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twentiethcenturymoviesandtv · 4 years ago

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Dead Poets Society: Facets of Film

After the script is written, the story worked out, and the characters cast, the only thing left to do in order to make it to theaters is to actually make the film.

Which, as you’ve probably guessed, isn’t as simple as it sounds.

There’s a lot of effort that goes into the process of making a film, taking a story from the written page and turning it into a visual experience: props, costumes, sets, editing, special effects, music, camerawork, and, most importantly, the performances from actors that solidifies characters and makes them seem real to an audience. Film is a collaborative art form, a project consisting of several different elements that are intended to blend together in order to tell a story in a visual, meaningful way.

It’s hard work, and it certainly explains why it’s called ‘movie magic’. It is these elements that have the potential to take a film from good to great, from a cult classic to a historical blockbuster. These elements are the shark from Jaws, the cinematography of Blade Runner, the sets of The Wizard of Oz.

See, although the most important elements of any given story, whether visual or not, are the characters and story, the fact is, the production of a film isn’t detached from the story it’s telling.

Movies are filled with all of these elements for a reason: to tell the story, to accentuate and reveal the plot and characters to the audience in the most efficient way possible. Although it’s very true that some films do it better than others, the best films use these ‘facets of film’ wisely, conveying information to the viewers in ways that make sense, and keeping up the illusion of reality within the film’s context, making a film more understandable and enjoyable.

The balance can be tricky to achieve. Underachieving films can end up with shoddy effects, or less-than-stellar performances, or sloppy camerawork, and other films, with the wrong focus, can end up turning their films into more extravaganza than story. In the end, ‘balance’ is the key word, using these elements to accentuate the film and improve it, without overshadowing the things that are the most important.

All of that brings us to today’s question: Does Dead Poets Society use these tips well, or not?

Let’s take a look, starting with something that can seem kind of simple: cinematography. (Possible spoilers below!)

A camera is a powerful tool, and nowhere is that more obvious than in movies. The purpose of such an instrument is to do far more than simply film what’s going on.

The way that an individual director or cinematographer uses a camera, what it’s pointed at and how, can end up giving the audience quite a lot of information without them having to think about it. Certain shots emphasize danger, or fear, or joy, and convey quite a lot of emotion. In post-production, editing of shots are what tells the story, and are used to direct the audience’s attention to specific things, ensuring they are focused on the action while setting up the atmosphere, leaving a vivid visual impression on the viewer.

And in the case of Dead Poets Society, it’s all about atmosphere.

Cinematographer John Seale is well-known for films like Rain Man and Witness, and would go onto doing films such as Mad Max: Fury Road and The English Patient, and his work on Dead Poets Society is evidence of a man who knows his way around a camera. Seale’s work as a cinematographer is subdued, designed to enhance the story, rather than overshadow it. Many shots are of the outdoors of Welton, showing the seasons of change and giving some beautifully artistic shots for the audience to enjoy as well as demonstrating the passage of time. But although Seale shoots the outside very well, he shoots the story even better.

Some scenes stick out in people’s memory: the iconic close-up on Todd’s shoe as it hits the desk as he stands up on it at the end, or the shot looking down at Mr. Keating, literally showing another perspective, or the interesting shot that follows Neil and Todd chasing each other around their dorm room in a tight spin, and, a personal favorite, the scene of Mr. Keating in the empty classroom after Neil’s suicide, and they all do this for a reason: they are shot with extreme care for the human experience. The halls of Welton are shot with cold wide shots, emphasizing their stately nature, and how much bigger it is than the people that live there. The focused opening shots on the banners instantly instill the impression of the values of the school. The tight shots of the Dead Poets within the cave informing about the boys’ close relationship. The empty camerawork framing Neil’s suicide deliberately builds up dread in the audience as we see his actions.

All of these are excellent examples of Seale’s eye for storytelling with a camera, but none are quite so well-done as the scene where the boys tell Todd about Neil’s suicide.

The scene opens with a close-up on Charlie’s face, not Todd, even though Todd is the one being told. Afterwards, the scene immediately cuts to the boys outside in the snow, where Todd runs ahead before collapsing. The camera closes in on the boys comforting him, before Todd gets up and runs off into a wide shot of whiteness, the oncoming snow.

It’s a cold shot, one that emphasizes the grimness of the emotion, and the stillness allows us to absorb Todd’s internal turmoil. And it gets the point across.

Throughout the film, the camerawork is used to frame great visuals, even though it seems like there aren’t too many ‘distinctive’ images from the film.

The boys all dress in a school uniform: there’s not much in costuming or the way people look to differentiate them, but that’s partially the point. The conformity of Welton bleeds into everyone, and there’s no ‘differentiations’, no individuality, that’s external. It’s up to the boys internally to change.

The visuals can only get you so far, though. Also helpful for a film’s attempt at communication is music.

Dead Poets Society actually doesn’t have a whole lot of music. It’s overall a quiet film, mostly reliant on performances and camerawork to get the emotion across to the audience, but that doesn’t mean there’s no score at all.

Composer Maurice Jarre (Best known for composing for Lawrence of Arabia, Ghost, Witness, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome)’s score is best utilized when it isn’t the main focus of the scene: the eerie sound of the boys sneaking into the cave for the first time, seeming almost magical or mystical as they disappear into the forest. During montage scenes of activities at Welton, a touch of the rock-and-roll sound of the 1950s can be heard. However, the score truly shines the best when its at its saddest: Neil’s suicide.

During Neil’s decision to kill himself, the music is quiet, not heavy, but definitely not light-hearted, either. It’s a devastating sound, somber, and keeps the audience knowing that something bad is about to happen.

All of these are great examples, but there’s no better example of emotional scoring than the ending.

As we’ve discussed before, the end of Dead Poets Society is very uncertain. There’s no real ‘happy’ ending, but it’s not exactly sad either, and part of that is in thanks to the way it’s scored.

When Todd leads members of his class to stand on his desk, the bagpipes start in, a victorious sound that harkens back to the beginning of the film. It’s an intensely emotional piece that doesn’t distract from the momentous amount of emotion on the screen, and it proves that, all along, whether you’re listening to the music or not, it’s always there, falling and rising to help the audience know how to feel, when they aren’t sure for themselves.

Individually, the music and the cinematography are amazing in and of themselves, but together, they blend exceptionally well in two ways: visually capturing the sets, and emotionally capturing the performances.

We’ll start with the sets.

Welton is an appropriately foreboding place, full of huge hallways. It looks old, old and rigid, because it is. It’s a stifling place, full of tradition, literally and figuratively. From the banners to the photos of famous alumni, Welton is a school concerned with how things have always been. Every building in this film feels old and grand (with the exception of Chris’s high school), from Welton to the theater, and as a result, the lively antics of Mr. Keating and his class feel all the more transgressively energetic.

Contrastingly, the outdoor scenes are open, spacious and beautiful. Even the cramped shots of the cave are more free than the more roomy halls of Welton, because of the change of atmosphere. These scenes, notably the ones where Mr. Keating teaches his class outside, are full of life and movement, a noticeable difference from the darker indoors.

But the energy present in these sets is nothing without the energy from the actors. Let’s talk about the most important part: the performances.

No matter how fantastic your sets, music, and cinematography is, they are meaningless trimming if the actors can’t pull off their characters. When it comes right down to it, it’s on the shoulders of the actors to sell their characters’ personalities and emotions. In the realm of film, a character is typically unremovable from the performance by a singular actor. Dead Poets Society pulls this off with remarkable tact.

Most obvious is Robin Williams as John Keating.

Despite the fact that Williams was best known for his comedic talents, he is suitably sober and genuine as an English professor: bubbling over with passion and a desire to help these boys learn about the power of words. He is exciting, drawing the audience in as much as the boys, putting out considerable charm as well as incredible enthusiasm and personal care for his students. He cares considerably about these boys, and tries to take care of them, giving out advice and attempting to lead them onto the right path. Occasionally, the typical Williams comedy shines through, but not in a way that feels unnatural for the character, and at the end, when he breaks down over Neil’s death, it is believable and genuinely causes pain to an audience who sympathizes with a teacher who feels responsible for losing a student. At the end, it is his expression of hope that the film begins to close on, an emotional beat that Williams’ performance brings home to end the film in a satisfactory manner.

Ethan Hawke as Todd Anderson is subtly subdued, demonstrating not a lack of emotion, but a quiet depth to it that comes across very well. We believe his transformation into a stronger person who is willing to take a stand, and his connection and grief over losing his best friend, and his nervousness overcome, revealing a poet inside.

Robert Sean Leonard as Neil Perry is also believable, performing a jarring switch between the confident leader and the obedient, dutiful son, portraying Neil’s restlessness and discontent with his situation very well. He is charming and charismatic, but in the end, a tragic figure, with his decision to end his own life played with genuinely chilling calm and resolve. We as an audience believe his passion for acting, and we understand why the other boys follow him, and we feel his absence from the rest of the film once he dies.

The other boys are acted very well also: Josh Charles as Knox Overstreet is appropriately dramatic and dedicated. Gale Hansen as Charlie Dalton is mischievous, outspoken and confident. Allelon Ruggiero as Steven Meeks and James Waterston as Gerald Pitts work well as a team, filling out the rest of the boys, and Dylan Kussman as Richard Cameron is appropriately reluctant, making his treachery to the rest of the boys very natural and believable.

Even the other adults are done very well. Kurtwood Smith as Mr. Perry is unyielding, misunderstanding, but not completely heartless, genuinely broken by his son’s death, but unwilling to accept responsibility for it. Norman Lloyd as Mr. Nolan is the film’s true antagonist, as hard and strict as the school rules that he enforces, but again, he thinks he is acting in the students’ best interests.

Each performance in Dead Poets Society contains enough nuance that no character is truly black or white. Every character in this film fills out their part, whether big or small, each putting forth genuine, passionate performances. It’s a heartfelt film, demonstrated in every aspect from cinematography to the presentation of each character, perfectly portrayed by every ‘storytelling device’ used in the film, not too much nor too little, but perfectly balanced. Every element comes together to tell an emotional and compelling narrative, assisted by the work done by the production team. As a result, the film feels like it is trying to be real, if not necessarily a realistic film. Dead Poets Society is grounded in emotion and people that we can believe in, that we want to believe in, and remains moving and consistent, ending with satisfaction, if not outright happiness, and leaving the audience to think about the story they’ve just been told.

Thank you guys so much for reading! Join us next time where we’re going to be discussing the behind-the-scenes story of Dead Poets Society in ‘Facets of Filmmaking’. I hope to see you there!

#80s #1989 #Dead Poets Society #Dead Poets Society 1989 #Film #Movies #Comedy #Drama #PG #Robin Williams #Ethan #Robert Sean Leonard #Josh Charles #Gale Hansen #Dylan Kussman #Kurtwood Smith #Peter Weir

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coppicefics · 4 years ago

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Masked Omens: Prologue

Read the fic here!

[Image Description: Image 1 - A simple rendition of the Masked Singer UK logo, a golden mask with colourful fragments flying off of it. The mask has a golden halo and a golden devil tail protruding from either side. Below, gold text reads 'Masked Omens'.

Image 2 - A scrapbook with two newspaper cuttings pasted in. Each has a date handwritten by it; the first reads ‘Tadfield Gazette, 24th July 2009′. The second reads ‘Toffley Courier, 10th August, 2009′. Full text transcription below cut. End ID.]

Tadfield Gazette, 24th July 2009

HIDDEN GEM: O’LEARY’S LATEST STUNS CRITICS Masterful casting highlights themes of innocence and fear against a background of domestic drama. [”What do you care, David? Maybe I’d rather he dream of monsters than wake alone, like me.” ~ Jane Winsome, Act 2, Scene 3] RUMOURS OF Colleen O’Leary’s retirement have been greatly exaggerated. While it’s true that in recent years her name has been conspicuously absent from the glossy playbills and bright posters of the West End, the Dublin-born playwright still has plenty to say. Her latest offering, Hidden, is on the surface a simple domestic drama about an upper middle class family with a young son. It follows their trials and tribulations through a single fraught year as ten year old Matthew (played by the talented young team of Warlock Dowling, Gert Johnson and Adam Young in rotation) questions his relationship with his parents, his nightmares, and ultimately the world around him. Anita Lovett is both adoring and adorable in her role as Matthew's mother Jane, while Oscar Williams fulfils the role of a baffled, slightly distant father as David Winsome. The cast is rounded out by Anthony Crowley, making a return to acting in the role of Ashton Storeth, Matthew's babysitter. What might have been a fairly pedestrian premise – a child becomes unsettled as his parents fail to find time for him – is elevated to new and sinister levels by Crowley's double role as both minder and monster; Matthew is plagued by nightmares of a dark creature that dwells beneath his bed, a creature that seems to have a lot in common with the mysterious Storeth. As Matthew's nightmares increase in both frequency and severity, strange events unfolding in the household lead the audience to question just how much of what they're seeing on stage is real. The script seems to demand introspection of its audience; how much can we ever really know about the world we live in or the people we invite into our homes, even trusting them with our most precious treasures, our children? And yet, ultimately, Storeth and the Nightmare have more meaningful interactions with young Matthew than either of his parents. It's a thought-provoking piece with an ending that must be seen and not spoiled. All in all, a triumphant return to the stage for both O'Leary and Crowley, who seem to have come determined to prove themselves and done so admirably. Hidden is now booking until September 30th this year; for venue information and to book tickets, visit www.hiddenuktour.com.

Lots Donated To Charity Fundraiser WITH PREPARATIONS well underway for the Anna and Eve Foundation’s upcoming auction, it seems there are still more celebrities prepared to offer up their most prized possessions for a good cause. The latest announcement of items going under the hammer includes: The upright piano played in the drawing room scene in The Grasswater Affair, kindly donated by Celestireel A flaming sword used in the original magic act of The Amazing Mr Fell, as seen on last year's Royal Variety Performance, with personal instruction in its use from the magician himself A signed drumskin and drumsticks used by Queen drummer, Roger Taylor A Nike Total 90 Omni football signed by every member of this year’s league-topping Tadfield FC squad The stunning faux-diamond necklace worn by Angela Crowley in the 2003 film More than a Memory, contributed by Pace Productions (newspaper cuts off here)

An advert for the Four Horse Inn is also cut off at the bottom of the cutting.

Toffley Courier, 10th August 2009

Toffley Gate Protests Planned [Uriel Scrolle, Reporter] When Lawrence Richmond was elected as MP for Toffley South, it was partly on the strength of his campaign promise to invest in building affordable housing for local people. Sure enough, within a year of his election, his flagship development had been completed. Having opened its doors in 2006, Toffley Gate is a towering edifice of concrete and glass, boasting over 300 individual homes, most of which are luxury apartments – but many of them still stand empty. Now local housing campaigners are calling for lower rents to be imposed on these unoccupied units in a bid to open them up to local people who cannot afford the current rates. (Continued below.) [Image: A large, modern block of flats in yellowed black-and-white newsprint. End ID.] [Caption] The Toffley Gate development, pictured shortly after completion. Local housing activists say the affordable housing they were promised has never been provided. Photo: Daniel Brubaker on Unsplash. [End caption.]

Local Theatre Reports Record Sales for O'Leary's 'Hidden' Masterpiece: Former 'Kilcridhe' star steals show with moving performance [Citron Deux-Cheval, Arts Critic] Greater Deville’s Inferion Theatre has long struggled to fill seats as the rise of commuting in the town has left residents with far les [sic] time and money to spend on the town’s recreational offerings. It relies, therefore, on the continued patronage of those who are able to attend regularly, and on the rare piece of theatre that causes its audiences to insist friends and family go along and watch, too. This week, it reported its highest ticket sales for a single show in over ten years for the Saturday night showing of Hidden, a new play from veteran playwright Colleen O’Leary. Naturally, I had to go along and see what all the fuss was about, and I was glad I did. Hidden is a deep, dark exploration of the psyche masquarading [sic] as a simple drama about two unhappily married parents and their neglected child. While the story of David and Jane Winsome (Oscar Williams and Anita Lovett respectively) and their strained marriage is compelling, with painful betrayals and soft, poignant moments aplenty, it’s their son Matthew who steals the show, along with his au pair, Ashton Storeth, played to perfection by Anthony Crowley (once a familiar face on our television screens as heart-throb Father Jacob MacCleod in Kilcridhe). On the night I attended, Matthew Winsome was portrayed by eleven year-old Gert Johnson, one of three children who take turns in the role. For such a young boy to take on such a complex role is a very tall order, but Johnson more than rose to the challenge, demonstrating a thorough understanding of the mix of fear and adoration with which Matthew regards Ashton. In scenes with his mother and father, Matthew is quiet and respectful, almost withdrwan - but opposite Crowley, who plays the double roles of Ashton and The Nightmare, he becomes expressive and unspoken, loud in his anger, his fear and, yes, his love. Crowley, too, gives an incredible double-edged performance as warm, gentle Ashton and the silent, sinister presence that lurks beneath his charge’s bed - perhaps drawing on his own inner demons to lend authenticity to the role. Hidden is a play that leaves much open to interpretation: whether The Nightmare is real or imagined, what, if anything, it has to do with Ashton, and what the surprising ending means for the family. It’s a play to get you thinking, and I highly recommend you go along. Hidden is playing at the Infernion until August 15th. Contact the Box Office on 01632 496055 to book.

#masked omens #good omens fic #image transcription #fanfiction #transcript #very much fake news #fanart #MO prologue

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dragonkeeper19600 · 4 years ago

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BATIM Lore from Dreams Come to Life

I ordered that Dreams Come to Life Bendy novel from Amazon. I’m a fast reader, and the book is clearly intended for a younger audience, so I was able to finished it in less than a day. I don’t see a lot of BATIM fans talking about this book, and it doesn’t come up all that often when people are formulating theories. This in spite of the fact that the book actually answers a lot of the mysteries surrounding the Ink Machine, the studio, the characters, etc. The novel is basically a prequel set in 1946 that tells the story of a recent hire to the studio and what he experiences there.

So, I’ve decided to make a quick compilation of what the book reveals about the game’s setting and characters.

Obviously spoilers below:

Thomas Connor and Allison Pendle are strongly implied to be a couple. Thomas shows up to a party with Allison on his arm, and the two are very intimate with each other in general.

Wally is the only janitor working in the whole building.

There are several women working in the studio - more than the young male protagonist expected - and a few are even in higher management positions. The then current head of the art department is a woman named Abby Lambert. Dot, a female writing intern, explains that many women were hired in the studio during WWII while the men were overseas. When the war ended, rather than fire the women and give the men their jobs back, Joey kept the women on staff. Some of the male employees were so irritated by this they walked.

That said, there are a few moments where Joey expresses sexist ideals, saying that “women don’t really understand business” when Abby Lambert objects to wasting art supplies and showing favoritism to Buddy, the protagonist, because he “reminds him of himself” (in other words, he’s a young, white-passing man).

For a long time, Bendy was held behind a locked door in the music department. It’s Buddy who lets him out. Buddy’s narration describes hearing an insistent whining sound, like that a dog that wants to get out would make, before he opens the door.

Susie is no longer working at the studio by 1946. Allison and Norman make a few comments about “poor Susie” but don’t elaborate on what happened to her.

Henry created Bendy, Boris, and Alice Angel. However, Alice Angel didn’t make her debut until after Henry left.

Joey is still really sore over Henry walking. He rants to Buddy about how “betrayal” is the biggest enemy to personal success. He also calls Buddy “Henry” as he’s saying this.

Linda is Henry’s wife. Henry quit because the long hours at the studio were too demanding for the relationship. (Henry’s reasoning was hinted at by Joey’s speech at the end of Chapter 5 of the game.)

Joey’s main MO is to hire talented people and then take credit for their accomplishments. He lets people think he created Bendy, obtained the patent from the Ink Machine from Thomas Connor, and got violently angry when Thomas tried to get it back.

Norman mentions that the studio did well for a while after Henry left, but Joey has been putting a strain on finances with frivolous spending on the Bendyland Park, the Ink Machine, throwing huge parties, etc.

Bendy’s heyday has already passed by the time Buddy starts working at the studio. Buddy vaguely recognizes Bendy’s image when he first arrives but can’t quite place him. Buddy partially blames this on his family’s economic status making them unable to afford movie tickets, but Joey seems deeply hurt that Buddy doesn’t know who Bendy is.

I’m gonna tell you how Buddy meets Sammy because it’s one of my favorite scenes. The book tries to play it for horror, but I couldn’t help laughing because it’s just Classic Sammy ™:

So, Buddy was hired by Joey kind of on impulse as a gofer. On his first day, he’s asked to deliver something to the music department. He gets lost and ends up in the recording studio. There’s nobody there except a single, creepy violinist.

All of a sudden, Sammy comes tearing into the room covered head-to-toe in ink. It is everywhere. He’s so slathered in it that Buddy can’t tell that he’s looking at a person at first. He responds to Buddy’s offer for help with “My eyes!” Because the ink is in his eyes.

It’s shortly revealed that one of the ink-filled pipes was running through the closet where they keep sheet music. Sammy apparently went to the closet and got drenched when the pipe burst on him. Sammy also pulls a shard of glass out of his own head, which leads me to think that maybe he banged his head into the pipe hard enough to shatter it.

The book also goes into some detail about what Sammy’s corruption process was like. Buddy mentions in his narration seeing black stains on Sammy’s gums after the burst pipe. It turns out Sammy accidentally swallowed some of the ink. In a very disturbing monologue toward the end of the book, Sammy mentions how he could “feel [the ink drops] moving around inside me.” The ink in his system triggered a craving for it, so he proceeds to slam down bottles of ink like cans of Fanta. I’m totally serious. Buddy actually catches him drinking a bottle while at his music stand. He fucking empties all the bottles in the closet and then begins pestering Thomas and Abby for some of theirs.

We don’t actually see him transform since he goes missing for several days. It turns out he’s been hiding in the studio all that time. When we run into him again in the climax, he looks like he does in-game.

The Ink Machine changes ordinary, store-bought ink into what Buddy calls “Bad Ink” that has a number of supernatural properties. Among these:

Pictures drawn with it will move across the page. I don’t mean like a Harry Potter-style moving image, I mean the drawings themselves will slide off the page as though being dragged by a mouse in Photoshop.

The ink will actively seek out people and attempt to flow into their orifices.

As we see with Sammy, getting some into your body will trigger a craving for more.

Sammy is convinced that the ink moves according to Bendy’s will. He believes that the ink sought him out and helped forge some kind of psychic bond with Bendy. However, as we see in the game, Sammy isn’t as good at predicting what Bendy wants as he seems to think.

Joey seems to believe that being submerged in ink long enough will cause a person to lose their soul. Joey only wants “good, real” souls (his own words) to reanimate through the Machine.

Henry isn’t the first person Sammy has tried to sacrifice to Bendy. Sammy grabs a few other employees, ties them up, and coats them in ink, apparently in order connect them to Bendy. Among the kidnapped employees: Norman Polk.

In addition to its constant production of Bad Ink, the Ink Machine can also reanimate the souls of the recently dead into living toons.

At the end of the novel, Buddy drowns in the ink, but Joey apparently got to him in time to resurrect him into Boris. It’s heavily implied that Buddy is the Boris Henry befriends at the end of Chapter 2 of the game.

Buddy implies on several occasions that he is now sharing a mind with Boris. When he first wakes up after being reanimated (tee-hee!), he is alarmed at first to find himself existing in three dimensions instead of two. Buddy has a hard time telling if certain basic needs, such as hunger, are coming from him or Boris and mentions that Boris “starts to whine” when Buddy “asks himself too much,” adding: “We don’t like it.”

Buddy’s senses are now enhanced to those of a wolf. He can smell better, hear better, and has better night vision. However, he is also incapable of speech. He can understand himself just fine, but all the human characters can hear is a series of growls and barking noises.

Buddy is apparently losing his mind to Boris’s. Boris’s mind isn’t in an antagonistic relationship with Buddy’s; he just seems along for the ride. Even so, Buddy finds that his memories are fading and his emotional needs are growing simpler. The book is framed as a memoir he’s writing while living in the studio, and there are a few occasions when he forgets what the book he’s writing is and has to remind himself. This is consist with Sammy’s dementia-like behavior during the Hot Topic Q&A, where he showed signs of memory loss and struggled to stay on-topic, sometimes forgetting what he was talking about mid-sentence.

Finally, appearances:

Allison Pendle is platinum blonde and as gorgeous as a movie star. Buddy can’t understand why she’s into voice work instead of being on camera.

Sammy is described as being bony and angular (like a bird). He also wore those same suspenders before his corruption.

Bertrum Piedmont is described as big and burly.

Norman has bushy eyebrows.

Buddy never really describes Thomas Connor, only mentions that he usually looks elegantly dressed. It is, however, implied that Thomas is POC in the following exchange:

Sammy: “Tom, come on, why would I want your ink?”

Tom: “It’s Mr. Connor.”

Sammy: “Why can’t I call you Tom?”

Tom: “Because we’re not friends. And you will give me the respect I deserve.”

[long pause]

Tom: “What’s wrong, Mr. Lawrence? Not used to giving someone like me respect?”

Sammy: “What’s that mean, ‘someone like you’?”

Tom: “You know what it means.”

#batim #bendy and the ink machine #dreams come to life #lore #spoilers #bendy #buddy lewek #sammy lawrence #joey drew #thomas connor #norman polk #boris the wolf #dot #henry stein #alice angel #adrienne kress

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theladyfromplanetx · 4 years ago

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Dear Lawrence Kasdan So, You Say You Love Han Solo

Dear Lawrence,

I hear there’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on about the Han Solo movie you’re EPing and have co-written with your son. I wish I could tell you I was sorry to hear that, but in all honesty I’ve been hoping for the last few years that someone would kill this project with fire and then nuke it from space for good measure. Sure, most of the reason that large chunks of the nerd world have responded to the very idea of this film is that a lots of people, including me, think it’s a fool’s errand for any actor other than Harrison Ford to strap on Han Solo’s DL-44 blaster. But ever since the release of The Force Awakens, I’ve had a second reason for saying:

to this venture.

I kind of hate to say it, Lawrence, but it’s not me: It’s you.

You see, the The Force Awakens did something to me that even The Star Wars Holiday Special, painfully delivered prequel lines about sand, and the very existence of Jar Jar Binks couldn’t do: The Force Awakens made me regret that Star Wars is still a thing.

It made me regret that children were being introduced to something that used to be innocent and good-hearted by a film that shows that the end game of youthful heroism is failure and running away (and that Han should have stuck to his initial demand of $10,000 all in advance in A New Hope).

It made me angry that nobody among the-powers-that-be looked at it, took a deep breath and said “wait a minute. In shadow-rebooting A New Hope, do we really need to make two of the biggest characters in film history pathetic runaway losers and the other a heartless automaton who would kill her son on (not a)Death Star unless hapless sucker Han showed up to do her bidding and die trying to bring him home…even though that request made not a lick of sense given that the Force-sensitive parent who could actually have had an influence was the bidding mother would have just blown Kylo clear out of the sky had Han not shown up to (1) solve her problem by getting yet another (not a)Death Star shield down and (2) die?“

It made me rue how far we’ve fallen as a critical thinkers when we can be hoodwinked so easily that we spend a couple of billion at the movie theatre on a film that’s dressed up to look and feel like Star Wars, but is utterly life- and hope-denying at its core and presents a kind of nihilism that we’d probably reject as an audience if the words STAR WARS weren’t plastered on it.

Oh, also, the story doesn’t really make any sense.

As you can see, eighteen months later, I can still get a bit aggrieved by all this. However, to quote one of the most egregiously jaw-dropping placeholder lines in The Force Awakens, that is “a story for another day.” (Sorry, Lawrence and JJ, but in a past life, which I call the late 1990s, I went to film school and put in my time in the screenwriting trenches as well. You know and I know that line right there would have gotten you laughed out of an on-line screenwriting class at an unaccredited diploma mill.)

The story for today is that I’m not really keen on the idea of you touching the character of Han Solo again, both because of TFA and because of whatever happened to upend the Solo standalone’s directors. The weight of the evidence coming from the usual suspects (aka unnamed sources) is that the disagreements over the tone of the film and the character of Solo became so vast that somebody had to go. Lord/Miller, as I’ve read in the millions of lines of digital type about this and to which I’m now adding, saw the film and the character as funny, while you insisted that Solo was not funny, but was selfish and sarcastic. Other descriptors of Solo that have been thrown around and attributed to you re: Solo are “narcissistic,” “uncaring,” “out for himself,” and “mean.”

Oh, and you’ve also been quoted as saying you “love Han Solo.”

And therein lies the problem.

Now no one wants a Han Solo movie…hm. I could just stop there for a lot of the fandom, but I’ll proceed.

No one wants a Han Solo movie in which Solo keeps trying to get Chewie to pull his finger, but I’d like to propose, Larry, that perhaps Lord/Miller weren’t the only problem here, because it seems that you actually don’t love the same character that the audience loved in the Original Trilogy. You love the darker version of the character that was tossed around in story conferences and in early drafts and you love the darker story that Lucas toyed with, but decided against using (thank the Makers) in Return of the Jedi. You love the Han Solo that Lucas and Leigh Brackett introduced as the “before” Han at the beginning of A New Hope, but not the “after” he became by the end of that film and the “after-after” he became by the end of ROTJ. Now that Lucas and his lighter view of the Star Wars universe are no longer on the scene, it feels like you’re trying to retcon Han Solo to win a battle you fought and lost long ago and in the process create a smuggler whose heart isn’t actually made of gold anymore.

I know that’s not a very nice thing for me to say, but I can’t help but say it, given how you and JJ had your way with the character in TFA, because he certainly wasn’t the character we left at the end of ROTJ. Nor, I should note, is he the character that we met in Bloodline, the Disney/Lucasfilm novel released after TFA and set five years before it, in which Han and Leia are still happily married and Han is pretty much an identifiable older version of ROTJ Han. TFA Han was an awkward mash-up of a script portraying an aged version of the character we met at the beginning of A New Hope and an actor playing hard against the script to show us a broken man wandering the galaxy and trying to make it work.

That impetus — to remake a beloved hero in a less heroic image — is kind of ugly in any context, despite all the folks who will insist “BUT IT’S REAL” as if real had anything to do with a franchise that for forty years has appealed to the little, innocent part of us that still wants to believe in Santa. It’s particularly a problem when applied to the character of Solo and the role that character plays for Star Wars.

Solo’s not the kid who, twenty minutes into the Original Trilogy, decides he wants to be a Jedi and spends the next five hours and forty minutes of film becoming just that. He’s not the character with royal roots who has been fighting for the good guys since before the first film started and continues to do so until the trilogies end.

He’s the character who has to find his better angels, who has to change in order to become the hero/man/boyfriend/partner/friend he decides he wants to be. He’s a guy who has to overcome his natural instincts for self-preservation. He needs to learn to say “I’m sorry.” He’s snarky, FUNNY, and sometimes grudgingly follows the conscience he’d rather not have in order to do the right thing. He’s not always really convinced about the whole “religion” thing, he’s had some rough times, he’s done some rotten things, and he likes money.

It’s no big mystery why Solo is a fan favorite. It’s Harrison Ford, yes, but its also because Solo is as much like all of us as someone can be in a universe with hyperdrives, lightsabers, and Wookiees. He gives the Star Wars universe some identifiable grounding — and HUMOR. (If you don’t believe me, see: prequels.)

And by the end of Return of the Jedi, Solo became the person we’d all like to believe we are or can be— the one whose better angels have won out and given him a real shot at a happily ever after.

Oh, right, that didn’t happen. Well, it did for 30 plus years, and then it didn’t. Thanks, Larry. Always good to remind myself of Han Solo’s utterly pointless death scene in TFA, a death that many of us steeled ourselves against because we were pretty sure it was coming. It was gutting, though, not because it happened, but because it came at the top of act three of a film that had already stripped the character of his OT arc and also because the death was utterly devoid of heroic meaning or salvific result, given that all it did in the context of the film was turn Darth Emo into Darth Lyle Menendez and make Leia sit down and look somewhat upset.

But it can’t just be a pointlessly sad death of a character who, for all the talking up JJ did about cool rogue Han Solo, wasn’t played that way and didn’t come off that way, right? We all know that when you take down an iconic character like that, you do it with the endgame all planned out. You know exactly how that death — of a parent who rouses himself from his brokenness and ennui to risk his life for son he believes is likely already beyond his reach because the woman he loves has asked him to — will reverberate across the sequel trilogy and, ultimately, we’ll see that Solo’s final act WAS heroic. In fact, it was Kenobi-like. Aslan-like. Christ-like. You gave Solo the ultimate 180-degree arc, didn’t you? He died to save his kid, he died so everybody else could live, and you know it, right, Larry? You’ve got this whole thing mapped out, right, bud? I mean, c’mon, you love Han Solo, so you wouldn’t strip the character of his growth, throw him down an endless shaft (holy cow, dude, you literally shafted him!), and walk away to write another movie about him NOT being a hero, would you?

Oh.

Maybe you did.

So…you’re telling me that it’s possible Han’s final act was utterly futile, solely a device to tell us Darth Emo is really, really evil ? I think we already knew that, given the platypus mask, Vader lust, and the blowing up of a solar system. But, hey, thanks for getting people in our already messed-up world to argue that patricide can be justified; what’s been missing from our pop culture crap stew for the last decade is Star Wars fans arguing that the vastly immoral may be moral because they identify with the patricidal emo character whom they want to end up with the Mary Sue whose mind he attacked in the TFA version of a rape scene. I’ll never know how you avoided feminist outrage there, but count your lucky stars that feminists were so happy to have a female (not)Luke Skywalker in Star Wars that they overlooked that.

So now you move onto the Han Solo film, wherein, after meeting loser, regressed, lost, runaway and dead Han in TFA, we’re going to meet selfish, sarcastic, mean, narcissistic, and out for himself but not funny Han.

Can’t wait. By which I mean I could have happily waited forever, because I wasn’t waiting. I WASN’T WAITING, LARRY.

I get it, though. I’ve seen most of your work. You’re a serious filmmaker — you went from Larry to Lawrence. The Big Chill, Grand Canyon, Accidental Tourist, Mumford. I’ve seen ’em all. God help me, I even saw Dreamcatcher…but that’s a story for another day. What I know from those films is that when you’re calling the shots, nothing is black and white. Everything is a shade of gray.

What I also know is that those films are not made for the part of us that still wants to believe in Santa and that gray is not a good color for Star Wars. Star Wars became the cultural touchstone it is precisely because it jumped into a very gray period in our history, with gas lines and Soviets and malaise, with a black-and-white, good versus evil morality that made everyone just a little bit happier when they left the theatre. You didn’t question if the heroes were heroes or the villains were villains. In its own goofball way, Star Wars — with its complete faith in the power of hope — was countercultural.

Now? The new Star Wars took one look around at our current culture and instead of being countercultural, happily jumped right into the morass and is swimming around in the sludge of relativism. Heroes become failures and run away. Evil characters are given some sort of justification for being evil. Rebels fighting against the Empire are portrayed as assassins instead of people fighting a monstrous evil. The Resistance is some kind of non-governmental paramilitary group. Luke Skywalker thinks the Jedi must end. Oh, and the last two films you’ve written focus on a less noble version of the character you claim to love.

Star Wars is starting to look like a reflection of the worst of us as adults and as a society, instead of a goofy, lovable, out-of-this-galaxy inspiration to kids (and the kid in everyone) to be the best version of themselves.

Hey, I’m sure everyone at Lucasfilm is just fine with this, because these films, despite their shaky worldview, are also printing money, but, Larry, consider that maybe Wonder Woman has proven that there’s still a huge audience for naivete, goodness, and hope. Since you now have Ron Howard, who’s specialized in empathetic leads even in complex films over the years, can you maybe jettison the gray and try to create just one more time not the Han Solo that you love, but the Han Solo that is a combination of you, George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Harrison Ford, and Leigh Brackett?

That’s the Han — the funny, snarky, constantly-irked one who talked a good game about being out for himself but somehow never was when the chips were down — that the audience has loved for forty years, because, in the end, CS Lewis was as right about this as he was about most things:

Oh, and if you could de-age Harrison Ford so he could play the role, that’d be great too…kthxbai.

Best,

Annie

Written in 2017 by Anne Michaela.

#Star Wars #The Force Awakens #Solo #Lawrence Kasdan #Medium.com #sequel trilogy #original trilogy #Han Solo #Anne Michaela #Iron Ladies #2017

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mikhailoist · 5 years ago

Text

words we never needed | a 15x06 coda (saileen + deancas)

as told through the eyes of Eileen Leahy.

—

Warmth rushes through her bones as Sam curls his fingers between hers, holding tightly onto her hand. She’d been dead for so long that she almost forgot the feelings that came with being held — with being touched by someone you love. Tears rise to Eileen’s eyes. Not the first ones since she was resurrected, of course, but Sam wipes them away all the same. With his free hand, he reaches up and brushes a stray tear from her cheek, his touch light and gentle against her skin. She leans into his touch, a quiet invitation for him to leave his hand there for a little while longer. He does.

“How are you feeling?” Sam asks her. He gently squeezes her hand, and Eileen has no reason to fight the smile that rises to her lips. She’s a little dazed and confused, still in so much disbelief that this is actually real, that she’s actually alive again. But she’s also happy. Every time she meets Sam’s eyes, her heart swells with gratitude because she’s here, and he’s here, and they’re okay. They’re together.

“I’m happy,” she replies. “Really, really happy.”

Sam returns her smile — a big, genuine smile that reaches his sparkling eyes and lights up every feature of his face. Eileen could get used to seeing this look on him. She knows Sam, knows that he hasn’t had the easiest go at life and carries a lot more weight on his shoulders than he should. Even before Eileen died the first time around, she grew to realize that Sam never really let himself feel any kind of pure, unrelented joy. He never admitted this to Eileen, of course, but she could tell. There was always a reason for him to hurt, to crumble under the weight of burdens that were not always his to bear.

And now? Now, Sam found a way to bring Eileen back, but she knows it’s not just her being here that brought on this smile. It’s the fact that Sam has what it takes to make right from wrong. Eileen always knew he had it in him, and now, maybe he knows, too.

Sam removes his hand from her cheek and signs, “Me too.”

He lets go of Eileen’s hand and wraps his arms around her, pulling her in as close as he possibly can. A sigh of content dances past Eileen’s lips, and she snuggles so close to his chest that she can feel the rhythmic beat of his heart. They stay like that for a while, finding safety in each other’s warmth and holding onto each other as if they’ll never let go again.

(And they won’t. Not ever. Eileen will make sure of that.)

—

Exhaustion hits Eileen pretty early into the night. She’s enjoying a nice dinner of greasy cheese pizza with Sam and Dean when she realizes she can barely keep her eyes open. Sam quickly takes notice and offers up one of the guest bedrooms to her. It’s not like she has anywhere else to stay the night; not at this point in time, anyway. Not to mention it’s past sundown, and after everything that’s gone down during these past few years, she’d much rather be under the same roof as the Winchesters than out there with whatever might be lurking in the shadows tonight. So she nods, swallows her last mouthful of pizza (which, considering it’s her first meal since coming back to life, tastes absolutely incredible) and stands up from the table alongside Sam. Eileen pretends not to notice the smirk that creeps onto Dean’s face when Sam takes her hand in his. She hides her face from the older Winchester brother, knowing full well he can make out the Sam-induced blush that has made its way to her cheeks even in the dim kitchen lighting. It’s not that she cares if Dean knows she likes his brother — it’s just that it’s still so new. She was only just starting to sort out her feelings for Sam when she died, and now that she’s back, they can kind of pick up where they left off, but not really. It’s arguably the strangest situation she’s ever been in, sharing her heart with the man who brought her back from the dead.

When they reach the bedroom, Eileen asks Sam if he’ll stay with her until she falls asleep.

“It’ll just make me feel better, after everything that’s happened,” she tells him. “I hope that’s okay.”

Sam smiles softly. He closes the door, understanding her unspoken wish to make this little space theirs (and only theirs) for the next couple of hours. “Of course it’s okay.”

He turns around while Eileen gets ready for bed. She removes the velvety sweatpants Sam lent her — an old pair, slightly smaller in size than what he’d wear now and safety pinned in the back to keep them from falling off. Considering her resurrected body didn’t exactly come with a fresh set of clothes, Sam was kind enough to find something for her to wear, despite the fact that this bunker is typically occupied by men. She leaves on the red flannel shirt that nearly reaches her knees (also courtesy of Sam) and settles into the bed, pulling the white sheets up to her chest.

“Sam,” she says, letting him know that it’s okay to turn around. He does, and there’s that smile again, illuminating his face the moment his eyes land on her. There’s nothing special about the way Eileen looks right now — she’s almost positive there are bags under her eyes, and she’s sure she’s still complete frazzled mess — but she knows none of that matters to Sam. It’s the fact that they’re here, together They don’t say a word to each other as Sam lies beside her on top of the comforter, but it’s okay, because they don’t need them. Sam doesn’t need words to open up his arms, and Eileen doesn’t need words to settle into his embrace.

The two of them, they’ve always known they don’t need words to communicate. Sam speaks to her, loud and clear, in ways she doesn’t need to hear to understand. He speaks to her in the way he rubs comforting circles on her back and presses his lips to her forehead. He speaks to her by holding her close to his beating heart, which lulls Eileen to sleep as she thinks about how what they’ve shared together has always been enough.

—

Sleep comes easy at first, but it doesn’t stick around for long. A series of nightmares throw Eileen back into consciousness, leaving her trembling beneath the covers, her skin cold and sticky with sweat. No, not nightmares — memories. Despite being awake, images of hellfire flash past her eyes, and the memory of endless torture lingers like a ghost in her mind.

She rolls over on her side and glances at the digital clock on the bedside table. 3AM. Eileen huffs, considering the irony. Of course vivid memories of Hell would jolt her awake at the devil’s hour — after everything, she’s not sure why she should expect anything less. She squeezes her eyes shut and desperately tries to go back to sleep, but after nearly an hour of tossing and turning (and almost breaking down into tears a few times, because the flashbacks feel so real and she just wishes they would stop), Eileen realizes that sleep probably isn’t in the cards for her tonight.

She decides to get out of bed and make her way to the kitchen. Maybe some leftover pizza and a glass of water will make her feel better. At the very least, it’ll give her an excuse to take her mind off of everything else. She throws the covers back and shivers a little when the brisk air conditioning hits her legs. After flipping the light switch, she finds Sam’s sweatpants where she left them on the floor by the bed and puts them on. The safety pin is still in where she left it, yet she still has to roll down the waistband a few times to keep the pants from dropping to her knees with each step she takes.

If she was alone in this bunker (or if it was just her and Sam), she wouldn’t bother. She’d just wear the flannel and rock it on her way to the kitchen, but she’s been around long enough to know that Dean has made downing beers at the map table his 3AM routine. Given she was a ghost for weeks and didn’t have any idea how to control her spirit state, she always wound up tripping through walls and falling into random areas of the bunker at really inconvenient times.

She remembers when she first arrived at the bunker, confused and afraid. She had followed the brothers into Sam’s room, desperate to get them to see her, but she stopped when she overheard their conversation. Something about Rowena, who died to save them. Something about how Rowena’s death was Sam’s fault. Of course, Eileen learned today who Rowena was, and that there had been a lot more to her and Sam’s story than what the brothers let on that night — but in that moment, Eileen saw how much pain Sam was in, and she just wanted to be there for him. Even if he couldn’t see her, she thought maybe her presence might be enough, so she waited for Dean to leave the room and moved to sit beside him on the bed. But the lack of control over her ghost state meant falling through the bed, then through the floor, until suddenly she had landed in the main room, dazed and completely out of sorts.

When she finally managed to recuperate, she noticed that there were two people in the bunker. Dean, and someone who she’d never met before. It didn’t take her long to figure out who he was, though. Both brothers had mentioned him plenty of times before. It was Castiel, their trenchcoat-wearing angel friend.

She witnessed it all — everything that went down between Dean and Cas that night. All the hurtful words that had been spoken, and all the pain that lingered in the air after Cas walked out. She knew something was up, because Dean didn’t seem to let go of whatever triggered Castiel’s decision to leave.

Eileen stayed around for a while. If she wasn’t in the bunker, she was wandering the streets of Lawrence, trying to find answers to her ghost problem or searching for a way to get the brothers to see her. When she was in the bunker, however, she always ended up walking in on Dean. Each time she saw him, he seemed to be getting worse. During the day, when Sam was around, he’d put on his pajamas and shove food into his face and laugh everything off, but Eileen was the one who was there for the 3AM drinking and the frustrated tears and Dean’s cellphone, opened to a contact name with a number that he never actually clicked on.

Sure enough, after Eileen pours herself a glass of water and steals a slice of pizza from the fridge, she walks into the main room of the bunker and sees Dean seated at the map table. He looks like shit, and that’s the simplest way to put it. His hair is sticking up all over the place and the circles underneath his eyes are heavy and dark. There are three empty beer bottles scattered across the table, and he’s already working on a fourth. Feeling uncomfortable, Eileen tries to sneak back to her room, but she must be a little rusty on her stealth, because Dean looks up and catches her right away.

“Eileen,” he says. He drags her name out a little too long, so she can tell his speech is somewhat slurred. He might not be totally drunk yet, but he’s getting there. “What’re you doin’ up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

Dean grunts. “I know the feeling.” He sips his beer, and Eileen stands there awkwardly, not sure if she should just walk away or not.

The elder brother sets the bottle back on the table and gestures towards her with his hand. “How’s it feel?” he asks. “To be back, I mean? ‘Cause I know, at least for me, I was pretty freaked the first time I came back from the dead.”

“I’m happy I’m back,” Eileen says. She shrugs. “It is weird, though. It’s gonna take some getting used to.”

“Yeah, but you’ll get used to it.” Dean’s hand returns to his beer, and Eileen watches as his fingers close around the bottle once more. “You know, when I came back — the first time, I mean — it was Cas who pulled me out of Hell.”

“Oh.” Eileen’s not entirely sure what to say to that. “That was nice of him.”

“Yeah.” Dean shakes his head and raises the bottle to his lips. “Turns out, though, it was always part of the stupid plan. The story. You know, I never thanked Cas — not really. But now I’m thinkin’, why should I? It’s not like he ever wanted to save me, anyway.”

Eileen tilts her head to the side. “Dean,” she says. “Is everything okay?”

Dean takes another swig and sets the bottle down, a little too roughly this time. “Yeah. Sorry, there’s just a lot that’s gone down these past few weeks, and I — well, it doesn’t matter.”

Frowning, Eileen walks closer until she can place her hand on the edge of the table. Dean is avoiding her gaze now, so she waits until he finally looks back up at her to say, “It does matter.”

Dean sighs. “I appreciate the concern, Eileen, I do, but… but there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

“That’s not true,” Eileen says. “You’re hurting, Dean, and it’s not going to get better if you don’t let anyone help you. So… maybe try talking about it.”

Dean doesn’t reply. He averts his gaze again, suddenly becoming very interested with the cracks on the floor.

“I saw you,” Eileen says. “You and Castiel. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but when I was trying to get you and Sam to see me all that time, I ended up witnessing what happened. I mean, I don’t… I don’t know what happened, or what’s going on, really, but I know it’s getting to you. And I know you’re refusing to talk to Sam about it, which means it must be pretty bad.”

For a moment, Eileen thinks Dean might be angry that she didn’t tell him about this sooner, because his eyes dart up and he looks at her for a few seconds, his face blank. Then, his expression twists into one of complete sadness and despair. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. After tapping the screen a few times, Eileen can see the contact from where she sits — a selfie of the angel taken at an awkward angle, and underneath it, a phone number and a name written in big, bold letters: Cas.

“I always think about calling him,” Dean admits. “But I never do. Because why the hell would I? He left. But then… well, let’s just say we had a chance phone call today. And he… he sounded so angry.”

He digs his teeth into his lower lip, and Eileen thinks maybe he is drunker than she first thought, because his face is turning red and there are tears in his eyes. She sits in the chair next to him, showing him that she’s inclined to be there for him if he needs to talk about it. So he does. He doesn’t put his heart on his sleeve for Eileen to see, but the words that come out of his mouth next help Eileen begin to piece this situation together.

“He has a right to be angry,” Dean mutters. “I was a dick. I know I was. But he, well — I don’t forgive him for what he did. I want to, but I don’t. Would there be a point in forgiving him, anyways? It’s not like there was ever a point to us, because God was pullin’ the strings this entire time. So maybe I should just forget about Cas, y’know? It’s not like any of it ever mattered in the first place. He can be as angry as he wants, because nothing’s changed. Nothing is going to change.”

“To be fair,” Eileen says. “I was supposed to stay dead and become a crazy ghost, but that definitely changed.”

“That’s different,” Dean says.

“How?”

Dean doesn’t have an answer to that, so Eileen leans forward in her seat and elaborates. “Sam told me a little bit about the God thing,” she tells him. “Not much, but some. And I don’t know a lot, but I think maybe — maybe God’s making the rules, but you and Sam, you guys can break them.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple anymore,” Dean says. “Actually, I don’t think it ever has been. It’s so hard to figure out what the rules are, and if anything we do is actually breaking them or if everything is a part of his dumbass plan.”

“And you think you and Cas… you think all of that was planned out by God, and that none of it was ever real?”

“There is no me and Cas,” Dean grumbles. “And I know none of it was ever real.”

Eileen sighs. “Listen, Dean. I have no way of telling you what’s real and what isn’t. But I can tell you all about what feels real. When I came back — when Sam brought me back — everything I felt in that moment was real. The happiness, the confusion, the… well, you know.” She rolls her eyes, because Dean knows what she’s getting at here, of course he does, and there’s a little smirk playing on his lips despite everything. “And that’s my point, Dean. Maybe all of this is God’s rules, or his story for our lives, or whatever. But everything in here?” She puts a hand over her heart. “This is real. So if Cas leaving makes you sad, or angry, or however it makes you feel, those feelings are real, and I don’t think you should ignore them. I think they matter. I think they matter a lot.”

Dean is quiet for a few moments. He lowers his head as Eileen’s words sink in, then he looks back up at her and says, voice a bit lighter than it was before, “You’re pretty wise, you know that?”

“I’m aware,” Eileen teases. Dean smiles, and although the smile is tight and marked with pain, it shows sincerity in the smallest amount. Eileen’s not sure if she got through to him — maybe her words went in one ear and out through the other, and didn’t have any effect on Dean at all. But there’s not much else she can do, because this situation is Dean’s to figure out, not hers.

“I should probably try to get some sleep,” she says. She collects her water and her cold slice of pizza and stands up, but before she leaves, Dean has one last thing to say.

“Eileen?” She looks at him expectantly, and smiles when his lips form a very honest “Thank you.”

Things aren’t going to get better right away; not for anyone. Eileen knows this. Visions of Hell still swarm in her mind, Dean’s still suffering from a broken heart (which he probably won’t fully admit any time soon), and Sam — well, Sam may have smiled a lot today, but soon enough, he’ll take on the weight of another thousand problems because that’s just what he does.

But it’ll be okay. Because even if everything goes downhill, they’ve always got more cards to play. And this time, Eileen will be around to help play them.

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superman86to99 · 5 years ago

Photo

Action Comics #692 (October 1993)

In this issue: Superman goes to the doctor and finds out why he's not dead anymore! But, before that, he's clearing some of the debris left by his fight with Doomsday when he finds... Clark Kent? Lois Lane is very happy to see Clark again, but Superman himself doesn't look very thrilled in these panels.

Turns out Clark wasn't dead as everyone believed, he was simply trapped in the basement of a collapsed building! The basement happened to equipped with plenty of food and gym equipment (explaining why he's still jacked, like Superman), but unfortunately not a single pair of scissors (explaining why his hair is now long, like Superman's).

Later, Superman bumps into Lex Luthor Jr., who demands to know where Supergirl is, but Superman gives him the runaround. Hmm, where could Superman's good friend who can change shape and pretend to be other people be? Anyway, Superman then meets Lois and Clark and... holy crap! Mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is secretly Supergirl!

So yeah, Supergirl pretended to be Clark for a while just so he and Superman would be seen together and no one would question why both are suddenly alive again. Then Supergirl leaves and we move on to the second dilemma solved in this issue: How the hell is Superman alive again? To address that question, supernatural DC character (and fellow Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster creation) Doctor Occult appears out of nowhere and rudely teleports Lois and Clark to a black void, where he replays moments from Superman's life... and death.

Occult explains that Doomsday DID punch Superman's spirit out of his body, but there was still solar energy keeping the body just barely alive. Superman's ghost ended up stuck between the living and the dead, attracting some nasty soul-eating demons. Fortunately, Pa Kent happened to be dying of a heart attack at the same time, so he and Superman teamed up to fight off the demons (as seen in Adventures #500). Superman’s soul returned to his near-corpse, which was taken to the Fortress of Solitude by the Eradicator and lovingly nursed back into health. (Okay, more like “coldly,” but you can’t argue with the results.)

Anyway, the point is that Superman's resurrection happened due to a convoluted series of events that could never be repeated, unless someone's willing to sneak behind Pa Kent and blow an airhorn in his ear or something. As the mystical exposition dump ends, Occult teleports Lois and Clark to Smallville, and the issue ends with the Kents finally reuniting. A tender moment...

...until two seconds later, when Ma smacks Clark in the back of the head for taking two whole issues to come see them (or that’s what I’d do).

Plotline-Watch:

Doctor Occult reveals that the moment when Bibbo shocked Superman’s body with a hyper-charged defibrillator in Adventures #498 actually helped keep him alive. Once again, Bibbo is the real hero of this saga.

Supergirl has a lot of experience posing as Clark, since she was stuck in that form between 1989 and 1992. That was also her in the only other photo of Superman and Clark together, taken in Superman #34.

While Superman is being interviewed by a news crew after rescuing "Clark", that lawyer from Action #689 barges in and demands that they stop calling Superman Superman, since that name is now trademarked by Superboy's manager. Damn, maybe he's gonna have to start calling himself "Supreme" or something?

Aww, Lex is happy to see Superman again. Sure, it's only because he wants to be the one to kill him, but still.

S.T.A.R. Labs is examining the Eradicator's corpse when they realize he's alive! Sort of. Later, Doctor Occult remarks that the Eradicator sacrificed himself "in mind, if not in body". Hmm. The doctors overseeing his condition are Kitty Faulkner, who can turn into an orange She-Hulk called Rampage after a workplace mishap, and a new character called David Connors, the only S.T.A.R. employee without superpowers. So far.

The JLA returns from the little space vacation the Cyborg sent them on, and we get the first instance in all of comics of Guy Gardner admitting he was wrong. Character growth! Don Sparrow says: “Nice to see some follow-up to the characters around the DCU and how they react to Superman’s return. No mention of the fact that they got suckered into a mission into space that went nowhere.”

When Doctor Occult shows up, Superman is like "aw, not this guy again!", referencing that classic tale of Superman's first encounter with the supernatural... which hasn't come out yet. Don: “It’s a neat forward call-back (is that a thing?) when Superman references his first encounter with Doctor Occult, given that we won’t see it happen until 1995, when DC does a line-wide ‘Year One’ series of stories. And wouldn’t you know it, that story is written by none other than Roger Stern (and even involves tentacles, as in the thumbnail image)!” #rogersternplaysthelonggame

Don Sparrow's section, on the other hand, can be read NOW, after the jump!

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):

We open with the cover, and it’s one of the top ten best of this era, for sure. Drawn by Kerry Gammill and Butch Guice, DC used this drawing on the “Return of Superman” cards. I tend to favour simpler, iconic covers, even when they don’t necessarily represent the story within, but in this case, it’s showing exactly what the heart of the story is about: Clark Kent is back.

Inside, we open with a full page splash of Superman’s shield, through tons of rubble, and it’s a great image, but without the face, it allows us to focus on the title of the story, a callback to the speech introduction of the old Fleischer Cartoons.

I don’t know if it’s from the writing, or the artist, but Action Comics has always seemed the most romantic of the Super-titles, and this one is no exception, as Clark and Lois have their hands all over each other for basically the whole comic. While it is a bit weird to remember that it isn’t Clark that Lois is caressing (more on that in a bit) in the early part of the story, it always feels intimate and romantic more than it feels graphic or titillating. A tricky balance that this team pulls off well, particularly in their “reunion” on page 3. [Max: Every time I read this issue I think it’s Martian Manhunter posing as Clark and when they start flirting I’m like “ew”. Then I remember who it is and I’m like “nice”.]

I always enjoy seeing Superman flying upside-down, which I consider to be a Byrne innovation—I don’t remember him doing it pre-Crisis. It always seems so joyful and carefree, and it’s nice to see Superman savouring his powers.

Jackson Guice uses tone very well in the scenes with Lex Luthor II in his aviators, and I quite like the sense of motion to Superman’s pose as he approaches the helicopter—almost like he’s swimming in the sky rather than floating.

It’s a good drawing of the Eradicator getting the post-Hoth Luke Skywalker treatment, with David Connor and Kitty Faulkner getting an eyeful. My copy has a slight colouring error that makes it look like the Eradicator is awake in the tank, even though he’s supposed to be catatonic. [Max: Still looks like that in the collections. Maybe he’s one of those people who sleep with their eyes open?]

Superman embracing Lois after the ruse of “Clark Kent” is very cutely drawn, as is the Ghost-like backward embrace on the following page.

The entire sequence replaying Superman’s death and rebirth is drawn well throughout, especially the dreamlike staging, and the darkness as Lois knocks the flashlight away. It’s also moving that Superman can see the heroic lengths that Bibbo went to try to save him once Superman succumbed to his injuries.

Lastly, it was wonderful to see Clark reunited physically with Ma and Pa, especially with the nice touch of the poem by DH Lawrence as the only narration. Stern was always the best at referencing secondary texts in his stories, and it’s well used here.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

Is it me, or is Matrix/Supergirl a little too into this Clark Kent act? I get that making their performances light and funny keep it from seemingly overtly dishonest, but “Clark” is pretty tender in these scenes. Lois does a good job of playing along, but it’s hard for me to fully forget that all this canoodling is actually with Supergirl. So as a helpful tool, I created these graphics: [Max: Nice.]

It was cool that Lois specifically mentioned that Jimmy got a shot of the returned Clark Kent next to Superman, I always like it when that can happen.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about how creepy it is that Luthor has a sexual relationship with Supergirl/Matrix, when she is in so many ways (mainly mentally) a child, and I can’t help but read the scene where Lois chooses Superman over “Clark” this way. The laughing and clapping has a whole different feel if you think of her as mentally diminished somewhat.

So it’s not exactly a continuity error that Clark says on page 13 that he has to call Ma and Pa to let them know that “Clark” is alright (even though he already called them in a previous issue). It could be that they want to tell the Kents the cover story of Clark’s return has now taken place, and they can act like their son is alive again when they go to the corner store, etc. [Max: Yeah, that’s how I took it. It would be awkward if their neighbors saw them all cheerful while their son is still “dead”.]

I like to imagine that Dr. Occult looks and sounds like Robert Stack. [Max: It’s impossible for me to hear him as anyone other than Humphrey Bogart after Lois calls him “Sam Spade”.]

We’ve mentioned previously Jackson Guice’s tendency to use photo reference for his characters. In this issue, Superman looks a lot like Jason Patric to me, who would have made a pretty great Superman had there been movies being made in this time.

I also appreciated this issue explaining both the physical and metaphysical reasons Superman was able to return—and that there’s no back door to the story—if Superman ever died again, he would be unable to return.

#superman #roger stern #jackson guice #denis rodier #supergirl #justice league #guy gardner #rampage #eradicator #doctor occult #pa kent #ma kent #bibbo bibbowski #S.T.A.R. Labs #cat grant #captain marvel #roger stern plays the long game #nice

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latenightcinephile · 5 years ago

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#734: ‘Gangs of New York’, dir. Martin Scorsese, 2002.

To start with some well-earned praise: Gangs of New York is not boring. It is a pretty good cinematic representation of the word ‘rollicking’. It is beautifully put-together, with art design and costume perfectly on-point, and a cast that has been chosen well for every role, from the major to the minor. Scorsese’s film is, however, irritating on a narrative level, and simultaneously feels like it’s trying to do too much and too little for its 160-minute runtime. It’s a film I would quite happily watch again, both in spite of and because of its narrative flaws - to pick it apart and see why it is so unsatisfying in its final hour, but just to bask in the things that Scorsese does so well here.

Generally, Scorsese’s films - and especially his crime dramas - are built around the character of the antihero. It’s pleasing to see the antihero break social norms and also to see him (and for Scorsese it is almost always a him) get his well-earned comeuppance as social morality reasserts itself through the text. The criminal is always damaged by his meteoric rise to success, and this damage makes it impossible for that success to be anything but fleeting.

Troublingly, a lot of films that feature antiheroes are also poorly-read by audiences, especially as these films are usually targeted towards younger men who identify more completely with the figures shown. This is not to say that portrayals of figures like Tyler Durden or William Cutting increase the likelihood of audience members following in their footsteps, but that identification, when it is easier in the short term, does not lend itself well to long-term reflection. On the face of it, Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) and ‘Amsterdam’ Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) are fascinating characters, especially in the way they use and justify violence. Often, though, the links between an antihero’s behaviour and their comeuppance is not drawn clearly enough to dissuade the audience’s identification or even to make it problematic to them.

Scorsese’s film also fancy themselves as being about American society in general, and Gangs of New York is perhaps his most explicit claim to this connection. Set during the Civil War, this film is both a celebration of and a criticism of the ‘melting pot’ of American society during the time, and it sets its composition directly around the tensions surrounding immigration. This analogy could be one of this film’s greatest selling points, but I don’t feel it quite works as Scorsese perhaps wanted it to - the film preserves its ambiguity perhaps too much, leaving itself open to the kinds of murky readings that usually accompany discussions of the antihero.

To make matters even more complex, Gangs of New York was scheduled for release shortly before September 11, 2001. While the reasons for its delay and subsequent 2002 release were not directly related to the political climate of America at the time, it’s very difficult to separate the film from that context (especially as the final shot, a time-lapse of the development of Manhattan Island, prominently features the towers of the World Trade Centre as part of the film’s closing image). Coupled with the film’s main track, U2′s ‘The Hands that Built America’, and the closing monologue by Amsterdam, it’s clear that Scorsese’s film is pitching the War of the Five Points as a moment that represents the development of the true American psyche.

The trouble is that the script isn’t particularly clear on what the development actually is. Let’s lay out the key elements of this metaphorical battle: on one hand you’ve got Cutting, an aptly-named butcher who represents what he calls ‘the Natives’ - white people who were born in the United States. Cutting’s side denigrates both black Americans and immigrants, chiefly Irish immigrants (but only because our POV character is Amsterdam). Cutting is the character most prominently associated with the old guard of the United States, reactionary towards anybody that isn’t immediately recognisable as ‘him’. As shown above, he is at one stage literally draped in the flag of the United States, delivering a monologue about “the spectacle of fearsome acts” being “what preserves the order of things”. This monologue answers several questions about Cutting’s character, the most important of which is the origin of his glass eye: Cutting removed it himself, associating it with cowardice following a fight with Amsterdam’s father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson). For Cutting, lessons are learned through pain, and the offending part is removed to teach those that remain a harsh lesson.

Facing down Cutting is Amsterdam’s gang, the Dead Rabbits. As a minority group themselves, the Dead Rabbits come to represent everything that threatens the old order of the United States, and for a time they are allied with the free black men of the North, as well as all those who are impoverished. Scorsese’s film makes the chief antagonistic act the killing of Amsterdam’s father, and so because Amsterdam is motivated by vengeance, a motivation that aligns itself well with Cutting’s worldview, it’s clearly the action we are meant to be approving of as audience members. Amsterdam is the POV character and the one who is ‘right’ by moral standards - his narration guides us through the film.

As well as this showdown, however, Gangs of New York has an extra plotline - the conscription for the Civil War. This complicates the film significantly, because it places both Cutting’s people and Amsterdam’s people on the same side, against the government. For Cutting, there’s no real internal conflict, but Amsterdam is in a bit more of a predicament. Scorsese’s film has to walk the line between demonstrating it’s on the right side of the Civil War but against the forced conscription of soldiers to fight that war - a position that’s easy to hold but hard to depict on screen without explaining it through dialogue. As it happens in Gangs of New York, it’s hard not to see the Irish immigrants as protesting a little too much - demanding both the right to be considered as American citizens and that only ‘true’ American citizens, the ‘Natives’, be sent to fight for the rights of others.

This is where Scorsese’s film begins to fall apart a bit - not so much that it becomes impossible to follow, but enough that the wheels make an audible grinding noise at the beginning of the third act. Were Gangs of New York just a film about Cutting and Amsterdam’s gangs fighting, it would be a perfectly clear and untroubling film - too anodyne to actually be great. If the film ramped up the conscription plot earlier, it would be better-integrated into the moral quilt of the narrative, but then the film’s scriptwriters would have to find something to add to that plotline without detracting from what exists in the main conflict.

One thing that would certainly help, though, is to expand the film’s cast of black characters. There is only one named black character, so incidental that I knew the actor’s name better than the character’s (Lawrence Gilliard Jr., by the way, playing Jimmy Spoils), who has fewer lines of dialogue than moments where he’s called the N-word. Normally I don’t expect much in this regard from Scorsese: he’s not a black man and comes from a school of filmmaking and is interested in a set of themes that relegated black characters to the sidelines. But here? Making a film set during the Civil War, where conscription is a major subplot? If your scriptwriters don’t put black characters in, Martin, you need to.

This is what makes the film infuriating towards the end, really: a lack of clear indication of how these three sides are meant to be interacting. The way the first two acts of Gangs of New York go, it seems that there are two ways of concluding the film: 1) Amsterdam kills Cutting, proving that a more inclusive American society is something to be desired, and then reconciling their identities as new American citizens with the issue of conscription, confirming or denying the necessity of fighting for others rather than for yourselves, or 2) Cutting kills Amsterdam, reaffirming the old racist order of the United States and subverting the traditional narrative of righteous vengeance. This ending would also potentially subvert the antihero identification with Cutting, by making his act of triumph unpalatable from a narrative perspective. Cutting can only win by killing the film’s narrator. Here, the reconciliation with conscription is less important: Cutting’s political position is strong enough that is doesn’t really matter what happens with the Civil War.

What Gangs of New York does instead is this: 3?) The final showdown occurs at the same time as a riot over conscription. The military coincidentally fire cannons into the prelude to the fight, scattering the forces and injuring Cutting. Rather than allowing Cutting to live in shame (an act of valour, as Cutting indicated in his flag monologue) or die in cowardice from his wounds, Amsterdam kills cutting. Several of the secondary characters, both on Cutting’s side and on Amsterdam’s, are killed in the riot, an action-packed sequence which is intercut jarringly with the relatively sedate and solemn interaction between Cutting and Amsterdam.

One of the characters killed in the riot is Jimmy Spoils, who is so thematically central to these conflicts that you would suspect he should have a more lasting impact on the film. The final sequence, though, is Amsterdam burying his father’s blade at the grave of Cutting, which feels like it relegates the whole question of race and the Civil War to a footnote in a story about Irish immigration. Which, to be fair, it kind of is, but then why have the Civil War going on at all here? Again, it’s a difficult balancing act and a complex set of themes and plotlines, but it feels like Gangs of New York couldn’t quite figure out how to weave these ideas enough to do them all justice. Amsterdam’s final monologue is emblematic of this even-handedness that doesn’t do the film any good:

“It was four days and nights before the worst of the mob was finally put down. We never knew how many New Yorkers died that week before the city was finally delivered. My father told me we was all born of blood and tribulation, and so then too was our great city.”

Gangs of New York is a beautiful and stirring film, sure, but delivered from what? What kind of city was born, and whose blood and tribulation paid for it?

#1001 movies #Martin Scorsese #Gangs of New York

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aspected-benefic · 5 years ago

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Prompt #5: Vault

@sea-wolf-coast-to-coast

As elders often said to the younger folk, "You haven't lived long enough." More in the context of, what Ash had assumed, to be about one's knowledge of life. Despite these heeded warnings, however, Ash felt as though he had lived just long enough to see patterns in behaviours and situations.

One lesson Ash had learned to take to heart since day 1: expect the unexpected.

One moment, Ash Lawrence had been on a leisurely stroll. Quiet, tranquil, nothing but a crisp breeze and the sound of the ocean waves to accompany him. The next thing he knew, he had jumped into the fray of a wild bandit case. Ash's starting contribution? A precise and well-timed shot to the back of one bandit's feet. Said ruffian crashed to the ground, curled up and wincing in pain. While some of the yellowjackets proceeded in bounding up their pray, the other three with their leader included already made off in the grand distance.

"Apologies for getting you caught up in this mess, adventurer," said one of the yellowjackets, "but thanks for yer help all the same."

"Save your thanks until after we catch them." said Ash.

Rather than attack blindly, Ash fell upon his natural instincts and first surveyed the situation and area. One large ruffian in the middle and two gangly, lesser dressed minions on either side. It didn't take a genius to guess that the one in the middle was the target in question. Still, judging by the fact that a couple of the yellowjackets had taken their time to apprehend the injured bandit, the entire gang was the target. Not just the leader. A network, most likely. Ash wouldn't have been surprised if this motley crew had some more hands hiding in the wakes. On top of all this, with the unfortunate positioning of the guards in front of Ash and not the way around, the machinist would most likely fire an accidental few rounds of friendly fire. Standing and aiming was one thing. Running and aiming? Another.

The bandits veered around into civilization. Ash's instincts had proven correct. Not only did the bandits have more options to hide from the plethora of narrow alleyways, had this group possessed more hands in the making, Ash and his his escort of authorities would have an ambush waiting for them. To make matters worse, ever since the bandits lost one of their own, the remaining few suddenly gained newfound speed. Ash waved his hands to summon the wind around him and his allies - an ability he had learned as a Bard. Yet, the bandits had a head start and soon, just as Ash had predicted, both Ash and the company he was with lost sight of their targets.

But not for long.

"Over there!" One of the guards pointed to a narrow alleyway.

To think that these order of events moved just as Ash had anticipated. Predictably so.

And in another predictable moment, just as Ash and the yellowjackets veered around the corner, they caught sight of the bandits, only to see the last of them crawl over a tall, conveniently placed wall. Ash fired at the bandit, but his bullet collided not with his intended target, but the tail end of a rope, which slunk over the top of the wall and beyond.

The yellowjackets came to a halt. The roegadyn marauder clicked his tongue. "Dammit!" he growled. He attempted to scale the wall, but without any significant ledges atop its smooth, brick surface, and with the buildings on either side too far from each other, scaling without a rope was no option.

"Is there any way we can get around this wall?" Ash asked.

The miqo'te yellowjacket - the one who had pointed out the alleway - shook her head. "Repairs be goin' on here. 'n they knew it. Th' only way around be all th' way around th' damn lot, 'n by th' time we do that, they'd be sailin' off into th' great beyond."

Ash looked up at the wall. At least twelve yalms high. No way the group could scale the wall in time. The bandits had predicted this much of course as indicated by the rope. And, in ordnance with the law of the unlucky, all options had been blocked off.

Or, so everyone thought. One option remained: one that Ash thought he would never have to consider again.

He could... jump over the wall.

No...

Ash felt his body twitch. He felt his chest tighten and his heart beat faster. His mind flooded his senses with memories of times before. The past... the father that never looked his way... his failures, his inadequacies...

I put that life behind me. This is my life now. The way of the firearms. I don't deserve to go back to that life, I-

Then suddenly, his fear stopped.

It was as though time around him slowed down to a crawl. All the nervousness, the tension, the hesitation vanished as he felt a blanket of calmness envelop him. For the first time in a long time, Ash had no dots to connect - no trail of patterns and behaviours to follow. Not even a logical reason to what he now felt. Like his mind, which had tried to move into several different directions at once, now all alined to one path straight ahead of him.

Ever since that fated day, I vowed never to run away ever again. If my childish hesitation causes everything to fall to the wayside, I dare not live with myself. There are still things I can do. I can do this.

As though his body had already known what he wanted to do before he had made up his mind, Ash found himself leaned forward and crouched to the ground. His firearm gently brushed against the concrete ground. He took one last deep breath. 'Perhaps there is something in this mess that I can predict: the past does indeed catch up to you, doesn't it?'

He raised his head upwards, not at the obstacle in front of him, but to the skies far above the wall. With no more mental barriers left to stop him, he vaulted into the air.

The wind scorched across his face, a sensation he hadn't experienced in what felt like forever. He soared over the wall and still moved on. Everything below him looked so small - the yellowjackets, the brick floor...

... and the bandits.

Once the trio saw a looming shadow above them, their eyes grew wide and they froze in place, unable to comprehend the image of a machinist sailing over their heads like a flying acrobat or a vaulter.

No, like a dragoon.

Their moment's hesitation was all Ash needed. While still overhead the trio, Ash aimed his firearm directly at them. In rapid succession, the bullets found their marks. The bandits hands now freed of their weapons. Their shoulder blades pierced with hot metal. And when Ash landed near to them, all he needed to do was stand there and aim his firearm at whoever moved until the yellowjackets finally came on scene with more of their members in tow.

As the yellowjackets cuffed and carted off the remaining bandits, the roegadyn and miqo'te who Ash had accompanied stayed behind with the hyur.

"The last time I saw anythin' or anyone go flyin' like that, I shot a cannonball with 12 onzes of gunpowder!" chirped the roegadyn. "Ye ain't hiding any of that in yer boots, are you?"

"Not that I'm aware of. Just some good old fashioned socks." said Ash.

The miqo'te snapped her fingers. "No wonder that accent of yers sounded familiar. Yer from that cold place up in nowhere, ain't ya? Don't they have those... dragoon people there?"

Ash paused. "Yes, yes they do."

The miqo'te looked as though she was about to elaborate, but like her roegadyn comerade, they got called away. The two yellowjackets waved goodbye to Ash, who waved back at them in return until they vanished into the distance. Once they left, Ash exhaled. Closing his eyes, he chuckled to himself. Funny how he often dismissed the wisdom of his elders until experiencing their words for himself. They were truly correct; Ash suddenly felt as though he hadn't lived long enough.

"What will I do now...?" he muttered.

((Entries 2 and 3 were from Ash’s canon story way back in Heavensward. I imagine this one to take place around the Stormblood or Shadowbringers time. So a lot of time has passed since then and now. X3 ))

#ffxiv #FFxivWrite2019

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minervacasterly · 5 years ago

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Martin Luther on the wholesale of Indulgences and Papal authority (from his 95 Thesis): "47. Christians are to be taught that the buying of pardons is a matter of free will, and not of commandment. 48. Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting pardons, needs, and therefore desires, their devout prayer for him more than the money they bring. 49. Christians are to be taught that the pope's pardons are useful, if they do not put their trust in them; but altogether harmful, if through them they lose their fear of God. 50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter's Church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep. 41. Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope's wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money, even though the church of St. Peter might have to be sold. 52. The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain, even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it. 53. They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order that pardons ay be preached in others. 54. Injury is done the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or a longer time is spent o pardons than on this Word. 55. It must be the intention of the pope that if pardons, which are a very small thing, are celebrated with one bell, with a single processions and ceremonies, then the Gospel, which is the very greatest thing, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies. 56. The "treasures of the Church," out of which the pope grants indulgences, are not sufficiently named or known among the people of Christ. 57. That they are not temporal treasures is certainly evident, for many of the vendors do not pour out such treasures so easily, but only gather them. 58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the Saints, for even without the pope, these always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outward man. 59. St. Lawrence said that the treasures of the Church were the Church's poor, but he spoke according to the usage of the word in his own time. 60. Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given by Christ's merit, are that treasure; 61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient. 62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God. 63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last. 64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is naturally most acceptable, for it makes the last to be first. 65. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel are nets with which they formerly were wont to fish for men of riches. 66. The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men. 67. The indulgences which the preachers cry as the "greatest graces" are known to be truly such, in so far as they promote gain. 68. Yet they are in truth the very smallest graces compared with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross. 69. Bishops and curates are bound to admit the commissaries of apostolic pardons, with all reverence. 70. But still more are they bound to strain all their eyes and attend with all their ears, lest these men preach their own dreams instead of the commission of the pope. 71. He who speaks against the truth of apostolic pardons, let him be anathema and accursed! 72. But he who guards against the lust and license of the pardon-preachers, let him be blessed! 73. The pope justly thunders against those who, by any art, contrive the injury of the traffic in pardons. 74. But much more does he intend to thunder against those who use the pretext of pardons to contrive the injury of holy love and truth. 75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God -this is madness. 76. We say, on the contrary, that the papal pardons are not able to remove the very least of venial sins, so far as its guilt is concerned. 77. It is said that even St. Peter, if he were now Pope, could not bestow greater graces; this is blasphemy against St. Peter and against the Pope." Whereas before he had just restricted his criticism to the wholesale of Indulgences and other Catholic practices. Now, he switched gears, pointed fingers directly at the papacy, also scolding Christians who believed that the Indulgences were enough to absolve them or their loved ones of their sins, or make them forget their moral obligations as Christians. Luther believed that faith alone could save someone and while he did value charity, he believed that most of the people who participated in this, like those who sold and bought indulgences, just did it out of some misplaced narcissist sentiment to show off, and virtue-signal to their peers. Basically 'look how good I am, helping the poor and speaking for those who can't speak for themselves.' Luther also thought it was one of the worst kinds of hypocrisies that run contrary to Christ's teachings. Nevertheless, as you will see in the other thesis I will post here until we get to October 31st where we will be celebrating 500 years after he nailed these to the university of Wittemberg, his intention was not to separate from the church but rather to reform it. Had things not gone too far, Luther would have faded into obscurity with a handful of followers to continue his work like the Lollards in England who followed the teachings of John Wycliff (which John of Gaunt, the grandfather of Europe and 1st Duke of Lancaster was a sympathizer of); or burned at the stake like the Dominican Friar Giacommo Savonarola. But he preserved thanks to the German Princes sponsoring him. And if you read some of his later works, you will see that he wasn't as radical as some of his enemies made him out to be and much of his views stayed the same. It was the people that came after him, who wanted to separate themselves from the church from the very beginning, that he disagreed the most with. But he supported some of them because Protestants had to stick together and if he didn't, the Protestant Reformation would not survive. In regards to some of the kings that took his advice on kings on being the heads of spiritual matters in their kingdom seriously, he railed against some of them, most notably Henry VIII of England whom he considered a bigger hypocrite than the pope. For better or for worse, he changed the course of human history. Centuries after his death, he continues to generate controversy. Many religious and social leaders have cited him as their main source of inspiration while others believe that without him, Western civilization would not have gone as far as it did. The Victorian era, more than the Renaissance itself, did a lot to boost his image and elevate him to saint status. An irony in itself and if there is an afterlife, Luther would probably have considered this sacrilege. Picture: 1521 woodcut of an indulgence seller

#Martin Luther #95 thesis #indulgences

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alcalavicci · 5 years ago

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Charles Plymell on Dean

[Jill: The following excerpt is from an essay written by Charles Plymell, titled "Charles Plymell From Kansa, Land of the Wind People" (yes, the 's' is left off of Kansas). This pulls Stockwell into Neal Cassady's world, because Stockwell is hangin' with Plymell, and Cassady is Plymell's roommate. See how nice and tidy everything is? But really, the San Francisco/Los Angeles Beat scene is probably a small world - that's why the same names keep appearing in all of the Links from this time.]

There were a lot of things coming together by 1963. It was like some great cosmic charge opened and sent ripples through every level of changes; as if the I Ching had been shuffled. I rented a house with Glen Todd and Justin Hein, a painter from Kansas. The house had been used as a meth factory, and before we had moved in, it was rented to a new wave of youths from Wichita who had by then immersed themselves somewhere in the Haight. I didn't know it at the time, but Ginsberg had lived at this address with the painter Robert LaVigne. Diane DiPrima had been there years before to gather material for her magazine The Floating Bear. She will visit the Gough Street flat again in the city of floating scenes.

During the summer of 1963, at the infamous 1403 Gough Street residence, a blast was in the works. It was an address well known to the Auerhahn regulars: Dave Haselwood, who would move his Auerhahn Press soirees to that address and entertain a steady stream of poets; Jonathan Williams and others from the Black Mountain school; McClure and the San Francisco Renaissance; Ed Sanders, another Kansan, who migrated to New York's Lower East Side and started the Fugs. He performed across the street at the Avalon Ballroom.

The Hollywood "alchemists," whose strong image collages and film montages mixed the word medium, also came to Gough Street and contributed to the scene: the publisher Wallace Berman and the actor Dean Stockwell. Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell sent collages and drawings to be included in an underground magazine I was printing at that time called NOW. Later, when I lived in Hollywood with Brad and Celeste Hammond and had no money, Dean's hospitality allowed me to explore the scene. There was some common ground in Hollywood, Barney's Beanery, where I wrote some "pop" poetry.

History in the making was the feeling at the Gough Street party in San Francisco that night. Parties were open affairs and strange people always showed up. It was like a cosmic gene pool, a Star Wars rehearsal, an archetypal convention with hidden messages and timeless meanings that manifested themselves with a look, a dance, a conversation; where everyone communicated on multiple levels, as if Carl Jung had met pop culture, where group consciousness was saturated with lysergic acid. It was as if enormous cosmic forces were coming together and the weave and warp of time was overlaying itself in a history that I suspect a keen Herodotus meditating on Mount Tamalpius (Marin County) might have enjoyed. Even the tile inlay on the stoop resembled a superimposed swastika over a Star of David. Or were things really that significant? When I answered the doorbell, a group was on the stairs. Allen Ginsberg, who had just returned from India, entered. Behind him: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and a host of other luminaries. The songs and dancing grew wilder, and a crazed poet, Dave Moe, started flipping out, dancing wildly, in a tantrum, for the famous guests.

After a while Ginsberg introduced himself and said to me something that sounded rather cryptic, like, "I guess you're the one I'm supposed to meet." And I said, "I guess your the saint", and he said, "No, I don't want to be," or something to that effect. I tried to make small talk with Ferlinghetti and told him he reminded me of someone a master painted. He looked puzzled and never said much. Within a few days, Ginsberg took me to Ferlinghetti's house on Portero Hill. Ginsberg said he had come to San Francisco to help his old lover, Neal Cassady, write his novel and was looking for a place to stay. I said I had this seven-room flat for a hundred bucks a month that we could share.

I had met Neal once when he had dropped by Maureen Kegwin's flat in North Beach where I'd been staying. Allen said Neal would be bringing his things to move in. A '39 Pontiac pulled into the driveway and jerked to a halt. I learned later that a brake line was damaged and Neal drove it that way, gearing it down as far as possible, then pulling on the emergency brake. It was in that car we went on a white-knuckled ride down the coastal mountain road to Bolinas with Neal driving and pulling the emergency brake to slow down while physically fighting with his girlfriend, Ann. Allen and I were being tossed around in a backseat like a couple of Marx Brothers' extras.

At Gough Street, Neal unpacked three or four cardboard boxes with his belongings spilling out of them. He moved much faster than a normal person and left his girlfriend, Ann, standing in a daze. His last parcels were a grocery sack and a shoebox full of marijuana which he tucked under one arm while putting his other arm around Ann to carry her up the stairs. I later characterized them in a poem as Popeye and Olive Oyl and began making collages-notes of scenes that would go into my book, The Last of the Moccasins.

Also: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-06-05-ca-623-story.html (about Berman)

#stockwell sassies

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squirrel-moose-winchester · 6 years ago

Text

Chapter 4

Title: Falling for the Holidays

Pairing: Dean x Reader AU

Word Count: 4461

Summary: With October ending and the holidays underway, that only meant one thing for Dean Winchester. It meant returning to his childhood home and spending time with his family. It meant listening to his parents, especially his mom, ramble on and on about when he was going to find himself a nice girl, bring her home for the holidays, and then eventually get married and have children. However, Dean wasn’t ready for that sort of commitment, so in order to get his family off his back, he comes up with an elaborate scheme! But like the saying goes, “sometimes lies become truths.”

Warnings: Crack, Language, flirting, and A LOT of FLUFF!

A/N: Oh Gosh! Forgive me for taking so long to get Ch. 4 out. I was ideally trying get this out on Thanksgiving, but things just got so crazy and I entered a block in writing. But here it is, and I’m actually quite fond of it, hope you guys are too! Dedicating this chapter to @dolphincliffs and @claitynroberts who are always, without fail, leaving something nice to say in my inbox about this story. Thank you ladies for the constant support. I appreciate you guys so much!! xx

Series Masterlist

“Oh shit!” He sputtered, before dashing out of his truck to help you. “Shit, Y/N, I am so sorry!” He apologized with earnest.

“Dean, what the fuck, dude?!” You snapped, punching him in the stomach, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to catch him off guard. He grunted, crouching over a little.

“I said I was sorry. I didn’t think you were going to freak out like that,” he mumbled, holding his hand out for you. You allowed Dean to help you up, taking his lending hand. As he got you on your feet, you hissed in pain, wincing as your foot hit the ground. “Y/N, are you okay?” Dean asked with concern.

“N-no. I think I sprained my ankle,” you whimpered, flashing him your sad puppy eyes.

“Fuck. Y/N, I’m so sorry.” You could see the guilt in Dean’s face. “Shit, shit, shit,” he mumbled, raking his hands down over his face, before pushing back up into his hair, messing it up a bit.

“Dean, Dean. Hey, it’s okay,” you told him. When he made eye contact with you, his face quickly shifted into a look of confusion. “I was just kidding.”

“You little shit,” Dean barked with relief, thankful that you were okay. Hurting you was the last thing he ever wanted to do, accident or not.

“Now grab my stuff and let’s get this show on the road,” you shouted, already settling yourself in the passenger seat of his Ford truck.

With a wide smile, Dean hopped into the truck and headed onto the road. Thirty minutes into the drive, you started to complain that you were hungry. “Seriously?” Dean deadpanned. “We just left. How about we get some miles in before we stop. It’s a seven-hour drive.

“S-Seven hours!” You sputtered, not realizing how far it actually was. “Dude, we should have just flown there!”

“No. No! We are not getting on those flying death traps!”

“F-flying death traps? What the – don’t tell me you’re afraid of flying?” You smirked.

“Have you ever seen Twilight Zone?” Dean exclaimed. You definitely knew the movie, but that was all it was. There sure as hell wouldn’t be an actual gremlin monster on the wing trying to kill everyone.

“You’re such a dork,” you giggled. “Now, hurry up and drive so we can eat!”

Three hours of nonsense chatter and off key singing, your stomach started to grumble, making you realize that you had yet to eat. Dean gave you a weird look before chuckling. “Sorry, let’s stop at the next Gas-n-Sip and grab something to eat. I need to refill on gas anyways. Sound good?”

“Perfect!”

When Dean pulled into the Gas-n-Sip, you headed into the shop while Dean pumped the gas. “Hey, don’t forget the pie,” Dean reminded over the hood of his pick up.

“Do I ever forget the pie?” You rolled your eyes.

“Actually…” Dean started, but was cut off.

“I was drunk! You can’t expect a drunk to have the greatest memory!” You defended.

“You went in for a drink and my pie, and came out with all this crap, except my pie!” Dean stated in a matter of fact voice.

Rolling your eyes, you promised him that you would not dare forget his precious pie, but he gave you a wary look, as if he didn’t believe you. Entering the small store, you immediately picked up a cherry pie first, so that you wouldn’t forget it later. You then got a couple of drinks, and a sandwich for each for you.

When you returned, Dean was finishing up, and the two of you were back on the road. Dean cheered as he pulled out his favorite food. “Whoa there, big guy. Sandwich first, pie later.”

“What? Why?” Dean pouted.

“Because I said so.”

“Bossy much,” Dean grumbled, taking the turkey sandwich you had picked out for him, while you ate a peanut butter and jelly one.

“Only because I care,” you muffled back with food in your mouth.

After a little sustenance in your bellies, you and Dean continued the drive singing off key to whatever was playing on the radio, and talking about random topics, most revolving around memories of college with your friends.

“Hey, remember that one time we dared Cass to go skinny dipping?” Dean started.

“Oh, god! And he ran out because it was infested with leeches!” You wheezed at the mental image of a very naked Cass running out of the water and flailing about, trying to get the leeches off.

“They were everywhere! I lost it when Jo had to pull off the leech in between his ass cheeks!” Dean snorted.

“Omg, that was the best part! Oh, Cass. I miss his face,” you giggled.

“I don’t. I’d rather stare at a pretty girl,” Dean winked at you, making you roll your eyes. It was such a bad habit to break when it came to Dean. He was the only person that you could completely be yourself with, no filter what so ever.

“Flirt,” you chided.

Before you knew it, you were passing the sign that said, “Welcome to Lawrence,” and you found yourself in a modest town, filled with pretty nice homes. All the nerves that had been pushed to the back of your mind came flooding back like a tsunami and you swore you thought you were going to be sick.

“Hey, remember, just be yourself.” Dean took hold of your hand in reassurance, letting you know that he was right there with you. As grateful as you were, it did little to calm you down.

When he began to slow down, nearing towards one of the houses, you held your breath unknowingly. Dean pulled into the driveway, where there were three other vehicles parked, but what caught your eye was the sleek black classis car. Dean talked about the Impala frequently, saying how one day it would be his.

“Oh, shit balls. I am so nervous,” you blurted as Dean shifted his truck into park, turning it off.

Your best friend didn’t respond, merely jumping out of the truck and grabbing the bags. You followed his lead, getting out of the car and standing next to him. “Y/N, I can feel your anxiety from here, could you just chill out and relax?!”

Annoyed by his request, you shoved him lightly from behind. “Don’t tell me to relax!” You hated when people told you to relax, and Dean knew it. Dean stumbled at the sudden action, causing him to lose balance a little. As he stumbled forwards, you tried to catch him in case the worst happened, but thankfully, his reflexes were better than yours.

“Sorry,” you giggled as Dean looked back at you with feigned annoyance, snickering as he did.

“You dick,” he chuckled out.

“I said I was sorry,” you managed to say.

Sam just so happened to pass the kitchen window when he saw his big brother grabbing the bags from the back seat of his pick up. He noticed you right after, opening the door and stepping out. He could see you and Dean talking, when you suddenly pushed him. Sam’s eyes widened a little, in fear that he was about to witness his brother eat shit, but when it never came and he saw the two of you laughing, Sam sniggered out loud, gaining the attention of his mother and girlfriend.

“What’s so funny?” Mary asked.

“Dean and Y/N’s here,” Sam announced.

In a flash, Mary and Jess were pressed up against the window, shoving Sam out of the way. The two women were over excited to know what you looked like in person. Jess had seen you before when Sam would FaceTime Dean, however, she hadn’t seen you up close and personal.

“She’s so cute,” Jess squealed, running over to the door. Dean was about to knock when the door was flung open and a mop of curls sprung passed him and latched themselves onto you. “Y/N! It’s so finally nice to meet you in person!” She mumbled against your hair.

“J-Jess! Wow!” You replied, laughing as you hugged her back. She was taller and slightly bigger built, but she was beautiful. Pictures and virtual chats did her no justice.

When Jess pulled away, you noticed Sam and an older woman standing at the doorway, a wide smile spreading across her face. “So this is the long awaited, Y/N! Sam and Jess told me all about you! I’m so glad you’re here!” She gushed, making her way over to you and bringing you into a tight, yet warm, hug. “And here’s my handsome boy,” she let go of you to embrace her son.

“Hi mom, it feels good to be back.” The smile he gave his mother was one you had never seen before. It was kind and soft, and it made your stomach flutter. Dean was certainly a mama’s boy.

“What’s all the ruckus?” A deep voice rumbled. At the door stood a tall and hefty man with peppering grey hair. He was strong built and incredibly handsome for an old guy, but finally being able to see the parents of Dean and Sam, it was no wonder why they were so attractive. Dean pulled more of his mother while Sam had a little bit of both.

“DadI Hey,” Dean smiled, walking up to his dad and giving him a hug. “This is Y/N, my b—uh, my girlfriend.”

“Of course! Good to know the Winchester men got good taste in women,” he chuckled. “It’s really great to finally meet you. Mary couldn’t stop babbling to everyone about how Dean finally got a girl.” Your face heated up, unsure if it was the attention you were getting or if it was the guilt eating away at you for agreeing to play charades to deceive them.

You should be happy that they seem to be taken with you, but at the same time, you hate the fact that you were hiding under the façade of Dean’s girlfriend. Your thoughts were interrupted by Dean slinging his arm around your shoulder, pulling you to his chest. “I got you,” he whispered, knowing that you were uneasy.

Entering the house, a wave of aroma came crashing to your senses. “Wow,” you blurted.

“What’s wrong, dear?” Mary asked, while everyone stopped to look at you.

“Oh. It smells amazing in here,” you told the truth, which felt really good.

“Mom’s a great cook!” Dean beamed, obviously proud of his mother’s talent.

“I know of another great cook,” you muttered, poking Dean on his side, the both of you chuckling together like you were keeping a secret.

Mary slipped her hand into John’s, intertwining their fingers as she smiled at you and her baby. In her eyes, the two of you were in love, smitten with each other in the most innocent of ways. In a moment like that, a couple would usually share a peck or two, but when her son pressed his forehead against yours, she knew this was something special. A love slowly in the making. A love that took time and would be everlasting.

“Mom, are you okay?” Sam asked, drawing the attention to her. Mary was near tears.

“I’m fine. I’m just so happy that my boys are here and that their happy. I’m just proud at my little men.”

“Mom!” Dean and Sam groaned in unison, Dean burying his head in the crook of your neck. You couldn’t help but laugh. It was rare to see a shy Dean, and you were going to revel in it and use it against him when the time needed for it.

Once the thrill of meeting everyone simmered down, Mary insisted that John, Dean, and Sam go to the living area while the ladies finished the preparations for thanksgiving dinner. Jess was setting the table while you took out the pies from the oven.

“This smells amazing! You would think, ever since I’ve met Dean, I’d be sick of pie, but every slice shared, is like a pull to the dark side of pie obsession.”

“Slice shared?” Mary questioned, as she paused from peeling the potatoes.

“Yeah, usually, after we finished eating, Dean and I would share a slice of pie.” Mary’s eyes widened. “Why? Is that not normal?”

“Well…” Mary huffed a humorous breath, “Ever since Dean was a kid, he never shared his pie. Not even with me, John, or Sam. Not anyone.”

“R-Really?” You were legitimately surprised. The first time you met Dean, he shared a slice of apple pie with you. “Funny story: when Dean and I first met, he shared a slice of pie with me, only because it happened to be the last slice of the night.”

“Ooh! First meeting story! This I have to hear,” Jess came skipping over, and you laughed at her excitement.

“It was just after my first semester at UT Dallas, and I was a mess. Finals had just ended and I was just stressing about if I passed my classes. On the verge of tears, Dean approached me, asking if I was okay. I explained to him why I needed to pass and stay in school, which is a little odd considering I didn’t even know him, but he offered to buy me a slice of pie to cheer me up. Coincidentally, they only had one left, and Dean bought it, so he offered to share his slice. That was pretty much the beginning of us, or our friendship at least.”

“Wow, who knew pie could bring people together,” Jess joked, you and Mary laughing along.

“The pie was delicious, and I’m pretty sure that was the moment I started to really like pie. Before that, I didn’t care too much for it.”

“You know,” Dean interrupted, popping out of nowhere, “we actually met before then.”

“We did?”

“You did?” Mary and Jess gasped the same time as you spoke.

“Yeah,” Dean chuckled.

“When?” You and the other women asked in unison. The three of you giggled, looking at each other before bringing your attentions back to the man who was trying to tell the story.

“Sorry. Go!” Your chirped.

“Okay, well… obviously, by the sound of your story, you don’t remember, but I do. It just started raining cats and dogs and I was soaked head to toe. I ran into Ms. Tea and Coffee Shoppe and you were working. You didn’t even bother to look up from the paperwork you were doing – told me that you guys were closed. When I didn’t leave, that’s when you finally looked at me. I remember how your eyes almost fell out of your eye sockets. You asked if I was okay and made me a cup of coffee… on the house. Then when the rain stopped, I left. But before I did, you gave me a blueberry scone and told me to be safe.”

“Ah, I remember that,” Sam chimed in, suddenly standing beside you, “the cute girl at the coffee shop. Didn’t you say you started going there a lot but she never remembered you or paid you any attention?” Sam teased.

“Shut up, Sammy!” Dean barked.

“Oh! It’s all coming back to me!” You quipped. “Yeah, you were soaked. You came in wearing a hoodie over your head. I thought you were some homeless guy seeking shelter from the rain. I was scared out of my mind when I looked up and saw you. I didn’t want to get robbed so I tried to be extra nice,” you confessed, everyone in the room snickering while Dean stared at you in shock.

“Really? A homeless guy?!” He pouted, his mossy orbs twisting into one of his hurt puppy eyes.

“Oops?” You shrugged apologetically.

“Great. Your first impression of me was that I looked like a homeless guy.”

“Technically, I didn't know it was you. My real first impression was that day at the diner, when you shared that slice of pie with me. I’m not going to lie; it was probably the best pie I’ve ever had.”

Dean smiled down at you before pulling you into a hug. “My girl,” he beamed, while everyone watched, his father included, who was standing by the entrance the whole time. Mary was in awe at how in love her son was. Her eyes shifted to Sam and Jess, taking note of the smile they were sharing. Her boys were happy and that made her happy.

“How’s dinner looking?” John made his presence known.

“Oh! The gravy!” Mary pipped, going back to the stove.

“I still need to finish peeling the potatoes!” You gasped.

“Let me help,” Dean offered.

“Sam and I will start bringing the food to the table,” Jess volunteered.

“And if you guys need a taste tester, I’ll gladly step up to the plate,” John joked.

“No. You always do that and you always spoil your appetite. This is why you’re not allowed in the kitchen, now shoo.” Mary waved the spatula in his direction, making her husband chuckle and raise his hands up in defeat.

“Alright, alright. I get it,” he mentioned before heading back to the living room.

When everything was set, John said grace and everyone dug in. Mary and John sat at each end of the table, while you sat next to Dean, and Sam and Jess sat across from the two of you.

The food was amazing and the company was… you didn’t even know where to begin to describe how they made you feel. Your heart was warm and you wanted to cry. If this was what a family felt like, then you never wanted to leave. You wanted to always come back here. To this house. To see these people. At that moment, you had so much to be thankful for.

In the midst of all the chattering, you lifted your glass of champagne. “Happy Thanksgiving,” you smiled.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” Everyone chorused, picking up their drinks and clinking their glasses to one another’s before taking a sip.

The rest of the night was filled with stories of youth, laughing until you cried, and a lot of champagne. By the time everything was cleaned up and taking turns using the shower, you found yourself finishing up the dishes alone, insisting that everyone relax since they had been preparing everything all day. Dean was in the shower, and you should have everything done by the time it was your turn.

Drying the last plate, strong arms wrapped themselves around you, Dean’s scent wafting through your nose, filling you with comfort. “Hey,” he whispered, placing his chin on your shoulder.

“What do you think you’re doing?” You questioned his lack of personal space.

“Mom’s watching,” he mumbled. Scoffing, you placed the last plate in the cupboard before drying your hands and twisting in Dean’s arms so that you were face to face. He smiled dopily, willing his eyes to stay open as long as possible until it was time for bed. “I brought our bags into my old room, the last door on the right. Looks like we’re sharing the bed.”

“Nothing we haven’t done before,” you placed your arms on his shoulders, taking a peek behind his back, and sure enough, there was his mother. “You weren’t kidding. Your mom really is watching,” you giggled.

“Well you better go hit the shower, you stink,” Dean teased.

“Ugh!” You unwrapped your arms from around his neck and rested your hands on your hips. “Oh, ho, ho, Dean Winchester, you are asking for a beating.”

“Is that a promise?” He smirked, wiggling his brows.

“You are such a flirt; you know that? The biggest flirt I know,” you laughed.

“Wait until you get to know my dad a little more. This charm of mine had to start somewhere.”

“Oh god!” You exclaimed, you and Dean falling into mutual laughter.

“No seriously, go and take a shower. You smell like pie, and if you don’t shower now, I’m going to eat you,” he stated, releasing you from his hold.

“Is that a promise?” You winked at him the same way he had done to you, except, you walked away leaving Dean’s jaw to drop on the floor.

“She’s going to be the death of me,” Dean muttered to himself, smiling like an idiot.

As you passed Mary, the two of you shared a smile before you hopped upstairs, heading into Dean’s old room. You smiled when you opened the door. Younger Dean was very much into music and horror movies. There were posters everywhere, a guitar in the far corner of the room, and you couldn’t help but giggle at the tiny hints of cowboys littered around the semi-large space.

Pulling out your bag, you searched for your sleeping clothes only to realize that you forgot to pack some. You were so nervous about the trip to Lawrence and the fact that you had to play Dean’s girlfriend, that it slipped your mind. Cursing to yourself, out of instinct, you checked behind you to see if anyone was there. When you saw no one, you stole a shirt and a pair of boxers out from Dean’s bag, picking up the towel you assumed he had left out for you.

After a refreshing shower and getting dressed, you brushed your teeth. There was a tingling feeling inside you as you appreciated the way Dean had set things up. Your toothbrush and his were laying together side by side. Once you were completely done getting ready for bed, you hung the towel in Dean’s room and headed back downstairs, however, the only person there was Dean.

“Hey, where’d everyone go?” You asked.

“Black Friday shopping,” Dean announced, eyes glued to the Christmas movie he was watching.

“But why?” You groaned. You never liked black Friday shopping. You preferred staying away from the crowds and just buying everything you needed online.

“Tell me about it. Told them that it wasn’t our thing and to go without us.”

“Awesome,” you plopped yourself down next to Dean, his eyes finally finding you.

Dean did a quick double take when he realized what you were wearing. “Are-- are those my clothes?”

“Sorry, I was so nervous about coming here that I forgot,” you sighed.

“Hey, it’s cool. I just wasn’t expecting to see you in my clothes. Looks good.” There it was, the smug grin playing on his face again.

“Why do you do that?” You asked, glowering over the fact he always looked so frustratingly handsome when he did that.

“Do what?”

“That stupid smirk of yours!” Your pointed. “It makes me want to hit you and… you know what? You’re just so annoying.”

“I’m annoying? You wanna know what’s annoying? When you touch me with your ice cube toes!”

“Oh you mean like this?” Your taunted, bringing your feet up and pressing the against his arm.

“Holy fuck! Get those icicles away from me!”

Dean tried to get away, but there was no where he could have gone, so instead, he tackled you onto the couch, tickling your sides until you couldn’t breathe and tears were falling from your eyes.

“Stop!” You managed to get out between your hysterics. “I surrender! Uncle, uncle!” you begged.

Dean stopped, but your laughter took a while to subside, and when they did… you had never realized just how many different shades of green speckled in Dean’s eyes. You never noticed all the lightly dusted freckles scattered amongst the darker ones. You never notice just how beautiful he was up close.

In turn, Dean couldn’t help but be hypnotized by you. Your smile, your deep eyes, soft lips, just all those little details he never really noticed, was up at the forefront and he was trapped.

“Hey,” he whispered, his eyes never once leaving yours.

“Hi,” you giggled.

There was a moment of silence as the two of you stared into each other’s eyes, until Dean broke it, by licking his lips. Your eyes caught the motion, watching as his tongue smoothed over his inviting pink lips. Lost in a trance, you felt hot breath on your lips, which sprung you back into reality.

Dean felt your body tense up against his and he suddenly pulled away. “Uh…” he chuckled, “why don’t we head up to bed?” He suggested.

“Sounds good. Honestly, I’m exhausted. Playing pretend is hard,” you kidded.

“Oh please, you barely had to play pretend. We’re best friends, that’s all we have to pretend to be. And we’ll just throw in a few “couplely” things here and there.”

“You’re right. We might actually pull this off.”

“Alright, c’mon,” Dean lifted himself off of you, standing up and offering his hands.

Taking his hands, he hoisted you to your feet, but he didn’t let go. He kept one hand holding yours as he leads the way to his old bedroom. The act should have been uncomfortable considering, most friends, best friends included, didn’t usually partake in such intimate pleasure such as hand holding in private, but something about it felt so natural. It didn’t feel weird, nor did it shake you in any negative way.

“Dean,” you called out his name, eyes transfixed on your hand in his.

“Yeah,” he asked, stopping in his tracks to look at you.

“Nothing,” you laughed softly.

“Tell me. What’s on your mind?” He pressed, turning his body completely to prove that you had his full attention.

“It’s nothing, really. I’m just glad I’m here, even if I’m pretending to be your girlfriend. Your family is so nice, and it beats being back in Dallas alone, so thanks for this.”

Dean couldn’t stop smiling, pulling you close into his chest. “I’m glad you’re here too, Sweetheart.” That nickname. Usually, you hated when he called you that, but this time… the butterflies came to life. “How about you come back for Christmas? I’m sure my mom and Jess would love for you to come back. I know I’d feel a lot better with you by my side.”

“But… this lie…”

“Then don’t lie. Best friends, girlfriends, it’s almost the same thing right?”

You couldn’t help but smile. “Almost the same. Just… no touchy,” you booped him on the nose.

“Maybe a little touching,” he teased, poking your sides and making you jolt.

“Dean! Don’t you dare start that again,” you chide, a smile threatening your lips.

“I won’t. Now, let’s go to bed."

Say Something Nice Here!

Falling for the Holidays Tags: @hannahindie @pinknerdpanda @winchesterprincessbride @amanda-teaches @dancingalone21 @a-winchester-fairytale @dolphincliffs @oneshoeshort @brewsthespirit-blog @jerkbitchidjitassbutt @atc74 @natasha-baggins @heavymetalhauswife @linki-locks11 @spnwoman @veevm @chameleah86 @kdcollinsauthor @claitynroberts @roonyxx @rainflowermoon @ladylaylo @closetspngirl @mirandaaustin93 @salt-n-burn-em-all @flamencodiva @fangirlanotherjust @tabbyjane

#dean winchester x reader AU #dean x reader #dean winchester #reader insert #dean winchester series #spn #supernatural #Falling for the Holidays #squirrel-moose-winchester

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blakegopnik · 6 years ago

Photo

BASQUIAT WAS A CONCEPTUALIST IN EXPRESSIONIST’S CLOTHING

MY WEEKLY PIC (first published at Artnet News): Over the years, the biggest fans of Jean-Michel Basquiat have had a strange way of showing their affection: They’ve just about drowned him and his work in tired romantic clichés.

He’s supposed to be a tortured soul overflowing with passions that pour out through the tortured pictures he paints. One writer likened him to “a preacher possessed by the spirit,” an image that comes dangerously close to primitivist stereotypes. A curator insisted that Basquiat’s art channeled “his inner child,” the kind of talk that could easily veer into ideas of the Noble Savage. Basquiat himself complained that critics had an image of him as “a wild man running around—a wild monkey-man.”

To this day, he’s almost always billed as being more in touch with his emotions and the passions of urban life than with the orderly reasoning of post-Enlightenment culture.

Luckily, a show opening in New York lets us see a very different, much smarter and more complex artist than that, one who has more in common with conceptualists like Hans Haacke and Hanne Darboven than with Hollywood’s earless van Gogh—a Basquiat who is an artist of words and thoughts, on the order of Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer, not of instincts and inchoate emotions.

That’s the artist on view in “Jean-Michel Basquiat,” a concise survey that opens March 6 at the new Brant Foundation venue in the East Village. (Tickets are—or were—free, but they have already run out for all 10 weeks of the show; maybe the Foundation will consider opening on some Mondays or Tuesdays to deal with the demand.)

Except for the very earliest collages and graffiti works, and the later collaborations with Andy Warhol, most of Basquiat’s major moments and modes are represented. But for an artist who died at 27—an artist who only ever had the chance to make “early work”—the 70 pictures in the Brant show, displayed across four elegant, light-filled floors, may give just the focused view that we need.

Basquiat is always described as one of the central stylists of 1980s Neo-Expressionism, and it’s easy to get lost in the attractive and exciting—but fundamentally conservative—look and touch of his paintings. In the Brant show, however, I was struck again and again by works where content seemed to matter more than form.

A canvas like “Per Capita,” a 1981 work from the Brant Foundation’s own collection that is today’s Weekly Pic, overflows with information. One end of the painting is a list of American states followed by the annual incomes of their inhabitants. The rest of the painting is scattered with bits and pieces of graphs and numerical tables. “Hollywood Africans,” a 1983 painting from the Whitney Museum, is a compendium of all-capped words that relate to the title, usually via some kind of political take on the subject: “SUGAR CANE INC.,” “TOBACCO,” “WHAT IS BWANA?”

A piece called “Museum Security,” from that same moment, overflows with accusatory words like “RADIUM,” “ASBESTOS,” and “HOOVERVILLE.” All three paintings remind me of the biting lists that Hans Haacke compiled of a slumlord’s real estate holdings, or of the corporate entanglements of the Guggenheim Museum’s trustees. Similarly, a lot of Basquiat’s paintings seem to be as much about simply pointing at things that concern him as they are about choosing how to do the pointing.

Deep down, he’s an artist concerned with inventories, so his pictures have much in common with the tidy cataloging of Darboven. The lack of polish in Basquiat’s style may be about achieving an utterly minimal, frictionless kind of indication—a kind of painting degree zero that parallels Haacke’s typed lists—rather than expressing basic or “primitive” emotions. Basquiat’s scrawls, that is, may really avoid having any style at all, and their ties to the well-worn look of European Expressionism, or to its 1980s retreads, may be almost accidental. When we see a similarity to Expressionist art, we’re indulging in the kind of “pseudomorphism” that the Princeton scholar Yve-Alain Bois has railed against.

Although Basquiat’s paintings are almost always linked to the raw emotions of graffiti, it’s important to remember that his own most important interventions on city walls consisted of pungent and concise bits of text. “4 THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE.” “A PIN DROPS LIKE A PUNGENT ODOR.” If they were rendered in neon or carved in stone, these could just about pass as maxims by Jenny Holzer.

“We wanted to do some kind of conceptual art project,” explained Al Diaz, Basquiat’s spray-painting partner, in the 2010 Basquiat documentary The Radiant Child. That’s not the kind of thought that springs from an “inner child.”

If Haacke and Holzer don’t come to mind at once in looking at Basquiat’s art, I think that’s because of another layer he adds to his “information.” He’s showing how the kind of order and transparent meanings that such white artists take for granted were not made equally available to black people and black artists when they confronted America’s majority culture. The assumption of cultural stability and transparency that information-based art is built around just wasn’t part of the lived experience of many African Americans, at least in New York in the early 1980s. Government statistics and Hollywood movies depended on ideas and images of blackness—and of society in general—that didn’t necessarily map onto what black lives were really like. Haacke could observe a slum landlord’s machinations from on-high; many African Americans suffered them from the inside. Society didn’t exactly give them easy access to the kind of disinterested remove available to the rest of the art world, or to the Kantian (or Marxist) contemplation that it fostered.

The “distortions” in Basquiat’s pictures are not there to deliver an Expressionist style; they are distortions that are really out there in the world, because of the filters of race and oppression that came between a black artist and the things he wanted to point to.

By contrast, Basquiat’s art can become orderly and almost Apollonian when it digs into modern jazz, with its unquestionable roots in black culture. A painting like “Discography II,” a recent Brant acquisition, gives a stable and systematic account of the first recording session that Miles Davis led under his own name, with the title and take of each song set down in orderly white script on a black background. The painting represents the world as Basquiat might have preferred to render it, if only circumstances allowed. (Images © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut.)

For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

#art #jean-michel basquiat

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logancreatesworlds · 6 years ago

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Paradise - (Angel!Spencer Reid x black!reader)

Author’s Note: AUs are my thing. Do I even have to explain? I swear God keeps sending me ideas. 🤣💡❤

Warning: Strong religious references.

Disclaimer: None of the images are mine.

Luke 23:43

And He said to him, "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise."

It was in the year 2035 that the world had officially gone to shit.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t because of global warming or war caused by greedy politicians, but rather by the very God that many claimed to love.

Lucifer always said that God loved humans more than him. Yet, the world had ended not in a ball of fire, but by flaming rays of light.

The Almighty God had finally had enough of his own creation.

First, it started in France, England and Western Europe with the water turning to blood and getting most of the people deathly ill with HIV.

The presidents and dictators could not stop it.

Then, it spread to Russia and eastern Europe, where frogs and lice invaded everything and destroyed the livestock and crops.

The farmers could not prevent it.

After that, it came to lower and southeast Asia, and the livestock either got attacked by their own livestock or were murdered by its diseased meat.

The people could not counteract it.

Next, it hit Australia and Oceania, covering the entire place in darkness and raising swarms of locusts to attack the people - conveniently murdering the first sons of all the families first before moving onto the rest and leaving them with venomous boils.

Nobody could repress it.

And finally, it attacked the Americas, plummeting and freezing the South in snow and hail and then torching the North in heat and fire.

Nothing could avert it.

The only place spared from God’s seven-day wrath was Africa, the Motherland.

Perhaps all those stories your mother told you about being a part of God’s chosen people was true after all.

Or more likely, you were just lucky - for now.

You were packing your bags, planning to return back to Houston, Texas after your vacation.

A graduation present from your uncle.

The next thing you know, you’re watching monks in Myanmar get rammed by raging bulls and French people scratch their heads so hard that they destroy their scalps on the news.

You had been in Cairo at the time.

The last words your mother had said to you over the phone were ones of warning.

“We are living in our last days. Stay there for just a few more weeks and then come home to me when it’s safe.”

But it wasn’t safe.

Houston was one of the first places to burn.

No amount of firefighters could put the flames out and everyone who tried to flee - quite literally, combusted.

Your mom was gone.

The scientists who were lucky enough to live estimated the the “Plagues” had killed off about sixty-five percent of the population.

Most of the other thirty-five percent were hunted down and shot to bits in blinding light by beings with golden wings.

They called them The Seraphim, the Burning Ones.

They were not friendly, nor were they gentle, and they chopped off the heads of every human they saw until God himself started assigning them people to spare.

One morning you had woken up with a G burned into your right arm.

After the angels had broken into the army barracks you had fled to for safety and cleansed the place of its human inhabitants, you figured out that that G stood for Genesis - the first book of the Bible.

Soon you were herded along with the other ‘G’s into a strange settlement.

The buildings were perfectly made of hard stone and sanded white.

The gravel streets were quiet and desolate. The gravel streets were quiet and desolate.

The golden sun shined over all of it.

“Forward!” An angel commanded, pushing you towards it all.

The angels then backed up, and a large wall magically blocked them from view.

You and the others looked around confused as you all wandered further into the strange land.

No one was there. No one.

What was going on?

The only thing that provided explanation to the question was a stone plaque in the middle of the town’s main square.

As the all of you got closer to it, golden letters burned into its hard surface.

To the people of Paradise, heed these commandments.

1. Thou shall not try to leave.

2. Thou shall not steal.

3. Thou shall not eat any of the blessed foods.

4. Thou shall not create or dabble in new invention.

5. Thou shall not marry another unless granted permission by the Holy Union.

6. Thou shall give The Burning Ones tribute on the first of every spring.

7. Thou shall worship God and only God.

The rules were simple. Still, people found it in themselves to be naturally disobedient. But they didn’t last long.

"That’s it!” An angry older man huffed, “I’m going!”

“Mister Coleman you can do that-”

“Enough!” Coleman snapped, “I’m a professor, and I say that this had got to be a prank. You all can stay if you want, but I’m getting out of here.”

Professor Lawrence Coleman then walked up to the wall and started to climb.

Then...

THWOOP!

A loud scream ripped from you and a the others as a shining gold arrow ripped through Coleman’s trachea. His body began to glow and then...ash.

Looking up, you saw the thing that had ended him.

A Seraphim floated above with emotionless air, his wings flapping as he spoke with authority.

“The commandments are clear and true,” the being spoke, “You are now servants of the Lord himself. Disobey his word? You die just as this wretch did.”

Even after Coleman’s deaths, people still tried to escape.

After about fifteen of them tried and failed, people started rebelling in other ways.

Some ate sugar, meat and spices, others tried to craft weapons to kill The Burning Ones...

Many died.

Soon, only thirty of you remained.

March 20th

Year 11

You sighed softly as you collected water from the well before carrying it through the courtyard.

This was your life now.

Slowly, people settled into their new lives in Paradise. Some became bakers, other farmers. You? You were ordained to be a nun in the convent.

Rape was illegal so you did not have to worry about covering your woolly hair, and the only people you saw on the regular were the other nuns and the children.

Your role was to teach them the word of God, and you knew what would happen to you if you did not play your role.

“Boker Tov Miss (Y/N),” little Alice greeted with a toothless grin as you came into the dining room.

“Boker Tov Alice,” you replied, placing the water on the table, “Ready for breakfast?”

“Mhmm,” she replied.

“Glad you could finally make it,” Miss Winifred - the oldest, said as placed hot bread and fresh milk onto the table, “We were starving. Come along ladies, let us get alone with prayer.”

It was the rule that everyone in Paradise had to say eight prayers a day: one in the morning, two before and after breakfast, lunch and dinner respectively and one at night.

This was the second prayer.

Later that morning, you sighed softly as you plucked fresh raspberries off their trellises and placed them in a basket.

Thank the Lord the rains had been frequent, lest your tribute would have been rendered inadequate and you obsolete.

Today was The Day of Babel.

Every March 20th the people of Paradise were commanded to bring gifts to the Main Church to please the Seraphim who watched over and protected them.

Tribute...

Each person was assigned one Seraphim per year and the cycle rotated.

This year, you were assigned to give a gift to the Seraphim called Spencer.

“You think he’ll like it?” Constance, your only friend, asked as she held the basket for you.

“He shall have to,” you replied seriously before dumping two handfuls of berries in, “Or else I shall be raptured.”

The people of Paradise knew what that term meant, raptured.

To you, it was foolish to pretend the friends you had watched be burned before your eyes were somewhere in heaven with God, but you decided to be sympathetic and go along with the delusion.

Sometimes it is better to believe a happy lie than to acknowledge the painful truth.

“Come,” you said, “We mustn't be late.”

After about a thirty minute walk, you made it to the square. Everyone else was walking to the church silently.

It was always easy for you to pick out the newer people, the younger ones who were not used to wrathful Gods and fiery angels.

The most scared-looking ones were always the children.

Soon, everyone was inside.

On the main stage stood several golden plates. Each plates stood for one Seraphim that was to come.

One by one, an angel appeared - their wings shining and their eyes glowing.

Then, your moment of truth arrived.

A blinding ray of light shined down on the last plate.

When it disappeared, there he was.

“Praised be to the Burning Ones,” you greeted with a bow, the other behind you following suit, “We humbly receive thine greatness.”

The Seraphim stepped off the golden plate and stood in front of you.

“Thank you. Now, let us see what have brought me.”

Steadying your hand, you held out the small basket of raspberries.

Spencer gave a pleased smile, “Berries, my favorite. Thank you.”

Everyone followed behind you, presenting their gifts.

With interest, you took notice of how Spencer accepted each gift with grace and kindness, giving a thank you to each person.

Then, it was little Alice’s turn.

“Hello,” Spencer greeted, getting down on one knee and looking her in the eyes.

Alice did as you both had rehearsed.

“Praised be unto you,” Alice replied with a little bow.

“And unto you, little one. What have you brought for me?”

“W-well, it’s not perfect but I...I drew you a picture.”

With two little hands, she handed it to him.

You held your breath.

If he didn’t like it...

“This is the best gift I have ever received,” Spencer said, “Thank you Alice.”

You breathed out a small sigh of relief. You would all make it another year.

That night, you couldn’t sleep and decided to step out to get some fresh air to help you relax.

The wind blew slightly through your fro as you clenched your robe tighter around you to keep warm.

The streets were desolate, silent. The only light out besides the lanterns on the doors was the moon.

This wasn’t the only night you had left the convent.

After more than ten years in Paradise, you...were getting sick of Paradise.

It was always the same routine: get up, pray, eat, pray some more...

What was the meaning of life now?

To obey, you huffed to yourself, It’s always to obey.

Soon, you made it to to the forest and as routine dictated, to the small clearing half a mile out.

You were so tired of it all - the praying, the obeying...

Still, what could you do about it? Nothing.

“Meaningless,” you muttered to yourself.

“Nature is never meaningless.”

You whipped around at the voice.

“Relax,” the familiar figure soothed, gliding out of the darkness, “It is only I.”

“Spencer,” you greeted, bowing, “What a lovely surprise.”

“Do not lie, (Y/N),” Spencer replied, his wings gently flapping as he floated, “I know you do not welcome my presence. No one here does. Not truly.”

“Then why are you here?”

The angel landed and shrugged.

“You interest me,” he replied, “Even if you hold everyone together, yet you yourself are falling apart.”

“I am not falling apart,” you growled, “I will never break.”

Spencer smirked, “Wrath is a deadly sin.”

“So is arrogance and yet that did not stop you.”

Spencer laughed, “You are something (Y/N), something indeed. On the outside, there is this smooth cocoa brown shell of humility and penitence. But on the inside, there is a blazing fire waiting to burn.”

“Then it is probably best to ignite me-”

Your retort was stopped short when Spencer pulled you to him, smashing your lips towards his in an illicit kiss.

Once you snapped out the trance his lips had put you under, you did the only thing a self-respecting woman would do.

SLAP!

Spencer held his cheek, his eyes wide with pleasant shock as you stood there fuming.

“You...you slapped me.”

“Yes, I did. Were you expecting a different reaction?”

“From you? No. But I could rapture you for that.”

“You won’t.”

“You are right. I won’t. You are different from the other humans. You are real.”

“You consider me real for slapping you?”

“I consider you real for standing up for yourself. You are fierce, strong, and you stand firm in what you wish to achieve. I like that.”

You stood there puzzled.

“Listen,” he spoke, “I agree with you. This life is meaningless. Paradise is lost. The honey is hardened and the milk is sour. This...holy project is a farce.”

“And what makes you think I dislike Paradise?”

“Your body language. You walk around with your arms crossed and your eyes blazing. You want to be free.”

“So what if if I did?”

“I want to be free with you. A bunch of us do.”

“Us?”

“Seraphim, some close friends of mine. We used to live for guiding humans to Christ, not burning them for straying form the path we set. Sure you humans failed many times but there was always brave souls like you who got it right. Paradise is dead.”

“Well...what do you propose we do about it?”

“Escape.”

“Escape? That’s your brilliant plan, oh great Seraphim? Even you must know that there is no escape from Paradise.”

“Then we shall make one.”

“And say your colleagues catch you, what then? I will be raptured and you will be sent to Hell.”

“God only watches this place periodically. I have a contact who guards his throne. She tells me so. If we time everything right, we can leave for good.”

You sighed.

You weren’t really going to-

“I’m in,” you answered.

God no.

“Excellent.”

You seriously were partnering with your designated angel to break God’s rules.

Great.

December 24th

Year 11

“And you are sure this sword is gonna get us out?” You asked.

“You have been asking that for months,” Spencer replied, wrapping his lithe arms around your waist and kissing the back of your head, “Yes I’m sure.”

“Sorry,” you mocked, “Just checking.”

“Don’t worry,” Spencer soothed, speaking into your hair, “We shall all be free soon.”

This intimacy between the two of you had become commonplace ever since October. Apparently devising a plan to be free from God’s tyranny is a good foundation for a relationship.

“I will defy God for freedom, but I would die for you,” Spencer had said once.

Just like the other angels, Spencer had an arrogant and prideful side to him. But he was also kind, clever and - to your surprise, very intelligent.

A Seraphim and human in love? Go figure.

“Where will we go?”

“Anywhere,” Spencer replied, “The plagues are gone so we can head towards Europe. Or we can go to America. I will carry you all the way there if need be.”

“Will it be worth it? Is there anything out there for us?”

Spencer shrugged, “Who knows? But at least it will be up to us to discover. I am done being God’s puppet. From now on, we shall have the freedom to live as we please.”

That was the goal. Freedom.

December 24th

11:50 PM

You waited anxiously in the daisy fields.

Constance, Alice and Miss Winifred had each split up and talked to the others, to see if they wanted to leave.

You had wanted to ask them sooner, but Spencer assured you it was too dangerous and that another Seraphim would surely catch you.

Everything had to be perfectly timed.

“Psst.”

You looked over to see Constance, Alice and Miss Winifred.

“You made it.”

“Yes,” Constance said, “We did.”

“And the others?”

Miss Winifred shook her head disappointingly, “They were too afraid.”

You sighed.

Can’t save everybody.

Quickly, you shook it off.

“It’s fine,” you replied, “Let’s go.”

Swiftly, you led your three companions to a hard spot in the dirt and cleaned the spot off as quickly as possible.

“What is that?”

“A seal,” you replied, “It’s the only other way out of this place. The Seraphim use it to enter and leave Paradise.”

Gently, you took the blade of the sword and stuck it into the seal’s one small hole. Magically, the sword’s handle glowed and the seal opened, revealing a dark tunnel.

“Let’s go,” you said.

Soon, you were in the tunnel.

“I thought you said he was coming too,” Constance said petulantly.

“I am.”

The four of you squeal when a lantern flickered on in the darkness, revealing Spencer’s face.

“You have got to stop doing that,” you mumbled as Spencer kissed your cheek.

“Sorry Ahuvati,” He replied.

“Wait you two are...together?”

Spencer nodded, “Since October.”

“Have you fucked yet?” Miss Winifred asked.

“Jesus Wini,” You huffed, “Alice is right here, and no - we have not.”

“There shall be plenty of time to discuss our relationship later,” Spencer said, taking his sword from you, “Right now we’ve gotta move.”

Unsure of what was outside, you followed him.

Who knows? Maybe there was nothing out there. Maybe there was an opportunity to start over.

Either way, the choice would be yours and no one else’s.

Goodbye Paradise.

Author’s Note: Aaaaand that’s all folks! I know this one was bit different but I really worked hard on it. Comment and let me know what you think!

@shinyanchorface @tenaciousarcadeexpert @naturally-bri @suz-123 @dontshootmespence @cynbx @girl-x-wonder-x-reid @lovepeacehappinessalluneed @princesswagger15 @confused-and-really-hungry @lyricsstories @dreatine @siriuslycollins @darkfaethedestroyer @jackiethedreamer243 @hekaates @yourfavoritefavorite @storage-space-running-out @blackwatershipper @fandom-rpblog @witchiewinchester

#spencer reid x black!reader #spencer reid x reader #Angel!Spencer Reid x black!reader #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds au #i know this was a weird one #but Spencer would make a great angel and no one can convince me otherwise #angel 😇

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cmarionthewilkid-blog · 5 years ago

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How We Need to Teach Corporate Social Responsibility to our Students

Today’s undergraduate business programs play a critical role in developing the socially responsible leaders of tomorrow. While being an ethically responsible individual should seem intuitive, I feel that as educators will need to make ethics, social responsibility, and sustainability explicitly intertwined in the fabric of undergraduate business curricula.

Sometimes a university’s goals can become murky, we cannot sit back and let our universities become a skill and knowledge factory (Pinar, 2004). Rather, allow educators the freedom to determine the ideals and competencies society admires to train socially responsible human beings.

Now, what might Scrooge McDuck have to do with business education you ask? He embodies the traditional image of corporate greed (maybe a bit of neoliberalism?).

While profit-generating business models remain an important part of any business school curriculum, we are now encouraging students to imagine a different perspective. Integrating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can serve as an integral part of business undergrad teaching. Could it be a response to creating the better business leaders of tomorrow? I think we can all agree that CSR is important enough that it needs to become both an explicit and implicit part of the business school curricula. But how?

Corporate Social Responsibility

First, the challenge is determining an acceptable definition of CSR. With over 37 definitions of Corporate Social Responsibility (Dahlsrud, 2018), how do we know which is best? In our context, I will consider the Canadian Centre Business in the Community’s definition. To them, CSR “is the overall relationship of the corporation with all of its stakeholders. These include customers, employees, communities, owners/investors, government, suppliers and competitors. Elements of social responsibility include investment in community outreach, employee relations, creation and maintenance of employment, environmental responsibility, human rights and financial performance.” (as cited in Khoury, Rostami, & Turnbull, 1999, p.2).

Breaking it down in an even simpler way, according to Carroll (2015), there are two main aspects that individuals must consider in CSR-related teaching, protecting and improving society.

So we have covered the “what”. What about the “how”?

Active vs. Passive Learning

With a definition in our minds, we need to figure out how to best integrate it in our curricula. To answer this how question in more detail, I will implore the concepts of active and passive learning.

youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpB89OPDtvU

Passive learning

There is nothing wrong with a few lectures on the topic. Simply put, before deep diving into a topic, professors can help frame students’ understanding about CSR through definitions and concrete examples. Let’s go back to the idea of protecting and improving society.

1. Protecting society is where companies should aim to minimize the negative impact of their products or services. (Example: avoid toxic paints in children’s toys). Lego is another prime example of a company who walks the walk when it comes to CSR. From using plant-based polyethelene, recycling 93% of operational waste, and investing in renewal energy (Valet, 2019).

2. Improving society takes a more proactive stance on its societal impact wherby they create positive benefits. (Ex: Support a charitable organization in the local community.) Not to be outdone, Danone has demonstrated quality CSR in it’s “One Planet. One Health.” program (Valet, 2019).

So, it is a little dry, but it does serve a purpose.

Active Learning

On the other hand, learning through CSR can provide students with the opportunity to become actively engaged in their learning through case studies, internships, social entrepreneurship, applied research projects (consulting), role playing, simulations, etc... This is a stark contrast to Pinar’s picture of our “nightmare” curriculum.

As educators, we can use case studies to spark discussion and reflection like Samsung’s use of virtual reality in Jordan.

youtube

What is the message of this video? How is Samsung demonstrating CSR? What is the impact on society?

Furthermore, experiential learning opportunities like internships with non-profit organizations can go a long way in educating students in CSR more profoundly. In line with active learning, Kolb’s 1984 Experiential Learning Cycle can complement such as experience for students.

The concrete experience is the non-profit internship. Following the internship, students reflect upon the competencies for which they have learned from the experience. They then wrap up (abstract conceptualization) their experience and learning in a final report. Finally, an example of active experimentation would be that the student becomes a social entrepreneur using what they learned from their internship.

While Tormo-Carbó et al. (2016) indicate that they measured no significance difference in a student’s ability to demonstrate knowledge of ethics and social responsibility, regardless of having had a been exposed to a course on the topic or not, I firmly disagree on this point! While a course in a passive learning environment could very well lead to less than optimal learning, experiences grounded in active and experiential learning have the profound opportunity to evoke real change in business students.

Is CSR Enough?

The triple bottom line (TBL) was a concept brought to light by John Elkington in 1998. Triple bottom line theory argues that a company’s success is not just based on the profits they generate. While a focus on profits (economical) is surely important, businesses should equally consider the people (social), and planet (environmental) perspectives as well. But is teaching CSR and TBL really enough?

Elkington, himself has recently written an article for Harvard Business Review recalling the term TBL (Elkington, 2018). From his standpoint, it was meant to transform capitalism, not just become another accounting principle or way of deriving “value” from a company. This is one way to ensure business students consider a multi-faceted approach to business learning.

Finally, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) argues that CSR is not truly sustainability and will dry up in times of economic downturn. What we need to be considering is Total Social Impact (TSI).

Bottom Line?

What are the salient points for educators with respect to teaching CSR?

Don’t let your course(s) become factory training sessions!

Find definitions that speak to the holistic approach to CSR.

Actively engage students in their learning.

Always present the full picture and counter arguments.

Peace & love.

REFERENCES

Carroll, A.B. (2015). Corporate social responsibility: The centerpiece of competing and complementary frameworks. Organizational Dynamics, 44(2), 87-96. DOI: 10.1016/j.orgdyn.2015.02.002

Dahlsrud, A. (2008). How corporate social responsibility is defined: An analysis of 37 definitions. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 15, 1–13. DOI: 10.1002/csr.132

Elkington, J. (1998). Cannibals with forks: The triple bottom line of 21st century business. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Elkington, J. (2018). 25 years ago I coined the phrase “triple bottom line.” Here’s why it’s time to rethink it. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2018/06/25-years-ago-i-coined-the-phrase-triple-bottom-line-heres-why-im-giving-up-on-it

Khoury G, Rostami, J., & Turnbull, P.L. (1999). Corporate social responsibility: turning words into action. Retrieved from https://www.conferenceboard.ca/temp/467bebf9-a4f1-4c32-92bb-6736da679016/255-99mb.pdf

Kolb, D. A. 1984. Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Pinar, W.F. (2014). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah (NJ): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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