#carnivalesque

[roadkill-dreaming]

ARE YOU HUNGRY?

A story about those who revel in the grotesque- about the inherent contradictory nature of dogma- about the red string of fate being pulled so tightly that it strangles. Nothing but meat and candy.

My debut novel- AVAILABLE NOW

[katebvsh]

Bold and beautiful Carnivalesque @ Maison Margiela Spring Summer 2024

[ghnosis]

the carnivalesque and Ghost pt 1 of ???

"[The gaping mouth] is, of course, related to the lower stratum; it is the open gate leading downward into the bodily underworld. The gaping mouth is related to the image of swallowing, this most ancient symbol of death and destruction."' (p. 325)

"The medieval public centered its curiosity on [the gaping jaws], expecting the most amusing and comic protagonists to emerge from them." (p. 348)

[ghnosis]

the carnivalesque and Ghost part 2 of ????

🤡🤡🤡

[caphetekla]

[stardustandrockets]

What was your favorite read of January?

I read 5 books in the month of January. Two review books, one reread, a manga, and a semi-new release. I'm quite proud of my start for the year.

I'd recommend all of these books, but The Whispering Dark was my absolute favorite read this month. So many of my favorite things in one book and Colton Price is my favorite!

Books include: • Wotakoi vol 2 by Fujita • A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske (reread) • Above the Fold by Tamara Girardi (eARC) • The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew (favorite!) • Midnight Duet by Jen Comfort (eARC)

[creative-joseraph]

[neuxue]

gotta say, 'poetry recitation as pain management' is not one i was expecting on my just-like-me-fr crawford of lymond bingo card and yet here we are

[suits-of-woe]

you can tell i'm too deep into shakespeare studies because i've started developing a mental list of plays that are not good, not bad, but interestingly bad maybe on purpose in a way that makes them somehow loop back around to being good

[fappellmoan]

why do so many tiktok dancers try to keep a comically straight face when dancing like do you know how strange this is. no yeah don’t let me know you experience joy as a human being or anything. what

[fortheturnstiles]

oh YES

[ghnosis]

yes

next question

do the papas count as drag personas?

[ghnosis]

historical, theoretical, contemporary context

for. over a year now. I have been working on this document my uni calls a "confirmation of route" which is sort of like a contextual review or a lit review and also a crystallization of my project.

so I have 10k words to talk about my methodology, the structure of my proposed thesis document, as well as the historical, theoretical, and contemporary contexts my thesis will build on and sit within.

and it has been. so fucking excruciating. trying to parse that out?

I know I'm looking at identity, freedom of expression, and some element of spirituality/spiritual freedom. I know I'm building on Black feminist ideas of identity and politics without biology. I know I'm looking at Gothic fashion and self-expression, as well as self-expression and community in punk. I know I'm looking at queerness and anonymity, or more like pseudo-anonymity... ghesties are playing at being ghouls bc to be ghouls is to literally wear a mask, to have a persona, right?

I think, at this point, three years in, if I had to explain my thesis to you in one sentence, it would be

Ghost is the carnivalesque space where gender and sexual euphoria can manifest.

we use words like "rabbit hole" to describe how we came into the fandom, because (whether we recognize the linguistic tie or not) we fell like Alice into a topsy-turvy world where Satan is good and everything we thought we knew (about what a band that looks like Ghost could sound like, about what we thought we'd like, about who we were) turns out to be incorrect or warped slightly. this is ghnosis - reflecting on the truths about ourselves as Papa or the Ghouls show them to us.

[duncebento]

i could write more about it but the reason ppl like rachel dolezal and oli london, bhad bhabie, that tiktok fake hippie chick with the hair mats ETC. get popular enough to have this big platforms is because white ppl view racism as a taboo and thus when they see someone make racism a personality they wanna stare at that person like a car crash.

of course the only socially acceptable way to obsess over caricature-level racists is by harping on about how strange or problematic they are— so u might find a white creator make ten tiktoks about one racist as though it’s anything but content production at that point….and you’ll notice that by that point in time the creators of color will have moved on, because racism is not carnivalesque to us but in fact quite quotidian. it’s annoying and revealing to me that if a racist is absurd and quirky enough their racism will GROW their platform as people flock to hate-watch their interviews and stoke their engagement via epic clapback comments

[probablyasocialecologist]

We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco. But we know enough to understand that this is an explosive milestone in the growing, if scattershot, revolt against big tech. We know that self-driving cars are wildly divisive, especially in cities where they’ve begun to share the streets with emergency responders, pedestrians and cyclists. Public confidence in the technology has actually been declining as they’ve rolled out, owing as much to general anxiety over driverless cars as to high-profile incidents like a GM Cruise robotaxi trapping, dragging, and critically injuring a pedestrian last fall. Just over a third of Americans say they’d ride in one. We also know that the pyrotechnic demolition can be seen as the most dramatic act yet in a series of escalations — self-driving cars have been vocally opposed by officials, protested, “coned,” attacked, and, now, set ablaze in a carnivalesque display of defiance. The Waymo torching did not take place in a vacuum. To that end, we know that trust in Silicon Valley in general is eroding, and anger towards the big tech companies — Waymo is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google — is percolating. Not just at self-driving cars, of course, but at generative AI companies that critics say hoover up copyrighted works to produce plagiarized output, at punishing, algorithmically mediated work regimes at the likes of Uber and Amazon, at the misinformation and toxic content pushed by Facebook and TikTok, and so on. It’s all of a piece. All of the above contributes to the spreading sense that big tech has an inordinate amount of control over the ordinary person’s life — to decide, for example, whether or not robo-SUVs will roam the streets of their communities — and that the average person has little to no meaningful recourse.

[sgiandubh]

Anon rebelde.

Menudo giro de guion para las antis, Sam y Cait juntos en un evento para fans donde no están obligados por Starz a participar, ya sabes, ese tipo de eventos con dinero de por medio que sus acérrimas fans siempre han afirmado que Cait no hace porque ella no es de esa clase de engañabobos como es Sam, siempre pensando en como hacer caja a costa de los bolsillos del fandom. Con eso demuestran que ya han pasado página de un fandom tóxico y empeñado en hacerlos parecer menos que compañeros de trabajo para hacer lo que les place, nadie haría ascos a una Venecia carnavalesca, sacándoles de paso ese dedo medio que tan bien saben utilizar y que creo que de aquí en adelante van a usar mucho más.

Dear (returning) Anon Rebelde,

Una vez más, llego muy tarde a responder a tu interesantísimo comentario. Sin embargo, esta vez, me atrevo a decir que lo hice por buenas razones: simplemente, encontré tu comentario provocativamente alentador. Me hizo pensar aún más en el asunto de Venecia, sobre el que ya se han mencionado muchas cosas. Sin embargo, faltaba algo, y ese algo es una perspectiva cultural más amplia. Pero, antes que nada, traduzcamos lo que me enviaste:

'What a plot twist for the antis, Sam and Cait together at a fan event where they are not forced by Starz to participate, you know, those kinds of events involving money her Stans have always claimed Cait doesn't do, because she's not that kind of con artist like Sam, always thinking about how to make money at the expense of the fandom's pockets. With that they show that they have already turned the page on a toxic fandom bent on making them look less than coworkers, and do whatever they like to do. Nobody would turn down a carnivalesque Venice, and they chose this giving the fandom that middle finger they know how to use so well, and that I think they will use a lot more from now on.'

Everything you wrote, dear Anon Rebelde, and then some more. If I weren't one of their favorite targets, I could even feel #sorry for this entire bunch of #silly people, who are now legitimately freaking out in public silence and inbox mischief. All of this just because their basic, binary tropes (S is a cheap scammer, C is an intangible saint) are seemingly being shaken to the core by what yes, is a very interesting and ironic plot twist. Granted, this is still an OL-ish related event, but it is just not your usual sort of event (a con, a panel, a promo-related interview) and it happens just as shooting is now completely over. It will be very difficult for all those people who are probably dumbfounded (and not in a good way) by this, to forget they were barking with great confidence no later than last week, that S and C will NEVER DO ANYTHING ELSE TOGETHER, that SHE WAS WAY OVER OL AND THAT PEASANT, that HE WILL DISAPPEAR INTO ALCOHOLIC OBLIVION AND SHE WILL OH, THE PLACES SHE'LL GO ON HER OWN. It turns out the opposite seems to happen and it goes to show spitting upwards is never a great idea, lest it would land on your own head. Therefore, we are met with a lot of sobriety and zero comments on those Mordorian outlets: when it's inconvenient - minimize, minimize, minimize and hope for better days (hooker, Tracula, Alphabet Fitness Harem, Orange Influencer, Brazilian fan with an agenda, etc).

Granted, this is not 'fair Verona', but literary tropes are very powerful and magic, like that, and it is almost impossible not to think about what happened there, 'when ancient grudge broke to new mutiny' (I hope I remember it correctly, as I write this). In other words, it is impossible not to think about the ballo in maschera at the Capulet's mansion, even if the official theme of the event is (oh, the irony!) Casanova's Venice (half of Mordor has no idea who that fine gentleman was, LOL). It also goes without saying the entire thing will probably look rather like Baz Luhrmann's interpretation...

... than the very aesthetically pleasing, but totally stiff Zeffirelli version:

Granted, this is happening in the context of the (nowadays) very touristy Venetian carnival, a horrific hullaballoo few people, snobbery put aside, really and honestly enjoy. But it is exactly the irony of this that seemed perhaps the most important of it all. In a form of poetic justice, the pretext is Carnival, that almost ridiculous, nonsensical, borrowed time of collective foolishness. You'd even be tempted to not think twice, yet there is nothing more dead serious and subversive than Carnival itself, and it has been like this since the Roman Saturnalia feast, when slaves turned into masters and masters into slaves, if only for a crazy day. Its deep meaning is not really about allowing freeform fornication in dark alleys and a brief respite before the long, austere dullness of Lent. Its deep meaning is, perhaps above anything else, about a giant, collective middle finger to what is perceived as oppressive, absurd and coercing authority. Since I suppose those fine minds across the street never read Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, where everything is explained with luminous clarity, they will have to either believe me or shite over the same inbox you sent your comment to, first thing in the morning. Sometimes, truth seeps through chaos. Sometimes, things are not what they seem to be. Oh, the irony!

I am not even saying SC are aware of the...uhm... metaphorical implications of their choice to attend a rather profitable event. I am pretending to even ignore the fact that at such events, the invited co-presenters or hosts are, more often than not, real life couples, too. All I am saying (since apparently I have to thoroughly, boringly explain absolutely everything I write) is that this tiny coincidental detail gave me pause and a contented chuckle.

And with all this, I still haven't watched that Paley panel. Will do, in reasonable time. Thank you for dropping by, Anon Rebelde - it is always a stimulating pleasure.