#and when i edit the theme it says it's supposed to affect both the web and the tumblr app

[destiel-wings]

so last night I did a little remodeling and I've been trying to use a google font for the name of my blog, messing around with the html of my page but the fancy font won't show up in the app 😕 does anyone know why and how i can fix that?

[lemmetellastory]

Okay but, i want Loki to look at Tony’s outfits and he sees that Snow White one,  Loki is active in social media, and half of the ideas comes there, so he got the idea that he is gonna make Tony a real Snow White and magic him.

It started out as animals coming to Tony, birds tweeting around his head, squirrels around doing things and when he was in Compound, a DEER came, and all other animals too.  No one knew what to do. They didn’t want to hurt animals, animals didn’t hurt Tony or anyone else, there was like a lot of flowers and nuts and rocks and other things they bring, but they didn’t cause trouble, well, trouble for other than Tony because they were following him, everywhere, even in the labs.

Meanwhile, Loki was in his cat form and came with animals and watched Tony while he suffered from animals affection. No one detected him yet and he can easily come on go out of compound that way so he used it to spy on Avengers.

But Tony also fed this animals and sometimes pet them and Loki was a little bit put out the first time Tony petting him caused purrs. But he went back and got more pets.

Everyone was okay with it at that point and they even called the Strange to come look at what is going on but Sanctum was busy and a few animal following Tony had to wait while they dealt with more serious threats. But they were all keeping an eye on Tony.

It just got to the point where it was a new normal when Tony never showed up to an Avengers meeting. They thought he forgot or something but Friday told them she couldn’t wake him since yesterday afternoon and he was still in lab, sleeping.

They got Tony out of lab and tried to understand whatever was going on. Animals were still coming with seeds, nuts, flowers and etc and they were trying to build a shrine around Tony. That finally got everyone freaked out and they called in Strange again.

Strange came and tried to understand what was going on, the magic wasn’t malicious in the roots but there was a spell and it was trying to complete it is task. Real problem was, he didn’t know what completed task would have cost the Stark. For all he knows, to complete it, the man might have to die.

That made everyone more nervous and it was Peter who found out what was going on because he and Friday was looking everything Tony did since the animals started to show. And that was he who realised Tony went to sleep after eating an Apple Pie.

Others tried to look into the pie for possible drugs and other things but Peter got a chart that he went into a Tony’s Snow White colors outfit and social media, and he kinda had to explain everyone that he was following Loki’s social media and he was fun, okay, and Loki tweeting about it, while Loki was watching them in his cat form.

Rhodey was the one who asked if they need to be a prince charming and kiss Tony awake. Peter was pretty sure it was gonna work while Strange was saying they need to bring Loki and ask, what end purpose he cast this spell. Peter’s cries of he is a mischief god, what purpose he would do this otherwise was never heard.

While they all go for the look for Loki, Loki was just sitting next to the Peter and they were both watching Tony sleep. Peter was absentmindedly petting him when Loki decided to talk.

After a nearly heart attack, and Peter was adamant that just because he was young or a superhero, it didn’t mean he couldn’t have a heart attack if a cat started to talk, Loki was offering him a little bit water to calm him down. Peter asked if he came to finally end the curse.

Peter while he had the theme of Snow White on his own, completely forgot that the ending needed a kiss and when Loki went for one, he didn’t know what was going on was shouting and trying to hide his face because Loki was kissing his father figure there but at least it was a peck and he wanted to ask if he couldn’t just lift the curse without the kiss but Tony slowly waking up distracted him.

On the other hand, Tony found the Loki on his face and his brain was telling him to be alert but he was still sleepy and after a second he found Peter hugging him that he woke up finally, how much stressed he was and all that while Loki just smirked an vanished from the room.

After others were alerted to Tony waking up and Peter explaining that he asked Loki to lift the curse and Loki lifting the curse and Peter needing a brain bleach for it and Strange finally declaring Tony didn’t have any more magic on him, everything a little bit settled on.

Tony was… well, uh, he was well rested. He didn’t get a sleep like that for a long time and his body was telling him that was appreciated very much. And even if he did sleep for a while, he was… able to sleep more normally, well, for Tony normal. And he might have thanked Loki, but the god did kiss him, so he was not gonna thank him for it.

And okay, waking up to Loki’s face and his searching gaze and fingers on his chin might be engraved on his mind. Or apparently Peter and Loki had some kind of friendship going on social media and Peter might have sweared that Loki did help him one time or two, but he helped with daggers so he was not going asking his help anyway. He went for Doctor Strange for help, not Loki, and Peter going Doctor Strange for magical help was another thing he didn’t know, and he have to have talks with them because his teenager was apparently needed more help. 

Even if Peter argued he was the one who found out what was going on, nothing would have stopped Tony to have the talks. And Peter was telling Loki did Prince Charming kiss to wake him and he had to deal with that before Peter got more ideas to do secretly.

And animals still didn’t left completely. Birds had settled down. Mouses were no where to find, most of the wild forest folk left. There is still a few bunnies or squirrels or cats, but that was normal amount and unless you hand fees them, they are not following anyone around.

Well, there is a black cat that still went into Tony’s lab or settled down next to Peter for pets. Peter named him Kitty but people might have heard him say Lokitty a few times. And that cat was also never around when Strange or any other magic user comes into the compound.

Tony did have a talk with Loki. And they might have had a kiss, or more. And maybe, just maybe, he was sleeping better. Tony didn’t know if it was Loki’s magic or not.

It took a nearly year for him to find out the “Kitty” was Loki himself and yes, he did slept in his room, on his bed when he was a cat too. And listened Tony rambling and yes, Loki was cheating with when to appear or needed and might have cause mischief just for the giggles. And he might have helped sometimes.

It took 5 years, 5 whole years to learn that Loki never had to kiss Tony to wake him up. Loki could have let the magic go any moment. Thats what Strange told them. Peter might have accidentally webbed Loki’s mouth shut because he caused so much need for brain bleach, really. And Lokitty didn’t get pets for a week.

Edit: Instead of an Apple Pie, it could have been an Apple tech, mainly it might be the iPod SHIELD took from Darcy and somehow it ended in Tony`s hands and he was looking what it was and after he took it, he got sleepy. But it felt like more Sleeping Beauty, i don`t know, why Tony eat Apple Pie in his lab also a mystery to me but whichever works i suppose.

Edit2: Darcy finds out where her iPod is and then it is now a magical artifact that causes the sleeping beauty sleep. Made by Loki. She goes for a punch while Peter the real reason why Darcy learned where it is in the first place watches. 

[caveartfair]

What Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” Could Have Learned from Art History

Still from Roma, 2018. Courtesy of Netflix.

At first glance, two of this year’s Oscar-nominated films, The Favourite and Roma, have little in common. In the former—an amalgamation of English palace intrigue, dark humor, and vibrant costumes—Olivia Colman gives a stunning performance as the fickle Queen Anne, while Emma Stone plays Abigail, her conniving servant. Roma, on the other hand, is a serious and methodical domestic story, raised to an epic scale, about a family in Mexico City and their maid, Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio). Nevertheless, the pair of movies, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and Alfonso Cuarón, respectively, share an important theme: They’re both, at their core, about the hired help.

History is full of male painters, writers, and filmmakers who have tackled the subject of women working for their own aesthetic and political aims. Portrayals of workers often suggest a larger economic message, advocating a more equitable society; it’s difficult to discuss such characters without thinking about class. From Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose portrait The Laundry Worker (1884–88) features a woman staring wistfully out a window, to J. Howard Miller, who created the iconic Rosie the Riveter poster, international artists and designers have tried to make the motif feel striking and new. Ultimately, while Lanthimos’s work is a surprising and rewarding entry into the canon, Cuarón’s falls short as he relies on tired tropes.

Paul Gauguin, Washerwomen at the Roubine du Roi Arles , 1888. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

From a moral standpoint, Roma’s Cleo is a much better person than Lanthimos’s Abigail. Cleo dutifully serves her mistress, Sra. Sofía, going so far as to risk her own life to save the woman’s children from drowning in the ocean. Besides an early moment of gentle rebellion, when Cleo and her cleaning companion, Adela, laugh about their employers’ idiosyncrasies, she is unflinchingly loyal, never expressing anger, frustration, envy, or resentment. Even when her boyfriend, Fermín, impregnates and then abandons her, she remains calm. The film glorifies this approach to life. Cuarón’s camerawork nearly shouts: “Look at her fortitude! Her goodness! Her total inability to make petty complaints!” Like Paul Gauguin’s Washerwomen at the Roubine du Roi Arles (1888), which reduces faceless, working female figures to bulging shapes and vehicles for blocky color, Cuarón’s film diminishes Cleo’s individuality, in service of the work’s larger ideas.

Under a lesser director, The Favourite’s Abigail could have fallen prey to an alternate stereotype. She sleeps her way into power as she initiates a sexual liaison with the queen, then marries her way into respectability as she weds a baron. But she’s no worse than anyone else in her universe, where cleverness reigns and loyalty is for suckers.

Still from The Favourite, 2018. Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Lanthimos drives the plot forward through Abigail’s sharply articulated desires, but under Cuarón’s direction, Cleo hardly seems to want anything. In a moment that’s supposed to feel like a revelation, after her baby is delivered stillborn, we learn that she didn’t wish to bear her child after all. In the end, we’re only left with a sense of what Cleo doesn’t want, which weakens both the character development and the larger narrative.

Richard Brody, a film critic at The New Yorker, has already scolded Cuarón for his failure of imagination. “Watching Roma,” he writes, “one awaits such illuminating details about Cleo’s life outside of her employer’s family, and such a generously forthcoming and personal relationship between Cleo and the children in her care. There’s nothing of this sort in the movie; Cleo hardly speaks more than a sentence or two at a time and says nothing at all about life in her village, her childhood, her family.” Though Brody’s sentiment is sound, it’s not just Cleo’s backstory we’re missing, but her entire personality. Even painters have been able to achieve a more significant sense of interiority with mere brushstrokes. In Edgar Degas’s Women Ironing (ca. 1884–86), for example, a woman’s open-mouthed yawn becomes a highly specific moment of vulnerability, a character-defining action that easily generates a larger personal story in the mind of the imaginative viewer.

Image from the set of Roma, 2018. Courtesy of Netflix.

Though we also learn little about Abigail’s background, Lanthimos clearly sketches her indomitable will to power, skillfully creating a larger web of intrigue. Given the complexity of its female characters, it’s no surprise that The Favourite was co-written by a woman, Deborah Davis, who, last fall, told the Los Angeles Times: “It was the first example in English history where we see not only women in power but wielding power.” Lanthimos himself told the paper: “I saw this opportunity of creating these very complex female characters that you rarely see onscreen. It was a period piece, but at the same time it also felt so relevant to today.”

But when Cuarón speaks about Roma, the director discusses his impulses as purely personal—his affection for his own childhood nanny, Libo, motivated him to make film. So it’s strange that he demonstrates more love for the formal elements of his craft than for her character. If it’s a gorgeous movie to watch (and to listen to—the sound editing is lovely), it can also feel hollow. Bound too closely to reality, perhaps, Cleo ironically feels less real.

Pablo Picasso, Woman Ironing, 1904. © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Washerwoman and Child, ca. 1887. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In Lanthimos’s tale, Abigail’s character transcends her title. She’s not just a domestic servant, but a person vying for power. Anyone with a twinge of inner nastiness (all of us, I’d argue) can relate. Cleo, on the other hand, never becomes more than the family’s maid: Her individuality is always subservient to her role. It’s difficult to empathize with such pure characters, mostly because they don’t actually exist. While we can sympathize with the sacrifices she has made, it’s harder to get swept up in her story.

Like a Communist propaganda poster, but less sharp-edged, Roma idealizes the working class, Cleo becoming a mere stand-in for why we should pay more attention to those less fortunate. A more distinctive portrait of a working woman, albeit in a different format, is Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period painting Woman Ironing (1904). In the work, an angular woman bends over a table, pressing an iron onto a rippling surface. Her eyes are shadowy, her hair tendrils delicate. It’s a moving picture, brimming with the sense of her individual spirit. When he created the picture, Picasso was an impoverished artist himself. Recently, the Guggenheim’s research team discovered that beneath the surface, Picasso had first sketched a man. To create such an evocative picture, perhaps, he had to see a bit of himself in his subject first.

from Artsy News

[victoriagloverstuff]

Edmund White: Reading is a Passport to the World

When I was a little child, my sister, who was nearly four years older, was astonished that I couldn’t read. We were in my mother’s old Ford, driving around the main square of Hyde Park, and my sister pointed to a sign and said, “You honestly can’t read that?”

“No,” I said sullenly. “What does it say?”

“Graeter’s,” she announced triumphantly, the name of Cincinnati’s premier ice cream maker. “Can’t you see that? What does it say to you?” She wasn’t being mean; she was genuinely puzzled. Reading was a magical portal—once you passed through it, you couldn’t even imagine going back.

I must have been four. Two years later I could read, or at least “sound out” syllables (that was the method then). When I realized that I could interpret these hieroglyphics, I felt so free, as if a whole new world had been opened to me. Now I could herar a chorus of voices, even those coming from other centuries and cultures. I was no longer bound to the squalid here and now, to my mother’s web-spinning of agreeable fantasies or my father’s sudden eruptions of rage, to the sweating summers of that age before air conditioning.

I remember toddling into my mother’s room, where she was taking a perfumed bubble bath in the late afternoon. I announced (or maybe thought), “I’m free. I can read.”

Could I really have had such an improbable thought at age six? Or have I just told myself that that thought occurred to me then? And yet I remember my mother’s sweetness, the good smell, the afternoon sunlight, and my very real feeling of joyful liberation. And, quite concretely, reading has always struck me as a passport to the world, one in which characters are more real than actual people, where values are more intense than in the dim light of reality, where characters fly up into destinies rather than paddle around in ambiguity.

I felt like a blind person who’d just regained his sight. I was no longer a Cincinnatian but rather an earthling. If things were clearly written in English, there was no text that was off-limits. I never read the standard children’s classics. No Wind in the Willows. Only recently did I get around to Treasure Island.

In my twenties and thirties no book was too ambitious for me; I worked my way through Theodor Adorno and Heinrich von Kleist, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, though I was drunk most of the time and often had to hold one eye shut. I suppose I was hanging out with a pretty brainy crowd back then, and I felt I had to keep up. I doubt I retained much, though in my thirties and forties I reviewed several books by Barthes and Foucault.

I was so driven back then, it never would have occurred to me to reread a book! My goal was to have read everything, or at least the major works that appealed to me, that seemed essential. Perhaps because I’d never done any graduate work, I felt inferior. I’d never read The Faerie Queene. Worse, I’d been a writer for eight years for Time-Life Books, the ultimate home of the middle-brow. Although I invariably said defensively, “I’m not an intellectual,” I wanted to be one—or at least to be able to refuse demurely that title. Sometimes I took comfort in the idea I was an artist, not an intellectual. I even resorted to the ridiculously snobbish notion I was a “gentleman amateur” and not an intellectual. But I’ve always wanted to have the choice to join any club, especially one that might reject me. For instance, I made a major effort to join the Century Club, for which one had to be sponsored by 11 or 12 current members. Two years after I was accepted, I resigned. Too many lawyers.

Now I do reread at least two books every year—Anna Karenina and Henry Green’s Nothing. Although these two novels are so different one from the other, they both reward closer scrutiny, so much so they scarcely resemble the same book one remembers having read the year before. People complain about the Kitty and Lvov parts of Anna Karenina, but that’s a frivolous charge. Their love stands in dramatic contrast to Anna’s and Vronsky’s passion and is the necessary counterweight to that tragic tale. In the same way, some readers treat Nothing the way they regard all comedy—as lightweight. Actually it is a profound study of the generations and social classes—and unexpectedly it sides with the older, richer people.

“Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity.”

The other book I’ve reread five times in my life is Proust’s. When I was a teenager I read it as the bible of snobbism; it gave me a whole vocabulary to describe this vice that Proust calls “narrow but deep.” Now I read it as the definitive condemnation of snobbism.

For my memoir, I’ve reread a few favorites by Colette, Nabokov, and Tolstoy and read for the first time novels by Guyotat, Giono, and Malaparte. Do we prefer to revisit books we love or to explore the unknown? Are we happier to find new things in the old or to detect familiar themes and strategies in the utterly new and startling? The brilliant novelist of modern manners Alison Lurie once explained to me why she was more popular in England than in America. “For the English I’m writing about an unfamiliar subject [American academic and artistic life] in a familiar style of social satire, whereas for Americans I’m writing in an unusual style about familiar subjects.” Has she touched on an explanation of why we like certain books and not others?

*

Joe Brainard reportedly said on his deathbed, “The best thing about dying is that you never have to go to another poetry reading.” How many times I’ve had to sit through poetry readings in a stuffy room with subaqueous light at the end of a long day and fight against falling asleep! The mind loves a narrative, and in my half sleep my poor brain has spun cartoons made up of chance words, my embarrassment, trace memories (what Freudians call dismissively “the daily residue”), and my shipwrecked will to wake up, or at least not snore.

Everyone says poetry is an oral art, and perhaps some of it is meant to be read out loud. Good actors can make us understand passages in Shakespeare that use obsolete language, though I hate it when pedants hope to indicate the line break or the caesura. I could never make sense of The Tempest until I saw it onstage. On the page I could never keep track of all the characters. Charles Lamb argued in an essay that reading Shakespeare is preferable to seeing him produced, and maybe hammy acting and garish sets and thundering exits and entrances do topple certain of Shakespeare’s cloud castles, but great performances can dial into sharp focus even the vaguest verse.

But does modern poetry gain from being recited out loud? James Merrill was a smooth, trained reader and the smile in his voice could give the reader permission to laugh at his improbable mixture of metaphysics and gossip. His light social tone so often gives way to the sublime that a reader less civilized than he scarcely knows what is funny and what is serious (sometimes both at once, since he thought wisdom was expressed in puns and that the language itself is the collective unconscious).

Percussive poetry like Pound’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon The Seafarer as read by the author himself to the beat of drums can be riveting; a casual scanning of the page would never render the granitic, prehistoric force of this masterpiece. In his recitation (now on YouTube) Pound rolls his r’s, thuds the final d’s, and maintains a shaman’s monotone. Maybe Paul Verlaine’s musical verse (or John Keats’s) is improved by being read out loud, but most 20th- or 21st-century verse is too abstract or too dense to be understood on a single hearing. The mise-en-page, the line breaks, the Latinate or Anglo-Saxon origins of the words, as in tomb and grave (“The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay”)—these are all elements that surrender themselves only to close reading.

With prose the problem is the speed. Everyone reads at a different pace, and some texts are not interesting or intricate enough to be dosed out at conversational speed. We get it; we want to scan it. Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity. It may be valuable for the fiction writer to gauge the response of his audience, to listen for contradictions or unintended echoes, to detect where people’s attention wanders. But do these practical benefits for the writer outweigh the torture undergone by the public?

Silent, solitary reading (if the book is good) is the best conversation, with all the uhs and ahs edited out, the dead metaphors buried, the dialogue sharpened, the descriptions vivid, the suspense rising, the characters hovering between the unique and the representative. In the great Italian and French guides to good conversation during the Renaissance and 17th century, conversation must avoid pedantry and cruelty and seek above all to please and to entertain. Finally it must be natural; affectation is the worst sin, far worse than flattery, which may even be desirable. In her definitive study The Age of Conversation, Benedetta Craveri (granddaughter to the philosopher Benedetto Croce) argues that good conversation should not make anyone feel inferior or ill at ease but rather the object of a total consideration. And Simone Weil, the French religious philosopher, thought paying attention was a form of prayer.

The novelist or essayist should never mystify for no good reason. We should know why the marquise goes out at five o’clock (if it’s relevant). In an essay we should not be thrown off by academese. An idea may be difficult, but not its expression, as I learned from my beloved Marilyn; the words should be as lucid as possible. The assumption should be that the reader is intelligent but not necessarily informed.

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