#and somehow he ended up reminding me more of marx

[reallilystuff]

found this old drawing of nox with the cartoon network color palette. yeah im just trying to find an excuse to post him tbh he is my SON

i mean i'd just draw a new image for posting but im. lazy and dont have the energy. have some more shitty sketches n doodles of my boy as a merman or whatever

[erickaproto]

Week 5

Lecture

This week may just be my favorite topic yet. In this weeks lecture we covered: Storytelling. The lecture gave an abbreviate overview into the history of storytelling from the perspectives of western and eastern practices. I appreciated the over view on the theories of storytelling presented by classical Indian philosophers Anandavardhana & Abhinavgupta and Chinese Philosophers Lao Tzu & Confucius as up until now most of my education on storytelling and narrative structure came from a western perspective. I am deeply interested in the history of mythos and how it influences they way we tell stories so learning more about the variations across cultures was fascinating.

Plato's idea of the ideal being the purest form of something somehow resonated with me. The idea that there is perfection in the ideal and anything following that, especially if it is within our material world, is merely a derivative of the ideal. I mention this in my post about my Time Capsule: Part 1 but for me writing poetry is preferable to me over other forms of writing as I feel it grasps more at the feeling or ideal of certain feelings rather than focusing on the specifics about plot. When we got to classical Indian theory on storytelling I was interested by the idea of "Rasa". the idea of a resonance and the value of transmitting specific emotional and mental experiences reminded me of the idea of "vibes" that is prevalent in contemporary dialect. The "vibe" of something is intangible and completely based on a feeling or certain flavor being conveyed.

I appreciated the lectures piece on Joseph Campbell as his work has had a huge influence on me. In high school I happened upon his lectures on the hero's journey and his work is part of the reason why I entered the field of psychology in undergrad.

Pedro Oliveira

Pedro Oliveira's card deck sems like a very fun and accessible way to approach creating a project. Id love this for those days where I lack inspiration. In their conversation about the card decks Pedro mentions how he wanted to leave certain categories broad as they were able to translate better across cultures when he used them for workshops. I think this approach to design is important. Recognizing the scope of your object and your audience is pivotal to any good design as it is to any good storytelling. What I learned from his card deck is that you can make materials that are broad yet effective.

Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects

I read Sherry Turkles Chapters on The SX-70 Instant Camera by Stefan Helmreich and The Synthesizer by Trevor Pinch. My favorite of the two was Helmreich's account of The SX-70. The narrative was descriptive to the point where I felt like i could hold the camera and feel its weight. he connected his personal relations to the camera through his own experiences and family's connection to its history. In his account of his camera, the object felt more like a family member than a mere camera. But the story was also informative as it explained how the camera worked but also the delicate nature of the polaroid and how it could be manipulated to create beautiful images.

Initially I was more excited to read Pinch's account of the Synthesizer and while it was well written I felt like it lost some of its strength towards the end. I enjoyed the section about his old roommate and her incredibly personal relationship to her own synthesizer. It showed how much an object and the idea of possession could take over us in ways we cannot control.

Elizabeth Chin, My Life With Things

I read a short passage from Elizabeth Chin's book My Life with Things. In this passage she talks about her child's relationship to objects as well as her own and how we teach our children to want things but there is also an innate relationship we have to certain object or as Marx would see it "fetishes". Initially when I read this article as a staunch critic of the woes of capitalism as many of my generation are, I was apprehensive to admit any innate love of objects outside of that we develop under capitalism. But as someone with two very young cousins constantly in my fore view, I have seen first hand a deep connection children have to specific objects that is outside a capitalistic hunger for objects. My cousins sleep with their cars they even bathe with them and like Chin in her book they often beg their parents to let them take them to school. Sure they often want new cars and will occasionally beg for a new toy but the cars are a constant comfort. Objects do have a particular hold on us to me because they are partly tied to memory. When a specific object can be used as a constant marker/ witness to specific events it becomes a therapeutic resource.

[poppunkporco]

the one where you walked me home (porco x reader fic)

the one where you walked me home (porco x reader)

contents: porco x fem reader, mentions of marcel galliard, childhood friends, best friends to lovers, fluff, pining, alternate universe - college/university, modern au, bisexuality, smoking, porco galliard-centric

rating: teen and up audiences

summary: When he walks her home that night, Porco realizes he might have feelings for his childhood best friend. He has no idea in hell how to deal with it but he tries.

word count: 5079

notes: i just thought it'd be interesting to try writing a modern au porco/reader fic in a more porco-centric POV. what i try to do here is explore how he deals with the soft sappy feelings of slowly realizing he's in love since he's pretty bad at emotions and even more so when it's not a [strong, violent type of feeling]

*fic loosely based on this song:

*this is also cross-posted on ao3

***

2:40 AM at an empty parking lot behind a 7-Eleven. The nearest lamp post flickers weakly with its dimming orange light as Porco sets down his third empty beer can on the concrete with a yawn.

“Hey,” he says, lightly shrugging the shoulder against which she leaned her head on. She doesn’t budge from beside him. He rubs the lethargy off his eyes.

They’ve been sitting on this parking block for almost three hours now-- since they left the gig hours ago at the pub just across the university. They’d just spent the past few hours ranting about midterms and how fucked up alienated labor is along with the absence of ethical consumption under capitalism-- and how everyone is forced to participate in it, talking about trips they’d like to make in and outside the city, their ideal lovers, and anxieties about the future. This was a thing they did now and then, usually on Fridays and Saturdays-- seeking a kind of cathartic escape from their hectic academic life in each other’s company. A friendly rendezvous they’d jokingly call dates every now and then.

He leans forward just enough to get a peek at her face, partly obscured by the mess of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes. 

So she’s asleep.

His eyes dart towards their things lumped together beside her feet-- their backpacks sitting atop an A4-size sketchbook along with the last unopened beer can.

Porco idly clinks his finger against the top of the beer can he had just emptied as he breathes out a wistful sigh.

Somehow, she always reminded him of his long-gone brother. Not to say that she shared even a bit of Marcel's fairly easygoing yet charming demeanor. Because she was far from that. She was loud with a crude mouth-- more like Porco himself, really-- except that she at least was kinder, more pleasantly charismatic towards other people than himself. And in that way, yes, she did remind him of Marcel. But there were other things-- pastimes and memories that reminded him of his brother when she came to mind. They’d known each other even as kids. Back in middle school, Porco remembers how she’d visit their home on the weekends so the three of them could build a Lego city which Marcel himself had drafted on the back of one of his sketchbooks. Those two were always quite the artists even as kids-- Porco recalls fondly. His brother had been the one to introduce her to Porco during one of those weekends. He didn’t like it at first-- how Marcel would seem to pay more attention to her at times as they animatedly sketched parts of the city on paper in the middle of assembling the Lego blocks. He’d eventually learned to be tolerant of her presence at least as the weekends passed by and the city gradually came to life-- vast with skyscrapers, houses, trees, vehicles, and lamp posts. Porco distinctly remembers building a garden with her beside a house that resembled the Galliard residence. He had assembled the green pieces that resembled leaf blades onto the flat Lego board, while she topped them off with tiny colorful flower pieces. It was honestly quite fun and it became a thing he eventually looked forward to on the weekends with Marcel.

But all things come to an end and at times, at points where they feel like they’re not supposed to. Porco knows this well.

In Marcel’s old room, the city remains hidden away, unfinished.

It was on a rainy day when Marcel had met an accident on his way home with a schoolmate. Onlookers had witnessed him racing against the red light to push Reiner away from the path of an incoming vehicle.

Even if it was an accident, Porco despises Reiner after that. He'd decided to never talk to him after the incident but as fate would ridiculously have it, they’d meet again in high school-- as classmates, nonetheless, to his dismay.

It was after this same incident that Porco had grown closer to her-- the only other person who possibly knew Marcel almost nearly as he himself did. She knew about the city and she knew about his sketches, after all. In the first few days after his brother’s wake, they’d simply talk about Marcel as they walked home together after school and how they both missed him. Those walks home would eventually involve detours at the nearest Mcdonald’s where they’d get nuggets and buy a Happy Meal-- the ones that came in flimsy cardboard packaging printed with colorful cartoon mascots-- for the sake of getting the collectibles that came with them. It was a thing they never really grew out of. Even now, as college kids, whenever they’d find themselves eating out together at the nearest Mcdonald’s after their Philosophy classes scheduled on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they’d get themselves a Happy Meal, even if they sometimes earned puzzled looks from the cashier as they engaged in quick, petty quarrels as to which collectible they should get.

Soon, Porco feels her shuffle in her seat beside him, the weight of her head now off his shoulder. She rubs the sleep off her eyes with a yawn.

“...should go home,” she drawls, accidentally kicking one of the empty beer cans sprawled in front of them on the concrete. It lands right at the feet of a passer-by who in turn shoots her a cold glare before kicking the can back in her direction. "I-- hey, uh, sorry about that," she apologizes, louder than necessary. Said passer-by only clicks their tongue in annoyance as they raised a middle finger at her before walking away with a muffled swear under their breath.

She exchanges incredulous, befuddled looks with Porco for a few silent moments before eventually letting out a snort and bursting into a fit of stupidly drunken laughter with him. 

“...is what I mean… fucking capitalism... makesnasshole out ofveryone,” she remarks, broken phrases drawn out in between chuckles. “Yeah, yeah. I got it for the tenth time,” Porco says, laughing with a roll of his eyes. He stands up and stretches out a hand in front of her. “Now can we go home? Can’t exactly start a revolution when the alcohol’s fucked you up that bad,” he says with an impatient sigh.

“Yeah? How do you know? Did Karl Marx write that?” She languidly takes his hand.

“No, but-- fucking… well, I don’t know. Maybe? Indirectly? I mean, we did just give in to consumerism,” Porco says with a sharp click of his tongue as he pulls her up to stand.

“Well… yeah. I guess so.”

“Anyway.” Porco places a palm at the top of her head and urges her to face him. “You seem more out of it than me. I’m walking you home this time, alright?

”She shrugs languidly. “Sure, whatever,” she says, her words muffled as she falls face first into his chest. 

--

“Give me the fucking keys,” he says coarsely after her third failed attempt at unlocking the door to her own flat. In the dim light of the hall, Porco tries to make out the shape of what he recognizes as the right one among the five keys dangling from her keychain. He sighs, frustrated as he finally unlocks the door. 

“How the hell did you--?” Confused, she eyes the keys still dangling from the door. “Why wouldn’t it open when it was me?”

“For the love of--” Porco runs a palm down across his face with an exasperated sigh. “You were forcing the wrong key.”

“Oh.” She snorts trying to stifle a chuckle. Porco pulls the keys from the door and hands them to her along with the sketchbook he’d been carrying.

“Thanks.” She gives the door a light push before finally taking a step into the flat. And then a sudden stop. She pockets her keys and lets the sketchbook fall on the carpeted floor of the foyer. She tilts her head pensively for a few moments, staring blankly at the darkness of her room. Porco raises an eyebrow in confusion. She turns on her heel to face him again.

“What is it?” he asks.

She stands on the tips of her toes, eyeing Porco with what felt to him like newfound curiosity. She rests a hand on his shoulder to steady herself.

Her other hand soon reaches up to cradle the side of his face. It comes as a surprise, but not the kind that made you flinch or visibly react in some way. This was simply… unexpected. Weird. And somehow new.

She’s looking at me. And she’s looking like she’s waiting.

And what is she waiting for, exactly? He feels a nervous lump in his throat, swallows it down. He has half the mind to lean his face closer as he, too, looks at her-- and he looks at her like he’s waiting.

Alas, whatever this is-- it ends where it feels like it’s not supposed to.

“‘Night, Porco,” she says with a feeble smile before falling back flatly on her feet.

“Yeah. You too. I’ll see you around,” he says, tentatively glancing at his side.She crouches down to lazily pick up the sketchbook before finally entering her flat again. Porco catches her giving him a tiny wave through the crack of the door moments before she completely pushes it closed. He bids her goodbye with a curt nod.

Once the door closes, he rolls up the sleeve of his jacket to check the time. 

3:15 AM. Porco raises a palm to his cheek. The ghost of her touch lingers on his skin.

***

“Are you serious?” Porco scoffs. “Y/N, you’re not even watching the film.” He leans his head against his palm with his arm resting on the side of the couch.

“Sure I am,” she says, unpinning her hair before letting her head fall on his lap. As she types out a message on her phone, Porco manages to make out Pieck’s name at the top of the chat box.

“You keep checking your phone.”

“It’s fine. We’ve both seen this film before anyway. I told you-- I’m just rewatching it for my paper on Nietzsche.”

“So you dragged me into this for what?”

She gives a halfhearted shrug. “I don’t know. Felt like it. Just wanted to bother you for a good film.” She finally sets aside her phone to look up at Porco with a shit-eating grin. He sighs and flicks a finger against her forehead. “Ow. What the fuck.”

“At least try to look like you’re actually watching,” Porco says, turning her head to face the TV screen.

"Fine, fine," she says with a grimace as she kneads the pain away on her forehead.

They’re now about an hour into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As lovers Joel and Clementine ran through the memories-- hand in hand mapping the history of their relationship-- the ups and downs-- scenes of the two playfully mocking the film at a drive-in theater, a stroll through the flea market leading into talks of having a child, lovemaking underneath the covers as Clementine told Joel about her insecurities rooting from childhood-- all these small intimacies that nonetheless revealed to each other their flawed, detestable selves along with reasons they probably shouldn’t be together, Porco realizes it. 

He looks at her, notes the way the flicker of the TV screen daintily lit up her solemn face and how she’d break into a smile every now and then. She’d brush the back of her hand against his knee and point at the TV screen to tell him that this was among her favorite parts so he absolutely had to pay close attention. A bit funny considering she was the one who wasn’t paying much attention to the film during the first part, Porco thinks. At least she’s watching now, even as he can’t help but watch her instead.

As he absentmindedly brushes a hand against her hair, he wonders if they could be something more, wonders if they’d be anything like Joel and Clementine-- imperfect, but nonetheless worthwhile. They’d known each other since they were kids and he can definitely make a list of things he doesn’t like about her-- like the way she’s too loud and frisky and never seemed to take the right things seriously, how scatterbrained she was that she’d forget the schedule for a midterm exam and how her room always seemed to be in shambles, the way she was so stubborn she’d easily get upset at something as simple as choosing to eat at a fast food different from the one she insisted on, how she’d smoke in his dorm no matter how many times he’d told her that she could get him in trouble for it. But it's not like he's perfect either. She’d told him that he came on too headstrong at times and that’s why a lot of people felt intimidated by him-- a trait that had gotten him into fights and eventually, long afternoons of detention back in high school. She says she hates the way he thought himself too strong to cry in front of anyone and how he’d grown dismissive of opening up to her as they got older. Whenever they’d get into heated fights, she’d tell him that all you ever are is angry and how he was pretty shit at saying sorry like he meant it. And despite all of these, they had remained close friends over the years. They’d promised each other that they’d get better-- slowly, but surely-- even if that was something easier said than done. He could live with that. He would.

***

“Hey, uh--” Porco breathes out a puff of smoke as he hands her the cigarette. He gazes distantly at the parade of city lights before them-- from the headlamps of the vehicles passing below them on the bridge, the streetlights, and the buildings overhead. “--do you still like Pieck?”

She suddenly lets out a cough and a puff of smoke at that. She gapes at Porco incredulously.

“Pock, it’s been three years since we broke up. And that was high school.”

“Look, I know that, but--” he sighs. “I was just wondering.”

She laughs. “That’s not really what you wanted to ask, is it? There’s something else.” She raises an eyebrow at Porco. He rolls his eyes at that, irked at how easily she could read him. “So ask.” She passes him the cigarette and he takes a drag of it.

“Ok--” he says with a sigh. “--Have you liked any other girls after her?”

She raises an eyebrow, intrigued.

“No, not really. Nothing serious, at least. I mean, I did have a crush on this girl who sat beside me in English class during freshman year. But... that was freshman year, you know? Nothing ever really came of it. And you know I would have told you if something actually did, anyway."

“I see.”

“There’s more you want to ask,” she says with a cheeky smile.

“Ok. Fine.” Another drag of the cigarette. “How about-- boys? Have you liked any guy at all since then?” The city lights blur against the filter of smoke. Porco refuses to meet her eyes even as he feels her gaze on him-- heavy with something he could not exactly put his finger on. He knows she’s not smiling anymore and from his periphery, he thinks he senses a swallow in her throat. She turns to the city overhead.

“Yes, actually.” She takes the cigarette from him, smiling fondly upon the light brush of their fingers. “I-- you know, even though I’ve known for a long time that I liked both guys and girls, I still find myself doubting that sometimes. When I’m attracted to a girl, I sometimes think that maybe I was just gay all along. And now that I find myself actually liking a boy again, a part of me entertains the thought that maybe me liking girls was just a phase and maybe I was straight all along. But... I just know it’s not like that. And yet, what people say still gets to me-- they’ve got a way of making you think that being bi isn’t a real thing. Even though it is. I know because... I’m real, right?”

“Yeah. You are. You’re… you’re here.” The corner of his lips turn up as he says it. “I get it. I mean, I think I’m the same.”

“Really?” She turns to gape at him.

“I suppose I’ve never told you this either because it’s so fucking embarrassing, but…” He sighs defeatedly, kneading his temples with unease. “...I made out with Reiner in high school.”

She regards him with a scandalized look.

“Dude, what the fuck. I thought you hated the guy.” 

“I do, alright? It’s just that… teenage hormones and shit. I was stupid and he’s stupid. I-- I don’t know what I was thinking that time. But… I do wonder sometimes--” He scratches his head tentatively. “--what my brother was thinking rushing in to save him from that accident. Like… just what did he see in that meathead that was worth saving?”

“And did you find your answer to that when you were making out?”

Porco eyes her with a deathly glare.

“Fuck you.” 

“Oh, so you did,” she says with an impish grin.

Porco flicks a finger against her forehead.

“Ow-- hey! Stop that,” she says with a grimace. “I mean, I don’t blame you. Reiner’s hot.”

He clicks his tongue at the remark before hastily seizing the cigarette from her grasp to take another drag. "Not like he's the only guy I ever found ho-- I mean liked."

She laughs.

"We should head back," he says coldly.

"Sure.” She nods. “Though… is there anything else you wanted to ask?"

As the filter of smoke hangs between them, Porco wonders about the boy she likes.

He shakes his head. "No. It's nothing."

***

“It was like deja vu,” Porco says, sighing into his phone as he shifts to lie near the edge of his bed. “Except in this dream… before she said goodnight, we, uh--”

“You kissed?” Pieck suggests from the other line.

“Well… yeah.” He puts a palm to cover his face, feeling the flush on his cheeks as he says it.

“So you like her,” Pieck says, almost breaking into a chuckle.

“I, uh…”

“I get it. She’s charming and reminds you of Marcel.”

“That’s…”

“I’ll be honest with you.” She sighs and Porco senses a smile from her tone. “Remember when I said I broke up with her because uni was getting too busy? The truth is that… I feel like you two always seemed to get along better than I ever could with her-- and it probably has to do with Marcel. When I realized that, I’ll admit I did start to feel jealous. I thought back then that you two might eventually get together. After all, you two were both still in high school, while I was already away in uni. It left me distraught for months so I just... decided to break it off. Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s been years and it’s not like I haven’t dated anyone else since then. And in hindsight, that just might have been for the best. I mean, you confiding in me about her right now-- I think-- is a testament to that. Because you realized it too, didn’t you?”

“Oh." He pauses. "I never thought that you-- Pieck, look, I--”

“Pock, if you feel guilty about it just because I used to date her, don’t. It’s not anyone’s fault. That… that she just loved you first. It’s circumstance. She met you and Marcel first before me.”

That she loved you first. As Porco echoes the words in his head, he becomes acutely aware of the beating in his chest and the warmth swarming his face. He buries his face in a pillow and screams into it.

“Hey, Pock? You ok there?” Pieck chuckles.

“How do I-- you think I should tell her?”

“Well, it’s the honest thing to do. And I genuinely think you don’t stand to lose much by doing so. Even if by the littlest chance of her not returning your feelings, I don’t think confessing would ruin your friendship. Might be a little awkward at first, but I don’t think she’ll end up hating or avoiding you at all.”

“You sure you’re not just sayi--”

“No, Pock. I’m not just saying this because we’re friends. I’m saying it because it’s what makes sense.”

“Ok, well… thanks,” he sighs. “And by the way… I’m sorry I called you this early. I know you’re probably busy especially since it’s your thesis year.”

“It’s fine. I’m glad you told me. Frankly, I do find satisfaction in knowing my speculations are correct. And you guys… you two are more predictable than you think-- if I’m being honest,” Pieck laughs.

“Well, I suppose being predictable isn’t so bad… if you’re right.”

Once they bid each other goodbye on the phone, Porco remains sprawled across the bed staring blankly at the ceiling. He rests a palm on his cheek, internally cursing Marcel as he feels the warmth streaming his face once again.

***

“Fuck,” Porco swears under his breath as they both ran towards the car, their feet splashing against the puddled ground as the rain cascades. A looming thunder rolls across the night sky as they make it to the safety of the vehicle.

“So… still not convinced that trying to get a Happy Meal on a rainy Friday at midnight was a bad idea?” Porco says, trying to catch his breath as he sets down the paper bag on the space between their seats.

“Well, I’ll admit it kinda sucked that you had to have your car still parked in school. And in my defense, I didn't expect the drizzle to cascade so soon on the way back. But you know what? It’s fine. We got what we needed and that’s all that matters. I’ll stand by this being a good idea.” She laughs as she peels off her drenched jacket. “Oh, by the way, where can I put this?”

“Just put it in the backseat,” Porco says as he peeled off his own jacket.

“Got it. Here, give me yours too,” she says before turning to place both of their drenched jackets in the backseat.

“Thanks.” Porco switches on the car’s dome light and the windshield wipers. The car’s interior now warmly lit, he rummages inside the paper bag, then hands her a box of chicken nuggets along with a plastic fork. “You want the fries now or later?”

“Later’s good. Thanks.” Porco acknowledges her with a nod, then leans back on the car seat with a languished sigh.

The rain patters incessantly against the windows over the rhythm of the windshield wipers. The faint yellow glow lulls from the ceiling of his car. He recalls a rainy evening spent staring out the window as he nervously waited for Marcel to come home. A distant memory weighs heavy on his eyelids.

“Porco. Are you ok?”

“What? Yeah.” Porco shifts lightly in his seat, slightly startled. “I just… remembered something.”

“What is it?”

“The rain. It just reminded me of Marcel.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, he was…” She puts down her food and lightly wipes the sides of her mouth with the back of her hand. “Back then, I considered him as something a little more than a best friend. I like that he liked my drawings and how he never made fun of them… even though he was ways better than me at it,” she recalls fondly.

He scoffs. “So… are you guilt-tripping me for something I said about your drawings when we were twelve?”

“You were an asshole, but you should be glad I’m past that.” She rolls her eyes with a sigh. “All I’m saying now is that Marcel was... really special to me.”

“What-- did you have a crush on Marcel or something?”

She snorts. “You could say... it was something like that. Yeah.”

Figures. He nonchalantly crosses his arms in front of his chest. The pattering rain fills in the lull in their conversation.

“I like your drawings too,” he finally says.

“That’s why I drag you along every time I go out to draw. You like watching me, right?” She teasingly raises an eyebrow as she says it.

“Well, sure.” He shrugs awkwardly in his seat.

“Tell me. What else do you like?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see…” he sighs, feigning annoyance with a roll of his eyes. “I like it when I’m in the middle of pulling an all-nighter at Tim Hortons… and you go on and disturb me just to get a Happy Meal on a rainy Friday midnight.”

“Yeah?” she chuckles. “What else?”

Porco turns to glance at her. As she meets him with a playful grin, his mind races with answers.

I like it when you steal my jacket and you leave me to freeze to death in the cold of the cafe’s AC. I like it when you go on a chaotic, semi-coherent drunken rant about how badly you want capitalism dismantled. I like it when you remember Marcel. I like your hair. I like how your hands unpin your hair before you rest your head on my lap.

He scoffs-- more in reaction to his own thoughts than at her teasing. Who knew he could be that embarrassingly sappy? “What are you… getting at?”

“Nevermind.” She shakes her head, still smiling. She laughs while timidly raising a palm to her cheek. “Can we share your fries now?”

***

“So I’m thinking of getting a tattoo,” Porco says, settling himself on the dormitory steps faintly lit by the porch lights hanging on both sides of the entrance.

“Cool. So where do you want it?” She sits beside him while setting down her things-- a shoulder bag and a sketchbook on the concrete step.

“I was just thinking on my arm,” he says, pointing a finger at a spot on his skin.

“What do you want it to look like?”

“Not sure yet.”

“I could draw you one.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. I could do it right now.”

“Really?”

She takes the ballpoint pen out of the spring of her sketchbook and begins to doodle something on his arm. Covering her drawing with a cupped palm, she chuckles while mischievously peering up at him.

“I swear to god, if you’re drawing something embarrassing-- Oh, fuck you.” Porco laughs, managing to take a peek at the ink drawing of a cartoon porcupine with the hair on its head stylishly pushed back. Below the drawing, it writes 'porcopine.' He pulls his arm away from her grasp.

"What? You don't like it?" She grimaces.

"Porcopine? Really?"

“What? It's cute,” she says with an offended click of her tongue, reaching for his arm once again.

Below the word 'porcopine,' she then writes the phrase 'i <3 you.'

Porco furrows his brows upon reading the phrase, then lets out a chuckle. “What does this--?” he asks, pointing out the inked words on his skin.

“What do you mean? It is what it is.”

“You mean it?”

“Of course I do.”

“How do you mean it?”

She tilts her head pensively and squints at Porco as she gathers how to describe exactly what she meant. She supposes that he’s right-- a clarification was indeed necessary. This kind of thing could get confusing, after all. When you’ve known each other for so long in a relationship such as this, lines tend to blur. One day, you could both feel like the bestest of friends, and then like lovers the next.

“I mean it in a way that I wouldn’t mind marrying you.”

“Oh.” Porco gapes at her for a moment. “Ok,” he says, letting out an awkward chuckle.

“What’s with that reaction? I’m serious, Pock.”

“I just… I mean, to be honest…” He furrows his brows, carefully pondering his words. “I wouldn’t mind marrying you either.” Porco scratches his head sheepishly.

“Ok then,” she chuckles, shifting in her seat to face him. “We could build something. Something bigger than a Lego house. Maybe one with a garden. A story with a perfect ending.”

“Yeah? And if it’s not perfect, what then?”

“Something worthwhile, then. An ending that feels like an ending.”

“Ok. I can live with that,” he laughs.

“Porco.”

As she cradles his face in between her palms, Porco becomes acutely aware of the flush in his cheeks.

Then, slowly, she leans closer to gingerly place a kiss at the tip of his nose.

They soon find themselves both chuckling at what was probably the most blatantly romantic gesture between them thus far.

“So, uh, what are we now, exactly?” he asks awkwardly as they soon pull away.

She shrugs. “Lovers? Best friends who would marry each other? Though the latter is kind of a mouthful if you ask me.”

“Yeah. Let’s go with that first one.”

“Say, Porco.” She tilts her head questioningly at him. “You want to tell me how this night ends?”

“How the hell should I--”

She puts a finger to his lips and shakes her head. “Hey. Lovers now, remember? I’m not the only one telling this story. So tell me.”

“Ok. Let’s see,” he sighs. And so he indulges her. “It ends with you beside me. We’re lying down on my bed.”

“Clothed or naked?”

He gapes. “Are you seriously even consi--”

She flicks a finger against his forehead as she regards him with a mischievous smile. “Just answer the question.”

“Ok, fine,” he resigns, lightly kneading his forehead. “Look, I want to say naked because my AC’s broken ri--”

“Naked it is, then.”

“Clothed.” He glares. “For tonight.”

“Fine, fine,” she says, scratching her head in resignation. “You sure you’re not having second thoughts about letting me stay tonight, though? Not worried you might wake up with a bunch of porcopines on your face? Or I don’t know-- dick drawings?”

“Fuck off,” he says with a chuckle.

“So… what is it, really? You want me to stay or you want me to go?”

Porco sighs before slowly leaning his face closer to hers.

“I want you to stay,” he says against her cheek, before placing a chaste kiss on her skin. “Whatever I wake up to in the morning, I’m sure it’s worth it.”

[wordsablaze]

Live And Let Livestream

Jaskier's saturday nights are reserved for livestreams but sometimes they end up including wikipedia fraud, protective boyfriends who only half-know how to use the internet, and a spontaneous sleepover instead...

A/N: this is just a bit of fun inspired by the jaskel discord - love y’all <3

-

Having a wikipedia page is pretty impressive and since Jaskier strives to be both pretty and impressive, it’s no surprise that he has one.

Well, he actually has two but nobody needs to know that. Either way, for someone as bothered about his reputation as he is, he pays very little attention to his wiki, often forgetting he’s even that level of famous until Yennefer teases him about it. Or until something inevitably goes wrong - It just so happens that he’s in the middle of a livestream when something does inevitably go wrong.

“...and yes, this is a new shirt, thank you for noticing, um- sorry, i didn’t catch your user! I’ll drop a link so we can all be scandalous together, hang on!”

He’s just about picked up his phone to check he’s got the right website in mind when it starts ringing. Cursing softly as he literally jumps, he shoots a guilty grin at his computer. “Can you guys pretend that didn’t happen so I can pretend I still have some dignity? Thanks, just give me a second…”

Ordinarily, he’d just put his phone on silent because all of his important friends know he spends Saturday evenings and often nights livestreaming. But it’s Eskel calling and he’s not about to be rude and decline someone who bakes him brownies whenever he has a meltdown now, is he?

“Is everything okay, darling?” he asks.

“Can you end your stream early? I think you’ll regret giving people a live reaction to this.”  

Jaskier frowns harder, reluctant to break his promise to the followers he only somewhat childishly considers to be his friends. “What is it? Are you all okay?”

He hears Eskel sigh. “Maybe at least mute the thing?”

Rolling his eyes, he clicks the mute button and types the link for his shirt into the chat along with a brief apology before focusing back on Eskel. “You’re worrying me, what happened?”

“So you know that wikipedia page we were talking about the other day?”

He nods, then realises Eskel can’t see him. “Uh yes, my page, what about it?”

“You might want to take a moment to take a minute to see for yourself?”

“What is it with you guys and being so cryptic? You don’t even all share the same genes so it can’t be that. Maybe it’s just the kind of people I attract, not that I’m complaining per se but still,” Jaskier mutters to himself even as he googles his own name.

He truly has no idea what Eskel was trying to get at until the page loads properly, at which point he blinks at the photo staring back at him. The photo that is most definitely not the one Essi had jokingly submitted and somehow managed to keep there because shut up about my terrible phone camera quality already, you actually look candid so who cares?

“Is this a joke, Esk? What the…” he trails off, scrolling to find lists of achievements and songs and facts that really shouldn’t be associated with his name. Not that it’s his name currently on the page.

“Oh, for the love of-" his breath hitches as he sees a parody of his own song written off as Valdo's- "actually, screw that! There is no love here, what exactly does he think he’s doing? Ugh, can’t a guy livestream in peace nowadays?”

“I’m sorry, Jas. Geralt just told me and I-”

“Geralt was on my wiki?” Jaskier finds himself asking, grinning at the very thought.

“I… wasn’t supposed to tell you that. Uh, yeah? I mean, he actually came and asked me how to email wikipedia but we kind of figured it out from there so…”

Jaskier laughs despite his frustration, his urge to punch Valdo morphing into an urge to kiss his boyfriends. “Who’s ‘we’, by the way?”

Before Eskel can answer, Jaskier’s computer starts rapidly beeping, at which point he turns back to the live and promptly curses when he sees the dozens of messages in the chat asking who Valdo Marx is or, from people who already know who he is, messages asking whether they have permission to throw hands; he'd be lying if he said those messages don't warm his heart.

“I didn’t mute the thing properly. Gods, I’m turning into Vesemir,” Jaskier groans, then slaps his free hand over his mouth and glares at his camera. “None of you tell him I said that, you hear me? I do love him so.”

“How would they even find Vesemir?” Eskel asks in his ear, clearly amused.

“Remind me to remind you how deeply the internet works later. More importantly, you haven’t mentioned Lambert or Aiden yet and I know for a fact they were heading to yours today so…?” Jaskier asks, hoping the former hasn’t punched a wall again or anything like that.

Eskel clears his throat awkwardly. “Yeah, they were heading to ours but they… well, uhm, they called to say they took a detour.”

“To mine?” Jaskier asks, frowning at the thought. He’s more than capable of fixing his own wiki page and as much as he appreciates the moral support, he doesn’t really need any of his loved ones’ presence for such a trivial matter. And anyway, he was already planning on joining the others in the morning so they could spend Sunday together, which means coming over to his makes no sense.

“No, not to yours. To Valdo’s…”

Jaskier’s eyes widen.

Throwing hands on social media is one thing but he doesn’t want any kind of misleading vagueposting from the likes of people who need to steal other people’s wikipedia pages in the direction of people who have no fault other than mildly violent forms of love, and especially not on his behalf.

“What are you still doing on the phone? Go derail their detour! I’ll be there as soon as I can too,” Jaskier says to Eskel, blowing him a kiss through the phone because he knows it’ll make the other man blush.

Once he’s hung up, he turns back to his camera with a pout. “Right, sorry guys, I’ll have to cut this one short so my darling idiots don’t ruin their evenings for the sake of a pathetic leech who just will not let me live! Okay, I promise some cute instagram selfies in exchange for this mess but for now, I’ll see you next week! Alright, bye!”

This time he does press the right buttons and closes both the live and the computer down even as he grabs his coat. Forgoing socks in favour of making sure nobody except Valdo’s weekend gets ruined - he already knows Yennefer or Renfri will be more than happy to throw shade his way to make him regret his failed publicity stunt - and pulling on a pair of boots really not designed for driving, he makes his way out of his apartment as fast as humanly possible.

There’ll be time to be angry at Valdo again later but he’s more than aware that between his family, his friends, and his followers, it’s simply not a big deal. He signed up for drama when he signed up for being famous and yes, he loves fighting against anyone or anything that tries to stop him from sharing his music, but he’s really not about to waste any more time worrying about all that at the moment.

At the end of the day, it's nice to be pretty impressive but there's nothing better than being pretty loved.

-

what are the logistics of this au? whatever you want them to be ;)

-

thanks for reading! masterlist | witcher blog: @itsjaskier

[one-leaf-grimoire]

Medieval AU

Hi I decided to write a little something based off that knight x king au I came up with for JuLisa!

Some background: the Clover Kingdom is mostly the same, but no one has magic. It is ruled by the double monarchy as well. In a less technologically progressive society, members of all classes are able to join the Knights Squads, which are the same as in canon. However, nobles are automatically given higher ranks while commoners and peasants are seen as pawns that are often sent into battle to die. However, there is a new King who is trying to change all that, but he doesn’t expect to meet someone interesting at the annual jousting tournament...

"LISA! I DEMAND YOU STOP THIS FOOLISHNESS AT ONCE!"

The young woman looked up in surprise, her hands still running through the mane of a large horse she was preparing to climb onto. The source of the anger directed her way was none other than her captain, Fuegoleon Vermillion. The knight was almost as red in the face as his flaming locks, and he looked like he was about to pop a vein in his temple. Uh oh- she thought, already steeling herself for what was about to happen. "H-Hi, Captain. What brings you to the stables-"

"You know bloody well why I'm here!" Fuegoleon stormed over before stopping before her. He huffed through his nose, not unlike the steed Lisa was grooming. "I cannot allow you to do this."

"Do what? Participate? Sir, it'll be fine." Lisa smiled happily to herself, unfazed, before turning back to her horse to check the armor on its head. "Randall got sick, and asked for a volunteer to take his place in the joust! So, here I am."

This answer did not satisfy Fuegoleon. "Lisa... you're one of our newest members. The jousting tournament is meant for only the most experienced knights." His anger faded slightly, his voice softening with concern. "There's a real chance that... well... y-you-"

"I could die?" Lisa finished, her hands stalling for just a moment as they adjusted the straps.

"... yes. You're far too young to die," Fuegoleon agreed, pursing his lips together for a moment.

"... I disagree. Many people in this country die far younger than I am now." Despite the grim thought, Lisa smiled brightly up at her captain. "Plus, I'm not gonna die!"

Her blind enthusiasm was refreshing but still worrying to the older knight. Fuegoleon prided his squad, the Crimson Lions, and cared immensely for even the newest members like Lisa. "You've never even jousted before."

Lisa shrugged. "So? The Lance is just a bigger version of my Rapier! You poke with both of them after all." To punctuate her point, Lisa poked at the air with an invisible sword. "I'll be fine! Promise."

Fuegoleon still wasn't satisfied, but he didn't get a chance to object again.

"Fuego! Leave her alone and come over here."

Fuegoleon turned to see Sei, his vice-captain and husband, walking over. He looked a bit annoyed, as if he had been searching the whole venue for a while. "They're selling big turkey legs out there, come buy me one."

"Oh? That sounds good!" Fuegoleon was distracted enough for Sei to grab his hand and start dragging him away.

Sei glanced back at Lisa as they left. "Good luck out there. Don't die."

"You knew?!" Fuegoleon asked, having no choice but to leave Lisa to her fate at this point.

"Of course I did." Sei let out a long sigh as they stepped out of the stables and walked towards the loud stadium. Many people were already gathered there, excited for the spectacle to come. "I think she'll be fine. She won't die, anyway."

Fuegoleon wanted to believe Sei's words, so he just nodded and pushed the thought out of his mind, but he was not looking forward for the tournament to begin.

Not long after, Lisa slipped her helmet on over her head, the edge resting just below her brow. I wish they gave me a set that actually fit, she thought, trying to ignore the fact that her hands were shaking quite a bit. Despite her confident words, she couldn't help but take some of Fuegoleon's warnings to heart. People did die often at these things, especially younger knights just like her. But, if I win, I'll be rewarded money and status, she reminded herself, taking a deep breath as she fidgeted in the saddle, waiting for one of the stable hands to give her the go-ahead. And if I die... well, at least I got to experience everything.

“Do I have to stay the whole time? I want to leave-”

“No! You are absolutely not going to leave early.”

Marx Francois, the royal advisor/babysitter, was already stressed out enough. But to his ire, the King himself, Julius Novachrono, was growing bored of the spectacle. Julius was strange for a monarch, having spent most of his life as a knight before becoming the head of one of the monarchy’s two ruling houses. He was eccentric, to put it simply. “I thought you’d like getting away from work for some fun, anyway.”

“Fun? This isn’t fun,” Julius grumbled. The tall man was slumped in his comfortable chair, the crown he hated wearing tilted upon his blonde hair. “It��s borderline barbaric.” He eyed the jousting strip as medics dragged off the last bout’s loser on a stretcher. “Honestly, I don’t understand why Kira has us continue this tradition… I’d rather be doing work.”

Marx sighed, not sure what to make of the man. “Well, you’re the one who hands out the awards at the end, so you have to stick around.”

Their conversation was cut short as the crowd cheered and the next two participants emerged from the stables. One was a member of the esteemed Silver Eagles, sitting proudly upon his horse in his fancy armor. And the other…

“Isn’t Randall supposed to be riding for the Crimson Lions?” Julius asked before Marx could. “That’s… definitely not Randall.”

He was right, the rider wearing the red cape was much smaller than Randall. Their face and figure was obscured by their armor, hiding their identity. “They must have substituted him… is that Seiros…” Marx’s voice trailed off as he looked to the stands beside them, immediately spotting Sei sitting next to Fuegoleon. “Never mind. Huh.” 

He turned back to the strip right as the referee started to yell.

“READY! SET! CHARGE!!!!”

The two riders raced at each other. In a moment, it was over. The Silver knight’s lance hit squarely in the middle of the small knight with a dangerous CRACK. But somehow, the Lion knight managed to stay upright as the opponents came to a stop at the ends of the strip.

“Yikes! I’m surprised they made it though,” Marx commented. “That wasn’t a light tap at all.”

The opponents were already gearing up to go again. Julius found himself holding his breath as they charged. The smaller knight was faster this time, and thrust their lance forward before they were in range. The feint caught their opponent off guard, planting in the middle of their shield. With a yell, the Silver Eagles knight slipped off the back of their horse and slammed into the sandy ground with a resounding clang.

The crowd erupted into cheers as the Crimson Lion knight did a victory lap before heading off into the stables again. Marx looked down, surprised to see Julius clapping more enthusiastically than he had before. “Oh? I see you like the underdog.”

“I wouldn’t call them an underdog, Marx.” Julius smiled to himself before letting his hands fall back to the arms of his chair. “It’s obvious to me… that knight is very, very strong.”

A couple matches later, it was time for the finals. Fuegoleon stormed back into the stables, his heart pounding. She made it to the finals! I didn’t expect this outcome, but now she has to face one more opponent… and I’m afraid it will be the last thing she does.

Lisa, already mounted on her horse again, grinned triumphantly as she spotted Fuegoleon. “Captain! What did I tell you?”

“I’m glad you’re doing well, but listen.” Fuegoleon came to a stop next to her horse. “Your final opponent… is Xerx Lugner of the Purple Orcas. Last year, he won the tournament, but he also-”

“He killed his opponent by accident, right?” Lisa finished. “I told you, don’t worry so much about that! I’m not going to die. And even if I do-” Her smile faded for just a moment, making Fuegoleon’s stomach lurch. Even SHE’s nervous… “I’ve already come in second place. Isn’t that good for the squad?”

Fuegoleon didn’t answer right away. He didn’t really understand what was beyond Lisa’s seemingly blind enthusiasm… no, her fatalistic enthusiasm. This was a girl who had something to prove, and she would go down in flames if it meant she could do that. 

“... no. Second place isn’t good enough.”

Fuegoleon smiled for the first time, catching Lisa off guard.

“Stay alive… because you have to win. Get first place, that’s an order!”

After a moment, Lisa matched his smile, and saluted. “Yes, sir!”

With that, she closed her helmet, and turned to enter the bright sunlight once again.

The crowd was cheering loudly, but she couldn’t hear it over the sound of her heart beating. It echoes around her armor. She glanced at the crowd, astounded that all of them were looking at her right now.

Before she knew it, the call to charge rung out, and she shot towards Xerx with her lance ahead of her.

She didn’t think about the crowd in that moment. Nor her squad. Nor her family. All Lisa could see was her opponent, above the tip of his lance.

With the same determination as earlier, Lisa thrust her lance forward. But unlike her last opponents, Xerx anticipated the move. He swung his lance around hers with perfect accuracy. Lisa’s eyes widened when she realized what was about to happen.

SHIT! NO-

CRACK

The lance slammed into Lisa’s upper arm, the one holding her own weapon, and the horses raced past each other.

Lisa’s vision spun, but somehow she remained on her horse. She skidded to a stop, and was immediately swarmed by medics.

“Are you alright?! Here-” one of them reached up and tried to take the lance out of her limp hand. 

However, Lisa suddenly straightened up, her grasp tightening. “No! I’m fine. Get out of the way, I’m about to go again!” she gave them a confident smile, and the medics scattered.

“Yikes… that looked nasty, but they’re not hurt!” Marx said, relieved as he watched with baited breath. He didn’t expect to get so attached, but here he was. “I’m surprised, Xerx must be losing his touch.”

Marx didn’t notice, but Julius’s smile had dropped.

No, Marx… that’s not what happened at all…

Lisa clenched her teeth so hard she thought they might shatter. Her arm was on fire, and it took everything in her to keep her lance up. This… this is nothing…

Julius’s grip tightened on the edge of his chair. This knight… she…

A broken arm is nothing! 

Lisa turned her horse towards Xerx once again. 

For some reason, Julius found himself smiling.

I don’t know why… I don’t know how… but…

“CHARGE!”

LIsa kicked her steed.

For my squad… and for me, I have to win!

Julius held his breath along with the rest of the audience.

Somehow…

Lisa thrust her lance once again with a cry of adrenaline.

I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life!!!!

Lisa was faster this time, and knew what Xerx would do. She countered his parry, leaving his chest wide open. With one last burst of speed, the lance planted right in the middle of his armor. With a strangled, frustrated yell, Xerx went flying off his horse and fell to the ground below.

The crowd burst into applause as Lisa slowed to a stop, but her mind wasn’t on her win. It was hot inside her armor, and her broken arm finally gave out. Her lance slipped to the ground as she reached up to take off her helmet.

Julius rose to his feet as he clapped, grinning. “You chose a good one to root for!” Marx told him happily.

“Of course I did! I’d like to think I have good taste!” Julius looked back out at the knight as they fumbled with their helmet. How exciting! I hope their arm is ok… I can’t wait to congratulate them person… personally…

Julius’s mind blanked on that last word, because the knight finally lifted off their helmet before dropping it to the ground. Short hair popped out from its confine, fluffing up to its usual shape. The knight reached up to smooth it back out of their face, revealing their identity to be a woman… 

She…

Julius was frozen in place, his mouth halfway open, as she opened her eyes, and gave a triumphant smile to the crowd.

She’s… so… beautiful.

He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Marx was saying something, but his voice was just a faint wah wah wah in Julius’s ears. 

It wasn’t just her face… it was the strength that radiated from her whole body. Despite being tired and injured, the knight continued to smile, the adrenaline of victory shining from every pore. She was stunning and terrifying at the same time, and it wasn’t until she rode off the strip again that Juilus came back to his senses.

“JULIUS! Wake up!”

Julius looked down at Marx, who was pulling at his sleeve. “Huh?”

“Don’t huh me!” Marx glared up at him. “Come on, we have to go get the awards ready.”

Julius quickly hurried off to prepare, even though his mind was spinning like a helicopter. 

Who knew… the knight I was rooting for this whole time… was such a cute girl!!!

Ten minutes later, she was in his presence again, this time standing alongside Xerx and Alecdora, the third place winner, on the podium. Her arm was in a sling, confirming Julius’s suspicion that she had broken it in the last bout. Amazing… I’ve never seen someone pull through that kind of thing before. Julius stepped up, and the three knights kneeled down before him. 

Julius quickly gave Xerx and Alecdora their medals before turning to the woman, his heart racing. Trying to keep a straight face, he smiled regally and held up her medal. “Congratulations… Sir Petalon.”

Lisa Petalon…

Lisa smiled up at him before bowing her head. Julius slipped the medal around her neck, his hand brushing against her hair for just a moment.

...s-soft…

Once it was in place, Julius stepped back, but left one of his hands outstretched, a purple ring shining upon it. It was traditional for the winner to kiss the monarch’s ring out of respect, especially after being honored in this way. Lisa reached up to take his hand, pulling the ring towards her face. But to Julius’s surprise, she missed the ring, her lips meeting the skin of his knuckle. 

...S-SOFT-

Julius felt his whole face heat up, and his smile faltered just a bit, shocked by the bold gesture. He didn’t know if it was on purpose or not, but Lisa’s gaze was meeting him from below her lashes. Then… she smiled at him, almost knowingly.

“Thank you… your majesty.”

He knew, in that very moment… he would never think of anything but her eyes again.

She was going to drive him mad.

Julius’s smile strengthened again, despite how hard his heart was pounding. Regretfully, his hand slipped out of her grasp, and he turned back to the crowd. The applause strengthened, many rising to their feet along with the winners.

Lisa grinned and waved at Fuegoleon and Sei in the crowd. Fuegoleon was clapping louder than anyone, tears almost forming in his eyes. She did so well! Who would have thought- But she still got her arm broken-

Julius didn’t dare look back as he walked off with Marx towards his carriage. He was ready for this hot, sweaty day to be over, but at the same time…

I’m glad I met someone interesting...

[duhragonball]

Krillin for the character ask :)

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: It’d be easy for me to say “he’s just a good dude” and leave it at that.   I think people would agree with that statement, but I think it runs deeper than that.   The thing that stuck with me about Krillin was when I was checking out the bonus features on the Movie 6 DVD I bought in 2002 or whenever, and they had an interview with Sonny Strait where he explained that Krillin only got into martial arts to impress girls, and that was the same reason Sonny got into voice acting.    Maybe I’m misremembering that, but it always stuck with me.   

Krillin wants things out of life, and unlike a lot of the other characters, he’s not looking to get them by wishing on a magic dragon.   He wants to become worthy of the things he wants, and he may not always be sure of how to get there, he knows that he has to become more than he is.  

Recently, I’ve been seeing excerpts from Barack Obama’s book, where he talks about reading up on subjects to try, unsuccessfully, to get girls to like him in college.    I think the idea was that he was trying to be self-effacing, but it hasn’t gone over very well.  I’m not sure if the problem was that he wasn’t being self-effacing enough, or if there’s something more sinister about reading Karl Marx just in case it helps your odds of getting noticed.    I’m not going to wade into that controversy, except to say that it reminded me of Krillin.  

Is it shallow to have self-serving reasons to improve yourself?   Did I just answer my own question?   The point I’m making here is that it’s a useful motivator.    Krillin has self-esteem issues, and he joined the Orin Temple and then Kame House to try to overcome them.   He thought “If I just get really good at this one thing, then people will like me.”   And we can say “Oh, no, it doesn’t work that way, Krillin, people like you because you’re a such a good person, and besides, it doesn’t matter how good you are at martial arts.”  

Okay, fine, let’s assume that’s true, and Krillin deceived himself by training in martial arts.    Oh no!   He put in all that work, and all he got out of it was... being the strongest human on Earth.   Shoot.    He made himself a better person for nothing.

The reality is that I don’t think he would be as well-liked if he hadn’t gone down this road, simply because people wouldn’t have gotten to know him.   That’s really what it’s about.   It’s easy to say that you’re liked for “who you are on the inside”, but what people really want is to be noticed long enough to be liked for who they are.    And sometimes you gotta take a long look at yourself and say “I need to do something to grab people’s attention.”

And sometimes, in order to motivate yourself into that kind of work, you have to play that trick on yourself.    “Just think, if I put in those extra reps in the gym, the ladies’ll be all over me!”   And it never actually happens, but it gets you through that workout, and the next, and the next, and the next.  

I think we can all relate to that.   I’m writing this because three people asked me to, and I’m sort of hoping a few more will see it and like what I wrote.   I try to get better, because I like the rush of validation that comes with it.   And if I don’t get it, well, boo-hoo, I wrote a few hundred words about Krillin, a subject I enjoy writing about.   It’s a no-lose situation, and there’s some non-zero chance that attractive single women might see this and decide to slide into my DMs.    It’s a tiny chance, hardly worth mentioning, but it’s a lot higher than if I just sit in my apartment and stare at the wall.   

Why I don’t: Ocean Dub Krillin really rubbed me the wrong way, because they wrote and voice directed the character to be really nebbishy.   That wouldn’t necessarily make him a bad character, but it definitely conflicted with what you see on the screen, where he’s stepping to Nappa, Vegeta, Dodoria, and everything else he has to deal with.    Once Sonny got the role, everything turned out cool.  Mondo cool, if you will.

I suppose I should point out the flip side of what I wrote above.  Krillin’s so focused on being worthy that he fails to recognize his achievements.   That’s admirable in its way, but it also makes you worry about the guy.    Like, he knows 18 is crazy about him, right?   Wait, does Obama know people like him?   Do I?  Oh I might have made myself sad there for a minute, excuse me.

Favorite episode (scene if movie):

Probably the moment he tries to take on Super Buu all by himself.   One of the cool things about Krillin is that he’s taken on every major villain from Piccolo Junior to Buu, despite being outclassed.    I think the Super Buu thing is the best one, though, because in that situation there’s literally no chance of anyone jumping in to save him.    His entire plan is to hold off Buu for a few seconds and maybe buy a few minutes for the others. He’s doomed and he knows it won’t even work as a diversion, but he still jumps in anyway.    It proves that this is who he is.    When there’s literally no one left to impress, and nothing left to gain, he’ll still play things out the same way.  

Favorite season/movie: The Androids/Cell Saga is probably his best material overall, just because of his conflicted feelings regarding 18, and the difficult choices he makes because of that.   You can make a strong case for the Namek Saga, where it’s literally just Krillin and Bulma and Gohan, so he has to take the lead by default, but I’m just not that into the Namek Saga.

Favorite line:

This is really more from one of the video games.   I think Budokai 3, but I’m not sure.   Piccolo demands custody of Gohan and Krillin’s like “No way, you’re probably gonna eat him or something!” and I’m pretty sure this wasn’t in the Ocean Dub, so it completely caught me off-guard, like it was the last thing I expected Krillin to say.   And then Piccolo comes back with “I’m not going to eat him!”  like he’s offended at the very suggestion.   As a runner-up, I dig that part in DBZA 54, where Trunks and Vegeta are both reeling from their losses to Perfect Cell, and Krillin reminds them that they don’t have to posture around him, because it’s just him... “Krillin.    Everyone’s friend.”

Favorite outfit: That’s easy.

Yeah, the Frieza Soldier armor looked mighty good on this dude, and the cop uniform does too, and the classic Turtle Hermit outfit is a signature look, but this, right here, is the Krillin for me.    My man’s got the blue shirt under his orange shirt.    No more of the Yamcha slipppers.   Those look great on Yamcha, don’t get me wrong, but Krillin needs those big chunky Goku boots, because they’re perfect for stomping those pesky girlfriend-exploding remotes.   Fellas, this is the ideal male body.    You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.   

OTP: Maron HAHAHAHAHAHA oh wow.   No. It’s 18, obviously.

Brotp: Clearly Goku is his bro, but it’s not surprising at all how effortlessly he gets along with just about everyone else.   He’s bros with the entire world.

Head Canon: I’m pretty sure the Maron/Marron thing was just a coincidence in real life.   Maron the girlfriend was a filler character, and Marron the daughter was introduced in the manga some time later, and both used the same naming convention to end up in the same place.   However, I choose to believe that Krillin actually named his kid after his ex, and he somehow convinced 18 to go along with that idea.   

By that, I don’t mean he had to sweet talk her into it or promise a bunch of stuff in exchange.    I mean he must have discussed what to name their kid, and 18 was like “Your ex-girlfriend?   Seriously?” and he was like “Yeah, I know she’s a ditz, but you gotta understand I was in a really low place and she helped me through it.”   Or something like that, where once he lays out the whole reason 18′s like “Yeah, you know what?   Okay.” 

Or maybe Maron helped deliver the baby or something.   Or she was the surrogate mother?   Holy shit I might be onto something.

Unpopular opinion: Krillin clanks when he walks, due to the solid brass balls he’s got.

A wish: They should do a movie where Krillin just fights Frieza and wins.   Decisively, undisputably, irrevocably.   Krillin is stronger than Frieza from that point forward.    I don’t care if that means nerfing Frieza or godmodding Krillin, but I just want it made plain that if they use Frieza from here on, it has to be with the understanding that Krillin can whip his ass at any time.  

That might sound silly, and I guess it is, but you see what this accomplishes, right?   It forces Frieza into a new character dynamic, so it’s not just the same old shit with him.    Or Toei collectively admits that they can’t use him anymore, which was what they should have decided in 1995.   I’m fine either way.

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: Don’t grow his hair back, okay? 

5 words to best describe them: Qualified to sell real estate.

My nickname for them: The Kriller.

[clintbartonswife]

burying her head into his chest and clinging to the moment

Pairings: Geralt of Rivia x Jaskier, Yennefer x Triss Summary: Finally safe, Jaskier struggles at the thought of being reunited with Geralt and Yennefer, all the while recovering from the mental and physical trauma inflicted during his stay with Nilfgaard. Meanwhile, Geralt and Ciri deal with their guilt. Notes: mentions of injury, recovery, self-doubt, round-about mentions of rape (no vivid descriptions but it’s hinted that it happened) masterlist  ||  part one  ||  part two  ||  part four

The first thing he noticed was the softness surrounding him, the comforting warmth so different to anything he had experienced the past couple of weeks. It felt like he was sinking into a marshmallow, his fragile body being supported by a cocoon of blankets.

‘I must be dead’ he figured, cracking one eye open, only to be greeted by a blurry image of a small girl sat in a chair by his bedside, hair silver as the moon.

“Melitele?”

His voice came out cracked and sore, and the bard winced at the harsh sound cutting through the once peaceful silence.

“You’re awake!” she said, rising up from her seat, "I’ll go and get Triss”

As the girl fleed from the room, her face finally registered with the bard.

“Oh fuck” 

If the princess of Cintra was here, Geralt couldn’t be far behind.

“Nice to see you’re awake”

Jaskier turned to face the newcomer, a pretty woman with an even prettier smile. A few months ago he would’ve probably tried to flirt, but for now he just gave the woman a smile, nodding in greeting.

“You were in bad shape when you arrived here” the woman Triss said, dragging the sheet down and revealing his chest, “I managed to stop the internal bleeding but I used too much of my energy to get rid of the surface wounds. I could try and heal them today if you’d like?”

“Surface-” Jaskier cut himself off, scrambling to look at his hands, the image of his broken fingers still clear in his mind.

Sensing his panic, Triss moved slightly closer, “that was one of the first things we fixed. I was told it was important”

The bard sighed in relief, “Thank you” 

Triss startled at the sound of his voice, narrowing her eyes in concern, “Did they harm your throat? I could try and fix that? I know your singing is important to you”

‘watch how he sings for me’

Jaskier winced, shakily raising a hand to touch his throat, nodding gently.

“Okay”

The sorceress smiled reassuringly, approaching the side of the bed, “may I?”

“Yes”

He closed his eyes as she reached towards him, her fingers skimming lightly along his adam’s apple, the tingling sensation of magic working around the ache until it had all-but disappeared. 

“There” her voice seemed tight, though Jaskier chalked it up to magic-exhaustion.

“Thank you” he said, the words coming much easier now.

Triss just nodded, smile looking slightly more forced, “I’ll leave you be. I’m sure you’re hungry - Ciri will bring up lunch in a few minutes”

Jaskier just nodded once more, eyes trained on his fingers, watching as he flexed and moved the joints without pain, the relief still palpable in the air.

“How is he?”

"As I’ve told you every time, he’s fine. He will live”

Geralt sighed, relaxing back into his chair.

“I don't understand why you don't go and talk to him” Ciri frowned, “You saved him after all”

The Witcher just shook his head, glaring at the floor, “He wont want to see me. We didn't end things well”

Ciri huffed, making her distaste of the answer clear, before picking up the bowl of soup and heading for Jaskier’s room. 

As soon as she left, Geralt redirecting his gaze back to Triss, “How is he really?”

“Physically, he’s fine, truly, but the rest is going to take time Geralt. He’s traumatised... I think they - his throat was bruised. Not from the outside but the inside. We’re dealing with more than just surface wounds here”

Geralt couldn't contain the growl that ripped from his chest, fists clenching.

“No need to growl at Triss” Yennefer said, breezing into the room and standing vigil behind the other woman, “We know the people that took Jaskier were piece of shits and they’re dead now. They cant hurt him anymore”

“But they did. Because of me” 

“Don’t get big-headed Geralt, not everything in the world is about you. Nilfgaard are pieces of shit. This is what they do. Those people would’ve hurt someone, and Jaskier is good at getting himself in trouble”

“He sings about Witchers because of me -”

“And if he met Eskel first he would sing of Witchers because of Eskel, this is not your fault Geralt. So please stop your whining”

“I pushed him away”

Yennefer sighed, crossing her arms, “Yes you did do that. That is on you, but you would’ve split up eventually for winter and this would’ve happened anyway”

Lost for words, Geralt just nodded, averting his eyes back to the floor.

“He’s going to be alright” Triss added, voice soft, “He will, but at some point you’re going to have to let him know that he’s not alone”

With that, the two women left the room, leaving Geralt to his brooding thoughts, the guilt crashing over him in waves.

“Jaskier” 

The bard jolted from his daze, sitting up straight, “Please not again!”

A shocked silence descended over the room as he regained his bearings, the past day returning to him, “Oh - oh your highness I apologise”

“No, it’s my fault” the girl said, moving closer, a tray held in her hand, “I shouldn’t have woken you like that.”

Jaskier shook his head, slowly pushing himself in to an upright position.

“I’ve brought you soup” Ciri smiled, placing the tray over his lap once he settled, “I helped make it this morning”

“Well then I’m sure it will be wonderful” Jaskier replied, his courtly charm re-emerging.

Ciri bounced happily on the balls of her feet, placing the water on the beside table, “Would you like to eat alone? I can stay if you want”

The bard smiled and gestured for her to sit down on the chair beside the be, glad for the company.

The two sat in companionable silence for roughly a minute before Ciri burst, the question spilling out of her mouth in a rush, “I think you may have played at my court a few years ago - I recognised your face in my dreams - did you play at my name day a few years ago?”

Setting down his spoon, Jaskier turned to the princess, “Yes I did, every year up until you turned 8. Calanthe decided she didn't want me returning so after that I wasn't invited back to court”

“Why? Did something happen?”

Jaskier sighed, accepting that his coup was going to have to wait for a bit, and placed the tray down on the bed beside him.

“You should know by now of your destiny”

“Being tied to Geralt? Yes. I found him a few weeks ago in the forest near Sodden”

‘So he's definitely here’ Jaskier thought anxiously, swallowing down the thoughts for now to continue with the line of questioning.

“Well I was there when he called for the Law of Surprise. Your mother, Pavetta, invited me back to your first name day celebration as a way of saying thank you. Though I think the invite was really meant for Geralt. So... I took it upon myself to check on you, only once a year, for as long as I could. By the time you were 8 I think that Calanthe was scared that I’d try and take you to Geralt behind her back - sneak you out of the castle somehow - and so she asked that I didn't come back”

Ciri nodded slowly, and Jaskier could practically see the wheels turning in her head. She eventually spoke, “So you knew my parents?”

“Oh, yes. They were lovely people, kind and fair.” Jaskier huffed a laugh as a reminiscent smile crossed his face, “I remember on your first name day they couldn't stop watching you, their love for you shining even brighter than that for each other. It was clear to everyone in that rom that you were a gift, Calanthe even let me play you some lullabies - and that woman never liked me playing anything but a jig.”

The bard was pulled out of his memories by a small sob to his left.

“Aw - no - Ciri come here” Jaskier cooed, opening his arms for the girl. She accepted the offer gladly, curling up in his embrace and placing her cheek against his chest.

“Do you think they’d be proud of me?”

Her voice was meek, mostly muffled against the now-damp fabric of his chemise. An ache radiated through his chest, the position reminding him of his younger sister back in Lettenhove.

“Oh, Cirilla, of course they would be. You’ve been so strong” he replied, stroking her hair gently, “You’ve done everything you were supposed to do, okay? You fought to keep yourself safe and you found Geralt”

“But all the people that have died -”

“That’s not your fault, you couldn’t have stopped Nilfgaard. A whole army against one person? In no world is that a fair fight”

“But you -”

“My kidnapping is not on you either” He said sternly, “I’m a bard, we know a lot of things. I likely would’ve been captured for information anyway, that’s the unfortunate way of the world. I can promise you that none of that is your fault”

Ciri hummed an affirmative noise, lifting her head from his chest, wiping her eyes, “I didn't mean to cry on you like that, I’m sorry”

Jaskier just smiled, “You cant be strong all the time, Ciri. Everyone cries, bottling it up can make things worse”

“I was always told to be strong. Grandmother - I need to be strong. I haven't seen Geralt cry”

Jaskier shifted slightly so that he was eye-level with the princess, “Crying doesn't make you weak, far from it in fact. But if you need to vent and don't want anyone else to see you can always come to me. Okay?”

Ciri nodded, though this time more self-assuredly, “Thank you Jaskier”

Smiling, Jaskier patted her shoulder amicably, “Right I should probably finish my soup. Why don't you fill me in on what I’ve missed in the world whilst I eat - has Valdo Marx died yet?”

“Who’s that?”

Jaskier chuckled, “We’re going to be very good friends, I can already tell”

Ciri flashed a grin, head tilting towards the door as her name was called from downstairs. Jaskier saw her hesitate, looking back a him.

“Go ahead. I’ll be fine”

“Okay, I’ll come back as soon as I can” 

As the door closed behind her, Jaskier slumped, the façade of energy draining away almost instantly. He stared down at his hands, the fingers throbbing with a dull ache, barely holding back tears.

‘What worth is a bard if he cant play anymore?‘

______________________________________________________________

@kittynannygaming  @fillingless-piee​  @nanazlovese​  @anotherunoriginal​  @baron-von-wilderpantz

[chiseler]

Great Zilches of History

Film is light. There are times, though, when that light may take on a Stygian cast, burning with a flamme noire severity, a weird and otherworldly keenness. Or it may burn lurid and loud — especially if it’s a very old film, acting like a séance that summons the unruly dead. The darkness in cinema best typified by that form we call film noir is in its essence an extension of the peculiarly American darkness of Edgar Allan Poe.

Early, nitrate-based film stock, with its twinkling mineral core, gives Poe's crepuscular light its time to shine and thereby illuminate the world. No longer held in the solitary confinement of a page of reproduced text or an image, frozen, rendered in paint or ink. Poe's singularly tormented vision is finally written alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts; into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational thing from one's mind. A Black & White image flipped into negative makes black fire, or black sunlight such as illumines Nosferatu’s Transylvanian forests, through which a box-like carriage rattles at Mack Sennett speed. But with the slightest underexposure, a little dupey degradation of the print, or even a little imagination (such collaboration is not discouraged), this liquid blackness will spread everywhere and anywhere, the most luminous pestilence known to creation.  Be it in the laughing nightmare of Fleischer cartoons of old (Out of the Inkwell, indeed) or John Alton’s vision of the night, we are left to wonder: is daylight burning out the corner of a building, or is it the blackness of the building which is eating into the sky? 

As with many such questions, film permits us no easy answer. We are simply to watch as the characters smudge. As their shadows pulsate and flicker, emanate out beyond themselves. But if Poe represents the loss of control over one’s existence and the ensuing panic, then cinema, consciously or not, takes existential dread as a given.

God, a vague and unseen deity, died at the moment cinema was born, replaced by a new celestial order. Saints and prophets made poor film characters, giving off the feeling of having stepped out of a stained glass window, flat, Day-Glo icons moving uncomfortably through three-dimensional space. Movies rather rejoiced in dirt and rags, texture and imperfection, so that the most lacklustre clown easily outperformed all the icon messiahs. At 45 minutes, Fernand Zecca’s The Life and Passion of Christ (1903) is one of the earliest feature films, but compared to the same filmmaker’s less ambitious, more playful shorts, it’s a beautiful snooze. A different execution climaxes his Story of a Crime (1901), in which we get to see, by brutal jump cut, a guillotine decapitation before our very eyes. This, as Maxim Gorky prophesied, is what the public wants. Or maybe the events of 1901, cinematic and otherwise, allow “the public” to define itself in ways heretofore unthinkable. The year brings Victoria Regina’s propitious death. And with her passing, Edgar Allan Poe’s pronunciamento on celebrity, “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque," comes to new and anarchic fruition as an incendiary schnook, one of history’s finest.

When he shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901, the currents of fear and vengeance unleashed by Leon Czolgosz would carry him on a journey from reflexive beatings at the hands of police and a post-Victorian mob – ladies in bustles shedding all restraint, transformed from well-honed symbols of middle-class decorum into yowling banshees, screaming “GIVE HIM TO US!” – straight to the electric chair, from whence his corpse would be taken for additional punishment, a process where ghoulish prison authorities at Auburn separated the head from the body, and then poured sulfuric acid on what remained, before secreting the sorry residue of America’s anarchist son into an unmarked grave.

Despite attempts to erase Czoglosz from history, a visual document survives, oozing with pathos and bitter recrimination. It is impossible, looking into those eyes, not to feel unnerved and, yes, sympathetic with him – his desperate act, after all, was as critical a part of America’s greed-engorged industrial fantasia as the near daily spectacle of peaceful strikers, his friends among them, being slaughtered in the name of profit. 

Cinema’s misspent childhood years in late-Victorian fairgrounds are followed by a grimy adolescence in Edwardian nickelodeon parlours. The medium, which finally comes of age amid gaudy palaces built in its honor, morphs many times. However, All Talking Pictures are the final death knell for the Victorian standard, belching from the screen a thousand inbred tongues that invade the ear willy-nilly. They remind us that when Queen Victoria breaths her last Naturalism sheds decorum, taste, breeding, good table manners.

Edgar Allan Poe essentially owns motion pictures via ongoing necrophilic obsession, since celluloid preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid. Like amber preserved holograms, they flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion. Film is bona fide illumination — as opposed to religion’s metaphorical kind – representing the supremacy of alchemy and necromancy over sackcloth and ashes. The inmates, emboldened under the spell of Klieg lights, were not only running the asylum, but re-shaping the world in their own image.  Both Church and State with their blunt instruments of repression proved impotent against the anarchy of this freshly liberated ghetto.

Holy men were unceremoniously defrocked, their doctrine of abject compliance to class-based norms re-written into storylines enriched by grease-painted floozies, costumed villains, and snooty dowagers brought down a notch by the drunk hobo in her drawing room. Amidst widespread labour unrest and mass poverty, followed soon by the Great Depression, filmgoers of the silent era had a front row view of the plutocracy’s helplessness against a swelling tide of restless humanity. Charlie Chaplin’s itinerant laborer may have accidentally thwarted a plutocrat’s plan for world domination and/or a house renovation, just as Groucho Marx seemed to have spontaneously derailed a social climbing matron’s equally fierce ambitions.

All hail the magic mirrors! Celestial mandalas! Giant eggs and butterfly women! Segundo de Chomón’s The Red Spectre (1907) ruthlessly assaults our eyes with a wraith-magician dissolving through his coffin lid in a red, hand-tinted, flame-flickering hell. His presence, caped, skull-masked, was to herald a new thespic truth, that from this moment forward the art of acting would be reduced to how you respond to light, and how light responds to you. The Specter of Chomon’s dark bauble is in every element Poe’s Red Death — japing and performing tricks for us, his adoring fans and welcome guests, before announcing our doom — literary metaphor slammed against a literal backdrop of amber stalactites, pellucid as an ossuary.

That was a long time ago, in the first decades of the 20th century, before artifice and studios and the commercial paradigm of stardom finally swallowed cinema in one ravenous bite. It was a period when one could see, if one paid close attention, the dreariness of ordinary life at the centre and around the edges of every motion picture brought forth. It lived onscreen in film’s early days, exposing the pretense, however fitful, of opulence or period as simply that: pretense, a fundamental desire to escape reality. But this “escapism” had always been erroneously attributed to the audience’s needs, when in fact it was rather those bankrolling the nascent medium not yet sufficiently in control of itself to impose any order.

The censors were on to something, even if they could never fully articulate what precise blasphemies were being committed. 

Take Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for instance, which isn’t pure noir but is pure Poe: what would the surgical excision of an influence look like? Granted, the noir genre seems an unlikely Poe derivative, but what of Laura — fatalism, romance and necro-fantasy (with Lydecker as Usher)? DOA is the kind of concept Poe might have dreamed up; one of the great noir scribes, Cornell Woolrich is channeling Poe through an all-thumbs pulp sensibility. And how hard would it be to cast Val Lewton as the horror noir hybrid, with premature burials, ancestral disease, lunatics taking over bedlam? Jean Epstein, who adapted The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928, complained that Baudelaire’s translations fundamentally mistook Poe’s innocence for ghastliness. 

The dead in Poe, writes Epstein, are “only slightly dead.”  

To the extent that Epstein was correct, the whimsy that Poe bequeaths to cinema finds itself absorbed in almost material terms — not as sensibility but as a texture whose particular nap or weave is never granted names. In Mesmeric Revelations a voluntary subject is quite near physical death and under the ministrations of his mesmerist, answering precise questions about the nature of God. Before dying, he says God is “ultimate or unparticled” matter: “What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought,’ is this matter in motion”. The same unnamable textures apparently survive on television, a case of Poe resonating inside our minds, a collective consciousness replaced by cathode rays. 

Deep within the 18 hours of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, there is a moment that, on its incandescent surface, could have been lifted weightless from the great post-war dream of material deliverance; as if the zeitgeist of the mid 20th century had somehow got lost and ended up in this one: Daytime, the top on the convertible is down, the radio tuned, The Paris Sisters singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky.  Within this tapestry of an early Phil Spector production — his trademark reverb eternally evocative of Romance and Death (two conditions Spector knows well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris could be a siren sound from the American Beyond, or a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt.  We don’t know.  We’ll never know.

In this oneiric echo chamber, Poe smiles down upon American blondness, muscle cars soaked in sunlight, candy for eye and ear; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion and immortality.

If Lynch’s Return means going back home, then home is that Lemon Popsicle/Strawberry Milkshake species of innocence proffered by America's music industry between 1957 and 1964. The horror genre always has to have some component of innocence to devastate, be it the existential kind which inspires the malevolence everyone paid the price of a ticket to have vicarious transit with; or the mere victimisation of the unsuspecting. Either way, there was no other period in American popular culture when innocence, of any variety, was so lavishly examined, toyed with, killed.  The free floating chord that opens The Everly Brothers song, All I Have To Do is Dream, remains a lamentation in sound: the sudden recrudescence of Poe’s beating, tell-tale heart.  Adoring such guilt-free teenage odes to sleep, death and sexual desire, David Lynch finds a muse in Amanda Seyfried. Specifically her visionary eyes melting Phil Spector’s dark edifice of sugar in a deathless, Sternbergian close-up — iridescent search lights, ever more urgently scanning the sky above, waiting for the sun to swallow her whole. We can only bear witness, and internalize this shimmering ingenue, this angel in a red convertible, trading places with Old Sol; as if whatever she just snorted has entered our system through hers.  But in that ephemeral instant she achieves oneness with all things; the transcendence of stardom — true, temporal stardom  — shorn of fame and the imperatives of show-business.

To this day David Lynch’s favorite film remains Otto e Mezzo, directed by Federico Fellini: Western Europe’s sorcerer of confectionary delights and unending motion; the man who put the “dolce” in La Dolce Vita. Fellini, he states, "manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do; namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner." Even if one were to take him at his word — and we must, of course, for no filmmaker has ever been known to misrepresent themselves to us — this seems a strange instance of gravitational pull, particularly in the light of the formal strategies of both men as they developed through time. Lynch has always favored a blunt pictorialism that, in its bluntness, borders on the language of Imagism: the studied simplicity of the language used to complex, powerful effect. Fellini, in 8 1/2 and throughout much of his career, by contrast, unleashes upon the viewer an insanely fluid, brutally precise camera ballet. Any good cinephile might be tempted to resolve the disparities and move toward a brighter, less subterranean comprehension. But, ultimately, such understanding would be a didactic burden no moviegoer needs. For here, in these conflicting dialects, you have a fleeting taste of ideologies swirled together like ribbon candy: a blur of four-wheeled luxury from the New World zooming past regional splendor into that fraternity of man: the socio-economic nirvana imagined by Karl Marx in the Old.

Careening from one via to another at harrowing, white-knuckle speed, Fellini was once heard to lament that “Some of the neo-realists seem to think that they cannot make a film unless they have a man in old clothes in front of the camera.” George Bluestone, recording these words for the pages of Film Culture in 1957, was sitting in the literal passenger seat of that ideal metaphor for post-war ebullience in action: expert, 20th century precision hurtling them through Roman streets with graffiti-scrawled churches proudly bearing the hammer and sickle; that famous Black Chevy skirting the Italian Scylla (the Vatican) and its equally dogmatic Charybdis (the Party). At that velocity, anything could make sense.

“Appearances aside" Bluestone wrote, "the Chevrolet is at every moment under Fellini’s control. He weaves in and out of traffic, misses pedestrians by inches, swerves away from Nomentana’s interminable monuments, dodging yellow traffic blinkers as if he were trying out a darkened slalom.” It is every bit a performance. Rome, after all, is the land of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Apollo and Daphne — marble-cum-flesh, even as flesh itself gives way to forms that leave the viewer in terrified awe. While reliving his own mythic, carbureted experience, Bluestone does some weaving of his own, quoting Genevieve Agel’s one-line pronunciamento (and, in the process, defining what would soon be labelled 'Felliniesque'), “Fellini is a visionary of the real”, as the passenger positions his driver somewhere between corporeal reality and ecstatic truth while the big man (no old clothes for this maestro) drives and drives. “As one hand lightly guides the wheel, the other gestures — it acts.”

Spirits of the Dead is one of those compendium films, with voguish directors (Malle, Vadim, Fellini) entrusted with bringing to the screen a Poe story each. Only the Fellini episode, Toby Dammit, is notable, but it's very notable, a hallucinatory yarn owing as much to Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill! as to Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head, its ostensible source. The title character, played by Terence Stamp with white-blond hair and dark roots and constant beads of witch hazel perspiration, is in Rome to attend an awards ceremony and to play Christ in a western, but he's fatally distracted by his new sports car and a vision of the devil in the form of a little girl. Toby's ride through a hellscape of nocturnal Rome seems lifted from Jules Dassin’s 10.30 p.m. Summer (1966), but works even better for Fellini than it did in the Duras adaptation. An oppressively subjective film, Toby Dammit narrows down to the view in the Ferrari's headlights, a ghastly floodlit interzone where human forms are gradually replaced with mannequins and cut-outs, as the city becomes unreal, an elaborate movie set, an uncanny valley laid out for the staging of an epic stunt/snuff film.

Fellini and Lynch celebrate bodily extremes in intriguing if differing ways, which should, in our time, naturally gallop beyond the pale, but nevertheless become wholly, weirdly digestible. It is perhaps the innocent glee of these artists, their wonderment at the vast variety of shapes the human body can assume; an innocence which suspends toward erasure our awareness the way physical representation functions in the 21st century. Lynch presents the disabled as childlike, mysterious, magical beings without ever worrying about lending them agency (The Elephant Man’s John Merrick functions both as passive whipping boy and chic spectacle for the whole of Victorian London), or the mendacity of adult sophistication (the latest Twin Peaks iteration includes a pint-sized hitman who whines like a puppy when his icepick is broken). Is it any wonder Lynch evolved a style which placed them front and center in unmoving shots, without irony or pity? 

Poe, while certainly a pioneer of fake news, also had a way of vindicating the lumpen masses of humanity (to the middle-brow’s abiding chagrin).  

The Mystery of Marie Roget, a Parisian murder mystery, presented as a fictional sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was simultaneously trumpeted as a correct solution to the real-life murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York. When a news article presented fresh evidence while the story was still being serialised, Poe made minor changes to the final instalment to keep his fiction in line with the facts.

He later published a story about an Atlantic crossing by balloon, accomplished in three days, in The New York Sun in 1844. "Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason's Flying Machine!!!"  The piece was presented as truth, and only revealed as "The Great Balloon Hoax" a couple of days later. “The more intelligent believed," wrote Poe, "while the rabble, for the most part, rejected the whole with disdain.” He saw this as a new development: “20 years ago credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic.” 

What had changed? Perhaps the acceleration of scientific and social progress meant that the more literate and scientifically-minded had become inured to startling new developments, so the most surprising events now seemed credible. And since these same technological leaps were always presented as social benefits, the working class was growing skeptical, since they rarely saw any improvement in their condition.

by Daniel Riccuito, R.J. Lambert and David Cairns

Special thanks to Richard Chetwynd

[randomnumbers751650]

Long, unedited text in which I rant about comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell and his monomyth,

Back in 2012 I wanted to improve my fiction writing (and writing in general, because in spite of nuances, themes and audience, writing a fiction and a nonfiction piece shouldn’t be that different) and thus I picked a few writing manuals. Many of them cited the Hero’s Journey, and how important it became for writers – after all Star Wars used and it worked. I believe most of the people reading this like Star Wars, or at least has neutral feelings about it, but one thing that cannot be denied is that became a juggernaut of popular culture.

So I bought a copy of the Portuguese translation of The Hero of a Thousand Faces and I fell in love with the style. Campbell had a great way with words and the translation was top notch. For those unaware, The Hero of a Thousand Faces proposes that there is a universal pattern in humanity’s mythologies that involves a person (usually a man) that went out into a journey far away from his home, faced many obstacles, both external and internal, and returned triumphant with a prize, the Grail or the Elixir of Life, back to his home. Campbell’s strength is that he managed to systematize so many different sources into a single cohesive narrative.

At the time I was impressed and decided to study more and write in an interdisciplinary research with economics – by writing an article on how the entrepreneur replaces the mythical hero in today’s capitalism. I had to stop the project in order to focus on more urgent matters (my thesis), but now that I finished I can finally return to this pet project of mine.

If you might have seen previous posts, I ended up having a dismal view of economics. It’s a morally and spiritually failed “science” (I have in my drafts a post on arts and I’m going to rant another day about it). Reading all these books on comparative mythology is so fun because it allows me for a moment to forget I have a degree in economics.

Until I started to realize there was something wrong.

My research had indicated that Campbell and others (such as Mircea Eliade and Carl Gust Jung, who had been on of Campbell’s main influences) weren’t very well respected in academia. At first I thought “fine”, because I’m used to interact with economists who can be considered “heterodox” and I have academic literature that I could use to make my point, besides the fact my colleagues were interested in what I was doing.

The problem is that this massive narrative of the Hero’s Journey/monomyth is an attempt to generalize pretty wide categories, like mythology, into one single model of explanation, it worked because it became a prescription, giving the writer a tool to create a story in a factory-like pace. It has checkboxes that can be filled, professional writers have made it widely available.

But I started to realize his entire understanding of mythology is problematic. First the basics: Campbell ignores when myths don’t fit his scheme. This is fruit of his Jungian influences, who claim that humanity has a collective unconsciousness, that manifest through masks and archetypes. This is the essence of the Persona games (and to a smaller extent of the Fate games) – “I am the Shadow the true self”. So any deviation from the monomyth can be justified by being a faulty translation of the collective unconsciousness.

This is the kind of thing that Karl Popper warned about, when he proposed the “falseability” hypothesis, to demarcate scientific knowledge. The collective unconsciousness isn’t a scientific proposition because it can be falsified. It cannot be observed and it cannot be refuted, because someone who subscribe to this doctrine will always have an explanation to explain why it wasn’t observed. In spite of falseability isn’t favored by philosophers of science anymore, it remains an important piece of the history of philosophy and he aimed his attack on psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung – and, while they helped psychology in the beginning, they’re like what Pythagoras is to math. They were both surpassed by modern science and they are studied more as pieces of history than serious theorists.

But this isn’t the worst. All the three main authors on myths were quite conservatives in the sense of almost being fascists – sometimes dropping the ‘almost’. Some members of the alt-right even look up to them as some sort of “academic’ justification. Not to mention anti-Semitic. Jung had disagreement with Freud and Freud noticed his anti-Semitism. Eliade was a proud supporter of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist organization that organized pogroms and wanted to topple the Romanian government. Later Eliade became an ambassador at Salazar’s Fascist Portugal, writing it was a government guided by the love of God. Campbell, with his hero worship, was dangerously close to the ur-fascism described by Umberto Eco (please read here, you won’t regret https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf).

“If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

Campbell did that a lot. He considered the Bible gospels and Gnostic gospels to be on the same level. Any serious student, that is not operating under New Age beliefs and other frivolous theories like the one that says Jesus went to India, will know there’s a difference between them (even Eliade was sure to stress the difference).

But Campbell cared nothing for it. He disliked the “semitic” religions for corrupting the mythic imagination (which is the source of his anti-Semitism), especially Judaism. When I showed him describing the Japanese tea ceremony to a friend who’s minoring in Japanese studies, she wrote “I’m impressed, he’s somehow managed to out-purple prose the original Japanese”. So, it’s also full of orientalism, treating the East as the mystical Other, something for “daring” Westerners to discover and distillate.

What disturbed…no, “disturbed” isn’t the word that I need in the moment, but what made me feel uncomfortable is that, in spite of all his talk of spirituality, the impression I had of Power of Myth is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more materialist than him. Not even Karl Marx, founder of the Historical Materialism, was as materialist as Campbell.

At one point in the book, he was asked if he believed in anything and he gave a dismissive reply and said “I want to get experiences.” A man who studied all the myths of the world available, apparently didn’t believe in anything. Is that what spiritual maturity is? A continuous flux of experiences? Being taken by some sort of shamanistic wind like a floating plastic bag?

In nowhere in the interview he talked about virtues. In rebellion with his Catholic childhood, he said that we should go to the confessionary and say “God, I’ve been such a good boy”. Any cursory reading of the Gospel would say otherwise. Wasn’t this exactly Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18:9-14? While the wasn’t the publican, who went with humility and asked for forgiveness, the one who walked out with an experience? And not only in Christianity, since in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is something you have to kill, not foster like an imaginary friend like in some internet circles, contamined with this obsession with experiences.

The way I came to see Joseph Campbell as a man who was so stuck in his own world that nothing could move him out of it. All he wanted to do was this big experience, but in the end it’s as wide as the ocean, but shallow as a puddle. Even when Campbell speaks about having a “cosmic consciousness”, all that New Age jargon, claiming it’s about people discovering they’re not the center of the universe, it’s still so…self-servicing. It addresses a crowd so obsessed with experiences, but wants nothing to do with anything that requires compromise. He quotes the Hindu concept of maya, that life is an illusion, but I wonder how right he is about it.

I want to share this critique, by a researcher in comic studies: “We do not remember The Night Gwen Stacy Died because Gwen’s death reminds us of our own mortality, ‘the destiny of Everyman’, but because the story exposes the fragility of Spider-Man reader’s fantasies. Even icons can die.”

The exposition of the fragility of myths, especially the Hero’s Journey, never happens in Campbell’s work. It never talks about the potential of myths hindering entire societies, causing strife and causing people who can’t fit to become outcasts. Not even the cruel ones, like the Aztec death cult is treated as sublime, ignoring the fact that the Aztec neighbors helped to Spanish because they had enough of the Aztec myth.

I have changed my article. While I will still write on the hero entrepreneur, I’ll take a more critical view. The focus of the entrepreneur as an individual has many issues, because it ignores the role of public investment (necessary for high risk enterprises, like going to the moon or creating touch screens) and it treats with contempt the worked wage. Cambpell also treated with contempt the “masses”, who cannot be “heroes”. The theory on the entrepreneur is the same, treating the entrepreneur as a hero and the waged workers as lowlifes who have nothing to do, but to work, obey and be paid – to the point it feels like some economists treat strikes as crimes worse than murder. Not only that, but they can exploit the worker (see a book named “Do what you love and other lies about success and happiness”, it could be replaced with “Follow your bliss…”).

Campbell wrote in a time that there was no Wikipedia. So his book was the introduction of myths to a lot of people. It helped it was well-written. He considering his approach apolitical, but it’s clear that’s it’s not exactly like that (though this is a reason why Jordan Peterson failed to become the next Campbell, since he’s also a Jungian scholar, but he tried to become a conservative guru and this was his downfall). And, nowadays, Campbell is still inevitable in the circles that his themes matter, unlike Freud and Jung. Read it, but be aware of its problems, because it has already influenced what you consume.

[tessatechaitea]

Cerebus #15 (1980)

If the story so far had revealed that Cerebus has a vagina, I could make a hentai joke here.

The first time I encountered hentai was at an anime convention at a Red Lion Inn in San Jose in 1994 or 1995. I went to the convention by myself because I had recently fallen in love with the cartoon Sailor Moon and wanted to get some Sailor Moon LaserDiscs unless it was actually Sailor Moon dolls I wanted. It was so long ago, how am I supposed to remember?! They had a room where they were showing movies and one of the movies I watched was Sailor Moon R: The Movie. It was subtitled which was great because then I had the story memorized for all the times I watched my non-subtitled LaserDisc. But that wasn't the pornographic anime I saw! I don't even remember what that was but I watched some tentacle fucking movie late at night in a dark room with a bunch of other sweaty nerds. I didn't know that was what was going to happen though so I didn't have my dick in my hands like the other guys probably did. I was as shocked as anybody when they first find out that cartoons where women get fucked by tentacles exist! I mean, how many penises does an alien need?! I grew up thinking the little gray aliens had zero! That Red Lion Inn was the same one where I played in a couple of Magic the Gathering tournaments. Being in a dark room with a bunch of horny anime fans was less awkward and uncomfortable than playing Magic the Gathering against Magic the Gathering fans. Most of them probably couldn't believe they were actually playing against such a cool and handsome dude. It really threw them off their game when I would say things like, "Yeah, I've touched a couple of boobs. I attack with my Serra Angel." I know what you're thinking: "Anime, comic books, and Magic the Gathering?! This awesome dude must have owned every single Stars Wars figure too!" Aw, you're too kind! I'm blushing! But obviously I never owned Yak Face. "A Note from the Publisher" is still being published so I guess Dave and Deni are still married. In his Swords of Cerebus essay, Dave Sim discusses "Why Groucho?" It seems to mostly come down to this: Dave Sim enjoyed the characters of Groucho Marx as a teenager and memorized a lot of their lines. He also mentions Kim Thompson's review of Cerebus in The Comic Journal (the first major review of the series) in which Kim praised Sim's ability to make his parody characters transcend the parody to become unique creations of their own. This review gave Sim the confidence to put Groucho in the role of Lord Julius. Which worked out so well that Sim later adds Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margeret Thatcher, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Woody Allen, Dave Sim, and the Three Stooges into the story. I'm sure I'm missing some but I can't remember every aspect of this 6000 page story. Was The Judge also a parody of somebody? Was the Regency Elf based on Wendy Pini? I don't know! I'm sure I'm missing a lot of references in Cerebus simply because I haven't experienced all the same knowledge sources as Dave Sim. Just like I'm missing a super duper lot of references in Gravity's Rainbow because nobody in the history of ever has experienced all the same knowledge sources as Thomas Pynchon. I've been reading Gravity's Rainbow (for the first time but also the third time because I'm basically reading it three times at the same time. You'll understand when you read it) and I'm surprised by how funny it is. I don't think anybody ever described it as funny or else I'm sure I would never have stopped reading it multiple times prior to this time when I'm actually going to finish it. Although I suppose when I read Catch-22, I had done so on my own so nobody ever told me how funny that book was either. But for some reason, Catch-22 lets you know it's going to be a funny book pretty quickly. Gravity's Rainbow is all, "Here is a description of an evacuation of London which is just stage setting because, you know, the bombs have already blown up, but it makes people feel safe. And after that, how about a scene where this guy makes a bunch of banana recipes for breakfast. Is that funny enough for you?" Oh, sure, there are some funny moments like when that one guy pretends a banana is his cock and then some other guys tackle him and beat him with his own pretend cock. But there's a gravity to the scene that doesn't lend itself to the reader thinking, "Oh, this is a funny book!" But if you make it far enough, you start realizing, "Hey! I'm not understanding this!" So then you reread the section and you start realizing, "Hey! I'm laughing at this stuff! This is pretty funny!" Plus there are a lot of descriptions of sexy things that I'm assuming are really accurate because Pynchon is obsessed with details.

Anyway, I was supposed to be talking about Cerebus, wasn't I?

A Living Priest of Tarim crashes Lord Julius' bath to scold him about a party Julius is giving in a fortnight (which is the amount of time your kid has lost to a video game). I don't know why the priest has to declare he's a living priest. You can tell that by the way he's shouting and foaming at the mouth. Although this is a Swords & Sorcery book so I suppose there are many dead creatures that also shout and foam at the mouth. Sometimes I forget I'm reading a fictional book and wind up ranting and raving about stuff that I'm supposed to just assume is fine. Like when I read The Flash and nothing in it makes any sense at all because The Flash should never have any trouble stopping crime or saving people from natural disasters. The comic book should be over in two pages. Even the writers, at some point, realized how ridiculous Flash stories were and decided the only way to make them believable was to have The Flash battle other super fast people. But that just meant Flash stories basically became bar-room brawls. Two people with super speed fighting is the same as reading a story about two people without super speed fighting. Boring! Some writers even decided that maybe a telepathic monkey would make things more interesting and I suppose telepathic monkeys make everything more interesting so kudos to them. I was going to go on a long rant about telepathic monkeys but then I realized how much I love the idea of telepathic monkeys so why should I create an argument against them? More telepathic monkeys, please.

This made me laugh out loud. Not as much as the chapter in Gravity's Rainbow where the old woman forces Slothrop to eat a bunch of terrible candies. But then it isn't a competition, is it? I mean, I guess it's a competition for my time which is why I haven't written a comic book review in a week or more. Blame Thomas Pynchon for being so entertaining (and also Apex).

Baskin, the Minister for Executive Planning, has come to let Lord Julius know what the revolutionaries have revealed while being tortured. The only bit of useful information was one prisoner's last words: "Revolution...the pits." Cerebus immediately assumes "the Pits" is a location and not a summation of the prisoner's feelings about revolution which led to torture which led to his death. Cerebus, being the Kitchen Staff Supervisor, begins an investigation into The Pits. His first step: threatening the Priest of the Living Tarim. Which makes me realize I transposed the word "living" in the previous encounter with the priest and went on a digression that makes no sense to anybody who has read and somehow remembers that particular panel. I'm sure they were scoffing and snorting and exclaiming to their pet rat, "What a stupid fool loser this Grunion Guy is! Living Priest of Tarim! HA! Ridiculous! What a moronic mistake! He has made a gigantic fool of himself!" I don't know that the almost certainly imaginary people who called me on my mistake as they read this have a pet rat but I do know there almost certainly isn't another imaginary sentient being in the room with them. Cerebus learns that The Pits are Old Palnu that lies under current Palnu. It was destroyed in a massive earthquake long ago and the new city built over the top of it. It's like a Dungeons & Dragons module but with a lot less treasure.

This scene reminded me that I need to finish rereading The Boomer Bible: A Testament for Our Times (which is what it was called in the 90s but is just as accurate for today).

Cerebus and Lord Julius engage in another typical misunderstanding (it's not hard when only half of the people in the conversation care about making sense) which ends up with Lord Julius deciding that the location for the Festival of Petunias will be The Pits. This complicates Cerebus' job of not allowing Lord Julius to be assassinated because the assassins are most likely housed in The Pits (along with their giant snakes (*see cover)). Lord Julius, Baskin, and Cerebus descend into The Pits to find a suitable location for the Festival of Petunias. In doing so, they wind up in a trap and confronted by a masked revolutionary of the "Eye of the Pyramid." Which is odd because you usually have to murder at least a dozen kobolds and several goblins before you reach the room with the boss in it.

Typical unbalanced beginning level module. A giant snake as the first encounter!

Cerebus manages to defeat the giant snake by crashing it headfirst into a wall. The wall winds up being a key support structure and the roof collapses. Everybody makes it out alive but the masked revolutionary evades capture. He will be back next issue to ruin the Festival of Petunias. Aardvark Comment is still just a mostly standard comic book letters page. I'll probably stop discussing it until people start criticizing Dave. Right now it's just "This comic book is great!" and "Keep writing, Dave, and I'll never think ill of anything idea you espouse!" while Dave replies, "I owe my fans everything! I can't wait until I can stop feeling that way and start jerking off onto my art boards and selling those as pages of Cerebus!" Cerebus #15 Rating: A. Good story, good Lord Julius dialogue, good Living Priest of the Living Tarim scenes. I wholeheartedly endorse this comic book and Dave Sim. No way a guy with a sense of humor like this is going to go off the rails, right?!

[incorrect-oldstar-quotes]

“Nothing that ice cream and Netflix can’t fix”

Stars: Mabel Normand, Zeppo Marx, Harpo Marx

Summary: Zeppo’s heart was broken while he was away for a conference. Mabel conspires with Harpo to help him pull himself together.

Word count: 1627

💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔

This was, without a doubt, the team’s best conference yet. Their three national delegations - Ethiopia, Germany, and Turkey - all came home with a slew of awards. The team was feeling high on excitement, singing songs and cracking jokes all the way from San Diego. But there was one member of the team who wasn’t feeling the same.

Earlier in the day, Zeppo received the worst possible text one could receive: a break-up. Elizabeth was always shy when it came to talking about her feelings, even so that she couldn’t look her boyfriend of five months in the eye and tell her their relationship was over. He really liked her, maybe not so much that he imagined himself marrying her, but the feeling was close enough. He never could have imagined that the end of their relationship would break him this hard.

When they took a rest stop just an hour away from campus, everyone filed off the bus. That is, everyone but Zeppo. Mabel took notice of this. She was the last to leave so she could have a moment with him.

“Everything alright?” she started, gently. “It’s not like you to be this quiet.”

Zeppo shrugged his shoulders. “I’m alright, tired I guess.”

But Mabel was unmoved. She could see it in his eyes that he was far from okay. “It’s okay, Zep,” she responded. “It’s okay to not be okay. What’s wrong?”

He stayed quiet for an extra minute longer, until she could see the single tear stream down his cheek in the fading sunlight. “Elizabeth dumped me this morning,” he started quietly. “And... a-and she didn’t even do it to my face or in a call, nothing. Look.” He showed her the string of messages, starting from 7 AM. He begged and pleaded with her to change her mind but she was unbothered. Her decision was made, whether he liked it or not.

“Oh,” Mabel muttered. “I’m so sorry, Zep.” She gave him a hug and felt him shutter in her arms. “Anything I can do to help?”

She felt him shake his head no. “Let’s just get home. I think I want some alone time in my room.”

“I know, I know.” She looked up to see a few team members returning from the convenience store. “Don’t worry about them. No one’s going to judge you if they see you.”

“Thanks,” he answered. “But, I’m sorry if you wanted to go to the store.”

Mabel waved her arms as if to wave it off. “It’s fine, you’re more important to me.” Until this weekend, Mabel and Zeppo had never really been the best of friends. She’s friends with his other brothers, but he seemed so elusive. But after their Germany delegation’s hang-out session and they bonded over dinner, she began to understand him better. The poor guy is in a family full of eccentrics and he’s somehow the only normal one. 

The bus headed back onto the highway once everyone was settled in. They were back on campus and Zeppo gave a few words to the team about their hard work that weekend. He was not as loud and clear as he normally is.  But only Mabel could understand the small crack in his voice.

They lived in the same dorm, two floors apart. Zeppo reached his floor first. “Are you sure you’re fine?” Mabel asked one more time as the elevator came to a stop.

Zeppo shook his head, attempting to crack a smile but the quiver was too obvious to ignore. “I swear I’m okay, I just need some time alone.” The elevator door opened and he stepped off. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.” He waved goodbye to her and thought he could hold back the tears one more time until she was out of sight.

Once he was alone in his room, Zeppo lost his composure. He slumped over his raised bed, elbows planted firmly and face buried in his hands. “Dammit,” he muttered to himself just as he began to lose his voice. “Elizabeth... why?”

~

Those last few seconds haunted Mabel for the next half-hour. It wasn’t in her nature to leave a friend in their hour of need, even if said person was still a new friend. She realized that was the problem here. She didn’t know Zeppo well enough to understand his mourning language. She didn’t know if he was being sincere about needing his isolation time or if it was a facade to not draw attention to himself. But, although she didn’t understand, she knew someone who did.

The phone rang a few seconds and a raspy voice was detected on the other end. “Mabel?” Harpo answered. “What’s up?”

Mabel took a deep breath. “It’s about Zeppo,” she began. “Don’t tell him I told you everything, but his girlfriend broke up with him today and he’s super upset about it. I want to help but I don’t know how, but I figured that you would know... oh, I should have asked first, are you busy?”

“No, not right now. Do you need my help?”

“Yes, please. He’s kind of holing himself up in his room right now and I’m worried about him. What can you tell me about how he handles this kinda thing?”

“Well, he’s a stubborn one. He does that because he’s worried about embarrassing himself. But I know just the thing to help him open up. Are you in your room right now?” He waited until Mabel gave him her yes answer. “I’ll be there in 15.”

Mabel breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you so much, Harpo! See you soon.” Mabel changed into more comfortable clothes and washed up from the long bus ride. By the time she’d finished, she heard a knock at the door. True to his promise, it was Harpo with a quart of rocky road flavored ice cream under one arm.

“Thank you again for coming over,” she answered as she let him in the room.

“It’s no problem at all. I’m always happy to help a friend and my little bro. Now, here’s what we should do -” Harpo explained everything about Zeppo’s handling of his emotions, from the denial to the moment that he finally decides to open up. They had an effective game-plan ready to go.

They went to the fifth floor and stood outside his door. Zeppo lived in a single room so there were no roommates to worry about bothering. Mabel sighed and knocked on the door, loud enough for it to slightly echo.

“Go away, Mabel,” Zeppo could be heard on the other side, obviously sounding more ragged and emotional than before.

“Herbert, it’s me.” At that moment, the younger brother froze. Nobody ever calls him by his real name other than his brothers, and when Harpo is involved, he can forget about trying to hide his feelings. “And yes, I’m here with Mabel too. Can we come in?”

The pair paused until they heard the sound of socked feet crossing the hardwood floor. He cracked the door open and he looked like a mess: baggy t-shirt and sweatpants, red splotches on his face, and his once-neat hair now returning to its natural state. The only light in the room was a corner lamp barely keeping it illuminated, and it was dead quiet. He paused for a second before opening the door wider. “Come on in.”

Harpo and Mabel walked into the room, and now it was the three of them alone. They watched as Zeppo took a seat on his bed, no one saying a word. Then finally, there was a broken sob.

“Hey, shh, it’s okay.” Harpo was the first to reach out to him, sitting beside him and wrapping his arms around. “It’s okay, I’m here now. Tell me everything when you’re ready.” Mabel stood by on his other side while Zeppo unloaded his feelings onto his older brother. He didn’t question why she brought him here. Harpo just listened and reminded him that everything would be okay, that it was okay for him to just cry and let it all out. Eventually, Mabel sat on his other side and gently ran her hand up and down his back.

“If it’s okay with you,” she began, “can we stay with you for a while? At least until you feel a little better. We can watch something together too, if you want.”

Zeppo nodded quietly. He slid back farther onto his bed, back to the wall and feet slightly hanging off. Mabel and Harpo made quick work of making the space more comfortable; Mabel prepared three bowls of ice cream and turned on Netflix, while Harpo grabbed his queen-sized comforter that was almost comically too big for his dorm bed. Zeppo sat between the two of them, tired and emotionally drained, but now warm and feeling more loved than before.

“Thank you,” he muttered quietly, almost quiet enough for them not to hear. 

Harpo gave him another hug. “It’s no problem at all.” The Netflix homepage opened and they could see that he had been watching Aggretsuko. “Wanna watch the next one?”

Zeppo nodded quietly. They sat and watched the colorful, quirky anime, occasionally interrupting their silence with laughter and commentary. They finished the first season, and before long they could hear the youngest of the three softly snoring. Harpo and Mabel moved quietly and let him down gently onto his pillow, pulling the blanket over him and quietly cleaning up the room. Harpo turned the light off and they were out of the room.

“Do you think he’ll be alright soon?” Mabel asked as they walked back to the elevator.

Harpo nodded. “Yeah, give him some time. But, I think this was a good first start.”

[maiselous]

Two Comics

Sorry, I just have to get this out of my system. So I wanted to just spit out some short one-shot, but it kept growing. 

If ya love it/hate it, hopefully it inspires more folks to write/draw/create more Maisel stuff in general. 

This is set-up right after the bar scene in 2x10. Our two sad comedians share a cab and end up at his place bc Midge wants to sober the man up (ie take care of him. :’) Ugh he so vulnerable.)

His apartment is small, but more put together than Midge thought it would be. She lets him know, and he says “Well I’m not here enough to make a mess of this place, so I gotta do it on the road.”

“Well regardless of what’s in your house, at the end of the day all you need is good coffee and good company,” she says as she rummages around his kitchenette for his coffeemaker. Under the sink. Bingo.

“Words of wisdom,” Lenny murmurs as he plops down on the small sofa beneath the living room’s only window. The rain won’t let up, and they’re still both a little soaked. “Was that Groucho Marx?”

“Karl, actually. Even the communists enjoy a cup of good joe.” she quips. Lenny cracks half a smile. He loves bantering with Midge. It’s easy, not forced. When they met he could see from a distance that she was formidable, commanding the attention of the whole room and spinning her crazy life into a tragic comedy. Up close she was just as charismatic, but warmer. 

“Nice and hot for you,” she brings over his coffee and sits next to him.

“Many thanks. You likely saved me from blacking out at my least favorite dive downtown, and for that I’m eternally grateful.” He doesn’t meet her eye. He’s probably not capable yet. 

As he sips on the mug, Midge’s thoughts linger on that last part. She’s grateful to him too. They’ve helped each other a lot over time. It’s been about a year since she met him, drunk in the back of that police car. God, how things have changed. Between them though, things haven’t changed that much. If he were anyone else, she’d feel indebted to him. But, she tells herself, he’s her good friend. She likes that she doesn’t have to keep up some perfect impression around him, especially since he’s so big in the industry. At the same time, she doesn’t have to slow down for him to catch up. He just gets it. She always felt like they were on the same page.

____________

They’re relaxed on the sofa, listening to the rain. At least, Lenny’s relaxed. Midge is sitting upright and her hands are firmly on her lap. Of course he doesn’t want her to be uncomfortable. Now he feels a little insecure. They rode together because she offered to see him home; a classic Midge Maisel move. She was concerned because she’d never seen him so down, and he had too much to drink. He doesn’t say it, but no one’s offered to take care of him in a long time. And now she’s here, hesitant. He understands, but is slightly disappointed. He always thought they were on the same page. 

____________

Midge can tell Lenny’s the type who enjoys silence. For her, silence makes too much room for her thoughts to take over, and they are beginning to do just that. ‘Is this okay? What would other people say? Do I care? Should I be here?’ She looks over at Lenny, and all her questions are answered: Yes it’s okay, no one cares what people think, and this is exactly where I should be.

He hangs his head back against the sofa and closes his eyes, which makes his hair sparkle with the lingering rain droplets. There’s a larger one floating just above his ear and she instinctively reaches to wipe it away. Suddenly her hand is there, fingers resting on the side of his face while her thumb rubs the water away.

This sends a quick shock throughout Lenny, but he plays it cool, reacting slowly because he is Lenny Bruce after all (and he’s still a little drunk). Wearily, he rotates his head to face her. Her hand is now cradling his cheek. He looks right at her--lazily and intensely at the same time, as if he literally can’t help but to focus on her because she’s the only thing in the world to look at.

Midge, strangely, is reassured. He’s still his exhausted, gentle self. He’s not some man who would think she��s leading him on or force her to see this through. His eyes are far more resigned. If they could talk, they would say “What are you doing to me?” And she wouldn’t have an answer, but she does love the way his skin feels.

They stay still there, not wanting to shatter the moment. Same page.

But Midge looks at his eyes and feels a palpable need to say what she thinks of him. “You deserve,” she begins just above a whisper. “So many good things.”

Lenny knows she’s referencing their conversation at the bar earlier, but it still felt like more. Beyond the warrants, the comedy career, beyond the baggage that comes with it. It’s something good friends wish for each other. Even so, somehow, it still felt like more. He pressed his head more into her hand. “You think that I could deserve you?”

Midge brings her other hand up so now she’s holding his face with both hands. She caresses his jaw and slowly lowers her hands to the base of his neck. She leans in, and a slow smile crosses her face. “Always and everywhere.” Lenny tries not to smile at the memory of that off-hand comment at the Gaslight. It seems so long ago. 

She closes the remaining space between them with a kiss. They never really act this way with each other. The subdued wit, the quieter voices, the slow movements. It seems out of character for New York’s most dynamic comedians. At the same time it feels exactly, perfectly right.

Lenny kisses her back. His hands, which just put down the coffee mug on the table in front of them, find their way to her waist. He pulls her closer to him, which makes her catch her breath. He hesitates for a moment, wanting to make sure she’s comfortable, and she presses herself more firmly against him. 

Their movements are not slow anymore. She lets her shoes falls to the floor as she curls her legs up on the sofa. He squeezes her waist even more, and she she opens her mouth for him. 

If Midge could see herself in the mirror, she would panic. Her hair has been undone by the rain. Her makeup’s practically gone and her dress is still damp. She would never have planned it this way. But Lenny kisses her more and more deeply and she cares less and less about her looks. He finally grabs her and brings her on top of him. She opens her eyes to find him looking at her directly. He looks intoxicated, but not in the way he was earlier.

And of course Lenny is entranced. He's wondering what the Hell he did to deserve Miriam Maisel, his favorite mad divorcee from the Upper West Side to straddle him on his sofa in his tiny downtown apartment. He says none of this, obviously. Meanwhile, Midge traces a line of kisses across his forehead. They’re tender and light. She’s not used to this. Even in bed, she’s always been the ‘cool girl’, making moves she thinks her man would like. This right here though, is for her.

Her lips make their way to his neck, and when she uses her tongue to move back up to his ear, he shudders and moans as if he’s been holding it in for a long time. Midge is sure it’s the best sound she’s ever heard. She finds other ways to make him utter that sound again. His roaming grip tightens and loosens with each movement; her back, her ass, her arms, her hair, all for him to explore. 

Midge stops to catch her breath and realizes just how undone she is. Her hair is falling in her face, her dress is falling off her shoulder, and the area around her mouth feels red and raw from pressing against his stubble. She doesn’t give a shit. She sees that Lenny isn’t much better. His hair is frizzy and disheveled, and his clothes are beyond wrinkled. She begins to sigh, but it comes out as a laugh. A grin spreads across his face too. “Oh, this is what it takes to make you really laugh, huh? Am I funny now?” He pretends to be offended. She laughs harder, which he loves. “This was it all along, huh?” Midge falls into him laughing and she breathes in his scent deeply. She feels him hold her a little tighter, and she wonders if he’s gotten her second-hand drunk, if that’s even possible, or if maybe she’s just deliriously content. 

_______________

They continue their ‘conversation’ for hours. On the sofa, in his bed, on the floor, in the doorway. It’s rhythmic, satisfying, and occasionally really loud. It’s determined, varied, and fucking exquisite. It feels like a perfect comedy routine on stage: performative and fun but also natural and fluid. 

It’s punctuated by long, sleepy silences. As they lay together on his mattress, Midge rests her head on his chest. Lord only knows what time it actually is, but she measures the seconds with the quick thump-thump of his heartbeat. The rhythm, along with the distant police siren and orange glow from the street lights outside, remind her that they’re still in New York, on some weeknight, in reality. 

Lenny lightly traces circles up and down her back, absentmindedly stroking the marks where her brassiere was. He thinks about where they were just hours ago, and how he opened up to her at the bar. Midge told him everything would be okay, and God, in this moment, she was more right than she could’ve known.

She’s not looking at his face, but she can feel him begin to smile and even laugh. “Two comics walk into a bar...”

That set-up suddenly seems absurdly real. She laughs and continues smiling, thinking about their conversation earlier at that bar. Midge recalls that question Lenny asked earlier: is it worth it? She was so doubtful only hours ago. Laying here next to him, feeling his fingers on her back and his heartbeat under her cheek, she knows her answer is yes.

[thesecrookedbones-blog]

the collection.

“I think yer book’s makin’ it worse out there, y’know? Girls’re disappearin’ faster than ever. What’re ya even doin’ about it? You think ya can come here with yer fancy education and yer fictional little books. This’s real life, slim. Emily’s a good girl. Comes in all the time gettin’ supplies to keep the neighborhood strays well fed. What’re you gonna do when her body shows up like the rest of ‘em?” Buck’s tenure in Chilling is measured by the way his teeth sit ground deep toward his gum line. His brows sit low against his eyes, like anchors dragging along rebellious eyes that no longer wish to see the pain around him. I know from what city hall records I could find, that Buck has owned this general store since 1983, inheriting it from his father before him. Southern hospitality is only known to the locals, like some kind of localized slang. There was never any welcome wagon for Nora and I. Any words of encouragement actually sound like a shotgun shell being loaded into a sawed off chamber. Or the coarse friction of a knotted noose. “Just the lightbulbs today, Buck. It’ll probably cost me extra for the lecture and I’m short today.” “You think yer so funny, Mr. Typewriter? You come into town an’ just look what you’ve done.” His words hiss past stained yellow teeth, syllables clicking like a slow trotting horse. The teeth were appropriately reminiscent of a horse too - in their prime. Back before the Copenhagen dips and malt liquor sips before sunrise. Behind the halitosis breath is a venom Buck has never spoke to me; something I have been too afraid to mention. His daughter was one of the names on a growing list of the missing, and later deceased. The Collector had left her in a deer carcass bag after collecting his trophy. It was her tattoo from her right shoulder blade, memorializing her mother with bumblebees and sunflowers. Two of her most favorite things. Layla Carpenter. She got inked underage at 17 after her mother lost her battle with breast cancer. It’d been a badge of honor. I could tell it from the way she showed it off in off-shoulder dresses and floppy tank tops. She smiled wider for Polaroids when the tattoo was in the photo with her, like she’d mastered the ‘glance over the shoulder and smile’ pose just to honor her late mom. She’d been missing since 2000. She was The Collector’s first. He kept her the longest. Her body was discovered exactly one week after Nora and I moved in; lakeside nearest our property. Her body melded with the burlap carcass bag, decomposing so harshly that the medical examiner couldn’t tell flesh from bag. Often even after severe decomposition, special wavelengths of light and photographs can enhance ink in any remaining tissue. There was nothing to enhance - but everyone knew The Collector’s calling card. Her tattoo was in his possession. A token of his kill. “Just ring him up, Buck. Fer Pete’s fuckin’ sake.” I nod my appreciation to Todd. He’s one of the few neutrals I have in this town. His eyes betray him in hiding the spark of curiosity I know he feels. He has no pawns; no one on the growing list. Hell, Todd lives alone in the home his parents expired in. He has no one to look after him as he expires and no one to lace his grave with flowers once he’s gone. He has nothing to lose. “Thanks,” I say, tucking the paper bag against my shoulder, though my eyes lock with Todd - the only person who deserves my gratitude. Back at the house, I leave the bag beneath the flood light fixtures that seem to have shoddy wiring. The fixture eats through bulbs at least once a week, somehow feeding too much power while still causing the ominous orb to flicker in and out. I check my watch. School will let out soon and Nora will be home. She’s been bugging me about this light. Any kind of darkness makes her feel uneasy. I can see it in the way every layer of her spine pricks as she rounds a dark corner, helplessly reaching for a lightswitch. Plugging the six-foot wood-runged ladder down beneath the flood light fixture, my shoe centers the rung and haphazardly trusts my weight to it. It flexes but the screws snar and it holds. Gravel sounds behind my back as I twist a fresh bulb in. I’m in a pissing contest with the rest of this town, careful not to show fear or cowardice, so I don’t turn my head. Fingers yo-yo the lightbulb to a tightened position and the footsteps behind me still. I finally sneak a glance.“Yer so fucked.” I don't know him by name, but he's recognizable as one of the local meth addicts. What about him? I try to paint a mental picture of his face and I’m lost in non-distinctive identifiers. Bugged eyes, a toothless grin, sunken cheeks, and clothes that loosely swing off of his bony structure. Is he a suspect? He laughs at me, his hollow soul echoing behind him as he continued on. He's probably hallucinating, I tell myself and finish with the second bulb. The ladder gets returned to the corner filled with dust bunnies in the garage and I discard yet another bulb box. The basement of the home is bunkered beneath ground; a safe haven from tornadoes. It is the only place I trusted my work, given the lack of any natural daylight. It’s the space I get lost in, drawn in like a moth to lamplight. As I descend on creaky, wooden steps, I decide - it’s time to start Emily Marx’s chapter. The latest missing girl. Keys gallop against paper freely, a brainwave on a stroke of genius. The latest victim is fresh in my mind. Bright eyed with a bright future, given the academic records her parents’ failed to share with me. They slammed the door in my face, blaming me for opening this can of demons again. They thought my soul needed saving. They hoped to see me in church on Sunday morning. Her body hasn’t been recovered, but it’s nearing two weeks. I expected her to be the next ink to his collection after 48 hours. Death is the sole consumer in this barren land, its hunger accelerated by demons sworn off by bible verses Sunday morning and ill-will cast against family and friends after a few swigs of whiskey post-service. Blasphemy pulled straight from the bottle. Hours wash away outside without notice. The south has a way of filling your pores with heavy heat and slugging you down, zapping Father Time until seconds rock by slower or the mind’s ability to be conscious of it slips away. Each chapter takes its toll. Another life vanished into the thick air, often in stark daylight. The moment they encounter The Collector, they become another ghost; a wisp of heavy wind to remind us all that Chilling is haunted by a living being. I find myself in the position I often end up in with this book, face curtained with my hands as I count the breaths it takes to make me feel better about it all. I still haven’t found the number. Then it dawns on me. The silence overhead. Usually the kitchen floorboards would creak as Nora dances around the kitchen, preparing another meal without company while I try to figure out the great mystery of Chilling, Missouri. No creaks have sounded above to distract me from proper sentence structure or finding the perfect word that’s just hibernating at my fingertips. No, it’s been oddly silent. I feel uneasy all at once, but disallow panic as I jog up the straining basement stairs. The kitchen is dark, as is the living room, and entryway hall. Upstairs sounds just as quiet, but I run up nonetheless. Nora perfects stability in my schedule, trying to make my life look somewhat normal. She never falters - but I’m the inconsistent one. Maybe I didn’t listen or didn’t remember. She could have parent-teacher conferences. Maybe some kind of after-school tutoring session. Maybe some other after-school activity. I pretend I don’t hear the stress battering through ragged breaths. Where would she be, where could she be? Tires squeal into the school parking lot. It’s empty. Her car is nowhere to be seen, but I still run toward the front doors, truck barely stuck in park. It’s dark inside. Not a soul to be seen. There I stand, in a pained shred of reality. I didn’t even notice she didn’t come home. I check all of the possible spots, and Chilling has a limited selection. The diner, the gas station, the library, the post office, the general store. No sign of her car. I stop outside of the old run-down drive-in that has only been used as vandal grounds for the last decade and find my hands shaky as I dial the sheriff’s department. “My wife - fiancee - is missing.” It’s better not to go to the office in person, I decide. They’ll waste precious minutes vetting me, seeing only an unfriendly face they already suspect to be all kinds of evil. “She - school gets out at 2:30 and she’s usually home by 4 at the latest, depending on what kind of students need help after-school. ...Eleanor Coulson. Yeah. Middle is Winona. She’s - her birthday is June 29, 1986. Look, can you just - I am being calm.” My lip quivers and heat streaks down my cheeks. The speedometer ticks to 65, the big truck’s steering wheel quaking within my palms. "She’s like...5’6” or 5’7” and can’t weigh much more than 100 pounds. She’s small, but she’s mighty.” The sorrow touches the back of my throat and I cough to cover the emotional choke. “No, no scars or tattoos.” It's an identification question, but it feels pointed and my answer washes gooseflesh down my neck. The female voice on the other end of my call drifts into a cavernous hole as my right foot shifts from gas pedal to brake, tires crying against warm pavement. I can hear my heart rattle my skull, vision blurred with thoughts lashing against positivity. The previous girls with their mangled bodies, tattoos sliced from their skin, torture evident in their demise - it all bleeds forward until the female’s voice rises, “hello?” “I - her, her car. I just found it on Highway 26 near milepost 17.” A long pause. “He’s got her.” 6 hours later, I return home after police interrogation. I’m the prime suspect in the tragic story I’ve supposedly created. I sit there in the driver’s seat, hands folded beneath my nose and listen to the waves of fear wash over my knuckles. Within eye line, the flood light surges and flickers, faltering between a vivacious glow and the absorption of death. I watch intently, hoping the light will stay lit. Lightness in the dark - a symbol of hope. But the light hisses and with a dull gurgle, it flickers to black. A tear rims my lower lid. He’s got her. Her life will burn out just like that bulb. Hot air fills the truck, my throat rattling with rage as a low growl precedes the words I will die by if I must: “The collection ends now, you motherfucker.”

[one-leaf-grimoire]

“triad”

Chapter 13: the apology and a promise

Notes: this is a bit of a turning point for Lisa! For now at least... I’m doing one more chapter and then jump right into the spade arc!!! Lots to look forward to~ If you have any questions or theories PLEASE hmu! I’m begging you.

AO3 link

For once, it's nice to not think. My mind lets itself go blank as I fly, my eyes unfocusing into a blur of light and dark. There's nothing but the wind whipping through my hair, my eyes watering slightly from the speed, and the buzz of wings fluttering around my body. 

I don't fly as fast as usual today. I'm tired of rushing; for once, I just want to glide, to savor the flight and the feelings that come with it. I can remember so clearly, the first day I manifested this spell. It was an accident, in a moment of panic that I took to the skies. Floating up there, defying gravity… there was nothing else like it. 

That day…

That was my wedding day. 

It was just a few months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. I still wear the ring on my finger, but I hardly look at it anymore. Anything that makes me think of Julius just hurts , especially now. 

If I actually went through with it… he would hate me. 

Adeline would hate me. 

I would hate me. 

No… I already do. And Adeline probably does, too. 

My gaze focuses again, and drops down to the houses and fields below. Everything is so quiet and peaceful; they have no idea that their lives were almost shattered, rewound, and possibly damaged. Adeline is right; If I turned back time, over a month of everyone's life would be destroyed. Relationships, hard work, all of it… I would abandon them for a better world, not create a better world. At least, that's what I think would happen. Maybe they would just stop existing altogether, and have no idea what hit them. Time and space, obliterated in an instant… 

No. My plan would have never worked in the first place.

Somehow, I'm relieved to admit it to myself. 

Horatio is weakened… if I took his gravity magic, it would hurt him. And his mana might not be enough to do what I want. 

I doubt that there's any gravity mages strong enough to match me in this world. 

Suddenly, I smell smoke. I let my lets drop down from my streamlined position, and quickly skid to a stop. A fire? All the way out here? It seems like I'm in the middle of nowhere, trees stretching as far as I can see. The capitol rises behind me, a dark city silhouetted by the setting sun. But what's on fire?

Then, I see it; a large building, its rooms jumbled and stacked half hazardly on top of one another. The base of the Black Bulls. 

So, that smoke…

I circle farther down, and as I descend I hear a voice. Well, several voices. 

"LUUUUUCK!!! I'M GONNA KILL YOU!"

"A hahahaha! No you aren't, Magna! Your ribs were very tasty."

"MAGNA-SENPAI! You may have some of MY ribs if you want!"

"Keep yer stinkin' ribs, shrimpsta, I'm killing this good for nuthin'-"

"Boyyyys~ stop fighting and have some alcohol!"

"And more nommies!"

It’s the loud, callous, unmistakable sound of a party. However, those sounds fade away quickly as soon as I land with a whoosh right by them.

Magna blinks a few times, then his jaw drops. “A-a-a-h- t-t-that’s the- the-”

“MISS WIZARD KING!!!” Asta springs to his feet from where he sat by the bonfire and quickly does about ten quick bows in a row. “It’s so good to see you here are our humble party, and-”

“Shut yer trap!” Yami grabs Asta roughly by the head and tosses him away. “But really, what brings you all the way out here?” He eyes me suspiciously, and I feet my stomach turn with nervousness. “Are we in trouble?”

I stand there silent for a moment, then manage to crack a smile. “No! No, no trouble! I just, er… needed to…”

The squad stares at me with varying degrees of expression on their faces. Come on… think of something-

Suddenly, Yami lets out a chuckle, immediately dissolving the attention. “Marx is probably driving you up the wall, huh? You don’t have to say it… come on, I’ll bring you a beer.”

For some reason, I nod, even though I have no intention of drinking. I watch Yami walk off to the cooler, and a thought occurs to me. Maybe he’s the reason why I’m here. Maybe he has the answers.

“So, how goes it with that new advisor?” Yami asks me as we walk a little ways away from the rest of his squad. “I heard she was… interesting.”

“Hm? I suppose so-” My heart clenches at the memory of Adeline’s face. “She’s interesting, yeah. Makes things a little less boring, I suppose.” I let out a sigh, smiling a little as I bask in the presence of an old friend. I tear my eyes away from the sunset for a moment to look up at him, only to find him staring at me intensely. I gulp and look away. “Say… Yami…” my mouth moves on its own. “This reminds me of the good old days… remember those?”

Yami lets out a snort. “Yeah, of course. You, me, and Vangeance, drinking and laughing together at the inn every weekend. Those were the days.”

“Yeah, before I got kicked out-” Both of us chuckle at that.

“Well, it worked out for you in the end, didn’t it?”

I shake my head a bit, but my smile doesn’t go away. “I suppose so…”

Silence settles in again, before Yami speaks up, his tone low and husky.

“Back then… you drank more than the two of us combined. You’re a monster… so…”

… uh oh-

“It surprises me that you haven’t even sipped your beer.”

I glance down at the open bottle, my hand clutching it tightly. Slowly, I look back up to see Yami still staring, his eyes narrowed.

“Tell me… what’s been botherin’ you?”

I let a little breath of laughter escape my nose, and I almost look away.

“Bothering me? No way, not anything, really…”

I should have known that I could never hide anything from Yami. Ever since the first time we met, 8 years ago, he somehow knew everything he could have wanted to know about me. And today is no exception. He stares at me with an expressionless face as his question hangs in the air, just like his cigarette hangs lazily from his teeth. But his eyes betray the concern he holds inside.

Don’t lie… what’s wrong?

There could be many answers to that question, ranging from minimal to world-changing. Each one compounding upon the other, higher and higher until there is no end. And the worst part is that I want to tell Yami everything. For once, I want to share this burden with someone, anyone. I’m desperate to do anything that could make me feel better, even if it’s a long shot.

But I can’t.

There’s hardly any room left in my shrinking heart… but there’s still a place for you, Yami. There always will be.

The sounds of his squad are the only things to break the silence, along with the buzz of evening cicadas in the woods, and the crackling fire of their barbeque.

… I won’t put that burden on you, Yami. But, I know you’re not going to give up, so I’ll need to tell you another secret…

“I’m pregnant.”

His eyes widen, but I look away before I can see the rest of his shock register on his face. “...damn,” he finally responds after a good five seconds of silence, his voice lower now. “...is it-”

“Who else’s would it be?” I cut him off, knowing exactly what he was going to say. The beat of quiet stings me after my words. “Sorry-”

“No, you’re fine, that was a stupid question.” Yami takes a long drag of his cigarette before exhaling. The smoke dances in the air for just a moment before dissolving away. “So… how do you feel?”

….

“I feel…”

…

“Nothing.”

There’s no way to describe how I feel any better.

“You should leave.”

My eyes widen as Yami’s large hand clasps my shoulder, and I look back up at him. “Huh?”

“You heard me. Go.” His eyes harden. “Look… go somewhere now. Someplace, to some thing… or to some one. Anywhere that makes you feel something.”

His words still confuse me in their suddenness, but I know from his tone that he’s dead serious. Go somewhere? Why? Where would I go? “What do you mean, something?” I frown, turning to face him straight on. All this time, I’ve been avoiding those emotions that would otherwise cripple me, and that’s the only reason why I’ve remained so strong.

Right?

Wrong…

I’m weak. I’m built upon stilts that a mild wind could blow out from beneath me. I’ve deprived myself of the important feelings and relationships that might have saved me from the abyss.

But, nothing could have saved me, right? I’m going to die, no matter what. So what’s the point of-

“Stop overthinking it!” Yami shakes me violently for a moment, and I let out a shriek of surprise. “I don’t care if you’re the Wizard King, you’re something more important than that. You’re my friend… and you’re the one Julius loved. So go.” His mouth twitches into a smile. “Go and feel. It doesn’t matter what it is. Grief, anger, sadness, fear… any of it is better than nothing. Because if you force yourself to feel nothing, you’ll never feel happy again.”

His words and shaking finally nail some semblance of sense into my head, and as soon as he lets go I start to back away. My heart is thumping, my blood is heating up. Not with anger or fear, but with purpose. Because, he’s right. I don’t want to live these last months like I’m already a corpse. I want to live. 

I’m the Wizard King… YES.

I AM the Wizard King!

I’m the most powerful person in this kingdom, and for the rest of my life, I’m going to act like it. 

Yami’s grin widens in tandem with mine, and a long-absent glint reappears in my eyes. “Yami… thank you. There’s so much I need to do…” Smiling brightly, I salute him. “I’ll talk to you later! I won’t be a stranger!”

“You better not be-” Yami warns, saluting back for once. “Don’t do anything stupid, now.”

I let out a little scoff. “As if you have any right to tell me that.” I wink before turning away, already activating my flight spell. Without another word, I shoot into the air and back towards the castle. Yami watches silently from the ground, taking a long drag from his cigarette.

“What was that about, Captain?”

“None of your business, Asta.”

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

Somehow, I manage to get home before the sun goes down; that’s how fast I fly. Julius could get from place to place in mere instants, and I’m more happy than ever that I managed to appropriate that trait. I Fly right through a window and hit the hallway ground running.

“Adeline! ADELINE!!!”

There’s so much that I need to set right. With Adeline, with Marx, with my friends… especially William. I did something horrible and manipulative to him. I have no right to hold my forgiveness above his head; in fact, I should be the one asking for his. But right now, I need to find-

“Adeline! There you are!” I run around the corner and spot her standing by the window. Adeline whirls around to see me stop short. For a moment, the air becomes awkward, and I take a nervous breath. A few minutes ago, I didn’t even want to face her-

“I’m sorry…” Adeline surprises me by speaking up. “The way I talked to you earlier… that was so disrespectful. I thought about it all, and I wanted to say that I’m in no place to question your plans. In fact-” She squeezes her eyes shut. “If you want to go back in time and save your husband, I’ll do anything in my power to help- AH!” She cuts herself off as I suddenly jump forward and wrap my arms around her. She freezes up, her hands trembling.

“Adeline… it’s me who should be sorry,” I mumble, squeezing my eyes shut and burying my face in her shoulder. “I’m in no place to question fate and the laws of nature. You told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear… and because of that…” I feel my face heat up against her shoulder.

“... I need you, Adeline.”

Slowly, I pull back and look up at her, my hands lingering on her arms. Slowly, almost unconsciously, she shifts to keep holding me, her eyes wide and shocked at the sudden confession.

“Adeline… do you love me?”

Somehow, that particular question doesn’t shock her as much as I expected. In fact, she almost seems to relax.

“... to be perfectly honest, I’ve never been in love. So, I don’t really know how it feels,” she begins, her words just the slightest bit hesitant. “But, I want to be. And more than that… I want to be in love with you. And, I know this is probably the worst time to say that, but it’s the truth. Even if you don’t want anything to do with me, I still just want to make you happy.”

I squeeze her arm, and I start to smile once again. My heart is pounding again, with a feeling that stirs memories of long ago. “Adeline… you’ve always made me happy. And if you want to be in love with me, then by all means… go ahead.”

We both know that Adeline is right; this is the worst time. But it’s also the best time. Maybe things will never be the same as me and Julius, but different is still good. I refuse to deprive myself of love at the end of my life.

Adeline doesn’t have to answer. Her golden eyes soften, and before I know it, we both lean in at the same time. Our lips meet in the middle, and time stands still.

So… soft…

Her arms wrap around me and pull me closer, and I let myself dissolve into the bliss I denied myself for so long.

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

There’s someone else that I need to speak to, though. I bid Adeline goodnight before walking downstairs. The castle is silent, almost abandoned. But I can’t bring myself to feel melancholy at the sight of the emptiness. Because, for once, I’m not empty. 

I continue farther and farther, then exit into the castle gardens. The grass moves silently under my feet as I walk, dew and mist puffing up with each step. Roses and peonies stare silently as I make my way to the back. I pause for only one moment as I pass the fish pond, its perimeter laced with green and white clovers. The bench sits there, empty. 

But I’m not empty.

I shake my head, smiling, before continuing on. Finally, I reach my destination. It’s a humble memorial, just what he would have wanted. The grass has already grown over the spot that was dug up. Bouquets of flowers are piled up all around the headstone, where a name is engraved:

Julius Novachrono.

It’s hard to believe that I never once came down here to visit. But, I’m here now. Slowly, I let myself sink to my knees, the cool grass hitting my skin through my tights. I sit and stare, and finally I feel a few tears start to bubble up.

Yami wanted me to feel… and I am feeling now.

Despite having so much bottled up, I can’t bring myself to sob or scream. My quiet grief leaks down my face and drips to the ground, watering the ground. After a little while, I bring my hand up and use the back of it to wipe the tears away. I take a deep breath, then let it out through my nose.

Breathe.

“Julius… I’m sorry this took so long.”

I know he doesn’t answer. But maybe, somehow, he’s listening.

“I almost did something terrible today… can you believe how selfish I can be?” I let out a ghost of a laugh. It’s still a painful thing to cope with, but somehow the situation feels brighter. I resisted temptation. There’s so much to live for now.

“And anyway… I’ll be seeing you soon. Sooner than I thought…” I sigh, my hand coming to rest on my stomach. “My life loves to be complicated, doesn’t it? Well… I’ve always found a way to pull through. Maybe I won’t succeed this time, but-”

A spike of determination flows through my hand and into my body. 

“I will fix everything before I have to go.” I tear my eyes from the ground to look at his name. The air feels warm… maybe from my mana, or maybe from something else. Either way… I can’t help but smile.

“I’ll be the best Wizard King that ever lived… I’ll protect the Kingdom. I’ll train my successor. I will give birth to this baby. And… I’ll make Adeline the happiest woman in the world. I promise, Julius… I swear on my love to you that I’ll be someone you can be proud of!”

And then, when it’s all over…

I stand up, walking over to the headstone. My hand drifts across the surface, over the etching of his name, before I lean down and press a kiss to the J.

I’ll join you again.

Next time: Chapter 14. Lisa poses a challenge to the Captains at their tournament.

[correspondencearchive]

4. Yujin Lee & Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (part 1)

Yujin Lee and Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai discuss Paul Chan’s article, “What Art Is and Where It Belongs,” artistic production and its relationship to capital, making art for (or not for) a Western art audience, their interest in collaborative/process oriented projects, and whether or not one can be free as an artist from the intersecting systems of global capitalism and white supremacy that make up the art world. Read part 2 of their conversation here.

Yujin Lee (YL): Hi, Prima! First of all, thank you so much for accepting my invitation! I see that you received my email with the link to Paul Chan’s article, “What Art Is and Where It Belongs.” I suppose I will start with this obvious question. What is art to you and where do you think it belongs?

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (PJ): Hi Yujin, thank you for sharing the Paul Chan text. It was indeed an interesting read! To your question as to “what is art to me and where I think it belongs”, my job as an art handler has deeply affected how I view art. I can no longer see art as a product of a singular mind but rather, an object that exists in relation to multiple networks. Paul Chan is generous in giving art the definition of a “more than” an object by the way that it expresses what an object desires to be. I would argue that art is only “more than” an object because it’s value is not intrinsic to its material properties and use-value but the cultural value assigned to it by a number of actors. When I was in undergrad I came across this book called, Worlds of Art (Les Mondes de l’Art) by Howard S. Becker. Anyway, he was one of the first authors to place art and artistic production in a chain of labour production from administrative works of post-production and marketing to intellectual works from universities and curatorial work. That vision of art is more true to me in my daily life than the art that is heralded for its poignant inquiry into humankind’s psyche and advancement of what we call “civilization”. So the simple answer to your question may be that art belongs to capital and serves those who can afford its production and consumption. But at the same time, while I serve as a clog in this system, I also want to make an art that can exist outside of the system and truly be moments of disconcert with the real. My current show is up at a gallery that used to be a storefront in a shopping plaza in Chinatown, Los Angeles. The interface with a non-art audience is inevitable. The projections attracted attention and the occasional passer-bys waiting to pick up their food would stop and talk to me. But the conversations remained fairly surface. None of them have yet made an appointment to intentionally see the work. Not to mention the heightened tensions caused by art’s complicity in gentrification. So, even in a public-facing space, art can only rely on its existing structures and those who already have access to them.

Since you work a lot with the public and collaborations, I wonder how the experience has been for you and whether you believe art can belong outside of the art world itself?

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, 2021, performance and multi-media installation, 2 video projectors, 2 overhead projectors, transparencies, colour filter, printed black and white images on photocopy paper, books

YL: I completely agree with everything you said about the complex networks that build up a work of art (and the artist’s career). Come to think of it, when has art ever been outside of that system? One example comes to mind that relates to how Paul Chan began and ended his article. Chan begins with a very “kitsch” painting that he purchased for thirty dollars in the streets of New York and an unexpected challenge in finding the right place to hang it in his home. And he ends the article with, “For art to become art now, it must feel perfectly at home, nowhere.” This beginning and ending reminds me of the Korean shaman paintings (portraits of the indigenous gods). Even though the tradition goes far back in history, not many of these paintings remain. They were either burned or buried because people believed that the painting is a physical dwelling (or a seat) for a particular god served by a particular shaman. In most cases, the artist is also unknown and unimportant. Moreover, up until the late 80s, art collectors refused to collect shaman paintings as they are not merely powerful paintings (as an art object) but empowered paintings (as sites of divine presence). Despite it all, if it somehow falls into a collector or enters the museum, it is believed to become what Marx called the commodity fetish, losing its power, thus losing its value. In this case, the art object, artist, and collector all have no place! This may be why shaman paintings have not been considered “art” for so long by its creators, users, and admirers. So for me, it’s not a matter of whether art can or cannot belong outside the “art world,” but that “it must feel perfectly at home, nowhere,” or that it must feel perfectly at home, everywhere. I test this theory by experimenting with process-oriented, collaborative, performance and relational art.

I watched the video documentation of the performative lecture installation that you’ve mentioned, Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, at The Fulcrum Press. The collage of your voice with the light and shadow of texts and images created by multiple projectors choreographed by the subtle gestures of your hands… It was a sensorial and immersive experience, even through my computer monitor. The occasional sound of the machines turning on and off took me in and out of this poetic narrative. I was also compelled by the intricately untangled individual journeys of your family members crossing three generations, and your re-interpretation of the overarching macro history that wolves together three continents. The most memorable moment was when you said, “... Both view history as driven by cycles of reincarnations. Within one body, one consciousness, are contained centuries of all earthly desires, unquenched. History thus progresses as a movement of return. For the last five years, I face the Pacific and the fear of a return.”

Having said that, I wonder why contemporary art often appears to be disparate from the rest of the world. Sometimes even alienating and elitist. Judith Butler actually defends this position quite eloquently:

“Who devises the protocols of ‘clarity’ and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does ‘transparency’ keep obscure?”

This statement may sound like art gibberish to the non-art audience and support your disappointment of the disinterest displayed by the non-art audience in Chinatown. But I wonder, what does it mean to desire the interests of the “non-art audience”?

PJ: First of all, yes to process art works! I think our two approaches to art practice staunchingly demarcate us from “the commodity fetish” that most high art/internationally-recognized art ends up becoming by the very fact that we care less about the end product and more about the creative process themselves. The process can take shape as a form of knowledge or a set of techniques that in my case, takes on a certain shade based on my personal narrative. But taken up by someone else, the combination of voice, body movements and layering of images that you noted, would express something else entirely. That is what I am interested in in achieving: rather than creating an original product, I want to redefine techniques and processes of thought. I think the relationality and collaboration in your work that I’ve seen at VER and what you continue to do at your residency in Jeju strive for a similar balance between the creation of processes and the specificity of the people you engage with.

This reflects the other side of our art practice: although it is defiant of consumerist art, it is still bound to the Western art canon. Even a working against or criticism of Western art canon asks the audience to be aware of the canon to understand our respective positions. I respond strongly to you raising the example of the Korean shaman paintings (of which I know nothing of!) as being uncollectable and therefore, not considered art. In this case, its power operates in a culture that is closer to the non-art audience. It doesn’t need to invent value for itself but its symbolic code is embedded in the culture that receives it.

That is why I am saddened by not being able to touch the “non-art audience”. I believe that I envy the power of the shaman paintings, a power that can touch anyone without necessary prior knowledge. That is what I lament in operating in the current art world that I am in. At the same time, I do deeply agree with you that the demand for clarity and the parochial is a form of holding back of thought and the need to plunge in the mystery that is sometimes too specific for the artist themselves to put words to. That is perhaps why I still value art over other forms of knowledge: art can give shape to what is previously unknown. I also don’t mean to juxtapose the shaman paintings versus the inaccessibility of high art, as if one holds more intellectual value than the other. What I simply want to highlight is the different levels of reception that each form allows for.

YL: It’s true that the non-art audience (who may not necessarily understand the painting’s aesthetic value nor its symbolic meaning) are likely to succumb to the power of shaman paintings because of its deep-rooted history that vibrates within the culture. Do you know about the Swedish artist and mystic, Hilma af Klint? I think she didn’t give two cents about the art or non-art audience. Af Klint considered her experimental paintings (the first Western abstract art known to date) too avant-garde for her contemporaries and rarely exhibited them in public in her lifetime. Meanwhile, her so-called Theosophical art, which was heavily influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism, interestingly brings us back to the Korean shaman paintings. Before creating a shaman painting, one is to take a good bath, wear clean new clothes and oftentimes chant a prayer. Af Klint did something similar. Before starting a new series of paintings, she dedicated many months of “purification” by adjusting her lifestyle, like practicing vegetarianism. It may sound like a frivolous formality, but it demonstrates a belief on how the creator’s (artist’s) personal life cannot be severed from their creation (art), even if the admirers (public) may never know or care about the creator to begin with.

I’d like to go to your comment on how art “can give shape to what is previously unknown.” Chan also states that “in art, the only ideas worth realizing are the truly untenable ones.” I seriously weighed this concept (of art giving shape to obscurity) during my exhibition in Bangkok at the end of 2019, especially through the work you mentioned earlier, Drawing Conversation 2.0, a series of collaborative live automatic drawing performances created with local Thai artists. The obscurity for me at the time was the uncomfortable reality of having a solo show at a place where I did not understand its native language, culture, nor history.

A smaller room attached to the main gallery was dedicated for this work. The walls were painted black, and the floor laid with a dark grey carpet. A square table (around 30 cm in height) was placed in the center of the room where a blank sheet of paper covered its entire surface. A large scale drawing titled, In the beginning was___, was hung along with 5 other blank sheets of papers ready to be conversed upon. Drawing materials such as graphite, charcoal, eraser, and pen (no colors) were provided. For each session, a local artist was invited to create a drawing with me in silence for 108 minutes. A timer was set on my phone. The audience could freely enter and exit the space, sit, stand, or walk around us. The first ten minutes or so felt highly performative. But as more of our marks, gestures, breaths, and bodily heat crisscrossed, I experienced a kind of a (collective) trance. And when the timer went off and broke the silence of the room, the familiar ringtone of an iPhone sounded like the Korean shaman bell, bringing everybody in the room back to the present time and space. I think maybe this was my closest attempt in creating an “empowered painting.”

Yujin Lee, Drawing Conversation 2.0, Nov. 29, 2019, collaborative live drawing performance with artist Dujdao Vadhanapakorn, 108 minutes, Gallery VER

YL: Back to Chan… He asserts that “art and life would rather belong to the world than be free in it.” That is a bleak outlook for art, don’t you think? So, my question is, can we imagine art to be free in the current world (of capitalism)? I wonder what your thoughts are on this last point, and could you expand your thoughts on “art giving shape to the unknown” in relation to how you use language/text in your work?

PJ: Two big questions! [laughter]. I think it is a good question because we’re working towards agreeing that art is more often than not, not free in capitalism but can there be instances where they are…

YL: I thought that the last part of his text was interesting because when he’s saying “art and life would rather belong to the world,” it has a negative connotation... contrasting to what follows, “rather than be free in it.” Also you would think that he meant to say, “be free from it,” suggesting an escape from the world of inequity. But he’s sort of saying even within the system, art can be free inside of it, right? I thought that was an interesting, nuanced statement, and I want to pose this question to you, since you are still in the system, the LA art scene.

PJ: Are you saying that you’re not part of a scene because you are in Jeju?

YL: [laughing hard] That’s how I felt when I moved to Jeju, but with COVID I don’t think that’s true anymore because the internet in some ways amplifies the presence of the international art scene.

PJ: I think art has always been in network and in communication across borders and that capital gives more value to the kind of art that travels or is part of the international scene. LA or New York may have a very specific local scene but these major cities give the impression that if you’re part of their local scene, you’re somewhat seen internationally. So I think that art still depends on this kind of network. But the thing that is different with COVID is that people are more proactive in participating across countries and timezones.

YL: Yeah, that’s actually what I mean. I thought I left, by relocating to an island, a countryside, but COVID definitely brought me back to the network.

Yujin Lee, Painting Conversation, 2021, collaborative drawing performance with artist Jo Ahra, paintings completed over 4 sessions (March 19th, 21st, 23rd, 28th), Next Door to the Museum Jeju Artist Residency completed painting used as a costume for an improvisational dance video (work in process)

PJ: I want to also argue that maybe even if our locations are specific, that doesn’t mean that we’re not part of a larger network that has formed us.

Whether you like it or not, your context will always be informed by the experience you had in New York.

YL: You’re right. I thought, ‘physically leaving New York= leaving the art world.’ But the reality is, like you said, my experience as an artist is based on my time in New York. So, I’m probably going to carry that with me. So back to my questions on Chan’s statement… We’re all part of this world that is not very equitable... How can we be part of it, yet “be free in it?”

PJ: I want to believe that there is some sort of freedom.  When you give away a certain part of the bargain and that bargain being monetary or investment by some sort of institution to give value to your art, to me, by abandoning that, I feel much more free. And I’m able to have full ownership of decisions around my work, which would not be the case if I was trying to respond to a certain expectation.

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Seven Springs, 2019, Collaboration with Chris McKelway, 2 violins, 2 overhead projectors, images printed on transparencies, colour filters

Yujin Lee is a Jeju-based visual artist working with drawings, performances, videos, and audience-participatory projects. Interested in the Buddhist concept of yuanqi (interdependency), Lee have pursued collaborative projects with artists Emi Hariyama (108 Bows, 2013), Nicole Won Hee Maloof (Same/Difference, 2015), Aracha Cholitgul (im_there_r_u_here, 2020~ongoing), and Jo Ahra (Untitled, 2021~ongoing). Since 2019, she has been running an alternative artist residency at her farmhouse, Next Door to the Museum Jeju. Lee received her MFA in printmaking from Columbia University and a BFA in painting from Cornell University.

leeyujin.com @jejuanarchist

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai is a transdisciplinary artist, working across performance, video and installation, based in Los Angeles. Born in Thailand in 1989, they were raised in Europe before moving to the US in 2011. They received their Visual Arts Degree from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Metropole and a License in Film Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. They earned BFA at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and MFA at the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco. Featured in the 2015 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona. Recipient of the SOMA Summer Award, Mexico City and the emi kuriyama spirit award.

Recent projects include: Fieldnotes for Useful Light, The Prelinger Library (San Francisco), Irrational Exhibits 11: Place-Making and Social Memory, Track 16 (LA) and The Anthropologist As Hero, in collaboration with Linda Franke, Justine Melford-Colegate and Jessica Hyatt, PAM Residencies (LA), Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, Fulcrum Press (LA). They curated the MAHA Pavillion for the Bangkok Biennial 2020.

www.primasakuntabhai.com @prima_jalichndrsakntbhai

[ahouseoflies]

Best Films of 2017, Part III

Part I is right here. Part II is right here. Let’s keep it moving. PRETTY GOOD MOVIES 67. Kingsman: The Golden Circle (Matthew Vaughn)-  Exactly, eerily, as good as the first one. Make a hundred more of these stupid candies and wrap them individually in wax paper. 66. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (Chris Smith)-   As a movie about the effects of fame: 5 stars As a movie about the inherent lie of acting: 4 stars As a movie about making a movie: 2 stars As a well-structured documentary of its own: 1 star 65. The Wall (Doug Liman)- War movies often topple under the weight of their messages, but that's not The Wall's problem. To his credit, Liman is worried about making this a thriller first, even as he's showing off the competency of the soldier at its center. There's no music, and the camera plants you subjectively in Sergeant Issac's field of vision. (The John Cena character is named Shane Matthews, but he ain't even SEC). Even at 80-something minutes, however, the film feels long, telegraphing its way from one plot point to the next, and its dark ending comes off as a too-clever shrug. If your movie is about the war, then make it about the war. If it's using the war as a backdrop, then make it about something. 64. Fist Fight (Richie Keen)- Once you start thinking about its logic on any level, it falls apart. (The whole reason schools are bad is that they can't find good teachers, so why would they be so intent on firing the ones they have?) And it's full of fake problems. (Oh my God, he might not make it to his daughter's talent show in time!) But this worked for me overall. Some jokes fall flat, but there are so many that you can just wait for the next one to land, particularly if it's from the salty mouth of standout Jillian Bell. The script, full of meticulous callbacks, creates a full, satisfying arc for the protagonist as well. 63. Brad’s Status (Mike White)-  A confused movie that is an easy, sort of Italian watch in the way that it so literally spells out its emotions. Even five years ago, this tale of a middle class White man's entitled bellyaching would have been told straight. Now it exists only because it weaves into the narrative people who check the Stiller character's privilege. Because the character's jealousy is communicated so truly and fiercely, it almost seems as if Mike White wants to tell a story but knows he shouldn't. That sounds like faint praise, but it's a fascinating experience. 

62. Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman)- For about an hour, this felt like a movie I had seen before. "Oh, why can't I get it up? I, uh, must have had too many drugs. Definitely not because I'm gay 'cuz I'm not." It was, due to the underplayed performances and the careful composition, better than some versions of that movie, but not by much. Then, the last leg of the film gets mission-focused. Without giving anything away, rather than being just about heterosexual performance, it becomes about homosexual performance and heterosexual performance at the same time. The protagonist is challenging his straight friends within the rules of what they've determined and outside of them. Those layers pile on until the bravura final shot. I just wish it had hooked me sooner. 61. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (Macon Blair)-  I preferred the Encyclopedia Brown fumbling at the beginning to the violent consequences at the end, but I realize that's how amateur detective movies work. I probably would complain if the film didn't open up in scale. The story is fairly simple, which, coupled with an assured visual style that is open to mystery, suggests that Macon Blair might have a real future as a director. He's not trying to do too much. Lynskey is absolutely perfect by the way. 60.  Life (Daniel Espinosa)-  Cool enough at the beginning and the end to excuse a few logical missteps in the middle. Still, without giving anything away, I'm recalling a fork in the road in which the film could have gone the easy, dumb way, and it went the more difficult, realistic way. I hadn't seen Espinosa's other movies, but he shows an assured hand here, especially with the rapturous gore. I can't say the same about Ryan Reynolds, who sleepwalks through a role that might as well be called You Know, a Ryan Reynolds Type.   59. The Zookeeper’s Wife (Niki Caro)-  It goes pretty hard for PG-13, and there isn't much wrong with it--the passage of time gets haphazard in the second half maybe. But personally, I think I'm all good on Holocaust stories. 58. Landline (Gillian Robespierre)- It's basically a Woody Allen movie if Woody Allen had an affinity for rollerblades instead of bad jazz. Most of the laughs come from the '90s milieu; in fact, I'm not sure if this movie would even be a comedy without the setting. Despite some of those easy laughs (and some laborious ribbon-tying at the end), the screenplay does a few difficult things well. I'm thinking in particular of a scene in which Falco and Turturro have to confront and punish their daughter. We've already been told that she gets forced into the bad-cop role, and he skates above the fray as the favorite parent. But to actually see that dynamic in action during this scene, which begins with him whispering that the mother is coming, is kind of thrilling. The performances are good: Slate is dialed up to a higher pitch than she was in Obvious Child, and newcomer Abby Quinn comes through when asked to carry long stretches. At first, I wondered why John Turturro had signed up for such a nothing part, but as his arc blossoms in the film's second half to become a quiet MVP. He gets to remind us that no one else can play an unrealized sad sack quite like him. 57. The Unknown Girl (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)-  I wish I had a unique take on this, but everyone else is right: It's a minor work from great filmmakers. There's some real psychology here--a woman in transition sublimates her upward mobility into a search for truth. And as a mystery, it works fine. But there's a tedium and a distance, despite the usual Dardenne tricks, that keeps it from hitting home. 56. The Glass Castle (Destin Cretton)-  There are too many characters in real life too, I guess. Far less focused than Short Term 12, The Glass Castle is an admirably sincere piece with some powerful sequences, but it gets way out of hand in the last twenty minutes. Recommendations for a movie that finishes with the point "It's okay to hate your dad"? 55. The Disaster Artist (James Franco)- James Franco reveals himself to be a workman-like director, a brilliant actor, and the best real-life brother of all time. Having a James Franco performance like this but giving top billing to Dave Franco is kind of like eating birthday cake but giving top billing to the plate. Playing a clown-fraud like Tommy Wiseau exposes an actor to artifice. Commit too much, and it's a stunt; commit too little, and it's a wink. I don't know exactly how he does it, but James Franco walks the tight-rope precisely. Dave Franco, playing a nineteen-year-old for some of this, is in over his head. If you've ever seen a well-done amateur Shakespeare adaptation, you know the electricity that comes from the company's freedom, when they realize they can do what they want with this supposedly sacrosanct work. So imagine how much fun professionals are in re-staging a work that is objectively terrible. At its worst, The Disaster Artist feels like a trifle. At its best, however, that feeling of putting-on-a-show is what comes across well.

54. Manifesto (Julian Rosenfeldt)- I knew this was various incarnations of Cate Blanchett--a homeless man, a conservative housewife, a broker--performing artistic manifestos. But I didn't know the most clever twist, which is that the manifestos are blended into one another, so that a line of Marx alternates with a line of Tzara with a line of Soupault. That dynamic approach brings to light how confrontational and immature all of these types of writings are, not to mention the collaborative spirit most of those writers had. Your mileage may vary based on your tolerance for intellectual bullshit, but I scratched my chin contentedly. The pairings of the manifestos to the settings are clever, and my favorite was probably a eulogist talking about dadaism at a literal funeral. As artificial as what I'm describing sounds (and yeah, by the eighth or ninth one, you'll check your watch), Blanchett finds an observational truth. The performative posture of a schoolteacher, the pause for fake laughs of a C.E.O., the paper shuffle of a news anchor: She remains the real thing. 53. Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)-  Now that I have taken a shower to wash off the movie's bleak grodiness, I appreciate its solid plotting and grindhouse super-sizing. Like Bone Tomahawk, Zahler's previous film, Brawl in Cell Block 99 takes about an hour to get where it's going. (The inciting incident is technically at 1:08.) I assume the fat is there to develop the protagonist, but I think about twenty minutes could be shaved off. Zahler's rhythms might make for an excellent TV show, but something about that '70s exploitation poster makes me think we won't find out. 52. Columbus (Kogonada)- Columbus wrestles with the balance of information and inspiration. The Cassandra character prevents the Jin character--I'll ignore the gross name symbolism--from looking a date up on his phone because she wants to be able to recall it herself. Earlier than that, the Jin character tries to impress her with knowledge of a building, but she blows him off when he admits that he memorized it from a book he had read earlier in the week. Would that thought be somehow more pure if he had retained it over years? I think that type of calculus is what the film is concerned with, so it makes sense that it centers on architecture, an art of identity as much as it is a science of measurements, an expression as much as it is a utility. If the paragraph above makes it sound as if the movie is up its own ass, running on Sundance fumes through its meth subplot, then you'd be right. I had just enough patience to admire it as a promising debut. 51. The Book of Henry (Colin Trevorrow)- Colin Trevorrow's best film is always compelling--for different reasons in the compassionate first half than it is as it's careening off the rails in the final third. But it's always compelling. You can't complain about all studio movies being the same, then not appreciate something this fundamentally godless and bizarre. 50. Kong: Skull Island (Jordan Vogt-Roberts)- People rag on the DC Universe films for being too serious and dark, but there's no limit to how dark a movie can go as long as it's balancing that mood with something else. Vogt-Roberts gets that, and Kong: Skull Island is a cut above most of these entertainments because he has a deft handle on tone. The film can get scary because it's so silly and fun at other times. Plus, if you have Jackson, Reilly, and Goodman selling your lines, they can be as dumb as you want. Even if the other sequences never reach its level, the first helicopter setpiece is dope, in part because the actual fighting of the monsters is dynamic. Skull Island is pretty far from Brazil, but Kong's chokes, holds, and throws owe a lot to jiu-jitsu. It seems like a consistent piece of design at least. Can we talk about Tom "The Tight Sweater" Hiddleston though? Vogt-Roberts has no idea how to introduce him properly, but he is an absolute zero in the role that is supposed to be heroic. The script doesn't do him any favors--the American army is taking orders from this British mercenary because...--but he is a vacuum of charisma. He's not dangerous in any way, and his blah blah my dad died backstory is delivered with no conviction. I don't get it. 49. T2: Trainspotting (Danny Boyle)- It's a perfectly pleasant experience to see these characters twenty years later--Boyle has a few nostalgic tricks up his sleeve--but "pleasant" is a backhanded response to something as vibrant and essential as the original.There's a meta-reading of T2 that admits that everyone involved is struggling with the same issues as the characters, but even that is kind of like returning to your middle school and realizing that the basketball rims weren't actually that tall. And how do you mess up the music?

48. Brigsby Bear (Dave McCary)- There are some huge ideas on Brigsby Bear's mind. The weight of nostalgia versus genuine affection is there. Caring versus pitying is there. Then there's the idea that drives it: If you're the only person who appreciates a work, does that diminish it in some way? How important is collective experience to art?Those ideas are suggested by the screenplay by Kyle Mooney and Kevin Costello, but they aren't wrestled with directly. Especially in its structure, Brigsby Bear is more conventional than its mysterious introduction and Mooney's bonkers comedic sensibility would have suggested. 47. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh)- Three Billboards flew by for me, and I loved Sam Rockwell's iceberg of a performance. But I was held back by the same elements that hampered Martin McDonagh's other work. There's some profundity lurking in the Harrelson voice-over, and you can't tell me that you didn't get the chills from McDormand's raw scream as her son holds her back from putting out a fire.But it's over-written in the first half--"HOW RESPONSIBLE ARE WE FOR OTHER PEOPLE?" might as well be on a storefront on Main Street. And McDonagh, a real poet of the profane at his best, is so willing to go for the easy joke that he undoes a lot of his own subtlety. Even before the dreadful final five minutes, there's too much plot and too many characters.Perhaps it's an issue of expectations--this would have been a satisfying video store find back in the day, but I'm not sure something so out-of-control should be up for All the Awards.   46. Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadignino)- For me, this is Guadignino's third straight film in which an emotional urgency underneath never quite equals the lush, meticulous, yet inert exterior wrapping. That being said, Chalamet's performance forces nothing, and the character is a uniquely novelistic creation: knowing everything, practicing mystery, but wearing his confusion on his sleeve. Despite an overall shapeless quality, the film brings everything home in the poignant moments near the end. One of those moments is a five-minute "it gets better" speech by Michael Stuhlbarg. By that point I think most of my audience was willing to go there, but I hesitated to buy it. You can't spend two hours being a movie about what isn't said, then switch over to a movie in which everything is laid out on the table. Then again, that's my exact Guadignino problem. 45. Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris)- Dayton and Faris show as little tennis as possible because they don't know how to make it look interesting. Carell sleepwalks through his role. There's a lot of "Here's plot point A" type dialogue. We're told about King's dedication to the game, but we aren't really shown it. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a Clinton-Trump allegory, and Dayton-Faris expected Clinton to win like everyone else did. But Battle of the Sexes still goes down smooth, mostly because of the tender love story between Billie Jean King and Marilyn Barnett. In fact, every time the film cut to something else, I wanted more of those women discovering each other. I'm a student of Movie Stardom, so I've given Emma Stone her due as a Movie Star. But this is the first time I forgot I was watching Emma Stone. The scene in which Billie Jean and Marilyn meet is an impressionistic, sensual haircut. Marilyn calls Billie Jean pretty, and based on the complicated reception of that compliment--a stumble but not a stammer--you can tell Billie Jean didn't get that much. As written, King is a strange mixture of inward flailing and outward tenacity, and Stone breaks hearts with it. It's not often that one performance can give a movie a reason to exist, but that's why they play the games. 44. King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword (Guy Ritchie)- It's hard to remember a film more uninterested in its own storytelling, and it's even harder to remember a time when I saw that as a strength. If nothing else, the permanent fast-forward button that Guy Ritchie holds feels like a fresh corrective against other self-serious origin legends. I say "origin," but this movie actually feels like a trilogy unto itself, with the excellent initial twenty-five minutes covering about thirty years at a breathtaking pace. The score, which incorporates human breath, makes that literal. Ritchie fashions King Arthur into a scrappy orphan story, so there's a bit of his underdog imprint, but he also sort of assumes that we know the basics of the King Arthur story and yada-yadas a lot. Merlin gets mentioned only by name, Excalibur never gets named, and Arthur literally cuts in line to pull it out of the stone. By the end some of the visuals look like Killer Instinct for the N64 with a code to turn CGI embers all the way up. But I prefer this to the three-hour version that the studio accountants no doubt expected to receive.

43. War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)- For better or worse, this movie plays for keeps. Aided by Michael Giacchino's second masterpiece of a score (after Up), the film lets the action speak for itself, going for long stretches without any dialogue. It culminates in the exact go-for-broke ending that I keep asking for. But am I the only one who feels a bit of cognitive dissonance with these movies? The audience I saw it with applauded at the end, but it's hard for me to buy in that way for something that is so dour and self-serious while also being goofy. Like, I'm really supposed to learn about the lessons of work camps from CGI apes? The commitment behind the apes' design is admirable--how has this series not won any effects Oscars yet?--but is the storytelling strong enough to transcend those tricks? It's novel, but I'm not sure it's new. Matt Reeves crams the film with Apocalypse Now allusions, and though I was thoroughly entertained, I couldn't help but think this was Apocalypse Now for people who will never see Apocalypse Now.