#dialogue cribbed from my other project

[rad-roche]

flexing my weak and flimsy valentine muscles after being out of practice

[miloscat]

[Review] Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 (PS5)

All new, all different.

After co-developing the first NASB, Fair Play Labs took over as lead developer for the sequel, with Ludosity (and several other studios) handling more minor contributions to the project. Fair Play have put a firm hand on the rudder, retooling the game in a major way while adding a substantial single player mode. But is it the better game? Well... yeah, but there's some nuance.

Load into a match and you should notice immediately that the zippy pace of NASB1 has been pulled back to more closely resemble the platform fighter that all others crib from, Smash Bros. Then examine the movesets and mechanics, and you’ll see that many of the quirks and tweaks that Ludosity had implemented have also been stripped away. We still have separate fast and strong attack buttons and aerials, but in other details, and in the game feel, NASB2 clings almost desperately to Papa Sakurai’s blueprints.

There are some innovations. A new slime meter builds up from your actions and can be spent to power up moves, arrest your launch, or other technical tricks in addition to a Final Smash-esque super move. Hmm, actually this is a lot like Brawlout’s rage meter now that I think about it… but I think they make better use of it here, with more options available from its use.

Other big changes come in the roster. Fun choices from the first game like Toph, Sandy Cheeks, or Powdered Toast Man are gone, as well as CatDog and Oblina along with representation of their shows entirely. Unfortunately many of the new choices that replace them aren’t too exciting for me personally, apart from the excellent Angry Beavers, while Azula as a new Avatar brawler is one of a few much-needed villainous additions. Upcoming DLC will also add Zuko and Iroh, making for an oddly imbalanced preponderance of firebenders.

It’s not just a handful of new fighters though; basically all the returning characters (of the ones I tried) feel new due to sweeping revamps to their movesets. The three that feel most similar are Garfield, Jenny, and Rocko, who were added to the original game post-launch, which points to Fair Play implementing them as part of a “lead takeover” as indicated on their website. The returning stages too have been redesigned with new layouts.

One addition that’s an unequivocal improvement is the story mode, a roguelite campaign that sees you build up perks to take into expanded “classic mode” style runs. In these, you choose paths that may have you 1v1 other fighters (unlocking them for use in this mode), bash a mob of enemy mooks drawn from the various cartoons, play minigames like break the targets pop the balloons, get powerups from shops or handouts, and finally face a boss (then repeat this three times for a complete run). There’s some variety, an addictive little loop, and a bit of fun voiced dialogue along the way, as well as more fanservice by way of NPC characters, including some of the first game’s cut fighters. It’s exactly what I wanted out of this sequel (although the actual plot is a bit Danny Phantom-heavy for my taste).

Some of the strengths of the first game remain, of course. It still looks great, although I did notice the occasional animation error or too-frequent bit of jank. The voices are at the same high standard, with either “returning veteran” or “spot-on soundalike”, including a recast of Korra to actor of colour Jacqueline Grace Lopez, at Janet Varney’s request. Oh, they also recast Aang but that’s nothing new, this is like the tenth time it’s happened.

NASB2 leaves me with mixed feelings. It’s an extremely playable game that’s still a grand tribute to Nicktoons past, with some essential new features like the story mode… but at what cost? Fun content and a whole lot of design from the first game have been wiped away. These big shifts are interesting, in that it makes the sequel stand out significantly from its predecessor… while also validating it in a strange way. Ultimately NASB2 isn’t really replacing NASB1; by way of 2 deciding to be different, 1 stays unique and special. I think I can live with that.

[otterskin]

Inverted Mobius, Mr. Tesseract and The Avatar of Truth

The mystery of the weird collar has deepened, thanks to @nebulousfishgills​ - by which I mean they totally solved it.

To those just joining me, I noticed this in my previous breakdown of the Loki trailer here.

Mr. Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, has an ‘inverted suit’. His collar is an indentation in his suit, rather than going on top of it.

So, first, a scene from Endgame that I seriously did think of when we learned there was a character called ‘Mobius M. Mobius’ in Loki (played by Owen Wilson). And yet I didn’t put this together. Thanks again to nebulousfish for making me realize that these things might not be coincidences.

When Mr. Stark is inventing time travel, he asks his AI to create a depiction of a Mobius Strip, inverted.

Which gets him this:

Anyway, what is a Mobius Strip, and who is Mobius M. Mobius? (Not to be confused with Morbius the Living Vampire, though wouldn’t it be funny if he was mistaken for Mobius M. if this show gets big first?)

I am not a quantum theorist or comic book aficionado by trade, so let’s do a Wikipedia-Fu on it.

In mathematics, a Möbius strip, band, or loop (US: /ˈmoʊbiəs, ˈmeɪ-/ MOH-bee-əs, MAY-, UK: /ˈmɜːbiəs/;[1]German: [ˈmøːbi̯ʊs]), also spelled Mobius or Moebius, is a surface with only one side (when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space) and only one boundary curve. The Möbius strip is the simplest non-orientable surface.

An example of a Möbius strip can be created by taking a strip of paper and giving one end a half-twist, then joining the ends to form a loop; its boundary is a simple closed curve which can be traced by a single unknotted string. Any topological space homeomorphic to this example is also called a Möbius strip, allowing for a very wide variety of geometric realizations as surfaces with a definite size and shape. For example, any rectangle can be glued left-edge to right-edge with a reversal of orientation. Some, but not all, of these can be smoothly modeled as surfaces in Euclidean space. A closely related, but not homeomorphic, surface is the complete open Möbius band, a boundaryless surface in which the width of the strip is extended infinitely to become a Euclidean line.A half-twist clockwise gives an embedding of the Möbius strip which cannot be moved or stretched to give the half-twist counterclockwise; thus, a Möbius strip embedded in Euclidean space is a chiral object with right- or left-handedness. The Möbius strip can also be embedded by twisting the strip any odd number of times, or by knotting and twisting the strip before joining its ends.

A Möbius strip does not self-intersect but its projection in 2 dimensions does.

Uh....right. Well, that clears everything up, doesn’t it?

Let’s crib off someone else’s work. Thanks to Thomas Wong on Medium, I was able to understand this a little better.

A Möbius strip is just a strip of paper, turned and taped together. It it only has one side, so an ant walking along the strip eventually returns to where he started. If we metaphorically interpret the ant, not as returning to a point in space, but a point in time, then it alludes to time travel.

...

As previously discussed, after a measurement, the quantum mixture (half born and half never born) becomes a definite state (born or never born). Finding the “spectral decomposition” is to find all the possible energies (eigenvalues) and states. Using these, one can determine how a quantum object evolves with time.

Combining this with the metaphoric interpretation of the Möbius strip, it could be that Stark found how to make quantum objects evolve such that they revisit a point in time, hence time travel.

Okay, that’s a little easier to understand. So how does this relate to the character Mobius M. Mobius, aside from him being named after the strip and the (apparently antiquated) ideas about time travel?

Well, he was based on Marvel Comics Legend Mark Gruenwald, a guy known for his passion for the lore of the comics, which he knew in innate detail. He even wrote the Official Handbooks and whatnot. Likewise, Mr. Mobius is a stickler for detail and one of the few members of the TVA even allowed a face - although it is off the rack, as he’s one an infinite number of clones (god I love the TVA so much already, it’s heaven for a Douglas Addams fan like me).

Despite being a clone, he rose through the ranks and is nearly the top guy, serving only underneath Mr. Alternity (and I am not familiar with these comics so feel free to correct me). Mr. Alternity has almost no comics history, but is based on editor Tom Brevoort.

There are several other misters, all of them near-identical to ‘Moby’. Mr. Orobourous, Mr. Paradox, Mr. Tesseract (!) and Mr. Oburos. They are also minor characters, but let’s look at all these names.

Clearly they are named after quantum theories of some-sort or another.

Mr. Mobius: Mobius Strip Theory - the idea that, essentially, is about the shape of time itself and the theory of traveling along that shape.

Mr. Alternity : Alternative universes

Mr. Ouroboros: A divine figure representing the beginning and the end of time in an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Mr. Oburos - I’m not sure, but I think this is a variant of Ouroboros. 

Mr. Paradox - Temporal paradox, causal loops - ex. The Grandfather Paradox

Mr. Tesseract - An object that exists in 4 dimensions. Time is often called the fourth dimension.

Obviously that last one is interesting, considering how the Tesseract will be the start of our adventure. The Cosmic Cube was renamed for the MCU, and in the comics has no relation to this minor character.

But what if it now does?

What if Tony has caused a change in the very appearance of Mr. Mobius when he inverted the Mobius Strip - literally inverting his clothing because he changed the shape of the Mobius - does that mean that these seemingly human-looking misters are in fact some sort of avatars for aspects of time itself? And if Mr. Tesseract is representative of how space and time intersect in the fourth dimension, wouldn’t a rogue god twisting space and time with the device that shares his name cause him some affect? Perhaps why the TVA noticed something was amiss to begin with.

This would be a departure from the comics, but the characters have almost no history there. They are ripe for new ideas.

Or, then again, since Loki will be working for the TVA - perhaps he’s the one who becomes ‘Mr. Tesseract’?

But continuing with that ‘Avatar of Aspects’ idea, let’s get away from this sausagefest for a second and visit my next newest favourite character -

I’m guessing she’s one of the Justices of the TVA. What gives it away? The imperious look, the giant oaken table, or the fact that I’m suddenly self-conscious when she looks at me? It’s the last one, of course. She’s a natural judge.

Of the named TVA judges, there’s :

Justice Goodwill, Justice Hope, Justice Liberty, Justice Love, Justice Might, Justice Mills, Justice Peace and Justice Truth.

Could they also possibly be avatars of their respective aspects?

If I had to guess, I’d say this is Justice Truth, as pairing up Loki with an avatar of Truth seems like it’d be a smashing good time, similar to how he was paired with Verity Willis in the comics. She might even be a composite character with Verity.

Verity’s power is detecting and seeing through all lies and illusions. I think this powerset will be given to Justice Truth, except instead of deriving it from a magic ring that she swallowed, she’d simply be the actual ‘Embodiment of Truth’ - and let’s get real here, when I said ‘Avatars of Aspects’, I was using that clunky phrase because the more obvious one - God of - is already ‘taken’. So Justice Truth may well be the ‘God of Truth’, as it were.

I think she’ll end up in something of a buddy-comedy with Loki, giving him someone to bounce off against who literally cuts through his carefully crafted veneer.

I’m reminded of a great quote from Taika Waititi when he was talking about what he wanted to do with Loki in Ragnarok:

��(He’s) someone who tries so hard to embody this idea of the tortured artist, this tortured, gothy orphan...It’s too tiring trying to be like that,” he says. “And, most humans, we get over ourselves, we get to that point where we’re like, ‘man, being a tortured artist is actually, like, a lot of work. Maybe I should just be real and present, and just be me, and I don’t have to be a tortured artist to be interesting, I can just be a f*cking weird New Zealander and that’s enough.”

...I think Taika is a living Loki, tbh, ha ha. No wonder he gets it.

Waititi, Yost, Pearson and Kyle did great work to cut through Loki’s illusions, both with dialogue and the visual allegory of his projections being dispelled by handy thrown objects, culminating in the very sweet ‘I’m here,’ scene at the end of the film. Loki seems to be much more open and expressive at the end of that film, and it seems like a weight has lifted off his shoulders.

But while this new Loki (Loki 2.0? Loki’s Show’s Loki? Loki II? Lokii? Lokii.) is shown a clip show of Ragnarok (one I previously theorized will be deliberately incomplete), that’s quite different from actually experiencing it, and he’ll be as performative as he was in Avengers and Thor 2. Instead of processing that ‘lack of presence’ as he did in Ragnarok, which came about as a result of Thor finally seeing through Loki’s illusions (guess he doesn’t fall for it anymore) as a result of their long history together, I suspect the band-aid will be torn off much more harshly by a total stranger who nonetheless simply sees through him.

Loki in general has a bad relationship with the truth (see the famous Vault Confrontation scene), and literally putting him on trial before the Truth Herself would certainly be enough to get him to switch from this phony expression:

To this one:

That’s not much of a facade there.

It’s not the same character arc as Ragnarok, but it does get us to a similar place, albeit in a darker and less healing way for Loki. I mean Lokii.

Anyhow. That’s what I got out of this thing.

[barkadasesh]

"SOMEONE WHO BELIEVES IN YOU"

Jack and Jill were good childhood friends. Their path crosses at the wide woody and wild forests for the very first time. They became friends since then - they treat each other as a family, not by blood but through souls. They had a lot of ups and downs and memories to cherished together yet after some few struggling years, both completed their studies and went apart and take their own paths.

Jack, once called the good boy, achieved his dream profession. It is one of the most diverse and versatile field at engineering - mechanical engineering. And hell yeah! It was really a once in a lifetime career where he designs power-producing machines as well as power using machines. He became one of the most famous mechanical engineers in New York and it provides him strong annual salaries. Despite of being at the highest peak of success, he just continuously frittered away his life and his fortunes taking up an immoral habit of practices such as alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, drugs and he is also a well-known womanizer committing sexual immorality.

At the other side of the globe, jill worked so hard to be able to put forth effort toward a certain goal. And that is to own a vast hectare good for a farm not just for herself but also for the whole community. The planet needs nutritious and affordable food and that requires thoughtful and intelligent people to grow it – and that’s her! She believes that this world needs someone like her. In the fullness of the time, she set specific goals and standards so she can work out her farm. And in just a month of dedicating lingering, it is sufficiently good, enjoyable and successful to repay her effort, trouble and expenses.

Early in the morning, Jack was awake by a loud snooze from his high-pitched alarm clock telling it is already 7 o’clock in the morning. “Argh! Yeah, I know I know!” He scornfully covered his annoyed face by his malleable squared pillow. “Aish! Could you please give me another five more minutes?” He exclaimed resentfully. He slightly crumpled his eyes while yawning stretching his arms wide open before he turned off his blatant clock. He went back lethargically like he is pulling of his king-sized bed. He lie down once again on his crib but as soon as reach the climax of his fantastic dream, a very rambunctious bang from his door makes him stood and jumped out of his cradle. “Now what?” he said ostensible. “Son! I think you should stand on end now.” It is his dad who summons him on the other side of his bedroom’s entryway. “Come on dad, can you please knock?” he responded annoyingly while scratching his head. “Come on son! It is already 7 o’clock early in the morning. Are you just going to take a load off and fucked up the rest of your day today?” “Yeah, whatever dad!” He no longer waited his dad to counter his immature reply then he shut down the door then started fixing his self for another sunrise-to-sunset working day.

Same time of that busy day, Jill woke up early before daybreak to get ready to grind for another productive day at his hustling farm. She ascertained that she will be doing good today in managing all the works in the land for its maximum fertility. So that, when the crop ripen, they can orderly harvest it by hand, combine or mechanical pickers. “Today is the day to lead and guide ‘em in caring the crops!” She exclaimed. “Good morning Miss J!” greeted by Juan, a young maintenance and repair boy who is responsible for upkeeping the farm. “I did tighten the loose fences.” he reported. He is sharp as tack in many kinds of labor that’s why Jill trusted him so much. “Wow! Job well done, Juan!” she complimented. “Day by day, you’re doing better. Keep it up, kiddo!” She smiled at him then proceed at inset.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU JACK?! YOU’RE NOT GIVIN’ A DAMN TO YOUR WORK ANYMORE!” YOU ARE NOT LIKE THAT BEFORE. YOU WERE ONCE THE MOST SENSIBLE AND WELL ARTISAN BEFORE!” shouted by Jack’s officer-in-charge directly to his frowning face with a sharp glare towards his boss. So obvious that he is suffocated by the scenario. “I apologize but I think you cannot feasible this project anymore. You are fired.” “You can’t do this to me freaking old man.” He rebuttals. “Yeah we can. Why not?” giving him a smirk before walking away from Jack. “Let us see if you will survive that fuckin’ stupid project without me and my power.” he mumbled as he left the company. After he got fired, he recured from life-threatening vices. And that’s how he spent his life. Days, weeks and months had passed and his life is becoming worst until he loathed his continual nonsense practice and decided to have an out of town to take a break to a place with a peaceful ambiance. He immediately packed his things up and started driving.

“How I wish I could be that young good child again.” he bleakly chuckled as he lay down on his bed at vacation house. “Oh well, gonna spend these weeks with a chill.” he sighed and head to nearby coffee shop. “1 Caffè Americano, please. Thank you!” then he handed they payment. “Kindly wait for a moment at this table, sir. Thank you!” and the polite barista guided him to his table. As he sat down while scrolling through his smartphone, he suddenly heard a gleeful voice from the counter. “Good morning, Miss J. I’ve been waiting for my fair-haired customer today!” “HAHAHA, still a facetious young boy. Please give me a Blonde Vanilla Latte.” she replied with an over the moon. “Aye! Aye, Miss!”. Unexpectedly, Jack was surprised to hear the voice, he known it very well. He peeked at the lady waiting at the counter and he is more wonder-stricken to saw who it was. “Jill?!” he exclaimed aloud. “Jack? Its been years! Hey how you doing pal?” giving an expressions of pleasure as she saw and walk towards the directions of Jack. “Oh well hi. You look gorgeous right now. You are no longer that crybaby girl just like the old days.” he responds with an unbelief tone. “Uhm, I am already a mechanical engineer. Didn’t you hear some news and articles about me? I am one of the most popular identity at New York.” he continued. “Ooooh! Cool! Well, here I am. I already owned and managed a farm in this town. Wanna come and take some visit? Guess you’re on a vacay?” said by Jill with a convincing tone. “Farm? What an inferior profession. But, sure! Lemme see your farm.” stating it with full of indignity.

Jack offered a ride on their way to the farm. “So, tell me, what are you doing in a place such as this, your majesty?” he asked while looking directly at the uneven surface of the road. “Oh well, I found my purpose here. I enjoyed here. That’s why I stayed here for good.” respond by Jill without even looking at Jack. “Purpose, eh. What a concept?” “Yeah! Purpose. The reason or feeling of being determined to do or achieve something. If you dig deeper, through that purpose I am capable to make others happy. Spending time as much as possible with them to make this world a better place.” Jill explained with full of hope. “Corny! What we have here in this world is nothing but an unfair system and toxic people around us. You had to trust no one. Because in the end of the day, you only have yourself.” Jack looked at Jill like he knows what’s right. “In the end of the day, it is you who will believe in yourself, in what you have, and in what you can do. Because no one was truly concern about you. It’s you, all by yourself. If I were you, you should take my advice. I’ve been there.” he continued. “Well, I cannot blame you with that. You had a good point anyway. Now tell me, what are you doing in a place like this Mr. Engineer?” A moment of silence enwrapped inside the car between the two. “I’m having a break.” he started. “A break? From what?” inquisition of Jill while sipping on her coffee. “I am on my downfall as of this moment.” obviously averting the dialogue. “Come on, spill it. I can lend an ear, just like the old days back then.” Jack too a deep breath then started to tell the whole story. “It was really a fantasy when I achieved my dream profession, which is to be a mechanical engineer. All my life, I worked hard for it. I spend my whole life for it. Yet, the worst part of here was when I started to lose from track. I used to take vices such as alcoholic beverages, multiple boxes of cigarettes and drugs. I also used to be involved in multiple times of wrong relationship full of immorality. I became a womanizer and a heartbreaker. I no longer find my purpose. It seems that I am living my own selfish ways. Little by little, my life was ruined. And now, I don’t have any idea on how will I started again from the very beginning, on how will I fix everything. And yeah, that’s how my life went.” He narrated hopelessly. “I see. I guess that was really a sad ending. But, you know what, despite of what had happened to you, there’s still hope. I guess you just need to take some time to evaluate yourself and to check something out from those painful experiences. And yeah, you’re right when you told me that at the end of the day, you only have yourself. My tip, take this opportunity to heal, my dear friend. You have to help and lift yourself up. And don’t you worry. I am still here to believe in you. I know you can do that and become the better version of yourself. You just have to be patient and work it out.” Jill recommended believing that she can convinced Jack. “Yeah, I guess so. I’ll try.” “Don’t try, do it.” And again, silence engulf inside the car between them.

Days and weeks had roll down, and Jack follow all the tips and advises of Jill. He started to evaluate his self. Separating right things that gives value to his life and surrendering negative habits that deteriorating his life. He also cut off his connections to those ladies that leads him to sin. Jill helps her to brings out the best in him, finding his purpose and creates a better vision. Then, it started his life to change from nothing to something, from zero to hero, from better to best.

"You know what, dear, sometimes, we don't need to have a luxurious life and luxurious things just to make ourselves happy. I had realized that sometimes, what we really need is someone who will believes in us and respects us. And, thank you for being one, Jill. Because of you, I found my purpose and I had a changed life better than my life before. I know God allowed us to meet again intentionally so that I'll be no longer slave to sin. You are just not a friend, but a family who truly cares. I owe you so much. How can I pay you for this?" Jack asked Jill." Pay it forward, Jack. Just pay it forward. Do to others what I have done to you." and Jill gave her sweetest smile. Few months later after their encounter, Jack went home." Good morning dad! I miss you!" he hugs his dad so tight that seems to be the first time." Dad, I just want to ask for forgiveness for what I have done before. I promise to be better this time. I love you dad!" Then, Mr. Johnson hugged him back, "I am so happy you're back again, son. You're forgiven." After that day, his relationship with his dad was restored and Jack was now back right on track. He spent his life doing the right things, multiplying his self to others. And that's how he made his own legacy.

(Short Story by Claire Montero)

[letterboxd]

The Package.

As the bonkers genre thrill-ride Shadow in the Cloud blasts into the new year, writer and director Roseanne Liang unpacks her love of Terminator 2, watching Chloë Grace Moretz’s face for hours, and the life lesson she learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-Pei.

Roseanne Liang’s TIFF Midnight Madness winner Shadow in the Cloud landed with a blast of fresh genre energy on VOD platforms on New Year’s Day. It’s A-class action in a B-grade body, cramming plenty into its taut 83 minutes, including: a top-secret package, a freakish gremlin, a hostile bunch of Air Force dudes, outrageous stunts, dogfights and a fake wartime PSA that feels remarkably real.

Throughout, the camera is focused mostly on one face—Chloë Grace Moretz’s, playing British flight officer Maude Garrett—as she tackles all of the above from a claustrophobic ball turret hanging under a B-17 Flying Fortress, on a classified mission over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

While the film’s tonal swings are confusing to some, schlock enthusiasts and genre lovers on Letterboxd have embraced the film’s intentionally outlandish sensibility, which “makes excellent use of its genre mash to create an unpredictable, guilty pleasure,” says Mirza. Fajar writes that “it felt like the people involved in this project knew how ridiculous it is and gave a hundred and ten percent to make it work. Someday, it will become a cult classic.” Mawbey agrees: “It really goes off the rails in all the best ways during the final third, and the last couple of shots are just perfect.”

Chloë Grace Moretz and her top-secret package in ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

To most of the world, Liang is a so-called “emerging” director, when in fact, the mother-of-two, born in New Zealand to Chinese parents, has been at this game for the past two decades. She has helmed a documentary and a romantic drama, both based on her own marriage; a 2008 short called Take 3, which preceded Hollywood’s current conversation about representation and harassment; and Do No Harm, the splatter-tastic 2017 short in which her technical chops and fluid feel for action were on full display, and, as recorded in multiple Letterboxd reviews, established her as one to watch.

Do No Harm scored Liang valuable Hollywood representation, whereupon producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones brought Shadow in the Cloud to her, thinking she might connect with the material. “It did connect with me on a level that is very personal,” Liang tells me. “As a woman of color, as a mother who juggles a lot.” She says Kavanaugh-Jones then went through the process of removing original writer Max Landis from the project. “He felt that Max was not a good fit for this project, or for how we like to run things. We like to be respectful and courteous and kind to each other…”

In several interviews, Liang has said she’s comfortable with film lovers choosing not to watch Shadow in the Cloud based on Landis’s early involvement. What she’s not comfortable with is her own contribution—and that of her cast and crew—being erased. While WGA rules have his name attached firmly to the project, the credit belies the reality: his thin script, reportedly stretched out to 70 pages by using a larger-than-usual font, was expanded and deepened by Liang and her collaborators.

Writer-director Roseanne Liang. / Photo by Dean O’Gorman

That team includes editor Tom Eagles, Oscar nominated for Jojo Rabbit, actor Nick Robinson (the titular Simon in Love, Simon) and Beulah Koale, a star of the Hawaii Five-Oh series. The opening newsreel was created by award-winning New Zealand animation studio Mukpuddy, after a small test audience got weirded out by the sight of a gremlin in a war film, despite well-documented WWI and WWII gremlin mythology. It’s an unnecessary but happy addition. The cartoon style was inspired by Private Snafu, a series of WWII educational cartoons scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss and directed by Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones.

But the film ultimately hangs on Chloë Grace Moretz, who overcame cabin fever to drive home an adrenaline rush of screen craft, in which the very limits of what’s humanly possible in mid-air are tested (in ways, it must be said, that wouldn’t be questioned if it were Tom Cruise in the role). Liang would often send directions to Moretz’s ball turret via text, while her cast members delivered live dialogue from an off-set shipping container rigged with microphones. “I just never got sick of Chloë’s face and I’ve watched her hundreds, if not thousands of times. You feel her, you are her, she just engages you in a way that a huge fighting scene might not, if it’s not designed well. Giant empty spectacle is less interesting than one person in one spot, sometimes.”

Ambitious and nerdy about film in equal measure, it’s clear there’s much more to come from Liang, and I’m interested in what her most valuable lesson has been so far. Turns out, it’s a great story involving Chinese veteran Cheng Pei-Pei (Come Drink With Me’s Golden Swallow, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Jade Fox), whose film training includes a tradition of remaining on set throughout filming.

Roseanne Liang on the set of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

That meant that, during filming of Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, Cheng would stay on set when she wasn’t required. “In New Zealand, trailers are a luxury,” Liang explains. “I said ‘Don’t you want to go to the trailer that we arranged for you?’ ‘No, I just want to sit and watch.’ ‘Why do you want to watch it, you’ve seen it hundreds of times!’ And she said ‘I learn something new every time’. To Pei-Pei, the secret of life is constant education and curiosity and learning. Movies are her work and her craft and her life, and she never gets bored. If I can be like her, that’s the life, right?”

Speaking of which, it’s time we put Liang through our Life in Film interrogation.

What’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the movie that is at the top of the mountain that I’m climbing. To me it’s the perfect blend of spectacle, action design, smarts and heart. It poses the theory that if a robot can learn the value of humanity then maybe there’s hope for the ships that are us. That’s perennial, and possibly even more pertinent today. It holds a very special place in my heart, along with Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

What’s your earliest memory of watching a film? I have a cassette tape that my dad made for my grandma in 1981 (he’d send tapes back to his mother in Hong Kong). I was three years old and he had just taken us to see The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. And he can’t talk to my grandma because I’m just going on and on about R2-D2. I will not shut up about R2-D2 and he’s like, “Yes, yes I’m trying to talk to your grandmother,” and I’m like, “But Dad! Dad! R2-D2!” So it’s actually an archive, but it’s become my memory.

What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not the sexiest, but it’s the most romantic. That last scene, those last words where she goes “But you’re gonna be like this forever and I’m gonna be like this forever…” and he just goes “okay”. That to me is one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen. It is a perfect movie.

And the scariest? If it’s a horror movie, the most scared I’ve been is The Ring. I was watching it on a VHS and I was lying on a beanbag on the floor and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, because I felt that if I moved she’d see me! Also, American Psycho just came to me this year. I caught the twentieth anniversary of that movie, which is a terrifying film, and again, possibly more relevant now than when it was made. The scariest film that’s not a horror is Joker. It scared me how much I liked it. When I came out of the movie, I was like, “I’m scared because I kind of love it, but it’s horrible. It’s so irresponsible. I don’t wanna like this movie but goddamn, I feel it.” Like, I wanted to go on the streets and rage. In a way we’re all the Joker, we’re all the Batman. That duality, that yin and yang, is inside everyone of us. It’s universal.

What is the film that slays you every time, leaving you in a heap of tears? This is a classic one, the opening sequence of Up. The first ten minutes of Up just destroy me every time. I also saw Soul a couple of days ago and I was with the whole family and I, just, if I wasn’t with the whole family I would have been ugly-sobbing. I had a real ache in my throat after the movie because I was trying to stop [myself] from sobbing.

Tell me your favorite coming-of-age film, the film that first gave you ‘teenage feelings’? Pump Up the Volume. Christian Slater! Off the back of Pump Up the Volume, I fancied myself as a prophet and wrote a theater piece called Lemmings. Obviously the main character was a person who could see through the façade, and everyone else was following norms. “No one understands me, I’m a prophet!” So clearly I have this shitty, Joker-style megalomaniac inside of me. It was the worst play, and I don’t know why my teachers agreed for us to do a staging of it!

Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis in ‘Pump Up the Volume’ (1990).

Is there a film that you and your family love to rewatch? We’ve tried to impose our taste on our children, but they’re too young. We showed them The Princess Bride—they didn’t get it. We literally showed our babies Star Wars in their cribs. That’s how obsessive Star Wars fans we were.

Name a director and/or writer that you deeply admire for their use of the artform. I have a slightly weird answer for this. Can I just give love to Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos? They are my film school. I was thinking of my love of Edgar Wright, but then I thought of their video essay on Edgar Wright and how to film comedy, and his essay on Jackie Chan and the rhythm of action and then their essay on the Coen Brothers and Shot Reverse Shot. I must have watched that 30 times ahead of the TV show that I’m making now. I started out in editorial and Tony Zhou is an editor and he talks about when to make the cut: it’s an instinct, it’s a feeling, it’s a rhythm. I realized the one thing in common that I could mention about all the films I’ve loved is Every Frame a Painting. It’s their love of movies that comes bubbling out of every single essay that they made that I just wanna shout out at this part of my career.

Were there any crucial films that you turned to in your development for Shadow in the Cloud? Indiana Jones was something that Chloë brought up—she likes the spiffiness and the humor of Indiana Jones. Sarah Connor was our touchstone for the female character. For one-person-in-one-space type stories, I watched Locke quite a lot, to figure out how they shaped tension and story and [kept] us on the edge of our seats when it’s only one person in one space. In terms of superheroes, I came back to Aliens. Not Alien. Aliens. You know, there are two types of people in this world—people who prefer Alien over Aliens, and people who prefer Aliens over Alien. But actually I think I vacillate for different reasons.

Can there be a third type of person, who thinks they’re both great, but Alien³, just, no? Maybe that’s the best group to be in. We don’t need to fight about this, we can love both of them! I was having an argument with James Wan’s company about this, because there’s a rift inside the company of people who prefer Alien over Aliens.

Okay, program a triple feature with your film as one of the three. I don’t know. Ask Ant Timpson!

I’ll ask Ant Timpson. [We did, and he replied: “Well, one has to be the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. And then either Life (2017) or Altitude (2010).”]

Thank you Ant! I used to go to his all-nighters as a university student. He is the king of programming things.

Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Life’ (2017).

It’s strange that we never met at one of his events! Ant would make me dress up in strange outfits and do weird skits between films. (For those who don’t know, Timpson ran the Incredibly Strange Film Festival for many years—now part of the New Zealand International Film Festival—and still runs an annual 24-Hour Movie Marathon.) So what’s a film from those events that sticks in your head as the perfect genre experience with a crowd? It was a movie about a man protecting a woman who was the girlfriend of a mafia boss: A Bittersweet Life. Not only does it have one of the sexiest Korean actors, sorry, not to objectify, but also I actually screenshot a lot of that film for pitch documents. And, do you remember a crazy Japanese movie where someone’s sitting on the floor with a clear umbrella and a woman is lactating milk? Visitor Q by Takashi Miike. I remember just how fucking crazy that was.

Finally, what was the best film you saw in 2020? I haven’t seen Nomadland yet, so keep in mind that I haven’t seen all the films this year. I have three: The Invisible Man, which I thought was just amazing. I thought [writer-director] Leigh Whannell did such a great job. The Half of It by Alice Wu, a quiet movie that I simply just adored. And then the last movie I saw at the cinema was Promising Young Woman. The hype is real.

Related content

Kairit’s list of “She Did THAT!!!” films

Beyond Badass: Female Action Heroes

Up in the Air: The Letterboxd Showdown of Best Airplanes in film

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

‘Shadow in the Cloud’ is available in select theaters and on video on demand now.

[sacredlettersspn]

Letter #1: Fear (Pilot, 1x01)

Welcome to the first letter of The Sacred Letters of Supernatural. I’m glad to have you here with me on this journey. I want to take a moment to say thank you to those who have already shown their support for the project on Tumblr and Twitter. You gave this project the kickstart it needed to get off the ground. And for those who will be jumping on board now and in the future, thank you. 

I also want to thank the people over at Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, the podcast which inspired this project. I hope to take the inspiration and love for Harry Potter that you show through your podcasts and channel that into my love for the show Supernatural. I also hope to take this project and make it my own while learning from the work put into Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. 

As I begin my work on this project, I find myself wishing I had a text to hold. There is something special about holding a book in your hands as you read from it, something about feeling the physical object in my hands helps me learn. But Supernatural is primarily a visual and auditory experience and I think there’s something special about that, too. We can see more details, see how characters react in body language and tone of voice. The set design, lighting, and color choices can clue us into what’s happening on screen. We don’t get internal dialogue or exposition of a character’s introspection on television, but I think many of the visual and auditory aspects make up for that. 

So with that being said, let’s begin the first Sacred Letter of Supernatural.

I want to start with a personal story. When I was a young child, I did not like Chinese food. I wouldn’t eat it. When my dad tried to convince me to try Chinese food as a child, it would usually result in tears. It wasn’t until years later as an adult that I learned that when I was about four years old, I had Chinese food for dinner and a stomach bug the same evening. You maybe can see where this is going? My parents’ bed sheets were ruined, let’s just say that. But that moment, the feeling of that memory, stayed with me many years even though I couldn’t remember the actual incident. This aversion was something my dad didn’t understand. I remember very vividly sitting in a Chinese buffet with my plain chicken, french fries, and a few vegetables. My dad is trying to make me try various different foods. I keep saying no and become so upset at the pressure to “just get over it,” I cry in the restaurant. To my dad, Chinese food was just chicken or pork with noodles, rice, and vegetables. It was delicious. To me, Chinese food was the reason I had become violently ill, and my body couldn’t forget that. The body’s memory of fear can be a powerful force in our day-to-day lives.

By now, you may have guessed our theme for today’s letter: fear. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines fear as “an unpleasant, often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.” I also like the definition given by Google which defines fear as “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.” I like how the second definition highlights the idea that fear is tied to our own beliefs that something is dangerous. This says to me that some people can believe that something is scary and experience fear, while others do not see the same danger. Like in my story about having this fear of Chinese food, I expected it to be dangerous while those around me did not. They couldn’t understand my fear. 

But I think we can understand the fear that’s happening in the pilot episode of Supernatural. For the fandom, this episode is iconic. We will likely never forget the visuals and lines of dialogue, many of which are echoed in episodes fifteen years later, but I’ll still give you a quick recap of what happens in this episode. 

The year is 1982, and we are introduced to the Winchester family on the night that their mother, Mary Winchester, dies. She is murdered by a mysterious figure who breaks into baby Sam’s nursery. When Mary goes to check on Sam, she interrupts this figure and is attacked. We see some of the ordeal, most poignantly the image of her stuck to the ceiling, stomach cut, and flames igniting around her. Her husband, John Winchester, sees her on the ceiling as well. John knows something is not normal about the way she dies. 

When we fast forward twenty-two years, Sam has been in college and is living with his girlfriend. He seems to be enjoying life. But he hasn’t talked to his family in four years. Unexpectedly, Dean shows up, tells him that their father is missing on a hunting trip, and Sam agrees to help Dean find their father. To track his whereabouts, they listen to a voicemail in which John says something bigger is happening, something dangerous. 

On the search for their father, they are led to a potential haunting where several men have been reported missing on a stretch of highway over the years. John had been on the case before he disappeared. The boys find out which motel John was staying at and find his room, but are caught by police and Dean is arrested. However, they are able to figure out that the ghost they’re hunting is a Woman in White and Dean’s arrest leads them to John’s journal where John has recorded everything he knows about the supernatural. 

The boys end up getting rid of the Woman in White, and they find out where John wants them to go next. However, Sam insists on being back home for his law school interview the next morning, so Dean takes him home. When Sam goes inside, he lays down in bed, looks up, and finds Jessica on the ceiling like his mom. The ceiling catches on fire around her. She can’t be saved. The episode ends with Sam and Dean outside of their car, the 1967 Impala. Sam says, “We got work to do,” before slamming the trunk full of hunting supplies shut and leaving with Dean for the next case.

Moments of fear are littered throughout this pilot. Given that the genre of the show involves ghosts, monsters, and demons, it makes sense that fear would be an integral part of each episode. But I want to focus on a key scene of this episode and how fear plays a special role in defining the Winchesters’ lives.

The opening scene of the Winchester family tucking in for the night is heartwarming. Everyone smiles at least once, John and Mary are doting on their children, John appears to be an involved, helpful father as he helps tuck the boys in for the night. There is a lot of focus on Sam. We get this shot of just Sam in his crib, laughing, playing with his feet, a shot of Mary kissing him goodnight, and a shot of John specifically saying, “Sweet Dreams, Sammy.” It sets up an expectation that Sam is the main focus, if not the main character, and it adds to the sweet feeling I get while watching this scene. 

But there are hints that something isn’t right. The opening scene of this episode is an exterior shot of the house at night with shadows of tree limbs crawling up the side of the home. The limbs are moving unnaturally. There’s suspenseful music playing. You know something is wrong and your fears are confirmed when the mobile in Sam’s nursery begins moving on its own, the clock stops at 8:12pm, the nightlight flickers, and the baby monitor in the parents’ room makes odd, high frequency noises. When Mary wakes up, John is not in the room. Mary sees John standing in Sam’s nursery, with more lights flickering in the hall. While Mary does not seem to be afraid, the viewer by now knows that she should be afraid. And that moment comes soon enough when she hears the tv on downstairs, and sees John asleep in a chair. She runs back upstairs to Sam with who she now knows is an intruder. We don’t see what happens between Mary and this mysterious figure, but we hear the screams and we see what happens next. John runs upstairs, finds Sam alone in the crib, and thinks everything is fine until he notices the blood dripping from the ceiling. That’s when he looks up, sees his wife on the ceiling, a slash across her stomach. He falls to the ground, looking up at the ceiling with horror as fire bursts around his wife and Sam begins to wail.

What strikes me about this whole first scene is how much we don’t see, and we can only notice what’s missing after having watched this show for its many seasons. We don’t see what happens to Sam, so we don’t know the reason for the man visiting his nursery. We don’t see Mary’s interaction with this man. John doesn’t even see the man. He only sees his wife on the ceiling, dying. And that’s why this scene is so horrifying to me. It turns the world of the Winchesters upside down, ruins every good thing we saw in their warm, family interactions, and it leaves us with many more questions than answers. 

The reason the scene works as being scary is because it leaves much unknown, and fear festers in the unknown. It seems that some of the most scary moments in life are when big, important questions are left unanswered. When you’re at the doctors waiting on potentially bad news, when your life plans are derailed because you didn’t get that job or that person left you, or when you see horrendous acts of violence on the news and you can’t fathom why humans would treat each other this way. When we are left to grapple with life’s big, important questions without anyone who can give us definitive answers, it can be terrifying. 

I believe the person who is trying to handle the biggest questions in this episode is John Winchester. He sees and remembers the most from the night Mary died, and therefore he has the most questions and a lot of weight to carry. Sam will never remember this night and Dean was too young to realize what was happening. None of them saw Mary on the ceiling except John, and he alone carries that image, that burden. John had just experienced an unspeakable tragedy. 

The thing with tragedies is that even though they can often be explained in some way, humans still have a hard time grappling with the aftermath. While some may move on, many others become stuck in grief for extended periods of time, possibly for the rest of their lives. This is what happened to John. He didn’t have a “natural tragedy” to deal with; there was no hope for a natural explanation. And now, the world was no longer safe to him. There were new, unexplainable threats that could take his family away from him at any moment. I can imagine he felt alone in his knowledge of these threats and I can imagine that he felt completely powerless in that situation. That feeling of powerlessness, coupled with fear of the unknown, can make humans do dramatic, unhealthy things. John Winchester was no different.

A sense of control is really important for humans. We all need to feel that on some level that we are able to choose a direction for our lives, and that our choices will directly affect our environment. So, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that John’s actions after this night were an attempt to regain control after an event that shook his foundation. Thinking about John in this way helps me see his actions in the rest of the series as his way of trying to gain back a sense of control in his world. He wants to control the thing that scares him, much like I think we eventually see Dean doing. John’s fear led him to do many things that the fandom has deemed unforgivable. Whether or not you sympathize with John Winchester is entirely up to you and is influenced by your own personal experiences, but I think we can all relate to the feeling of fear in the face of the unknown, and the utter powerlessness we can feel in uncertain times. 

Lectio Divina 

The next segment of this letter is where we use a practice to analyze a part of the episode. We will be using “Lectio Divina,” a Christian spiritual practice for reading scriptures that involves interacting with the text on four different levels. I am following Harry Potter and the Sacred Text’s use of this practice and adapting it the best I can to the visual format. Normally, you pick a scripture or a line of text to analyze. I randomized numbers between 1 and 42 (the amount of minutes in the episode), and picked the first full line after the minute mark I was given.

Line: “That’s cus you’re out of practice… Or not.” -Dean Winchester (7:00)

Now we analyze this line on the four levels of Lectio Divina : literal (narrative), allegorical (metaphors and symbols), reflection (how do I connect to it), and invitational (what is the text asking of us or teaching us). 

Literal: What’s happening on a literal level in this scene is that Dean has broken into Sam’s house, Sam has snuck up on him, and they’ve just fought because Sam didn’t know who was in his house. Dean ends up pinning Sam to the floor, saying that he was able to do so because Sam was out of practice. “That’s cus you’re out of practice.” But when Sam promptly flips him over, pinning Dean to the ground, Dean proudly but surprisingly says, “Or not.” The scene comes across as a little heartwarming, a little funny. The two seem like natural brothers.

Allegorical: To me, this is a scene about returning. Here we have the loyal child who has stayed with his father and continued the “family business” confronting what I think of as the prodigal son. You can see the tension between the brothers play out in the fighting. But this prodigal son story is not the same one that we’re used to. This isn’t the prodigal son coming back home because he realized he was wrong. Sam left something horrifying. He left for safety and found love, a career, and independence. But despite his reasons for leaving, there’s still tension when he returns. Stepping away from your family, a friend group, a job--that’s never easy even if you have strong convictions about your reasons for doing so. There are relationships there, shared experiences, and bonds. So, I think there’s a sense of betrayal from Dean’s perspective, an invisible contract that Sam broke. Then Sam and Dean have to confront all of these feelings and experiences again. I'm impressed with the way Sam and Dean handle it. Dean could have grilled Sam about why he left, made him feel bad, or approached with a hostile attitude, but he very much is happy to see Sam and wants his help. Sam ends up helping Dean even when there’s a possibility of Sam confronting his father, and Dean risks being rejected to ask for Sam’s help. They’re each risking the status quo of their lives and making themselves vulnerable to one another by reaching out and deciding to take on this task together.

Reflection: Watching this exchange between the two of them, it reminded me of when I used to play soccer as a kid. I played for about four or five years and like to think I developed a few skills. One year recently, I was playing soccer with my younger siblings on Father’s Day and I could tell that I was out of practice, but dribbling, kicking, stopping the ball -- those movements still felt natural. I was even able to give pointers to the kids. I hadn’t touched a soccer ball in years, but that knowledge is still stored in my brain.

I think that, in the same way, Sam was forced to play out his own muscle memory while fighting with Dean, and through that, is forced to acknowledge once again the reality of his childhood and his family, of what lives in the dark and why he ran. In one fell swoop, Dean shoves that all into the forefront for Sam. A few years of building walls of safety around him and now Sam is vulnerable again, using his fighting skills to protect himself when I imagine he had begun to settle into a “normal” life. 

Invitational: There’s a question that jumps out at me after spending time contemplating this scene: how do you have the courage to confront burned bridges with other people? I don’t have a clear-cut answer but I think it takes some courage and understanding on both sides. There should be a realization from both parties that each person assumes some responsibility for what happened between them, and for this to happen, there needs to be a cool-down period and opportunity for forgiveness. Forgiveness is rarely easy. I can think of situations in my own life in which forgiveness seems impossible, and maybe it isn’t always an option. But for those situations in which time can heal, I think repairing a burnt bridge can be worth the effort. I see this play out between Sam and Dean. Dean has to overlook his feelings of abandonment by Sam, see the decision from Sam’s perspective, and practice some forgiveness. Sam has to have hope that he will be accepted by his family again and courage to face the people who feel hurt by his actions. I think there would be a lot of fear on both sides: fear of another fight, fear of rejection. But Sam and Dean are able to put aside their own fears and their own hurts for the sake of family and the bond they share. So maybe one thing this scene is asking us to do is to practice forgiveness despite our fears.

Thank you all for reading the first ever Sacred Letter of Supernatural. I hope you enjoyed our exploration of the theme this week. Before I finish this letter, I would like to end with a question for the audience. This question is for personal evaluation, but if you would like for your answer to be featured on the blog or to contribute to a discussion, please send your answers to my Tumblr inbox.

This Week’s Question:

How do you recognize when you’re afraid and how do you make decisions in the face of fear?

[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

Lin-Manuel Miranda on Bringing More Magic to Spanish-Speaking Moviegoers and In the Heights Film

Lin-Manuel Miranda talked to People CHICA from Wales, where he is taping the new HBO series His Dark Materials. “I get to play this cowboy who flies this hot air balloon, and it’s this incredibly imaginative fantasy world,” he says about the show, premiering in November. He will also be directing his first movie, a film adaptation of the musical Tick, Tick…Boom! by American composer Jonathan Larson. At the same time, the creative genius and multitasker, 39, will be producing and acting in his hip-hop musical Freestyle Love Supreme on Broadway.

“I struggle,” he admits with a laugh about juggling his work projects and family life. “We all struggle with the work-life balance! Right now I’m in Wales and they are in New York,” he says about his wife, Vanessa Nadal, and their kids Sebastian and Francisco. “But I will leave tomorrow because my son starts kindergarten at the end of the week and I’m not missing his first day of kindergarten. I will go home for the first days of school and the first ride on the school bus and all of that.”

No matter how busy his schedule gets, it never distracts him from staying connected to his loved ones. “It’s a lot of checking in. I celebrate nine years of marriage to my wife and it’s a constant dialogue. We are really lucky that our kids really like each other. They are about to be 5 and 2, and Sebastian is a really good big brother, they get along really well. I got a picture from my wife at 5 a.m. with the headline ‘Jail Break,’ and my son had taken the baby out his crib and brought him to his room and they were just playing together,” he recalls with a laugh. “They also get really surreal experiences like driving all over Wales on my days off. I’ll be curious to read the book they write some day!”

The renowned playwright, actor and producer, of Puerto Rican descent, is also excited about being a global ambassador for the innovative app TheaterEars, which allows people to watch movies in the movie theater in Spanish. “This is so that you and your abuela can go see the same movie. When I heard about the app and how it worked, I just thought, ‘I wish this was around when my abuela was around so that she could take me to the movies and have the same amount of fun watching as me,” he says. “It allows families that speak different languages to all go see the same movie together, you pick your language and you go. If you look at statistics of moviegoers, people who are going to movies, it’s Latinos. We are the ones who go out to the movies and we go as a family. The fact that you now have this app that allows you to enjoy the film in your language of choice is really exciting.”

...

Working on the film adaptation of his hit play In the Heights is another dream come true. “It’s so exciting. We spent the summer doing principal photography and filming the movie, it’s in edit right now. You have no idea how validating it is. The show, which I wrote with Quiara Hudes, was a love letter to our neighborhood. We both lived in Washington Heights. I grew up in northern Manhattan, just a little north of Washington Heights, and the show is a love letter to that community — in the way in which it’s always changing, in the way in which it never changes — but its debut was on a Broadway stage, so it was a Broadway version of that neighborhood. Now to go and take those same songs and those same characters and actually put them on the screen is amazing,” he says. “We filmed entirely on location. We took over a block on 175th Street and filmed there all summer, and the way we were embraced by the community was so incredible. I can’t wait for the world to see it.”

The film is the epitome of Latino representation, with a stellar cast that includes Jimmy Smits, Anthony Ramos, Dascha Polanco, Daphne Rubin-Vega, salsa crooner Marc Anthony, and Miranda himself. “It was so emotional,” he says about seeing this film come to life. “A lot of the time when you are Latino working in Hollywood, you are one of a few on screen. There are very few where everyone — in front of and behind the camera — has that same shared experience. It’s a party con pay. It’s a party but they are paying us to do it.” One particular anecdote that comes to mind is recording the song “Carnaval del Barrio” with the cast holding up the flag of the country they are from and continuing to dance and laugh way after director Jon Chu yelled “cut” to end the scene. “We just kept going and singing and cheering and chanting and stamping and crying and laughing, and I’ll never forget that experience,” Miranda recalls.

[houseofvans]

ART SCHOOL | INTERVIEW WITH JUSTINE JONES

Baltimore based artist and illustrator Justine Jones creates her vein of psychedelic fantasy horror drawings–filled with tiny black lines and an occasional pop of bright colors–which have been featured on the covers of Kobold Press and Warlock magazine. Using the hashtag #VisibleWomen to amplify the voices and portfolios of women comic artists, Justine has be able to do more illustrative work and character design. We’re excited to find out more about Justine’s artistic journey, her love of role-playing games, comics, art, her influences and much more. . .  Take the leap! 

Photography courtesy of the artist. 

Introduce yourself?    Hi, I’m Justine!  I’ve lived in Baltimore Maryland for the past decade and currently live in a small apartment downtown with my partner and my shiba inu Mo, who is a cool and grumpy guy.

How would you describe your work to someone who is just coming across it? I used to call it storybook surrealism, but now I guess it’s more like psychedelic fantasy horror?  Monsters and Wizards.  Lots of tiny black lines, sometimes with lots of bright intense colors.

How did you start from doodling and drawing to what you do now? I feel like it sort of happened organically.  When I was younger, I would do just pencil drawings, and then in my late teens, I got more into using micron pens.  I didn’t really discover color until a few years ago, so I’m a huge color noob.  I think a lot of it also came from working in comic shops for years and going to conventions.  Seeing all of these amazing artists grow, and thinking hey, I could maybe also do that! I first started with t-shirt designs because it just seemed really fun, and I used to have a really hard time selling prints.  People don’t need more prints, but they can always use clothes!  Now i’m getting more into illustrative work and character design, and I’m loving it!

Who and what were some of your early artistic influences? When I was a baby, my dad hung an Aubrey Beardsley print over my crib.  My mom thought it would make me deranged, and maybe it did, but it also made me love ink work and Art Nouveau style haha.  I was obsessed with sword and sorcery stuff and loooved cartoons like He-Man and She-ra, and later, Pirates of Darkwater. I also spent a lot of time in elementary school copying sexy comic book ladies from 90s comics, and I know that is pretty far from what I do now, but it’s honestly how I learned to draw.  I also copied a lot from children’s storybooks when I was little.  

What are some things that inspire the drawings you make? What are some of your favorite creatures and beings you like to explore in your art? Video games are a huge inspiration to me, from SNES JRPGs, to games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne.  Also folklore and mythology from around the world, and fantasy artwork from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.  Basically anything fantasy.  My favorite things to draw are wizards and monsters.  I love body horror, anything disgusting and beautiful at the same time.  I take a lot of inspiration from Manga, like Berserk, or anything Junji Ito.  I’ve done a lot of Illustrations for Clark Ashton Smith stories, which I find endlessly inspiring, visually.  Just like, fantasy/ sci fi/ dying earth type stuff.

When did you start collaborating with Kobold Press on creating some awesome fantasy art covers for their publications?  I remember getting the email from them when I was on the way to Necronomicon Providence in 2017.  I thiiiink they found my stuff through the visible women hashtag on twitter?  I was very excited because I owned some of their adventures from back in the day when I played Pathfinder!!  Plus, I have always always wanted to draw things for table top RPGs, so it’s been really cool to actually do it! The Warlock mag that I’ve been doing covers for is awesome because it’s going for an old school DND vibe, but it’s all things that are made for 5th edition.  You can get it on their patreon, and I hiiiighly recommend it to anyone who plays 5e dnd!!  

Take us through your artistic process? What’s a typical day in the studio like? Haha extremely chaotic!  I don’t even have a real set workspace, which I really need to change, I just draw where ever. Just chill out, listen to music or a podcast, and draw.  If I’m further along in a drawing and don’t need to focus so much, I’ll watch movies or video gameπ– let’s plays while I’m drawing.  I also love to listen to/ watch things that are in theme with what I’m drawing, to give me some inspiration.  I try to go to coffee shops to change things up sometimes!  Basically I just do a bunch of sketches until something materializes, and then I will just slowly refine the sketch.  I guess it’s not that exciting, but it’s cool to see the first sketch and the finished product because in my head, the sketch always looked like the finished product, but when you go back to look at it, it’s usually just indecipherable scribbles.

What are your essential art tools and materials? 90% of my art is just done using a .05 mechanical pencil and micron pens.  I also draw everything on smooth bristol.  If I have time and want to make my lines super crisp before I scan them in, i will use a light box.   Then for color, I generally use Kyle T Webster brushes in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet.   If I’m on the go, I like to draw things in Procreate on my iPad Pro, but I’m definitely not as good at doing detailed lines digitally.  

What do you do when you’re not drawing or working on projects? How do you unplug? Haha, I wish I ever truly unplugged, I think my brain is now melded into the internet!  But mostly I love to play video games.  JRPGs and anything From Software/ Soulsborne (currently obsessed with Sekiro!)  I also love comics and manga.  I’ve been reading The Girl From the Other Side, which is a beautiful dark fairytale Manga by Nagabe.  I also just got one called Witch Hat Atelier, which has the most amazing art! My partner also owns an insane amount of board games, so we play a lot of those.  I’m obsessed with coffee, and work part time at a coffee shop, and my favorite thing in the world to do is eat good food.    

What has been the most challenging project you’ve worked on? How did you overcome those obstacles and what did you take away from it? I made a kind of cosmic horror short story in mini comic form last year for SPX, I had very little time,  and it was my first time actually writing a story/ dialogue to go with my pictures.  It was insanely challenging.  I ended up with a finished product that I’m really proud of and that I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on.  I think it really drove home the fact that I just need to stick with things and finish them, even if I don’t feel like they’re perfect.  I’m never going to have the time that I want, and I’m never going to feel like anything is perfect.  I can still make a great thing!  

What advice would you give someone who wants to follow in your footsteps and pursue art? Don’t spend 4 years doing nothing, but playing World of Warcraft (Or doooo?).  Uhhh, believe in yourself.  Be nice to other artists.  Draw all the time! Immerse yourself in things that inspire you!  Also, like I said before, things don’t need to be perfect.  Let go of perfect, because sometimes it’s an unattainable ideal.  Just do as good as you can, and don’t beat yourself up so much!  I’m horrible at advice!!!

What’s your best Art School tip that you want to share with folks?   Haha, I moved to Baltimore to go to MICA like, 14 years ago, and then realized I was poor, and would never be able to go to MICA… sooo… I never went to real art school.  I wanted to go so bad, and I still wish I’d had that experience, but I want other people who can’t afford it to know that you don’t NEED it.  Things are a bit harder, but you can find so much free info online if you have the drive, you can teach yourself so many things.  Don’t get discouraged just because art school isn’t gonna happen for you.

What are your favorite style of VANS? I love my lavender/ sea fog Authentic Vans, because they basically go with anything, but I am always eyeing those Sk8-His.

Anything you can share that is coming up?   Ahhhh, I have some realllly cool things that I can’t share yet, but just everyone keep an eye out (It will be very exciting, i swear)!!  As for things I can share, I’m working on some new t-shirt designs, and another comic, and also plan on drawing some more cool wizards in my spare time.   So if you wanna see some cool wizards, uhhh, come to my Instagram–you guys!  Let’s hang out and look at wizards.  And talk about wizards.  And if you don’t like wizards well, don’t come I guess.

FOLLOW JUSTINE: INSTAGRAM | WEBSITE | TWITTER | STORE 

[drinkthehalo]

Sleep No More Shanghai - Final Thoughts

Some final thoughts on Sleep No More Shanghai. There will be some minor spoilers.

I saw the show 34 times, over five visits from NYC from Dec 2016 to Oct 2017.

My initial thoughts on the show are posted here and highlights of my favorite performers are here.

I have to be honest, the show lost a lot of magic for me after the first cast change. There are some great new performers, but the original cast was INCREDIBLE. It brought together many of the best performers ever to work with Punchdrunk.

It was particularly magical because many of the performers were in The Drowned Man, and of course you know me - anything that reminds me of  Drowned Man makes me happy. (I wouldn't be the @sleepnomoreboston of Drowned Man; my heart warms at the thought of it living on in any form.)

But it's not just the nostalgia - it's that Drowned Man had a particular performance style that was all about developing interesting characters and engaging the audience. Building in little interactions and moments throughout the loop, recognizing audience members who'd been following a while - and developing the characters with complex motivations, dialogue, and humor. And with many performers having worked together before, and with weeks before opening to rehearse together, the chemistry between cast members was absolutely off the charts when the show opened.

Since the cast change, I feel the loss of those performers, and that original chemistry. Miranda Mac Letten and Laure Bachelot as Sexy Witch. Omar Gordon & Fred Gehrig as Cunning Man. The extraordinary chemistry between Fania, Miranda, and Olly as the witches. Fania as Bald and Omar as Banquo. I could go on and on.

That said, of course cast changes are inevitable, of course new performers will come in and many of them will eventually become the next generation of "great performers." 

So - final thoughts -

I was lucky enough to see Paul Zivkovich as Macbeth. Having seen Paul as Macbeth many times in New York, it highlighted for me the differences in the Macbeth loop in Shanghai. The Shanghai Macbeth is SCARY. Scarier than in New York, more deranged.

In New York the Walled Garden solo is contemplative, Macbeth wrestling with the nature of his own soul, and sorrowful, foreshadowing his fall from grace and his death. In Shanghai it's still beautiful, but it's also explicit that in his internal struggle the dark side of Macbeth has won. The Walled Garden is right outside Duncan's room, so Macbeth peers in, creeps in through Duncan's room, lingers over the bed, malicious. It’s not just a philosophical struggle between good and evil; it is a premeditated decision to murder another human being.

The other reason the Macbeths seem worse in Shanghai is Duncan. In New York, Duncan is a symbol. Regal. Distant. I never really care when he dies; my heart doesn't start to break until Banquo and Lady Macduff.

But in Shanghai, Sam Booth's Duncan is a stunning reinvention of the character. He's still a symbol - as every character is - but he's also human. He's *specific* and idiosyncratic. He sings to himself, and dreams, and has moods and fears.

He's terrified not just of his own death but of age, of irrelevance. He's conflicted towards his son, proud and yet full of dread that Malcolm will one day replace him. He latches on to Lady Macbeth because she makes him feel youthful, alive in the face of the looming death he fears. He's flawed; he thrills at the prospect of an affair with his host's wife. 

Sam's performance highlights the man beneath the regal symbolism of the character. The fragility of his humanity, as he stumbles up the stairs singing, as he struggles to remove his jacket under the influence of the drug. As he dreams of kissing the woman who's sent him to his death.

He becomes a symbol, not just of "the king," but of regrets and lost possibilities.

A few other thoughts:

For my final visit I didn't get to see Andrea Carruciu at all. But thankfully I did see him for a final time in August and was as impressed as before with the quality of his performances as both Macbeth and Porter. Two of the most complex roles - and so different from each other - for someone new to Punchdrunk to pull them off as well as Andrea is an exceptional feat.

I love the Bride as a character, and the performances of both Tang Tingting and Debbie/Wen Hsin Lee who originated her.

I love watching Speakeasy Barman play pool with the audience. I’m delighted with how much fun Olly is in that role.

I love that Witches 1 has such a huge space to flow through, how beautiful it is with an unobstructed view and a high ceiling. 

I love every single thing about the Dragon Boat scene. How epic and emotional and eerie and dark it is. It feels like Drowned Man, like Twin Peaks, like that video of Faust that’s floating around. It’s completely new to Sleep No More yet fits and complements everything about it.

I love Witches 8, obviously.

I love the gorgeous film noir lighting in the speakeasy, and the layout so that you can see many more angles on the Macbeth/Banquo fight. If you stand in the right place you can see the expressions on their faces up close in ways that are impossible to see in New York. 

I am super impressed with Garth Johnson, whose improvisations are clever and full of characterization. I was thrilled when his Porter made up for the lack of mirror behind the lobby desk by finding his reflection in the top of the lobby desk itself. 

I was thrilled also with Ian Garside’s Porter, who was full of sorrow yet also amusing and sweet. He performed his 1:1 with an emotional narrative that I’ve not quite seen before, and loved very much.

(Overall the Portering in Shanghai is A++).

Although I miss Omar & Fred I still love that Cunning Man is such a distinctive, devious character in Shanghai.

I love the expanded use of the Macduff child's mirrored bedroom. Multiple scenes and 1:1s happen in there, making sure that far more of the audience notices what is certainly one of the most chilling and heartbreaking sets that Punchdrunk has created.

I love the little passageway into the crib room, and the scene over the cradle with the tiny lights. Eerie and beautiful. The beauty of the set in Shanghai is extraordinary.

I didn't get to see Austin Goodwin's Boy Witch, Conor Doyle's Porter, or Paul Zivkovich's Porter, all of which have been popping up recently. That's Punchdrunk, of course. Get used to disappointment.

I understand they need flexibility in the cast schedule, that many of the people I want to see are swings who wouldn’t be on the regular schedule anyway, that Punchdrunk’s long-running show model depends on the audience not getting attached to particular performers in particular roles. But of course we get attached anyway. A great performance can be life-changing. The performers are not interchangeable.

Ed Warner is my great regret of Sleep No More Shanghai. I did not see him perform at all on my final visit, and saw him only once before, as Banquo. His Banquo was exceptional (best Banquo 1:1 I've ever had) but I would have loved to see him as Husband or Cunning Man.

I wanted to see him as Husband because I have not yet seen a fully convincing performance of Husband, and I think Ed would convince me. He can capture vulnerability like no one else. The best Husband I've seen is Ben Whybrow, who is an extraordinary actor (I wish I'd seen his one man show in London) - his 1:1 moved me to tears both times I saw it - but he also projects competence, self-confidence, a sense of emotional remove, a sturdiness. That doesn’t work quite right for the Husband character - he should be very young, very naive - a character whose primary function is to be manipulated by Cunning Man and (in a way) Bride.

Your heart should be breaking for him, but with Ben I wonder why he falls for it. He seems like he should know better. But I think Ed - based entirely on that Miguel 1:1 where his eyes were brimming with tears and I STILL remember every moment of it like it was yesterday - he could project the vulnerability in such a way that I would never question it. I would feel the tragedy of the character, and the longing for love that drives him; he'd have my complete sympathy, without my doubts.

But I'll never see it. Sigh.

Oh and Cunning Man because... I don't know, it's just a funny character in Shanghai, and I'm super curious as to what he'd do with it. It's the opposite of Husband, an archetype I've not seen Ed play - how would he handle it? I’ll never know.

Anyway. I am, in general, running out of things to say about Sleep No More, in any form. Six and a half years is a long time to be active in a fandom, especially one as physically and financially exhausting as this one. I’m taking a break for a while, but I’m sure you’ll see me around.

[coll2mitts]

#92 Labyrinth (1986)

Right out of the Muppets and into the Labyrinth...  I am very glad I watched this movie before I dug into that project, because I think I would have rage quit this whole thing.  This list has a Jim Henson bias, which is semi-understandable, but like... 8 movies?  Out of 100?  There aren’t better musical movies than these?

Family Video rents most old movies for like .50, but because of the world slowly ending, the one by my house was closed and I was forced to pay $3.99 to stream Labyrinth.  It was about $3.49 too much.  I don’t understand how Jim Henson, George Lucas, Terry Jones, and David Bowie could get together and make such a mediocre film.  Like, honestly, the entire time I just wanted the movie to end so I could watch Flight of the Conchords and laugh at some truly ridiculous Bowie-related content.

A self-involved teenage girl named Sarah is politely asked by her stepmother to babysit her little brother.  Sarah decides to take her angst out on a literal infant by offering him up to a goblin king, freeing up her time so she can wander the streets reciting dialogue from a play to herself, which is super important, guys, there’s no way she could have done that in her own home.

Jareth, the Goblin King, who is also David Bowie, is in love (!?) with 15-year-old Jennifer Connelly, and shows up to steal her little brother, leaving a glitter trail behind him.  Sarah decides suddenly she wants the burden of being an older sister, and follows him to the Goblin City to get the kid back.

She is immediately greeted by Hoggle, a puppet that simultaneously looks like the animatronic tree trolls in Maelstrom and Mel Brooks dressed up like Yogurt.

He tells her the only way she can get to the castle of the Goblin King is to first make her way through the Labyrinth.  In an effort to save money on sets, they have Sarah run the same glitter herpes infected stretch of it for 5 minutes, complaining it goes on forever, without having the thought she could use any of the trees to climb up the wall and jump over it.  An actual adorable worm takes pity on her and tells her to walk through the wall, because he’s sick of seeing her pace back and forth.  Sarah learns that everything in the Labyrinth is not as it seems.

David Bowie, observing how slowly Sarah is making her way through the maze, does a preemptive “I’ve stolen a child to raise for nefarious purposes and there’s no way she’s going to get him back” celebration dance.

I discovered Sting was Jim Henson’s first pick for Jareth (presumably because he saw how excellent his acting was in Dune) but his son talked him into approaching David Bowie for the project.  I would give anything to know what that conversation was like.

“Now, picture this... you are a goblin king, and you’re going to steal a kid.  The great majority of the movie you’ll either be trying to entertain an infant, lust after a teenager, or dance with creepy fucking puppets.  Also, we need you to write all the songs.  We cool?”

I should probably take this moment to mention that I’m not a huge David Bowie fan (I know, I know... it’s terrible), so it’s hard for me to consider how appealing these songs are to those who like his type of synth-pop.  They fit the mood of the film, but I don’t feel like they add anything particularly special to the narrative.  Labyrinth easily could have not been a musical and nothing would have been lost.

Anyway, Sarah continues to truck her way though the maze and runs into Alice in Wonderland-style talking playing cards that ask her to pick a door, and then assist her in falling through a rabbit hole.  She is accosted by nightmare-fuel hand faces that ask if she wants to be molested up out of the pit, or down into it.  

She decides to go farther down into hell, where she runs into Hoggle and convinces him to help her get through the maze in exchange for a fancy plastic bracelet.  It’s about around this time where Jareth intervenes to grab some constructive criticism about her experience.

Not very much, David.  Not very much.

Being frustrated with her answer, he sicks the cleaners on Sarah and Hoggle, which is a drill driven by two guys on a bicycle.  After avoiding certain death, they are greeted by a series of verbally abusive rock faces, who apologize for just doing their job.

Here’s the thing about this movie - The sets and the puppets are awesome (although super fucking creepy), and they are used for some really great visual gags.  But all the craftsmanship is crushed under the weight of a truly unremarkable, low-stakes story.  I tried to write this summary for over a week, and every time I tied, I got bogged down trying to come up with what the fuck I’m going to say.  The plot is like if Monty Python and the Holy Grail and every Disney movie fairy tale cliche had a puppet baby, and I’m just bored.  Let’s fast forward through the rest of the Labyrinth, shall we?

Hoggle and Sarah run into a large dog-looking thing named Ludo (not Pluto), who is being attacked by a bunch of things that look like the naked mole rat anti-christ from South Park’s Woodland Critter Christmas.  They save him, work their way through another set of doors, listen to a musical number by a group of demonic Crash Bandicoots, and trudge through a bad smelling swamp.  They are then introduced to the only cute thing in the entire movie, a fox-looking puss-in-boots that pulls a Gandalf and a black knight.

Sarah convinces Sir Didymus and his big Hammerlock energy to help them reach the castle, and he joins their group.  She then gets poisoned and trapped in a dream bubble, where she wears a gown that looks like it would melt if exposed to an open flame and lusts after a grown-ass man who yanked her brother out the window like the Lindbergh baby.

She escapes from the dream, reunites with her party, and storms the castle.  They are immediately confronted by the coolest monster ever to be made out of a door, and Hoggle Shinji’s his way into the mecha and takes it down from the inside.

Seriously, this, and the battle that ensues afterward, is peak Jim Henson.  From Ludo opening up the wall to enter the house, to the exploding cannon, to the goblins going down like bowling pins... I was increasingly impressed by the work and care that clearly went into creating these scenes.  If only the rest of the movie were this captivating.

Sarah finally confronts Jareth in the castle, and the big climax of the movie is... David Bowie whining that Sarah is ungrateful that he stole and babysat her brother for a few hours, while she runs through an M.C. Escher painting to grab Toby.  No, seriously.

Sarah jumps out of the rabbit hole and returns back to her house to find Toby in his crib.  She celebrates by throwing a party with all the puppets in her bedroom, while Jareth turns into an owl and buggers off to make some other teenager walk through a maze for 2 hours.

Now to prepare myself for some 1950s Baltimore camp, because Cry-Baby is next.

[lekshk]

Bangalore days - Nanna Life in Namma Bengaluru

If you hear the word Bangalore, which Malayali would say no? ~ Kuttan (Nivin Pauly's character from the movie Bangalore days) That was the case for me too but life had become stressful when I moved from Mumbai to Bengaluru a year back. My parents settled in Trivandrum, I was juggling between 3 cities. Three operations and a dialysis back to back, my move was a blessing because I could reach my parents faster anytime at a cheaper cost. However, the strain associated with it was good enough to take a toll of my mental health. I was missing Mumbai and all the struggles associated with moving to a new city were clearly affecting me. Work was equally demanding and even though I had a supportive team, I was always having a sense of not being able to give enough. Soon, I started becoming toxic to everything around me. Nothing made sense and I would get irritated at the drop of a hat. Loneliness started creeping in and it just felt like the odds are not in my favor. If only someone could understand me. That's when I came across this quote. Have 3 jobs in life – one that gives you salary, one that keeps you fit and one that gets you creative. ~ Unknown source What excited me reading it, I don't know. Probably the possibility of donning multifarious hats awoke my Mumbaikar spirit. Suddenly, I could feel the buzz and the energy in my bones and I started looking forward to it. To start with - Salary, well, I already had the job. What should I do to keep fit? That's when another quote struck! When you want something badly, the whole universe conspires to make it happen. ~ Pauolo Coehlo (The Alchemist) Salsa, Bachata, Jive – as if the ballet dancer in the picture of Dance with me studio was staring at me. I used to see it everyday while commuting to office, but how come I never payed attention to it?! So, dance it is! Fitness – check it off! Next- Creativity Again, Paulo Coehlo's words started ringing in my ears. I had always wanted to learn art. Cool, that's settled then! Enroll for art classes and burst your creativity! Now, a 9 hour job and Bengaluru traffic don't go hand in hand. I had to find a way where I could have the cake and eat it too! Soon, a time table was set considering the commute time and the space for intermittent relaxation periods. Because self care, while necessary, shouldn't become exhausting by overdoing it out of excitement of newfound strength and invincibility! You can conquer the world but hey! hey! take one day at a time! I realized weekdays I was out for work anyway. So, enrolling for classes on such days would be a good idea because that would ensure I attended them no matter how much ever tiring they seem because the traffic here would discourage you to step out of the house on weekends. I decided the weekends could be a leisurely one instead. Hence, I chose the less peak hours of 12 to 9 pm shift which fortunately my project had. Twice a week, I would attend dance classes in the mornings and freshen up in the office shower rooms and login to work. Surprisingly, even though initially, it was hectic, dance brought out joy in me. I would feel rejuvenated and work was becoming pleasurable. My face started to glow, I would joke with my colleagues, call my parents regularly. There was more laughter and happiness around. The remaining 3 days I would do simple yoga in the meditation room in the office premise. I also made it a point to spend half hour in the library known as the Information Resource Center (IRC). Reading edit page in Bangalore mirror became a ritual and attending video screenings arranged by IRC became part of the work DNA. It motivated me to work better and build effective relationships at work. I enrolled for art workshops during weekends and would spend an average of 3 hours of learning. Here, there was no pressure of commitment because it would be a one time activity and one could take our art work the same day. Soon, I ended up making macrames, dot mandalas, paintings using fluid water colors, acrylics and pallete knives. A finished art work would make me feel proud and the weekday stresses melted away in the art. The remaining hours went in cleaning my room, washing clothes, watching movies, go for shopping etc. The new found love for myself, made me even bolder now. I realized, I had always wanted to teach music. And lo! the opportunity came in and I got 3 kids between 5 to 16 years of age under my tutelage! I was now an entrepreneur! It was here Maya Angelou's words came to my rescue- If you get, give. If you learn, teach. I realized only when you give back to the society, your life becomes meaningful. And volunteering is a great way to start here. What better than TATA initiatives? I began teaching spoken English to security and house keeping staff once a week on weekdays. Though my joy grew multi fold, so did my work obligations. Volunteering on weekdays gradually became a distant possibility. But I was not to give up. When plan A doesn't work, there's always a plan B and the remaining 24 English alphabets! I decided to contribute through content creation instead of teaching and shifted volunteering to weekends instead of weekdays. This resulted in getting associated with other volunteering activities such as making doodles for road safety or attend awareness sessions on mental health or environment conservation or read stories to kids in a children's home. It is said that charity begins at home. For me, it began with myself. The moment I started to take care of myself, it got extended to my family and friends, colleagues and relatives, work place and communities. It was now time to give back to the city that embraced me with open arms. Through The Ugly Indian suggested by a dear friend, I contributed to this NGO's efforts to beautify Bengaluru by adopting the streets, flyovers, underpasses, metro stations, parks through simple geometrical wall paintings, garbage cleaning and sapling plantation, all of them famously known as spot fixing. I realized my problems were indeed manageable. And slowly my cribs turned into love. The expectations from myself, my family, work, colleagues, friends, relatives, communities became easier to maneuver. I started maintaining Gratitude and Thought journals. It is said that either you do what you like or like what you do. I know I have the capacity to look for things I want and pursue them. How about trying the other way round? i.e. instead of going for what I want, can I go for what is available? What does the city offer? Do I like it? Do I want to experiment with it? The answer was a big YES! Famous for numerous start ups, the city is active with events such as dialogues with books, travel, cinema, board games, comedy nights, karaokes in various cafes or at cubbon park and with film screenings and theater performances in metro station auditoriums too! People are ready to welcome new ideas and experiment with them. Boasting of cycling enthusiasts too, I also went for one day cycling trips. The Indian Heritage Walks (IHW) helped me see the city through a different lens. Karnataka being a state blessed with forests, beaches and heritage sites, weekend getaways are pretty popular in the city and I managed to visit Hampi (a long time wish, thanks to the Malayalam movie Aanandam) and Coorg through an adventure group and Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation (KSTDC) respectively. My next in the wish list is Jungle lodges! As Bengaluru traffic is unavoidable and since I travel by AC Volvo buses of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), I decided to read a book during the commute to not only avoid the boredom but to also add variety to my creative pursuits. Known also for pub culture, I reconnected with my cousins already settled here, and together, we explored pubs, fine dine restaurants, reminisced the old days, shared laughter, played poker, watched cricket matches and had loads of fun in simple terms! From all this I realized, when you know and accept who you are and then go for what you want, what you think, say and do, come in perfect harmony. You end up loving more, giving more and caring more. Genuinely. At the risk of sounding cliched, life is indeed a balance. It is simple but we make it complicated. That reminded me of a joke shared by a psychiatrist in the TV show Satyamev Jayate - Agar 100 saal ki zindagi, 10 saal mein jeena chahoge, toh pareshan hi rahoge na? (If you aim to live a 100 year life in 10 years, wouldn't you be stressed?) Now I give percentage of importance to all that matters to me. I neither chuck out anything or compromise anywhere. Because I know I can have it all but not all at once. I remind this kindly to myself and just play with the levels of significance. I try to be flexible enough to change them when necessary. I also try to embrace negative emotions like disappointments, anger, frustration and later change the way I feel about it. Now I don't feel like running away from the past or being afraid of the future. My endeavor instead has shifted to be the first rate version of my unique present. Trust me, it's very hard to practice but it is definitely worth giving a shot. I would like to end on a funny note, keeping in mind the pub culture of the city - When life throws lemons, I order a tequila. In true Bengalurean style, Enjoy Maadi!

Picture collection 1 - (From top to bottom) Family, Cousins, Friends

Picture collection 2 - Volunteering with The Ugly Indian

Picture collection 3 - Alumni meet with storytellers (Kathalaya Academy of Storytelling)

Picture collection 4 - (From top to bottom) Know Your Indian Roots, Dialogues with Books, Tipu Sultan Palace through IHW, SPIK MACAY Classical Vocal Concert

Picture collection 5 - Mime performance with TCS colleagues (Team Mounam)

Picture collection 6 - Art & Craft Workshops

Picture collection 7 - (From top to bottom) Story reading at children's home, doodling for traffic awareness, mental health awareness session at NIMHANS through Volunteer For Cause (VFC)

Picture 8 - Trip to Yelagiri with family and cousin's family

Last but not the least - my love for plants as a gift to all my wonderful readers

[violetsystems]

#personal

Summer has been busy already.  I started that project for Paypal around the 11th of June.  I work a regular job on top of everything else.  The shirts came out good.  We all hung out at my crib and cranked out a bunch in my kitchen.  The whole process happens at home so when I got depressed over the winter, I spent a lot of time focusing on that.  Now when somebody randomly stops in town like that, I’m just prepared for it.  And it’s not to say that it isn’t work.  My personal life is pretty quiet as a result.  The extent of it is basically the internet and running before work in the morning.  That’s another thing that happened this last two weeks was running six miles before work.  I ran seven in there somewhere which is the most I’ve ever run.  It’s also like seven months without drinking and the only joke I have is about being really thirsty.  I was thirsty back in 2013 evidentally.  Guilty as charged.  It’s hard to think about that being four years ago.  Being online this long and doing whatever it is I do.  I don’t know why my jokes come back to haunt me.  Maybe it’s because I’m really thirsty.  Which is where drinking water regularly at a club helps.  Also maybe standing in the corner the entire night dressed all in black.  Some might say I’m asking for it.  I probably am.  Very politely.  I walked out of a packed club last night with the pressboard and the giant Mall Music screen by myself.  I came there by myself too.  I don’t think anybody saw me leave.   It was fun while I was there.  It will be kind of crazy to see those shirts we printed on Boiler Room tuesday.  They’re all playing the MOMA PS1 warmup too.  Paypal was even in the New Yorker in some article about the “allure of an anonymous dj” and here we all are just chilling in my kitchen making stuff after work on a weeknight.

Socially it’s not too frustrating.  People just shut up, put on some music and get to work usually.  Everybody is pretty positive and shares the same sorts of views.  Low key I get respect from places lately I never really would have imagined.  Places I’ve never been.  Places not so far away.  I don’t really get much respect in town.  That’s kind of a broken record argument.  They just don’t know the value.  And the worst thing you can do is stress yourself out trying to prove it to people.  The thing I like so much about running was how with all this work it’s been hard to see the progress.  Running is fairly easy to measure your progress if you care about yourself. People don’t give a shit about half the stuff I’ve done.  It is what it is.  I don’t know that in the current state of dialogue in America it’s worth talking about.  There’s privilege and there’s actual real life.  Footwork is street music.  If anyone tells you otherwise they’re probably not from Chicago.  Street music has it’s boundaries.  As does any music, art, social scene to be fair.  It’s a weird feeling to be respected in the streets.  Especially in Chicago seeing as how chaotic and dangerous as it is.  I’m not exaggerating when I say how much of my feed on some networks is filled with gun and gang violence.  Those are my friends and mentors who are directly affected by it.  You can express shock and horror all you want.  But unless you go out there and do something about it, it’s not helping.  I think a large part of why we all collectively hate Trump in Chicago is that kind of talk.  People get killed here every day by guns.  The city starts to get curious when they see the bunch of us hanging out being positive.  It’s annoying but it’s what you deal with.  Or at least I do.

Does it make real life in Chicago a little surreal?  Of course.  Especially when people perceive your success in some backwards way.  I think people here are horribly nieve and misguided sometimes.  It’s true I am successful enough to continue to do what I do.  I have a nice place to live, make music and art in.  I would like to share aspects of my life with somebody someday.  I think it’s pretty evident it’s not going to happen in Chicago.  I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.  I admit all of that.  I live in a totally ambiguous fog sometimes when it comes to how all that manifests itself.  Most of that is because I’m dehydrated.  I am smart though.  Maybe too smart sometimes for my own good.  I hate when people question my judgement and the way I carry myself just like everybody else.  I understand in this world it’s necessary to establish credibility.  But I’ve always just been trying to live my life wearing clothes nobody heard of and were too scared to ask.  For the record people ask me about clothes all the time now in public.  I’m always pretty nice about it because I love clothes.  I always have.  Just like I’ve always loved anime, obscure movies and weird music.  My dad dumped a bunch of comics on me last Easter so I’ve been slowly reading old x-men stuff.  I saw Logan the other night.  I feel a little more like Wolverine every day.  It’s a very dystopian feeling to be fair.  Romantic as well.  It’s hard to be romantic in Chicago.  Everybody is so rough, skiddish or disconnected.  The world is a big place to be consistently romantic since 2013.  Also for the record very thirsty since December 2016.

[oscopelabs]

Personality Crisis: The Radical Fluidity of Todd Haynes’ ‘Velvet Goldmine’ by Judy Berman

[This month, Musings pays homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to film we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Over the next four weeks, Musings will offer its own selection of tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

Like the glam rockers it gazes upon through the smoke-clouded lens of memory, Velvet Goldmine is most beautiful when it descends into chaos.

Stolen, the way great artists do, from Citizen Kane, the skeleton of Todd Haynes’ 1998 film is a chain of interlocking reminiscences of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a David Bowie-like glam rocker who fakes his own onstage death in the mid-’70s. A decade later—in that most dystopic of years, 1984—his ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and former manager Cecil (Michael Feast) relate their bitter tales of betrayal to a journalist (Christian Bale) whose assignment has him reluctantly reliving his own teenage sexual awakening under the influence of Brian’s music. Between the interviews, musical numbers, and onscreen epigrams, there’s also a mysterious female narrator who sometimes surfaces, like a teacher reading a subversive storybook, with dreamy exposition that reaches back a century to invoke glam’s patron saint, Oscar Wilde.

The film climaxes with a propulsive sequence of scenes that are exhilarating precisely because they merge all of these points of view, subjective and omniscient, into one collective fantasy. Brian and his new conquest, the Iggy Pop/Lou Reed composite Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), ride mini spaceships at a carnival to Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” Two random schoolgirls, their faces obscured, act out a love scene between a Curt doll and a Brian doll. In a posh hotel lobby, Brian’s entourage, styled like Old Hollywood starlets on the Weimar Germany set of a fin-de-siècle period film, recites pilfered sound bites about art. Then Brian and Curt are kissing on a circus stage, surrounded by old men in suits. They play Brian Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire” as Haynes cuts between the performance, an orgy in their hotel suite, and Bale’s hapless, young Arthur Stuart masturbating over a newspaper photo of Brian fellating Curt’s guitar. Stripped of narration—not to mention narrative—the film seems to be running on its own amorous fumes, its story fragmenting into a heap of glittering images as it hurtles from set piece to set piece.

Visual pleasure aside, it’s a perfect way of translating into cinematic language the argument that underlies Haynes’ script—that glam’s revelations about the radical fluidity of human identity go far beyond sex and gender. As the apotheosis of teen pop audiences’ thirst for outsize personae, fictional characters like Ziggy Stardust (who Velvet Goldmine further fictionalizes as Slade’s alter ego, Maxwell Demon) melded the symbiotic identities of artist and fan into a single, tantalizing vision of hedonism and transgression. Kids imitated idols they didn’t quite recognize as pure manifestations of their own inchoate desires. Musician and fan became each other’s mirror, and both could become entirely new people simply by changing costumes or names.

But it’s pretty much impossible to imagine Velvet Goldmine’s distributor and co-producer, Harvey Weinstein, appreciating this as he watched the film for the first time—or seeing anything in it, really, besides an expensive mess.

Haynes and his loyal producing partner, Killer Films head Christine Vachon, had already been through hell with Velvet Goldmine by the time they delivered a cut to Miramax. Bowie had refused Haynes’ repeated requests for permission to use six Ziggy-era songs in the film, claiming that he had a glam movie of his own in the works. And in a production diary that appears in her book Shooting to Kill, Vachon points out one unique challenge of making a film about queer male sexuality: “The MPAA seems to have a number of double standards. Naked females get R ratings, but pickle shots tend to get NC-17s. Our Miramax contract obligates us to an R.” She also mentions that an investor pulled $1 million of funding just weeks before filming.

The shoot was even more harrowing than the two veteran indie filmmakers could’ve predicted. As they fell behind schedule, a production executive started nagging Vachon to make cuts. “Todd is miserable,” she wrote in her diary the night before they wrapped. “He says that making movies this way is awful and he doesn’t want to do it.” In an interview that accompanies the published screenplay for Velvet Goldmine, Oren Moverman asks Haynes, “Was the making of the film joyful for you?” “I’m afraid not,” he replies. “We were trying very hard to cut scenes while shooting, knowing that we were behind and we didn’t have the money for the overloaded schedule. But there was hardly a scene we could cut without losing essential narrative information.” It’s remarkable that he managed to capture 123 usable minutes’ worth of meticulously art-directed ‘70s excess (and ‘80s bleakness) in just nine weeks, under so much external pressure, on a budget of $7 million.

When the film finally reached Harvey Scissorhands, after months of editing, Weinstein told Haynes it was too long and the structure didn’t work. “He made suggestions that I didn’t follow, and then he just buried it,” the director told Down and Dirty Pictures author Peter Biskind. What happened next comes straight from the Weinstein playbook: “Even afterward,” Haynes remembered, “they threw out a DVD, they didn’t ask for a director commentary, my name wasn’t on the cover of it, it was buried in the minuscule billing block. He can’t even do the really small things that don’t cost anything—he never shows any respect.” (That Haynes never found a distributor he preferred to Weinstein, with whom he reunited for I’m Not There and Carol, speaks volumes about the way Hollywood treats ambitious filmmakers.)

After it failed to blow audiences away at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Miramax effectively dumped Velvet Goldmine. It debuted on just 85 screens that November, ultimately grossing about $1 million stateside. Its ridiculous theatrical trailer might well be a glimpse at the movie Weinstein was expecting: a “magical trip back to the ‘70s” with 100% more murder mystery and 100% less gay sex.

Critics were just as ambivalent about the film as festival audiences. While forward-thinking reviewers wanted to love it for its visual beauty and openly queer aesthetic, many lamented that its plot was slight and its characters hollow. David Ansen of Newsweek complained that “Haynes is unwilling to get too close to his characters. Slade, in particular, is a blank”—failing to see that Brian is a cypher by design. Like the Barbie-doll Karen Carpenter of Haynes’ debut feature, Superstar, and the fragments of Bob Dylan diffused across I’m Not There, Velvet Goldmine’s Bowie is less a portrait of the real person than a screen on which fans project their own fantasies about him.

At The Nation, Stuart Klawans rightly identified Arthur, not Brian, as the film’s protagonist. But he also wondered why he grows up to be such an unhappy adult. “Why is Haynes so tough on Arthur?” Klawans wanted to know. “Why, through the character, is he so tough on himself? It’s apparent everywhere in Velvet Goldmine that Haynes, like Arthur, loves Glitter Rock. He, too, fell for a mass-marketed product, which was no more likely than Mr. Clean to carry out a world-transforming promise. But instead of honoring the truth of his enthusiasm, so that he might look back on its object with a smile and a sigh…Haynes does penance for being a sap.”

Others found the film’s collage of ideas and allusions cumbersome. “Velvet Goldmine is weighed down with self-important messages, but it’s also splashily opulent,” Stephanie Zacharek wrote at Salon. “It’s as if Todd Haynes had plunged his hand into a pile of clothes at a jumble sale and come out with a handful that was half velvet finery, half polyester rejectables.”

All of these reactions make sense, coming from adult critics who had probably seen the film just once, after reading months’ worth of reports about its troubled birth, in the sterile environment of a press screening. But what’s clear from a distance of nearly two decades, during which Velvet Goldmine has become a low-key cult classic, is that few films are so poorly suited to be judged on the basis of a single dispassionate viewing. If you’re looking for tight plotting and complex characters, you’re not going to find them in this mixtape of music videos, aphorisms, and waking dream sequences. There is no actual murder mystery, and Arthur’s investigation into Slade’s disappearance isn’t a source of suspense so much as an excuse to keep contrasting an incandescent past with a dull, gray present.

I’m lucky enough to have first encountered Velvet Goldmine under what turned out to be ideal circumstances: at age 15, on premium cable, late enough at night that it easily bypassed my rational mind en route to my adolescent subconscious. I had no idea how many details it cribbed from the biographies of Bowie and his contemporaries, or how much of the dialogue was quoted from their (and their heroes’) most memorable utterances. I bought the soundtrack without realizing that it put ‘70s originals side-by-side with contemporary covers and new songs by younger bands like Pulp and Shudder to Think in yet another glam pastiche. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to find the 1984 scenes unsatisfying because I got so instantly immersed in the ‘70s spectacles that they barely existed for me.

Not that the film only works on an emotional level. Haynes’ ideas about fandom, politics, sexuality, and identity become even more profound once you can see the organizing principle behind what might initially seem like a jumble of indulgent images. Like the death hoax Brian Slade uses to escape a fantasy life that’s grown too real for comfort, Velvet Goldmine’s loose plot is classic misdirection, obscuring a tight and purposeful structure that delays the resolution of the ‘80s storyline until it’s primed you to feel the loss of the liberated ‘70s viscerally. But you’ll never get that far into dissecting the film if you don’t fall in love with it at first viewing. And that’s easiest to do when you’re as impressionable as young Arthur, who watches Brian Slade flaunt his queerness in a televised press conference and imagines himself shouting to his parents, “That is me!”  

Revisit it as you grow older, though, and you might discover that the disillusioned 30-something characters now feel as rich as their idealistic former selves. Velvet Goldmine is often called a gay film, but that obscures the universal resonance of its queer coming-of-age narrative. Better to think of it as a bisexual film that uses non-binary sexuality as a metaphor for the boundless possibilities of youth—the promise of a future constrained only by the limits of one’s own ambitions and appetites. Its characters can’t achieve permanent liberation by “coming out”; to maintain lifestyles that match their desires, they would have to reject the monogamy that defines adulthood for most people. Particularly amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which haunts the film’s dreary present on a purely subtextual level, it’s obvious why they (like the real glam rockers they’re modeled after) retreat from the liberated lives they staked out for themselves.

But you don’t need to buy in to the incendiary claim Brian makes at his press conference, that everyone is bisexual, to see how this storyline reflects the many kinds of disappointments that await most starry-eyed fans in adulthood. Klawans’ objection to Haynes’ treatment of Arthur feels naive because it assumes people should be able to peacefully coexist with their shattered dreams. Why shouldn’t he feel bitter about having joined a sexual revolution that didn’t, finally, set him free? “It gets better” for Arthur when he leaves his homophobic family to move in with a latter-day glam act in London, but sometime after he hooks up with an unmoored Curt Wild at a tribute concert called the Death of Glitter, “it” just gets boring as the world gets worse.

And the world really does sometimes get worse, though audiences in the relatively peaceful, prosperous late ‘90s might have forgotten about that. Watching Velvet Goldmine for perhaps the 25th time, two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, at the end of an era that has brought unprecedented freedom of sexual and gender expression, I was struck by how vividly Haynes captures a culture’s flight from progress, and how rare it is to see that kind of transition depicted on film. His argument about fluidity turns out to be even more potent when applied to societies than individuals (or, at least, it seems that way in 2017). Our capacity for transformation may be infinite, but that doesn’t mean those changes are always for the best.

[jacewilliams1]

The famous quote that da Vinci never said

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

This Leonardo da Vinci quote is everywhere — aviation books, magazines, websites, Instagram posts, coffee mugs, tee shirts, several science textbooks and some Smithsonian publications. It’s been repeated by the Washington Post newspaper, the Italian ambassador to the United States, and an executive director of The Leonardo museum. I saw it last year in big painted letters on the wall of a California flight school. It’s timeless emotion from a renaissance master of art and science. A flying quotation from maybe the most diversely talented genius ever to have lived, penned 400 years before the Wright Brothers flew. It’s evocatively magical and achingly relatable.

Yet Leonardo da Vinci never said it; and it’s nowhere close to 500 years old.

Yep, it’s fakey fake! Like, totally busted. Now, it’s still a great line. Maybe the best encapsulation of what pilots feel like when we’re stuck on the ground. As I write this during the coronavirus lockdown my eyes are turned skyward, longing to return. But how did this distinctive line come to be credited to the famous Italian polymath with a fascination for flight? And who actually did write it?

I started questioning the quotation’s authenticity over twenty years ago, while trying to nail down the details for a book I was editing. It was slow sledding. Several big aviation books had the line, but none of them cited a reference. None. I soon noticed it never has a date or even a year ascribed to it. This was back when university library catalogs were giant physical card files, Google didn’t exist, and you dialed into the internet on Netscape.

Since I don’t speak Italian, flipping through photos of Leonardo’s original notes didn’t get me anywhere. Reading English translations of his words didn’t uncover the phrase. Leonardo didn’t write books as such, but rather had observational and inspirational notebooks that he wrote in mirror-image cursive with shorthand codes and extensive sketches. There are in total about 13,000 of these pages, originally loose papers of different types and sizes.

Leonardo wrote about birds and flying, but not that famous quote.

Leonardo certainly was obsessed with birds and flying machines, drawing and writing a lot about them over his entire lifetime. He believed a bird flew into his crib as a baby. He swam underwater to study how fish fins worked compared to bird wings. His aerodynamic ideas foreshadow Newton, Galileo, and Bernoulli. He was the first to draw flow fields. Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says Leonardo was “the ultimate genius,” and that “as scientists and explorers we always looked to him as the model.”

One of his famous notebooks, the Codex on the Flight of Birds, is devoted entirely to flight. It was written at the same time (1505-1506) he was painting the Mona Lisa. It contains aerodynamic understandings not equalled for hundreds of years. Elachi believes this codex is “probably the most important document about flight” on Earth. In 2012, a scanned copy of it flew much further, landing on Mars attached to the Curiosity rover. While close inspection of the Codex on the Flight of Birds reveals it was written over old notes, and contains a grocery list as well as other personal notes, our famous line is not there.

Peter Jakab, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, says Leonardo wrote 35,000 words and drew 500 stretches on flying. His last notebook, Manuscript E (circa 1515), has advanced studies of gliding flight and clearly shows how migrating birds use the wind for long range soaring. By then I think Leonardo had given up on mechanical human-powered flight, after a lifetime of never actually making it into the air in any machine. This disconnect from actually “tasting flight” is part of the magic of the quote, that the great master could voice our primal aerial passion before anybody could have experienced it. The general acceptance seems to be that the extraordinary intellect that envisioned so many mechanical possibilities, and could paint so many human emotions, conjured in his mind what flight would feel like, what lingering sweet taste it would leave in our psyche.

The search was frustrating. What if the quote was never in his notebooks? Maybe he wrote it in a letter to someone else? Or maybe was it a bad translation? Or an extrapolation? Or a misunderstanding? But surely not, as the line was quoted so definitively, so often. The only variations seem to be at the start. Sometimes it’s, “For once you have tasted…” other times it’s, “When once you have tasted…” The body of the quotation is remarkably consistent for something supposedly 500 years old, originally written in Italian or Leonardo’s poor Latin.

I found nothing. Neither did some nice folks I talked with at National Geographic magazine years ago, who had contacted one of the world’s leading Leonardo authorities in Italy as part of a long research project, and were told flat out that he did not write it. They were quite confident it was folklore fiction, and privately they sounded a little smug that a Smithsonian publication had recently printed it. I believed them, but how do you prove a negative? And who originally did pen the line?

The question quietly bugged me for years. The 2007 book Leonardo on Flight by Domenico Laurenza never mentions the line. A whole chapter of the 2008 book Leonardo’s Legacy by science writer Stefan Klein is devoted to da Vinci’s dream of mechanical flight, yet it also never mentions the line. Rather, the book concludes “after thirty years of tireless work, Leonardo’s dream of flying had reverted to what it was in the first days of his research—a flight of the imagination.” And the amazing 2017 biography Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, drawing on the latest research, didn’t include it anywhere in its over 600 pages. So every time I saw the quote on a tee shirt or Twitter it was a poke to a bit of my brain that knew something wasn’t right, that something was unfinished.

Well, finally the mystery has been solved, thanks to several patient detectives connected via the internet, using the vast search tools of Google Books and other electronic storehouses. People reached out to book authors and asked where ideas and narrative came from, while others sat through dreadful old copies of films. It all came together in the nerdy discussion page of the Wikiquote entry for Leonardo de Vinci, and now we can reveal the author was… drum roll please…

John Hermes Secondari. An American TV writer. In 1965.

John Secondari discussing rockets with Wernher von Braun.

It seemed all a bit underwhelming. A TV writer? But a little more research finds a pretty cool cat. He commanded a tank company in combat during World War II. He wrote romantic novels. An uncredited Frank Sinatra sang “his” song that won an Oscar. The New York Times called Secondari “a dominant figure in the field of the television documentary” in their February 1975 obituary. He had won three Peabody Awards and more than 20 Emmys during a career making quality documentaries. And while John was mostly found behind the camera, there’s pictures of him from a 1958 Walt Disney Television show—smoking a cigarette and discussing rocketry with Wernher von Braun. And he had deep ties to Italy.

Born in Rome in 1919, at five years old Secondari sailed with his mother to Ellis Island for a life in the United States. After getting a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University, he worked as a correspondent for The United Press and CBS News. In 1941 he joined the Army and saw combat in Europe. After the war he rejoined CBS and was head of their Rome bureau. John also wrote several novels. The first one published drew on his knowledge and love of Rome with a title referencing the famous Trevi fountain—Coins in the Fountain. The book was turned into the 1954 movie Three Coins in the Fountain. It won two Oscars: best cinematography and best song. The eponymous song was sung by Frank Sinatra.

At the start of the 1960s Secondari organized ABC-TV’s first documentary unit and went on to produce over 80 documentaries, covering serious subjects with award-winning substance. The Museum of Broadcast Communications’ Encyclopedia of Television (2nd edition, 2013) says Secondari “forged a coherent house style that featured a heavy emphasis on visualization and dramatic voiceover narration.” One of his projects was a series called The Saga of Western Man, highlighting key historical events that drove civilization forward. It was nominated for five Primetime Emmy awards. The New York Times said that to make the past come alive Secondari used “sound effects and animated the screen by treating the camera lens as if it were the eye of an actual witness to the event—scanning , zooming or resting on shadows, furniture, silhouettes, ships and other objects. As much as possible he restricted the acting to off-screen voices, using historically authentic dialogue.”

One of the episodes of The Saga of Western Man was “I, Leonardo Da Vinci.” The credits state it was written, produced and narrated by John H. Secondari, with “the voice of Leonardo da Vinci” played by Fredric March. Its copyright date is 1965 and it was released in 1966 by American Broadcasting. At 16 minutes and 21 seconds into the second reel, after the off-screen Leonardo narration urges people to build his flying machines, claiming after any crash “the hurts will be slight,” over gentle visuals of a wheat field panning up into a clear blue sky, the voice says:

And once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you would return.

That’s it. The first recorded version of what became the quote. There is nothing similar in any of the millions of pre-1965 documents digitized by Google or other archivers. It was written by John H. Secondari, channeling the real ideas and passions of Leonardo as part of a TV documentary. This was a serious project, with Professor Carlo Pedretti of the University of California as the consultant historian, but it did present conjectural concentrations of Leonardo’s ideas. Condensing 13,000 pages of notes into a one hour show is hard. Clearly it’s a great line, compelling, ethereal—even if it’s closer in time to Leonardo DiCaprio than Leonardo da Vinci.

As an additional fact check, I talked with Marissa De Simone Day, Director of Exhibits and Learning at The Leonardo Museum of Creativity and Innovation in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was part of the creation of their outstanding Flight exhibit. If anyone should know about the line, it’s her. She stated, “as far as we know, the quote originated in the script of an educational film by John Secondari which is titled I, Leonardo da Vinci. The script is inspired by Leonardo’s notes in his codexes and narrated as though by Leonardo.”

This spoken line is not exactly as we’ve seen it repeated time after time over the last few decades. It lacks the “forever” and the ending is missing the “always long.” Those parts came to be added in pieces later. The first time the line appeared in print was ten years later, in the May 1975 edition of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. It was quoted as a Leonardo epigraph in The Storms of Windhaven, a science fiction story by George R. R. Martin (yes, that’s Mr. Game of Thrones) and Lisa Tuttle:

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward; for there you have been, and there you long to return.

Now we have the “long to return.” But where did they get the line? A fantastical lost da Vinci codex discovered in George R. R. Martin’s attic? A personal letter from Leonardo delivered through a vortex time portal? Sadly not. Seems the communication was more down to Earth. According to Lisa Tuttle it was the editor of Analog, Ben Bova, who suggested it. An email to Ben revealed that he heard it in a documentary about Leonardo.

It was perfect for the start of a story of human space voyagers who crash-landed on a planet and constructed mechanically simple gliding machines from their wrecked spaceship. The presented-as-historical-fact quotation was read and spread by late seventies hang glider pilots and sky divers. Five years later, a newspaper story in the The Herald Statesman had the compelling headline Hang Glider Died “With His Eyes Turned Skyward.” By the 1980s the power of the line had caught the imagination of the wider aviation world. And then it started being repeated in books and magazines.

Which is when I first saw it. I joined the echoing chorus by adding it to my lists of aviation quotes. Now it’s almost everywhere. It’s easy to understand why. The line perfectly describes a human emotion about our favorite obsession. It sounds just like what we think Leonardo sounded like. And fact checking the line used to be nearly impossible. But now we have better tools. It might take a while for the quote’s attribution to be changed, considering how common it’s become. I heard it as part of a theme park ride. It even made it to page 135 of the 2008 National Geographic book Leonardo’s Universe: The Renaissance World of Leonardo Da Vinci. Emails to the authors were unanswered.

It’s my speculation that the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile is Leonardo’s reaction to his most famous flying quote turning out to have been penned by a ghostwriter centuries after his death. The great man did enjoy funny prophecy-riddles. His quote that “winged creatures will support people with their feathers” actually refers not to flying machines, but rather “the feathers used to stuff mattresses.” His line “feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, towards heaven” is finished by “that is by letters written with their quills.”

While we have to let his most repeated quote go, thankfully there are many well researched, 100% authentic quotations that match his amazing aerodynamic sketches. Like this one from the Codex Atlanticus:

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, and it is in the capacity of man to reproduce such an instrument. A man with wings large enough and duly attached might learn to overcome the resistance of the air and raise himself upon it.

The post The famous quote that da Vinci never said appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/08/the-famous-quote-that-da-vinci-never-said/

[marjaystuff]

Elise Cooper’s Interview with Alyson Richman

The Secret of Clouds by Alyson Richman brings to life the bond between a teacher and student.  In the current environment, it is a reminder of how precious a life is even for a fleeting moment.  It is a story of hope and the dreams of a young boy who readers will connect with immediately.  

The book opens with Sasha and Katya living in the Ukraine.  They move to America but discover their young son, Yuri, has a major heart defect caused by the exposure to nuclear radiation.  Because of his condition he is not allowed to attend school with other students.  Assigned as a home school English teacher, Maggie Topper needs to find a way to connect with Yuri.  Realizing Yuri is passionate for baseball she uses it as a teaching tool, having him read the biography of Shoeless Joe.  Throughout the book are tidbits of baseball history as well as comparisons between baseball and Yuri’s life.

Although Richman is known for her historical novels, she ventured into the contemporary genre.  But she makes sure to include the historical significance of the era by delving into such topics as the Chernobyl disaster, baseball, music, and a mention of the Holocaust.  Trying to show Yuri that people always need hope, Maggie has him write a letter to his future eighteen-year-old self.  She precedes it by explaining to him how children in the Terezin Concentration Camp wrote poetry and drawings even when starving and freezing.  Maggie came to realize that “a teacher’s job is to make children feel safe, to make them believe their ability is boundless…to use their minds-and their imagination-in their darkest hour.” Yuri’s letter and the drawings/poetry of the Holocaust children sparked a creative dialogue where they were able to imagine the possibility of a better life.

This is a heartening tale of the influence a teacher has on a student, but also how a student can impact a teacher. Richman makes people think about the importance of life and how a child born can make such an impression on those adults around him, even for a short time.

Elise Cooper:  How did you get the idea for the story?

Alyson Richman:  I was at a friend’s house in August who is an elementary school teacher.  She mentioned in an off handed manner a project, having her class write an assignment to their eighteen-year-old self.  She holds on to the letters and mails it to them when they graduate high school.  They address it “from the past with a message for the future.” I was in awe of that assignment.  

EC:  You related it to this book?

AR:  The writer in me questioned if she ever had letters where the student has passed.  I found out there were about four or five students.  We discussed how holding on to the letter the child felt they had some future and yet it can come to pass that it might not turn out as everybody hoped.  She also had a child that died of cancer that got inadvertently mailed by her teaching assistant.  I thought how a teacher can be the lifeline for a family to the outside world.

EC:  You were known as a historical writer. Did you go cold turkey with this contemporary novel?

AR:  Not at all.  I made sure that this contemporary family had some historical past.  I was influenced by a former Ukraine nurse sitter for my son who lived there during Chernobyl.  She told me on the day it happened no one had any idea, and many were sun bathing in the river.  Only days later did the Soviet Union admit what happened, but unfortunately a lot of people absorbed so much radiation.  Many children were born with cancer, birth defects, or heart problems.  I hope I was able to connect the different cultures through books and even food.

EC:  It must be nerve-racking for a mother who fears she will outlive her child?

AR:  I could not imagine.  Yuri’s mom, Katya, desperately wanted to protect her child.  Think how worrisome it is for a mother to think her child’s heart could stop beating and not to be able to see any signs.  There was this powerful scene in the book where Yuri is sleeping in his crib and she is hovering over him to make sure his chest goes up/down.  I interviewed people who had children with rare heart defects and they never wanted to leave their children for even a minute.  Another scene has Maggie staying with Yuri so Katya can get some rest. As a mother, I kept thinking Yuri was my child.

EC:  Where did the title come from?

AR:  I put a sentence in the book, “We have to hope every family has a family cloud that will unite everyone.” It is based on my son saying that to me after my grandmother died.  I tried to explain death to him.  He wanted to know where she went, how is it she was here one day and gone the next.  He looked up to me and said, ‘mommy, I just have to hope there is a family cloud.’ I thought that was so beautiful.  

EC:  How do you feel about teachers?

AR:  This book is a love letter to the beauty of a student/teacher relationship.  I wanted to show how teachers leave fingerprints on their students, but also how the student makes an imprint on the teacher.  Maggie was able to open up Yuri’s mind and he was able to show her how important it is not to take any day for granted and to live one day at a time.  As I look back onto my own life there were teachers who encouraged me to be a writer.  They said, when, not if, I will become a writer.  They believed in my potential and enriched me.  

EC:  What was the role of baseball?

AR:  In a game anything can change around the corner.  Baseball can change on a whim, good and bad.  It relates to life, as one thing happens other situations transform.  

EC:  Are you a fan?

AR:  When I was little I was a diehard Yankee fan.  My son really loves baseball.  He has a boyish wonder and awe of this game.  I guess you can say I am a fan indirectly, through my son.  

EC:  What was the role of music?

AR:  In a lot of my books there is a nod to the violin.  My daughter and husband play it.  I wanted to weave something artful and beautiful that stirs the soul on an artistic level.  Where my daughter takes lessons is a luthier, someone who makes and repairs violins.  I gave Maggie’s father the backstory of making violins after he retired from his traditional job.  I wanted to show my readers you are never too old to learn a new art form.  The same can be said of Katya’s background.  As a ballet dancer in the Soviet Union I showed the details of what was expected.  Hopefully, the sense of beauty that music and dance can bring into our lives will come through.  Also, the character Daniel uses his personality to help him with his job.  He is a good listener, which enabled him to listen to the notes an orchestra plays and have the parts make a whole.

EC:  What do you want readers to get out of the story?

AR:  All my novels have a message of being kind to one another as the characters become knitted together.  In this book, light was brought into the household.  Within a community people could leave a lasting fingerprint on each other.

EC:  Can you give a heads up about your next book?

AR:  It is about a Viet Nam veteran and a Vietnamese child whose lives collide in the 1980s.  They helped each other to heal.  It will be another contemporary novel with historical significance.  

THANK YOU!!

[martechadvisor-blog]

Interview with Nick Worth, CMO at Selligent

Nick discusses the need to connect insight and engagement, the current challenge with the weightage on email and exploring the next frontier in CX. Born and raised in Washington DC, this CMO stays loyal to the baseball and hockey teams The Nationals and The Capitals. Now in London, he lives by the mantra, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” To relax, he enjoys walking his dog in the English countryside while listening to a podcast

Ginger Conlon:

Hello and welcome to MarTech Advisor’s executive interview series. I'm Ginger Conlon, a Contributing Editor with MarTech Advisor and joining me today is Nick Worth who is CMO of Selligent. Welcome Nick.

Nick Worth:  

Thanks Ginger.

Q: Ginger Conlon:

So glad you're here with us today. We are going to talk about trends and opportunities with omnichannel customer engagement. But before we do that I would love for you to briefly introduce Selligent. Tell us a little bit about what Selligent is and what's its unique value proposition.

A: Nick Worth:

Sure. Selligent is a one to one omnichannel marketing platform that empowers marketers to engage with consumers using relevant insights. So, what's different about what we do is we put our focus on having the consumer at the center of everything, center of the data model, the targeting, the journey building, the contextual engagement and ultimately the reporting and analytics. So, we build it all around the consumer not the channel.

Q: Ginger Conlon:

Excellent, that's where the consumer should be right, at the center. So, let's talk about omnichannel customer engagement. Of course, interacting with customers across channels presents a host of opportunities and some more obvious than others, so, what is one opportunity that you see some marketers overlooking with omnichannel customer engagement that has the biggest potential impact if they harness that opportunity and how can customer engagement technology help them do that?

A: Nick Worth:        

I think one of the biggest challenges out there is that marketers are often separating the insight gathering process from the execution process and those two things are living apart, for a bunch of good reasons, but they are apart and I think that makes it difficult to leverage the insights in the way that you can most effectively take advantage of them. So, what you want to do, in our view is, take that insight and do something with it, even if it's not a huge insight, even if it's only a single insight, build something better with that and then iterate out from there and by connecting insight and engagement together, you have an opportunity to build progressively more effective engagement over time rather than having separate systems that don't necessarily link up as effectively as you might want.

Q: Ginger Conlon:

So, actually that leads into my next question which is, every technology and every tactic has those opportunity but also has their share of challenges. Any other challenges that you're seeing along with the connecting the dots that marketers can make some changes and overcome?

A: Nick Worth:        

Well, the biggest challenge we consistently see is with data. I think once upon a time there wasn't enough data, now it sometimes feels like there's too much data and that data is often in faraway places, channel data for different channels might be housed separately. Sometimes our clients are caught up in massive corporate data integration processes that slow down and don't deliver the results that anyone wanted, instead of enabling more effective engagement it ends up slowing it down.

So, I think, it's really a question of saying, well, data is wonderful but actionable data is what you really want, you want to be able to do something with it, not just store it and move it around. So, I think if your goal is, as we think it should be, a unified customer profile because that's really the heart of getting to an effective communication strategy, you've got to

figure out a way to house that data together in a way that you can actually make some use of it and really think about the consumer in that 360-degree way

Q: Ginger Conlon:

Yeah, absolutely, definitely a big issue with data, which brings me to all the things that you can do with that data using omnichannel customer engagement technologies, So, you can do everything from contextual personalization to behavioral targeting to campaign management, where do you see marketers underutilizing these technologies where if they harness it a little bit more in that area it would really make a big impact?

A: Nick Worth:        

I think that you mentioned the most important one in my mind which is contextual personalization. I think not only do we have the opportunity to do that, I think consumers more and more expect us to be able to know where they are and what they're doing. I think maybe the parents or grandparents of today's consumer get freaked out by ad retargeting, banners that follow them around the internet, but I think most of today's consumers have the opposite reaction on things like that. They say, well, why are you targeting me, I already made the purchase and you should know that I made the purchase and why isn't the data working the way that I think it should work, so to speak, what's your problem Mr. Brand, why aren't you treating me more respectfully and I think contextual personalization is a great example.

Why don't you know that I'm in the store when I'm receiving this message? Why don't you know that it's raining and I have no interest in sunscreen today? Why don't you know this stuff? Why don't you know more about me? So, I think that's a big gap. I think the second thing is kind of an outgrowth of that which is, the most effective omnichannel marketing is leveraging three different kinds of data, all that traditional, transactional data, so, that's one, two is the contextual stuff that we've been talking about and I think the other piece is the kind of behavioral data which is often that recency data, what have they been surfing? What areas of the website has that consumer been looking at? They might have last bought a crib from you 18 months ago but today they're in market for a TV, they don't want to hear about a crib for a kid who's now walking around and sleeping in a big bed, they want more information about electronics because they finally have time to watch some video again and they want to buy a television. So, I think it's by combining that stuff together in an intelligent way, in a useful way that you really can plug a gap in the way that you think about addressing consumers.

Ginger Conlon:

Absolutely and then you can say, do you want some Barney videos with that TV?

Nick Worth:  

Absolutely!

Q: Ginger Conlon:

So, that leads me to my next question which is about customer experience. So, as you said, customers’ expectations today, especially younger consumers, are for that targeted experience and omnichannel customer engagement is really one way to make sure that customers are having that great experience that they expect. Where do you see customer engagement technologies really helping the most in terms of delivering that great customer experience?

A: Nick Worth:        

Well, I think what you see today is a lot of pushing stuff out, primarily through email, often through mobile channels as well

I think the real opportunity in consumer experience is to drive conversation, is to drive dialogue and that's to meet sort of the next frontier and we're all collectively as an industry struggling to really deliver on that

I think what will potentially unlock that eventually is more widespread adoption by brands of what we think as message tech where you start to see messaging apps as the way that people begin to communicate with brands, where they're asking questions in China or South Korea, you're seeing customer service driven by chat bots on messaging platforms, rather than through email or through SMS or some of the channels that we're using here in the West, and I think that's where you can begin to see what every marketer should want which is a genuine exchange, a back and forth as it were with that consumer talking about the experience that they’re having. We're not there yet, those API’s are not open to us for the most part yet but I think they will be and I think that we’ll be driven to those platforms for everything because I think that's where consumer adoption is ultimately going to end up, it's on those messaging platforms.

Q: Ginger Conlon:

Yeah, absolutely. So, let's dive into the details a little bit and talk about process. So, one of the best things about technologies is that they help improve the efficiencies of what marketers are trying to accomplish. So, where are you seeing marketers really getting the most out of improving their processes in using these types of technologies and where do you see them faltering where you could provide some advice on how they could use the tools better?

A: Nick Worth:        

Well, let me take the second thing first. I think the challenge for me right now is the weight that we all place on email. We mostly say omnichannel and what we really, really mean is email plus and we do it that way for a good reason, email has such a proven ROI, it's such a workhorse, it drives such extraordinary lifetime value and we understand why marketers use it so much because it delivers real results. I think what you often see though is, you have a brand with an email program and then they've got a special projects team working on some mobile initiative of some sort or another and not really having that same long-term commitment to the channel, and it's a special project, and a special project in a marketing department is a bad thing because that's something that's going to die when it's finished and not go forward.

I sometimes wonder whether what marketers are waiting for is parity, they’re waiting for mobile to become as important as email and I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it. I think maybe the right way to think about the channels is in a sense as your children, you love them all the same but you don't treat them all the same and you don't expect the same things from all of them, doesn't decrease your love, you love them all but they're not the same and they shouldn’t be treated the same and it would be disrespectful as a parent, bad parenting, to treat your children the same, the same with your channels. You need to give them each what they deserve in, of course, ultimately the family works best when all the children are together and talking and communicating and there's a flow of conversation across all of them. So, I think that's really a huge opportunity for us in terms of thinking about the channels as a group but not a group of equals just a group of some things that are important but not the same.       

Q: Ginger Conlon:

Right, I love the analogy, that's terrific. So, let's wrap up with a look forward. What are you excited about in two areas, one, in the market is there a new tool or technology or trend out there that's on its way or happening right now that you're excited about and in terms of Selligent, anything new coming out that we should be on the watch for?

A: Nick Worth:        

Well, I think the thing that I've been interested in following right now is the Amazon Go experiment. Because Amazon Go brings a closed loop marketing cycle into a brick and mortar environment which will be very hard for other companies, perhaps only Wal-Mart will be able to replicate what Amazon's doing because of the amount of investment that's required from an owned perspective, but if they are in fact Amazon is successful in driving consumer adoption of using mobile technology, having customers use their phones in a retail environment I think that has profound implications for relationship marketers over the long term because it means that in a traditional retail environment you could get that closed loop and a closed loop is the holy grail for all of us and then you could begin to see marketing programs changing based on a much richer set of data over time. So, I'm very interested to see how that unfolds.

In terms of Selligent going forward, I think one of the opportunities for us, one of our advantages we feel is our database and how it works, how open it is to different data feeds, how it brings data together in supporting a unified customer model but I don't think we're really satisfied that it's good enough, as good as we think it is already. We're looking at enhancing the data layer to make data flow in and out of the tool more easily to make sure that we are doing things in real time all the time because we think that's so important, if you're going to bring together all the different data streams whether they be contextual, behavioral or transactional. So, data is the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity at the same time, so, anything we can do to make it easier for marketers to really leverage it properly we think is something that's going to be really important.

Ginger Conlon:

Excellent. Well, Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.

Nick Worth:  

My pleasure Ginger, thank you for having me.

Ginger Conlon:

Thanks so much for being here and I want to thank everyone who joined us on the video and say, Nick and I also talked about the skills that you need to succeed in marketing today, so, I hope you will check out that video as well and thanks again for being here.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor