ever mindful of the fact that she was a Vanya and he was the prince of the Noldor and thus needed to curate his education in a direction that suited his birth.

Indis likely spoke to Fëanáro of Míriel from the very beginning. First as a baby, rocking him in her arms and singing to him songs that she’d heard Míriel sing to her swollen belly as she worked on her pieces. Mindless ditties of shining threads and jewel-tone colors and embroidering. Singing Vanyarin songs of beauty and perspective and thought that Míriel had enjoyed for their rather pretty and bright evocative turns of phrase.

Telling him bed-time stories of laughter and joy and expectation. Míriel’s grey eyes shining with mirth. Her mouth curved into an impish smile. A long-fingered and elegant hand splayed over a pregnant belly. Silver-grey hair falling in a mass of loose curls over a slender shoulder. Each strand shining and lovely. Of a bright and fierce temper that could cow any uppity noble and only gave way before her loved ones.

Drawing a blanket over Fëanáro’s chest. Míriel’s work. One of her finest and final masterpieces. Indis had spun the materials that went into the thread. Brought from Valmar the materials that Míriel needed for her jewel-toned dyes. Míriel had woven and sown the squares that sealed the goosedown. She’d embroidered the blanket itself. Her final gift to the child she’d loved and never gotten the chance to watch grow up.

We know that Míriel’s body lay in-repose in the Gardens of Lorien.

We know that Fëanor went to visit her often. Finwë likely went as well. Not quite as often and more than likely because it was more than he could bear.

I can see Indis being the one to accompany Fëanáro when he was still young enough to want her to come with him. Before the marriage that is. Indis running a careful hand through Míriel’s hair while her other arm is wrapped around Fëanáro. Ensuring that he doesn’t run off or clamber onto his mother’s body.

Let me just say too. Míriel’s body being held in-repose could only have exacerbated Fëanor’s issues here. Especially since Finwë clearly struggled with the loss of his wife. Míriel died but she was never laid to rest. Her memory lingered on. In her husband. In her friend. Among her people as well. Fëanor never had a chance to come to terms with his loss. Especially since his loss occurred when he was a baby and thus never had a chance to properly know his mother and was instead left with her lingering memory.

I don’t doubt that Finwë loved him. But considering that he might have been struggling with depression after Míriel’s death and might have been a distant parent during those initial years of Fëanáro’s childhood. I can definitely see him trying to make up for it by overcompensating. Showering Fëanáro with affection and making time for his wants and needs. Even at the expense of his later children. And Fëanáro himself might not have recognized that Finwë was attempting to make up for those years that he couldn’t be a good parent.

If Finwë was struggling with depression here. He would definitely not have told his son. I tend to think that Finwë kept as much of Míriel’s circumstances from Fëanáro. Because it’d have been very easy for the boy to blame himself for his mother’s death and who knows how servants or nobles saw the whole situation. I can also see him wanting to keep Fëanáro in the dark of his own personal issues out of fear and worry that Fëanáro himself might be susceptible to depression as well. Plus fearing that he himself might fade from grief/depression and not wanting his son to have that on his mind.

All of this would lead to Fëanáro not understanding and not taking it well that Finwë’s immediately affectionate with his and Indis’ children. Because the thing here? It’s not Fëanor’s fault. Finwë was likely in a better mental state and was thus capable of involving himself with his younger children from the get-go. Whereas he couldn’t do the same with Fëanor himself at first. 

It’s incredibly likely that Námo had informed Finwë of Míriel’s reluctance to return. Perhaps even told him that it was unlikely that she’d be ready for re-embodiment anytime soon. This may or may not have worsened Finwë’s own condition. I think that he began to lean more on Indis on a more personal level after this. For mental or emotional support. As well as realizing just how much Indis had taken on for his sake (running the palace and household/raising his son in his stead). Which could have very easily led to a far stronger connection and to marriage.

When we add all of the above to Finwë and Indis getting married during Fëanáro’s childhood? It’d be easy to see Fëanáro taking offense to the whole affair. Fëanáro likely knew that dead elves can return from the Halls of Mandos once they’re ready. Indis herself likely told him of this while relating stories of the Valar and perhaps the reasons for why the Eldar left Cuiviénen. A young Fëanáro would have seen this as a betrayal from the woman that had raised him. She’d told him all of his life that his mother loved him and his father. That she’d come back from the Halls to be his mom again and they’d all be happy.

Fëanáro could and would have absolutely taken this badly. And it’d be easy for a young boy to blame his new step-mother/formerly beloved aunt-figure rather than his father in this situation. Especially if he desperately adores his previously distant but still loving father.

This would then lead to Fëanáro resenting Indis. And Indis herself having to deal with the fact that she’s lost Fëanáro’s love and trust. Perhaps hoping that things will get better as time goes on. But knowing that they won’t once Ñolofinwë is born. Because Fëanáro likely took Findis’ birth with some ambivalence. If he was still young then he might be genuinely curious and affectionate with Findis because he hasn’t had time to internalize a lot of his issues. Plus Findis is tiny and pretty and eager to interact with her elder brother.

A brother, however, changes things. And Fëanáro was likely old enough (the equivalent of a Human 9 year old, I’d say) to realize that it changed things. One: Fëanáro’s position as Crown Prince was potentially threatened by Ñolofinwë. It wasn’t really but Fëanáro no doubt had begun to tie his father’s love and affection to the position which would eventually make him possessive of it. Two: Because Fëanáro watched as Finwë eagerly welcomed the arrival of the new baby. Watched as he didn’t struggle to connect or dote on Ñolofinwë the way he did with Fëanáro himself.

I suspect that ultimately led to his resentment of his younger siblings (Ñolofinwë especially). As well as encouraging his belief that Indis had stolen his mother’s chance at life and intended to take everything from him. Thus leading to Fëanáro possessively and almost obsessively defending his mother’s memory.

Just... give me Fëanor in the Halls of Mandos having to come to terms with his childhood and the Indis that had raised him and the woman he’d come to hate for taking his mother’s place in life as wife and mother. Maybe having a long and much needed discussion with Finwë about what occurred during Fëanor’s childhood. Having to realize that nothing had truly changed between them. He’d simply refused to see it for a very long time.

[semper-legens]

73. Alice by Heart, by Steven Sater

Owned?: Yes Page count: 267 My summary: London, 1940. Alice Spencer shelters from the Blitz in the Underground, with her dearest friend Alfred. He will survive through the night. He has to. Despite the fact that his tuberculosis is eating him alive. In a spin, Alice resorts to the last comfort she knows...their favourite book, Alice in Wonderland. My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

Ah, Alice by Heart. A little musical that ran for a couple of months off-Broadway, which for some reason captured my entire soul and forced me to love it unconditionally. The show’s relative inaccessibility - there’s an album out, but it’s hard to divine the story from it - means it’s actually perfect to be adapted into a novel, as this will help provide context on the show’s musical numbers for an audience who wasn’t able to experience the musical when it was being performed.

I am very familiar with this show, and so I am not the target audience for this book. Nonetheless, I got it. Let’s see how that went.

So first of all, because of my familiarity with the musical, I have to judge this as an adaption, and it fares...weirdly. See, the advantage one has with theatre is a certain sense of unreality. You can have an actor walk out onto a completely bare stage and invoke wartime London, or the far-off future, or the inner mind of a character, in a way you can’t really do in a lot of mediums. The musical uses its format to transition seamlessly between Wonderland and the real world - the first time this happens, it’s in the space of a musical number, where reality is already altered just because everyone started singing and dancing. Here in the novel, surreal passages are used when Alice transitions from reality to the dream-world, and I’m not sure it works as well. Part of the issue here is the stream-of-consciousness state of the narrative (more on that later). In addition, large swathes of dialogue are lifted verbatim from the musical - granted, 99% of people reading this wouldn’t notice, but it stuck out to me, and it was jarring when there were slight changes. (Also, he cut the stuff with the birds from Chapter Three! That’s one of the best parts!)

I have a few britpicks as well. Sater, English people don’t use ‘period’ to mean ‘full stop’. That’s an Americanism. Also, Angus is said to be from Leeds, but just sounds like a Dick van Dyke mockney, as opposed to having an actual northern accent. It’s jarring to me, as someone from the northwest of England myself. Sater’s definitely done some research - he cites his bibliography in the back - but the story could really have done with an English person reading it over for stuff like this. Plus, there’s that whole London-centric thing going on - Angus seems to be the only non-Londoner in the cast, though Harold is described as northern once but then his mum is said to be glad that he’s out of London? No idea what’s going on there. It bugs me, and I say this as someone who once spent half an hour trying to figure out if Americans use the word ‘sofa’ for a fic. I get it, our linguistic differences are small enough that it trips you up easily. 

Let’s talk about Alice, who is our main character. I actually ended up liking her a lot less here than in the musical. Here, we have more flashbacks into her relationship with Alfred, which makes her look incredibly codependant. She abandons her mother after a bombing raid just to be with him. I mean, sure, it’s a fraught situation and I don’t blame her for acting emotionally, it’s just that in the show the impression I got was less ‘I devote my life to Alfred’ and more ‘I am fixated on him now because he’s literally dying right in front of me’. In addition, I was uncomfortable with the focus on her breasts and body as a symbol of her growing up. She’s 15, Sater. You don’t need to talk about her breasts every few paragraphs. 

Alfred, meanwhile, is both more and less of a character in this book - more because we see more of him, less because thanks to the book’s page count, his appearances seem lesser, and more attention is drawn to the fact that the Wonderland White Rabbit version of him isn’t really him by virtue of being able to distinguish them better in prose, while on stage they’re played by the same person so the line is blurred. I like Alfred, for the most part. His illness, his personality, and his quirks are expanded on further, and make for a few cute moments between him and Alice in the backstory.

And then we get to other characters, and here’s where I need to raise my eyebrow. See, most of the show’s minor characters have been adapted into the novel, and given the names of their show counterparts even if these weren’t stated on-stage. All apart from one. Clarissa, whose Wonderland counterparts are a Canary, a playing card Queen, and one of the mock-Mock Turtles, has been replaced with a girl who is exactly the same in characterisation, but whose name is Mamie. This is notable because Clarissa is the only musical character who has received this treatment, and because Mamie is described as blonde and white, while on stage Clarissa was played by actresses with some Asian heritage. This...is straight up whitewashing. Did Sater not think an upper-class Asian woman would be believable in 1940s London? A quick google search tells me that London’s had a Chinese expatriate community since the 1800s, 20k people of South Asian descent emigrated to Britain from 1800 to 1945...I’m sure something more thorough can come up with more information. It’s incredibly noticeable, especially since Mamie and Clarissa are otherwise identical.

As to the rest...they’re relatively inconsequential, but for the roles they play in Wonderland. This is Alice and Alfred’s story, after all. One bizarre thing is Harold Pudding, who abruptly disappears halfway through the book and is never seen again? Ok. The most fleshed-out of the minor characters is Tabatha, otherwise known as the Cheshire Cat, who helps Alice and urges her to finish the story, helping guide her through her grief and pain. I’m glad to see she comes across as just as much of a massive lesbian as she does in the show! ‘Sister’, my ass. This Cat Is Gay. I don’t think Sater knows that, though.

One final thing - the novel is written in a very stream-of-consciousness, rambling style. (Much like this review.) This can be hard reading at times, especially if you read fast, like I do. I had to go back and reread some passages just to make sure I’d understood what happened - not helped by the surreal nature of the narrative, as befits a Wonderland story.

I’ve done a lot of complaining here. I did enjoy this novel, honest. I’m just not sure about a lot of it? I get the feeling, though, that if you’re much less word-for-word familiar with the show than I am, you’ll have a better time with this book. It’s for you, after all, not me!

[gloamingdawn]

Send “💓” and I’ll tell you how I think a romantic relationship between our muses would go - Dicenne

You might not know this about me, but I’m extremely biased and I totally feel like a romantic relationship between Lyn and Dicenne would be actually really wonderful, great and perfect. 

Well, maybe not that last one, but I’m sure you catch my drift. 

I think this one would wind up being a fairly long, slow burn. One fraught with minor but conquerable complications. They’re both in fairly transitional periods in their lives so a relationship really does need, to use a baking metaphor, proving time to come out successful. 

If they ever started the dating dance, Lyn’s personally not at all interested in rushing into something serious, and she knows Dice has a preference of taking the lead in these sorts of things -- this won’t stop her from asking him to go dancing or surfing. Lots of little fun dates that just give them time together, both friendship and relationship building. I feel like it’s probably pretty important to both of them at this stage in their lives to be good friends with their partner. I can absolutely see them keeping it a little quiet at first, too, for personal privacy’s sake more than anything else. 

However keeping it a little quiet at first might be hard because they’re both really into physical affection. It’s a love language they both share, and they already do a little here and there, but this would absolutely get dialed up to 11. Lyn would even let him touch her hair. Wild. Any kind of physical affection Dice chose to give out would just be soaked up and dished right back. It’s been years since anybody really handled her with good touches and she’s super starved for it. 

The Other Job is a blip of a complication -- a lot of her current jealousy is because she isn’t getting much affection (and she desperately wants it). Dice would absolutely have to put in some time and effort on occasion to remind and reassure Lyn that it is just work and she’s still the guiding star on his horizon, and that’s something he probably understands or would just do without needing much prompting. This is something that would naturally taper off in time once a really solid foundation is set, especially as it’s a condition of his life that Lyn is fully aware of and has no desire to interfere with if he enjoys it. 

Communication would probably be totally fine. Neither of them is really the type to let things just linger unsaid or to be left to too much interpretation. Lyn’s a little more blunt and less tactful than he is, but they don’t dance around each other now and that would be incredibly unlikely to change. They’re both very independent people who will continue to do their own thing the way they like to, and being able to talk frankly without awkwardness is important in reducing misunderstandings. Communication is a major factor in downplaying or negating a lot of Lyn’s worse traits.  

As things got more serious they’d probably have to knuckle down on reassurances; they’re both widowers, recent widowers if elvish lifespans are taken into account, and nobody wants to feel like a major aspect of their life is being glossed over or replaced by anyone. I can see Lyn having to make plenty of time for Dice take time to himself for Lina and Kynson. She gets it. She has a much different relationship with grief and death than he does, and she’d be more than happy to let him keep a space for his wife and son in whatever life they start to build together. 

I think there’d be a big learning curve for Lyn on being part of a family again. She’s been trying with Meryn, but that relationship is so much different than the one Dice and Kara have, just by nature of having never grown up together the same way. She knows Dice wants a big family, and Kara wants to be an auntie really badly, and that’s a major physical issue for her -- she’s got eight embroys on lock as being good to go, but that’s it and there’s a real chance only one or two of those will actually take. They’d probably have an easier time adopting as a couple, and might still do that (it’s very important to her), but she knows it’s not quite the same and this would be a high point of stress for her for a long time. 

Sexually they’d be stellar, Lyn already knows they’re physically compatible and they have a lot of complimenting kinks and shared favorites that haven’t really ever been explored, and Dice has so much experience that he could probably teach her some crazy stuff. Things would stay very spicy. If Dice wanted to keep his shenanigans with Felon going whenever the other man visited, or if Dice wanted to go visit him, she’d let him. That’s a relationship much older than their time together and there are a lot of things Felon can provide that she can’t, and she’s comfortable with that.   

So anyway this is getting very 95 thesis-y and really is a very rosy view of what it could be without any major massive world issues cropping up, but those are totally navigable in a strong relationship and gosh darn it I think the kids could do it. 

@turning-through-the-never I don’t know what you expected. For @dicenne :V

[rebelsofshield]

Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron-Review

Alexander Freed resurrects the X-Wing novel in Alphabet Squadron, a rousing and emotionally complex adventure that ranks among the best in the current canon.

(Review contains minor spoilers)

The second Death Star is destroyed. The Emperor is dead. The Empire is falling and its forces are scattered and desperate. For the first time since the Galactic Civil War began, the Alliance, now the New Republic, is winning. However, as a galactic government collapses and a scattered militia group begins to take its place, it turns out that the waning days of the war may be more chaotic than anyone anticipated. Among those caught in the chaos is Yrica Quell, a former Imperial TIE pilot of the infamous 204th Imperial Fighter Wing aka “Shadow Wing,” who herself just one of thousands of other former soldiers looking to escape to the otherside of a losing war. After Yrica attracts the attention of New Republic Intelligence agent Caern Adan, she is drafted into a makeshift working group to hunt down and eliminate her former wingmen, whom have become a major thorn in the burgeoning Republic’s side. Overseen by Adan, New Republic general Hera Syndulla, and a reprogrammed Imperial torture droid, Yrica helps to form a group of misfit and war addled pilots to help save the New Republic from dying before it even begins.

At Celebration Chicago, Alexander Freed said that he was inspired to write Alphabet Squadron by the classic Expanded Universe X-Wing novels written by Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston. While Freed’s pilot focused narrative and thrilling action sequences are sure to evoke memories of this series, the book that Alphabet Squadron seems to brush shoulders with most after first read is Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy. Like Aftermath, Alphabet Squadron is the first in a trilogy following an ensemble of misfit characters in the waning days of the Galactic Civil War and the fallout of the Battle of Endor. Wendig’s trilogy always boasted an impressive scope and stylistically impressive prose, but the first installment of Aftermath struggled due to characters that failed to make an impression and an unfocused narrative. Each novel in the trilogy improved on the one that preceded it, but it is hard to deny that Aftermath got off to a rocky start. Conversely, while Alexander Freed’s dense prose may not appeal to some readers, Alphabet Squadron launches out of the gate with fully formed characters and a sense of purpose and place.

Like his previous Star Wars novel, Battlefront: Twilight Company, Freed excels in making the Galaxy Far, Far Away feel lived in. As previously mentioned, his dense writing style may turn off some readers, but it does an incredible job in helping this setting come to life. It’s clear that Freed put extensive thought into helping to realize a galaxy in this degree of turmoil. In the months immediately following the Battle of Endor, there truly wasn’t a seat of power in the galaxy as both The Empire and the New Republic are each in periods of transition and internal upheaval. The Empire finds itself lacking in direction and leadership and facing a long collapse that seems unlikely to turn in their favor. The New Republic must not only contend with forming a new government but transitioning from a guerilla military to an expansive force capable of finalizing a war it never really prepared to win. Alphabet Squadron in the process evokes such classic pieces of desperate military science fiction like Battlestar Galactica and even The Last Jedi. In the aftermath of such devastating canon events as Operation Cinder, Freed captures the fluctuating and unstable state of the galaxy with descriptive settings, well thought out dips into everyday life of the average galactic citizenry, and first and foremost the characters at its center.

As any good novel should do, it is truly the characters of Alphabet Squadron that make this book sing. Freed brings together an ensemble of damaged and diverse pilots to make up the titular Alphabet Squadron. Fittingly each of these characters not only feel as unique and varied as the ships they fly, but they all realistically bear the scars of beings who have spent their last years embroiled in war. For better and for worse, Freed frames much of the narrative around the reader and the characters gradually learning about the pasts and motives of the different pilots and their commanders. While Freed maintains a rotating third person limited point of view, it becomes quickly apparent that what we learn from each of the characters isn’t necessarily to be trusted. These are damaged people that are hiding things not only from their teammates but from themselves and it is this obscuring, while at times perhaps a bit too illusive, that adds a larger sense of discovery and engagement to a narrative that by and large follows the familiar “learning to work as a team” structure.

Of the five main characters, Yrica is undeniably the most intriguing and fraught. Unlike many classic Imperial defectors, Yrica joined after the Battle of Endor when Palpatine’s regime was already collapsing. While her motives for seeking out the New Republic are mostly self-serving, Freed succeeds at making Yrica a sympathetic protagonist, if an undeniably flawed one. Her narrative becomes one not only of finding a purpose or direction in a galaxy that wants nothing more than to cast her aside, but of deprogramming from fascist doctrine. “Think like a rebel,” becomes a mantra that carries its way not only in the cockpit but to the cantina, to her therapy sessions, and in learning to be a leader to her team.

The rest of Alphabet Squadron are similarly impressive. Nath Tensent is a classic Star Wars style rogue, a mix of pirate, rebel, and early Imperial defector, with a charisma that easily wins over reader and co-pilots alike. He’s the type of lovable bastard whose true intentions are often hard to read and frequently underhanded but nonetheless is capable of incredible moments of humanity and empathy for others.

Wyl Lark and Chass na Chadic hail from two formerly paired squadrons, whose long, tortured final mission takes up a large portion of the first act of the novel. Lark becomes Alphabet Squadron’s heart, bringing a boyish sense of naiveté but also empathy to his fellow pilots. Smartly, Freed knows how to show the dangers of this though and demonstrates how Lark’s inherent good nature sometimes leads to personal danger and overstepping his bounds in the care of his teammates. It avoids cynicism while also teaching the value in trusting the independence of others. In particular, this is demonstrated with Wyl’s relationship Chass na Chadic, the music blasting Theelin pilot, who joins Alphabet Squadron alongside him. Given their shared trauma and different manners of coping, Freed frames the frayed relationship between these two particular characters as a central arc of the book and it works well, especially given how well drawn both characters prove to be.

And Kairos? Kairos is the resident, silent badass. Cloaked in rags, armor, masks, and mystery, Kairos remains the closest to an enigma at the novel’s conclusion. What little we learn of her hints at a past filled with trauma and strife which not only comes about in cold mystery but short bursts of intense violence. She feels not unlike the fan favorite animated bounty hunter, Embo, with a dash of Wolverine-esque tragic past. It makes her brief moments where she opens up to the other members of Alphabet Squadron linger for pages afterward.

Even supporting cast members spark with their own sense of personality and life. Caern Adan tows the line between grandstating jackass and pragmatic foreward thinker in a way that makes him feel realistic if not empathetic. Chass and Wyl’s former squadmates before joining Alphabet Squadron shine through with individual quirks and personalities and their presence becomes particularly haunting and painful despite their relatively little time on the page. Even Adan’s mechanical assistant, an Imperial Torture Droid turned team therapist, is a standout with an unexpectedly endearing sense for emotional sensitivity.

Fans of Star Wars Rebels are also sure to enjoy Hera Syndulla’s meatier than expected role here. Freed paints a picture of a war weary Hera that is driven by duty and longs for the days of Ghost family. Her maternal caring for those under her command shines through and her moments of guidance to the Alphabet Squadron team rank as some of the most emotionally affecting beats of the novel as a whole. Those hoping to see Jason Syndulla or some of the other members of the Rebels may be disappointed, but any fan of the Spectre Two is sure to get a lot out of this book.

Freed also succeeds in bringing these characters into action. While his prose while the characters are grounded is often dense with detail and minutiae, Freed somehow finds an incredible balance when his characters step into the cockpit and begin fighting off TIE Fighters. Dogfights feel energetic and kinetic and Freed manages to block these with a sense of action and pacing that feels clear and exciting. Alphabet Squadron even gets creative in just how a squadron of five different types of ship would function and the resulting set pieces feel both imaginative and surprisingly practical. Given the strong work done to fleshing out these characters and their chaotic world in the quiet moments, it gives the beats where blaster bolts are flying and starships are exploding an extra oomph of tension and emotion.

It may not be immaculate, but Alphabet Squadron is a truly engrossing and affecting read. Between Freed’s incredible sense of setting to his well-drawn characters, it’s hard to find a more satisfying book in the current Star Wars canon and the wait for the next installment of this series in 2020 feels like an eternity away. The sequels may be ending this winter with The Rise of Skywalker, but the next great Star Wars trilogy may have already just started.

Score: A-

[lucidentia-sb]

Q&A WITH SIMON BAKER

The actor on challenging prescribed masculine ideals, leaving legacies behind, and his feature film directorial debut Breath. 

“I’m really proud of this movie and I still sort of pinch myself that we were able to pull it off at all,” confessed Simon Baker to The Guardian earlier this month in speaking about his feature film directorial debut. “What I wanted to do with this movie is try to make a film that had a bit more longevity and, for my own satisfaction, had some kind of a legacy that I felt proud of.” Up until this point, the Australian actor has been a TV mainstay with his seven-year tenure on The Mentalist, not to mention his three-season commitment on The Guardian before it, playing a corporate attorney sentenced to countless hours of community service at a child advocacy office following a drug conviction. Evidently, Baker is looking to cement a different kind of legacy with Breath: an adaptation of Tim Winton’s acclaimed novel of the same title, in which is he also stars.

Set in the 1970s and largely shot in the Western Australian coastal town of Denmark, Breath is a rite-of-passage tale that chronicles a pair of small town boys who come under the spell of a Svengali-like, former pro surfer. The bro-triangle that develops out on the water between sensitive teenager Pikelet (Samson Coulter), his reckless best friend Loonie (Ben Spence), and their mentor Sando (Baker) is held together by instinctive respect, but also threatened by ego and rivalries, especially as Loonie’s increasingly erratic bravado pulls him mercilously into the direction his name suggests. Further complicating the boys’ surrogate parentage is Sando’s wife, Eva (Elizabeth Debicki), a former competitive skier - a confusing erotic presence: too old to be a conventional love interest, yet too young to be their mother - who communicates a kind of impenetrable sorrow.

I’m sure adapting any novel for the screen, let alone something by Tim Winton whose work is beloved, is fraught with obstacles. What sort of conversations did you have with him when you were about to embark on this project?

I had a couple of conversations with him on the phone and we talked more broadly about the approach to it. Then at one of the first dinners that just he and I had together, we pretty much outlined what I wanted to take out of the novel and distill into a film. Because they’re very different mediums, you can’t do a literal translation of the book and put it on the screen—it’s not really going to work out. It has to be broken down and then reinvented as a movie. So that was the process. I had the framework and the approach to it that I needed to run by Tim. I had his go-ahead or his approval and a sort of blessing, really, to be able to fuck with it and make it my own. He was a hundred percent on board with that. In fact, he was really encouraging of that, which I thought was brave of him and very trusting of him. Then he pretty much let me go in the direction that I wanted to go. He did a very early draft of the script, but I worked a lot with Gerard Lee. When we got to a point where [Gerard] kind of wanted to make a different movie out of it, I worked on it on my own from that point on, getting it to the shape where it is now.

I saw this quote from you: “You have to be prepared to murder the book, I think, and I needed to get Tim’s permission.” I think that’s so honest and accurate.

That was pretty much it, yeah.

Breath was a seven-year journey for you to get made and you can sense that it really comes from the heart. But I understand you weren’t originally attached to direct on top of your other duties. Was there always an ambition to direct?

It was an ambition that I had for a very long time. I mean, pretty much from the point in which I was an actor arriving on set. I was like, “Yeah, this is fantastic. I’m on this set as an actor. But I’m much more interested in what that guy there is doing.” [Laughs] Because he’s the conductor. He’s the guy that’s putting the whole thing together and that always fascinated me a bit more. I like the way things work. [Directing is] a lot more consuming in so many aspects. Your time, your energy, your emotional input, your sense of craftiness—I find it far more fulfilling in so many ways than I do with acting. I wish I found acting as fulfilling. Unfortunately, I just don’t. I don’t dislike acting. I just like that all-consuming nature of directing.

Maybe there’s a kind of parallel to be made between you, a veteran actor, directing these newcomer actors, and Sando mentoring the kids. Did that bring back some memories from when you first started out in the business?

A hundred percent. We were kind of living the story of the film in the making of the film in a lot of ways. It did make me [feel that way], just like probably how Sando aligns himself with these two young guys because I think he’s fearing his own mortality—a midlife crisis or something. Being around those two guys, Samson Coulter and Ben Spence who play Pikelet and Loonie, made me feel incredibly vital again. It did really energize me in a lot of ways, and because they were so raw and so natural, it kind of puts you on your toes as an actor as well.

I’ve come to learn that you surf in real life so you were well-aware of the world that you’re going into. What was your approach to capturing these expressive images on the water? For instance, how do you communicate to viewers this feeling of surfing for the very first time?

My approach was to make it feel really authentic and a big part of that authenticity is the fact that, when you’re on the water surfing, you’re exposed to such a sensory overload at times. Sometimes, you can’t see completely. Other times, you can’t hear completely. So you’re sort of immersed in the water and the things that we rely on on land are pushed to the back. It’s incredibly visual when you’re surfing on the water. Some of the glimpses of the beauty that you’re exposed to and take for granted—I wanted to capture the simplicities of what those things are because I think it’s always going to help the audience feel like they’re experiencing it themselves. Also, living that experience through a character—going from land and transitioning into the water—you never really lose sight of the protagonist. We don’t detach and then see them surfing. We go with them. I think that helps to enhance the experience. Obviously, visually, it’s shot very simply, but that visual world is incredibly beautiful. Then the sound design just enhances the visuals. The sound design is a big part of this film. If you do get a chance, go see it in a cinema with good sound. The sound design is a big factor in a lot of the sequences in the ocean.

The film is so much your baby as a filmmaker, but you also turn in a great performance as Sando. Was he immediately recognizable to you? Who did you model that character after?

He was definitely immediately recognizable to me. I’ve had very similar relationships as these boys. I’ve had relationships with Sando-like figures all through my life, particularly through their age period. I mean, my upbringing was very similar to this. I knew most of these characters quite well. I didn’t model Sando after one specific person. I think there’s a bit of a license there because Sando is just one piece in the fabric of the film and I wanted him to be the antidote to Pikelet’s father, who is quite restrained and conservative. He’s loving and gentle and thoughtful, but quite conservative. The idea was that, as a sort of mentor figure, Sando paralleled the role of Pikelet’s father, but was the antithesis of his father.

You directed a string of episodes when you were starring on The Mentalist. I know that must be a completely different beast, but that must help you nonetheless. What did you find most challenging on this directorial debut on a feature film?

Because it’s such a personal story, I think the most challenging thing for me was keeping a perspective on the bigger picture of the story for audiences that do know this world. I love movies where you enter into a world that you’re not familiar with or that’s sort of somewhat unexpected, but there’s an integrity to the world where there isn’t anything that takes you out of it once you’re in it. You’re in it for the entire film, even if it’s a science fiction film. A fantastic movie that I love is Children of Men, the Alfonso Cuaron one with Clive Owen. You enter into that world and you just buy right into it completely. There’s no bad notes that take you out of what that world is. I enjoy that aspect of watching a film, especially if I don’t know anything about it and just going in and going,”Wow, I’ve gone into this other sort of dimension.” To keep perspective on the storytelling and keeping that world authentic, whether it’s personal or not, is a challenge. But going back to what you were saying about working on shows and directing episodes of The Mentalist, it’s a completely different animal. But obviously, it’s great training ground—a great sort of practice field for doing something that immerses like Breath.

Breath offers this bit of poetry in the form of narration: “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.” It’s a wonderful meditation on prescribed identities and finding your own way. What does that signify for you on a personal level?

I like what you’re saying: prescribed identifies. I’ve articulated that the film’s about identities, but I haven’t used “prescribed identity” and I’m going to steal that from you, Kee. [Laughs] Because that’s exactly what it is. To me, there were so many times as a young man this pressure to comply to a certain masculine ideal. So often, you would feel like a failure because you fell short in some way or you couldn’t live up to this expectation. It puts a lot of pressure on the individual. That is a prescribed identity. What I wanted to do was set up that framework of the stereotypical, masculine, macho sort of idea and subvert it through Pikelet’s strength as an individual, in the moment that he finds his strength as an individual that defines him as a unique person. And then he sees that in his father as well. That was important to me because I’ve felt those moments as a kid. I fell short and I didn’t understand why I fell short or why I had to comply to a prescribed identity.

The Mentalist is far-reaching. You go to South Korea and they’re still rerunning episodes. I saw it come on in Austria the other day. You’ve cemented one legacy. What legacy are you looking to leave behind now?

I want to make films. I want to become a filmmaker. I want to make films that connect with people, you know? Whether I’ll be achieve that—I don’t know. I don’t think of it as so much a legacy. It’s more about just not taking the opportunities that I have for granted, more than anything. And growing. I wanna grow. I wanna learn. I wanna share these experiences with people. And when I say that, I don’t mean sharing the film with people so much as sharing the experiences of making the film because you do share that experience with a lot of people. That’s what you carry away. The film is a byproduct of that shared experience.

Is there a sophomore feature on the horizon?

There is. I’ve optioned Tim Winton’s most recent book called The Shepherd’s Hut, which is a great book. It’s tense and brutal and speaks a lot to intergeneralational, toxic masculinity.

[antoine-roquentin]

In many ways, Coates’s career manifests these collateral trends of progress and regress in American society. He grew up in Baltimore at the height of the crack epidemic. One of his own friends at Howard University in the 1990s was murdered by the police. Coates didn’t finish college and had been working and writing for small magazines when in 2008 he was commissioned by the Atlantic to write a blog during Obama’s campaign for president. Three books and many blog posts and tweets later, Coates is, in Packer’s words, ‘the most influential writer in America today’ – an elevation that no writer of colour could previously have achieved. Toni Morrison claims he has filled ‘the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates seems genuinely embarrassed by his swift celebrity: by the fact that, as he writes in his latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, a collection of essays published in the Atlantic between 2008 and 2016, ‘I, who’d begun in failure, who held no degrees or credentials, had become such a person.’ He also visibly struggles with the question ‘Why do white people like what I write?’ This is a fraught issue for the very few writers from formerly colonised countries or historically disadvantaged minorities in the West who are embraced by ‘legacy’ periodicals, and then tasked with representing their people – or country, religion, race, and even continent (as in the New York Times’s praise for Salman Rushdie: ‘A continent finding its voice’). Relations between the anointed ‘representative’ writer and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism.

He doesn’t have a perch in academia, where most prominent African-American intellectuals have found a stable home. Nor is he affiliated to any political movement – he is sceptical of the possibilities of political change – and, unlike his bitter critic, Cornel West, he is an atheist. Identified solely with the Atlantic, a periodical better known for its oligarchic shindigs than its subversive content, Coates also seems distant from the tradition of black magazines like Reconstruction, Transition and Emerge, or left-wing journals like n+1, Dissent and Jacobin. He credits his large white fan club to Obama. Fascination with a black president, he thinks, ‘eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he’d awakened about American identity.’ This is true, but only in the way a banality is true. Most mainstream publications have indeed tried in recent years to accommodate more writers and journalists from racial and ethnic minorities. But the relevant point, perhaps impolitic for Coates to make, is that those who were assembling sensible arguments for war and torture in prestigious magazines only a few years ago have been forced to confront, along with their readers, the obdurate pathologies of American life that stem from America’s original sin.

Coates, followed by the ‘white working classes’, has surfaced into liberal consciousness during the pained if still very partial self-reckoning among American elites that began with Hurricane Katrina. Many journalists have been scrambling, more feverishly since Trump’s apotheosis, to account for the stunningly extensive experience of fear and humiliation across racial and gender divisions; some have tried to reinvent themselves in heroic resistance to Trump and authoritarian ‘populism’. David Frum, geometer under George W. Bush of an intercontinental ‘axis of evil’, now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared ‘neo-imperialist’ and exponent of ‘savage wars’, recently claimed to have become aware of his ‘white privilege’. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently embattled on behalf of the open society in Mitteleuropa. Goldberg, previously known as stenographer to Netanyahu, is now Coates’s diligent promoter. Amid this hectic laundering of reputations, and a turnover of ‘woke’ white men, Coates has seized the opportunity to describe American power from the rare standpoint of its internal victims.

As a self-professed autodidact, Coates is primarily concerned to share with readers his most recent readings and discoveries. His essays are milestones in an accelerated self-education, with Coates constantly summoning himself to fresh modes of thinking. Very little in his book will be unfamiliar to readers of histories of American slavery and the mounting scholarship on the new Jim Crow. Coates, who claimed in 2013 to be ‘not a radical’, now says he has been ‘radicalised’, and as a black writer in an overwhelmingly white media, he has laid out the varied social practices of racial discrimination with estimable power and skill. But the essays in We Were Eight Years in Power, so recent and much discussed on their first publication, already feel like artefacts of a moribund social liberalism. Reparations for slavery may have seemed ‘the indispensable tool against white supremacy’ when Obama was in power. It is hard to see how this tool can be deployed against Trump. The documentation in Coates’s essays is consistently impressive, especially in his writing about mass imprisonment and housing discrimination. But the chain of causality that can trace the complex process of exclusion in America to its grisly consequences – the election of a racist and serial groper – is missing from his book. Nor can we understand from his account of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most incredible of eras, and an underestimation of its continuities with the past and present.

In the sentimental education of Coates, and of many liberal intellectuals mugged by American realities, Obama is the culmination of the civil rights movement, the figure who fulfils the legacies of Malcolm X as well as Martin Luther King. In Jay Z’s words, ‘Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on slavery and genocide. There is no doubt that compared to the ‘first black president’, who played the dog whistle better than the saxophone, a hip-hop enthusiast and the son of a Kenyan Muslim represented a genuine diversification of America’s ruling class. Obama offered his own ascent as proof that America is an inclusive society, ceaselessly moving towards a ‘more perfect union’. But such apparent vindications of the American dream obscured the limited achievement of the civil rights movement, and the fragility of the social and political consensus behind it. The widespread belief that Obama had inaugurated a ‘postracial’ age helped conceal the ways in which the barefaced cruelties of segregation’s distant past had been softening since the 1960s into subtle exclusions and injustices.

A ruling class that had been forced to make partial concessions to the civil rights movement subsequently worked, as Nixon blurted out, to ‘devise a system’ to deal with the black ‘problem’ without appearing to do so. With the wars on crime, drugs and welfare queens, the repertoire of deception came to include coded appeals to a white constituency, the supposedly ‘silent majority’. But the cruellest trick used by both Republicans and Democrats was the myth that America had resolved the contradiction at the heart of its democracy. For the conviction that African-Americans were walking and running and would soon start flying, enabled by equal opportunity, paved the way for an insidious ideological force: colour-blind universalism. Its deceit was summed up best by the creepy Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia: ‘In the eyes of the government, we are just one race here. It is American.’ The rules of colour-blind equality and the ‘level playing-field’, as they came to be outlined in the 1980s and 1990s, created a climate in which affirmative action came to look like reverse racism: unacceptably discriminatory against whites. With structural injustice presented as a thing of the past, what appeared to deform the lives of black people was their culture of single-parent households, scant work ethic, criminality and welfare dependency. This widespread attitude was summed up by a New Republic cover in 1996 urging Clinton to slash welfare: it showed a black woman, or ‘welfare mom’, bottle-feeding an infant while smoking. Blacks, in this politically bipartisan view, needed to get with the American programme just as various immigrant communities had done. As the original exponent of centrist liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, charged, they had become too prone to ‘nourishing prejudice, magnifying difference and stirring up antagonism’ – in other words, blacks were guilty of identity politics.

The detractors of ‘identity liberalism’ are still prone to the fantasy that the end of de jure racial inequality ushered in a new era of opportunity and mobility for African-Americans. In reality, even the black people admitted into the networks of prosperity and privilege remained vulnerable compared to those who had enjoyed the inherited advantages of income and opportunity over several generations. This became gruesomely evident during the financial crisis of 2008, when African-American families, deceived into home-ownership by banks peddling subprime loans, found themselves in economic freefall, losing half their collective wealth. When Coates and Obama simultaneously emerged into public view in 2008 the political and ideological foundations of racial progress ought to have looked very shaky. But this structural weakness was obscured by the spectacular upward mobility of an Ivy League-educated black lawyer and constitutional scholar.

There were signs during Obama’s campaign, particularly his eagerness to claim the approbation of Henry Kissinger, that he would cruelly disappoint his left-leaning young supporters’ hopes of epochal transformation. His actions in office soon made it clear that some version of bait and switch had occurred. Obama had condemned the air war in South Asia as immoral because of its high civilian toll; but three days after his inauguration he ordered drone strikes in Pakistan, and in his first year oversaw more strikes with high civilian casualties than Bush had ordered in his entire presidency. His bellicose speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize signalled that he would strengthen rather than dismantle the architecture of the open-ended war on terror, while discarding some of its fatuous rhetoric. During his eight years in office, he expanded covert operations and air strikes deep into Africa; girding the continent with American military bases, he exposed large parts of it to violence, anarchy and tyrannical rule. He not only expanded mass surveillance and government data-mining operations at home, and ruthlessly prosecuted whistleblowers, but invested his office with the lethal power to execute anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world.

Obama occasionally denounced the ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African-Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African-Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace. Nor did he wish to be seen as soft on immigration; he deported millions of immigrants – Trump is struggling to reach Obama’s 2012 peak of 34,000 deportations a month. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he had eloquently sympathised with the marginalised and the powerless. In power, however, he seemed in thrall to Larry Summers and other members of the East Coast establishment, resembling not so much the permanently alienated outsider as the mixed-race child of imperialism, who, as Ashis Nandy diagnosed in The Intimate Enemy, replaces his early feeling for the weak with ‘an unending search for masculinity and status’. It isn’t surprising that this harbinger of hope and change anointed a foreign-policy hawk and Wall Street-friendly dynast as his heir apparent. His post-presidency moves – kite-surfing with Richard Branson on a private island, extravagantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street and bromance with George Clooney – have confirmed Obama as a case of mistaken identity. As David Remnick, his disappointed biographer, said recently, ‘I don’t think Obama was immune to lures of the new class of wealth. I think he’s very interested in Silicon Valley, stars and showbusiness, and sports, and the rest.’

Embodying neoliberal chic at its most seductive, Obama managed to restore the self-image of American elites in politics, business and the media that had been much battered during the last years of the Bush presidency. In the updated narrative of American exceptionalism, a black president was instructing the world in the ways of economic and social justice. Journalists in turn helped boost the fantastical promises and unexamined assumptions of universal improvement; some saw Coates himself as an icon of hope and change. A 2015 profile in New York magazine describes him at the Aspen Ideas Festival, along with Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, assorted plutocrats and their private jets, during the ‘late Obama era’, when ‘progress was in the air’ and the ‘great question’ after the legalisation of gay marriage was: ‘would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state?’ Coates is awkward among Aspen’s panjandrums. But he thinks it is too easy for him to say he’d be happier in Harlem. ‘Truthfully,’ he confesses, ‘I’m very happy to be here. It’s very nice.’ According to the profile-writer, ‘there is a radical chic crowd assembling around Coates’ – but then he is ‘a writer who radicalises the Establishment’.

For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates, the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it. In his account of a party for African-American celebrities at the White House in the late Obama era, his usually majestic syntax withers into Vanity Fair puffs: ‘Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number.’ Since Clinton, the reflexive distrust of high office once shared by writers as different as Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald has slackened into defensiveness, even adoration, among the American literati. Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama’s staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a ‘feeling’, that ‘this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.’ Not so incomparable if you remember Tina Brown’s description of another power couple, the Clintons, in the New Yorker in 1998: ‘Now see your president, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife.’ ‘The man in a dinner jacket’, Brown wrote, possessed ‘more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)’. After his visit, Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Showgirls and Basic Instinct, exulted over the Clinton White House’s diverse workforce: ‘full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics’. ‘Good Lord,’ he concluded in American Rhapsody, ‘we had taken the White House! America was ours.’

A political culture where progress in the air was measured by the president’s elegant bearing and penchant for diversity was ripe for demagoguery. The rising disaffection with a narcissistic and callous ruling class was signalled in different ways by the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy. The final blow to the Washington (and New York) consensus was delivered by Trump, who correctly read the growing resentment of elites – black or white, meritocratic or dynastic – who presumed to think the White House was theirs. Writing in Wiredmagazine a month before Trump’s election, Obama hailed the ‘quintessentially American compulsion to race for new frontiers and push the boundaries of what’s possible’. Over lunch at the White House, he assured Coates that Trump’s victory was impossible. Coates felt ‘the same’. He now says that ‘adherents and beneficiaries’ of white supremacy loathed and feared the black man in the White House – enough to make Trump ‘president, and thus put him in position to injure the world’. ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to We Were Eight Years in Power. ‘But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.’ This, again, is true in a banal way, but inadequate as an explanation: Trump also benefited from the disappointment of white voters who had voted, often twice, for Obama, and of black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton. Moreover, to blame a racist ‘whitelash’ for Trump is to exculpate the political, business and media luminaries Coates has lately found himself with, especially the journalists disgraced, if not dislodged, by their collaboration in a calamitous racist-imperialist venture to make America great again.

*

As early as 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois identified fear and loathing of minorities as a ‘public and psychological wage’ for many whites in American society. More brazenly than his predecessors, Trump linked the misfortunes of the ‘white working class’ to Chinese cheats, Mexican rapists and treacherous blacks. But racism, Du Bois knew, was not just an ugly or deep-rooted prejudice periodically mobilised by opportunistic politicians and defused by social liberalism: it was a widely legitimated way of ordering social and economic life, with skin colour only one way of creating degrading hierarchies. Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R. James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today. The realisation that economic conditions and religion were as much markers of difference as skin colour made Nina Simone, Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X, among others, connect their own aspirations to decolonisation movements in India, Liberia, Ghana, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Martin Luther King absorbed from Gandhi not only the tactic of non-violent protest but also a comprehensive critique of modern imperialism. ‘The Black revolution,’ he argued, much to the dismay of his white liberal supporters, ‘is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.’

Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year – disproportionately people of colour – and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and ‘the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as ‘the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’ – the ‘inter-related flaws’ that turned American society into a ‘burning house’ for the blacks trying to integrateinto it. And in Coates’s worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world’s most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. ‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent.

As long as Coates is indifferent to the links between race and international political economy, he is more likely to induce relief than guilt among his white liberal fans. They may accept, even embrace, an explanation that blames inveterate bigots in the American heartland for Trump. They would certainly baulk at the suggestion that the legatee of the civil rights movement upheld a 19th-century racist-imperialist order by arrogating to the US presidency the right to kill anyone without due process; they would recoil from the idea that a black man in his eight years in power deepened the juridical legacy of white supremacy before passing it on to a reckless successor. The intractable continuities of institutional brute power should be plain to see. ‘The crimes of the American state,’ Coates writes in one of the introductions to We Were Eight Years in Power, ‘now had the imprimatur of a black man.’ Yet the essays themselves ultimately reveal their author to be safely within the limits of what even a radicalised black man can write in the Atlantic without dissolving the rainbow coalition of liberal imperialism or alienating its patrons. Coates’s pain and passion have committed him to a long intellectual journey. To move, however, from rage over the rampant destruction of black bodies in America to defensiveness about a purveyor of ‘kill lists’ in the White House is to cover a very short distance. There is surely more to come. Coates is bracingly aware of his unfinished tasks as a writer. ‘Remember that you and I,’ he writes to his son in Between the World and Me, ‘are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic.’ Nowhere in his published writings has Coates elaborated on what this cosmic consciousness ought to consist of. But his own reference to the slave trade places the black experience at the centre of the modern world: the beginning of a process of capitalism’s emergence and globalisation whereby a small minority in Europe and America acquired the awesome power to classify and control almost the entire human population.

The black slave, captured early in this history, presaged the historical ordeal of the millions yet to come: dispossession and brutalisation, the destruction of cultures and memories, and of many human possibilities. Today, the practices of kidnapping, predation, extraction, national aggression, mob violence, mass imprisonment, disenfranchisement and zoning pioneered in the Atlantic have travelled everywhere, along with new modes of hierarchy and exclusion. They can be seen in India and Myanmar, where public sanction drives the violent persecution, including lynching, of various internal enemies of the nation. They can be seen in Africa and Latin America. They have returned home to Europe and America as renewed animus against migrants and refugees. All this reproduces to a sinister extent the devastating black experience of fear and danger – of being, as Coates wrote, ‘naked before the elements of the world’. Coates’s project of unflinching self-education and polemic has never seemed more urgent, and it has only just begun.

[altarofistus]

IM VERY HYPER OVER THE CHANGELING ELF THING.... do you have any headcanons my dearest friend

BOY DO I

where the hell did the elf condition Come From.  magic in the trees? some lonely forest god wishing for disciples who lived long enough to see the pattern in threats to the forest and could therefore protect it??  just a freak accident in the evolutional history of faerun??? we have no fuckin idea.  im banking on the lonely god giving a blessing to the land, or maybe the elemental plane of magic just crosses into forests more easily.  the changelings just have to stay there long enough.

babies cannot be taken, this is a myth perpetuated by anxious young mothers hovering over their cribs and  wearing iron pendants.  the child can only be taken when they can want to be taken.  until they can walk down the forest roads on their own legs.  thats a very important part of elfhood- a connection, physical first and spiritual second, to the earth.  there has to be the childs free will involved.

of course, this puts lonely children at a far greater risk.

they can only be taken in periods of transition, when the veil is thin in their minds and their bodies.  for example, the transition from baby to child is the most common time for a changeling to be taken to the woods, though there have been cases of children becoming teenagers and teenagers becoming adults, but those are incredibly sparse and fraught with doubt.  it is unknown whether these older changelings survive the change, or whether or not it is too late to plant the magic inside them.

changing is painful.  there are older elves who look after the children, croon them to sleep, stroke their poor heads, press cool kisses to their aching joints.  this is painful, and i am so sorry, little one, the caretakers say, apology light in their voices, light like grey mornings and dew on grass, but it must be done.  i love you. 

elves treasure their children so very much.  they dress them in fine silver leaves light as a whisper, comb spells into their hair, stitch protective sigils into their cloaks.  they have great games of tag lasting for weeks on end, falling down into a pile to learn how to meditate rather than sleep, learn the thrill of the hunt in a way that only a people with the forest on their side can.  they never go without a kiss goodnight.

changelings forget about their original homes very quickly.  their original names and their parents and siblings and friends fade as they walk into the trees, the memory of their smiles and voices fading soon after.  they cant imagine being called anything else than the name their caretaker gave them, until it is time for them to go back into the wide world and find a name for themself.

[jerseydeanne]

Mercury RX

Hey love…remember how I said you NEVER EVER announce an engagement or get married during Mercury Retrograde?  Bad bad time for Harry and The Grifter to announce all this.  Good read on this…especially the “Don'ts during Merc RX”.  I’ve seen this in action over and over.  Just sayin’. I’m going to die laughing watching this thing.  Karma is coming and it won’t be pretty.  Chin up..hang in there and get to feeling better!! 

https://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/05/5-dos-donts-for-your-love-life-during-mercury-retrograde-may-18-to-june-11/

When Mercury goes retrograde from May 18 to June 11, expect the cosmic trickster Mercury to upset the very romance his son Cupid previously brought to your life. In fact, be warned that Mercury may play havoc with your love affairs, especially if you don’t pay attention to five “dos and don’ts” during this tricky time frame.

The retrograde period is a time to be careful about the way you conduct yourself in all your romantic contacts to avoid a variety of problems that tend to occur over these three weeks.

During the retrograde, your love relationships may go haywire with miscommunications and crazy turnabouts of all kinds.

You may have experiences that remind you of the interaction between the two main characters in the classic 1987 romantic comedy, Moonstruck. In that movie, Loretta (played by Cher) one day passionately makes love with Ronny, (played by Nicholas Gage) seemingly receptive to embarking on a great new romance with him. The next day, when Ronny claims to be in love with her, she slaps him and says, “Well…snap out of it!”

That would be a Mercury retrograde moment between two people, filled with misperception, leading to misunderstanding, leading to an inappropriate communication (i.e. a slap)!

What causes such confusing and crazy events to happen to people who are romantically involved?

Astrologically, each planet in the sky exerts a unique influence on us and the way we relate to others, especially those with whom we socialize or have a love relationship. The planet Mercury rules our intelligence, mind, memory, and all types of communication ranging from talking and texting to writing. Since it also affects our self-expression and communication style, this planet influences the quality of our social interactions.

How Mercury functions in a person’s birth chart explains a great deal about how they formulate ideas and share them, especially in their romantic pursuits and love affairs. It indicates how they make sense of the relationships they have with others.

During these three weeks when Mercury is retrograde, one’s mental faculties are not functioning well when it comes to the way a person interacts in their social relationships, especially those concerning matters of the heart.

When this unique cosmic event happens (three to four times a year), the communications people have in their social relationships seem to go “bonkers!” Suddenly, normal communications, even with those we have a love relationship with, become unreliable and filled with misinformation where important data is missing or misunderstood. The passage of information between two people seems to be unintentionally cloudy or confused in some way.

This is why any action one takes or decision one makes during the retrograde often fail or seem sabotaged. As a result, they will have to be re-done or restructured in some way when the Retrograde period ends and Mercury goes direct.

During these three weeks, pay special attention to your romantic life and the actions you take in your love relationships. Here are five dos and five don’ts to respectfully observe during Mercury retrograde. Remember the old adage: an once of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Dos in Your Love Relationships:

1. Do reassert your vows and commitment to your spouse or partner (or that special relationship in your life). This is an excellent time for a ceremony that reconfirms and commemorates your continued devotion and love for each other. It’s positive because you’re just re-celebrating a wonderful event that had its beginnings when Mercury was direct.

2. Do show compassion and forgiveness toward a recent love relationship that has broken-up, especially if you still have unresolved feelings about it. The retrograde is perfect time for a peace offering, whether it’s sending your ex a dozen roses or suggesting that you’ll pack a lunch so that you can meet each other for a picnic in the park. Vow to talk less and listen more so that you can gain a new understanding you didn’t have before. It may lead to reconciliation.

3. Do take time to sit down with your partner and resolve your differences. This is an excellent time to openly discuss upsetting problems or contentious issues that have produced tension between you. Use this time to have an open dialogue where you both take the time to listen and hear each other’s point-of-view. Agree that if can’t come to a resolution, you’ll re-visit your discussion when Mercury goes direct.

4. Do revisit the old haunt where you used to meet the most incredible women (or men). Get in your car and drive to that cozy coffee shop where your flirting met with smiles, hellos and a romantic connection. Take a taxi to your favorite nightspot where you once sat at the piano bar and fell in love. Those places may come alive for you once again, during the retrograde. You may even see someone from your past.

5. Do call that woman (or man) you dated months (or years) ago you were sure was “the one,” but wasn’t. Do call that person who rejected your advance because the timing was wrong. Do call your old flame from many years ago to see what she’s up to. During Mercury retrograde, you may be surprised to find that the romance that didn’t work then, will work now.

Don’ts in Your Love Relationships:

1. Don’t get married during Mercury retrograde, no matter what the inducement or how much you are in love. The retrograde is famous for mental confusion that causes you not to see a complete picture of the relationship you’re about to commit to. It is a time when promises are effortlessly made and unpredictably broken. It’s when you’re sure that nothing can go wrong, until it surprises you and does. The problem is, at this time, there are some facts and extenuating circumstances you don’t know—that you will when Mercury goes direct. Wait until then to get married.

2. Don’t break up with the person you’re in a love relationship with, even if that relationship is unhappy or upsetting. It’s the wrong time to do it. There is something unclear about your situation that may alter your plans. Wait until the retrograde is over. Then, make your final decision. Meanwhile, if necessary, find a safe place to get away if you must. But do not act. Filing for a separation or divorce should be delayed because such actions will only lead to more fighting and misunderstanding that will strain you mentally, physically and emotionally. You’ll need the benefit of a clear mind that will come when Mercury is direct.

3. Don’t change the nature of your current relationship. These three weeks are the wrong time to go from casual dating to going “steady,” or going from seriously dating to becoming engaged, or going from engagement to marriage. Under the spell and confusion of the retrograde you are not seeing the entire picture. Your vision is blurred. You are mentally missing important details that may affect your plans. All that seems right under the retrograde can turn into all that’s wrong when Mercury goes direct. Wait for these three weeks to change the status of your love relationship.

4. Don’t go out on a first date with anyone new. That means if your friend has a fabulous man for you to meet, or your mother wants to introduce you to the gorgeous model she met on the bus, delay your meeting until the three weeks of the retrograde are over. First dates under the retrograde are fraught with unintended miscommunication and complex drama that may be occurring behind the scenes (unbeknownst to you). For this reason, if you have a chance to meet or date someone you might be romantically interested, wait until Mercury goes direct, when clarity of mind will return and you’re more likely to have a fortuitous romantic connection.

5. Don’t engage in any relationship with anyone who sounds dishonest or appears deceptive. Mercury is in the sign of Gemini during this retrograde. Be prepared to meet more “silver-tongued” devils than you’ve met in the last 10 years. If you go to a bar, you’ll think you walked into a “salesmen’s convention.” During the retrograde fibbers, storytellers and deceivers come out as much as ghosts and goblins do on Halloween. If you’re at a social event and you start talking to someone you think is a liar, they probably are. Trust your intuition. Go slow in your social relationships, especially any new ones that are born during the retrograde. Wait to “give it up,” until Mercury goes direct on June 18.

Good News: Mercury Retrograde is Over on June 11

Mercury goes direct on June 11. That’s the time to take action and make important decisions about your romantic life and love relationships.

When that happens, clearer communication will return, important words demonstrative of love can again be relied on, and you’ll see matters with crystal clear vision. You’ll possess important information you didn’t know while Mercury was retrograde. This new knowledge will help ensure you’re making a correct decision where it concerns your love life.

You’ll be happy you listened to the advice of your astrologer, Larry Schwimmer. I’ve got your back.

If you want to know if you were born with Mercury Retrograde, and where your personal transits are—to see if they are affecting your romantic relationships—go to the Free Transit Calculator and enter your birth date. And, if you’re curious to learn more about your personal Horoscope in 2015 and what it says about your love relationships, career, investments and health, order your customized report: Your Horoscope & Future in 2015.

[nigelsaywell]

To Be A Success in Indonesia You Have To Understand The Past

To do business in Indonesia you first have to understand certain elements of history. Struggles, Occupation, Independence, Communist tendencies and Authoritarian regimes, which have led to this point today.

Indonesia's technically was colonized by the Dutch for a 126 years. Indonesia’s view is this period ended in 1942 as the Japanese rolled in taking control for a further 3 years. It's important to point out the vastness of the Indonesian archipelago, overlaid on Europe it would stretch from London to Tehran. The Dutch cherry picked parts of Indonesia which were important for trade and logistics, they never really took total control. In fact the Indonesian were grouped into Kingdoms with each leader taking responsibility for their individual part corralling their like-minded people into tribes, led by a sultan or King.

I say the Dutch colonial period terminated in 1942, which is not strictly true. After the war ended and the Japanese surrendered the Dutch attempted a return.  By now the Indonesian had mustered a kind of guerrilla warfare experience whilst making life difficult for the Japanese.  Needless to say colonial incursion were no longer tolerated.

The period that followed was brutal the Dutch Army were in many instances likened to the Nazi's with their behaviour and atrocities that followed prior to full independence. No story can be complete until you write about Christmas of 1946. A Battalion under the command of Captain Raymond Westerling moved on the South Celebes, now known as Sulawesi over a two-month period they wiped villages off the map killing 4,000 people.  This was a war crime which has never been atoned for.  The irony in this situation was that whilst this barbaric act took place.  Nazis were being tried at The Hague for similar atrocities. President Sokarno declared Independence upon the Japanese surrender it took a further 3 years to rid the archipelago of the murderous atrocities to finally win freedom.

The Asia struggles were far from over as the Russian army were sweeping down through Manchuria and into the Korean Peninsula. China was in a state of civil war ending in 1949 with the victor being the Communist leader Mao Zedong over the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang retreated from the mainland onto Taiwan. Taiwan was given tolerance as Mao was unwilling to pursue further allowing Chiang Kai-shek to save face in a way the Chinese only understand.

Of course Vietnam became a focus as did South Korea. Much has been documented on this point. In the 60s Indonesia fell under the control of Suharto a brutal dictator given free rein by his American backers.  Suharto ruled for a further 32 years, that is until the end of the cold war. Some would say he was kept in power for the few years following the fall of the Berlin wall by his very canny wife Siti (Tien) Hartinah m. 1947–1996. Tien Suharto was widely reported as the power behind her husband’s throne, a meddling and unscrupulous woman who gave a new meaning to financial corruption. She was called Ibu Negara, Mother of the Nation, and she never let anyone forget that she, unlike her husband, was descended from royal stock. According to local belief it was she, because of her descent, who possessed the wahyu, or gift of power. Now that she was dead, her husband can no longer lay claim to it.

After her death the Soharto dynasty was collapsing giving way in 1998 to a true democracy in transition, not glossing over this as the fall of Soharto was not a smooth affair.  The country erupted into a short civil war. Students were rioting, gangs were forming on all major arteries, I remember this well as I was in the heart of the city on the 24th floor of a major telecom operators office building putting together a 5-year plan, we abandoned the meeting recognizing the stupidity of the situation as no one could be clear as to the next day let alone look 5 years out.  The brunt of the anger was metered out to the Chinese communities many were killed others fled for their lives. My journey that day was onto London but my trip through the marauding masses was not so easy. My driver Wayan was excellent, and we made it to the airport unscathed. Many Indonesian Chinese were also there their journey more fraught than mine. Most had travelled in the boot of their car, some wrapped in carpets.  On my arrival in London I was met by the MOD who later visited me in my hotel to strategies a military led evacuation of Brits in Jakarta. Strange times indeed.

Here we are some 20 years later with a leader, imaginative, honest and intent on breaking the elites past strangle hold, this he is doing at incredible speed.

This is just a potted history lesson, over time I may embellish in greater detail but for now the purpose of this blog is to show the future this dynamic democracy has and the opportunities it holds to those that are prepared to step a toe into this country deemed to be the 5th biggest economy.  It would be wrong to say take a risk on this market because that would be a phrase you could use some 20 years ago.  This is now a maturing market full of opportunity. As the saying goes the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago the 2nd best time is now!