#he is less important than the Colin that is definitely not a drawing of a cat

[hazardous-sol]

Colin (Feat. Martyn)

Complete Time: 03:13:19

[petalsmooth]

Watched the trailer for Bridgerton man times.

Clearly spliced some scenes/voiceovers so for example I am highly doubting Pen in the green dress is what the crowd is stopping to look at. Because we know that ball she is virtually ignored and possibly someone (Cressida?) does something to the hem of her dress. It's been noticed the back of her dress looks ripped as she is walking away from Colin outside after their confrontation.

Instead that scene seems to mimic the one where Daphne tried to move on from the Simon and wore undoubtedly her best dress of the season to attract the Prince. If there are staring at Penelope than I definitely think it's a different dress.

The voiceover where Colin breathlessly says Penelope's name? That definitely doesn't match the shots shown. It could be from the same scene but not that exact shot. Or, it could be from another scene. Same with him asking Violet because the success of a love match based on friendship. It COULD be from that ball and contact we see, but I don't believe the words matched up with their lips so I don't think it's precise shot.

Clearly these is an incident/accident with the hot air balloon which would explain the Debling shot with Pen on the ground. Likely rescues her. Colin is apparently at same place though so I'd be surprised if he doesn't witness in some way. I'm generally of opinion most scenes with Debling will be in Colin's vision as that is the purpose of the character. Not so much to make him jealous, even if he may be, but to awaken Colin to seeing Penelope outside of the untouchable box he's had her in. Little sister's best friend a few years his junior he should protect not romance. The fact they went heavy with the trailer on Debling's scenes just tells me hiding more important ones for Colin/Penelope and he's not that important.

Because we KNOW per Nicola and Luke as early as episode two there was at least A scene where they wouldn't want to watch with their mothers. We also know in prior year's would show an almost kiss, yet nothing in this one. Longing, staring into eyes, but no shot an inch or two apart. Colin clearly has a dream of Penelope that I sense is intense, but we only get him sitting in bed. We only have a brief glimpse of the carriage with Colin, they are practically hiding all the Whistledown content including his discovery. There isn't even a dance with Colin and Pen and they usually always show one dance in a trailer...and Pen and Colin always have at least one dance a season. In THEIR season I have a hard time imagining wouldn't have one in the first four episodes at least.

Same for the brief clips of Colin charming a woman with a kiss on the hand or with Benedict looking at a trip of women who have approached them. They are showing the less spoilery, less important details. I mean it still has some significance in sense we can see the show adjusting Colin's character to be more in line with his book counterpart as ALWAYS should have been the case. This Colin is like 10 year's younger of course but the book one was known as the most charming of the brothers, affable, etc...among ton and considered favorite of his siblings and the last show runner really didn't follow through on that.

But the REAL spoilers we only get to infer or don't see at all or tiniest of clips. Such as Colin in the dark with the candle alighting. That is a brief symbolic scene that people that follow would understand but we don't hear conversation or the scene that leads to it. We know means his realization of his feelings has sparked but nothing about how that happened.

We have TWO garden scenes at least but we know NOTHING about them. Except someone managing to enlarge a Whistledown pamphlet that notes a scandal in a garden. The closest we have to an actual in context scene being released between the two that we can reasonably decipher is with Colin's cut hand she is fixing and you can see Colin unexpectedly affected by it. And if read the book can draw inferences.

They deliberately chose to air the rom com comedy of Pen trying to flirt because spoils nothing, vs say...the conversation where Pen and Colin are laughing.

I stand by opinion Debling is nothing much of a concern. I don't know if gets to stage of a proposal ala Prince and Daphene but aside from helping Colin recognize his feelings he primarily exists to build Pen's low self esteem. Colin does that too, but he's also in denial of feelings so a third party is set up. I'm not fond of third parties in general but I can tolerate them if have some sense about them. If simply device for drama because the writers lack imagination then no. Won't be a part of second part really either imo and the actor hasn't even been a part of interviews which shows rather irrelevant to grander storyline.

Violet apparently may be involved with someone this season if that Marcus clip was an indication, which also proves my point they are keeping real spoilers under wraps because one glance in a ballroom tells you nothing.

Eloise is REALLY starting off season unlikeable. I don't know if that is their intent, but no matter what sob story they give Cressida to try to make the audience embrace it this is a complete betrayal of who her character has been. Putting aside Eloise didn't suddenly develop empathy for other people that isn't self motivated (because no I don't buy it) and the fact it's clearly a passive aggressive shot at Pen knowing it's Pen's bully....this is person she said she never wanted to be like before. But remove Pen from her life and suddenly she is the popular mean girl's side kick? The very stereotype of what people would assume a privileged Bridgerton to be? Because apparently Eloise cannot function as a TRUE feminist and find her way in the season without reliance of a clique? Francesca is supposed to be an introvert and struggle a bit but I don't think we've been given evidence she is turning to Cressida for guidance. So who here is really the true independent thinker, the actual Bridgerton sister with the integrity to be who they are in face of insecurity and fear?

None of this means I hate Eloise mind you, I said before she needs to grow up. If this is part of her learning lessons then I'd be fine with it. I just hope that IS the intent rather than presented as some sounding board of modern feminist thought without any true reflection or accountability. I most certainly do NOT want a reconciliation with Pen where Eloise is not owning up to her own faults.

BTW if Francesca truly does manage to navigate the season being true to herself, I would love that. As an introvert myself, seems I would identify with that. Not to say introvert's can't be pulled into the crowd but honestly you spend a lot of time in your own head. You need time to yourself because crowds or excessive socialization can be draining physically except with the select few closest too. If any of the Bridgerton's is most equipped to withstand the need to conforming I would think it would be her. If for no reason than conforming would be exhausting. Mentally and physically.

Yes, you have to learn how to co-exist among extroverts and that is something clearly she's attempting but huge difference between that being a follower because you want to be included or middle of the action. OH! We also haven't seen John, yet another big spoiler. Her first husband who dies early.

Clearly the Whistledown/Queen Charlotte drama hidden too although I think that picks up in ep four and far more prevalent in part 2.

No clue what Benedict is doing but I'm not sure he's doing anything important in the first half anyway. I think his might be the next story so in 2nd half could have a bigger role.

I don't know if Anthony and Kate are doing anything but being newlyweds. I figure they could just be the happy couple this season with maybe a pregnancy announced although I kind of hope they introduce a side story about Kate's trauma with lightening that should have happened in season 2.

The Modrich's have a good story this season but it's not been really spoiled too excessively. Although I think I am more interested in what happens with his gentleman's club now that a peer. Active professions generally frowned upon for the titled.

Really hoping Danbury is heavily involved with Colin and Pen, her story has been absent in spoilers so I'm thinking that might be good news. Would mean embargoed because too spoilery with lead story.

We've also heard nothing about Colin as a writer which also goes back to them keeping true spoilers quiet. Of course possible maybe not a sl but I doubt it. I see no reason to have that scene with his cut hand that so clearly has importance in the book if he's not a writer. And these was a vague spoiler about finding out what Colin has been up to on his travels apart from a tan and developing his physique.

Still unhappy they split the season up though and the fact season 4 has not been filming. We should have already seen this season LAST Christmas and have the 4th ready to debut perhaps in Christmas but greedy netflix execs screwed it all up. So storyboard for season 4 delayed, costume planning delayed, likely work commitments overlapping so filming of next season was pushed back. No I am not a fan of Netflix since they were among the key principles who caused the length of the strike. It is not reasonable to have 2 and a half years between seasons. Especially when you have at least two more actors in their '30's and nearing '40's one of whom plays a near teenager. I speak of Eloise who I think will be season 5 and the actress will be nearer 40 then. Luke T is already near 40 which is why I think he has to be next. Only thing saving Eloise is that in the book supposed to be near 30 and Francesa is a young widow so if they DO get to her season probably not end of world if a little older then book counterpart. Where is becomes problematic is if you chose to keep the actress, and she stays, playing Hyacinth because at this rate she'll be pushing 30 before playing a 18-20 something girl. Where is they filmed season more on schedule would not have been the case.

Anyway, as you can see this is where my current fixation lies. I'd like to have a tv show that airs 22-27 episodes a year again but they don't make those very often anymore, and the selection is slim. Picard was the closet to one show I had that aired once a week that I enjoyed in year's. Which is why I just spent the last month or so re-watching NUMBERS.

Oh, also laughing at people who spent 2 years campaigning against Luke and Nicole being leads claiming would be a failure realizing not shaping up to be. Anyone who thought they didn't have chemistry, well, good thing your job isn't to cast shows because clearly you are blind. Not only do the character's have chemistry and could see that day one but the leads clearly are very comfortable with each other making the promo far more fun. And the story? The fact they thought friend to lovers, crush on best friend's older brother, wallflower/outsiders story wouldn't resonate shows what little they know of any tropes that don't involve instant sex or arguing. This is one of the most popular tropes TO do. It's just not done often because requires more time to set up and these days lucky to get one season. Which is why so many shows rely on the annoying but easy trope of neverending triangles like that summer turned pretty show to hook people hoping it won't be canceled until resolved. AND considering how little we've seen on the season, the few clips we do have are showing good acting range from both leads. So there goes the theory can't act either. As does the theory too ugly to be leads which...yeah, says more about their desperation than any reality.

Throw in the Whistledown drama we'll get in second half and these people are too stupid to commentate on tv and what makes for a good plot.

[pathofcomet]

'cause all that you are is all that i'll ever need

fandom: bridgerton series / bridgerton tv 

pairing: colin/penelope

summary: 5 times Penelope said ‘I love you’ to one Mr. Bridgerton, and one time it was out loud. (AO3)

There are many ways to fall in love, surely. It’s called a fall for a reason: mainly that it hurts and it comes at the most unnecessary moments and it’s an entirely ungraceful matter. Just as one might fall down the stairs after too many glasses of champagne, or fall unconscious after being punched in the face, or fall because one’s ankle decided to twist most rudely – so do people fall in love in a various of ways.

Benedict Bridgerton swears it was love at first sight, like being struck by lightning. Laying his eyes on his beloved that fateful day, and knowing with insane certainty that he was going to spend the rest of his life by her side. Then Daphne’s murmured admissions, that it’s like a sigh you didn’t know rested in your chest releasing, rush of comfort and certainty when touching the other’s hand. Eloise scoffs at all of this, but Eloise can scoff because she has refused six marriage proposals, while Penelope sighs, because she hasn’t had one caller in a decade of London’s most notorious seasons.

Romantic stories wouldn’t fit with Penelope, she agrees. Her mouth doesn’t really know how to work half the time during social situations, and her dresses are most painfully unfitting. And if those were her only problems, but she is, to put it delicately and kindly, definitely not what seasonal diamonds want in a friend, not what loving mamas wish for their sons and not what men desire in a woman. It stung only the first time around, afterwards it was most expected. So no, Penelope Featherington’s love story is not romantic because she’s not a typically loveable person.

It doesn’t make it any less precious in her heart. When her bonnet flies with the gust of wind, consequently covering one Colin Bridgerton’s face while riding, and consequently having him fall down his horse directly in a fresh puddle of mud, she is mortified, certain that she is about to ruin her life before it even began. But then he laughs – not to mock her, not in jest and not in anger, unlike any of her past experiences with a man’s laughter, especially thrown in her direction. He doesn’t even look angry, not at her anyway.

And Penelope falls, too, even if not quite literally as Colin. She’s not sure how she recognizes it exactly as love – maybe the desperate flutter of her heartbeat against her wrist, or the fact that she can’t quite unglue her eyes away from his face (though that seems like an overall Bridgerton issue). Regardless, the truth and weight of the moment hung deep in her chest. Instead, what she manages to say, between the warm blush and their mothers’ chatter, is just an apology.

“I’m the one who should apologize.”

But she has a meddling mama, and he’s nothing but a young man despairing at such nagging, and despite how much she cares for this first moment, she knows she doesn’t quite yet exist in his life. And then – with her debut, with her growing friendship with Eloise, she suddenly is.

***

“Enjoying the evening, Mrs. Featherington?” Colin asks, having materialized himself near the refreshments table.

Penelope chokes on her drink, her cheeks reddening, the fingertips of her gloves now stained.  She has been sipping at her glass for the best part of an hour now, wondering how much longer she can wait for everyone to get so drunk that they won’t notice her grabbing one of the cakes on the table. The answer is obviously an eternity, for a lady should never eat in mixed company, especially if she is a debutante. But although this is barely her fourth ball this season, Penelope has already learnt the most important lesson of her life: that she is not what others would necessarily call a catch. Just because that is true, however, doesn’t mean she can do as she pleases, no matter how incredibly tasty the chocolate cream might look to her right now.

Colin obviously seems to have no problem with such rules, as he pops a biscuit inside his mouth. This one Bridgerton son is known for his appetite in particular, and social circumstances seem to not make much of a difference to his need. And the amount of food he ingests seems to not make much of a difference on how handsome he is.

Penelope pushes her glass on the table, straightening her back, though she immediately hunches back, aware that she’s wearing one of her mother’s absolutely horrid choices, and hell-bent on making it as unobvious as possible.

“Absolutely entertaining,” she answers, though the enthusiasm in her voice most certainly does not match her words.

“I’d rather agree,” Colin retorts. “I haven’t been this bored since Anthony got drunk and drawled on about the responsibilities of the first son.”

“Mr. Bridgerton!” she says, raising her fan so she can hide her smile behind it.

“Keep it a secret, Mrs. Featherington, would you? The Bridgertons tend to be quite unforgiving about these things.”

She thinks of Eloise and her adorably brilliant tendency to throw a tantrum about every single thing that bothers her about her siblings, whom she loves very, very much at the same time, which only makes her smile even larger. They’re such a lovely family, and with time, they’ll only grow to seem even more so in her eyes.

She nods her head in agreement, meeting his eyes over the edge of her fan. He looks, suddenly, quite proud to have her on his side. From across the ballroom, Eloise spots them: sending a nasty look at Colin, and waving her friend over.

“And please, Colin,” he leans a bit to whisper this to her, as the orchestra starts playing another song. “As it seems we will be seeing each other quite a lot.”

“Then, Colin,” she breathes, the name still foreign in her mouth, the roll of it on her tongue so strange that she’ll test it out many times over, in the darkness of her room long after she’s supposed to be asleep. “You may call me Penelope.”

She tries not to fixate on the sound of her name in his mouth (or his mouth in general, that’d be a good idea as well), and fails immensely, everything Eloise tells her that night flying over her head.

***

Penelope isn’t sure when the habit actually started: serving her tea once a week in the company of the Bridgertons. Of course, the number always changes, depending on the day’s circumstances, but it’s always more lively than her own home, in the most pleasant sense. Even the gossip doesn’t feel as cutting in here, with the warm banter and somewhat friendly threats. Eloise is now entangled in a complicated conversation on the virtues of marriage with her sister Daphne, and they’re sure on two different sides on the topic. Violet Bridgerton, the matriarch, just sighs. She meets Penelope’s eyes over the heads of her children, and smiles in a kindest manner. Eloise just rejected her second marriage proposal, while her best friend is yet to receive even a caller in her drawing room.

She recognizes the smile as the pity it is, and yet even that doesn’t feel as bad in here. Penelope has always taken only what has been given to her and made the best out of it. It’s hard when that is actually nothing, indeed.

“Pen,” Colin greets, draping himself in an armchair close to the side of the sofa where she is seated.

He doesn’t yet know how incredibly appropriate this nickname of his is, which is why Penelope smiles so brightly when she turns towards him. Violet’s attention has already moved towards Hyacinth and George, her youngest children, fighting quite loudly over the same colour that they both want to use right now in their paintings. She fails exactly to notice Daphne’s on them now, maybe out of lack of familiarity with the eldest sister.

Colin hands her a piece of paper, and she raises her eyebrow at him before taking it. He’s immediately replacing it with a piece of cheese from the numerous platters on the table, and that’s how she knows he is, in fact, quite nervous about whatever this is about. So she opens the piece of paper.

“The itinerary for my Europe tour,” he provides, though it wasn’t necessary, as she obviously recognizes the most famous locations. “Wanted to know what you think.”

The paper almost slips from her hands, unfair as he is right now. Of course, he has no way of knowing that he’s asking the one who loves him what she thinks about having him away. Penelope manages to somehow smile in-between the thundering of her own heart.

“You’re asking the opinion of a soon-to-be-spinster who has never left London?”

Joking is safe, she can cover her misgivings so easily with some humour – and Colin is so good at picking it up, matching her in her banter.

“No,” he says, and his thumb is over his lips, where he’s licking a spot of jam, and Penelope is quite distracted by the sight of his tongue in-between his fingers. “I’m asking my friend.”

Her neck snaps with how quickly she moves to meet his gaze. There’s a warmth feeling spreading all through her body, overwhelming with how pleased she is at the simple fact that he considers her a friend, how shocked at such admission.

“Are we not? Friends, that is.”

“Of course,” she adds, a bit too fast, and he smiles.

“Then?” the tone of his voice now turns teasing again.

“Colin,” she says, and her mouth twists in a smile just at the syllables making up his name. “You’re a young man: if there’s a world out there you wish to see, all you have to do is go.”

Even if she has to say goodbye, even if she has to see him go, just because she knows it’ll make him happy.

***

Penelope can feel herself getting physically sick. It’s been years now, of her silent love growing and growing in her chest – and it would seem that this moment would destroy it all.

Colin, standing in-between his brothers, having just shouted at the top of his lungs that he will never marry one Penelope Featherington, looks quite livid now that the exact person has been standing in the doorway for long enough to have heard him. Their eyes meet, and she wishes, with all the strength she is capable of, that he would say something. She waits – five seconds: the eldest, Anthony, starts finding excuses for his brother, but there’s really nothing else she wants to hear right now.

She knows her hands are trembling, which is why she hides it by fisting the material of her dress. She knows her voice cracks, when she says his name, but that’s just because she will absolutely not cry in front of three perfectly fine gentlemen over something that is entirely her problem. All things considered, she thinks she handled the situation more gracefully than a lot of others would have.

And when the other Bridgerton men leave the room, and Colin is left stumbling through his apologies, she discovers how meaningless she actually finds them. Because even with her heart breaking exactly because of the one she loves, she finds herself unable to love him any less. Yes, her pride is wounded, but he has said nothing that she didn’t know so well so far.

“I assure you, it is quite alright.”

The pain is there, sharp and terrible – but she will play pretend and she will say whatever words he needs to hear right now, because while he was unnecessary cruel, he was never so in front of her, on purpose, and there’s no need for her to be mean in return. And most of all, because she loves him so desperately, she doesn’t want him to be pained over this, not like she is. Anguished, really, and when Colin shakes his head, knowing that whatever apologies he’s given aren’t enough, but certain enough that he can’t give more, she almost runs in her haste to get away from him.

To get somewhere where she can cry her feelings out. Though her love, as every time, always lingers.

***

Her mother should get an award for the most optimist person, seeing how even with two of her daughters married, she still insists on parading a third one through ballrooms and promenades, as unsuccessful as they prove each and every time, and as old as they both keep getting.

Her mother should also get an award for way less flattering awards, seeing how she insists on dressing her daughter in the most terrible, happy colours, and pointing at third-rate suitors even as they’re standing right in the middle of the ballroom and it’s incredibly embarrassing.

In her defence, once they’re there and once it’s obviously clear Penelope is as unsuccessful as during any other social gathering before, she is left pretty much alone the rest of the time. She’s a wallflower, so just standing on the side of the dance floor and looking awkward is what she does best. The worst part is that this situation puts one quite in the spotlight of everyone else present, especially those old enough to have no other occupation but gossip.

Violet Bridgerton elbows her son in his back, hard. Who knew his mother has such incredibly sharp bones, or such a demanding tone? Colin has been home for a total of two days before he’s been dragged to the first ball, and he’s allowed three sips of his drinks before all attention-seeking young debutantes and their sharp mamas accosted him (which included his own dear one). Colin balances his options, and without even hesitating, he walks across the room to join Penelope in her sulking.

“I imagine these fine gentlemen are all waiting for their chance,” he says, looking around at several old lords, twice her age, which he knows she would not consider an eligible match no matter how desperate, “but would you maybe do me the honour of the next dance?”

She snorts. “I see you’re back and as amusing as ever.”

“You find me amusing?” he asks, already grinning.

“Colin Bridgerton, I’m not complimenting you again, lest it gets to your head,” she retorts.

“I missed you too, Pen.”

And it’s true. He didn’t realise it until just this moment, when they’ve fallen to their usual dynamic with no bit of awkwardness, even after the past months with his absence. It shames him just the tiniest bit that it has taken his mother’s most unkind pressure to even come by her side.

The orchestra starts its next song, and he extends his arm to her, which she takes with a blush and a shy smile. He is in fact her first dance for the night, and she has no doubt it’ll be the only one as well, which is a shame, since she always quite enjoyed dancing. Dances with good partners are the highlight of a party. Dances with Colin Bridgerton are the highlight of the season.

“Thank you,” she says, and if Colin wasn’t already leaned quite close to her, he maybe would have missed it entirely.

***

Penelope really should have learnt better by now – that her heart is never entirely safe with Colin. Be it that he has a tendency to step all over it, or that it makes it beat so fast, that she starts understanding all the ladies who faint all over during a season.

Being engaged with him doesn’t really change the situation. Not when his kisses make her feel like everything that she’s considered so bad in herself is worth the entire world, and then more.

With his hands now swiftly unlacing her dress, the shadow of his room all around them – she finds she cannot keep another secret for this man that is to be her husband,

“I love you,” she sighs. “I have loved you for years.”

“I know.”

How unfair he is, to the bitter end. Even as he essentially accosted her in his carriage, even as he asked her to marry him, even as he defended her in front of her numerous family, getting offended on her behalf, getting worried on her behalf… Terrible man that she loves, terrible man that Colin is, he drags out his own admittance as long as possible.

And she loves him for it, too.

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Episode 32 Review: Sea Fever

{ Not available on YouTube }

{ Full Synopses/Recaps: Debby Graham | Bryan Gruszka }

{ Screencaps }

I apologize for the delay in posting this review. Once again, I’ve been busy in real life and didn’t have enough time to work on it last week. (And so soon after starting my Shadow Over Seventh Heaven review series!) But now I’m back and I have enough time to write about my favorite show again--and, in a week or so, hopefully enough to continue my other review series as well.

This is the first episode to differ completely from the Lost Episode summaries published in various U.S. and Canadian newspapers--and therefore probably the point at which the original outline and the final one began to diverge. Episode 30′s summary described an event that happened in the episode, but whose cause appears to have been changed during forced rewrites; last episode’s was still accurate after revisions; but this one’s summary is the first to describe a scene absent from the final, aired episode. (More on that later.)

Shall we begin this review? This episode features some of the darkest Jean Paul (yes, Jean Paul!) dialogue thus far, along with many entertaining facial expressions as multiple characters feast on the scenery. It’s a wild ride with a genuinely scary scene, and, if you like those things, I think you’ll enjoy it.

We open right where last episode left off, with Elizabeth reacting to Jacques’ little comment about Holly and how he would stake her life in a bet that Vangie couldn’t contact Erica in the planned séance. ”Jean Paul,” she shouts, “your inference that I would harm my daughter to take her fortune for my own is insulting and in bad taste: something I’d never expect of you!”

The handsome devil replies, “Your strong defense against a simple query lends credence to a simple supposition”--which is just a fancier, less archaic way of saying “the lady doth protest too much.”

She flounces and runs into Vangie at the door--figuratively, not literally, although that would be amusing. “You interrupted Mrs. Marshall’s romantic exit from which there might be no return,” Jacques comments, which sounds suspiciously like foreshadowing.

The conversation drifts to the séance and how Jacques is most definitely not going to back down because he’s not a coward, and then, suddenly,

Vangie SCREAMS!

Apparently, every time a female character other than Raxl screams, she has to try eating her hand immediately afterwards.

She’s screaming because she can sense that someone is tampering with the cryonics capsule. And, at the same time that this happens, Jacques also de-possesses Jean Paul:

I’ll let these headache faces speak for themselves.

Jean Paul who threatens to kill anyone who tampers with the capsule. Very nice (not)! Normally, I find his concern for Erica romantic, but this is going too far. He reminds me of the captain in the CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode "Sea Fever" (also by Ian Martin) who…well, I don't want to spoil the ending, but let's just say that he is even crazier in love than Jean Paul. It isn’t one of the best CBSRMT dramas, but it will likely chill your bones. It certainly chilled mine.

Love this shot of Colin Fox backacting while Paisley Maxwell and Angela Roland stare at him with wide-open eyes. This episode is full of unintentionally funny facial expressions.

Jean Paul hurries back to Maljardin with Elizabeth and Vangie, and heads to the crypt immediately to see Raxl about the capsule. She recaps to him about the capsule tank’s malfunctioning in the previous episode. He asks who discovered it; she tells him Dan, which only makes him more suspicious of him. SHe also recaps to him about how Alison and Dan are searching for the cyanide that he stole from the lab. “Everyone questions my changes of mood,” he shouts. “Now I must question changes in others!...There is danger hiding everywhere on Maljardin. It has a history that has plagued the family, that will plague all who pry into my affairs!"

While Vangie questions the sincerity of Elizabeth’s devotion to Jean Paul above, Jean Paul leaves red flowers on the cryocapsule and announces his planned next moves to his love: “Erica, my dove, now [there] are some people here on our island who would destroy the process by which you will be returned to me and fill my arms again, but I promise you, no one, no one under any consequences [line flub], will live again if he or she causes you to remain forever dead!"

A beautiful shot of Jean Paul with flowers for Erica.

When Raxl next joins Jean Paul in the crypt, she tells him that “only the priestess of the Serpent knows what is really on their minds.” Jean Paul mentions that she has told him before about the human sacrifices that the priestesses used to perform on the island--which is not recap (as we have only heard her tell Matt about them so far), so she must have told him sometime before Erica’s death. She insists that, although that was true long ago, their altar has not been used for them since Jacques's time.

“But, if his evil can rise again, as you fear,” he begins, implying that he wants to start making blood sacrifices.

“No! Please, M’sieu, no!” Raxl interrupts.

“I will do what has to be done, Raxl. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Raxl draws the Sign of the Great Serpent in the air and the same Great Serpent symbol that's in the Temple appears on screen. It’s a cool effect and not something that’s ever seen in any other episode.

She leaves the crypt, looking back at Jean Paul a few times, probably in complete disbelief that he wants her, daughter of the unseen Priestess of the Serpent, to sacrifice Dan and any other troublesome guests to protect against THE DEVIL JACQUES ELOI DES MONDES. This is a shocking new low for Jean Paul Desmond, and shows the darker side of his character. This is a man who, even without a curse and even when he is not possessed, is capable of murder because of his obsession with his love interest. This is a male yandere.

She sees Matt in the Great Hall, who tells her that he’s searched all over Maljardin and that there must be many hidden rooms there. It turns out they have both searched in every room they know about and still have found neither the missing cyanide nor the conjure doll and silver pin. He demands that she tell him the legend of Maljardin and that old black magic. And so we learn from her some very important background information, some of which is never brought up again:

Where there is evil, there is magic. Where there is magic, strange things happen, but first there must be evil, and there is!...Before the time of Jacques Eloi des Mondes, when this house first stood, it was a palace of kings and there were many people here until this island became his!…Only the greedy and foolish [natives] remained, and none who left ever returned.

There is a curse here, Reverend: him, that devil!

The implication is that Jacques did not build the château, but took it from someone else, which connects to his revelation about a month earlier that he was a “free looter”--or, in other words, a pirate. Matt argues that Jacques cannot still hold control over Maljardin because he died three hundred years ago, but Raxl says that “for some of us, three hundred years is but the span of a single lifetime,” indirectly revealing her true age to him.

She smiles at him right after she reveals to him that she’s centuries old. I think this is the first time Raxl smiles on the show, and the only time in the entire Maljardin arc.

Matt asks about the natives who stayed on the island, and Raxl says of them, “They died very soon. It was the curse on Maljardin. Have you ever seen a man who has lost his soul, Reverend? Their eyes down, the fishermen no longer fish, the children cease to play. They do no more than sit and wait [for death]...Since then, no native has ever tried to settle on Maljardin.” Only Vangie, the Conjure Woman, can go back and forth to and from the island “on the wings of the Great Serpent,” but she, too, is destined to die someday on Maljardin.

At the end of this scene, Vangie enters and adds that she doesn’t know when she’ll die, because the tarot cards did not (and cannot?) give her an exact date. This would seem to make her death on the show a foregone conclusion, but that may or may not be the case. (I say that not only to avoid spoilers, but also because the show and the original scripts give the Conjure Woman radically different fates, as we shall explore in future reviews.)

Meanwhile, down in the crypt, Jean Paul is still talking to Erica about how he is determined to kill anyone who interferes with the cryonics process when Jacques starts intruding on his mind. Like in Episode 27, the special effects team illustrates this by superimposing Jacques’ face from the portrait over that of Jean Paul when he is talking to him:

The best example from this episode.

None of Jacques’ lines in this scene are as funny as those of the old, pre-Lost Episode era Jacques, even if Fox-C still delivers the devil’s lines with the same amount of sarcasm and relish as before. His best line this time around is, in my not-so-humble opinion, “Suppose we just whisper so dear Erica may sleep.” I miss early Jacques’ jokes already--yes, even the ham-handed, cornball puns--and it hasn’t even been a week’s worth of episodes since the last.

We cut to Raxl and Vangie in the Great Hall, discussing the upcoming séance. Vangie says that she wants to find out if Erica’s spirit genuinely wants Jean Paul to continue mourning her and keeping her frozen. She insists that Raxl let her touch the cryocapsule before the séance, most likely to get a sense of Erica’s energy before they perform the ceremony.

Jean Paul: “What are you doing!”

Raxl: “Please, M’sieu. The Conjure Woman is trying to help.”

Jean Paul: “Only for a séance, Vangie. Erica must remain undisturbed.” Vangie: “And if you don’t like what you learn?” Jean Paul: “I’ll face that--when the time comes!”

The Lost Episode summary indicates that, at some point in the original draft, Raxl and Vangie had a conversation about Jacques, and Raxl would have told her how she can tell him and Jean Paul apart. As I’m sure many of you have realized, Raxl and Vangie oscillate between knowing that Jean Paul is being possessed and merely suspecting, depending on the episode. In the original Episode 32, Raxl would have known when Jacques is controlling Jean Paul’s body and Vangie would have only suspected until after Raxl explained. Ruling out all obvious non-diegetic clues such as the vanishing portrait shots and Jacques’ theme music, she could have said any number of things, including:

His energy/aura changes (although, logically, Vangie would notice that, too).

He wears the ring from the portrait (which we know is diegetic, because Elizabeth commented on it in Episode 13).

He opens his eyes really wide and makes silly faces.

He makes corny puns Never mind, we’re not doing that anymore.

He acts far too cheerful for a man who is supposedly mourning his dead wife.

He talks about kippers.

Etc.

I suppose we’ll never know which one(s) she mentioned, but I suspect #1, #2, and/or #5. Anyway, Jean Paul leaves to return upstairs and Vangie continues whatever she started doing with the capsule. He orders Jacques to “stop turning people against [him],” which he refuses to do, threatening to keep Erica dead if he doesn’t shut up about it.

“When we really get into the battle, someone has to die,” quips Jacques.

“Perhaps it will be you!” shouts Jean Paul in response.

“Or you, Jean Paul Desmond,” the handsome devil replies. “Or will you be preceded by one of our guests? Now let me see. A likely candidate could be...”

Jean Paul turns away from the roars of laughter, and the episode ends before Jacques can name the guest(s) he plans to murder.

Could it be Vangie? Or Holly? Dan? Alison? Even Elizabeth?

This episode was a fun one to watch, and probably the first review I’ve completed in only one day since sometime last winter. Jean Paul’s willingness to put everyone’s life on the proverbial line to save Erica shows a dark side to his nature that mostly vanishes at the end of this story arc--which is a shame, because I find morally ambiguous antihero Jean Paul the most interesting version of his character. I recommend this one, if you have access to it.

Coming up next: A Quito-centric episode where the detained guests learn shocking truths about Jean Paul’s manservant.

{ <- Previous: Episode 31   ||   Next: Episode 33 -> }

[quixoticquincy]

( colin ford, ghost, he/him & cismale ) is that (don’t you (forget about me) ) by (simple minds) playing? (quincy wren) must be nearby!  heard folks say the ( twenty four ) year old ( bookstore assistant ) was at the thanksgiving fair, ( looking for his friends ) when chaos ensued. during the glitch, ( he was about to run and help someone up when he found himself in the bookstore with no idea how he got there).

(death tw, homophobia mention tw, crime mention tw, gang mention tw?)

quincy in a summary? a soft summer boi who i would like to protect at all costs. even if he is already dead and doesn’t know it. works at the bookstore and loves art! he will find any excuse to sketch or paint. here’s some more stuff;

so quincy wren is from a long line of wrens, each going down a successful path. however, he was different from his siblings and from his parents!

(crime mention tw? gang mention tw?) the important thing to know about his parents is that they were definitely of a dubious nature. involved in something they shouldn’t have been doing most of the time. his older sister got involved with law enforcement and it pretty much meant they got away with things. but quin didn’t want this. his parents weren’t exactly impressed with his decision not to do that, not to go into a life or organised crime or get involved in the gang of criminals or to cater his career to help them

quin loves to paint. to draw. to do anything that involves art. he’ll often be found at the bookstore in a corner or at the counter with a pencil in his hand. if he doesn’t have the resources on him then it’ll be doodling on receipt paper. customers have been known to find doodles on their receipts. art is what he saw himself doing, along with still working at the bookstore and his family weren’t very happy over that

(homophobia tw, crime tw) his parents had some choice words to say about him loving art and not wanting a “proper career”. they immediately jumped to conclusions and labelled him as gay, telling him the sissy career would get them nowhere and acting like a pansy, he’d get nowhere with his family’s business. it wasn’t for him but he wasn’t getting that

(death tw, crime tw) one day, his parents asked him to do something for them. meet someone, pass on some information. however, he never made it there. he was dragged into an alley by rival criminals. from then on, he was a ghost. he needed to get the information, find peace, find out who killed him and why. was it because of his family? was it because of what they thought about him? was it just wrong place at the wrong time?

when he woke up, he found that his family were just... gone? the house was there, some of his things were still there but his parents and sister were gone, almost as if they’d just... moved. of course he wasn’t aware that a little time had passed and they had moved. but he still had the people he knew and.. well, he continued as if it had never happened. because he didn’t even know it had happened

he began to notice things weren’t quite right in two ways. one, he was maybe looking at men... differently to women. working something out about himself that made him feel conflicted, the comments of his parents ringing in his head. and two, that sometimes he drops things. it’s as if it just falls right through his hands. but that’s not possible, right? it’s not possible for someone to be able to walk through doors or disappear when upset?

ok so!!!! in summary, he’s just... gentle. will fill any awkward silence with small talk and anything to try and make himself and the other person comfortable.

he just wants everyone around him to be happy but he can get stressed easily sometimes. tends to turn invisible when he’s upset, angry or frustrated because his focus on being human appearing disappears

he doesn’t yet know he’s dead for sure and doesn’t know what happened to him

oh also he loves birds. probably cause his last name is wren who knows

call him quin or q, he likes that a lot better than quincy! maybe even wren, he’d accept that, even if his last name does hold a bit of a stigma cause of his parents.

but ya welcome to my ted talk i love my dead gay son. if you have any questions, just ask, i’m more than happy to ramble on about him and plot stuff!

possible connections:

- someone to tell him that he’s dead, honestly. someone who knows what “ghost” looks like and to say hey buddy, ur a ghost

- co worker at the bookstore

- someone passionate about art, reading or birds to talk to him about

- any sort of friends! friends that tell him to work less hours, friends that will let him make them endless cups of tea, friends that will let him ramble about books or help with displays at letum read

- someone that knows what happens to him? a witness to when he died?

- someone that was in the gang his parents were involved in or a rival gang

- art friends/colleagues! anyone to encourage his art or talk to him about it

[theonceoverthinker]

OUAT 2X22 - And Straight On ‘Til Morning

Despite all the mourning from the last episode, we’re gonna go straight on ‘til we finish off this season.

...Wanted to make my last pun of the season classy. Now you know what to do.

Press Release The inhabitants of Storybrooke brace themselves for the end when Greg and Tamara detonate the trigger Regina had placed within the curse, with the annihilation of the town and its residents imminent; and Mr. Gold mourns the loss of his son, Bae/Neal. Meanwhile, back in Neverland of the past, Hook discovers his connection to a young Bae after he rescues him from the sea and soon realizes that the Lost Boys are in hot pursuit of the boy. General Thoughts - Characters/Stories/Themes and Their Effectiveness Past I really struggled with how I felt about the past segment. Something about this flashback has always rubbed me the wrong way (Or at least, as much as the two times I’ve watched it can do) and I spent the lesser part of two days wondering why. And I think I finally figured it out.

The actions and broad strokes of this storyline are great, as is admittedly much of the dialogue. I like the bond that forms between Killian and Bae and I like how Killian’s framed. The dialogue is for the most part pretty good and I love all the time we get to spend on the Jolly Roger. However, the thematically heavy lines like “being alone” and “caring only about yourself” are honestly so distracting because Killian’s is blatantly committing revenge on Milah’s behalf and he has a whole crew with him.

Now on one hand, I get it. Especially given Killian’s decision at the end of the flashback, one can argue that Killian’s revenge and the decisions stemming from it are more for his sake than Milah’s. It’s similar to what Regina was doing with Snow and her subjects, where she claimed that after she killed Snow, she’d show them love. On the other hand, as I said before, it’s honestly so distracting and I feel like if the above were the case, there would’ve been more to paint it that way.

Okay, so now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, just remember: The segment is good, but dialogue choices like that separate good from great. The drama between Killian and Bae is one of the most important parts of Killian’s redemption and their bonding provides serious insight into who Killian is as a character.  Present First off, I love the way Neal’s “death” was handled. First, let’s talk about the acting. Robert Carlyle continues to be flawless. He shows how Rumple’s overcome with sadness and regret immediately upon hearing the news. Second, I love how he’s paralleled against Henry. While Henry has his mother to lean on and hold (A great if not tragic Swan Believer moment in and of itself), despite being told the news by two people, Rumple’s in the shot where he first takes it in alone and only comforted from a distance. Third, it gets Rumple questioning his own philosophy and is one of the biggest cases of “all magic has a price” being turned on him. It’s nothing short of a spiral and the way he pulls everyone down with him fits the character so well.

I got so many Spongebob Musical feels as I was thinking about the main story here. XD I’m going to explain it when I get to arcs, but I think that the main story does a good job bringing together Emma, Regina, Henry, Snow, and David’s stories. Every emotion here hits and the main story, which seemed to rightly get the most focus, was handled well.

Keep that in mind when I go off here.

”I did it [Kill Cora] because it was easy. It was a mistake.” FUCK THAT NOISE! NO! IT WASN’T EASY! IT WAS ACTUALLY BOTH DIFFICULT IN EXECUTION AND IN ITS AFTER EFFECTS! It was cruel, sure. And I get the guilt, but honestly, it was Cora (An uncontrollable monster) or Rumple (Someone who had been persuaded to do good in the past and could in the future AND had two morality pets to keep him on the straight and narrow). Fuck the noise where this was a wrong decision and that GOD this is the last instance where Snow says something like that! “There were other paths -- harder paths.” AND THEY WOULD’VE RESULTED IN MASS MURDERS ALL AROUND. FUCK! The ONLY good thing about that shitty flashback in “The Cricket Game” was that you supposedly learned that this idea was bullshit and you just threw that idea out like a dirty diaper! FUCK THIS SET OF LINES! It’s especially infuriating because it comes in the middle of a GREAT Snow scene where her optimism and leadership are so well shown!

Finally, What’s interesting to me is how Killian immediately dismisses Emma’s speech about being alone and being part of something by asking “Why are you really doing this?” Bae, being dead and Henry no longer having a father, is the spark that becomes the flame of his redemption. I’m with @sab031794 with the idea that Bae is definitely his turning point, while Emma’s words further the point, something he appreciates. Insights - Stream of Consciousness -Was there ever a concrete answer as to who drew the Milah drawing? Was it Killian? Milah herself? Like one of the people at theme park who paints people? -SMEE!! So by this point, is Smee Killian’s first mate or is he still just a regular crew member? Also, got to hand it to Smee for his faith in Killian. Smee’s a scared dude, so to see him with so much resolve in his voice as he tells Killian that they’ll avenge Milah, it’s so much bigger of a moment! -I didn’t realize how closely this episode borders on child trafficking until now! Dark. -I’ll never quite be over the way Bae’s eyes pop when he tells someone what happened to his father. Powerful! -It’s great seeing Killian piece together the puzzle that’s this new boy and immediately making a plan upon realizing just who he is. -It’s so creepy seeing how having only Lacey to depend on as a morality chain can corrupt Rumple so much. Hurting Henry to save himself at the very least was a point he was torn on when he first found Neal and learned the truth about his and Henry’s relation. But as he sees Henry on the swing, he’s so close to giving in and killing Henry. (Okay, someone write a dark ass fic where this happens. Henry dies and Emma goes crazy trying to figure out if his death was an accident or not. Can you IMAGINE the final confrontation there?!) Also, I refuse to believe it’s a coincidence that it’s David that snaps him out of it. Sheep Bros to the rescue! -Colin acts that last scene in the mine so freakin’ well! Like, less than three minutes later, that’s gonna turn out to be horseshit, but he sells that so believably! -I will say, while I don’t like a lot of platitudes this season, I’m cool with Henry’s “work together” schtick. -David, that was an amazing punch! XD -WHAT AN EXCELLENT REGAL BELIEVER SCENE! Once again, Regina apologizes to Henry and it’s very sincere. She’s not blaming anyone and is saying that it’s she who failed to live up to his standards. And Henry’s reaction does not absolve her, but lets her know that he loves her. THAT is GOOD! -”The things we do for our children.” This is kind of a weird line. -I love how it’s so obvious that this Pan is “him” and they are doing every backflip to make this a killer twist. -Oh My God! Felix is trying to be so menacing and it is just the HAMMIEST thing ever! XD I love it! It’s not appropriate at all to the mood they’re setting, but fuck it! I love it! -Grumpy, that is the best cup I have ever seen! I can’t even blame you for taking it back for Sneezy (And then maybe channel your inner-Stealthy and take it for yourself)! -I’ve been trying to do a count of the number of men in KIllian’s crew. So far, I’ve seen at most six pirates (Killian and Smee included). Does anyone have a better count? -Left is port, right is starboard. I don’t know why, but I always forget it. Hopefully, Captain Hook will be able to help me remember! -It’s interesting to me how Killian, even when he was just using Bae, used a real and vulnerable part of his life to relate to him. It’s great insight into Killian’s life and a subtle nudge in the direction of Killian coming to care for Bae even before the truly touching moment on the scene hits. -I do have to wonder, why does Killian want to live so badly? During “The Outsider,” Killian was more than willing to die so that he could return to Milah, but he wouldn’t have even killed Rumple then (though one could argue that he’d at least leave a black mark on Rumple and Belle’s relationship). Here, he’d be killing Rumple and there’s no sign he care about saving anyone else. -”I’m not your mate.” Give it a season, Davey! -Emma and Regina work brilliantly together here. There’s such a softness to Regina sacrifice and the way Emma tries to fight against what looks to be the inevitable. It’s a great testament to their dynamic. -Wow! The CG for the destruction of Storybrooke is awful! XD -Farewell, Lacey. I hardly knew ye. -Snow, that is not all of Storybrooke. That’s not even a quarter of Storybrooke. There should be a giant ass crowd of people, not just your besties! -The moment when Bae is told the truth of his mother by Killian is so powerful! There’s so much rage, passion, and love, all of it left on on the floor in the scene. -”I’ll track them down in Hell if I have to.” Granted it’s not regarding the same character, but give it a few seasons, Emma! -”There’s no way. I spent a lifetime trying to cross worlds to find my son.” Hindsight makes that line utterly hysterical! -Rumple! Let Belle help! Get some other stooge to cast the protection spell! Belle’s such a good tracker! -Why is this goodbye making me flashforward to Belle’s death?! *bawls* -GOLDEN HOOK WORKING TOGETHER!!! That look they exchange as they understand the map’s destination! YES! I’M FILLED WITH THE POWER OF YESSSSSS! Arcs - How are These Storylines Progressing? Regina’s Redemption - Regina’s redemption was handled masterfully in this episode. The focus of it was put on Henry. As the inevitability of the end hits her, all she can and does focus on is keeping Henry alive. But that’s not all. Her acceptance of ehr bad reputation being her own fault goes a long way towards washing away the exasperation from the last few episodes away. Her sacrifice works on every level, reinfusing sympathy into Regina without it feeling out of character because of the sharp focus on Henry. Rumple’s Redemption - So like usual, Rumple takes one step back and one step forward, and I felt that it mostly worked. I say mostly because I don’t really get how Lacey attempting to use Bae’s shawl is the turning point for Rumple using the memory potion on Lacey. It’s not like Lacey used the shawl maliciously and she even apologized for it. Was it so she could help him grieve? If so, I wish it came across better. That said, I like the effect that Lacey has been corrupting Rumple, but he realizes that he both needs Belle in her real state and that his thoughts of murdering Henry are awful and need to be shunted. At the same time, he’s not willing to lend a finger to help with the end of the world. Killian’s Redemption - What’s interesting to me is how early on in this episode, Killian is pointed at for not believing in something by Tamara, and when he does turn, Killian himself is one of the most belief-heavy people on the show! Additionally, in the flashback, Killian is so belief-heavy, believing that he can get his revenge on the Dark One and later that he and Bae can fill the empty holes in their hearts. But aside from that, Killian’s turn around is actually pretty simply set up for a sympathetic character. First, it comes through in the decision to go to the heroes to help stop the diamond, knowing they’re more effective. Second, it’s of course the decision to turn his ship around. It represents Killian’s decision to start caring again, allowing himself in a way to be reborn. Emma Accepting Her Parents - “Mom...Dad…” ...Do I even need to say any more? ...Well, apart from the fact that it’s a great closing out of the arc in the beginning of the season, it’s also a PHENOMENAL setup for the events of Season 3. Greg and Tamara - Greg and Tamara kind of get stupid in this finale upon revealing that they don’t know who runs the home office and all the deflectation that takes place when Killian questions them. Really? A group of people who supposedly value science over magic wouldn’t ask who their boss is? Favorite Dynamic Emma and Regina - Emma and Regina are amazing to watch. The episode doesn’t pretend that they’re friends or even that they like each other all that much, but that their bond over Henry is powerful enough that they can overcome those facts and at least start in that direction. For the first time, I feel these two come together as real mothers. They act in Henry’s best interests and that includes saving the other, being honest to Henry, and portraying the other in a good light. Darker Elements (TW: Mention of Child Trafficking) I’ve seen it be said that Killian’s decision to abandon Baelfire was the most evil moment of his life. While I’m not sure how much I believe that, I must point out how this is as close to child trafficking as OUAT can ever get without outright saying it, and that is fucking dark. While trying to examine my own feelings on the issue, I think in terms of the show, because of the fantastical distance of the child trafficking being conducted in an equally fantastical way by a pirate with a hook for a hand and a set of children in cloaks putting a boy in a dinghy to take him to Peter Pan, it’s different than other instances of Darker Elements that I’ve already touched on. If a woman is assaulted or someone is raped by deception, the resonance with the treatment of women and the realities of sexual assault, especially in our modern political climate, makes it difficult to cloud with fantastical elements. And I’m not saying trafficking isn’t, but it’s not something a large portion of OUAT’s audience sees on a constant basis.

Writer A&E are as usual in charge of the finale, and honestly, while well delivered, I expected better. So much of the dialogue works, and that makes the fact that some of the crucial dialogue doesn’t hurt so badly. I feel like they were trying to make square pegs fit in round holes when they talk about things like Killian choosing to be alone and how kiling Cora was easy and and how Rumple decides to turn back Belle because Lacey accidentally used Bae’s shawl as a napkin. it almost overshadows the genuinely good dialogue in other places and I feel like with another draft, those problems would either be minimized or non existent. It pains me how this episode reminds me in a lot of respects more of “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” (My current least favorite episode of the series) than some of their better episodes like “Broken.” Rating 8/10. I’ve been torn on ratings before, but never quite like this. So much of the Season 2 finale does work, but it does have failings and they chip away. However, I’ve gone on about some of the dialogue choices enough. Let’s talk about the good stuff. This episode is a good culmination point for so many of the arcs started and presents a good jumping off point for them to be furthered in the next season. It’s entertaining to watch emotionally resonates where it counts. It’s dark, but optimistic and has that Once-y feel! Flip My Ship - Home of All Things “Shippy Goodness” Swan Fire - We get to see some pretty sad and yet hopeful Swan Fire stuff. Emma is barely able to mourn Neal’s loss, but when she tells Henry and Killian the truth, you really feel the grief she’s going through. And then Neal’s alive! Swan Queen - It was so great seeing Emma and Regina working together! You really feel for the emotional bond they’ve formed as they fight off the diamond and it’s gotta be said that there’s a serious weight to the fact that the two of them together managed to fight off something that neither thought possible. Captain Swan - I feel like Emma and Killian really get their deserved start here. Emma not only tries to get her bean back, but tries to invite him to the hero squad with as much effort as she can given all else on her plate. And while it initially doesn’t work, Emma’s speech does find its resonance with Killian through remembering of his love for Bae. Rumbelle - My thoughts on how Rumple decided to use the potion aside, the moment where Belle comes back and they kiss is beautiful and heartwarming, as is their goodbye at the docks. Grumpy Beauty - Grumpy went out of his way as they were all gonna die to get another memory potion to restore Belle! That is so cute!!! I love this ship!!! There’s also such a real feeling of sacrifice as Rumple sees Belle off before his trip to Neverland. ()()()()()()()()() Oh My God! Season 2 is completed!!! Well, sort of! Like last season, I’m going to do my overview where I talk about everything from the quality of the season itself to the best dynamics to who was the best writer! I hope you’ll join me for it because it’s gonna be a lot of fun!

Thank you all for reading and to the fine folks at @watchingfairytales! Couldn’t have done it without you!

See you next time!

Season 2 Tally (194/220) Writer Tally for Season 2: Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis: (58/60)* Jane Espenson (44/50)* Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg (40/50)* David Goodman (24/30)* Robert Hull (24/30)* Christine Boylan (26/30)* Kalinda Vazquez (28/30)* Daniel Thomsen (18/20)* * Indicates that their work for the season is complete Operation Rewatch Archives

[canaryatlaw]

okay it’s midnight and I should get writing because I can’t sleep in all day tomorrow which would afford me the ability to stay up later (that sentence was horribly phrased but I’m too lazy to fix it so oh well). today was pretty great! some stuff not ideal but overall still pretty good. I woke up to my alarm at 9 and got dressed and got prepared for our first quest of the day, which was trying to get yet another pair of concert tickets for a KPop band Jess wants to see. This was one she cares slightly less about so we weren’t under quite as much pressure to get the good seats, we were just aiming for the cheap ones. So I put our usual breakfast order in on ubereats and it arrived shortly after she did at around 9:30, the tickets went on sale at 10. Since we’ve had not great experiences trying to get tickets up to this point we wanted to try to maximize our chances of getting them by using multiple accounts (which is probably cheating but tbh idgaf I’m sure the ticket scalpers are doing much worse with many more tickets) so I had my main one up in my main browser and then the one attached to my old email up in another one (it was funny, I logged onto it and it was under the name “Ann”- my mom’s name- and the credit cards stored on it expired in like, 2012 😂) and then Jess had hers up on the chromebook. Unlike the other ones thus far this one wasn’t doing the thing where they had a virtual queue form 10 minutes beforehand, so it was just whenever they decided to let you in. The lack of a virtual queue was objectively a good thing because it meant there weren’t as many people trying to get tickets, but it also meant it was just totally random with everyone who was there at that minute. But thankfully we got in after not too long and Jess was able to snag two tickets before anyone else clicked on them (because it does this really annoying thing where the page with refresh with the available tickets and you’ll click two but when you try to go forward it says somebody else already got them and then refreshes your page and it’s a pain in the ass) and after some slight panic over getting the right credit card the tickets were ours for the least amount of money, so we were pleased with that result. May is gonna be crazy, as it stands we have at least 2 concerts (well 3 for Jess being that she’s going to BTS twice) in the same week and are very likely going to end up with another when the Monsta X tickets go on sale on Friday (and of course for them we’re trying for Chicago and New York, so it might involve a NY trip as well). so that’s gonna be a lot, but nothing we’re not used to haha at this point I think we thrive in chaos. So once we had that taken care of we grabbed our things and headed out to Jess’ car. In case I forgot to mention this up to this point we were cosplaying as Ariel and Snow White in their pajama outfits from Wreck It Ralph 2 which is 100% a lazy cosplay but I really give zero fucks because it was comfy and easy. So we drove down to the convention center, this isn’t in the one that most of the Chicago cons are in out by the airport (northwest of downtown in the top corner of the city) but rather C2E2 is in the convention center that’s adjacent to the loop that happened to be the place that they used for my law school graduation and bar swearing in, so I’ve had some very different experiences in this building, lol. I did my make up in the car and was fairly pleased with how it turned out. Once we got there there was some confusion about parking, we were originally planning on parking in one of their lots that’s right connected to the place so we didn’t have to walk in the cold (we were leaving our jackets in the car so we didn’t have to carry them all day; I was in shorts but was wearing my extra thick ice skating tights underneath them so it wasn’t terrible) but that didn’t end up happening so we had to walk in the cold a little bit but we managed. Later in the day Jess mentioned that apparently all of their parking had filled up and there were people with tickets who couldn’t get in because they didn’t have anywhere to park, so the con probably oversold their tickets in that sense. So we got in fairly easily, it was already opened at this point since we were doing the tickets that delayed our arrival a bit. So we start walking the show floor a bit and then decide we should check out artist’s alley first, but try not to buy anything on our first walk through, just consider stuff. the issue of course is that artist’s alley is generally full of great art, but I have literally no room on my wall for anything haha and I still have to hang up my 3 photo ops from London (though they are only 6x9′s instead of the standard 8x10′s so hopefully that will make it easier) and my Matt Ryan one from Cleveland. so I could really only consider very small things, lol. but there was a lot of cool stuff, always a pretty great assortment of different art styles and subject matters. I spotted a few things I may come back and get tomorrow, we will see. I really wanted to see if they had any art from The Cursed Child but I didn’t see anything, besides one drawing that I’m pretty sure was supposed to be Draco but could conceivably be Scorpius from the way he was drawn (but he was with drawings of the original trio so probably not). still a cool drawing though. so that took a while, though definitely less time than it did last year. So after that we went in search of anybody we might know that was there but didn’t see anybody, so we started wandering the show floor. Now, in terms of not needing to buy anything, this was even worse because the solid majority of it is clothing, and we both already own way too much clothing, especially comics related lol. so we made our way through most of everything, some cool stuff, not managed to refrain from buying anything up till that point. We had checked the schedule for panels at one of the smaller stages (their main stage panels are super crowded and there wasn’t anyone we cared that much about) and Colin Donnell (aka Tommy from Arrow) was doing one at 1:30 and it was like 12:50 at this point, so we went over to the little row of food vendors they had and managed to get some decent food for lunch that we sat and ate before returning to the panel stage and managing to find seats right before it started. It was pretty entertaining, he is very pretty in person, though that’s probably not a shock to many. He talked about Arrow of course but also about Chicago Med being that that’s his current show and it is after all filmed and set in Chicago. He also talked about his background doing Broadway which I wasn’t aware of so that was cool to hear about. one of the questions they asked him was like “if you’re on jeopardy, what category would you want the final jeopardy question to be from?” and I was like “musical theatre trivia” (answering somewhat for myself but also for him) and right after I said that he was like “broadway trivia” haha so I felt validated, that is definitely what I would choose given that question. So that lasted about half an hour and was pretty fun. After that we went back to wander the rest of the show floor that we hadn’t made it to yet, most notably a few KPop/Anime/etc. themed booths that were wild, Jess ended up getting into a conversation with these like high school girls about going to BTS and they were like, unironically fans of them when Jess is only a very ironic fan, and they were like “oh who do you stan??” and then the girl said she stans the one guy Jess hates and I busted up laughing at all of it, I couldn’t stop myself, it was truly hilarious. they were talking about the concert and what nights they were going and the girls were like “oh yeah Sunday’s gonna be tough you know because it’s a school night!” and I just fucking died because they’re clearly like 15. So that was very amusing. Jess ended up convincing me I needed one of the hats they sold at that booth, they were the snapback style with the big plastic letters attached across the top which said “THICC” in pink and I got it for the pure reason to wear to ClexaCon next month and it’s gonna be great, I of course put it on as soon as I bought it too. We then went upstairs to where they host the main stage panels just to check it out, there were a lot of people in very long lines, and I was glad I wasn’t in one of them. So we hung out up there for a while just to chill out a bit. We ended up heading back downstairs to see if we could locate an internet friend who’s working the con but we weren’t able to find her today (probably will see her tomorrow) and ended up finally seeing some people we knew, so we sat with them for a while until they ended up heading out, and after that we did a little more wandering before deciding to call it a day, it was a little earlier than we’d normally leave but Jess was feeling kinda crappy and there wasn’t really anything else we were dying to do so it made sense to just go home. Drove back and got dropped off, I changed into comfortable clothing and didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of so I ended up sitting on the couch and watching the last four episodes of season 5 of The Americans, stopping somewhere in there to make two eggs for dinner (which was a bad plan, I go through weird phases with food and I had convinced myself that I was fine eating eggs but I really wasn’t), and then before the last episode to shower before returning to finish it. This season happened to have a fairly brutal finale, in my opinion at least- trigger warning here for self-harm/suicide. So the plot was basically that they had befriended this family that had just defected from the Soviet Union and for some mildly important reason they wanted at least the wife and their son to go back, so one of the methods they employ is using their fake spy son (not their actual child) who had originally befriended him make things at school really bad for their son to the point where he would be so miserable that his mother would want to return to Russia with him. Well, it didn’t look like it was working, and their fake son ended up advising his friend to “slit his wrists” in order to get his parents attention enough for them to take him back, and the spy apparently “showed him” how to do it without hitting an artery, and the spy is calmly recounting this to his fake parents, saying he was going to do it at 7 pm that night, right when his parents were supposed to get home. Of course their majorly alarmed but were split on what to do because they didn’t want to compromise the mission, but the dad ends up storming out of their fake home and walking to their friend’s home and are trying to get in when his parents arrive, and so they get into the house and sent the spy son up to the other son’s room, and a second later you hear him yelling for help, so they storm upstairs to find the boy unconscious on his bed with blood all over his arms and bed. And I mean, I knew going into this episode I would probably see this (they left the previous episode at a cliffhanger about them intervening) but I really was not prepared for that image. And then of course his parents start freaking out and his mother is just next to him sobbing while everyone is scrambling to call 911 and try to bind his wounds the best they can until the paramedics get there and like.....the whole thing just made me so mad. To be fair, the main characters were very alarmed that this was used as a tactic and think their fake kid way overstepped in doing telling him to do this, but the whole idea of basically risking sacrificing the life of a child for a part of your mission that was not even very critically important meanwhile you go home to your own children.....like how as a parent could you ever live with yourself?? And I mean, I know these are spies that regularly just shoot people, some innocent some not, but like, interfering in this boy’s life to make him absolutely miserable and it culminating in something as horrible as this really just pissed me tf off. and I mean that’s for obvious reasons, this is an intersection of two issues I care deeply about, mental health advocacy and the wellbeing of children. So that whole storyline left me pretty angry. And I mean I know, it’s fiction, this didn’t actually happen, but just to see the callousness to the life of a child portrayed like that was really disturbing to witness. But I finished the episode and then turned the tv off for the night and started getting ready for bed, and shortly after I started writing this and now I am here. It’s almost 1 am and I have an 8:30 alarm set, so I think it is time for me to go to bed. Goodnight babes. Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.

[counttotwenty]

Bullet Points: Collecting Clues

Murder Most Foul-part 3 (parts 1-2 can be found here and here) Bullet points are encapsulated scene analysis from the top of each act to the bottom. (each act is bookended by a commercial break)

1. The way they shoot the establishing scene of Act 1, uneven light, shadows on the floor, lots of extraneous sound, with the stone columns at times obstructing our view of Robert, is a reminder that we the don’t yet have a clear picture of exactly who he is. Or at the very least that the picture we think we have isn’t accurate.

Nicely done.

2. “You should be spending that on your family.” 

That may well be true but keep in mind, no one likes a judge-y barkeep. 

As far as an exposition scenes go this one was handled fairly well. Giving David’s age, along with Robert’s current ‘half in the bag and so broke everyone in town knows about it’ status, is great shorthand for letting the viewer know everything they need to know about the last 6 years. 

They’ve been rough.

3. It’s kind of heartbreaking that all of the tables surrounding Robert are filled with people celebrating in pairs or in groups. Even the candles on the other tables are less melted down and sad looking than his. Poor guy.

Great visual representation of his current state.

4.”He deserves better than me”

Robert is self aware enough to know he’s on a bad path but he spends what little money he has on a drink anyway. Much to the barkeeps scowling disapproval. Seriously, dude, I’m pretty sure trying to push the customers towards sobriety is bad for business. If you’re looking for every person you encounter at work to be making good decisions a bar was a bad choice of employment.

But still this brings up a very important point. Right now Robert isn’t trying to improve himself. In fact, he’s leaning in on the whole drunken loser thing. He may not be happy with where his life is but he’s not unhappy enough to do anything about it.

It’s important when comparing all the people in this ep dealing with the idea of redemption to remember where each person is on the journey.

There was a period of time when Hook was content to be a pirate. He had no desire to change. Then a defining moment with a certain blonde savior struck like a bolt from the sky and suddenly he was all about charting a new course.

Perhaps Robert can have a similar moment.

Oh hello, King George.

BOING!!!!!!!!!!

5. “Do you think he’s going to want to come back here to a dying farm and a drunken father?” 

Well definitely not if you put it to him that way.

This exchange is a sad glimpse into the toll the last 6 years have taken on Ruth. She’s lost hope to the point that she can’t even imagine her son wanting to come home.

6. “I have to be better for the boy.” Interesting he doesn’t say boys plural. (more on this in a minute)

7. BEAUTIFUL camera work to shoot Robert’s determined “I have to try” from young David’s perspective. David has a hope and an innocence at this point that no one else in Robert’s life does. He believes in his father’s ability to get well without question or doubt.

7. “Fixing this broken family is how I finally fix myself.”

Redemption isn’t about just changing yourself. It’s about becoming a positive force for the people you love.

BOING!!!

8. “In two weeks I’ll be home. Myself again.”

I’m just sayin’

9. It’s interesting that Rumple’s coin became David’s “lucky” coin. Because the question of which boy was lucky looms large for the entire family. The fact is that even though the boys are identical twins the action Robert took 6 years ago, essentially selling James to the king, regardless of the reasons, created a world where what’s best for one of the boys may not be best for the other.

Hence the singular use of the word earlier.

Very subtle and very nicely done.

10. So young David descends the stairs with the coin to give it to his father right before we cut to grown up David descending the metaphorical stairs of obsession when it comes to learning the truth about his father.

Bravo. Well done.

11. Between the backwards sitting in the chair and the way he popped up and almost glided to the door I thought David was about to go all Flashdance on us for a minute.

12. Nice work with the bike hanging on the wall. These two characters are headed for a steep uphill climb.

I see you, show.

13. Josh Dallas does a good job here of making it clear David has gone a bit round the bend without overdoing it and making it campy. The nervous energy, the laser focus, the way he disregards the very clear signals Killian is putting out that he’s not on board with the plan

He’s a man on a mission and he will not be deterred.

Even when it’s clear to the audience, even if they hadn’t seen the Archie scene, that Killian has something else on his mind.

14.”Are you entirely sure about that? Heh. Colin delivers that line flawlessly.

15. Both actors do a great job here of helping the audience see and feel exactly what their character is going through. And in doing so a feeling of uneasiness begins to set in. Because it’s clear they want two very different things.

Someone asked a few days ago if A&E dropped a trail of breadcrumbs to the murder reveal of if they worked hard to preserve the twist. I said at the time, and I still believe, that they did everything they could to preserve the twist.

It’s moments like this however, when we see these two men pursuing diametrically opposed agendas, that we can see something looming in the future for them. Even though there were no breadcrumbs to specifically what.

16. “You’re a pirate. And a pirate’s what I need.”

Ooooooof

Read the room, David.

Killian’s disappointment at hearing that is palpable yet David barrels forward like he just pinned a gold star on Killian’s chest.

The ultimate irony here. of course, is that what happens later in the ep is a direct result of Killian being a pirate and doing what pirates do.

Well played, show.

Be careful what you wish for.

BOING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

17. Robin asking Regina to tell him their story at some point is interesting. There are three scenes in this Act. In the first scene Robert is struggling to define who he is, in the second scene David badly misidentifies who Killian is now, and in the third scene Robin is asking Regina to define his identity for him.

That’s a lot of flashing red neon you invested in there, guys.

Whatever else may happen later in the ep to draw attention (heh) the bottom line is that this is an arc about identity. Who you are, who others think you are, and who you want to be.

I said in a post a few days ago that Killian was fixin to be a the center of a storyline that defines the first six seasons and this is it. Since day one we’ve seen the characters struggle with the dichotomy of the SB personas vs their EF personas, we’ve seen some struggle with the pull of evil and seen them wonder if embracing it is who they really are, we’ve seen people wrestle with the idea of true love and how it defines a person, we’ve seen people struggle against the concept of fate, we’ve seen Snow get her groove back and eschew the Mary Margaret moniker. It’s all been about defining yourself to yourself and to those around you.

Peripheral character my ass.

18. “Actually, it’s quite easy.” 

Sing it, Zelena. Can I get about 100000000000 amens.

As usual, it’s difficult because Regina is making it difficult. She wants what she wants--for this new person to be the old Robin--and she refuses to accept she can’t have her way and continues to try to have her cake and eat it too.

19. I really wanna believe the programming department at ABC knows what they’re doing but then I remember someone there--or actually several someone’s there--gave the green light to Imaginary Mary and I realize my faith is badly misplaced.

Next up--You Gotta Trust Me

[captainignatiuspigheart]

Oosh, where has the time gone? It’s hard to figure out whether it’s the weeks or the weekends that go by faster. Either way, they’re going nuts and I’m waaaay behind on my weekly updates. I’ve noted this for the last couple of weeks, sighed, and discovered that it’s now Thursday or something equally ridiculous. And of course, the longer this goes on, the more I have to write and the more impossible it becomes. I guess I’ll have to draw a line under it… This week you’ll only be seeing the things I gave a damn about from the last couple of weeks because otherwise I’ll never finish!

A Rare Moment of Self-Reflection

What I should do is to think a little about why I’m now struggling to do this. In part it’s because this exercise was great at the beginning of lockdown, and gave me a focus. Now, of course, I have a fucktonne of work to do and things are sort of ramping up in other areas of life, like occasionally seeing people in the flesh and stuff. A number of things have helped me keep it together for the last 129 days (I think) of working at home: work, obviously, is my primary routine and aiming to go for a cycle ride beforehand really frames my day. Every Thursday for ages (forever? Who knows) I’ve been hosting a virtual pub for our MissImp weekly regulars (and folks from further afield too, which has been amazing) which has filled my regular evening out slot nicely. Then there’s been the fortnightly We Are What We Overcome webcasts, and the quick chats we have on the off weeks. That handful of regular activity has been great.

I try to keep these posts going because of something we talked about in one of our podcasts: if I’m depressed, I can’t remember any good things I’ve ever done, and if I’m all perky and up then I don’t care about remembering what I’ve been doing. Right now I’m mostly pretty chipper, largely a consequence of being busy and having acquired lots of LEGO recently, so this doesn’t feel important in the same way it did a few months ago. That’s a tricky place for me to be in, because despite occasional dips into glum days, I think I’ve been upbeat for a while now. The longer I’m upbeat, the less likely it feels that I’ll go down, or that I’ll worry about crashing. And that’s actually a decent indicator that I’m going to have a bit of a crash. Keeping track is the whole damn point! Must make more time. 

Anyway… what have I been up to? Well, we’ve seen real live humans on both the last Saturdays, partly in attempt to normalise the new normal, or whatever the pre-second wave era is called, and partly because it turns out that folk want to see us, which is very nice and reassuring. Messing about with my sister and nieces at Highfields Park was a rather fun afternoon, as was eating and drinking at Dovecote Lane park last weekend. That bandstand is perfect, other than it’s brutish tarmac flooring. As I have alluded to earlier, I’m also quite busy at work as we race for the print deadlines for October titles, commission more and more artwork and do general bookstuff. It’s ace really, but is certainly filling my days tightly. We’re not likely to see the office for another month, and that’s OK with me.

I’ve been a rather busy LEGO person too, albeit more “busy” in the sense of “buying” than making much. I did join a LUG though, the Brick Central LEGO User Group. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last couple of years, and though I’m not sure how much time I could feasibly put into big displays and conventions, I’m interested in finding out. Also I got neat printed bricks and bits and pieces when I signed up, so I’m happy with that. I took advantage of the LEGO double VIP points last week to pick up a “few” things, from cute little LEGO Dots and baby dinosaurs to the massive Pirates of Barracuda Bay set. It is all very exciting! I’ve got some random builds I need to take some decent photos of and share them too.  

Big Stuff

Little Stuff

Big Stuff

Watching: The Order, season 2

I can’t deny that this is a low-rent Teen Wolf crossed with the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, themselves low-rent versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and so many more.  I remembered nothing of the previous season, even when we saw the “last time on this thing”, and would have sworn I’d never seen it at all. Nonetheless, this proved to be effective brain chewing entertainment while eating, in the sense of it noticeably degrading one’s braincells. Daft witch academy with neighboring anti-magic werewolves (who turn out to have previously been the witches’ bodyguard or something), but the wolves have all been tricked into being witches, or something. It doesn’t really matter – the entire show is redeemed by the delightful relationship between the four werewolves, which feels very much like how I felt about my university housemates: loving, occasionally fighty and laced with sarcasm and alcohol. Shame the lady werewolf ended up in hell this season. I’m sure I won’t remember this next time either, but if I can be persuaded to watch season 3 I’m sure I’ll enjoy it. 

Reading: The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt

Continuing the really quite wacky steampunk series set in a far-future with multiple species of human (Craynarbians are splendid shelled folk, for example), steammen, and wild action adventure. I have insufficient time to summarise this one, but it covers an Atlantis-alike ancient city in the sky, infernal plots of genius industrialists to take over government, a frightening Borg-like jungle species, savage feral robots, submarine journeys, and so much more. The whole series is an absolute blast and I’m enjoying re-reading them enormously. Get on it.  

Building: LEGO Overwatch Watchpoint: Gibraltar #75975

While I still have almost no idea what Overwatch is (yeah, yeah, I know it’s a game, and my friend Sam has a nice summary on Overwatch here), but I adore the LEGO sets. I’ve had my eye on this one solely because it features a gorilla in a spacesuit. Now that it’s reaching the end of its shelf-life “Watchpoint: Gibraltar” has become more affordable, and on a midnight whim (always the best time to buy LEGO) I ordered…

The minifigs are an utter delight! Check out Pharah (in blue) with that gorgeous gold visor, and Mercy (admittedly with the usual pink-printed-on-black face which never really works that well) with a lovely hair/hat element and lovely printed torso and legs, plus the rather ominous Reaper. I’m guessing he’s the bad guy. The gorilla is apparently named “Winston”. I hadn’t noticed that he’s wearing glasses, but he’s rather charming either way.

The build is pretty straightforward: you make a spaceship, which has a couple of separating sections, and the cool but not very exciting gantry/rocket leaning post thing. The spaceship itself is a satisfyingly sleek affair, with cleverly connected sections and very neat work on making the hatch fit flush. Building it felt like a wonderful flashback to my childhood, making largely flat spaceships that feel a little like this, but much less good.

The whole thing looks very pretty, but is inconveniently tall for anywhere I want to put it…

Watching: Derry Girls, season 2

Just marvelous. I can’t recommend this show enough, and I’m thrilled that there’s a third season on the way. Set in, um, Derry, in the 90s, this teenage sitcom is pretty much perfect. In keeping with non-American TV shows about teenagers, this lot actually look like real teenagers – the scowl game is extraordinary. The relationships and dialogue are brilliant, and you can’t help but love them all a little bit. The parents are savage and equally funny (finding Bill Clinton is a particular joy). The costumes are bang-on 90s-hideous and the soundtrack makes me unusually nostalgic.  My only complaint is that there aren’t enough episodes. Not even close. Apparently Netflix screwed up and released this early, so it’s not available any more. Sorry folks!

Building: LEGO Jurassic World Dr Wu’s Lab: Baby Dinosaur Breakout #75939

Jesus Christ, baby dinosaurs! How was I ever supposed to resist? Reader, I did not. Clearly. 

Like many of the licensed sets, especially the Jurassic World theme, there isn’t a lot to this. That said, the build is drawn out by the usual agony of applying stickers to transparent elements, and my desire to get them mostly straight had me turning on extra lights and teasing them into place with a scalpel. The egg turning machine is pleasing, and although I was complaining about applying the stickers, this is a set where they really do shine. The details in them are lovely, from the laptop screen to all the heads up displays, they’re adorable, and I’ll have to find more uses for them.

The figures are reliably cool, and I really like the LEGO Friends elements such as the baby feeding bottle sneaking into the mainstream LEGO sets.  Dr Wu has the most cunning expression, just like in the movies! But none of this matters – all shall be recycled for parts except for the ADORABLE baby triceratops and even babier ankylosaur. Just so goddamn cute. I couldn’t be happier. 

Watching: What We Do in the Shadows, season 2

A show that completely revels in its own stupidity with enormous commitment, we caned this in a single sitting too. Colin, the energy vampire, continues to be my personal favourite, but they’re all pretty great idiots. I’m delighted that the main storyline has turned out to be Guillermo’s, as he learns of his vampire-hunting past and wonders about his future, killing vampires while still being a dedicated familiar. Wonderful nonsense.

Doing: We Are What We Overcome – Fortnightly Mental Health Check-In

We reflected a little on how life has changed with a whole fortnight of being allowed to go to the pub… And here’s the link for next week’s chat.

Watching: Warrior Nun

This is dreadful. OK, that’s not entirely fair, but it’s definitely mostly fair. This is the story of a bunch of nuns who are warriors (duh), fighting demons and stuff. One of the nuns always has an angel’s halo embedded in their back, which makes them a sin-fighting superhero. When a mission goes badly tits up, the warrior nuns rip the halo out of their dead leader and stick it in a recently dead girl… She comes back to life, no longer paraplegic, but certainly perplexed about why she’s alive, why she has superpowers (kinda), and why she should give a shit about the Catholic church. Sounds fun, right. The trailer looks pretty fun too, and there are about 25 minutes of great stuff spread across the entire show, with some fun fights, laughable CGI demons, the one good character (Shotgun Mary) who appears to be in another, much better, show. But the rest of it is bogged down by impossibly tedious exposition where characters literally open books and read endless passages from them, or an agonisingly dull romance, in which the most exciting bits are them sitting on a ferry. The show almost redeems itself with a final heist episode but by that point it’s so laden with cack that I couldn’t bring myself to care. You may enjoy it though.

Doing: MissImp’s Virtual Drop-In – Roberto Lewis

More great and splendid video content right here, on one of my favourite topics — coming in with nothing! (I mean, favourite because I cannot plan…)

Last Week: The Order, The Kingdom Above the Waves, Warrior Nun, Derry Girls, LEGO Overwatch and Jurassic World, We Are What We Overcome and more… I’m quite behind. #books #tv #LEGO #stuff https://wp.me/pbprdx-8GV Oosh, where has the time gone? It’s hard to figure out whether it’s the weeks or the weekends that go by faster.

[artsoccupychi]

Don’t Get Your Calcium From Milk

One of the most powerful industries in America is the dairy industry, earning over $50 billion and spending over $200 million annually to spread the lie that dairy products are necessary for human children’s health. They’re smart enough to target mothers (and they started, very successfully, with our grandmothers), because parents can create habits for life if a child is drinking cow’s milk at an early age. So, while for many this will be a revelation, it shouldn’t be: our mothers and grandmothers were conned!

In this article:

Milk from Another Species

Milk Calcium Myths: “Milk and dairy build strong bones.”

Oxidative Stress and Millk

Milk, Casein, and Disease

Debunking Myths About Calcium from Animals

Milk and Allergies

How Should You Get Enough Calcium?

Keep the Calcium You Have

Say No to Cow’s Milk

Calcium in Milk and Healthier Sources

Milk from Another Species

The idea that the milk of another species is an appropriate and necessary source of calcium is a serious thinking error that has led to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and autoimmune disease in epic numbers.

The Diet of Dairy Cows

Especially when you consider the atrocious diet our dairy cows are fed, the steroids and hormones and antibiotics they’re given, the lack of exercise they get in their pens, and the blood and pus that comes out in the milk that you then serve your child.

Milk is not a solution for getting your calcium.

Milk Calcium Myths: “Milk and dairy build strong bones.”

Ask yourself why the U.S. consumes more than double the amount of milk and dairy than the #2 milk-drinking country, and yet has one of the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world. The other highest dairy-consuming countries, in Scandinavia, are also among the highest for osteoporosis!

Calcium for Bones and Joints?

A recent set of long-term studies by a group of osteoporosis researchers shows that not only does dairy intake correlate with higher fracture rates, it is also associated with higher mortality rates!

Increasing Health Risks in Correlation with Milk Consumption

The studies, following over 100,000 men and women for up to 20 years, showed that each additional glass of milk correlated with more risk they were for fractures, cancer, heart disease, and early death.

Why would that be?

Oxidative Stress and Milk

The researchers also found that the more glasses of milk people drank, the higher they scored for a biological stress marker called oxidative stress.

What is Oxidative Stress?

Oxidative stress is when the number of free radicals overwhelms the number of antioxidants in your body.

Free radicals damage DNA and cell structures, leading to inflammation and rapid aging. They are also the hosts of degenerative physical and neurological diseases.

Milk-induced oxidative stress might also explain some of the other studies that associate dairy intake with other conditions, like acne and allergies.

Switch to Fermented Dairy Products

Interestingly, the study found that fermented dairy products, like yogurt, did not correlate with oxidative stress. In fact, fermented dairy products had the opposite effect.

Fermentation consumes milk sugars like galactose and lactose–two of the suspects for oxidative stress–and produces health-protective probiotics, which may be the reason for the difference.

Inflammatory Dairy Products

An important conclusion, overall, then, is that cow’s milk and most dairy products are highly inflammatory foods.

Milk, Casein, and Disease

Animal proteins, including casein (the protein in milk), are acid-forming in the body.  One of the body’s coping mechanisms to deal with acidity is to pull minerals (such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium) from resources like bones, to neutralize the acidity. The blood must maintain a precise pH, or you die. So, it robs minerals from bones and tissues where you pay the price over time.

Drinking milk, then, can result in a net loss of calcium and other minerals!

Dr.Campbell | Milk Leaches Calcium from Bones Study

Colin T. Campbell, Ph.D., one of the most preeminent nutrition researchers in the world, conducted the most comprehensive, longitudinal research study in history known as the Oxford-Cornell China Project. Published in 2004, The China Study examined dietary habits and disease rates in 6,500 adults in China over almost 30 years.

Casein and High Rates of Disease

Campbell started with animal studies duplicated by other researchers all over the world and progressed to his enormous human population. The researchers documented massive evidence that casein is linked to high rates of disease when animal products including dairy are consumed at a rate of 20% of the diet, which is the American average.

Diets with Less Animal Protein are Superior

He documents very low rates of those same diseases in subjects eating only 5% or less animal protein. Eight thousand statistically significant correlations resulted from this study. (“Statistically significant” means the likelihood the finding is due to chance is less than 5%.)

Debunking Myths About Calcium from Animal Products

These findings definitively decimate American mothers’ nutrition beliefs that feeding their children dairy products will build strong bones and good health.

Modern mothers are wising up and feeding their children nuts, seeds, and greens, for highly bioavailable forms of calcium, and letting their children out in the sun. Because Vitamin D (the best source is the sun) and good sources of calcium make strong bones–not hormones, antibiotics, or steroid-laced American dairy products.

Milk and Allergies

Cow milk’s large fat molecule is acid- and mucus-forming in humans; thus we are all “lactose intolerant” to one degree or another.

Our grandparents, with their strong genetics, withstood it well. Unfortunately, our own children with three generations of weakened genetics on a processed-food diet, are not faring so well.

Why Milk is Bad for You Today

Every time I see a child with green snot running from his nose, I wish I could in some socially acceptable way beg his mother to get her child off cow’s milk. I learned this the hard way, having weaned my own first child from breast milk to cow’s milk, at the pediatrician’s recommendation, only to see his excellent health destroyed. We were in and out of doctor’s offices and emergency rooms, on drugs ranging from bronchodilators to steroids to antibiotics, before I decided to try getting my little son off dairy and sugar, the mucus-forming foods. That was the end of a year of terror and drugs and Failure to Thrive. Getting him off those foods changed his life and led to him regaining his weight and his health.

Try Raw Goat’s Milk Instead

I never fed any of my next three children any dairy products. I did buy raw goat milk and made it into kefir. Goat milk has a smaller fat molecule, some compounds similar to human breast milk, and when I fermented it as kefir and made it our daily breakfast, my children never got sick again. (Note: getting raw goat milk requires some “pounding the pavement” in your community, and I believe one reason this food was very nutritious for my small children is that the goats were untreated with steroids and hormones.)

Decrease Mucus Problems and Allergies

I have counseled willing mothers about this many times, and every time the mothers reported that the mucous problems disappeared or decreased as they eliminated dairy products. Related asthma and allergies dramatically decreased as well.

How Should You Get Enough Calcium?

Logic begs the question: where does the cow get its calcium? Answer: From green foods (and ALL the plant food groups, actually) rich in highly bioavailable calcium.

Calcium Rich Foods with Additional Nutrients

Calcium from plant sources is 50-60% bioavailable to humans, compared to cow milk bioavailability of about 30%.

Whole foods like greens, veggies, fruits, legumes, and nuts and seeds all have calcium, plus the micronutrients like magnesium, zinc, and vitamins A and D to help absorb it.

Keep the Calcium You Have

Don’t lose the calcium you’re eating in plant foods, by doing things that decrease it! Keep your bones strong, with these habits:

Get some sun: Vitamin D is a big factor in absorbing calcium.

Exercise: Exercises that put weight and stress on your bones make them denser.  Running, jumping, dancing, climbing stairs, and weightlifting are all good weight-bearing, bone-building exercises.

Avoid salt: Salt leaches calcium from your body, and your bones are the biggest calcium stores to draw from.  If you do eat salt, eat it minimally, and make sure it’s only unrefined sea salt, not toxic table salt.

Avoid animal proteins: Animal proteins, as we’ve already discussed, leach calcium from bones by creating an acidic environment.

Stop Smoking: Several studies have shown smoking to be correlated with rapid bone density loss and osteoporosis.

Avoid Alcohol: Alcohol interferes with calcium absorption and bone density on many fronts, including decreasing hormone production, increasing cortisol formation, and blocking Vitamin D.

Say No to Cow’s Milk

Cow’s milk is the perfect food for baby cows.  But the evidence is against it being a good source of calcium (or anything else) for humans.

Learn WHY and HOW to eat more whole foods in my FREE VIDEO MASTERCLASS going on right now.  It’s your shortcut to my best tips, getting to the bottom of the controversies, and learning to eat more of the world’s healthiest foods.

Where do you get your calcium? Mention them in the comments section below!

  Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on September 6, 2017, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

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[frontmezzjunkies]

Keira Knightly. Colette

Movies To Be Excited About This Fall, 2018

By Ross

I love going to the movies, I really do, but the frontmezzjunkies theatre train has really taken me on a wild ride these past few years far away from the movie theaters, but I hope as the fall approaches, I will find my way back to the movies, especially after discovering my new favorite movie theatre in Brooklyn, The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema at City Point.  Not only do they respect the film, have great parallel themed pre-shows, with very strict noise and phone rules, they also serve me beer and cocktails directly to my comfy seat throughout the film! It’s the best place ever, and I hope to see all the following films there, if I can, or else I’ll just have to watch curled up on my couch streaming them into my living room.  Here’s a list of the ones that caught my eye when going through the EW.com fall preview list (click on the film title for a preview):

Now I must admit a lot of these films are not blockbuster material, and many are female centric, which might say a lot about me, I guess, but who could not be intrigued by these two female star-heavy productions: Lizzie starring the glorious Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. It’s twisted and seductive, with two strongly constructed female leads, so when the axe falls, I hope I’m watching (Directed by Craig William Macneill; Release Date: 9.14),. Then there is the finely corseted Colette with the stunning Keira Knightly in the lead. Many say she is giving the performance of her career, and from the clip it appears they might be right. Co-starring the magnificent Fiona Shaw and the handsome Dominic West, the sumptuous story is a must-see on my list (Directed by Wash Westmoreland; Release Date: 9.21). Both are centered around amazingly interesting characters and each sound like they have been given a specific viewpoint that could really produce something very special.

Robert Redford. The Old Man & The Gun

One can’t deny the legacy that Robert Redford has created around himself, his work, and his independent film festival, so to hear that The Old Man & The Gun will be his final acting project makes it especially inviting.  Add the phenomenal Sissy Spacek and the talented Casey Affleck, who rocked my world with his performance in “Manchester by the Sea”, into the mixture, and we have a film that will definitely draw me to the cinema late September as if held at gun-point (Directed by David Lowery; Release Date: 9.28). It seems sweet and intimate, and Spacek is such a talented natural beauty, partnered with the Sundance Kid, that watching them converse has got to be pure heaven. Another one that intrigues, but I am doubtful whether I will actually be able to sit down in a movie theatre to see it, is the frighteningly creepy, The Nun, starring the young and so familiar looking, Taissa Farmiga, sister of The Conjuring film’s star, Vera (Directed by Corin Hardy; Release Date: 9.7). I can’t imagine gathering up the courage, as scary films, well, just plain scare me, tremendously and uncomfortably.  I think it has something to do with why I love film and theatre so much. When done well, they have the extreme ability to enter my heart and soul, and make me feel whatever they want to, easily and fully. To invite in the feeling of being terrified, is just that, terrifying, and why would one want to do that to oneself?  As I found watching the preview almost too much for my senses.  Suspense is a different thing, though. I can handle a twisty spine-tingling adventure, but one that sets out to frighten and startle is just that. In spades. So I’ll probably pass, even though I was hypnotized by the clip.

Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Joan Plowright, Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Judi Dench.

More to my speed are these two documentary films: Hal, a film about the legendary filmmaker, Hal Ashby, who balked at convention and won when he created the classic film “Harold and Maude” (Release Date: 9.7), so “if you want to sing out, sing out“. The 1971 film was a surprisingly epic exploration of death, aging, and embracing the life we have, and even though I saw the film decades ago starring the phenomenal Ruth Gordon (Golden Globe nominee), it still resonates and inspires, so to learn a bit more about the maker is just too irresistible. Secondly, there is a delicate little documentary film about a group of legendary ladies gathering for tea and conversation, called Tea With the Dames. And to no one’s surprise, it brings together Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Eileen Atkins, and Dame Joan Plowright to do just that, drink tea and chat, and who doesn’t want to be invited to that table? (Release Date: 9.21).

Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga. A Star is Born

One of the more compelling big starry pictures being released is the remake of  A Star is Born, with first time director Bradley Cooper reinventing the classic Hollywood tale, and this one I can’t wait to attend. The clip shows an impressive and surprising musical turn by the handsome and talented Cooper (Broadway’s The Elephant Man), playing the troubled singer, battling his own fame and addiction. His singing and performance feels beautiful, simple, and excitingly well sung, stripping away his movie star sparkle in order to find new life in the role, and in the young lady talent he discovers. Donning the ingenue cap that Janet Gaynor (1937), Judy Garland (1954), and Barbra Streisand (1976) all once did too much acclaim, Lady Gaga attempts to show us she is more than the ‘monster’ and ‘American Horror Story‘ adored celebrity and star that we have grown fond of, and from what is being said of the two, they might have created something that is forever “Evergreen” and worthy of our movie dollars. (Release Date: 10.5)

Colin Morgan, Rupert Everett.  The Happy Prince

There are a few titles coming up this fall that feel almost theatrical and stage-worthy, or at least feel inspired by the stage. The first being, The Happy Prince which was written and directed by its star, the fantastic Rupert Everett who I had the pleasure of seeing play the fascinating Oscar Wilde once before in The Judas Kiss.  This time around, the film explores the same Wilde man but begins during the final years of the writer’s exile and imprisonment for “gross indecency”. “Love is everything” to Wilde, and he pays the price that one shouldn’t ever have to. Emily Watson and Colin Firth co-star alongside the lovely Colin Morgan as the man centered in Wilde’s eye. (Release Date: 10.10). Peterloo is yet another film coming from the mesmerizing Mike Leigh that seems important and worthy of our attention.  It’s a gorgeous looking period piece about the 1819 massacre that left a dozen protesters dead at the hands of the British government.  If it lives up to the master who wrote and directed the film, and is anything as gripping as the preview, it’s a battle that should not be missed (Release Date: 11.9).

Chris Hemsworth. Bad Times at the El Royale,.

Starring the Tony winning Cynthia Erivo (Broadway’s The Color Purple) and the incredible Jon Hamm, Bad Times at the El Royale, along with co-star Jeff Bridges and Chris Hemsworth checks in to a ’60’s motel that straddles the California and Nevada state line. With The Cabin in the Woods director Drew Goddard as head check-in man orchestrating it all, and the cast of cinematic pros arriving one by one, the premise is sure to be an exciting and strange stay at the El Royale for all of us, that is if the preview is any indication. It seems destined to thrill with its unconventional and twisty crime thriller structure, but the chance to hear Erivo sing, well, just about anything, is definitely worth the cost of a movie ticket, and then some  (Directed by Drew Goddard; Release Date: 10.12).  Beautiful Boy saunters into the field looking like quite the heart-breaking tale of a young man in trouble. He is played distraughtly by the talented Timothée Chalamet (“Call Me By Your Name“), driving fast into a collision with his father, played by Steve Carell doing all that he can to save him from himself.  The clip suggests an anguished ride, hopefully to salvation, but it most definitely will bring tears to my eyes, I’m guessing, and I can’t wait (Directed by Felix van Groeningen; Release Date: 10.12). In the less intimate style of story telling, there is a period piece starring the amazing Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy. First Man takes a realistic, almost documentary-style glimpse at the men (and women) who all played a role in the expedition to the Moon by NASA  (Directed by Damien Chazelle; Release Date: 10.12).  Not exactly my kind of picture, to be honest, unless is manages to be something more than a history lesson layered with an overly glorified public relations piece about the Apollo 11 project.

Timothée Chalamet. Beautiful Boy

I’m more interested in The Guilty, the Danish filmmaker’s tense feature debut centering on the adrenaline rising experience of an emergency-call dispatch operator who must find the way to save a kidnapped woman from certain death (Directed by Gustav Möller; Release Date: 10.19). It seems crisp and solidly unromantic in a way that Hollywood rarely is, strongly compelling in its coolness. Or maybe the interesting movie of the fall will be the modern noir film starring Anne Hathaway (Public’s Grounded) and Matthew McConaughey, Serenity. It seems that there might be little of that in this captivating tale of a fishing-boat captain being seductively convinced by his ex-wife to feed her current husband, played by the sexy and scary Jason Clarke, to the sharks.  Will he bite, or will he be bitten in the process? It’s hard to guess, and if the style and the story mesh, then I’m biting (Release Date: 10.19). If that’s not your cup of moody tea, there is also a Ben Foster-led drama, with the actor, who was pretty Stella-tastic in St. Ann’s Streetcar Named Desire, starring in the double-crossing Galveston. The dark film is centered on a violent and dangerous hitman who rescues a young woman, played by the enigmatic Elle Fanning, who had been held captive (Release Date: 10.19). It might just be the thrill of the fall, if it’s a dark violent road you want to travel down.

Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. Bohemian Rhapsody

For me, the real film of the fall is all about Queen. Not director Steve McQueen,  who has made the compelling and fun looking Widows, starring the amazing Viola Davis, the powerful Michelle Rodriguez, and Tony winner, Cynthia Erivo (Broadway’s The Color Purple). A capper tale that looks to be so much more than just a heist (Release Date: 11.16). Nor is it, McQueen, the biographical documentary about the life and career of fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen (Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui; Release Date: 8.20).  The film I most desperately want to see is the film about the one and only, Queen, Freddie Mercury.  And his electric rise to fame. His story is being told in Bohemian Rhapsody, starring the well cast Rami Malek (‘Mr. Robot‘) as the genius himself.  This is the movie that I didn’t know I wanted to see until I heard about it a few weeks ago.  That song, and that band had a dramatic and powerful impact on my life.  Queen was the first big stadium concert I ever saw, sometime back in the 1980’s at the CNE Exhibition in Toronto, Canada. I also fondly remember meeting and sitting next to him one hot summer’s night in Ibiza, Spain telling him that story after being introduced to the legend by Elton John. He was most gracious and charming, celebrating, what turned out to be, his last big birthday gathering, and I’m still honored that I had that moment. That being said, this band’s story just has to be as thrilling a ride as it was for these gentlemen to skyrocket to stardom, and I. CAN. NOT. WAIT (Directed by Bryan Singer; Release Date: 11.2).

Boy Erased

On a more current and dramatically important framework, centered around a similar theme that was just recently explored in “The Miseducation of Cameron Post“, Boy Erased arrives. Starring the compelling Lucas Hedges (MCC’s Yen, “Manchester by the Sea“) the film chronicles a young man coming out hard against the tightly held ideals of his parents, played by Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe who try to “strike this demon down“.  The story, based on the true tale of a son sent to a Christian gay conversion therapy camp by his religious parents seems to be as strongly captivating as the timely “Miseducation..” was, but possibly more family focused as we watch the tattered family cut the ties that bind, only to witness the strength and power of motherhood.  It should be disturbing stuff, and my hopes optimistically ride high on the shoulders of director, Joel Edgerton (“Bloodlock“) to make this tale as strong and assuringly real as this boy’s tale deserves, rather than creating something too rose-colored and sappy. This topic needs a harsh light shined upon it with a relentless vigor, especially with what is happening in the real world today (Release Date: 11.2). Hedges(“Lady Bird“) is also starring in the powerful Ben is Back with the pretty woman, Julia Roberts this time as his concerned mother.  A Christmas story, somewhat, about drug addiction, recovery, and hope, penned by Peter Hedges, father of the star, and author of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “About a Boy“. With a tough-love spewing graveyard scene, this potent film will most likely pack a punch, highlighting the struggle of personal shame and the upending power of maternal love – yes, that again.  It seems to be the story of the fall (Directed by Peter Hedges; Release Date: 12.7).

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

Now that I am once again fully hooked on the Potter/Rowling universe, thanks to the miraculous play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child currently casting its magic spell on Broadway, I’m thrilled and excited for another trip to the world of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. And with the return of the wonderful Eddie Redmayne (“The Danish Girl“), and the addition of the talented Jude Law as Dumbledore and the ever and always fascinating Johnny Depp as Grindelwald, what else is there to do but fly as fast as your broomstick can get you to a movie palace that is showing the new installment.  “I’m scared, Professor Dumbledore“, scared that it won’t live up to expectations, but without a doubt I will cross my fingers and wands as I can’t wait to be swept up again by Newt and his mischievous beasts, especially the adorable newborn Nifflers (Directed by David Yates; Release Date: 11.16). Aquaman, on the other hand, is one of the many larger than life installments coming out of the DC universe that doesn’t thrill or excite me.  I’m not a big comic book/superhero film fan, and although it stars a very appealing Jason Momoa as the fantastical man of the Ocean, I doubt I’ll swim too quickly over to his deep blue sea, even with the addition of the handsome Patrick Wilson (Broadway’s Barefoot in the Park) as his brother and nemesis, King Orm, and the stellar Nicole Kidman adding yet another caring mother role to her growing list of cinematic mothers (‘Big Little Lies‘, “Lion“).  But if it’s on a plane as I fly over the Atlantic, maybe I’ll take the dive and give it a try,. Time and tide will tell (Directed by James Wan; Release Date: 12.21).

Aquaman

There’s the strange-looking Suspiria, based on a 1970’s Dario Argento’s horror film starring Dakota Johnson, with the real draw, naturally, being the phenomenal Tilda Swinton playing the dance teacher Madame Blanc to Johnson’s dancer. The young ballerina travels from Ohio to attend a prestigious and unusual dance academy in Berlin only to find a great deal of avant-garde expressionistic movement, dreamed up by the film’s choreographer Damien Jalet. It is impressive and dementedly creepy, dripping in the feeling of blood and violent shenanigans at every knotted end. It looks like a terrifying and bizarre journey, one that I’m not so sure I’m going to take (Directed by Luca Guadagnino; Release Date: 11.2). Much like the new chapter for Lisbeth Salander, now played by Claire Foy from ‘The Crown‘. The jury is still out just how interested I am to return to this new Swedish territory that is based on David Lagercrantz’s 2015 novel,. This is the first book to be written since Larsson’s 2004 death, having Lisbeth resurface as The Girl in the Spider’s Web.  Directed and re-harnessed by Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe“), the heroine looks a bit different, but the Swedish Millennium series hacker stays true to her complicated twisted Dragon Tattoo’d soul even if she doesn’t register as stone cold as the previous one. But it might just be enough to get me back in the theater seat to witness her revenge upon all the men who deserve it.

Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie. Mary Queen of the Scots

The kind of women that I’m really interested in though are the two battling it out over the ruling of England and Scotland in Mary Queen of the Scots. The royals, Queen Elizabeth I, played by Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya“), and her cousin and rival, Mary Stuart, portrayed by the always fascinating Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird“) are given a revisionary slice of the monarchy to gallop into war with. The film looks gorgeous and just like the famed Friedrich Schiller’s, Mary Stuart (a powerful play that I hope is making its way to Broadway soon), director Rourke has fashioned a dynamic face-to-face confrontation between Mary and Elizabeth, a scenario that never actually happened, historically speaking. If the two ladies find true emotional complexity in their historic, and totally fabricated, confrontation, then I shall be very pleased (Directed by Josie Rourke; Release Date: 12.7). Another real-life female trailblazer, the incredible Ruth Bader Ginsburg, played by the sweet-faced Felicity Jones (“The Theory of Everything“) arrives on Christmas Day in Mimi Leder’s biopic On The Basis of Sex. with a lovely supporting turn by co-star, Armie Hammer (2ST’s Straight White Men).  The script chronicles the early years and magnificent rise of RBG, showcasing the life and legacy of this fascinating U.S. Supreme Court Justice, played out with humor, grace, and humanity, the qualities that helped make this woman the fierce defender of truth that she truly is. Long Live the Queen RBG (Directed by Mimi Leder; Release Date 12.25).

Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali. Green Book

With an intriguing rear-view mirror vantage point, Viggo Mortensen (“Captain Fantastic“) plays a working-class Italian-American bouncer who gets hired to drive a wonderfully well-spoken and talented African-American pianist, portrayed by the glorious Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight“) on a performance tour through the 1960’s American South,. In the powerful Green Book, sure to elicit a strong emotional response, this seemingly beautifully created atmospheric piece is looking to drive the conversation forward about what it means to be an African-Americian in this country at that time, and in our present convoluted time (Directed by Peter Farrelly; Release Date: 11.21). Another one to watch out for, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Shoplifters is a quietly touching drama about a family of thieves and a young girl that wanders into their clan. Legendary director, Hirokazu Kore-eda is determined to steal into your heart and present an thought-provoking alternative to what it means to be in a family of one’s own (Release Date: 11.23).

Matt Dillion. The House That Jack Built

One can’t even start to express the insane oddity of the compelling film by Lars von Trier that casts Matt Dillion as an unapologetic serial killer in The House That Jack Built, co-starring a perceptive Uma Thurman (Broadway’s A Parisian Woman) as a woman who should have followed her gut instinct.  It’s loud, shocking, and bold, with a strong dynamic intensity. And although it gives the impression that it might be hard to watch and definitely not a feel-good kinda film, one would be as unwise as Uma’s character, to expect anything but exciting and heart-pounding from this iconic film master  (Release Date: 12.28). Roma, one of the many great films to be making its debut at the New York Film Festival, seems to be another strong visually arresting piece from an exciting filmmaker. This one comes from the keen eye of Alfonso Cuarón (“Gravity“), but unlike Lars, his black and white period piece is a simple and understated autobiographical exploration of his own middle-class family living and breathing in 1970’s Mexico City. Further up north, Andrew Garfield (Broadway’s Angels in America) stars as a confused doe-eyed neighbor in David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake . Garfield looks perfect as he struggles against himself to find out what happened to that pretty girl who sparked fireworks that one starry night but was gone in the morning (Release Date: 12.7). It has a satisfying edge and feel as the film dives into a strangely symbolic mystery that boarders on erotic obsession.

Emily Blunt. Mary Poppins Returns

But the one that is most exciting and terrifying to the young boy who lives forever inside this grown man, the one that fills him with wonder, nostalgia, but also nervous angst, is the much-hyped and discussed re-hiring of the most enigmatic nanny of them all. Mary Poppins Returns with Emily Blunt slipping into the proper turned-out shoes immortalized by the practically perfect Julie Andrews 54 years after she disappeared into the skies once her work was done. Lin-Manuel Miranda (Broadway’s Hamilton) is also on board, helping fill the slot that Dick Van Dyke dutifully did.  But it’s really the next generation Banks family home that once again needs Mary’s wise magic and love.  It’s the film of the holiday season that could inspire a new generation with intelligence, compassion, and joy. Or it might just depress us all if it turns out to be a sad disappointment.  It’s a high bar to fly over, thanks to the dark P.L. Travers’ children’s books and the gloriousness of the 1964 Disney film, but here’s hoping it is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or else director Rob Marshall (“Chicago“, Broadway’s Side Show) will have a lot to answer for (Release Date: 12.19).

Good luck to one and all, and I hope to see you at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema grabbing a pint or a cocktail, and silencing your cellphones for the feature presentation.

#frontmezzjunkies talks about the #Movies To Be Excited About This Fall, 2018 #fallfilmpreview #fallmoviepreview Movies To Be Excited About This Fall, 2018 By Ross I love going to the movies, I really do, but the…

[sandinz]

Rather than our previously planned almost five weeks of pottering on this charming waterway, unexpected events dictated we’d instead experience just short of three weeks – from 29th May to 17th June.

When I say ‘we’, in reality Barry relished three days short of three weeks, while I managed to squeeze in a measly eight days. Was it worth it you may ask?

Of course! Every inland waterway in the UK is worth visiting. Needing some planning and booking (as we’ve discovered!) to access, this is unfortunately one of the ‘canals less travelled’ on the system – we feel it’s definitely worth going to of your way for. A bit like Barry’s home town of Gisborne – remote – but that may be one of the reasons it’s so serene and special!

Once again this post’s a mixture of Barry’s and my words – but all the pictures are his Inspirational Images.

The Lancaster Canal had been on our ‘waterways bucket-list’ for a number of years, and we were determined to embrace whatever opportunity we had to see it. At a mere 41 miles long (and lock-free once you’re off Savick Brook which was widened to connect the Lancaster Canal to the River Ribble in order to open the Ribble Link in 2002), it doesn’t take too long to travel the length and breadth of it.

It can proudly boast the accolade of being the longest lock-free canal in the country – leisurely cruising and chilling is the order of the day in this delightful part of the country.

Admittedly we experienced a few irritating challenges too. Like the reality of the reported sparse mooring availability as most of the sides are extremely shallow; but also around the more scenic areas, suitable spaces seemed to be mostly taken up by long-term moorings which was frustrating at times.

On a brighter note, there’s a number of pleasant places to meander around along the way …

Gorgeous Garstang

The remains of Greenhaigh Castle on the hill as you approach Garstang

Garstang (purportedly ‘The World’s fist Fair Trade Town’), is a popular mooring stop, with a lovely shopping area containing plenty of quirky shops, and a couple of welcome supermarkets.

John Rennie’s aqueduct (started 1792) over the Wyre River at Garstang. Very similar but earlier and smaller design to his Dundas Aqueduct (started 1794) on the Kennet and Avon Canal.

Garstang town centre

Lush surroundings in Lancaster

This time of year in England was the perfect season to languish in these surroundings, with the foliage in full magnificence.

Magical.

I’m sure you’ll concur from the images below that the lighting amongst the lush greenery was quite spectacular.

The beautiful Ellel Grange Bridge just before the turnoff to Glasson Docks, which we explore on the return journey

Approaching Lancaster the canal winds through a deep and very green cutting, emerging on the outskirts of the city itself

Lancaster Castle – which until 2011 it was still used as a jail; the barbed wire, visiting hours sign, etc, all remain for posterity

Affectionately (!) known as ‘The Hanging Town’, Lancaster has apparently strung up more people than anywhere else in the UK – not to mention the many jailed for life or transported to Australia.

On his first evening in Lancaster, Barry took a walk around this fine city and captured a few of the older buildings in the centre, taking a veritable collage of unusual windows, doors, and fine architectural nuances. What a surprisingly fabulous and  fascinating place.

Barry moored up in Lancaster not far from the infamous Water Witch pub, which many years ago was the stables for the horses who hauled the fast boats between Preston and Kendal. Happening to be fortuitous enough to be in the vicinity for their quiz night, he teamed up with cajoled Carol and Colin into participating; a couple of locals who thought they were just there for a quiet drink. They informed him they were rubbish at quizzes, and were right – their ‘team’ came second last!

However …

Carol went on to win the prize draw and successfully completed the ‘Guess Your Cards Right‘ round, to win the jackpot of £210.00 – of which she insisted Barry got a third. How wonderful. Very nice thank you Carol – he reports that he’s since then invested the cash wisely on alcohol! (addendum from Sandra – he wishes!).

One of the unique aspects of this canal is that for a while it almost hugs the coast – though to be perfectly honest the views weren’t as spectacular as we’d anticipated or been led to believe.  Especially when the tide was low, as the ocean’s then a considerable distance away. There’s  warnings aplenty about quicksand and fast-moving tides where Barry managed to moor briefly at Hest Bank.

A few minutes walk from the canal you can view Morecombe Bay at Hest Bank. Here it was full of water at high tide. In the following post there’ll be considerably less!

Splendid mooring spot outside the Canal Turn pub

Barry did a bit of trading outside the fabulous Canal Turn Pub at Carnforth, with new owners Bill and Victoria going out of their way to give punters a great experience. They were astonishingly welcoming of The Home Brew Boat trading, even going so far as to post a photo of us on their Facebook page. They also bought a few canal greeting cards.

If you’re passing – call in, Barry highly recommends the establishment and feels sure it’ll go from strength to strength.

Going quackers

This year we’ve started selling duck food from the boat. Watching so many people thoughtlessly feeding ducks, swans and geese bread, we wanted to do our bit for nature.

Along with a stapled bag of high quality duck food, Sandra shares a leaflet containing information she’s discovered explaining WHY it’s best not to feed them bread:

“Bread has no nutritional value. To ducks it’s a ‘junk’ food – filling them up with carbohydrates and consequently stopping them from foraging for food that DOES provide what they need.

Rotting bread also makes ducks sick, contributes to algae growth, which kills animals, and attracts vermin, which spread disease to birds and humans.

PLEASE DO NOT FEED BREAD TO DUCKS/SWANS/GEESE

For more information, check out the links below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKzPw9lzshc

https://www.popsci.com/feeding-ducks-bread

What foods CAN you feed ducks? ~ Kale ~ Lettuce (cut up) ~ Corn (canned, frozen or fresh) ~ Peas (as above) ~ Seeds (not apple or cherry) ~ Porridge oats ~ Rice (cooked) ~ Cherry tomatoes (cut up) ~ Flowers – dandelions, pansies, clover ~ Fruit (not citrus) – especially apples cut up, banana chips (broken up) ~ Cat and dog food   Foods to avoid: X BREAD –of any type X Junk food X Avocados or onions are toxic to ducks X Citrus fruit X Nuts X Chocolate X Popcorn X Carbonated drinks X Alcohol!!”

Barry befriended a local female mallard. This duck would have to be the friendliest one we’ve ever met. She had no fear and you could even pat her. It did help of course that we had some particularly tasty duck food on offer!

Our new poster girl! (Amazing how a bag of duck food overcomes any model rights)

Venturing to the most northerly point of the English canal system

Barry had the good fortune to be able to travel all the way to the end of the Lancaster Canal at Tewitfield, having been joined at the Canal Turn pub by Jim (ex nb Starcross) and his wife Hilary, along with her spritely 94 year-old mum Jean for the journey. Jim wrote a blog about their experience.

Touching the end of the canal with the front fender

Jim drove all the way there and back, with Barry suspecting at one point he detected a tiny tear of nostalgia.

As it’s the furthermost north canal on the linked system, He felt it important to photograph the ‘touch the end of the canal with the front fender’ shot, just to prove we’d finally done it and have Jim there as an ‘Expert Witness’!

This particular journey up the Lancaster was taken with Barry on board Areandare, while Sandra was on a planned week away in Menorca with my daughter and grandsons.

There’s lots more fabulous memories to share of our journey from Carnforth back to the Ribble Link, including a side-trip to Glasson Docks – in the next post!

Where are we in ‘real time’?

John and Angela joined us in Wigan for an overnight stay and morning cruise with three locks

We’ve cruised from Tarleton to Worsley since we returned on the Link Sunday 17th June, heading to Manchester for the weekend where we have kiwi guests jumping on board. we even had some surprise visitors yesterday from Australia, originally from Hawkes Bay in New Zealand.

  Thank goodness we chose to travel to new vistas and not trade this year. Our income from floating markets and festivals may be drastically reduced, but we feel incredibly rich in relishing life and all it has to offer. And we hope to be running Calendar Club in Lichfield again from October to January, so we don’t feel that ‘pressure’ to do the same old, same old anymore.

By the way, if any boaters are considering applying for Calendar Club this year, here’s the link.

Our long awaited enchanting journey on the Lancaster Canal Rather than our previously planned almost five weeks of pottering on this charming waterway, unexpected events…

[ripstocking]

Architecture's Appearance and The Practices of Imagination, by K. Michael Hays

1.

The power to create images would be a good partial definition of architecture's competence, if the performance of that power is understood to be a disclosure of truths about the world by giving appearance to them. This disclosure should not be understood in a straightforward representational sense, even less so in a propositional one. Architecture is not a language. Rather, architecture summons into appearance ways of thinking about the world that are otherwise unavailable; it is a particular mode of thought, one irreducible to other ways of thinking. And its images of thought have no lesser claim on the real than those of philosophy. This mode is not representation, then, but emanation -- a showing forth of a world that exists but is not yet actualized.

So appeared architecture for Adolf Loos: "If we find in the forest a mound, six feet long and three feet wide, raised by a shovel to form a pyramid, we turn serious and something in us says: here someone lies buried. That is architecture."1 Let us unpack this hypothetical event. First, there is an unanticipated encounter with an empirical object -- If we find in the forest a mound -- the apprehension of which produces an almost immediate categorical response: That is architecture. Prior to our encounter, it is presumed, someone used a shovel to form a pyramid. Thus, technique is involved, but it is far from the most important aspect of the encounter. The pyramid as form is not identical to what is apprehended by our senses; what is sensible remains contingent and variable, notwithstanding its defined shape. The material of the mound and its indexical relation to the shovel, no matter how intense the impression they may make on us, are just sensuous qualities and associated features of the encountered object. They are not the real thing; they are not the That.

We can say this another way. The real object of architecture is autonomous from our encounter with it. If we close our eyes, the visible object that is the mound disappears, but the real object of architecture remains. So That is an instantiation of architecture that exists before and after our encounter with the mound, an architecture that is always already there, where "always already" entails prior conditions that are brought into existence by their own outcomes. For us to recognize That as architecture, architecture -- not the mound -- must always already be there.

There is an epistemological claim made in Loos's aphorism: we know something about the world through the architectural event. Through the appearance of architecture, we recognize the ritual of burial and the need for memorialization -- here someone lies buried -- and it affects us. But there is also an ontological claim: That is architecture. The necessary anteriority of the architecture instantiated by That explains why we can imagine architectures that are never built.

Cognition is required to reproduce the form, or type, of the pyramid, indeed removing much of what is perceived -- the material, the technique, even the site -- to isolate what is essential to the form of the pyramid. We schematize, we mentally organize, we design the type form. And then and there, we enter the architectural imagination. We proceed from the initial appearance, through the imagination, to the symbolic order -- that is, to the category and concept of architecture. For this, preparation is required; we must have some sort of education or prior instruction in order to produce concepts. The pronouncement That is architecture is not a simple experience, not only intuition or cognition, but a recognition: an understanding built from prior encounters, memories, and reflected conceptualizations. The authority of the symbolic rule imposes itself on the imagination and determines it, regulates it, legitimizes it. The imagination operates in accordance with rule unwittingly, without expressly observing it, but the symbolic must be in play. Through its interaction with the symbolic, the imagination gains the power to both register and overcome the limits of experience. Only when the imagination mediates between the sensible and the understanding, with the symbolic order of the understanding presiding, is That architecture.

2.

My description of the architectural imagination as essentially interpretive, as well as cognitively productive, borrows from Immanuel Kant's theory of the schema and its role in reflective judgment developed in his third Critique.2 For Kant, a schema of the imagination is not quite a concept and yet is something more than an ordinary image. A schema is something like a script for producing images in accordance with the symbolic order -- a synthetic operator between the sensible and the understanding.

In Kant's architectonic, the imagination must coordinate with the two other faculties -- the intuition and the understanding -- to construct its practical-empirical role out of machinic parts. The intuition synthesizes sensory experience. The understanding spontaneously deploys concepts and categories. But intuitions are purely sensible, and the understanding cannot scan sensible objects. So we need a way of relating and connecting these two separate faculties. "There must be a third thing," Kant writes, "which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and make possible the application of the former to the latter. This mediating representation must be pure (without anything empirical) and yet intellectual on the one hand and sensible on the other."3 This third thing is a product of the imagination; it is the schema. The function of the schema is to subsume the uncoded array of sensations, the empirical objects of intuition, and convert them into images that can be processed by the understanding.

But a schema is not itself an image in an ordinary sense, because it is not a thing. Rather, a schema is a rule for an image that is produced in the act, or procedure, of schematization, a dynamic process that takes place in the imagination. Kant gives the instructive example of a triangle: "In fact it is not images of objects but schemata that ground our pure sensible concepts. No image of a triangle would ever be adequate to the concept of it. For it would not attain the generality of the concept, which makes this valid for all triangles, right or acute, etc. . . . The schema of a triangle can never exist anywhere except in thought, and signifies a rule of the synthesis of the imagination with regard to pure shapes in space."4 Images remain attached to the senses, incommensurable with the concepts used by the understanding, while schemata regulate the abstraction of sensation into something the understanding can process. As one scholar put it, "The schema is the procedure of the imagination in providing an image for a concept. . . . Schemata must underlie all of our concepts if they are to be relevant to the realm of empirical experience."5 A schema is a necessary component of perception itself, but also a requirement for practical and theoretical knowledge, as well as reflective interpretation.

If Kant's formulation of the schema should feel familiar to architects, this is perhaps because it is very similar to Quatremère de Quincy's definition of the architectural type: "The word 'type' does not represent so much the image of something that must be copied or imitated perfectly, as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the model. . . . The model, understood from the point of view of the practical execution of art, is an object that must be repeated such as it is; [the] type, on the contrary, is an object on the basis of which everyone can conceive of works that may not resemble each other at all."6 What has not been sufficiently noticed in discussions of type is the freedom of relationships among sensation, memory, and imagination that this formulation allows, at the same time that it insists on harmony and resonance across component parts. While one model of the schema could construe its effects as rigidly stabilizing, it is also possible to find liberating hints at different modes of becoming in the constructive and autonomous act of the imagination.

Indeed, the schematic imagination, as articulated in Kant's philosophy, is deeply embedded in architectural historiography. Countless historians have been influenced by Kant -- Paul Frankl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Emil Kaufmann, Erwin Panofsky, and Wilhelm Worringer among them. But it is Rudolf Wittkower, in his 1944 drawing "Schematized Plans of Eleven of Palladio's Villas," who gives us the most vivid graphic expression of a schematizing machine. As part of his survey of Palladio's Veneto villas republished in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) -- in which he utterly suppresses site, material, technology, decoration, patrons, clients, and even program (many of the villas were in fact working farmhouses, complete with barchesse and dovecotes) -- Wittkower "designs" a schema that totalizes the villa type as the geometric-mathematical systematization of the ground plan.7 That Wittkower's Architectural Principles was as compelling as it was tendentious is evidenced not only by its widespread and decades-long influence but also by its practical instrumentalization by scholars and designers alike.8 In 1947, Colin Rowe extended Wittkower's analysis to the villas of Le Corbusier; in 1967, Peter Eisenman used the same schema as a generative structure to begin his seminal house series; and in 1998, Greg Lynn defined his own counterposition of animate geometry and continuous differentiation as a decisive departure from the schema of Wittkower, Rowe, and Eisenman. The architectural imagination is action prone and highly connective; it is promiscuous.

[Due to copyright restrictions, an image of "Schematized Plans of Eleven of Palladio's Villas" from Rudolph Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) is not available. See Lecture 1.2 for more information.]

3.

In the half century since Wittkower's powerful demonstration of the schematic imagination at work in interpretive practice, scholars have grown skeptical of the transcendental formalism of models like his, turning their attention instead toward methods able to accommodate newly conceived issues of multiplicity, potentiality, virtuality, and becoming, as well as various materialist tendencies. New practices of the imagination began to develop in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily following the work of Manfredo Tafuri but also influenced generally by exchanges across various critical disciplines that accepted Marxism and psychoanalysis as common metalanguages and tended to use methods derived from ideology critique and deconstruction. Since the 1990s, the works of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze have been the dominant influences on architectural interpretation. In particular, Foucault's diagram of the architecture of the 19th-century panopticon and Deleuze's reading of that diagram as a cartography of an entire social and historical field have authorized new modes of architecture's appearance and new constructions of the architectural imagination.9

Foucault is concerned with how the apparatus of power and knowledge configures a domain of visible matter (the "seeable") that is shaped by the articulable functions (organized utterances and discourse, or the "sayable") into various disciplinary forms like the panopticon. In his study of Foucault, Deleuze focuses on the relation of the visible (which is not reduced to a thing seen but comprises "multisensorial complexes," processes, actions, and reactions) and the articulable (or discursive formation), rendering their interaction as an agon of Kantian sensibility and conceptuality. "Between the visible and the articulable we must maintain all the following aspects at the same time: the heterogeneity of the two forms, their difference in nature or anisomorphism; a mutual presupposition between the two, a mutual grappling and capture; the well-determined primacy of the one over the other."10The visible, like Kant's intuition, is passive and determined, while the articulable, like Kant's understanding, is spontaneous and determining. But just as Kant needs the schema, Foucault needs a third agency, a mediator of the confrontation, but one in a space removed from the visible and the articulable, "in a different dimension to that of their respective forms."11 This nonplaced operator is what Deleuze, reading Foucault, calls the diagram.

The schematic imagination is an imposition of order on a stratum of sensible and conceptual knowledge that has no exterior, on an assemblage that is autonomous and closed. The schematic centers, territorializes, and patterns sensation in accordance with categories and concepts already present (even though they can be known only retrospectively), whereas the diagrammatic draws the center of the assemblage together with peripheral force fields and operations exterior to the assemblage proper; the diagrammatic is concerned with deterritorializing and reterritorializing. If the schema is a template, the diagram is a frame and a connector. The diagrammatic imagination comprises functions that trace and map a region captured from a larger field, thereby also creating an outside. Deleuze resorts to prose poetry to define the outside: "The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside" -- that is, an inside of thought. "Thinking involves the transmission of particular features: it is a dice-throw. What the dice-throw represents is that thinking always comes from the outside (that outside which was already engulfed in the interstice [between seeing and saying] or which constituted the common limit)." He asks, "If the outside, farther away than any external world, is also closer than any internal world, is this not a sign that thought affects itself, by revealing the outside to be its own unthought element?"12 The outside is the unthought other; it is difference itself. The outside is the virtual; and the virtual is history. But it is not the history of architecture's actual unfolding; it is not the archive. The virtual is, rather, absolute history -- the constitutive outside that, across an implicating membrane, disturbs the identity of the inside, the actual, and is nevertheless both a prerequisite for the actual's constitution and a record of its existence. Virtuality is the source of resistance.

Near the end of his Foucault study, Deleuze inserts an illustration of the diagram. It depicts the "line of the outside," an indefinitely unfurling plane with an atmosphere above -- itself populated with condensed particles and intersections of forces tossed about -- and a sedimented "strata"below (more packed and stacked, having been archived). Between the two lies a "strategic zone," a zone of negotiation between the formed strata and the unformed outside. The left-side strata are archives of visual knowledge, and the right is a kind of sound cloud of articulable knowledge: "the two irreducible forms of knowledge, Light and Language, two vast environments of exteriority where visibilities and statements are respectively deposited."13 Together the two archives delineate a band of forms of content and forms of expression that can be taken to determine the limits of actual, concrete historical formations of knowledge and power. Deleuze calls this the concrete assemblage, in contradistinction to the abstract machine of the diagram itself. In between the two archives is a striking enfolding of the line of the outside, pulled down into a pouch, a pocket, an implication "constantly reconstituting itself by changing direction, tracing an inside space but coextensive with the whole line of the outside" -- a "zone of subjectivation," as Deleuze labels it -- the place of thought itself.14

[Due to copyright restrictions, an illustration of Gilles Deleuze's diagram from Foucault (1986) is not available.]

4.

Let us now consider how this diagrammatic version of the architectural imagination works in interpreting an architectural project. Architecture is both an artifact of culture and a sociopolitical act; hence, the architectural project does not simply reproduce the contexts that are its sponsors but rather connects to their fields and forces in complex and often contradictory ways, drawing up the threads of the real into a fabric whose weaving operations may be modeled as much on dreams and prayers as on maps and machines. Architecture is the constant making and remaking of the world -- the territorialization and reterritorialization of the concrete assemblage through architecture's particular diagram. So it must be recognized that any project of architecture is not merely informed by ideology -- by its patrons, its designers, or its audiences -- it is ideological in its own right. The diagrammatic imagination accounts for the fact that architecture is entangled within a complex of social, technological, and historical forces, which are deep-seated, perhaps repressed, and yet shifting and contradictory. It is these forces that close formal readings of architectural projects seek to deconceal. What the diagrammatic model does not allow is an uncritical collapse of the architectural project into its context, as if it were completely determined by its context. Architecture necessarily remains in dialectical tension with its own historical moment. It is not capable of sublating art and life, but neither can the discursive and institutional authorities completely control and exhaust architecture. Architecture retains the power to negate certain dimensions of historical social life and expose undiscovered spaces, expanding the territory on which we dwell. "It is here that two forms of realization diverge or become differentiated," Deleuze instructs, "a form of expression and a form of content, a discursive and a non-discursive form, the form of the visible and the form of the articulable. . . . Between the visible and the articulable a gap or disjunction opens up. . . . The concrete assemblages are therefore opened up by a crack that determines how the abstract machine [the diagram] performs."15 The seeable and sayable are not contextually given forms but rather spaces of emergence inextricably linked to historical discourses, which they also help to organize. The social and historical context may determine the visible, but the visible pushes back on the expressible to enable what in turn underwrites conditions of visibility. The discontinuity between the visible and the articulable, the irreducibility of the one to the other, is the crux here. For this is the moment around which the differences between a symptomatic reading and a merely suspicious reading turn. The recognition That is architecture still entails an active, engaged, and critical imagination rather than an inert and compliant object.

The diagrammatic model of the architectural imagination enables us to retain from Kantian aesthetics and the architectural historiography that it influenced the notion that architecture is characterized by a certain degree of formal autonomy. But it mediates this with an emphasis on the social and intellectual importance of form and the corollary of a deep historicity. Finally, we achieve a materialist emphasis on architecture's embeddedness in heterogeneous networks of other forms and forces, interconnected constellations that will not resolve or reduce into a single structure because each constellation connects to the others through events rather than passages determined by one or the other. The architectural imagination has historically demonstrated the capacity to structure perceptions and experiences while remaining outside any single structure's absolute control. This explains why great architecture always exceeds description and theory. It explains architecture's power for disturbance and transformation rather than inert passivity. Architecture associates the intensity of sensation with the rigor of structure and then transfers that intensity into other disciplines and practices, revealing not only their limits but also their openness to change.

Notes

1. Adolf Loos, "Architektur" (1910), in Die Schriften von Adolf Loos, vol. 2, Trotzdem, 1900–1930 (Innsbruck: Brenner, 1931), 109–10. My translation.

2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 272 (B177/A138).

4. Ibid., 273 (B180/A141).

5. Charles E. Winquist, The Transcendental Imagination: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 18.

6. Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, "Imagination," in Dictionnaire historique d’architecture, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie d’Adrien le Clere, 1832), 629, quoted in Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 40.

7.See Rudolf Wittkower, “Principles of Palladio’s Architecture,” in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949), 51–88. Originally published in two parts in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 102–22; 8 (1945): 68–106.

8. See Henry A. Millon, "Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism: Its Influence on the Development and Interpretation of Modern Architecture," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 31, no. 2 (May 1972): 83–91; and Alina A. Payne, "Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 3 (September 1994): 322–42.

9. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977); and Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

10. Deleuze, Foucault, 67–68.

11. Ibid., 69.

12. Ibid., 96–97, 117–18.

13. Ibid., 121.

14. Ibid., 123.

15. Ibid., 38.

Author's note: I extend sincere thanks to Bryan Norwood and Chelsea Spencer, whose comments and recommendations on multiple drafts have produced content as well as clarity

K. Michael Hays is the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architecture Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

(Hays, K. Michael. "Architecture's Appearance and the Practices of Imagination." Log, vol. 37, 2016, 205-213. https://www.anycorp.com/store?category=Log)

[junker-town]

Bruce Maxwell would like you to listen

Baseball finally had its first National Anthem protest, and it came from an unlikely and perfect source.

Baseball is the sport that’s responsible for the National Anthem being played before sporting events, and it was always going to be the last sport to get sucked into the controversy. It’s responsible because the tradition started at a World Series game 99 years ago, during World War I, when millions of young men were killed for reasons that most adults don’t remember today. It was going to be the last sport because it’s the stodgiest one. It’s the sport that’s the most resistant to change.

Baseball was going to be the last sport to get sucked in because it’s the one that appeals to how great everything used to be. With football, you can measure the height, weight, and 40-yard dash time of the average player in 1956, compare it to the modern player, and laugh. With basketball, you can watch five seconds of video from a different era and appreciate the difference in skill and speed today. With baseball, there’s always someone to call back to, someone who was the best you ever saw, full stop, no context needed. The sport doesn’t have to progress to be enjoyed, even as it unquestionably does.

Baseball was going to be the last sport to get sucked in because it’s the one in which traditions are followed because they’re traditions, and this is important because the traditional traditions are traditionally followed in a traditional manner, look, just respect the traditions. Don’t stare too long at a home run. If they hit our guy, we hit theirs. Rookies don’t get to complain to umpires nearly as much as veterans. There is rarely any introspection when it comes to the unwritten rules. They’re commandments, and they’ve just always been there, man. Don’t ask too many questions. Follow them or get hurt.

Baseball was going to be the last sport to get sucked in because it’s one of the whitest sports, both in terms of participation and viewership. Whitest makes a difference not because patriotism is connected to pigment, but because it makes a huge difference in one’s ability to say, “Hey, knock it off, nothing’s wrong, what’s the big deal?”

Baseball was going to be the last sport to get sucked in, but it was never going to be immune. This conversation was always coming because it’s nearly impossible to pretend like nothing is wrong right now. This makes people so damned uncomfortable. The status quo is incredibly comfortable, just a warm, snuggly blanket, and now it’s being challenged by rude, shivering people. This ruins your whole vibe.

The only surprise, really, is who challenged that status quo and how perfect he was for the job. Bruce Maxwell was born on a military base. He’s on record as saying that the patriotic garb for Memorial Day and Independence Day means more to him because of his family’s military background. He made a calculated effort to draw a clear line between protest and disrespect.

The most important part is that Maxwell is a 26-year-old rookie with absolutely everything to lose. He’s a backup catcher with a .244 batting average and three home runs. He’s someone who’s been worth 0.1 WAR this year, which means he’s a replaceable player, by definition. He looked at Colin Kaepernick, an accomplished veteran without a job, someone too toxic for the billionaires of the NFL to consider, and knew what the worst-case scenario was. Maxwell kneeled anyway because he felt his message and the amplification of it was more important than his job security.

As a reminder, that message is this:

Listen.

That’s it. That’s the controversial message that has everyone so upset. Instead of mindlessly singing along and pretending that the country is beyond criticism, we have to listen now? The people who are upset at anthem protests are upset that they have to listen and engage with the idea that the country isn’t perfect, that there’s still more work to do. The current president was elected on a campaign slogan that roughly translated to “Everything is shitty now, but I can help,” but he’s also the loudest critic of anyone who dares to say, “This one specific thing has always been shitty, and we need you to listen.” The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming.

A man born in Germany because of his dad’s devotion to this country would like you to listen.

If you want politics out of your baseball, I regret to inform you that they’ve always been there. Hollywood got to make a clean, shiny movie about Jackie Robinson, which allowed people to feel good about the progress we’ve made, except Robinson didn’t get to live in that clean, shiny movie. He lived in a bleak reality, where the death threats didn’t stop coming when the two hours were over. If you think baseball has always been about keeping politics out, Hank Aaron has some letters to share with you.

If you want an example that’s less dramatic, consider the story of Andrew McCutchen, who explained why there are fewer and fewer American-born black players in Major League Baseball.

For all the backlash around the Jackie Robinson West team “cheating,” most people are ignoring the truth of how these 12-year-old kids make it out of their towns and onto a national stage. Individuals step in and fill that financial gap. Hopefully those people are trustworthy and have their hearts in the right place. I was fortunate in that respect. Other kids might not be. When you talk to players around Major League Baseball, almost every single one of them has a story about a person who stepped in and took care of their expenses. You hear it all the time: “If it wasn’t for this guy, I wouldn’t be in the league.”

It takes money to play travel ball. It takes money to play at the highest amateur levels. African-Americans have a disproportionately small amount of the country’s wealth, which means they’ll have a disproportionately small chance of climbing the ladder in baseball. And you have two choices: You can believe that African-Americans are poorer because they’re genetically inferior, which would make you a flaming racist, or you can believe that it’s the case because of opportunities that were denied to earlier generations, with a clean, neatly drawn line that goes back to slavery and the guns, germs, and steel that allowed the institution to exist. It’s not a stretch to suggest that the declining number of African-American players in baseball shares a root cause with the systemic violence that Kaepernick was protesting in the first place. It’s all tangled up in the same bloody history, and having everyone wear the number “42” once a year isn’t going to fix that.

And if you have a moment to listen, Bruce Maxwell would like to point all of this out. That’s all he asks.

This isn’t the first time that players have used the National Anthem to send a message. This was just a couple years ago:

Scott Van Slyke and Joe Kelly used the National Anthem to send a message. That message was this: Tee hee. They weren’t thinking about the sacrifices their fellow Americans made to keep them free. At that moment, the anthem was just a vehicle to break the tension, get a few giggles, and give their teammates an incrementally better chance of winning. And no one minded. Not a single editorial was penned in response, which suggests that the problem isn’t that athletes are using the anthem to send a message, but that they’re using the anthem to send a message that’s more threatening than “tee hee.”

Baseball was always going to be the last sport to get sucked in, but this was always coming. If history is any guide, Maxwell will be remembered fondly. I walked past a statue of John Carlos and Tommie Smith every day for years, which would have been unthinkable to the people who were the angriest at being told to listen back in 1968. It’s why Jackie Robinson went from death threats to a national hero, even though he used his autobiography to point out that the National Anthem rang hollow to him, too.

Until history is on his side, though, Maxwell will be dealing with a lot of nonsense. He knew that. He knew that there would be consequences, and he weighed that against the urgency of his message. He decided the message was more important. Maybe you should check out his message, then. It won’t take too long.

Bruce Maxwell would like you to listen. He risked his career because he thinks you should listen. Won’t you take a few minutes to listen?

[yahoo-puck-daddy-blog]

Don Sweeney, Joffrey Lupul and whining about new rules (Puck Daddy Countdown)

Joffrey Lupul’s situation with the Maple Leafs has been truly bizarre.

(In which Ryan Lambert takes a look at some of the biggest issues and stories in the NHL, and counts them down.)

7 – New rules

People getting mad about a bunch of illegal faceoff penalties in the preseason are amazing, truly. Like, honestly, who cares. You’re watching a bunch of guys who you will never hear about again this season, if not ever. If you’re watching preseason hockey because you think it’ll be, like, entertaining? Hoo boy, I have to question your understanding of what goes on with this league.

6 – Injuries!

Zach Sanford, Jay Bouwmeester and Colin White are, as near as I can tell, the first two major injuries suffered in training camp by players with at least a nominal chance of making their teams. Given the nature of these things, there are probably a few injuries that haven’t been given timelines, but man tough break for the young kids especially.

Bouwmeester fractured his ankle; no timetable for him to return except to say that he’ll be re-evaluated in a few weeks. That alone probably tells you this could be a rough one.

But for Sanford, who played 39 NHL games last season, this was his first opportunity to really be a full-time NHLer. Instead, he dislocated his left shoulder and he’s out at least five months. By my math, that puts him at a late-February return if things go exactly right. Woof.

Colin White, by comparison, got off much easier: He “only” broke his wrist and will miss at least six weeks. Not terrible, all things considered, but broken wrists are unpredictable in this sport especially, so who knows what he even looks like in his first full pro season after he comes back?

Tough bounces for the players and their teams. And probably a few more on the way.

5 – *extremely Donald Trump voice* China

I don’t know what the beautiful, nice people of China ever did to deserve a Kings-Canucks series featuring AAAA-level rosters, but this is gonna set back Sino-American relations more than anything since the Cultural Revolution.

The good news is with all the fog that got whipped up in the Canucks’ first practice there, the good, kind citizens of the People’s Republic of China might not have to actually watch the games.

4 – That Bryan Little extension

Hey look I like Bryan Little a lot. Good player. Pretty underrated. And I don’t even think the money on this six-year deal is all that bad for what he currently delivers. BUT:

Six years with a no-move in the first two and a 14-team no-trade in the last four? For a guy who turns 30 in November? Did Kevin Cheveldayoff forget he still has Little locked up for a year on his current contract ($4.7 million, good deal there too).

Again, I like Little, but why on earth do you lock up a guy — leaving aside the limited options he now provides thanks to the various clauses in this deal — through his age-37 season? He’s not a superstar, never been an All-Star. He finished 27th in Selke voting one time. He’s just an above-average complementary player. I’m not sure what that aging curve looks like, especially because he’s missed 20-plus games each of the last two seasons. And 12 the year before that.

That’s Jets Hockey, baby!

3 – Drawing conclusions

Ahh, hmm. That guy who is lighting up the preseason? Looks great. Potential All-Star. Get excited.

Those guys are gonna be just like Jon Sim, who routinely scored like 12 points in eight preseason games in the mid- to late-2000s, and is now in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

2 – Robidas Island

This situation with Joffrey Lupul is fairly weird.

Mirtle had a good explainer over at the Athletic but man, there are a lot of twists and turns there. Basically, the Leafs say he’s too injured to play, that he failed his physical. He says probably he isn’t, and his teammates seem to generally back him up on that.

He said on his Instagram, “Haha failed physical? They cheat, everyone lets them.”

That’s a serious charge, but it’s worth noting the Leafs intend to carry Lupul as an injured player without putting him on the LTIR because, as Mirtle says, “that could trigger an investigation from the league into how injured he actually is?” They could put him in the AHL, shave some of his cap allocation off their total and maybe sign someone else. But they don’t, potentially because Lupul has a rep as a party boy.

But Bob McKenzie says he doesn’t think Lupul would use the NHLPA to file a grievance about all this either.

And here’s something else: Steve Simmons reported yesterday that, “Word around for some time has been that there is more to this story, that the Leafs have something on the veteran winger. Something damaging they just might release should Lupul become an annoyance to them.”

Coming from the purveyor of the Kessel-and-hot-dogs rumor, you might take that with a grain of salt — and certainly I’m inclined to — but you pair that with Mirtle talking about the party-boy thing, and the fact the Toronto media is always more than happy to shiv someone at the team’s behest, and well, maybe that’s why there’s no PA grievance.

Weird situation, but to Lupul’s point about “they cheat, everyone lets them,” it seems like a bit of a coincidence that it’s guys like Stephane Robidas, Jared Cowen and now Lupul who get deemed medically unfit to play and it just so happens that it’s a little convenient for the richest team in the league.

Cowen here and now Lupul have questioned it. (For his part, Robidas never did, but he was old and broke his leg twice in a short period of time.) Who knows what all this means? Probably nothing good.

1 – Don Sweeney … hold on, really? Yeah, look at that: “Don Sweeney.” Says it right here. Huh.

Really having trouble wrapping my head around Don Sweeney winning the staring contest with David Pastrnak.

The contract he ended up wringing from the player — six years at just $6.667 million AAV with zero trade/movement protections except for the last two years — is a stunning victory for a GM who can’t help but overpay all kinds of players who don’t bring nearly as much to the table as Pastrnak does.

Of course, you can call that the Bruins not knowing what’s actually important and not wanting to pay or properly use their young players. I’d say that criticism has been more than earned in recent years. But here we are: Sweeney has his entire top line of Bergeron, Pastrnak, and Marchand locked up for each of the next five(!) years at a total combined cost of less than $20 million. It’s amazing. No team in the league is in that sort of position, at least not with a proven group like this one.

(Meanwhile, the less said about the $13.25 million committed to David Krejci and David Backes for the next four years, the better. Not that the Krejci contract is Sweeney’s fault, but y’know.)

Point being, if you can make good moves to lock up your top players at less than market value — and all three of those forwards definitively earn less than market value — you can afford to make mistakes elsewhere in the lineup. Maybe not as many as the Bruins are currently paying for, but still.

They’re overpaying Krejci, Backes, Beleskey, McQuaid and Miller. But Torey Krug and Tuukka Rask are getting roughly what they’re worth, and the top line is a bargain. Everyone else is either cheap (i.e. on ELCs or making less than $3 million) or old enough to basically not count because that’s the cost of doing business (Chara).

It’s not a bad way to really get your rebuild off on the right foot in earnest.

And it’s Don Sweeney who did it? Well, okay.

(Not ranked this week: Not signing Jagr.

This is getting ridiculous. Not a fan.)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here

[magnuscagney]

Kaep

Mike Glennon: In 2013 he started for the TB Bucs GM 4 when the team was 0-3. They finished the season 4-12. He won one game. He finished with an 84% rating 59% completion pct, 2608 yds and 19 tds 9 ints The Bucs then sign McCown but still claim Glennon is the "QB of the future" 2014 Glennon starts wk 3 I think? Bucs go 2-14. 2015 they draft Winston and Glennon?...he goes to the Bears and inks a 3 yr $45 Milly deal. I establish In short, Glennon's trajectory or lack thereof because I think that it doesn't establish worth but does indicate the market. So if that's the market (and I think most of us agree it's disproportionate) then we have to look at Kaep's career carefully to see if his resume commands the same contract (or at least similar) that Glennon got. To be clear about my opinion of Glennon's contract I think the Bears org seriously screwed up the economics of signing a FA QB as now you've put Kaep in a situation where to ask him to accept anything less than $9 milly per is to either price himself out, or short change himself. I agree with Carlos Singer that $9 Mill is excessive. But the market says we are both wrong. So let's take a little closer look at Kaeps resume. 2011 Kaep, if memory serves, plays in week 4, the 9ers finish 13-3, meet the NYG in the NFC Championship game and come up short. Sidebar: it's worth noting that the NYG would go on to win the SB 2012: Kaep gets his first NFL start on MNF against a good Bears D and goes 16-23 for 246 yds and 2 TDs. Now we have a QB controversy. At this point Alex Smith has a career of-104 rating, 70% Comp pct and a record of 19-5-1 Hey, that's pretty damn good. But Kaep was a semi-wild, dynamic scrambling QB with a big arm and potentially high ceiling. I felt like Smith was the guy. Harbaugh felt differently and the 9ers had very good momentum and he wanted to keep it. I was wrong yet again and Harbaugh (in hindsight for me) was right. Kaep helps take his team to the SB where they fall short 31-34. It's also worth noting that Kaep threw for a TD and ran for one in that SB. Outstanding SB performance? Maybe not. Did he give his team a chance to win putting up 14 pts? Absolutely. 2013: Kaep returns and in his first game against GB he puts up 412 yds passing and three TDs. Q Boldin had 208 yds receiving. Kaep goes back to the NFC Championship game against the Seahawks (one of the best Ds to ever step on the field) and he doesn't exactly blow anyone's mind but he does rush for 130yds and pass for 153 and lead his team on their last drive down the field where his pass is deflected by who was arguably the best CB in the league at that time. I was impressed at what I saw in that game. He never gave up and if it's a different playcall? Who knows what happens (I do agree with Sherman that targeting him in the end zone was a foolish call) not sure but I believe that was the play drawn up? I'm sure Deon Harvey knows for sure. So please bare with me again as I move for just a minute In a direction which at first may seem off course but it's necessary before I reach Colin's 2014,2015,& 2016 seasons which will be a much shorter synopsis for obvious reasons. I believe and understand (as I think most of us do) the importance of the chain of: Owner GM HC QB This chain, when dialed, creates the cohesive unit that establishes a winning locker room and culture and if you look across the league all of our current winning franchises have that in place. Patriots (Belichick is both GM & HC cutting out the middle man) Steelers Seahawks GB Just to name a few and that tree of executives and coaches if held together can make or break an organization that can take yrs to recover from. Ok, back to Kaep. 2014: Kaep gets a 6 yr extension worth up to $126 mill Frequent reports surface of strain and tension between Harbaugh and the 9ers front office and its close to being beyond repair. This is the beginning of the end. The 9ers go 8-8. Exit Harbaugh and several other pro-bowl/team captains and locker room glue leaving Kaep with a new coach, new locker room, new playbook and vastly diminished team in talent on both sides of the ball. Kaeps total for 2014? 3,369 yds passing 18 TDs, 10 ints rushes for 639 yds and 1 TD Not great, but certainly not terrible. 2015: Kaep struggles with the new HC and system (which I think is to be expected) loses the starting gig at week 9. Kaep injures shoulder (and honestly I think the majority of people thought he was bluffing) turns out he's not bluffing, goes in for surgery. Tomsula is fired 2016: Kaep again has a new HC, new playbook (and a radical one at that) and new locker room culture (that's two HCs two play books and still diminished team talent for anyone keeping track...it's a lot. Apologies. I'm almost finished. In a ridiculous back and forth between Kaep and Gabbert for the starting gig, neither QB is allowed continuity or growth under the new system resulting in struggles and instability in arguably the most important and complicated role on offense. Here are a few things Kaep did in 2016. Against Buffalo his numbers were 13-29 187 yds passing 1 passing TD and 66 yds rushing in a loss. In a loss against Miami he put up 296 yds passing, 3 passing TDs and rushed for 113 yds. To put these numbers in proper perspective the only other players to achieve 3 passing TDs and 100 yds rushing in a game: Michael Vick Cam Newton Randall Cunningham Marcus Mariota. In a career low Kaep passes for 4 yds and is benched again for Gabbert. If anyone's argument is Kaeps inconsistency I'd have a hard time arguing against that and could only counter with I think he needs more time to build. But yeah, there are certainly arguments to be made about his consistency. But the potential is their in my humble opinion and it's unquestionable for me. So having now looked at his overall resume, and comparing his asking price (which I wholeheartedly agree with Peter Mann and the article he shared here is premature at this point) how does he stack up in your opinion to QBs that have been signed so far which...well obviously Glennon, and Geno Smith and whomever I may be missing ? I'd say before Glennon and Smith got signed he's the best FA QB available and a better pick up than any 2017 NFL draft QB prospect (mostly because we have a resume to review at the pro level) But in that resume I see a SB appearance, playoff wins and 2 NFC Championship appearances. Again, it's worth noting that the NFC Ship loss to the Seahawks? Hawks went on to win its first Ship. A special team indeed in my opinion. So if you are of the same mind as myself, can remove yourself from any bias as to your feelings about Kaep and are just looking at resumes then you may be asking the same question as Deon Harvey asked and I am also wondering myself. Why doesn't Kaep have a job? Now Peter Mann has shared and backed up both in the article posted here and Peter and myself have what we believe to be an irrefutable, collective opinion that black balling has to be ruled out if for no other reason than the definition of the term itself. But if Kaep has a stronger resume than any other FA QB or QB in the upcoming draft....well..then I have to assume that he is not signed because of a non-football related issue. And I'm inclined to believe that issue is his decision to sit first and then kneel to raise awareness to the insanely accelerated and unpunished murders (be it accidental or otherwise) of inner city black citizens in several cities across the US and in our penal system. The outrageous proportion of black prisoners and that ratio of proportion to white citizens. Now there are some I am seeing that are criticizing his new stance and have claimed that it is because he is now looking for a new job. He is still very active in the community and raising money and awareness. Some will say he doesn't want to be a distraction to his new team. I fail to see that as a negative. You can go to his website at www.kaepernick7.com to see the activity and magnitude of his position. I've tried here not to discount the article, it's author, or Peter Mann. Instead I wanted to contribute to what Peter has shared, for that to be looked at as a whole , and for you to draw your own conclusions but in that drawing, you have as much information as possible. But for me, until proven otherwise which I am certainly open to, this is still about race. And I'm wrestling with a concept that I cannot understand, in fact infuriates me that a man stood up and used his voice to speak about the injustices that are happening in the communities that are the very same ones that provide a majority of the athletes that we all gather around our TV sets with our families and friends every Sunday to watch. I hope you are all right about him getting another gig. I will never wear any others teams jersey but if and when Kaep does get signed I will purchase his jersey, frame it, and mount it on the wall of the room I watch every game with my family. The reasons for which will be multiple. I will have followed Kaeps example of putting my money where my heart and mouth is. I will have not forgotten a man who refused to forget us. Epilogue: I have either coached or attended all of my daughters elementary school teams/GMs and middle school. This year was her freshman year of high school and when I attended her Volleyball game I took a knee during the anthem and pledge. I was the only one who did. Cheers. -MC