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justfinishedreading · 4 years ago

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After having read In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami and hearing about the critically acclaimed film adaptation of another of his novels, Audition, I was excited to read it. At first glance it seems a perfect story for the Me Too era: a film producer hosts a fake film audition with the secret aim of finding himself a wife. But the beauty he selects gradually starts displaying warning signs that others around him, and us the audience, can see, but he cannot.

The novel presents the story solely from the producer’s experience of events, his name is Aoyama, he is 42, a widower and has a teenage son. He is a good creation of a character, what I mean is it would be too easy for a writer to portray him as total lying villain, a man deserving of all the horrors coming to him. But what author Ryu Murakami does brilliantly is make him human, presenting his misogyny and arrogance alongside his vulnerability and hope for a warmer home life. His misogyny is presented in subtly ways, it is important to understand that sexism isn’t always extreme and obvious, often sexism is most damaging when it occurs unnoticed in uneventful daily life.

An example of the duality of his character: in the very first pages he tells us a little bit about his late wife, Ryoko: how she was an amazing woman, he “had nothing but love, respect and gratitude for this remarkable wife of his” and yet in the very next sentence we’re told he frequently cheated on her, and spent large amounts of money on hostesses. He praises Ryoko for maintaining her “cool and quiet dignity” in light of his wrongdoings. Since losing Ryoko, Aoyama also lost the desire to fool around with other women, in the way that an adulterer feels less able to gamble with love and rejection if they’ve lost their guaranteed partner at home.

Aoyama’s biggest positive, some would say his only positive, is his love for his son, Shige. He is frequently thinking about his son and his well-being. And yet in parts of the book when Shige comments that strange things have been happening in the neighbourhood and hints that he’s worried to be left alone, Aoyama leaves him nevertheless for large periods of time without a second thought. Shige isn’t a child, he’s 15, but this love merged with lack of responsibility and lack of thought is typical of Aoyama’s character.

In their first scene together father and son watch a women’s marathon. To watch women as Aoyama puts it. Both father and son lament the lack of beauty on display and in the world in general. Here we have a case of female athletes being judged by two men on their appearance. Aoyama comments that he thinks women will outrun men in marathons due to physiology, praise that women can excel men at something, but still within the physical realm. Physiology is a huge part of sports of course, but so is psychological strength and determination, which is something neither of them think about.

Shige suggests that his father should find a new wife, and Aoyama agrees. He wants a wife. Not a girlfriend, not dating, but a wife and step-mother to Shige. He doesn’t want to go on dates, doesn’t have the time for it, or for match-making interviews. He talks to his buddy Yoshikawa, who’s also in the filmmaking business, and Yoshikawa has the idea of holding auditions for a fake film, but with the sole intention of finding a wife for Aoyama.

The idea of a man wanting the luxury of picking a woman from a swarm of applicants, is very real. As I was reading Audition I heard about real-life Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, who was looking for a female "life partner" to accompany him on a tourist voyage to the Moon planned for 2023. The 44-year-old had at the time recently split from his 27-year-old actor girlfriend. He was now asking women to apply for a "planned match-making event" on his website. How balanced would this relationship ever be if one of the partners had literally been in competition with hundreds of other women for the “prize” of being a billionaire’s “special someone”?

So, what kind of woman does Aoyama want? “I’m not that particular about age, but nobody too young” Says Aoyama. On the next page he settles on mid-twenties to early thirties (the woman he eventually picks is 24, Aoyama is 42). He wants a woman who has trained as a classical musician or ballerina, but she doesn’t necessarily have to be successful at it. And she shouldn’t be “contaminated” by the entertainment industry. Basically, someone he can show off but who doesn’t surpass him. “Office girls?” Says Yoshikawa “Forget about it, it’s not that there aren’t beautiful office girls, but get a well-adjusted woman with a regular job and it’s just not that easy to pull the wool over her eyes.”

Aoyama does wonder whether they should go ahead, it seems immoral and fraudulent. Yoshikawa is excited at the prospect of having fun organizing a fake audition solely for their amusement and eggs Aoyama on. A radio announcement for wannabe actresses with no previous acting experience is put out and applications for the film start pouring in. “Having them include a brief essay along with the résumé and photo was a brilliant idea. The essay, amazingly enough, gives you a clearer image of the person than even a photo does” remarks Yoshikawa. Duh Yoshikawa.

Amongst hundreds of applicants Aoyama is taken in by the profile of Asami, a beautiful, young and modest woman who trained as a ballerina but was forced to stop because of an injury. That evening, without even having met her, he daydreams of her washing the dishes at his home after a meal, they discuss how Shige has accepted her. Aoyama imagines her asking him how best to drink an alcoholic spirit “is it all right to have it in ice?” she asks, and they relax together on the sofa.

Although they have selected thirty candidates for face-to-face interviews, Aoyama can only think of Asami. He anxiously awaits her interview time, barely listening to the other candidates before her. So what can I say about Asami? For the majority of the story she keeps us guessing, Aoyama can only see his own created perfect image of her, combined with the manufactured image she presents. She appears humble, beautiful but insecure, fragile and needing guardianship and so appreciative of Aoyama’s attentions. The other characters around Aoyama feel uneasy but the author never explanation why exactly. Anyone who reads this book already knows something is wrong with Asami, we’re constantly wondering how much does she know? Or does she have motives outside this story? How much is an act or a plan? What is she thinking?

The more we want to know Asami’s inner thoughts, the less Aoyama seems to care to. And that really is the most fighting of all. As an audience we know something bad is coming to someone falling deeper into his own illusion. Even Aoyama’s 15-year-old son seems to be more mature and clued-in than his father. And yet they both share a difficulty understanding woman, Shige comments that he doesn’t understand the girls in his school and maybe he’ll end up with a beautiful foreigner from Kazakhstan, “Language might be a problem, but-“. We never get to hear Shige’s solution to the language problem but it illustrates the absurdity of thinking that you as a man would get on better with a woman you can’t actually communicate with, and from a completely different culture, than trying to talk and understand the women around you.

Something that works to Aoyama’s, and the story’s, favour is that Aoyama was never a sleazy film producer looking for easy sex, he is looking for a bride. The first couple of meeting are completely innocent. In this way we feel some sympathy for him, stupid as he may be, he is not an evil man, and yet we also want to see what Asami is going to do to him. Or at least I did.

If I were writing an essay (which perhaps this does feel like) there’s all sorts of other moments and even linguistic choices which I’d mention and analyse, but for this review I’m going to wrap it up. I was enjoying this book until close to the last chapters. For me the story goes downhill the moment Asami’s reasoning is revealed, her whole persona is explained in a few paragraphs and the mystery of Asami is resolved whilst the story is still happening. She goes from potentially being intelligent and conniving to being a woman of impulses she cannot control. And the book loses something in the process. I had read In the Miso Soup before Audition and I loved the psychopath Frank, a character we never get to fully understand, complex and full of lies. To have Asami explained away so simply robs her of interest and urgency.

The brilliance of the book is really in the lead up to the final grand event. Not so much the ending itself. In fact regardless of whether things turned out badly or well (I won’t spoil it for you), it still ends on a bitter note, a final comment that the men of Audition, after these life lessons, after feeling the consequences of their actions, still don’t understand where they went wrong.

Review by Book Hamster

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blackswaneuroparedux · 5 years ago

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Anonymous asked: I think you have one of the most cultured blogs on tumblr and I respect your views (even where I disagree) because you are highly educated and experienced and not a knee jerk ranter like many here. Yet I was disappointed by your post on Islam and West with a quote by the conservative writer, Mark Steyn. Don’t you think history shows that the hate filled anti-Islamism of the Crusades taught Muslims to rightly fear and hate Western Christians and that has continued down to our present day?

There’s a lot to unpack here so thank you for your thoughtful words. Thank you for being sincerely honest and open and I hope I can reciprocate in the same way. I don’t claim a monopoly on truth and I am always open to be corrected if I know I am wrong in some way. I hope you are too.

Firstly, Mark Steyn - within the specificity of the quote alone - wasn’t attacking Islam so much as showing the slow burn decline of the West, especially Europe. He was admonishing Europeans for the state of their moral and political decay of their civilisation.

As a side note, Mark Steyn is now Canadian but originally born and raised English. As such he deploys wit and sarcasm in a British way that isn’t entirely understood by North Americans. I don’t always agree with Steyn but I like his colourful turn of phrase and stylish prose. he was a drama critic before he turned his hand to political commentating and so he knows how to provoke.

Secondly, I want to make clear that I am not anti-Islamic. I have a sincere respect and appreciation for Islamic arts and aesthetics. This comes from briefly living in those cultures such as India and Pakistan as a small child and then later backpacking across Iran and Central Asia and South East Asia, and even later serving in the British army in Afghanistan.

As a rule, I also respect people of genuine faith and what it means to them in their every day lives to be better people having learned to speak Urdu, Farsi, and Dari to a fairly conversant level. I have always been the recipient of generous hospitality and unexpected kindness, especially ordinary people I met on the buses or in the night market bazaars or remote villages when I was backpacking.

However speaking frankly, I won’t apologise for being anti-Islam when it comes to the religious Islamic hardcore - unwittingly aided by misguided leftists and PC multi-culturalists - who wish to threaten the fabric of our European heritage or where imported Islamic customs and cultural practices are incompatible with our native European traditions.

Questions of how and in what ways does Islam impact and even undermine the very fabric of European civilisation are legitimate ones provided we can leave aside the unhelpful histrionics of fear mongering and stop taking comfort in broad brush racist caricatures.

Taking easy pot shots at straw men of our created fears may serve as a release for pent up frustration in the short term but does nothing to take a serious approach to practical policies to solving these problems in the long term. We need to have an urgent, sober and clear sighted discussion about how far can western societies can allow Islamic customs and practices to continue to shape our traditional European identity.

Thirdly, your view that Islam was peaceful until Western Christianity started the fight with the onslaught of the crusades is deeply flawed. Your view of the crusades is not unusual though. It pervades textbooks as well as popular literature which is based on out of date historiography.

The historiography of the crusades tends to focus on varying degrees on the three key medieval impulses that drove the crusades: piety, pugnacity, and greed.

In the popular imagination today the crusaders were nothing more than boorish bigots. In films like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), the best of the Christian knights are portrayed as being torn between remorse for their excesses and lust to continue them.

Within the hallowed halls of academia the impression one gets comes down either believing the soldiers of the First Crusade appeared basically without warning, storming into the Holy Land with the avowed - literally - task of slaughtering unbelievers. Or the Crusades were an early sort of European imperialism. Some ‘woke’ historians would go as far as to say confrontation with Islam gave birth to a period of religious fanaticism that spawned the terrible Inquisition and the religious wars that ravaged Europe during the Elizabethan era.

The most famous semi-popular historian of the crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, ended his three volumes of magnificent prose - written in the 1950s - with the judgment that the crusades were “nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

Runciman was badly mistaken and his research has been surpassed as a new generation of historians have moved down fresh avenues of archival research. That’s the nature of historiography.

There will always be a sense of the complexity of each of the historical issues regarding the crusades and why historians often disagree with common popular, often unnuanced interpretations of historical events as popularised by Runciman. It is a topic that crusade historians discuss among themselves quite often, occasionally publishing articles in popular publications.

So I don’t buy in to the argument that literally all the crusaders were virtuous or had pure motives - I don’t think any serious historian does. Nor would I ever categorise all the crusaders on one side as the good guys and Islamic forces on the other as the bad guys. That’s just lazy and silly.

There is a story about Carole Hillenbrand, one of the present leading scholars on the crusades, who was invited by an interviewer in 2018 to venture an opinion on whether the Muslims who had encountered westerners in the Holy Land during the time of the crusades had seen the best of western Christendom in their midst, Hillenbrand agreed that - with notable and distinguished exceptions - they almost certainly had not. In turn what had the Western crusaders learned from their Islamic adversaries? "The most important thing that most of the crusaders who remained in the Holy Land learned ... was to use soap".

History is a two way street of complexity and contradictions. It’s also full of unexpected ironies as we shall see.

At the moment the piety argument is in the ascendancy and is often ascribed to the late great Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley Smith - arguably the most important crusades historian of modern times. As early as 1977, he argued that the crusade was a special type of holy war that was differentiated from all previous Christian holy wars by its unique institutional and penitential nature, thus it had a special religious appeal to those who participated. It was at first associated with pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the most penitential goal of all, and a place where devout Christians went to die, which may be why so many of the earliest crusaders were old men.

I find this argument more convincing because of the reams of research now been done and adds to our broader picture of the crusaders and their motivations.

So you might see the assumptions behind your question make you fall into the Runciman view of the Crusades - and that has been out of date for some time.

The historical truth is that Muslims had been attacking Christians for more than 450 years before Pope Urban declared the First Crusade. They needed no incentive to continue doing so. Islam was always in conflict with Western Christianity from the beginning.

But even here there is a more nuanced and complicated answer which I want you to consider.

Up until quite recently, Muslims remembered the crusades as an instance in which they had beaten back an insipid western Christian attack. Islamic popular belief that was prevalent in these societies that they were the winners, not the losers during the time of the crusades. Past Muslims never whined about the crusades because they saw themselves as the victors.

An illuminating vignette is found in one of Lawrence of Arabia’s letters, describing a confrontation during post-World War One negotiations between the Frenchman Stéphen Pichon and Faisal al-Hashemi (later King Faisal I of Iraq). Pichon presented a case for French interest in Syria going back to the crusades, which Faisal dismissed with a cutting remark: “But, pardon me, which of us won the crusades?”

This was generally representative of the Muslim attitude toward the crusades before about World War One - that is, when Muslims bothered to remember them at all, which was not often. Most of the Arabic-language historical writing on the crusades before the mid-19th century was produced by Arab Christians, not Muslims, and most of that was positive. There was no Arabic word for “crusades” until that period, either, and even then the coiners of the term were, again, Arab Christians. It had not seemed important to Muslims to distinguish the crusades from other conflicts between Christianity and Islam.

Nor had there been an immediate reaction to the crusades among Muslims. As the British historian, Carole Hillenbrand has noted, “The Muslim response to the coming of the Crusades was initially one of apathy, compromise and preoccupation with internal problems.”

By the 1130s, a Muslim counter-crusade did begin, under the leadership of the ferocious Zengi of Mosul. But it had taken some decades for the Muslim world to become concerned about Jerusalem, which is usually held in higher esteem by Muslims when it is not held by them than when it is.

Action against the crusaders was often subsequently pursued as a means of uniting the Muslim world behind various aspiring conquerors, until 1291, when the Christians were expelled from the Syrian mainland. And - surprisingly to Westerners - it was not Saladin who was revered by Muslims as the great anti-Christian leader - he was a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish ethnicity. That place of honour usually went to the more bloodthirsty, and more successful, Zengi and Baibars, or to the more public-spirited Nur al-Din.

The first Muslim crusade history did not appear until 1899. By that time, the Muslim world was rediscovering the crusades - but it was rediscovering them with a twist learned from Westerners. In the modern period at the end of the 19th Century, there were two main European schools of thought about the crusades.

One school, epitomised by people like Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, and Sir Walter Scott, and later echoed in the 20th Century Sir Steven Runciman, saw the crusaders as crude, greedy, aggressive barbarians who attacked civilised, peace-loving Muslims to improve their own penury state.

The other school, more romantic and epitomised by lesser-known figures such as the French writer Joseph-François Michaud, saw the crusades as a glorious episode in a long-standing struggle in which Christian chivalry had driven back Muslim hordes. In addition, Western imperialists began to view the crusaders as predecessors, adapting their activities in a secularised way that the original crusaders would not have recognised or found very congenial.

At the same time, nationalism began to take root in the Muslim world. Arab nationalists borrowed the idea of a long-standing European campaign against them from the former European school of thought - missing the fact that this was a serious mis-characterisation of the crusades - and using this distorted understanding as a way to generate support for their own agendas.

This remained the case until the mid-20th century, when, in Riley-Smith’s words, “a renewed and militant Pan-Islamism” applied the more narrow goals of the Arab nationalists to a worldwide revival of what was then called Islamic fundamentalism and is now sometimes referred to, a bit clumsily, as jihadism.

This led rather seamlessly to the rise of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, offering a view of the crusades so bizarre as to allow bin Laden to consider all Jews to be crusaders and the crusades to be a permanent and continuous feature of the West’s response to Islam.

Bin Laden’s conception of history was a feverish fantasy. He was no more accurate in his view about the crusades than he was about the supposed perfect Islamic unity which he imagined Islam enjoyed before the enduring influence of Christianity intruded. But the irony is that he, and those millions of Muslims who accept his message, received that message originally from their perceived enemies: the West.

So it was not the crusades that taught Islam to attack and hate Christians. Far from it. Those activities had preceded the crusades by a very long time, and stretch back to the inception of Islam. Rather, it was the West - based on faulty scholarship based on misconceived principles sourced from the Age of Enlightenment - which taught Islam to hate the crusades.

The irony is rich is it not?

Thanks for the question.

#question #crusades #history #christendom #religious extremism #islamic civilisation #holy lands #historians

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Trump’s Paradigm of the Personal https://nyti.ms/2NwK2xW

Excellent piece by @CharlesMBlow of the Times. Highly recommend, also the comments are interesting as well.

Trump’s Paradigm of the Personal

He confuses the way he thinks he is treated with the well-being of the country.

By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist

Published Aug. 25, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 26, 2019 |

For Donald Trump, all is personal.

And in his view, he is not the executive of the company. He is the embodiment of the country. He runs the country the way he ran his business, as the curating and promotion of his personal brand.

The people who support him are customers — people to be sold a vision and a dream. The people who criticize or oppose him threaten the brand and must be dealt with.

For Trump, everything is image-based and rooted in the appearance of personal relationships. When the Danish prime minister rebuffed his overture about buying Greenland, calling the idea “absurd,” Trump threw a tantrum and canceled his visit to Denmark.

Trump discussed the episode at one of his press gaggles, calling the prime minister’s response “nasty’ and saying, “We can’t treat the United States of America the way they treated us under President Obama.” He went on to say: “She’s not talking to me. She’s talking to the United States of America. You don’t talk to the United States that way, at least under me.”

No, actually, she was talking to him.

America was not being dismissed or disrespected. This proposal, which sounded like a joke, was being laughed at. And this president hates being laughed at.

Everything in Trump’s view is about whether someone is nice or nasty to him. It’s not about the country at all. It’s not about historical precedent or value of continuity.

His dislike of his predecessors — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even Jimmy Carter — is personal, not rooted in policy. He has a particular obsession with Obama, and has set about to undo everything Obama had done.

It’s petty and small and beneath the presidency, much like Trump himself.

I believe that Trump has had a longstanding belief about how China should be dealt with, but I believe that the current trade war is as much a personal beef with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. Trump thought that he could play rough and that Xi would fold.

That was silly and shortsighted. The U.S. presidency is term-limited. China’s is not. The Chinese may experience pain from the trade war, but they can afford to wait Trump out.

The fact that Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, won’t attempt to manipulate the economy in ways Trump thinks would be favorable, but is instead operating as an independent thinker, Trump takes as a personal slight. Trump appointed him. Trump demands loyalty and blind obeisance.

When China announced another round of retaliatory tariffs this week, Trump had a Twitter meltdown, tweeting “... My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” and sending the markets into a tailspin.

Trump hated North Korea’s Kim Jong-un before he loved him. Kim has played Trump like a fiddle. Kim has baited Trump into two summits, where Trump got nothing and Kim got a priceless public relations moment. Kim can just send Trump love letters and do what he wants and surrender nothing. In Trump’s paradigm of the personal, Kim likes him and is his friend.

Vladimir Putin is also exploiting Trump’s personal need to be liked — his weak man’s desire to be admired by strong men. Trump has a deep and mysterious affection for Putin. Yes, Putin helped to get him elected, but I’m not sure even that explains the way Trump genuflects for him.

Everyone around Trump knows his weakness: He is a bottomless pit of emotional need, someone who desperately wants friends but doesn’t have the emotional quotient to know how to make and keep them. So, they flatter him and inflate him.

They have all become major-league yes men and women.

None of this is good for the country. The presidency is not owned; it is occupied. It is bigger than any man or woman. Men have grown into it, but they have never subsumed it.

The presidency must have one eye on the past and one on the future. It must place national interest over personal interest. It has absolutely nothing to do with any one person’s feelings.

In George Washington’s farewell address of 1796, he said:

“The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

Trump is trying to embody the country and to lead it astray in the way that Washington warned against. Trump is a slave to his emotions, and this impulse is doing great harm to the nation, both internally and on the world stage.

I’m not sure that damage is irreparable. Our democracy, though fragile in many ways, has proved remarkably durable in others. But there is no doubt that the damage Trump is doing is deep and will take time and effort to undo.

Trump’s personal problems will leave a national scar.

COMMENTS FROM READERS, ADD YOUR THOUGHTS AS WELL:

""Trump’s personal problems will leave a national scar." More like an open wound that won't heal. 60 million citizens have succumbed to his bombast, and to date there seems to be no weakening of their support. That will take years if not decades to heal. It may never. Iraq and the Bush years were tragic, but with President Obama we started a recovery. Even with one of the deepest recession, we all pulled together, and we started the to build jobs again and pulled out of the recession quicker than the rest of the world. We lead the way. But literally within days of Trump taking office the country started it's tragic descent into the abyss. And there is no end in sight."

CHERRYLOG754, ATLANTA

"Because this president views himself a king, like Louis XIV, his actions and words smack of "l'etat c'est moi". Which is a fancy way of saying, what Charles just said, he thinks he embodies the nation, not leads it. Which is funny, because if you are the nation, wouldn't you have a better appreciation of its history, culture, mores, and values? One would think so. I watched the world leaders at G-7 and except for Trump, each shows a keen understanding of what their country represents and where it's headed. Even newbie Boris Johnson is well educated, even if his bombast often resembles that of Trump. More important, they know they are leading their entire countries, not just a small base of ardent supporters. Trump's problem is he can't grow his base, because he doesn't want to: the best part of his job is the one he shouldn't be doing on the taxpayers' dime: holding political rallies to boost his ego." CHRISTINE MCM, MASSACHUSETTS

" In other words Charles, Trump lacks the temperament to be President. Anyone who is honest with him/herself knows that. Even the Republicans in Congress know this. The problem is that neither they nor Trump's base care."

JAY ORCHARD , MIAMI FL

"It makes a sort of sense that Trump expected his "tough guy" act with President Xi would result in Xi giving in. Just as he thought his thrown down the papers and stamp out of the room would make Speaker Pelosi grovel for whatever he wanted. Trump, in the private sector, could choose his victims, and he made sure they would at least perceive he was far richer and more powerful, (whether he was or not) so he could, bluster and rage, doing as he pleased and demanding whatever he wanted. That doesn't work when you become a public employee, which the President is, and Trump has no other rabbits to pull out of that same tired stage hat. And he clearly can't figure out why it's not working any more."

1DCAce, LOS ANGELES CA

"There's nothing mysterious about the President's admiration for Mr. Putin. Putin has made Russia into exactly what Mr. Trump would like to make the United States: an authoritarian plutocracy where the super-rich can do absolutely anything they want — except dispute the legitimacy of the government — while everyone else is kept in line by voter suppression, state-controlled media and churches, and an intimidating security apparatus."

JL WILLIAMS, WAHOO NE

"From my understanding of Trump, his greatest fear, going back to his early days in NYC, is that he is not taken seriously. It's an old vs new money sort of thing, as far as I can tell. He tried to buy his way into big money society by assuming a false name and giving the media false numbers about his personal wealth he was so desperate to prove his real worth. He put gold plate on everything he touched, hoping that would show how wealthy he was. Still, no one took him seriously. And now he's finding that world leaders fail to take him seriously as well. You can almost hearing him thinking -- I'm in the White House, surely they'll take me seriously now. But alas, he's the poor little sort-of-rich boy that no one wants to play with. He doesn't care about the country. He only cares about himself. And he still finds that no one takes him seriously. Sad, as he used to like to say."

AVRDS, MONTANA

"Excellent observations as usual from Charles Blow. I would only add that Trump's form of mental illness is dangerous. It is not innocuous, rather it is pervasive and boundless. That renders him an immediate dangerous to our nation. Immediate. That means he must be removed office immediately. Failure to do so opens the door to sheer disaster and that is exactly what we are looking at everyday he remains office. Disaster." INDEPENDANT, ALABAMA

"After World War 2, our allies respected the United States. Mr Trump has destroyed this respect. Now, our once-firm allies are looking to go around the United States and put their countries first. This will result in a race to the bottom. Trump has diminished the US - and succeeded in making China and Russia great. However, it’s important to remember the this isn’t just Mr. Trump. The vast majority of Republicans like what Mr Trump does, not seeing the damage and reveling in his tough-guy rhetoric. When the damage becomes too obvious to ignore, they’ll say that Trump was’t really a Republican (as they did with George W Bush) They will also, of course, blame Democrats for the consequences of Republican policies. Pity that Republicans, including Mr Trump, seem incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions."JOHN M, OAKLAND

"For Trump, the sun rises and sets in himself. He cannot conceive of anything without inserting himself somehow. He cannot make any move without calculating how it will benefit him personally. The farthest from what a leader should be."NM, NY

"In my more than 60 years I have never experienced a President who truly believed the nation, the American people, excluded all who did not support him. Nor millions of my neighbors who were fine with that idea if they considered themselves as part of that group of supporters. This, to me, is among the most dangerous things which this man has unleashed. My disappointment in my neighbors goes very deep. We will get past Trump, but not the millions of our fellows who like him."DAGWOOD, SAN DIEGO

"Countries can tragically and suddenly head in the wrong direction. In the 1930s, Germans were the most educated in Europe with Berlin the leading city in Europe. Ten years later, the country and most of Europe was destroyed. 75 million dead. It can happen here." SOMEWHERE, AZ

"I have a hard time seeing where it is all personal with Trump. He is faithfully carrying out two agendas, one of the white nationalists and one of the extreme libertarians. It is hard to tell how much of his rolling back of Obama's accomplishments are personal and how much is agenda driven. There seems little question that Trump will have done permanent damage. Western countries will no long be able to trust the US again as they did in the past as another Trump could be elected in any future election. It cannot be quantified how much he has set back efforts to fight climate change but it would seem to be considerable. Can white nationalism be put back in the bottle? That seems unlikely. Trump has uncorked some of the worst stuff in the US population. It is anybody's guess whether the country can return to its previous level of civility." BOB, HUDSON VALLEY

"In the same address Washington also spoke about the three big threats that could destroy America: too much debt, influence of foreign interests and political partisanship. hmmmm" AERYS

"People keep trying to find rational explanations for Trump's behavior. I don't think he generally acts from anything more complicated than going with what makes him feel good. He, and those around him, often say that when he feels attacked, he punches back. That is consistent with a lot of the strange things he has done. Punching back makes him feel strong and he likes that feeling. The problem is that governing is complicated. If Trump's feelings are hurt, he seems to feel justified in throwing a temper tantrum. That tendency to bluster in an effort to intimidate may work for male gorillas, but leaders of governments ought to know better." BETTY S, UPSTATE NY

“The U.S. presidency is term-limited.” The US presidency was term-limited. Does anyone really think he’s joking when he talks about being in office another 10 or 14 years? He’s not going to leave willingly. The bottom line here might end up being whether the military will support his coup."

CLAIRE ELLIOTT, EUGENE OR

"Rather than making America great again, 45 has made America a second rate country. Our allies no longer trust us to keep our word. Our enemies see that our leadership is faltering. It will take years perhaps decades to regain the trust we once enjoyed throughout the world. People see that 45 has not thought out anything he says past the current news cycle. There is no vision for America, no grand plan, nothing."

PSCHWIMER

"Now that this "president" has decided that he has the authority to order America's private businesses to cease all operations in China (which would entail crippling a great many of them financially), it seems to me that the 25th Amendment truly needs to be invoked. Which is to say that the walking apparition named Mike Pence should visit the Oval Office along with the leaders of both houses of Congress and as many of Trump's cabinet members as can be rustled up and tell our delusional chief executive that he has no such authority over private industry and that he should immediately and publicly acknowledge this. He should also explain that the order he had delivered was intended only as a suggestion or a recommendation. Should he refuse to go along with this, it would be clear that he's fully entered the realm of madness (as his private obsession with China would already seem to indicate) and that his removal from office would thereby become necessary. If we weren't already at such a critical juncture we could spend a good deal of time discussing Trump's own business connections with Beijing and arguing that his preference for having his (and Ivanka's) branded merchandise produced there should dictate that he not impugn other American business executives for doing the same thing (let alone "order" them to cease doing so). It's too late for idle speculation, however. Mad King Donald really has to go." STU FREEMAN, BROOKLYN

"I have to think that Washington's words would be met by Trump with blank incomprehension, not merely because the language is hard (by comparison with Trump's own "cartoon-bubble" mode of communication) but because understanding it would require Trump to betray his own most firmly-held convictions." PORTLAND, OR

"Thank you, Mr. Blow, for another strong column. This president's bizarre behaviors have led to complete demoralization and discouragement for U.S. citizens. How can a powerful country be so feckless when it comes to getting him out? Someone commented that the 25th amendment wouldn't work because it's for cases of complete incapacity. I assume they mean physical incapacity. In the case of mental/emotional incapacity, does a President have to be drooling and catatonic, or fly into a rage on television? Is it not enough that he lies constantly, proposes buying another country, frequently insults allies, calls himself the chosen one, decrees that private businesses shall exit China, and flip-flops in divergent directions on important national policies during the same 24-hour period? If it were another president in another time, members of Congress would have taken Trump in hand and led him away to restore order and standing to our country. But no, Congress is on vacation and Trump golfs while the Amazon burns."GWOO, HONOLULU

"The Greenland episode is classic Trump: throw out a crazy initial offer and see what happens. But international politics is not pure business. Greenland was never up for sale by Denmark. Trump's behavior makes him look wholly irrational and by extension makes the American voting public look like a population of fools. Trump displays isolationism with "America First." Other countries should take this seriously. In fact, they should quarantine the United States. They should do so until America can figure out how to elect a sane president and a stable cast of supporting legislators in Congress. Indeed Trump has a penchant for calling those he dislikes "nasty," but that term is reserved for women in power, such as HRC and the prime minister of Denmark. Trump befriends ruthless dictators in countries like North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- leaders who actively torture and kill their people -- without referring to them in this way. Trump is also already backtracking on China. He will not let the economy crumble before the election: after all, it's his only real "selling point." Trump maintains a particular disdain for Obama because he is black and Trump is an overt racist, as demonstrated by violations of the Fair Housing Act in the 1970s to the Central Park Five to birtherism to Charlottesville to the Squad. The election next year is bound to be a close one. Do what you can to see that Trump does not win a second term."

BLUE MOON, OLD PUEBLO

#politics #trump news #trumpism #trump scandals #trump administration #president donald trump #greeland #impeachment inquiry now #impeach trump #impeachthemf #impeachtrump #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #g7 #g7biarritz #trump trade war

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skriak · 6 years ago

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The best language no country uses: my first month learning Esperanto

Saluton! Mi lernas Esperanton. But a few weeks ago I’d have barely been able to guess what Esperanto was, and mainly knew it from a joke in the beloved sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. Then one day a random YouTube recommendation led me to start learning a new language for the first time since I left school.

Esperanto isn’t your typical language, coming about as a collective cultural phenomenon over many years. Instead it was the passion project of Dr Ludwik Zamenhof, a Jewish-Polish linguist who, noticing the strict language barriers between different groups in his home town, formed the dream of an international second language which might help alleviate humanity’s long-standing issue of killing each other. He eventually called it Esperanto, which appropriately translates as “one who hopes”. As if creating a whole new fully-functioning language wasn’t impressive enough, Zamenhof’s baby enjoyed a fair bit of success after its 1887 release, to the extent that the League of Nations almost adopted it as an administrative language. Sadly, his idea might have come along at just about the worst possible time; the global surge of nationalism surrounding the world wars proved antithetical to the tolerant philosophy behind Esperanto, and the language has remained little more than a curiosity in the public eye ever since.

So why did I literally decide overnight to start teaching myself a language with no official government support and a speaking population scattered in small pockets across the globe? Well, quite simply because it’s a fascinating piece of work. Common knowledge states that a person can pick up a working comprehension of Esperanto in a fraction of the time it would take them to learn a traditional language, especially if they have at least one European tongue in their repertoire already, and I can honestly say that within a month I’m already more confident with Esperanto than I ever was with French after two years of schooling.

Zamenhof’s creation is remarkably efficient. For starters, it’s essentially a splicing of prominent European languages, meaning it’s common to recognise words from Spanish, Italian, English etc. More than that, though, the grammar is flexible, the pronunciation and spelling is downright utilitarian, and as a whole almost every possible step has been taken to make Esperanto as approachable as possible. There’s only one word for “the”, compared to the six I had to remember for German. Every noun ends in O, every adjective ends in A, and every present verb ends in AS, with the whole language using a consistent system of suffixes and prefixes that make it so much easier to guess at a word’s meaning based on its easily identifiable type, or even invent a new one. All in all, what quirks you might find with Esperanto are nothing in comparison to the minefield of half-rules and archaic logic you’ll find in a natural language. Especially the Anglo-Saxon clusterfuck that is English!

So yeah. It’s kind of a big deal. Even though a new language invented by one dude was always going to have an uphill struggle getting international recognition, Esperanto might have been ahead of its time and to date remains arguably the most well-known constructed language, with at least one popular language app featuring a course (which I passionately recommend if you’re remotely curious, since it’s free and low-effort), and a devoted global following who tend to be delighted to bump into a new Esperantisto. And while English may have stolen the spotlight as the likely candidate for a lingua franca, Esperanto remains shockingly easy to pick up and play, to the extent that some experts have argued the case for teaching kids Esperanto as a stepping stone to traditional languages, because it’s so much less punishing.

And on a personal note, I’ve found that the tangible sense of steady progress these past weeks has had a notable effect on my mental health after a rough few months marred by illness and the return of the dreaded warmer months. I enjoyed learning German back in the day too, but Esperanto’s flexibility and consistency makes it a satisfying puzzle to solve because it’s mostly just a matter of remembering the rules and assimilating new words. I’m also inspired by the philosophy and surprisingly eventful history that some research uncovers. From the Nazis cracking down on Esperanto as a supposed Jewish conspiracy (since fascists generally hate when people try to empathise with each other), to a pre-Star Trek William Shatner mispronouncing his lines in an Esperanto film, and even bands who exclusively perform as Esperantists. And while the language is politically neutral, it’s hard not to see it as a bit of a rebellious underdog after all it’s been through.

Esperanto might never be a serious cultural phenomenon but it’s certainly a subculture, and has practical benefits for anyone looking to understand how languages are put together. And while it might not be as weird as Klingon (which is an actual, functional language), or Solresol (which uses musical notes so you can talk through music), I sincerely believe it’s a beautiful and inspiring triumph in itself. A great book is still a great book even if nobody ever reads it, and Esperanto deserves to be known as a linguistic milestone even if its devotees will forever be an underground movement of friendly nerds.

Tre dankon, adiaŭ!

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nowtravel · 3 years ago

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Puffin Rally to the Látrabjarg Cliffs

On a road trip to Iceland's remote Westfjords, I explore the travel bloggers insatiable quest for novelty, and the decline of the iconic Atlantic Puffin. Includes an interview with puffin researcher Erpur Snær Hansen.

We are driving north from Reykjavik, to the westernmost point of Europe — the Látrabjarg Cliffs of Iceland’s Westfjords.

The cliffs are a massive promontory, just a few degrees south of the Arctic circle, pointing towards Greenland. The granite cliffs slope vertically downward for up to 1,400 feet into the North Atlantic, and hold the largest colonies of nesting seabirds in all of Europe.

I had packed several cups of skyr; the stunningly tasty cultured cheese, for our long journey north. I immediately fell for the low-fat, high protein Icelandic food, reminiscent of thick yogurts. One of my great joys in travel is to form a ritual around a simple local food.

Iceland’s post World War II diet is heavy on hot dogs, road meats and gas station junk food. The restaurants are often insanely expensive. Skyr, with a few berries, is the antidote: breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Reykjavik to Borgarnes

It’s remarkable to find how quickly you can leave the city of Reykjavik. Within minutes of driving out of the city center, it’s the suburbs. Minutes after that, a long road with little traffic, fewer towns. To our right, steep, treeless mesas, peppered with sheep and oystercatchers. To our left, inlets, bays and mud flats.

For almost all of its 1,100 year human history, Iceland’s population hovered around 50,000. Today, the island’s total population is 350,000 — a phenomenally low population for a geography about the size of New York State. Reykjavik, where most people in Iceland live, features a population about the same size as Killeen, Texas.

Because of these low population levels, Iceland is to some degree a blank slate, with seemingly few stories for traveling writers to tell. It’s easy to fall for the idea that Iceland is encapsulated by the same stories we keep hearing about, as if there a bait has been dangled for us in front of the Icelandic Tourist Board.

Tourism in Iceland has boomed so quickly that it has also become a bit like a wild west of travel documenting; a frontier to rehash the same story over and over again.

One recurring story you hear almost constantly is: I went to Iceland and ate a daring, gross and controversial food.

I am perennially repulsed by this trend in travel. Imagine the meaty head of Andrew Zimmern, (Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern), gullet open to the sky, swallowing something rare for the camera. A reminder of how unnecessary eating gross foods for a smart travel audience is.

In Iceland, however, weird and gross foods often cross a distinct line of ethics, which travel bloggers gleely cross, often while downplaying that line in their writing, or even explicitly crossing it to shock their audience. When travel bloggers and tourists consume Minke Whale, Atlantic Puffin or Greenland Shark, for example, aren’t they crossing a firm line of global conservation ethics?

Low tide flats in typical scenery from Reykjavik to the Westfjords.

THE ETHICS OF EATING PUFFIN IN ICELAND

ravel blogger Candie Walsh writes in her blog, Free Candy, “On one of my final nights in Reykjavik, the Obesity Gods intervened.”

In her home province of Newfoundland, Atlantic Puffin is treasured and revered. “In fact, it’s a heavily protected species of the most adorable order,” she writes. “Hunting puffins in my home province is treason. Obviously I had to eat one in Iceland.”

The explicit statement of understanding that the species is threatened is a common theme among travel bloggers talking about their daring cuisine in Iceland.

“Surprisingly, the puffin was delicious...the puffin was prepared in such a way that you’d hardly know you were eating one of the most adorable creatures on earth.”

Responding to commenters, Candy Walsh advertises her wild and crazy ability to eat. “I’m a heathen...Hahaha. I will apparently eat just about anything!”

Like any travel blogger around the world, Candy knows that seabirds have a precarious path to survival. Throughout North America, from Panama to Canada, we protect our rocky offshore islands vigilantly. We know that their manner of nesting in cliff and island colonies puts them at a particular risk. With so much input and education about the fragility of seabirds, it is impossible for us not to know the line the behavior crosses.

THE ETHICS OF EATING WHALE IN ICELAND

When weighing whether it’s okay to eat whale in Iceland, travel bloggers repeat the conclusion that the controversy surrounding whale is simply whether the animal is endangered; Ultimately, whales are just another animal, and a quick internet search on whether the species can be ‘sustainably harvested,’ is enough to satisfy the travel blogger advertising to their international audiences that they too can also eat whale.

There are a few animals which modern civilization has deemed morally repugnant to kill and consume. Obviously, among this short list is all the great sentient mammals. We find human flesh morally repugnant, as we do the flesh of the great apes, the elephants and the cetaceans.

But then how did Lauren Monitz of iExplore come to such a different moral conclusion? She writes, “Often served raw, I also sampled whale tartare with a fine blueberry sauce that tasted like ahi tuna albeit refreshingly fruity thanks to the topping.”

Like with Candy, Lauren dismisses the moral weight, a way of telling her international readers that they too can ignore the moral implications of eating whale: “It was in fact one of the better dishes despite obviously being discouraged by animal activists who regularly campaign to get the protected creature taken off menus.”

THE ETHICS OF EATING GREENLAND SHARK IN ICELAND

Travel bloggers visiting Iceland love to eat a fermented shark dish called Hákarl, or fermented, rotting Greenland Shark. They refer to it as a traditional Icelandic dish, and a ‘Reykjavik delicacy’. Others call it Iceland’s national dish. They cite the weirdness of it, and the excitement of trying a dish that tastes like rancid urine, on account of the poisonous, ammonia-rich flesh of the Greenland Shark---the large, docile shark pees through the fabric of its body to stay warm.

Icelanders will tell you that the idea that Hákarl is a national dish is a bit of a fabrication. Through most of the twentieth century, it was virtually unknown to most Icelanders, who would have nothing to do with it. Others will tell you that it would be served only once a year in certain seaside towns, usually as a Christmas tradition. Its existence in grocery stores and fancy Reykjavik restaurants has appeared alongside the recent boom in tourism.

Kiki, of The Blonde Abroad, calls Greenland Shark all those things at once. She writes, “Rotten Shark...is a traditional delicacy in Iceland that dates back to the time of the Vikings. While it might not be at the top of your must-eat list, it has always made practical sense in the kitchens of Iceland.”

Kiki shares a large photo of herself with a grossed out face, eating the shark. And a youtube video, that also shows her being grossed out during a bold act of consumption.

The problem with Greenland Shark is a different one from both puffins and whales. If Icelanders eat a small amount of shark bycatch as a holiday delicacy, it is a local act that is harmless to the species. But, everybody knows the dual stories of how fishing sharks devastates their populations and the story of the speedy decline of Orange Roughy, the fish popular on dinner tables around the world in the 1980s. Because the fish grows slowly, lives deep in the ocean and matures late, nobody realized they had nearly decimated the world supply of the species until it was nearly too late.

The Greenland Shark, similarly lives for hundreds of years: it is the world’s longest living vertebrate, and slowest moving of all fish, and, as a mysterious deepwater denizen, we really don’t know how many, or how few, are left. We literally have no concept of their remaining population. While we often hear that most Greenland Sharks are bycatch, the rise in demand from the tourist trade puts more pressure on the annual catch of a species now designated by the IUCN as near threatened.

Eurasian Oystercatcher foraging on tidal flats on the Seltjarnarnes peninsula near Reykjavik.

Borgarnes to Búðardalur

rom Borgarnes to Búðardalur, Highway 1 crosses through inland terrain. Some of the terrain is forested with birch and conifers, a reminder of Iceland’s pre-human past, when over thirty-percent of the island was covered in trees.

In this inland wilderness, the ubiquitous sheep and horses are a reminder of the near absence of native mammals. Arctic foxes are the island’s only native land mammal; knowing this puts a damper on our desire to spot for wildlife while driving north.

My son and I will sometimes make up stories while traveling together. The history of skyr is somewhat bland, and certainly not as exciting a backstory as rotten urine shark. Skyr production was a technique common in Scandinavia when Iceland was discovered, but later forgotten everywhere but here.

So, my son and I invent a more Instagram-friendly backstory for skyr:

The skyr squirrel, named for its ability to escape raptor predation by sliding down a snowy slope on its hind-haunches, was common in the interior of Iceland up until the eighteenth century.

Fernando, a wealthy Spanish trophy hunter, took up employment among the whalers of Northern Europe, making his way north to Iceland, where his hope was to bag the island’s greatest mammals.

Upon finding only non-native sheep and horses, he grew weary, turning his bloodlust on the common skyr squirrels, which he discharged by the thousands. Luckily for trophy-less Fernando, he found delectable the milky-white substance that erupted when that musket-shot struck the skyr squirrels. Pleasant was the slightly sour, slightly sweet yogurt-like substance, which he made into a local commodity, exported to Denmark by the barrel.

But, little did he know, the skyr squirrels were on the verge of extinction, just like the Passenger Pigeons of North America.

My son has learned about Passenger Pigeons in school, and we have seen a rare stuffed specimen at our local science museum. But today, we talk about the specific way in which the species declined so rapidly. Passenger pigeons are believed to have been the most populous bird in the world prior to the 1800s. When they crossed the sky in their millions, they would blacken it. The spectacle of this mass of life, moving like an interstellar starling undulation, was one of the great natural spectacles of the planet.

On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last of her species, passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo.

But how did the species go from billions to zero in two decades? Passenger Pigeons were tasty creatures, and after the Civil War, a network of roads and railroads allowed a network of hunters easy access to their entire range in the East, Midwest and Canada. They killed them in every way possible, sometimes by just waving a stick or a net in the air. Sometimes by torching their roosts or simply by blasting a pellet into that mass of black.

The exact cause of their quick demise is unknown, but the general belief among ornithologists is that they had adapted to live in as ultra-social creatures in super-huge groups. Imagine a bird that lives like humans in Manhattan. Once their numbers were hunted to a point of just a few million left, their advanced social structure - their population dynamics - could no longer function.

My conversation with my son, on the road to Búðardalur, prompted me to want to learn more about whether there were similarities between the Atlantic Puffins of the North Atlantic, and the Passenger Pigeons.

The carcass of a US Navy Douglas C-117D sits on the property of the Hnjótur Farm, near the Látrabjarg Hotel. The Hnjótur Farm makes up most of the village of Örlygshöfn, just south of the emerald and turquoise waters of Patreksfjörður fjord.

Interview with Erpur Snær Hansen

I caught up with seabird researcher Erpur Snær Hansen, director of the South Iceland Nature Research Center, whose research into the decline of Iceland’s puffins has begun to reverberate on the world stage. With access to time series unheard of in other bird populations, Hansen and his colleagues have begun to piece together the correlations between the puffin’s prized fish; Silvery Sandeels, warming seas, and overhunting of the species for Reykjavik’s ritzy tourist restaurants.

ERIK: HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH PUFFINS AND SEABIRDS?

Erpur: I was a birder at age 11, and later, I built up an interest in science with plans to become an ornithologist. I moved into seabird research, Trying to answer questions like, “Why do they raise only one chick, and what determines their growth patterns?”

In Spring 2007, I was asked to give a talk in the Westman Islands, because they were worried about persistent chick death in the colonies. I had a good background, because I had studied puffins for my honor’s thesis, on their habitat selection.

An intense decline in seabird chick production had started in 2003 and peaked in 2005, involving not only puffins, but most Icelandic seabird species, which constitute about twenty-five percent of North Atlantic seabird biomass. We really needed to understand the key factors of the decline. They were keen enough to hire me, and I began working to find out what was going on.

I started out in Iceland’s Westman Islands. Our methodology was to use infrared illuminated video cameras to peer into their burrows. We learned a lot in these three years.

We received a grant together with sandeel researchers at the Marine Research Institute, which demonstrated that the sandeel stock collapsed in 2005, and one puffin year class after another disappeared from the puffin harvest.

We expanded our methodology developed in the Westmans to twelve colonies throughout Iceland in 2010. The research is funded by the trust, which is financed by the annual hunter permit fees.

The idea was that we would visit each colony twice each year. First, in early June to see how many eggs were laid in our study burrows, and again in late July to check the same burrows to see how many chicks remained. We also photograph adults carrying food in July. This is the Icelandic Puffin Population Monitoring Program, or less formally what we call the Puffin Rally. This is exhausting work, in particular, a lot of travel. We travel about six-thousand kilometers by car, and then from there a variety of boat and airplane travel.

ERIK: WHAT ARE YOU FINDING IN THE BURROW?

Erpur: That differs between both regions and time. The puffins have been doing moderately fine in the north; in the Westfjords and in northeast Iceland. In the South and East, they have been faring poorly, and taken together, not well enough to sustain the whole Icelandic population. The West started out like the south, but have been improving considerably in the last 4 years and sandeels are being seen again in the last few years. Things have improved in the Westmans, although the sandeel is still scarce.

ERIK: IN ICELAND, WHERE PUFFIN ICONOGRAPHY IS UBIQUITOUS, DOES THIS MAKE YOU A CELEBRITY?

Erpur: Puffins are one of the main reasons people are visiting Iceland. Seeing them is a huge industry for us. Special tours to see puffins all over the island are extremely popular. The Atlantic Puffin is actually ranked the number one bird globally in terms of people’s favorite bird.

Does that make me a celebrity? No, but of course, with everything that is happening now, I was reporting our results to the media.

The bill of the Atlantic Puffin is designed to hold several fish at once. The fleshy yellow roseate at the base of the puffin's beak is a stretchy material that allows the seabird the ability to open its beak very wide, to enable catching more fish and for communicating.

ERIK: LET’S TALK ABOUT PUFFINS WHEN THEY ARE AT SEA. WHAT IS THEIR LIFE LIKE?

Erpur: We have participated in a multicolony international collaborative program named SEATRACK, deploying geologgers on the Atlantic Puffin, together with ten other seabird species in order to map their winter distributions. Icelandic puffins have a triangular migration pattern, they head into the Labrador Sea in fall, stay there until the end of the year when they move south over the Atlantic ridge centering on the Charliecr-Gibbs fracture zone, and in spring, they head north.

The Charlie-Gibbs fracture zone in the Atlantic ridge is rich with prey in winter and is a mega hot spot for sharks, whales, as well as many seabird species of the North Atlantic It’s a fascinating place, with summer conditions in the middle of winter and undoubtedly the reason for the large size of many seabird populations in the North Atlantic.

ERIK: AND WHAT ABOUT WHEN THEY COME BACK TO ICELAND?

Erpur: After a completely pelagic existence like other ‘true’ seabirds; they come back in the middle of April to meet up with their mate.

Puffins have monogamous relationships for life. We say that puffins have a pretty low ‘divorce rate’ - seven percent. For example, if the mate dies, or if they have breeding failure.

Between Iceland and Norway, there have been sharp declines, which is why Atlantic Puffins were put on the IUCN red list in 2015.

I am able to study puffins backwards in time, because we have data on the harvest records in the Westmans Islands going back to 1880. Eighty-percent of the puffin harvest is composed of three year classes that are 2, 3 and 4 years old. Since the effort has remained relatively constant, the harvest in any given year reflects how many were born 2-4 years before.

This gives us one of the longest and perhaps the most interesting time series of birds, as the data show that puffin chick production has a very strong correlation to sea temperature. When sea temperatures are warmer, fewer puffins are harvested, and vice versa.

We know that temperature is key, and temperature in the Atlantic follows a seventy year cycle termed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO, characterized by 35 warm years, followed by 35 cold years A warm period started in Icelandic waters in 1996 with temperatures peaking in 2003. In Icelandic waters, the warming is greatly intensified by contemporal contraction of the Sub-Polar Gyre, a circular current system, which opens for great flow of warm and saline Atlantic seawater northwards.

In the process our waters warm by about one degree Celsius, in less than a decade the same warming as predicted by global warming for this century using the IPCC A1B1 “business as usual model!”

The polar currents coming from the north mix with the warmer waters and thus create three marine ecosystems. We have essentially a natural laboratory of extreme temperature variation gradient. That’s exactly where our study colonies are located.

ERIK: THE PUFFINS ARE DECLINING BECAUSE THEIR PRIMARY FOODSOURCE, THE SILVERY SANDEEL, ARE IN DECLINE?

Erpur: The sandeel is one of the most commercially harvested fish in the North Sea, and is studied by a number of specialists. There are a number of exciting hypotheses for their decline and how this relates to seabird declines. One hypothesis is that the sandeel’s first winter survival is negatively related to temperature by increase in their Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), leading to a premature depletion of their fat reserves, prior to the onset of their zooplankton food in spring. They die of starvation during these warmer years.

Another, complementary hypothesis is that in warm summers, the sandeel´s elevated BMR wastes energy, instead of building energy (fat) reserves and growth. We don’t always have warm and cold summers in conjunction. In 1948, for example, summers cooled during an otherwise cold winters AMO period, which allowed the sandeels to really strengthen, judged by the increase in Puffin harvest. In 1996, we started to see the reverse of this, and sandeel numbers declined very rapidly, much more than in the last warm period in the 1930´s. Oceanographers are modeling to see if global warming will buffer against the cooling of the AMO cycle, essentially terminating the cooling period.

If this warming trend continues, the puffin colonies here will be a shadow of their former past. In the north, the colonies would remain. We would have a northern coast with current numbers, and losing more than half of the rest of the populations. This IUCN red listing is really about this: If you would have been here in the 1980s, you would have seen so many birds! Now there is nothing like that! The puffins haven’t even socialized normally in the troubled colonies in the last decade. These social birds are known to spend a lot of time communicating with each other, they don’t have the time to hang around anymore. They need to put all their attention on acquiring food.

What is happening differently during this warm period now, I think, is that the algae blooms that normally occur in March and April, happen much later. The sandeel eggs are hatching about the same time as the algal bloom. The algae are grazed on by zooplankton, which is the prey of sandeels. If there is a delay in the bloom timing, we have what is termed a trophic mismatch. Basically the sandeel prey show up so late that they are already dead from starvation.

Puffin chicks have been fledging in September, rather than in late August. 2019 is however the sunniest year on record, creating a massive algae bloom that you can easily see from space. There is a huge amount of food in there. So there are a lot of variables out there.

Sandeel numbers are expected to increase when you have a good bloom year: early and intensive blooms benefit the the entire food pyramid.

We have satellite data since 1998 that shows that the blooms have been really late in the last decade or so, and one could expect that to increase with global warming: more evaporation and more clouds in our region, and consequently, less sun. That delays and reduces the blooms.

Traditional Southern Westfjords fishing vessels on display on the grounds of the Hnjotur Museum.

ERIK: HOW DOES THE HUNTING OF PUFFIN FOR TOURISTS PLAY INTO THEIR DECLINE?

Erpur: Between 1995 and 2017 there has been a ninety-one percent reduction in the Icelandic puffin harvest. Interestingly, sixty-six percent of this decline, or two thirds, occurred before I advocated for a moratorium in 2008.

The puffin harvest went from over 200,000 to about 30,000 annually, and the prices went up. Now the restaurant business is selling most of the catch to tourists. Chef Hrefna Sætran has a couple of the most exclusive restaurants in Reykjavik. She was asked on Facebook in spring 2019 why she was selling an endangered animal in her restaurants. she replied: “While it is legal to hunt them and sell, I am selling them.”

The problem is the legal aspect of it. The government plans on addressing the issue in 2020 with a new law. But today, the ‘traditional hunting loophole’ has been interpreted to be exempt from the sustainability clause in the law, anyways. The problem is that landowners regulate the hunting on their land—- they are in many cases also the hunters, thus regulating themselves. It’s up to the landowners, who are allowed to hunt their land during the hunting period without limits.

Since the populations are doing okay in the North, the hunters there have used that to justify their continued hunting, despite the fact that the whole population is doing poorly. They are earning a lot of money from this—greed is put above the welfare of the species.

ERIK: ARE OTHER SEABIRDS IN ICELAND HAVING THE SAME PROBLEM OF REPRODUCTIVE FAILURE?

Erpur: Yes, we think of the puffin as a model species. Most of the other seabirds, the auks, the fulmars, and the kittiwakes, they all eat the same prey. Most seabird populations in the North Atlantic are going down. Counts show similar declines are happening to the other species.

ERIK: TRAVEL BLOGGERS SAY THERE ARE 10-15 MILLION PUFFINS IN ICELAND AS A JUSTIFICATION FOR EATING THEM. TWO QUESTIONS. ONE, IS THIS NUMBER ACCURATE OR OUTDATED? TWO, IF THERE WERE BILLIONS OF PASSENGER PIGEONS, IS MILLIONS OF PUFFINS A SAFE NUMBER TO TAKE FROM THE SKY?

Erpur: These numbers they quote, they are getting from Icelandic tourism sources, which are all wrong. Today, there are about 2.7 million Puffin burrows in Iceland, and about seventy-four percent are active at a given time, so there are 2 million breeding pairs in our country. This comprises the production unit of Iceland’s puffin population. Let’s say that you have almost the same number of immature birds. That ideal represents the maximum population: about 6 million individuals in total.

Since the population is not maintaining their numbers, but declining, the principle of long lived – low chick productive output life histories applies, that any hunting adds to the decline. In seabirds, the killing accelerates the decline. People who only see the millions of individuals and do not think how many are needed to maintain the numbers are illiterate in population dynamics and have no valuable contribution to make but to pseudoscience.

ERIK: IS THERE A FEAR OF THE PASSENGER PIGEON SYNDROME?

Erpur: When the sand eels collapsed, there was definitely peril for the puffins. But this hunting on top of that is not sustainable. It’s certainly not helping, and it is not ethical. We manage our fisheries well for the most part, we are looked at fondly by other countries for how we manage them, at least we had more success than many others. Sure, we fucked up a few times with capelin and halibut. We biologists are saying that all wildlife should be treated like we treat our fisheries, that will be the nature of the new law bill.

These Puffins are much more valuable alive than hunted, providing revenue year after year. They bring Iceland serious tourism money. That’s millions of euros each year. That is a lot of foreign currency pumping into Iceland because of the puffin.

ERIK: IS PUFFIN A TRADITIONAL ICELANDIC DELICACY, OR AN OLD STARVATION FOOD IN ISOLATED COASTAL VILLAGES?

Erpur: Puffin was initially a just part of normal food. They were harvested as soon as the settlement of Iceland. This was often the only meat people had until spring. Puffin was a sustenance food until between World Wars. After that, the hunting became a ‘traditional sport’ using a polenet called háfur.

Evening looking over the Látrabjarg Cliffs. Puffins burrow on such treacherously steep slopes here, they are safe from the Arctic Fox, which are wise to steer clear of the famously steep cliffs.

Búðardalur to Flókalundur

he village of Búðardalur, at the very end of mainland Iceland, is known mostly for the nearby Eiríksstaðir, the homestead of Erik the Red and the birthplace of his son Leif, who went on to explore North America five hundred years before Columbus anchored in the Bahamas.

From Búðardalur, we’ll be driving across the Westfjords Peninsula, one of the most exciting pieces of geography on Earth. Our final destination will be the furthest western point in Europe, even though, like Americans with Leif and Columbus, Europeans disagree.

When I told a tableful of Europeans that we were headed to the westernmost point of Europe, they pointed to the fact they all learned in school: Portugal’s Cabo da Roca, a peninsula just went of Lisbon, is Europe’s westernmost point.

But this commonly held fact is misleading, and wrong, on several points.

Cabo da Roca is indeed the westernmost point of the Eurasian landmass, that is a point to which no one disagrees.

However, the question is not about a landmass or a continent, but an area, a place, specifically, Europe. Europe is not a continent. While it is often taught in school that Europe is a special case continent; in which the Caucasus mountains somehow separate it from the other half of itself, most geographers see Eurasia as one big thing: Europe and Asia are the same large landmass. From a biological perspective, this is certainly the case. When we look at the mammals and birds and plants of the region, we recognize that the history is one.

Europe, then, is better defined as a place with distinct shared human history and culture.

Nobody doubts that England and Ireland are a part of Europe —they share language borne from mainland Europe, a common culture and history, but Portugal’s Cabo de Roca is actually further west than the most western points of these islands. Only Iceland, which shares a common history and language to mainland Europe, is further west than Cabo de Roca.

Well, that’s not quite true either. Monchique Islet, a rock jutting out from the westernmost point of the Azores Islands of Portugal, is much further west than Iceland. Although, as a remote island that actually sits within the North American plate, it can’t be categorized as being part of the place called Europe, even though it belongs to a European country. This is the same as saying that Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa are all part of the United States, but they do not fit into the definition of being part of North America.

So by this evening, we hope to reach the westernmost point of Europe.

A view of the Patreksfjörður fjord a few minutes before midnight.

Flókalundur to Látrabjarg

riving along the southern coast of the Westfjords is dizzying: The spectacle of the geography, the immensity of it, is confounding.

As we head west, the sense that we are at the edge of something feels very real. The geography becomes more surreal, often bays are shrouded with rocks in peculiar linear formations.

Treeless slopes grade steeply into vast inlets. And something unimaginable this far north in the world: white sand beaches and clear turquoise shallows. Arctic Terns, gulls and sandpipers abound along rocky shores, and at one point, a viciously precise Parasitic Jaeger crosses in front of our car, tailing a gull at high speed.

We stop to check in briefly at the 9-room Látrabjarg Hotel, one of a handful of structures in the area, before heading the final forty minutes to the Látrabjarg Cliffs. These cliffs are known as the largest tourist attraction in the Westfjords. The fact that there are only fourteen cars in the parking lot is a testament to the isolation of the region.

Right next to the parking lot is the Bjargtangar Lighthouse, the very westernmost point in all of Europe. From here, we can see hundreds of gulls, fulmars and kittiwakes; an explosion of bird life at the top of the largest seabird cliff in Europe.

We walk along the path that rises along the sloping edge of the cliffs, watching the spectacle of seabirds speeding along the water below.

As late evening approaches, the puffins begin to ascend onto the cliffs after a day of fishing. We sit just feet from a group of three of them, hobbling around a burrow. What singular creatures! Tiny Mannequins in masquerade. They are also, as travel blogger Candie Walsh stated, adorable. If you’ve seen the porgs of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and sense their cuteness resembles that of a puffin, it’s not coincidental. The porgs were a last-minute fix to the ubiquitous puffins on set. The miniature aliens were CGI’ed over the plump seabirds, who remained unafraid of the busy sets.

As the sun grows weaker, we rush back to the Látrabjarg Hotel, just in time for our meal. “My father’s best friend caught this cod this afternoon. We have prepared it with a tomato compote and local herbs.”

Jane and I agree, the fresh fish is one of the finest meals we’ve had in our lives, and after a long day of continuous road travel, to have this quiet meal at the edge of the world, looking out over a turquoise bay, is an exquisite end to our puffin rally.

The owner’s son comes out and says, “And for desert, we are serving Skyr!”

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Upcoming Movies in February 2021: Streaming, VOD, and Theaters

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2021 is now in full swing, and film distributors are beginning to feel out what the new normal actually is. Given the latest news about COVID variants, movie theaters remain a tenuous bet—although some films are still releasing there—while streaming at home becomes evermore enticing with one of Warner Bros.’ Oscar contenders set to premiere simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. This month also marks the theatrical and/or streaming release of some of last year’s best films.

So for film lovers, the choice of what to watch (and how to view it) remains more varied than ever. Here’s a guide to what’s coming up in February:

A Glitch in the Matrix

February 5

After chronicling the oddest of oddball theories regarding Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in the documentary Room 237, filmmaker Rodney Ascher is back to take on sci-fi classic The Matrix. In truth, the idea of there being a “glitch in the Matrix” predates the Wachowskis’ 1999 movie, but the duo mainstreamed the idea that we all live in a simulation. So with his new film, Ascher explores that philosophical idea (and fringe conspiracy theory) that nothing is real, and therefore everything is permitted.

With the rise of conspiracy theories and magical thinking in recent years, this could be timely stuff—or unnecessary based on some of the mixed reaction this film has thus far received out of Sundance.

Malcolm & Marie

February 5

This Netflix release has awards buzz around it as well as eye-popping marquee value with its depiction of a love story between John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman, Tenet) and Zendaya (Euphoria, Spider-Man). The film is from the mind of Euphoria creator Sam Levinson and is his third feature, following Assassination Nation.

Shot in black and white, Malcolm & Marie is a visibly personal project, with its depiction of a romance on the edge of evolution or despair. Washington’s Malcolm is a movie director in the story, and he’s on the verge of superstardom after the premiere of his first feature. Clearly his life is about to change, but his girlfriend Marie suspects those changes don’t include her. After his big night, all the things left unspoken are about to be uttered.

Falling

February 5 (U.S. Release, Playing Now in the UK)

Viggo Mortensen makes his directorial debut in what is reported to be a quiet and revelatory affair. Like several other filmmakers this year, Mortensen is tackling the subject of parents and adult children being placed under the strain of dementia. Yet there’s long been a tension between Willis (Lance Henriksen) and his son John (Mortensen) in this movie, even before early stages of dementia.

Uncomfortable with the fact John is gay and living openly with his partner and a young daughter, Willis is reluctant to visit his son’s family. But as the aging process sets in, both generations are going to have to make peace with a lot of things.

Judas and the Black Messiah

February 12 (U.S. Only, UK TBC)

As the next Warner Bros. film set to premiere on HBO Max the same day it opens in theaters, a lot of attention is gathered around Judas and the Black Messiah, not least of all because it is very good. As a film with Oscar aspirations—Daniel Kaluuya has already been nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards—Judas gives a hard-edged study of the life and times of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther Party chairman who was executed by police in 1969.

Told from the perspective of William O’Neal (a jittery LaKeith Stanfield), the FBI informant who spied on Hampton and the Panthers for law enforcement, it’s a unique approach to a biopic that finally shines mainstream Hollywood light on the struggles of the Panthers and the demand for Black Power. It’s brutal and, ultimately, haunting.

Minari

February 12 (March 19 in the UK)

Another major awards contender, and easily one of the best films of the last year, is Lee Isaac Chang’s intimate and visibly personal passion project, Minari. Loosely inspired by Chang’s own childhood, the film chronicles a family of Korean-Americans who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s, and after a decade of scraping by in the dead end of industrial farming, they’re making a go of it with their own small farm in rural 1980s Arkansas.

Presented as a multigenerational tapestry, the film is an achingly beautiful piece told from the vantage of a young boy, his put-upon and distancing parents (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han), and his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung), who’s visit from Seoul is intended to save the family. It really is something special and all-American, despite its occasional categorization as a “foreign language film” by awards bodies. See it in theaters on Feb. 12 or wait for its VOD release on Feb. 26.

To All the Boys I Love: Always and Forever

February 12

If you’re looking for something a little more romantic this Valentine’s Day season, Netflix is completing its To All the Boys I Love trilogy—or at least finishing its film adaptations of the so-far published Jenny Han YA novels—with Too All the Boys I Love: Always and Forever. In the movie, Lana Condor returns as Lara Jean, the once gawkish high school girl with a series of crushes who is now coming into her own as she spends her spring break on a whirlwind vacation that sends her to South Korea, New York City, and around the world. (So clearly this is set before 2020.) It’s a romance for all ages, and one that could be sweet in our current age.

French Exit

February 12 (March 26 in the UK)

Michelle Pfeiffer is one of those rare performers who can make even the most venomous line readings sing with playful amusement—or turn the screws. She indulges both skills in French Exit, a dry comedy with exceeding detachment and apparently perfect casting. In the Azazel Jacobs film, Pfeiffer plays Frances Price, a Manhattan socialite of a certain age who’s lived long enough to see the invitations to high society dry up. Worse, she’s also run out of the inheritance she’d been living off for decades.

So Frances moves in with her peculiar son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) in a tiny Parisian apartment. Slow boiling mayhem ensues. Well-regarded for Pfeiffer’s performance on the festival circuit, this is one to keep an eye on.

Land

February 12 (April 9 in the UK)

Robin Wright has had a remarkable career in film and television, time and again showing us new dimensions onscreen. But with Land, she makes her directorial feature debut behind the camera after helming several episodes of House of Cards. In the film, Wright plays Edee, a bereaved woman who attempts to start over in the wilderness of Wyoming. Even with its wide open landscapes, it’s admittedly a narrowly framed tale. Yet there be gold up in them hills.

I Care a Lot

February 19

One of our personal favorites out of the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Netflix’s I Care a Lot is a clever, knotty, and incredibly sardonic dark comedy. Framed around the bottomless ambition and avarice of Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), it’s the story of a woman who makes her wealth by convincing the government to lock up senior citizens with large bank accounts, leaving her in charge of their finances.

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It’s a hell of a con until one nice little old lady (Dianne Wiest) whom Marla preys upon turns out to have connections to a crime boss (Peter Dinklage). This is wicked entertainment, with Pike at her most devilish since Gone Girl, and Dinklage also playing sharply against type. They and the rest of the ensemble, which includes Eiza González, are brutally funny in this grim satire of modern American capitalism run rotten. The J Blakeson who made The Disappearance of Alice Creed is back.

The Mauritanian

February 19 (February 26 in the UK)

Kevin Macdonald continues his career of hard hitting political dramas based on true events with The Mauritanian, a new awards contender which documents the real legal case of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a Mauritanian detained without a charge by the U.S. government in 2002. For 14 years, he remained in custody at Guantanamo Bay until he had his day in court.

Macdonald’s film documents that legal fight with a large ensemble which includes Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley as the lawyers representing Salahi, and Benedict Cumberbatch as an American officer who suffers a crisis of conscience. Most of all though, the film has gotten attention for Tahar Rahim as Salahi in a performance that has already garnered him a Golden Globe nomination.

Nomadland

February 19 (March 19 in the UK)

Chloé Zhao’s Best Picture contender is finally having a major streaming release, and on Hulu at that. Produced by Searchlight Pictures, Nomadland is a remarkable achievement that blends the acuity of narrative filmmaking with the sobering authenticity of documentaries. Focused on the real life culture of American Nomads in the modern American West, the film was made within the community while telling the story of how it came to be. Thus enters Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman who in 2010 has been left with nothing once the Great Recession literally erased her hometown from the map.

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Now the middle-aged widow lives in a van on the open road, estranged from the idea of living at one address, and at peace with her new community of fellow travelers, who we see gather, commiserate, and grieve. It’s a powerful piece of filmmaking that may be a frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar, which is fairly odd to consider when one realizes Zhao’s next movie is Marvel’s Eternals.

Tom & Jerry

February 26 (March 19 in the UK)

It looks like someone remembered they have beloved (and relatively ancient) intellectual property just sitting in mothballs, because Tom & Jerry is back. Yay? Looking like a leftover from the mid-00s craze of inserting CGI Smurfs into a sitcom-y New York, Tom & Jerry follows a familiar formula, but at least does so with sophisticated computer cel-shaded animation. That’s pretty nice.

The premise of this HBO Max-bound release is Jerry has set up shop as a mouse in a Manhattan hotel when junior management (Chloe Grace Moretz) introduces a cat to take him out. Unfortunately, for her, the cat is Tom. The two old foes immediately resort to their old ways, destroying the swanky establishment just before a high-profile wedding. Maybe she should have called the Ghostbusters?

Cherry

February 26 (March 12 in the UK)

Tom Holland and the Russo Brothers are a long way from the Marvel Cinematic Universe now. Indeed, after helming the highest grossing movie in history, Joe and Anthony Russo are turning their attention to the opioid epidemic in the U.S. by offering a stylish depiction of an Army vet who falls into addiction and a career of fourth wall-breaking bank robberies. Holland is clearly trying to step away from his goofy Spider-Man image, and the picture is of high pedigree for Apple TV+. The movie also stars Ciara Bravo and Jack Reynor.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday

February 26

This upcoming Hulu release is a passion project for Lee Daniels (Precious, The Butler), and one that aims to provide new dramatic light on the life of Billie Holiday. One of the great jazz and swing singers of the 1940s and ‘50s, Holiday had a singular voice and talent that was commodified by the music industry at the time due to her Blackness, and then hindered further the more political she became. While Holiday did have a drug problem, it’s interesting how the industry seemed to conspire to exacerbate it, as opposed to urging her to get clean.

A traditional biopic, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is now getting awards notice, with Andra Day’s starring turn as Billie already netting her a Golden Globe nomination. Not bad for an actor in her first starring role.

The Father

February 26 (March 12 in the UK)

It’s one of the most powerful movies of 2020… and one of the most depressing. In a role that’s already netted him Golden Globe and SAG nominations, Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony, an elderly man who’s been living alone for years since his wife passed. But with dementia setting in and his daughter (Olivia Colman) wishing to move to Paris, some tough decisions are going to be made about Anthony’s care.

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Yet what makes Florian Zeller’s The Father so effective is it’s told entirely from the perspective of Anthony’s deteriorating mind, and as it goes along, it becomes unclear how much of what you’re seeing can be believed as happening—or if it might’ve happened years ago. Hallways in his London flat change, doors are replaced, and the countenance of his daughter’s boyfriend shifts or vanishes depending on the day. It becomes debilitating, and ultimately heartbreaking, stuff.

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gadgetgirl71 · 4 years ago

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Top Ten Tuesday 8 September 2020

Welcome to this weeks Top Ten Tuesday. Originally created by The Broke & The Bookish, which is now hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week it features a book or literary themed category. This weeks prompt is:

Books for My Younger Self:

(These could be books you wish you had read as a child, books younger you could have really learned something from, books that meshed with your hobbies/interests, books that could have helped you go through events/changes in your life, etc.)

Well there are a few series that I would have liked my younger self to have read which are mainly fiction along with only a few non fiction and they are:

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

A new edition of one of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years, with a new introduction by the author. The publication of Wild Swans in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the best-selling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two million, it was received with unanimous critical acclaim, and was named the winner of the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year Award. Few books have ever had such an impact on their readers. Through the story of three generations of women — grandmother, mother and daughter — Wild Swans tells nothing less than the whole tumultuous history of China’s tragic twentieth century, from sword-bearing warlords to Chairman Mao, from the Manchu Empire to the Cultural Revolution. At times terrifying, at times astonishing, always deeply moving, Wild Swans is a book in a million, a true story with all the passion and grandeur of a great novel. For this new edition, Jung Chang has written a new introduction, bringing her own story up to date, and describing the effect Wild Swans’ success has had on her life.

The State of Me by Nasim Marie Jafry

It s 1983 and 20-year-old university student Helen Fleet should be enjoying the best days of her life, but while all her friends go on to graduate and have careers in London, she is forced to return to her parents home, bedridden with vile symptoms that doctors can’t explain and often don’t believe. She is eventually diagnosed with M.E, a cruel illness that she must learn to live with over the next decade. All of her relationships are tested and changed by her condition, but Helen s story is so much more than an account of her suffering. Far from it. The State of Me explores the loneliness and chaos of one of the most misunderstood illnesses of our time, but also celebrates the importance of family, friendships, and sexual love. A stunning, eloquent and linguistically perfect debut novel.

Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda

Sayo Masuda’s story is an extraordinary portrait of rural life in japan and an illuminating contrast to the fictionalised lives of glamorous geishas.

At the age of sis Masuda’s poverty-stricken family sent her to work as a nursemaid. At the age of twelve, she was indentured to a geisha house. In Autobiography of a Geisha, Masuda chronicles a harsh world in which young women faced the realities of sex for sale and were deprived of their freedom and identity. She also tells of her life after leaving the geisha house, painting a vivid panorama of the grinding poverty of rural life in wartime Japan.

Many years later Masuda decides to tell her story. Although she could barely read or write she was determine to tell the truth about life as a geisha and explode the myths surrounding their secret world. Remarkably frank and incredibly moving, this is the record of one woman’s survival on the margins of Japanese society.

Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World by Lesley Downer

Ever since Westerners arrived in Japan, we have been intrigued by geisha. This fascination has spawned a wealth of fictional creations from Madame Butterfly to Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. The reality of the geisha’s existence has rarely been described. Contrary to popular opinion, geisha are not prostitutes but literally arts people. Their accomplishments might include singing, dancing or playing a musical instrument but, above all, they are masters of the art of conversation, soothing worries of highly paid businessmen who can afford their attentions. The real secret history of the geisha is explored here.

A Night Out with Robert Burns Arranged by Andrew O’Hagan

January 25, 2009, marks the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth. It will be a huge event around the world, not least across Canada. And we have the book!

Robert Burns (1759-1796) is part of your life. If you’ve ever given or received a romantic red rose, or talked about a “do or die” situation, or if you’ve sung “Auld Lang Syne,” you’re included.

Others celebrate this ploughman poet with an eye for “the lasses” more directly. Every year, literally hundreds of thousands of Canadians, from coast to coast, go to Burns Suppers in January to celebrate his life. This year —2009 — will be the biggest ever, since it’s a 250th celebration of his birth.

CBC TV is joining with the BBC to produce three one-hour programmes on his life, all written and hosted by Andrew O’Hagan, who is now the authority on Burns. This is because this book, published by Canongate in 2008, has already become a classic, bringing Burns to ordinary readers. Because Burns was on the right side of history, against privilege and rank and for everyone getting a fair chance, he is beloved around the world — in Andrew O’Hagan’s words, he is “the world’s greatest and most loveable poet.”

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Bequeathed a rare diamond by her late uncle, heiress Rachel Verinder has no idea it was stolen from an Indian temple or that it has a cursed history. When the diamond disappears on her eighteenth birthday, multiple suspects – including Rachel’s suitor, Franklin Blake – are implicated in its theft. Determined to prove his innocence, Franklin begins his own investigation. Did one of his fellow Englishmen steal the jewel? Or was it whisked back to India? The case, which unfolds through multiple narratives, takes startling twists and turns in pursuit of the truth.

Widely considered the first great detective novel written in English, The Moonstone is one of Wilkie Collins’s most famous works.

Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows Series) by Kim Harrison

Rachel Morgan lives in a world where a bioengineered virus wiped out most of the world’s human population – exposing the existence of supernatural communities that had long lived alongside humanity. It’s her job as a white witch working for Inderland Security to protect the humans from things that go bump in the night.

For the last five years Rachel has been tracking down lawbreaking Inderlanders in modern-day Cincinnati, but now she wants to leave and start her own agency. Her only problem: no one quits the I.S.

Marked for death, Rachel will have to fend off fairy assassins and homicidal werewolves armed to the teeth with deadly curses.

Unless she can appease her former employers by exposing the city’s most prominent citizen as a drug lord, she might just be a dead witch walking.

The Last Orphans (The Last orphans series) by N W Harris

One horrifying day will change the life of sixteen-year-old Shane Tucker and every other kid in the world.

In a span of mere hours, the entire adult population is decimated, leaving their children behind to fend for themselves and deal with the horrific aftermath of the freak occurrence. As one of the newly made elders in his small town, Shane finds himself taking on the role of caretaker for a large group of juvenile survivors. One who just happens to be Kelly Douglas—an out-of-his-league classmate—who, on any other day, would have never given Shane a second glance.

Together, they begin their quest to find out why all of the adults were slaughtered. What they find is even more horrifying than anything they could have expected—the annihilation of the adults was only the beginning. Shane and his friends are not the unlucky survivors left to inherit this new, messed-up planet. No, they are its next victims. There is an unknown power out there, and it won’t stop until every person in the world is dead.

A spine-tingling adventure that will have you gasping for breath all the way until the last page, The Last Orphans is the first book in an all-new apocalyptic series.

The Breakers Series by Edward W Robertson

In the Breakers series, humanity faces not one apocalypse, but two: first a lethal pandemic, then a war against those who made the virus. This collection includes the first three books and is over 1000 pages (350,000 words) of post-apocalyptic survival.

BREAKERS (Book 1) In New York, Walt Lawson is about to lose his girlfriend Vanessa. In Los Angeles, Raymond and Mia James are about to lose their house. Within days, none of it will matter. A plague tears across the world, reducing New York to an open grave and LA to a chaotic wilderness of violence and fires. Civilization comes to an abrupt stop.

Just as the survivors begin to adapt to the aftermath, Walt learns the virus that ended humanity wasn’t created by humans. It was inflicted from outside. The colonists who sent it are ready to finish the job–and Earth’s survivors may be too few and too weak to resist.

MELT DOWN (Book 2) In upstate Idaho, Ness Hook is run out of his mom’s house by his bullying brother Shawn. In Redding, California, Tristan Carter is graduating college, but with no job and no prospects, she’ll have to move back in with her parents.

Then the world ends: first with a virus, then with an alien invasion.

Ness and Shawn take to the mountains to fight a guerrilla against the attackers. In California, Tristan and Alden are taken prisoner. Separated from her brother, Tristan crosses the ruins of America to track him down. She will stop at nothing to get Alden back–but her fellow survivors prove even more dangerous than the monsters who broke the world.

KNIFEPOINT (Book 3) Raina was just a girl when the plague came. She survived. Her parents didn’t. Neither did the world. As civilization fell, she took to the ruins of Los Angeles, eating whatever she could catch.

After two years alone, she’s found and adopted by a fisherman and his wife. Their makeshift family lives a quiet life–until a man named Karslaw sails in from Catalina Island with an army of conquerors. Driven by visions of empire, he executes Raina’s new father as a traitor and takes her mother captive.

But Karslaw’s people aren’t the only ones vying for control of the ruined land. As violence wracks the city, Raina joins a rebellion against Karslaw’s rule. She will stop at nothing to free her mother–and to have her revenge.

Wrong Number, Wright Guy (Bourbon Street Boys Series) by Elle Casey

When a mysterious text message summons May Wexler to a biker bar in downtown New Orleans, she knows something is very wrong. Her sister has sent out an SOS, but when May gets there, she’s nowhere to be found and May is the one in trouble—she’s wearing pink espadrilles, she’s got a Chihuahua in her purse, and she’s in the middle of a shootout.

After tall, muscular Ozzie comes to her rescue, May has no choice but to follow him to safety. At the headquarters of his private security firm, the Bourbon Street Boys, she finds a refuge for the night—and the offer of a job. But it’s not long before a gun-toting stalker isn’t the only complication in May’s life: the more time she spends with Ozzie, the less she can deny that they’ve got some serious chemistry. A wrong number got her into this mess…Will it also get her the right guy?

#JustForFun #Top Ten Tuesday #TopTenTuesday #TTT

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chanoyu-to-wa · 5 years ago

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Nampō Roku, Book 4 (1): the Origin of the Conventions for Decorating the Shoin.

❖ Shoin shō-shō oboe-gaki [書院少〻覺書]¹.

1) With respect to the decoration of the shoin, these replicate the arrangements created by the Higashiyama-dono, and take [his arrangements] as their precedent.

As the four seasons flow onward², from one celebration to the next³, perhaps [there is] a court banquet for [the composition of] poetry, or a meeting at the court for [a game of] kemari [蹴鞠]; or, perhaps, [the focus may be on] things like the ceremonial that accompanies the various festivities throughout the year⁴. The diverse and manifold ways [of decorating the shoin] can be rather redundant and overwhelming, so nothing [positive] can be said about this approach⁵.

Now when someone like this vulgar person⁶ in particular -- [people] like of Nam[bō], and his ilk -- brings out [arrangements of objects] in the sitting room that should not be attempted, without regard for the inherited teachings⁸, Sōeki voices his criticism, and this is admirable. So that the [previously] unexplained [points] related to the [decoration of the] shoin need not be asked about one by one, now and again [I] will set their stories down [here]⁹.

[￭ These details were overheard at the Shino incense-family's gatherings.]¹⁰

_________________________

◎ This introductory passage linguistically seems to date from a significantly later period; and its ascription of putative authorship to Nambō Sōkei is, as Shibayama Fugen noted in his commentary, unconvincing.

¹Shoin shō-shō oboe-gaki [書院少〻覺書].

“Shoin: several notes.” This is the title of the book -- which, like the previous book, centers around a collection of teachings passed down* by Jōō†.

Ten of the nineteen entries from Book Four of the Nampō Roku are discussed by Kumakura Isao in his Nampō Roku wo yomu [南方録を読む]. Kumakura sensei notes, in his introduction, that this is, by far, the shortest book in the Nampō Roku, (and it is implied that the selections covered constitute the entirety of the book). __________ *Whether directly to Nambō Sōkei (who was one of Jōō's prominent disciples up to the time of the latter's death), or through Rikyū, is not known. All that can be said is that this book is based on a collection of papers that were found in Sōkei's wooden chest, meaning that he felt they were worthy of preservation.

†The ultimate source of these teachings is the O-kazari Ki [御飾記] of Sōami [相阿彌; 1472 ~ 1525], though Jōō apparently came into contact with these ideas during discussions of the arrangement of the shoin that took place at the kōkai [香會] that he attended at the Shino family’s residence (according to the final statement in this entry -- which is missing from the Enkaku-ji manuscript).

Sōami’s influence, therefore, was second-hand, and this likely accounts for those differences between his writings and Book Four of the Nampō Roku.

²Shi-ki ori-ori ni tsukite [四季折〻につきて].

Ori-ori [折々] presents an image of the passage of time -- time flowing onward, from one (season) into the next.

³On-iwai no gi-shiki [御いわひの儀式].

On-iwai [御祝]* mean the official festivals in the annual cycle.

Gi-shiki [儀式] refers to the formal rituals and ceremonies celebrated on each of the festive occasions. __________ *To use the correct, classical, pronunciation for the honorific in this construction.

⁴Aruiha shika ・ kemari no go utage, aruiha nenjū sekku no go-sahō nado [或ハ詩哥・蹴鞠の御宴、或ハ年中節句の御作法等].

Shika [詩哥] is a non-standard* way of writing shika [詩歌], which means poems or poetry.

Kemari [蹴鞠]† is a sort of kickball game that was popular in the Heian period‡. The players formed a circle, with the object of the game being, in addition to keeping the ball from touching the ground for as long as possible, to offer a verse between the time that the previous contestant kicked the ball, and ones own kick (the poem apparently showing who intended to play next).

Go-sahō [御作法] means ceremonial behavior, the correct way to do something.

Nado [等] means "and so forth;" "and the like." __________ *Perhaps the kanji ka [哥] -- which is seen very commonly in this construction in writings from the sixteenth century -- should be understood as a hentai-gana, representing the sound “ka.”

†A video of a costumed kemari match (though apparently missing the poetry from the element) may be seen at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGp_sQHQLc

‡The game was imported from the continent in the early period.

Kemari has periodically experienced periods of renewed interest, and managed to persist through the Edo period, before finally falling out of favor during the Meiji period. It has survived due to a grant from the Meiji Emperor, which established the Kemari Hozon-kai [蹴鞠保存会] a group dedicated to the preservation of kemari.

⁵Shu-ju sama-zama kekkō no chōjō mōsu bakari nashi [種〻様〻結構の重疊申はかりなし].

Shu-ju sama-zama [種々様々] means something like diverse (there are many different ways to arrange things in the shoin) and manifold (within each of those possibilities, there are many different ways one could do things).

Kekkō no chōjō [結構の重疊]: chōjō [重疊] means to pile up (literally, piling one tatami mat on top of others), hence superposition, repetition, one thing added to others; kekkō [結構] means things like “splendid,” “nice,” “wonderful.” So, wonderful arrangements piled one on top of the other -- which would be both redundant and garish to the point of being revolting.

⁶Boge no mono [凡下の者].

Boge means things like unwashed, plebeian, vulgar, worn out, and so forth.

This expression is used in a self-deprecating way by the author.

⁷Koto ni kono Nan nado [ことにこの南など].

The kanji bō [坊] is missing from the Enkaku-ji manuscript. The reference here is to Nambō Sōkei, the putative author of this entry.

Other manuscripts have just bō [坊] (which means monk)*; while still others have the full name Nambō [南坊]. __________ *Which would make sense: koto ni kono bō nado [ことにこの坊など] means “especially people like this monk” (are guilty of such redundant excesses). Nambō Sōkei occasionally refers to himself as kono bō [此坊] in the Nampō Roku.

⁸Sōden muyō [相傳無用].

Sōden [相傳] literally means (ones) inheritance; and in this case refers to the body of teachings that have been passed down to posterity*; while muyō [無用] means “not put to use,” “not employed.”

In other words, the arrangements attempted by Nambō Sōkei, and others, were judged harshly by Rikyū, and condemned for failing to make use of the teachings that have been handed down from past generations of tea masters. __________ *This word became quite popular during the Edo period, especially in the Sen family's schools, as a way to refer to the inviolable body of teachings inherited from Rikyū (as interpreted exclusively by those schools).

⁹Ori-ori monogatari no koto-domo wo shirushi-oki nari [折〻物語の事どもをしるし置也].

Ori-ori monogotari [折々物語] means something like a story that is related in parts or installments (more literally, “set down over time”).

Koto-domo [事ども] means things, matters. In other words, the various components of the teachings will be set down as independent items.

Shirushi-oki [記し置き] means to write down, set down, make a note of something (in writing).

¹⁰Kuwashiku ha Shino kōke ni te kiku-beshi mōsare sōrō-koto [委ハ志野香家にて聞可申候事].

This statement -- which probably is all that remains of Jōō's original introductory remarks (and betrays his authorship) -- is (perhaps intentionally*) missing from the Enkaku-ji manuscript (and many other copies†), for obvious reasons‡.

Nevertheless, in his commentary, Tanaka Senshō points out the importance of this connection**. __________ *In other words, the omission was probably an editorial choice made by Tachibana Jitsuzan, since he was desirous of producing a work of tea scholarship (and it seems that it would have been inappropriate -- in his opinion -- to imply that there was this outside influence on the teachings that would fill this book, even if this simply established the venue at which the author of these remarks was apprised of these various matters).

It is important to point out here that the Shino family did not invent these conventions. They were set down by Sōami, for the most part based on the writings of his grandfather (who was likely transmitting details that had been decided upon at the Koryeo court), and it is likely that members of the Shino family’s inner circle became aware of the O-kazari Ki and its teachings through their incense activities at the shōgun’s court (which, by this point in time, had become little more than a fashionable cultural salon). Nevertheless, Jitsuzan was probably averse to mentioning anything suggesting the potential for contributions to the inner details of chanoyu by one of the leading families of a competing art (the original Shino family, which hailed from Korea, became extinct during the sixteenth century; the modern lineage, which held sway in the time of Tachibana Jitsuzan, went back to one of Shino Shōha‘s Japanese disciples).

†Apparently this omission is common to those that were based on the Enkaku-ji manuscript.

‡The Edo period idea of the purity of the traditions associated with each individual art demanded that they have no influential connection with any of the others. Such foolish “reticence” simply did not exist during Jōō's and Rikyū's period (the chakai [茶會] -- chaji [茶事] -- as we know it today would not exist were it not for the precedent of the Shino family's kōkai [香會] -- since that is the source from which Jōō appropriated both the idea and the framework).

Significantly, this idea persists to this day among the traditional arts in Japan (along with the idea that a professional should have no personal interest in the art with which he is involved).

**Even though he ascribes the material in Book Four to Rikyū (rather than Jōō), and so draws attention to Rikyū’s connection with the Shino family.

It might be helpful for the reader to reflect on the history of several of the people who are supposedly connected with this document.

Rikyū, as is well known, was originally trained by Araki Dōchin (also known as Kita-muki Dōchin, from the name of the area where his residence was located -- since the use of these Japanese-style family names does not seem to have been common in Sakai, especially in the decades prior to its forced incorporation into the Japanese state in 1595). Dōchin was the direct heir of Nōami’s teachings, and it is likely that the material dealing with the decoration of the shoin that is covered in the Kun-dai Kan Sa-u Chō Ki was imparted to the young Rikyū as a matter of course (the Kun-dai Kan Sa-u Chō Ki -- as well as the revised version known as the O-kazari Ki -- was a secret book, and access was forbidden to people outside of the shōgun’s household). Jōō, as an outsider, would not have had access to this material (indeed, it seems that Dōchin introduced Rikyū to Jōō precisely in an attempt to answer at least some of Jōō‘s queries indirectly, questions that the material in this book implies that Jōō would have desired to have answered -- since Jōō was a competitor, rather than one of Dōchin’s disciples). Jōō’s primary claim to fame appears to have rested entirely on his personal possession of the unprecedentedly large collection of meibutsu utensils, since (as has been mentioned before), ownership implied a knowledge of the secrets of their use (whether or not this was actually true): the strength of this claim is something that we, in this age where imitations of just about everything are easily and cheaply come by, cannot really imagine -- nevertheless, it was something that was powerful enough to hold Rikyū in its thrall at least until the time when he entered into Hideyoshi’s household (in 1582 or 1583).

Furthermore, while Rikyū had charge of decorating Hideyoshi’s shoin (once again, underscoring his deep familiarity with these traditions), Jōō never held any such responsibility -- or a connection with anyone of a rank where he might have been called upon to demonstrate his knowledge by acting as a source of such information. Indeed, Jōō does not seem to have given lessons at all, relying upon the senior members of the group that formed around him to provide novices with instruction, while Jōō took a seat as the group’s arbiter of propriety based on precedent (which, again, could be provided because he owned the meibutsu pieces that established those precedents). The lack of any sort of practical information (such as that found in Rikyū’s densho) suggests that the author of this book was, in fact, unfamiliar with those kinds of details.

For these reasons, it is more likely that Book Four of the Nampō Roku represents a collection of notes which, as this statement (which Tachibana Jitsuzan deleted during the preparation of the Enkaku-ji manuscript) attests, were recorded based upon things that Jōō heard during the Shino family’s kōkai.

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canvaswolfdoll · 7 years ago

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CanvasWatches: My Little Pony the Movie

Well, I’m obligated to write about this film, aren’t I? I like animation, light fantasy, world building, overthinking children’s entertainment, and I am a Brony of waxing and waning interest, so, sure, better actually get out to a theater for The Movie.

Luckily for my brother and I, my advice to attend a later screening (21:45) not only granted reprieve from children young and old, but also literally anyone else. We had the theater to ourselves.[1]

So I got to riff the commercials and talk during the movie. I… don’t know if my brother appreciates me doing that, or if he’s resigned himself to it just being how I am, because I do it constantly whenever it’s just the two of us watching. He’s never asked me to stop, though, so oh well.

Anyways, I went in with as little (non-show) information as possible, skipping commercials, early released songs, and the Prequel Comics, because I wanted to make sure the movie held up by it’s own merit as much as possible.

So, first, a quick overview of Canvas in relation to ponies!

I watched the first episode because the creator of El Goonish Shive had remarked about liking it, and I heard there was a reference to Doctor Who in the show. So, I downloaded the first episode off iTunes, because it was free, then bought the second because it wasn’t free, but the pilot’s story was incomplete. I thought it was okay, and would’ve left it there, but then Vulpin kept going, and I got swept up. We caught up to the release dates with Owl’s Well that Ends Well and have clung on since.

I wrote a couple fanfics, my first and only serious efforts in the field, and lovingly gazed upon the fandom as it grew.

In general, I say the show was at it’s best with Season Two, and has otherwise been uneven since. Some amazing episodes came later, but some luster was lost with the departure of Lauren Faust. I keep watching because nothing’s made me rage quit, and it’s been relatively easy to keep going through momentum.

Scootaloo is best pony.

Now I can talk about the movie.

My initial impression was ‘Oh boy, this is a little too well animated’. An odd complaint, but the improved lipflaps, more varied movements, and 2D animation on CG backgrounds was disorienting for my Flash-adjusted eyes. However, as I starting watching out for the many cameos[2] front loaded into Canterlot, I grew accustomed, and once the plot really kicks off, I was used to it.

The plot was essentially that of a Season Opener or Closer, with a couple points of character development carefully rolled back to allow conflict and reduce continuity lockout for parents and others unfamiliar with the franchise as it currently stands.

The movie opens with Twilight planning a “Friendship Festival” taking place in Canterlot. All the ponies are excited, it’s being headlined by Songbird Serenade, a character freshly introduced as if we’ve always known her, and voice by Sia, a performer I literally never heard of until she was announced to be guest starring in this movie, but she is apparently supposed to be some kind of draw?

Actually, I don’t know any of the big-name stars for this film, which I’m okay with, since I prefer ability over recognition.

Anyways, Twilight attempts to approach the other three princesses to get them to use their personal magics to improve the festival, but the other three are all “Look, Twilight, none of us have done anything of substance on screen, and we’re not going to start now.”

So instead Twilight goes and checks on how her friends are doing on preparations and give us a song.

It’s a nice song.

Then the Storm King’s forces invade!

Who is the Storm King? What is his motivation? How does he relate to ponies?

So this invading force is lead by Tempest Shadow and…

Look, I don’t know the deal with The Storm King, okay? I haven’t read the prequel comics yet, and the movie gives no direct backstory, only implying how things kind of are? And that would’ve been fine if they kept the Storm King off mic more often. But he’s given a presence, and is equal parts amusing and threatening.

Which puts him in an awkward position, narratively speaking, because he has too much personality to be a force of nature villain and too little history to be a strong narrative villain. Besides, Tempest does a good job of being the narrative villain, so the Storm King is just kind of poorly executed.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked his dialogue. He had some very funny lines, but it was poorly implemented. Maybe those lines should’ve been moved to Grubber to transform him from bad comedic relief (in both senses) into Tempest’s leash, reminding her about the bargain she and the Storm King have.

Tempest, meanwhile, was the actual looming threat, and was well written and given motivations. You understand, within the context of the movie, why she’s doing what she’s doing, and fans of the show know how devastating it would be for a unicorn to lose her horn.

Now, would I perhaps prefer they move away from the ‘rejected as a young pony, so screw everyone’ narrative they keep using to oppose Friendship? Sure. Maybe have some backstory where Tempest was part of a Celestia-sent brigade to combat the Storm King, only to be abandoned by her fellow soldiers. Bam! Reason to turn on Friendship, child-appropriate darkness, and a different narrative. Plus, that puts her in the hands of the Storm King within the scope of the movie and gives an opening for Celestia to offer a bit more exposition (and thus have an actual narrative role.)

Grubber is a bad character, and outside of the above recommendation of altering his and Tempest’s dynamic, I wish they’d drop him off the side of an airship. He’s just your usual ‘Minion who likes to eat’ character, with nothing added. Which is unfortunate, because My Little Pony’s been pretty good about taking old character tropes and spinning them into something new and interesting.

The Mane Six (plus Spike) are on their usual form. Pinkie Pie, being the pink one, acts as a sort of backup protagonist, pulling the narrative weight Twilight can’t. Rarity also gets her moment, as does tomboy Rainbow Dash, as a sort of spectrum of showing how you can be valuable regardless of your personal femininity. Applejack and Fluttershy are just there for support, which works. Not every pony needs a big song and dance.

Twilight is still uncertain about herself and her role as a princess,[4] and she nearly ruins everything by trying to steal a Macguffin while using Pinkie and the others as distraction. This is, of course, to set up the third act ‘Everyone mistrusts the hero’ conflict which the formula demands.

However, speaking to the skillful twisting of tropes, we get an onscreen acknowledgement with the great line of ‘It’s about time we talk to Twilight.’ This lampshades the cliche plot point, implies everypony was merely taking a moment to cool off and collect themselves, and justifies the event.

Of course, Twilight’s been captured by Tempest, and the villain tries to use Twilight’s sudden loneliness to turn her against Friendship, but Twilight never believes she’s been abandoned. It’s strongly implied that she knows her friends were always coming back, and they all just needed a healing moment.

So that’s a strong point in the movie’s favor.

The set-up for act three is full of good lampshade hanging. Applejack identifies Capper’s elegant speech as a means to hype the ponies back up, and once the full strike force is assembled, Spike makes a pointed comment that all their new friends are there, so they should stop waiting and get planning.

When the writing’s on point, it’s really on point.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have my usual complaints. This time, it’s in regards to consistency in world building.

So, the world of My Little Pony has drifted over the years, which is broadly fine, because art needs space to breath and transform, but at the same time, there are still boundaries and rules that the audience will pick up on and which need to be obeyed.

When the current generation started, Equestria was a quasi-medieval fantasy world, with limited technology. Lights were provided by fireflies, books appeared like parchment, trains had to be pulled by teams of ponies. This has been progressively dropped, and the Equestria we see is much more modern with a thin coat of pulp fantasy. I’m fine with this change, because it was gradual and occurred as a means to open narrative options. And computers still aren’t a thing, so that’s still a nice, subtle limitation to justify the use of magic.

Another gradual change I’m less happy with is allowing sticky hooves and prehensile tails. Originally, there was a strict ban on ponies being able to just pick things up with their hooves, and use of other bodies parts at least had to look reasonable. Then pegasi started to use their wings like hands, tails gained increased dexterity, and so on. Which means we lose a significant portion of the neat background details that showed how ponies make their technology operate.

Even Pinkie, who can be granted allowance for her Looney Tunes shenanigans, has also seen a drift in her abilities to keep up with these changes.

However, one (admittedly vague) law had remained intact until this movie: the nature of the sentient fauna. There are no humans in Equestria, and presumably the rest of the world (the actual nature of Equestria, geopolitically, is a headache I can’t begin to broach. Ponies, for the longest time, were the dominate species, the builders of society. Those creatures that were sentient outside of Ponyhood were either also hoofed creatures (who enjoy a confusing second-class citizenship that is rife for pondering), or classical mythological creature: Griffins, dragons, and the like. Those are the society and culture builders, and most are still quadruped. Hands are still an alien concept[5], and all other animals are as they are in our world (with a little cartoon intelligence for gags.)

But in the Movie there’s Capper, an anthropomorphic cat that stands at human height. No mythological origins, and capable of speech in opposition to Rarity’s own Opalescence and other cats we’ve seen in the series. He’s given no explanation or origin, and our main characters just accept him as is. And he has hands.

In fact, exploring the world beyond the Badlands just raises so many questions that don’t even get a cursory nod. Most of the residents (also vague anthropomorphic animals) seem broadly unaware of ponies which… fine, maybe Equestria has a closed borders policy, but their royalty literally raise the sun and moon. Equestria controls their own weather and nature.[6] Luna’s profile was literally shoved on the moon for a thousand years! How aren’t ponies a well known thing?

Then we meet some griffins, and they turn out to be bipedal, which not only breaks the implied canon of sentient races, but established canon on a preexisting race.

Now, I liked the plot and dialogue of all these characters, but the world beyond the Badlands shakes our preconceived notions of what this world is like. Which is bad. The regular audience has occupied the fiction’s world for seven years now. Like it or not, they’ve picked up on how things are supposed to work, and the movie’s breaking the rules.

Which would be okay. Rules exist so you think before you break them, but the movie isn’t thinking. It just tosses the rules aside without giving narrative weight to the act. Neither Twilight nor other ponies are confused by seeing a cat man suddenly fast-talking them. He looks out of place - and no other cat people are shown - so even in the context of the movie he looks alien, but nothing about it is explained.

I think that’s been the true reasoning behind my gradual deflating love of the franchise. The individual stories have been good, but the worldbuilding been breaking itself, and I dislike that inconsistency.

In summary: I liked the story of the movie, Tempest is an interesting character, but the worldbuilding shown makes me wish it were non-canon.

Guess I’ll just have to wait to see how it plays out with future episodes.

Kataal kataal.

[1] What do theaters do if no one comes to a screening? Do they still play the film to keep the system running, or do they let the projector rest? [2] I, admittedly, cheered a little upon seeing Sepia Tock[3] hanging about. [3] I am clinging to this interpretation until I die, try and stop me! [4] As is everyone else, quite frankly. Why is Twilight a princess? [5] My editor would like to point out Spike has hands, and Griffons use their fore talons in a hand like manner. However, those are referred to as claws and talons, and, besides, dragons are a rarity and Griffons are still quadrupedal. [6] Which is why the Everfree Forest, which maintains itself, is such a scary oddity. It’s wild magic!

#canvaswatches #my little pony #mlp the movie #canvasreviews

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calamity-bean · 7 years ago

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Atsula & Nunyunnini: But People Are Greater

For the most part, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the series of American Gods. I try to resist comparing it too strictly to the novel; adaptations are their own creatures, after all, and I sincerely believe in letting them stretch their wings. I often enjoy when they do so. However, I have to say that episode 1.05′s Coming to America prologue — the story of Atsula and Nunyunnini — is the first sequence in the show to deeply disappoint me. Deeply bother me, in fact, not only because it bears little resemblance to the novel, but because the ways in which Atsula’s story was changed have muddled the message of the anecdote and seriously undermined the power of Atsula and her death.

Specifically, the show:

1. Omitted or reversed pretty much every identifying characteristic of Atsula, her people, and their culture — and, in doing so...

2. Undermined its own message about people being greater than gods by failing to present any real conflict between the two.

This is necessarily going to involve comparison to the novel, so I’m putting this under a cut for anyone who wants to experience the novel in their own time.

1. Gods, humans, and humanity

For reference, here is a transcript of Mr. Ibis’s narration from the show:

It had been a hard journey east across the land bridge from Siberia. Freezing and dark, and it had taken a bitter toll. After the custom of her people, Atsula spoke her baby’s name, Aputi, for the final time. Her daughter would never see the new land to which they traveled. They did not travel alone. Their god came with them: Nunyunnini.

But when they reached the new lands, the promised food was nowhere to be found. Atsula communed with Nunyunnini, for the barriers were thinner then between people and their gods. And Nunyunnini spoke. And he showed her what to do, as he had once shown her grandmother, and her grandmother’s grandmother.

Nunyunnini loved His people, as they loved Him. And so it pained Him to tell her that escape from the cold embrace of starvation would come at a terrible price.

The gods are great. But people are greater. For it is in their hearts that gods are born, and to their hearts that they return. Gods live and gods die. And soon enough, Nunyunnini was entirely forgotten.

On the surface, show and novel seem to have the same broad strokes. A holy woman named Atsula is travelling with her people — and their mammoth-skull god, Nunyunnini — across Beringia from their Siberian homeland circa 14,000 BCE; Atsula is sacrificed, and Nunyunnini is eventually forgotten. Indeed, the bolded lines are nearly verbatim from the novel (although the context is very different).

But does Atsula of the show bear any resemblance to Atsula of the novel? I’m not just talking about her iconic withered arm; what I mean is, does show-Atsula have any personality at all? Any actual characteristics? Does she feel like a character who actually exists within a society? No; she’s nothing more than a name, a profession, and a dead child. She speaks no lines, expresses no opinions, has no interactions with any other human beings except to speak her daughter’s name. Nor do any of her people have lines or opinions or personalities or interactions or even names. Indeed, they scarcely even have faces, because the show (or Mr. Ibis, to play along with the narrative device’s conceit) has chosen to render them all as exaggerated blue-gray CGI creatures in fantastical costumes who look vaguely but definitely not really human.

I have to admit that I don’t understand why this sequence was done in CGI. I’m a fan of Bryan Fuller’s work and tend to trust him, so I’m sure the showrunners had their reasons. I just don’t know what they are, and would personally have preferred that this sequence were done with real people, considering that the importance of people is ... kind of the sequence’s whole point.

And what people we see in the novel! Maybe this is just wistfulness related to my personal tastes rather than an actual fault in the show’s storytelling, but I love this story’s worldbuilding in the novel and wish we could have gotten some of it in the show. We could have had Kalanu, the scout who "was a woman who dressed and walked as a man” (even going so far as to take a wife). We could have had Atsula preparing an entheogenic potion from mushrooms and her own piss; we could have had that strange and surreal and dreamlike debate between her and Kalanu and Gugwei and Yanu, where they each in turn don the guise of Nunyunnini and speak in his voice, arguing literally with themselves. These are characters. They have a culture. They have traditions and a social structure, and they argue and disagree and debate, with each other and even with their god.

In six pages, Gaiman makes these people and their culture feel fully human. The show, for some reason, deliberately dehumanizes them by stripping them of their individual names and personalities, their religious traditions, and even their literal human bodies.

I understand that adaptations have to make choices about what to include and that the show may simply have not had the time or the budget to develop Kalanu, Gugwei, etc., the way the book does. I get that. It makes me a little sad, but I can absolutely understand the show omitting them.

But if there is ONE THING, one single personality trait among the entire tribe that is critical to this anecdote, and thus one thing that I am baffled the show chose not only to omit but to reverse, it is Atsula’s defining quality:

She lacks faith.

2. “And there is no telling how long she might have continued in this blasphemy...”

Oh, look at nice, devout show Atsula. Look at her pressing on bravely in the face of personal tragedy. Look at her asking her god for guidance and piously accepting it, like her grandmothers before her. Look at how willingly she sacrifices herself, and how sad Nunyunnini is that it has to be this way, that he has to kill one of his people whom he loves.

...Yeah, I don’t know who this Atsula is? But she’s not the Atsula I remember:

Atsula spat on the mud of the floor, and said, “No.” She could feel the god staring at her. “No,” she said. “You are a bad god to tell us this. We will die. We will all die, and then who will be left to carry you from high place to high place, to raise your tent, to oil your great tusks with fat?”

Because the Atsula I remember is a repeat-offending blasphemer, a doubting, heretical holy woman who defies her god from the outset because she cares about — and trusts — her people more than she trusts Nunyunnini, and because she knows that he needs them more than they need him.

And for calling him out on all that?

“Atsula has no faith,” said Nunyunnini in Atsula’s voice. “Atsula shall die before the rest of you enter the new land, but the rest of you shall live. Trust me: there is a land to the east that is manless. This land shall be your land and the land of your children and your children’s children, for seven generations, and seven sevens. But for Atsula’s faithlessness, you would have kept it forever.”

Note that there is nothing here framing Atsula’s death as necessary for her people’s survival. Nunyunnini frames her death not as a sacrifice but as a consequence of her faithlessness. Whether it’s an organic cause & effect sort of thing or an outright punishment by him upon her is unclear, but either way, the doom extends to her people as well, damning them to eventually fade. Certainly there is nothing to suggest that the idea of Atsula dying “pained” Nunyunnini in any way.

But what’s truly remarkable is how Atsula reacts to news of her death.

If the point of this story were that Atsula was wrong to lack faith, I would expect some sort of contrition from her; I would expect her to eventually come around and profess her devotion from him, or else to be proved weak or foolish in some fashion and Nunyunnini proved strong and wise. (He’s not. He is, as we know, ultimately proved out of date.) But Atsula never apologizes. She never praises Nunyunnini again. (Every time Kalanu, Gugwei, and Yanu do, Atsula is conspicuously silent.) And far from being weak, she — NOT Nunyunnini — is the one who chooses to frame her death as “the sacrifice that takes you into the new lands,” with absolutely no mention that this sacrifice is IN ANY WAY intended for her god.

It is a sacrifice for and to her people. For Atsula’s great blasphemy and great insight is that her people — indeed, humanity in general — are both more powerful than Nunyunnini and more WORTHY. And for her insight and her sacrifice, she is elevated to the status of an oracle among her people, who keep her head as a sacred object in the very same cave as Nunyunnini’s head. Thus it is NOT the blessing of a god that sees the tribe safely into the new land, but the action of a mortal who has empowered herself in spite of that god. And by empowering herself, she ultimately becomes something like a god to her people after her death.

Which is a powerful illustration of the second blasphemy Atsula speaks:

“That is the doom that Nunyunnini warned us of,” said Gugwei the old. “Surely he is a wise god and a mighty one.”

“He is the best of all gods,” said Kalanu. “In our new land we shall raise him up on high, and we shall polish his tusks and skull with fish oil and animal fat, and we shall tell our children, and our children’s children and our seventh children’s children, that Nunyunnini is the mightiest of all gods, and shall never be forgotten.”

“Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return...”

And there is no telling how long she might have continued in this blasphemy, had it not been interrupted in a manner that brooked no argument.

It’s amazing to me that the show was able to quote Atsula nearly verbatim and yet so thoroughly alter the context that the meaning becomes so muddled and confused. Her statement is not meant to be some kind of poignant truth delivered as a devout priestess sacrifices herself to a loving and sadly doomed god. It’s heresey, and that’s important, because the point of Atsula and Nunyunnini’s story is not only that gods can die but that they are fucking terrified of the very humans upon whom they depend for existence. We are greater than gods, and the gods absolutely do not want us to know.

Reviews I’ve read of this episode seem to feel that the point of this sequence — the reason for it’s inclusion in the overall narrative — can be boiled down to that final line: that Nunyunnini is forgotten. Belief sustains gods, and gods who are forgotten fade. If that is indeed the only point here, then sure: the show succeeds in communicating it. It’s no great revelation, considering that it’s central to the premise of American Gods and has already been made clear, but yeah, the point gets across.

But the show’s take on this sequence does nothing to communicate the complexity of the human-god relationship: the power dynamics, the affirmation of humanity over deity, the fear and hostility between worshipped and worshipper. It uses the right quote, but because it fails to present Atsula and her people as actual humans, it fails to include her defiance, and thus it offers no illustration of conflict between gods and mortals and thus no context for WHY their greatness is being compared at all. Nor does it even hint at the irony inherent in the fact that Nunyunnini essentially damns himself in the same breath that he damns Atsula and her people — for if they fade from power, naturally so does he. The show-only invention of her daughter, who dies at the very beginning, only further muddies the waters by giving the impression that Atsula already has sacrificed a life to this journey, really — not a sacrifice that she gave willingly, perhaps, but that she accepted and persevered from. Else, what is the point of Aputi at all?

Forgive me my rambling. I know this is all very rough and raw, and I hope it makes any kind of sense. I just can’t help but be staggered by the richness of theme and worldbuilding contained within these six little pages in the book ... and by how thoroughly the show flattened it all and flipped it on its head. The way the show presents it, it seems an affirmation of Wednesday’s line later in the episode: “We [the Old Gods] gave back. We gave them meaning.”

...Mm. To an extent, yeah. But when it comes right down to it, people give gods meaning, not the other way around, and while people can survive without gods, the reverse does not hold true. And I can’t help but feel that the show missed an opportunity here not only to feature an interesting culture but also to help communicate that the conflict in this story is more complicated than simply Old Gods versus New.

#american gods #meta #my meta #op #''calamity when will you write meta that's fewer than a gazillion words long'' the fandom sobs #''NEVER'' i shriek

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redscullyrevival · 7 years ago

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The most daring of them all voyaged across the vast ocean to take it. He was a Demigod of Wind and Sea. He was a warrior. A trickster. A shapeshifter who could change form with the power of his magical fish hook. And his name was Maui.

Okay there is just, like, so much to unpack here I’m not even sure were to start!

I’m going to do my best to divide up all the Māui info as we go along (the majority of which will probably be in the “You’re Welcome” scene) but for now lets just start with trying to understand Māui as a culture hero.

What is a “culture hero”?

If you search wikipedia it will tell you a culture hero is a mythological hero specific to some group (cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) who changes the world through invention or discovery. And honestly that’s the bare bones of it, although far less nuanced than the reality such figures play into specific cultural contexts.

Culture heroes typically act as intermediaries between gods and humans. They test the parameters of existence and the boundaries between reality and the supernatural, and between life and death, in stories about heroic journeys back and forth across these thresholds while conveying the bounties of creation for the benefit of humans.

Often times a culture group will have one hero test the darkness of creation and death by attempting to gain immortality and another hero who revisits the origins of creation by attempting to ascend into the heavens.

In the Polynesian pantheon of culture heroes, Māui is the figure who challenges death and Tāwhaki is the one who ascends into the heavens.

The Māui oral traditions of Polynesia actually span the breadth of Micronesia as well as Melanesia - making Māui the most widely known and oldest culture hero of the Pacific. In fact the geographic distribution of the Māui oral traditions suggests the hero dates all the way back to the early Lapita period between 4000 to 6000 years ago.

Cognates (words similar in sound and meaning because of common ancestry) of the name Māui-tikitiki-a-Taranga are found throughout east Polynesia, northern west Polynesia and Micronesia and Melanesia. On Yap in the Caroline Islands at the far eastern end of Micronesia he is called Mo-tik-e-tik. On Hawai’i at the northern point of the Polynesian triangle he is called Māui-ki’iki’i and to the far south in Aotearoa (New Zealand) his names are Māui-mohio, Māui-atamai and Māui-nukurau-tangata.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Māui has a lot of names.

[Image: “Maui Names”, page 30, Vaka Moana, Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific]

Yeah.

The versions of Māui from Melanesia and Micronesia display much more significant variations than those within Polynesia, and understandably so, but even among Polynesians almost every group has their own versions of Māui’s exploits, with the notable exceptions of Tuvalu and Rapa Nui (who have none).

But when taken into account that the myths are spread across 5,000 km from Yap Island in the west to Mangareva in the east and across 4,500 km from the Hawaiian Islands in the north to Aotearoa in the south it is utterly remarkable how great a similarity exists within the various stories of Māui given how much a wide area they have crossed.

Although the myths about the culture hero Māui were shared on most islands within the whole of Polynesia the greatest development of the myth’s cycle took place in Aotearoa, Hawai’i, Tonga, Tahiti, and the Cook Islands, places that recall this ‘newer’ Māui to be “the discoverer of fire”, “the ensnarer of the sun”, “the fisherman who pulls up islands”, “the man endowed with magic” or “Māui with spirit power” - and is the most influential upon the Māui character found in the film Moana.

Māui is considered a culture hero because he perfectly meets the criteria for such a mythological being as he is in the overwhelming majority of his tales a benefactor of humans. Māui forces the gods to share their comforts with mankind while never creating anything from nothing. Māui is across Oceania exclusively treated as a transformer, and yes sometimes that’s very literal. We will dive more into Māui’s various depictions as the film goes along but for now let’s remember that he is a transformer in many more ways than one; a shifting entity whose presence indicates humanity experimenting with mortality.

Moana Mamafa Post List under the cut:

Moana Mamafa:

About Project

Introduction

Te Fiti

#Moana mamafa

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whaq · 3 years ago

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How Do You Write Like You're Running Out of Time: Hamilton and Me

I. Just You Wait

Hamilton was alright. Not the best opener is it? I’m not referring to the show, I meant the opener to this verbose verbal vomit. The musical was typical fare, all things considered. Lin Manuel Miranda is the farthest thing from a good singer. I believe anyone singing his praises should take a listen to his rendition of Jesus Christ Superstar’s Gethsamane. Talk about taking your shot… to the gut.

It still kinda baffles me how a show so unexpectedly and unremarkably unprovocative found such a huge cult following; the likes of which the musical world has yet to match since. Overlooking the novelty of a Founding Father finessing like the Fresh Prince, the musical fits the mold of presenting the concepts of rap and immigrants for the first time to the aristocratic white people (y’know the ones, they probably called it “hippity-hop” and are currently collecting their stimulus check amid the pandemic) who could actually afford it.

There’s a lot to be said when it comes to meta-textual analysis. Contrary to the marketing’s emphasis on “The Room Where It Happened” seemingly depicting a story meant to peek behind the curtain of politics, the eponymous song actually does present a better alternative to House of Bars (alternative jokes include: The West Side, Bars & Recreation, and The Fire).

II. The Room Where It Happens

There’s an element of mysticism that surrounds the number ‘The Room Where It Happens” thanks to the inconsistently charismatic narrator of the show: Aaron Burr (Sir--). With only the three gentlemen involved with that day’s events being in that room, much of the going-on’s details are shrouded in mystery. No servers, no stenographers, spies, nor sluts, to witness history in the making. It’s any wonder how history gets recorded at all! Question of the hour...

Hamilton’s downfall in the play, all leading up to his descent into the proverbial ‘Hurricane,’ would not be as impactful if not for his most precious desire. We’ve seen it first-hand, all politicians need to do during a scandal is to “talk less, smile more.” Although... $130,000 in hush money excluded from your tax returns should do the trick-- [President Obama complete remarks at 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner (C-SPAN) 16:48 - 16:59] No, not if you want to protect your legacy.

III. Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

There are many perspectives on the subject of how one lives on well past their time on Earth, and Hamilton has its fair share. Aaron Burr references a fallen colleague of his being given a street named after him and how it makes his “legacy secure.” Making idols, commemorations, names on a parchment, the epitome of memorability. You may be gone, but your name remains physically engraved on plaques and local parks.

At first, it seemed like Alexander also subscribed to a similar outlook. By imprinting himself on literature, legislature, and ladies, he found a way to almost literally leave his mark on everything he’s had his hands on. Hell, the show left out the relevant factoid that his 2nd freaking son was his junior. He’d rather die than let the Hamilton name Burr away, and that’s exactly what he did.

That being said, it doesn’t take a keen eye to realize that the self-destructive behavior these men exhibit isn’t exemplary by any means. The play depicts the consequences of the paths these men take. Burr ends up being painted as an apolitical squirrel, Alexander a self-indulgent tomcat. While their legacies remain, they’re tarnished by shame. If these great men still strived and struggled to cement their legacies, then what chance do we have?

Many of us, if not most, will barely be but a footnote in history. We can’t all be president, the same book can’t be written twice, there is no solitary thought that has yet to be thought of. However, even with all this in mind, it never stops us from trying, does it?

We still attempt to paint like Gogh, write like Tolkien, or waste human space like 6ix9ine (this was written in July of 2020 and it was dated then too), for life has little meaning or value without purpose; that’s exactly what’s been on my mind: Who will tell my story if I have nothing to leave behind?

IV. Palaces Out of Paragraphs

How do others do it? How do they just snap their fingers and… well-- do? Do what, you ask? Nothing in particular, it is the act of doing that I refer to. With hustle culture being the trend, many people like me have found that making the most out of their existence is a more daunting task than it’s cracked up to be. When others are so good at doing, are you doing nothing in comparison?

I’m not one to judge others so I’ll only be doing so for myself: I believe I have not been doing anything productive with the time I’ve been given. Every waking moment of mine has been spent either attempting to maximize my time and energy to do something worthwhile or bereaving on the lack of my drive to execute. This, however, is obviously an uphill battle for me.

When everything , your mind, your body, and even yourself, are against you, the last tool in the arsenal of human perseverance is the ability to do what one wills. The phrase shouldn’t be “if there’s a will there’s a way,” for many of us have found ourselves in no-win scenarios. Instead the phrase should be “if there’s a will, there’s a way out.” And there is a way out of the rut that is dissatisfaction.

Most conflict within one’s self is the disconnect between our ideal self, who we want to be, and our actual self, who we currently are. One may find themselves longing to become a strong-willed scribbler of scripts like Hamilton, it takes no more than a glance at your reflection to see that, when the rose tint decays, you’re a sniveling Burr. This is where the pain stems from, my pain.

Ambition and reality will always be at odds with one another. When one desires to leap over skyscrapers, actuality reminds you that you can barely skip over an anthill. That’s kind of what has been bothering me. For years I’ve seen those capable of what I could only dream of doing, and that has always bothered me. Not my pride, but my sense of who I really am.

I desire to leave a legacy that depicts me as larger than my life, what I leave behind being greater than what I have done; a kingdom left prospering after my reign. My lofty aspirations extend to being renowned, and contract to being remembered fondly. But the sad reality for I, and many others like me, presents itself: we can’t all make leaps and bounds that impress, most people aren’t so easily enamored.

Not having this in mind has resulted in my complete inability to create and finalize. For a person with each of their toes dipped into a different pool of expertise, I can barely muster up the strength to continue to submerge, much less immerse, myself into any of them. Looking into the dark Mariana Trench of inadequacy one sees as their skillset will induce aquaphobia in many.

Beyond all pretension and rhetoric, my issue is this: I can’t make anything because I fear I will make nothing worth making. This is already the 5th rewrite of this maligned monotribe, that in and of itself exemplifies how I’m not quite past that hurdle. That being said, I’m looking forward to and deciding on taking steps to amend that.

V. Taking Back The Narrative

This text marks the beginning of another attempt at reinvention. With limit tests spanning over the course of two years, involving stressing the definitions of human minimums and maximums, I am content with commencing continued coercion with my consciousness (translation: I’m letting the process of improving continue despite my fear of the absence of such). I took back to writing once more because I needed something to stare at that convinced me I’m capable of the things I want to do, but also that there’s no rushing or forcing things.

It is honestly kinda silly how someone like me, who has made it their life goal to show that passion and wit is enough to get someone through the typical things in life like work, school, and relationships, had to be reminded of that very mission.

I’m not blessed with any genius in particular, and I’m not nerdy Casey Neistat who runs at the speed they can create meaningful and worthwhile content. Holding myself to higher standards was supposed to be a healthy way of preventing stagnation, not a destructive process to kill my motivation.

After going through the Hurricane of my own inner turmoil, realizing that being ‘Lucky to be Alive Right Now’ doesn’t have to come with survivor’s guilt, and that there is no such thing as ‘Running Out of Time,’ for all time cannot be wasted, I’m once again going back into the swing of things. Just like my last relaunches, all beginning with varying degrees of premature declarations, I’ll be doing the same right now.

I have made something

for all intents and purposes

I wrote my way out

#hamilton #critique #media criticism #essay #writeblr #I made this in July of 2020 and only now decided to release it because it was kind of personal but eh

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wineanddinosaur · 5 years ago

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Before Dating Apps, Retro-Futuristic Telephone Bars Nurtured Introvert-Friendly Flirtation

The sign on the bar’s front door sounds almost quaint for this era: “By entering these premises, you hereby waive the following rights: To privacy. To publicity. To bring a claim against C.E.V.”

C.E.V. stood for Controlled Entropy Ventures, the experimental technology company behind Remote Lounge, a concept bar that opened in NYC’s East Village less than a month after 9/11/2001. Inside the lounge were 60 miniature cameras (or was it more?) that filmed patrons and allowed them to surveil each other in hopes of generating love connections — or impromptu hookups.

Considered mind-blowing and transgressive at the time, Remote Lounge seems antiquated if not downright childish today, when literally everyone at every bar has their head head, staring at their phone. Still, looking back at the bar offers a fascinating insight into social culture in the final days before iPhones and dating apps. While hardly remembered today, Remote Lounge rather presciently foreshadowed the vaguely performative, look-at-me digital narcissism that has pervaded, if not somewhat ruined, modern nightlife in NYC and worldwide.

The Telepresence Bar

“The genesis of the idea came from working with Josh Harris,” explains Leo Fernekes, one of the three partners of C.E.V. “He basically funded these crazy experimental ideas and I used them as a paid lab learning experience.”

Labeled New York’s first Internet millionaire, Harris was the founder of live streaming network Pseudo Programs — and a bit of a conceptual artist. With $85 million in his bank account after cashing out an early dot-com IPO, he hired C.E.V. to produce “Quiet: We Live in Public” in December 1999. It was a “Truman Show”-esque experiment in which 100 volunteers lived in a four-story human terrarium in SoHo, filled with free food and drink, not to mention machine guns, while webcams followed their every move.

“People want to turn the camera on themselves,” Harris told Wired at the time. “There is a pent-up desire for personal celebrity.”

The toilets lacked walls, the only shower was in a see-through geodesic dome, and the basement had a system that allowed residents to control cameras to watch their housemates having sex. A giant sign constantly warned the residents: “WE LIVE IN PUBLIC.” Their experiment later became the subject of a 2009 documentary of the same name.

“One thing that convinced me to open Remote Lounge is that Josh threw a party with all those cameras,” Fernekes says. “There were cameras in the bathroom and during the party, people would go in and perform for them. Doing sexy, naughty things, knowing they were being broadcast and monitored outside. Then they’d come out of the bathroom and people would cheer.

“‘Wow, that’s something I’ve never seen before!’” Fernekes remembers thinking. “It seemed natural to extend it into a business concept.”

A bar appeared to be the most practical move, especially since another one of C.E.V.’s partners, Bob Stratton, a software developer, knew the industry a bit from his stint as a bartender at 2A, a dive on 2nd Street and Avenue A.

“Our concept of voyeurism is very much along the lines of a normal bar,” Stratton told the L.A. Times. “People are constantly checking each other out anyway.”

The startup took over a storefront on the skid row Bowery where Bowery Electrical Supply Company, an electrical wiring outfit, had resided since 1947. They cleaned up the space’s rotted floors and outfitted it with cameras and monitors. The equipment was hardly state of the art, even by nearly 20-year-old standards.

“This has to be as inexpensive as possible,” thought Fernekes, claiming if he had developed a fancier bit of technology he wouldn’t have wasted it on a bar. They used the cheapest possible consumer-grade televisions and mounted them in interesting places around the space. There were 12 cameras over the bar, six more scattered in random places, and 24 cameras placed at custom-designed “Cocktail Consoles.” They were all rigged together like a cable TV set-up — each console had joysticks that could move any camera 360 degrees, able to see every inch of the bar — as well as a monitor that customers could tune to any camera’s black-and-white broadcast.

C.E.V. called Remote a “telepresence” bar, but critics thought the NASA-gray consoles and traffic-cone-orange seating was more “retro-futurist.” Based on this 2002 picture of Remote Lounge, it resembles a 1960s vision of the future; “The Jetsons,” if you consider that a positive, or “2001: A Space Odyssey” if you don’t.

Fernekes estimates it cost them about $1 million to set up the bar, but about 75 percent of that was just exorbitant Manhattan real estate costs.

“My partners and I were high on the total hubris of the dot-com era,” Fernekes says. “We were delusional in the thought that everything we touched could be turned into gold. I look back at it now and it’s a little sad. Sad, but humorous.”

Remote Lounge opened in NYC in 2001 with retro-futurist interiors. Credit: JPDA.net

A Digital Playhouse for Local Hipsters

Yet Remote Lounge was almost immediately a hit with the “in” crowd, and it quickly (and briefly) became a part of the East Village party circuit. From its October 9, 2001 opening onward, there were lines to get in every night for the first six months. Microsoft and Apple even fought over which would be the first to hold a party there (Microsoft won).

“The whole city was still in mourning, in shock and disbelief [over 9/11] and Remote kind of popped up as this cute, happy story,” Fernekes says. “The media also went bananas for it.”

Within the first month The New York Times called it, “perhaps the most media-intensive public setting in the city.” CIOL thought it was “a digital playhouse for local hipsters.” Reading these articles in 2019 is incredibly amusing, given the very public nature of social media, dating apps, and nearly every other facet of modern society.

“The concept is incredibly simple: hand over your privacy at the front door and enter a world where anyone anywhere can follow your every move,” proclaimed a 2001 BBC News article, crediting its development and acceptance to “a mix of instant messaging and reality TV, both becoming extremely popular in the last few years.”

Early Yelp reviews are even more hilarious: “It’s like on-line/chat room dating but you’re in a real room and everyone’s eerily watching you! (sic)” “I guess you can call it ‘instant’ video-dating?” “why would you call someone on the phone when they’re in the same room with you??”

Adding to the surreality, Fernekes would often lie about how many cameras were actually in the bar (that BBC article claims a remarkable 120) and made up names for the drinks they served (he told writers their most popular cocktail was the Vertical Hold, an archaic term for adjusting a tube television set).

In actuality, Remote Lounge was like any other bar, serving Brooklyn Lagers and vodka sodas in the early-aughts era of New York nightlife — except for all those creepy cameras.

“Culturally the world was evolving to having a greater comfort for these ideas,” Fernekes says.

The visionary Harris had previously predicted to Business Week that the world was already headed toward a place where “people want their fame on a day-to-day basis, rather than in their lifetime.” And Remote Lounge fit the bill, even screen-grabbing the most outrageous moments of the night — which often involved nudity — and uploading them to the lounge’s website instantaneously. This encouraged introverts to monitor what was happening at the bar and, if they saw something they liked, hopefully lure them out for the evening. (Curious to see what they were seeing? You can! For unknown reasons, someone is still fitting the website’s hosting bill.)

Still, if Remote Lounge was the world’s first “telepresence” bar, Fernekes knew there was a bit of a precedent in the form of “telephone bars.”

A Neat Party Trick

Telecommunications have a long history in nightlife. The telephone was invented in 1876, and by the early 1900s, diners at higher-end restaurants could request to have phones brought to their tables for important calls.

In 1920s Berlin, some nightclubs had installed tischtelefonen on every table, so Weimar-era partiers could dial up random guests at any other table, which were marked by lighted numbers. At Femina and the Resi, two Berlin dance clubs that each held thousands, customers could even send pneumatic tubes filled with cigarettes, Champagne bottles, and notes to other tables. (Though nothing too provocative, as “messages sent by tube [were] checked by female ‘censors’ in the switchboard room,” according to The Chicago Tribune.) This gimmick was memorialized in “Caberet’s” “Telephone Song” and still occurs at Ballhaus Berlin.

A few decades later, in 1968, a pricey joint called Ma Bell’s opened in New York’s Times Square. Each table at Ma Bell’s had its own “old-timey” landline with free calling privileges (even long distance!). It was open until the mid-1980s and was featured as a setting in a Season 6 episode of “Mad Men.” While bar-hopping, Joan (Christina Hendricks) and a visiting gal pal hit the new spot, noting that, “Apparently, there are quite a few men here who go for a certain type.”

Yes, whether Berlin in the 1920s, Times Square in the ’60s, or the Bowery at the turn of the 21st century, these bars were, of course, mainly designed for amorous purposes. USA Today believed that, with Remote Lounge, C.E.V. had created “a setting that could revolutionize flirting in New York.” The L.A. Times wasn’t quite as certain, mocking the bar as a place “where Stanley Kubrick and Michel Foucault would go scouting for dates.”

But 20-something New Yorkers immediately loved the concept, a harbinger of their technological dating futures to come. “Around midnight, a long-haired man dressed in requisite all-black, sidles up to writer Kate for a rare moment of face-to-face human interaction,” observed journalist Lauren Sandler in 2002. “His parting words are the ultimate postmodern pickup line … ‘Find me on screen later.’”

“It’s a legalized version of stalking,” a female NYU student told CIOL on opening night, observing how the monitors only showed grainy, black-and-white images. “It makes people look a lot better than they do in person, masking their flaws and making them look more attractive.”

That was intentional. Fernekes had realized that the impersonality of it all was why the concept worked so well. When the place was packed, you could be ogling a person on the monitor with no sense that they were just five feet away from you, unaware where you were as well. If both parties actually liked what they saw on their monitors, you could message a “hello” using the system’s crude text-messaging capabilities or ask to speak to them on the console’s land lines.

“That gave you the freedom to say outrageous things, as if the person wasn’t really there,” says Fernekes. “This chaos diffused into a sense of detached, impersonal anonymity.”

Rejection didn’t hurt as much either, claims Fernekes, because, unlike a face-to-face interaction in the real world, you didn’t have to actually see them reject you. They could just ignore your console-to-console texts. It became a total free-for-all, with customers trying to pick up as many people as they could at one time. Get rejected, and you could simply flip the TV channel, quickly moving onto the next person on screen, then the next. If in-person pick-up culture used to favor the bold, Remote Lounge favored the shy and timid.

“Remote Lounge provides yet another opportunity to erect a barrier between ourselves and the people we hope to meet. It is almost as though we yearn for the days of an appointed chaperone to play interference,” Stacy Kravetz wrote in her 2005 book “The Dating Race,” ultimately denigrating the cameras and monitors as nothing more than a “neat party trick, a way to entertain myself while I sit at a table.”

Our Technologically Perverted World

“Twelve years later, it’s funny to think how this novelty bar in NYC would so closely mirror our modern experience,” says Brian C. Roberts, a popular online personality. “Sometimes I’m shocked at how my experiences at the Remote Lounge would be recreated time and time again by following a hashtag on Twitter, to a photo on Instagram, to a small conversation online, and finally with meeting someone face to face … all over the course of 10 or 20 minutes on my iPhone at a local bar.”

Unfortunately, though, whether Remote Lounge was shockingly prescient, or just a neat party trick — or probably both — it ultimately wasn’t enough of a gimmick to create a thriving business. Nor was all that media coverage.

“The truth is, [Remote] reached a huge international audience,” explains Fernekes, “but those people couldn’t come to our bar, so it was lost at that point.”

C.E.V. had once hoped to franchise its idea, with pop-up Remote Lounges all over America and Europe. It hoped to then connect them all through the same system so drinkers in, say, Dallas could flirt with bar patrons in Amsterdam — “the time-shifting of content,” Fernekes called it. “The problem is, the only way we were making money is by selling drinks and there’s a limit to what you can charge people for a cocktail. It just didn’t make much economic sense.”

Eventually, Fernekes realized the bar also suffered from what you would call a “critical mass” problem. A packed house on Saturday was great. But what if you came in on a Monday evening and there were only two other customers in the bar?

“It was very uncomfortable, like going into a hall of mirrors,” Fernekes says. “If the bar had less than three or four people, it was a very unpleasant experience.”

People quickly realized that as well. First, Mondays started being dead, then Tuesday, then the whole week, and little by little Remote Lounge was only getting viable crowds on the weekends. Soon the cameras and monitors quit working; drunk and disorderly patrons even broke a few. Eventually you had a mostly empty, windowless, retro-futurist bar with dozens of monitors broadcasting bright-white static.

“It was a novelty at first, but gave way quickly to just being creepy,” Eater wrote in a 2007 postmortem. “The crowd got seedier over time.”

The real world was changing, too, and finally catching up to Remote Lounge’s vision. In 2007, Americans sent more texts than phone calls. Dating websites were becoming more prominent and mainstream. Then, in June 2007, the iPhone hit the market. This was perhaps the final nail in the coffin for Remote, and the one topic Fernekes seemed unwilling to discuss still today. Remote Lounge closed a few months later in November 2007.

“Nowadays you’re just numb to all of it. It’s too much of a technologically perverted world,” Fernekes says. “I think Remote definitely alluded to the perversely artificial and competitive nature of Instagram. The technologically augmented social interactions that are completely fabricated and just designed to tap into the human instincts. It’s a bit perverse and unhealthy. Our genetic, instinctual evolution has not caught up with the technology.”

And the technology is still racing forward. Smartphones have gotten better and more widespread in the last decade. Meanwhile, texting grew more prominent, and a plethora of dating apps arrived. In 2009, Grindr launched, and in 2012 Tinder. Now all the pieces are in place — everyone has a tiny Remote Lounge in their pocket or purse at all times. You just need to add drinks.

“I see kids on their phone today [at the bar],” says Fernekes, now 56 and living in Bangkok. “And I think, wow, that looks kind of sad. It’s just not a reality that seems very interesting to me.”

The article Before Dating Apps, Retro-Futuristic Telephone Bars Nurtured Introvert-Friendly Flirtation appeared first on VinePair.

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how2to18 · 6 years ago

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BUYER BEWARE: the catalog for “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” the upcoming blockbuster-to-be from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and motive for Vogue magazine’s “Met Ball,” contains no notes on fashion. Instead, the curators have preferred to talk about the exhibition’s theme of Camp. The catalog is divided into two discrete, mint-colored books, both of which are strapped into a handsome pink leather-bound case. The design is pure confection, as if the macaron purveyor Ladurée decided to extend its reach into the graphic arts. Book I of the set, entitled “Camp,” is arranged in a conventional codex format (pages collated along their left-most edges) and reads like the catalog for a much vaster art historical survey of the Camp concept. Rather ingeniously, the curators have traced Camp’s history all the way back to the classical canon of the beau idéal — the longstanding reverence in Western art for heroic, ephebic beauty — and they then follow the term’s development up until the triumph of Pop Art in the ’60s. As the exhibition’s title makes plain, the catalog’s authors have drawn heavily from Susan Sontag’s influential essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), which is reprinted at the end of this first volume.

By contrast, Book II of the catalog, “Notes on Fashion,” looks more like a luxury notepad (pun likely intended) than it does a museum catalog. Composed of stiff sheets of cardstock with golden versos bound along their upper-most edges, Book II’s pages contain glossy photos (occasionally as foldouts) of contemporary, ostensibly Camp-inspired garments. In his introduction to this second book, the Costume Institute’s curator Andrew Bolton declares that “Sontag’s voice can be heard more as an echo in Book II [and that o]ther voices of post-Sontagian ‘camp criticism’ can also be heard.” This is a peculiar way of phrasing things, since it downplays how literally Book II makes use of “echoes.” After Bolton’s two-page remarks, the only other descriptive texts found in this volume are image captions, copyright information, and a series of pilfered quotes from Sontag and later critics of Camp, each of which serves as the epigraph for an individual garment or a pair of them. Readers can decide for themselves whether these text/image matchups improve upon the various listicles already available online for free.

One wishes that the exhibition’s curatorial team had been daring enough to match Sontag’s source text with its own “Notes on Fashion.” The ambition alone would represent a marked improvement on Book II’s folly. Like Camp, fashion also bears a minor relationship to the history of art and style, at least as one typically encounters this history arranged in major museums like the Met. This minor status has led to a certain defensiveness on the part of the Costume Institute’s curators, evidence for which can be found in Bolton’s repeated claims on behalf of fashion’s dignity in Andrew Rossi’s 2016 film, The First Monday in May. Bolton’s best shows to date have made his convictions appear as if they were self-evident. For this reason, his real curatorial triumph was not his much-celebrated Alexander McQueen retrospective, “Savage Beauty,” but rather his “Manus x Machina” show from 2016, which presented contemporary fashion as a complex of cultural techniques that were first codified by French philosophes in the Encyclopédie. In this earlier show, the historical gap between the exhibition’s 18th-century source text and the majority of its presented content made perfect sense. Contemporary designers are not just inspired by old-fashioned techniques of feathering and beading. Many still practice them. Haute couture names the prestige of outmoded labor relations.

Unlike “Manus x Machina,” “Camp: Notes on Fashion” appears to hang much more heavily on the enigmatic appeal of its organizing concept. This approach to fashion is, ultimately, a self-defeating one, since it awards clothing with an art historical value extrinsically, as the mute content of style. Without furnishing any explicit criteria for evaluating contemporary garments in relation to Camp, the catalog also leaves the exhibition vulnerable to an uninteresting, yet ultimately fair critique. “That’s not even Camp.” Worse still, it casts fashion in a position of chronic belatedness, with iconographically overloaded dresses functioning as the wearable reception history of some cultural zeitgeist better observed, or, as in the case of Camp, read elsewhere.

What a shame, too, that the catalog offered contemporary designers no space for sustained reflection on Camp’s continued meaningfulness for their own work. At least this appeal to authorship would have saved the exhibited clothing from being reduced to emblems of some cultural critic’s earlier aperçu. Finally, the catalog opens the curators up to accusations of bad faith, of, say, the outsize influence of their corporate sponsor, Gucci, whose designs (at least those printed in “Camp”) appear tailor-made to the book’s own. Readers of this catalog will still be obliged to answer the show’s underlying questions for themselves. What does Camp mean today? And what does Camp mean in the context of fashion?

This leads me to an even more disappointing aspect of the “Camp” catalog: its inability to decide how best to build from Susan Sontag’s legacy. This indecision is apparent in Fabio Cleto’s essay, “The Spectacles of Camp,” which waffles uneasily between an over-identification with the late critic’s “Notes” and a will to establish a so-called “post-Sontagian” criticism of Camp. On the one hand, Cleto’s essay depends so literally on Sontag’s original language that it occasionally fails to recognize its own debts. Here is Cleto, tracing the term to Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening: “In 1954, at the time of the novel’s publication, ‘camp’ […] had hardly ever broken into print.” And here is Sontag: “Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954), [Camp] has hardly broken into print.”

On the other hand, Cleto’s essay offers original interpretations of Camp, but does so at times through misrepresentations of Sontag’s thinking. In one telling instance, Cleto claims that Sontag distinguished between Camp as a mode of perception “being prominently ‘in the eye of the beholder,’” and Camp as a conscious mode of performance. But in the passage cited by Cleto, Sontag was claiming that “not everything can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.” Unlike Cleto, Sontag distinguished between a “Camp way of looking at things,” which is wholly (not “prominently”) subjective, and a Camp “quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons,” which isn’t. The eye of the beholder is ultimately irrelevant in determinations of “campy movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings.” If they can’t be Camp, then they can’t be Camp. For Sontag,“[t]he Camp eye has the power to transform experience,” but not its objects. Her cited note thus collapses the distinction that Cleto develops between Camp vision and Camp performance. One becomes the conscious execution of the other.

Where Cleto’s essay really shines is in its cultural history of the “camp craze” of the 1960s. His sharp retelling of this period style makes his contribution a worthwhile read. What remains unexplained, however, is why Sontag’s essay remains intellectually (as opposed to just historiographically) indispensable for our current discussions of Camp. My own opinion is that Sontag’s true achievement in “Notes” lies less in her text’s relation to the history of art than it does in its contribution to the history of taste and sensibility, which is to say within a speculative tradition of aesthetics.

The Camp sensibility takes traditional judgments of taste from behind. As Sontag writes, “Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.” Many readers of Sontag and many of the academic partisans of Camp cited in Cleto’s essay (though, irony this, not many genuine Camps) have since taken this statement to describe a critical ethics or anthropology of taste. Camp, they believe, constitutes a form of parodic subversion. (Think of Judith Butler writing about the art of drag.) Nothing could be further from Sontag’s meaning. “Camp doesn’t reverse things,” she writes, “It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different — a supplementary — set of standards.” Camp does not challenge judgments of taste. It supplements them.

As a sensibility, then, Camp describes a universal receptivity to aesthetic experience beyond our pre-given sets of standards for judgment; as a style, Camp composes this same aesthetic beyond into works of art (or life); as a taste, which Sontag defines as a consistent sensibility, Camp names a peculiar aestheticist discipline: the formalism of the too much or the well, why not? Camp aestheticism is peculiar because it still entails an appreciation for art’s sake, but does so even in absence of aestheticism’s conventional predicate: art. “[S]eeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon,” Camp seems to filter the wrong objects or at least too many of them through the Kantian dictate of “purposiveness without purpose.” (Ex: “stag movies seen without lust.”) Whereas we might ordinarily imagine an art critic to face off with a work of art, to deliver his judgment, and then imperiously to strike all offenses to good taste from his consciousness, a Camp finds reason to prolong aesthetic experience, preferring to persist in contemplating so-called bad objects rather than to dispense with them.

A newer cohort of Camp theorists has come much closer to appreciating this sensibility for its passivity with respect to critical judgment. Taking their inspiration from the writings of the late literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, these students of affect have re-construed Camp as a form of individual or collective reparation, as opposed to the earlier model of queer sabotage. Camp, according to Sedgwick, teaches us “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture — even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” Though Sedgwick’s account is no doubt appealing in its rhetoric of care, it is also perfectly mistaken. What could be less Camp, for instance, than the deflating re-description of works of art as “objects of culture”? More troubling still, valuing Camp for its therapeutic vampirism (sustenance extraction) transforms an aesthetic sensibility — i.e., an idealistic and idealizing receptivity to art’s purposelessness — into an expressly weak form of utilitarianism. Sontag knew better. “The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.” A Camp does not extract sustenance from a culture inimical to his flourishing. Instead, he aesthetically refines his own masochistic affections. “Camp,” after all, “is a tender feeling.”

Critical writings on Camp — my own, of course, included — always risk disappointment. Sontag took an even stronger stance. “To talk about Camp is to betray it.” The most straightforward way to interpret this betrayal would be to read Sontag as describing a problem of over-exposure. By mainstreaming a seemingly esoteric sensibility, Sontag would in effect be killing it. However, “Notes on ‘Camp’” offers plausible reasons to reject any reduction of Camp — including, of course, Sontag’s own — to “something of a private code.” Pure Camp, at least as Sontag describes it, is nothing like a game that can be given away because Camp is precisely the art of giving the game away. “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient!” The genuine Camp “can only, whatever his intention, exhibit [his sensibility.]” This returns us to the central problem of Book II in the Met’s catalog. Camp fashion requires no critic’s quotes, because Camp is already clothed “in quotation marks.”

And if Camp has nothing to hide, then Sontag’s betrayal must be interpreted otherwise. The more appropriate way to understand the term’s meaning for her text would be to follow the critic’s express intentions and to allow for form to triumph over content. Sontag always considered herself to be a serious writer, which meant for her that her essays ought to be judged first and foremost as writings. “Style is everything.” Nothing would have been more embarrassing than to have criticized Christopher Isherwood’s 1954 account of Camp for its laziness, only to pen an essay of no greater literary distinction. (It isn’t as if Sontag disagrees with Isherwood about what Camp means.) The truly indefensible betrayal of Camp, then, is mediocrity. “When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.” Ultimately, Sontag penned her “Notes” in the hopes that her “betrayal [could] be defended.” If she had to corrupt Camp by making too much sense of it, at least she would not do so with middling prose.

The author appears to have suffered from something like the New Critic’s fear of paraphrase, or the skeptical belief that any critical interpretation of art must necessarily constitute an act of aesthetic disloyalty. As a result, she composed “Notes on ‘Camp’” as notes (as opposed to a more conventional essay format) so that she might avoid “producing a very inferior piece of Camp.” However, once the reader begins to compare the critic’s original “Notes” with those various citations of Oscar Wilde that she intersperses among them, it becomes difficult to arrive at any other judgment. Her text achieves almost nothing of her literary hero’s aphoristic concision. Wanting to get Camp just right, Sontag ended up “jotting” down a series of intricate qualifications. (“The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful … Of course, one can’t always say that.”)

In other words, the closer Sontag comes to representing Camp’s logic in all of its nuance, the more her text falls out of step with Camp form. The writer’s “Notes” emerged from a phobic conflict in her own sensibility, which she described as a “deep sympathy [for Camp] modified by revulsion.” She wanted her essay to be edifying — to help herself and her readers come to terms with Camp — but she also rightly knew that this sensibility had no such practical motivation. Pure camp is in essence “a seriousness that fails,” which Sontag the serious writer could never fully abide. With “Notes,” Sontag may have betrayed Camp defensibly by refusing to betray it herself. It’s just too bad that so many of Sontag’s readers lack her same feeling for treachery.

Banner Image: Bertrand Guyon (French, born 1965) for House of Schiaparelli (French, founded 1927). Ensemble, fall/winter 2018–19 haute couture. Courtesy of Schiaparelli. Photo © Johnny Dufort, 2019

Alex Weintraub is an art historian and critic based in New York City. He earned his PhD from Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology.

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