#homelander definitely zones out a lot and puts when Not About Him

[blindmagdalena]

Currently wondering how Homie would react to an s/o who has a passion for the ocean and all the animals in it. Has plenty of pet fish at home, gives them the best care and thinks they're the cutest little things ever; has several books about sea life (mostly sharks), her favorite childhood movie is Finding Nemo, etc. Obviously gets along swimmingly with the Deep, pun intended 😂 The guy could start a 3-hour long story starting with "So I was talking to some clownfish..." and she'd be genuinely interested to hear about the fish while the rest of the room is falling asleep bored

(I just described myself in this hehe)

he’d tell the Deep privately that if he ever talks to you again, he’ll pull out his liver with his bare hands and feed it to him.

but then when you offhandedly mention how the Deep is suddenly snubbing you, and how much it’s bothering you, Homelander offers a sympathetic expression and says, “What? C’mon, let’s go see what’s up.”

and then he stands behind you glaring daggers at the Deep, who’s looking between the two of you like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world as he desperately tries to navigate HL telling him not to talk to you while also asking why he won’t talk to you

[cinearia]

The way the flowers remind me of you

Summary: Emerie values her work with your store in a world where it was not expected of someone like her. That routine is different, varying from her work, to her reading, and her time with her friends, that the time she spends with Nesta has become something common when she gets a new friend.

Except that the things she feels when it's just her and Nesta is not exactly what someone think for a "friend"

----------

Packing new merchandise became easier when Emerie shop started to have more customers. When unloading and organizing everything on her own started to pay off after receiving the profit from sales. It was a lot of work for one, but it was how worked with her for a long time.

She would swear with her soul, most of the time requiring more mental than physical strength to complete the task completely, in which it seemed more advantageous to drop everything. She had no friends and money to risk getting into debt. Whatever had to do, Emerie had to do alone. In the first few days there she noticed the looks she got when people heard that she claimed her father's store.

The loading gave her physical strength, at least. And the little time Cassian stayed to train taught her the damage it could do if she wanted to hurt someone and turn most manual jobs less suffering.

Your primary purpose, however, was defense, to make time to run while immobilizing. Emerie refused to put her hands up to hurt someone in vain, even if he is a filthy drunk man. Like being proud of a wound she caused, things that her father and uncle often did. Emerie has always chosen to find another solution that does not necessarily come from violence.

What could come up with after leaving a black eye on someone, she didn't want to know. She had no interest in being in a leather uniform that looked more like a second layer of skin than a suit for battle. Calling herself a warrior seemed so distant from what she saw herself, although it was fun to be with her friends.

Curious, being in that store is where was she find more comforting than holding a sword. Even if at any moment she is threatened to lose it. At this point, the chance went to zero. Training with those two warriors at Rhysand court served a purpose. How long had Bellius not come? How much profit has started coming into the store in the past few weeks?

It was enough for her to say that the whole fight was worth it. That not even the title of warrior could take away. Only Emerie knows how she felt.

For how long did you have to do all the calculations by herself? Pack and tidy each showcase, listening to one of your cousins who was not grumbling that a certain part was wrong, that other needed to be fixed, there were two more boxes to be opened. Look at the splinters on your fingers, cousin. Careful with the nails. He never bothered to take them out - he was a woodcutter once, he knew how those things hurt. Her aunt, who once had some of her dresses sewn and intended to order her wedding dress, asked about Emerie ingrown toenails, ignoring the bandaged fingers and purple stains.

Most of the store that has been redecorated, except the glass and the walls, was by her. Emerie was proud to say that she did it. But anguish came from nowhere every time someone in her family commented on it. Although they did not know that it was Emerie who did most of the work, it was her who chose what the store would look like.

It wasn't the most perfect place in the world, it had parts peeling off, but it couldn't be that bad.

From Bellius smile, he knew his words hit her.

Once Emerie forgot to mask her dark circles under the eyes with makeup. You are so tired. A luscious tone as a lullaby.

If she shrugs, they can deviate from that subject and say how much shrugging was disrespectful. If you just sigh and say you had more to do, they would say everything they had to say and leave. Emerie could lean over the bed and think, rest on the blanket and resist the urge to slip under the covers and not go out for days. She could reconsider for the thousandth time and accept defeat as a good loser, go somewhere else, build a market stall, or work for another store - if she wasn't spiteful.

Was it wrong not to know how to feel after her father died? How Emerie can be angry if he showed her the store, let her pass the free time as she wanted there. How Emerie is going to feel sad if he doesn't come to her comfort when she begged them to not cut the wings, was in tears with pain, and ignored his gaze at everyone who flew away?

Emerie already noticed pity in his countenance when noticed the change in her movements, the difficulty of getting up, which was already constant before she cut her wings. Emerie case seems more critical. Maybe because she was born that way? Or because she got worse when she lost her ability to fly with much of her motor activity?

Where it had been clear as Illyrian skies when the man of the family was last seen going off to war as she looked… Simply horrible. How she had to beg to go to a specialized doctor, not the one who was there when her clipping happened. Other than the one who'd been at family lunches on weekends longer than Emerie had in her life, but who had always been a good attraction for him and any young woman who came to age of majority.

For one who can tell them that Emerie moves might not change. That being born that way did not make it synonymous of frailty. No one needed to cast a pitying look on her every time they noticed.

Even though it's useless to wait for the look people gave her since that day to stop, they'll still remember how she was before the clipping, how she tried to fight, how she cursed everyone around her, how there was little, very little, chance to the doctor hit her, if your father hadn't.

A relief just to know she wasn't mistaken. That not everything she said was pure female hysteria or post-clipping stress. A good doctor would tell that it wasn't just her high hormones, that breaking out of her comfort zone wasn't running counter to everything she believed. And even if Emerie started to develop that ideia though the years, hearing someone say it aloud was a final sentence that she was not crazy.

There was a feeling growing inside her that many others also had. Emerie wanted to know how they managed it, how they buried and buried for the decades that were left to them. Without wings, but with thousands around her, with a pair who would take her being and soul and cradle all her desires as long as there's something in return.

They came in so many ways, disguised themselves as docile words, in a different skin, so that if you ever realize you've left one walled prison for another, it's too late. And there's a lot to just turn your back on. Can be a baby in the arms, but just the security of a family can provide to a single person. If Emerie was really smart, she would have seen it in time, and maybe, just maybe, she still could fly.

Gwyn heard it from her mouth. Emerie has never heard your voice low before. She let her braid her hair while told where she would go if the store didn't work. One day she could go to the Dawn Court. Gwyn's eyes lit up at the idea.

One day it would take a long time, but it was possible. In addition to the mountains of Illyrian, further south of Prythian, there would be something that interested her that would make her leave that territory. Something she didn't know and didn't allow herself to think about when she grew up. Emerie didn't have a reason, since Illyrians didn't usually leave their homeland, but it was also possible.

Emerie stopped limiting the things she think, she doesn't know when she started to, even when more obligations fell the more she become a woman, but began to fear what was out of those lands. If she can't run a store, what makes her think she could travel to another court?

Gwyn spoke encouraging words. Said that Emerie would pay for her trip to some strange library at the Day Court. That she will pay the presents that Gwyn will bring to the other friends in the library of the priestess. And it would be so rich that it would finance Nesta's trip as well.

The worst was that it seemed like a good idea, but she was never sure what Nesta wanted living there and never asked her where she would like to go. Anywhere but the mountains of Illyrian? She guess, so. But where?

What was the High Lady sister doing in those mountains with a body that definitely didn't look like a warrior? The sister who cut off the head of the King of Hybern, for sure. But why was she there? Why there, if she leaves with the blood boiling all the end of conversation with that general? What did she think when they talked about her High Lord when she corrected them saying that he was not her High Lord? What Emerie could know with those disconnected facts that she can't notice?

Nesta had been visiting for months and Emerie still had no idea. When Gwyn finish her work, she get together with the other women in the library for some kind of stupid game or conversation. Something they do after work and bring Gwyn to meet anothers Nymphs and others storys that she really wanted to hear, wich was great seen her interact with the other woman there. Meanwhile, it was just Nesta and Emerie.

Nesta smiled a lot when it was just them. It fell apart when Emerie smiled back, and thought, and stared, something inside turning off and on again, trying to regain her senses, and looking away quickly.

Emerie learned to notice the first signs in Nesta, as if she saw a side of her that not even her family – her sisters, in fact – knew about. Your presence became frequent, common in that environment. When Nesta went back to home, her scent was there, pervading the chair near the counter.

A scent of lilies, or hydrangeas, Emerie didn't know how to differentiate, floating in the air while she was doing some task.

Just focus on checking some corner of the store until it becomes just a smell of flowers. She opened the back window to run the late-afternoon air, warmer than Illyrian winter wind, dispensing with her friend remnants, and went out to buy her ordered dinner on two corners. Then the cycle begins, following her own routine.

At that time, everyone was already closing their shops, receiving good night from the neighbors, taking her food and making her way back.

Nesta huddled in her room, enjoying reading in an armchair next to the bed, interrupted by Cassian or Azriel call for dinner. If she forced herself to eat as much as she needed, as much as Emerie insisted that she have to do, she soon returned to her reading after splinters exchanged with the general. Maybe given more attention to Cassian, turning a fight into something more, smelling the fight of his skin and a perfumed essence in hers, rubbing the skin on each other like the characters in the books she read. Emerie embraced the cold of the night, smelling of the warm breads in the bag she carried mixing with a flower shop near her store. She was able to smell the lilies and the violets and to distinguish, when leaned, the hydrangeas sprouting from a vase.

And then the cycle started again. Her daydreams disappeared with sleep, as they accompanied Emerie when she tried to dream a dreamless night and Nesta's face disappeared with her consciousness. And would come back the next day. And again. And again. And again. To the point that she didn't remember when it started.

Emerie only sold clothes and utensils, but maybe all this had to be a sign to sell flowers too.

The bell rang just before a person was on the other side of the store. Emerie lifted her body, containing the sound that would come out of her throat with the effort, seeking to balance her body with the wings. Her senses were slow since the cut on the wings, but after so long trying to get used to the different joints, Emerie disguised it.

A book was between Nesta chest and her arms crossed. If she tried to hide, it was a very flawed act to use thin arms, and too late when she took him behind her back.

How does she manage to carry weight with them? Emerie noticed some new body mass. For training with the general, for sure. Over the long sleeves of a blue-violet dress, her skirt came loose from her waist. On the spine a brown corset to adjust the spine. What for, exactly? Did Nessa ever relax her spine?

"I want to give you something"

Emerie met her eyes, looking into hers and at the same time her whole body. Rarely did Emerie dress like the women of the High Court. Nesta can combine the simple and the beautiful at once, nor matters wich one is majority.

Emerie, on the other hand, wore the apron she liked so much, because she was the one who sewed it, and a brown dress. Somehow, Nesta looked at her as if she were the tallest lady of any court.

She shouldn't be excited about that feeling.

"What would it be?" Emerie smirked.

Nesta lifted her chin, level with hers, spine erect and shoulders low. The thin neck stretched as if it were going to detach from the body. Reached out to deposit a small book in the middle of the counter. Emerie fingers almost turned him toward her, if an orange tulip wrapped in two tiny daisies didn't get her attention.

Emerie looked from the flowers to Nesta. Her face was impassive.

"Would it be for me, too?"

Nesta shook her head, anxious or neutral, Emerie couldn't say anymore, but saw her swallow hard before turning to the book. Picked up the flowers by the stem, closely examining a tulip and the daisies adorning around it. Emerie was never a fan of flowers, but the color matched the cover of the book. She read the title out loud.

"I think it suits your taste" Nesta said "It has romance, a little bit of smut, but a lot of mystery. The author balancead between and it was... Really great. It's a special edition. I got it at the bottom of a bookcase when I was polishing the books"

Emerie noticed the lines of folds at the edges of the cover, and, flicking through quickly, some idiot thought it a good idea to fold the pages as a highlighter. The leaves denounced their long years, disagreeing with the polished cover several times and an outdated edition.

"Well, thank you" Emerie thanked her and held up the flowers "And thanks for that too, although I don't know where to put them"

The words came out with her regret.

"Tell me what you think when you finish"

"Did you get it from the library?"

A wave with her head.

"Is that allowed?"

"Gwyn said yes"

"Gwyn say yes to many things"

A smile appeared on her dark salmon-colored lips and a light brush on your cheeks.

"Nobody would notice. It's not like I'm the only one to pick things up without Merril knowing. If you knew what the Priestesses do when they're alone" she winked "It's good to distract them, have a little fun. Gwyn even got along with some of them"

"Good. We're not the only who are going to endure her"

Sometimes, Emerie feared they would think that everything she said was true. Nesta laughed. "Oh, not really" she left her hands on the counter, close to her body.

Emerie felt on the other side. A scent that was definitely hydrangeas rising as she heard a lower voice, soft as a flower, from Nesta "Don't worry"

She stared at her, gray blue eyes glued to hers with unbelievable attention. The way Emerie, she reflected that second, never saw Nesta look at anyone. To a favorite book in her hands? For a suitor? For Cassian?

Has anyone ever looked at Emerie with such interest?

"I wouldn't think of leaving you anytime soon"

Emerie smiled, she couldn't tell from the way Nesta smiled or for the irony.

For the irony, of course.

--------------------------------------

A one-shot of what I would think if it were Nesta x Emerie. Because Nesta deserves more than Cassian does to her (sorry, but I completely dislike Nessian) and Emerie deserved more development.

So, this is just an au that I did very quickly and just to do. I also like their friendship, but I would also like to see them as a couple.

Could it be a crackship? Yes, but I don't regret it yet.

[musubiki]

🅱️ls tell me more about the merchant so I can make him the moodboard he deserves

👀

i talked a lil bit about him here, but heres some more!!!

- as per usual for the mood boards…his favorite oreos are………………………the mystery flavor oreos LOL

- he’s almost always smiling/grinning!! only times he’s not is when his wares spoil and/or he somehow got ripped off or lost some money

- a total con man. he will try to market his unfavorable goods to you. do not listen. just buy what you went there to buy and leave before you gets you to spend more than what you want

- this is why the merchant doesn’t have many friends (if any at all) and also why no one really challenges his prices. they just wanna buy shit and LEAVE before he tries to sell them. like. some pencils or something

- mochi and lime are one of the few guilds that actually take some time to talk to him/give him a hard time. he both loves and hates them for it

- has a policy of no fighting near his shop. sometimes two witches will end up going to him at the same time. the merchant’s shop is a neutral zone and all scuffles will be done at least 20 miles from his present location

- surprisingly, he doesn’t seem to mind being a loner. he’s just enjoying his life. he doesn’t even have a lil friend to keep him company. he’s just riffin

- mochis offered to summon a little flame wisp for him as a little friend, but he refused. guess he just likes his alone time

- doesn’t seem to have a home either. when he’s not found wandering with his backpack or setting up shop in some town, he's just camping out by some fire in the wilderness. 

- animals don’t seem to mind him

- easy to run into at random, but if you go looking for him, its almost impossible to find him. why? no one knows. just stop looking and he’ll pop up soon.

- also a regular at the underground fighting ring/goods market, where there are plenty other shady salesmen selling their wares. sometimes you can get unique stuff down there, but the merchant prides himself on having the highest quality goods

- i think……he might have a scarier, unhinged form. for when someone steals his backpack. still working on the beta but he., definitely changes form. to some degree.

- i WANT to say hes a pun master because he gives off that vibe, but doing so would require ME to make the puns so lets just say pun master pending..,…depending on how much effort i wanna put into his puns..

- even though he has no home/family/whatever, he claims to come from the mountain region. everyone just says “yeah okay that makes sense.” the mountain region has too much weird shit that they just accept it. normal mountain region stuff

- seems to be known far and wide. hed show up somewhere and the most unlikely people would be like “oh the merchant? yeah i know that guy. he sold me a rotten tomato once.”

- no backstory. no history. no past, present, or future relationships. no records. claims to have a homeland, but its unconfirmed and foggy at best. no friends. no family. nothing to spend his money on. no information to be had. and no questions asked or answered

- when mochi (and most witches) find this out they feel bad for him??? and a lot of them (mochi included) offer to let him live with them, hang out sometime, make friends or whatever, and he refuses. usually with a grin and a joking remark, but refuses nonetheless. no one knows why. mochi thinks it has something to do with the inscriptions on his arms, but again, it’s unconfirmed and foggy at best.

- and i can’t stress this enough but Sullivan DOES NOT LIKE THE MERCHANT.

- not that he hates him, but the merchant is maybe the only person in the hundred-thousand-something years Sullivan has been alive, that he has no idea what this man is. and Sullivan is supposed to be like. the information archive. he keeps the info/records on everything and everyone. hes the guy witches go to for information on LITERALLY everything,. and he has nothing on the merchant. NOTHING,. it’s unnerving and unsettling and it makes his stomach sick and he doesn’t like the implications behind it.

- also keep in mind sullivan is also like. lord of the underworld, the gatekeeper between life and death, maybe one of the most powerful members of the magic community. hes been alive for so long and has been everywhere, seen everything, he doesnt hate people easily, or at all. again, hes like a hundred-thousand-something years old (and still fairly young for an undertaker), so even despite these interactions he has with mochi, lime, murda, pom, everyone, theyre essentially a moment passing by for him. he sees them more like mice. children, really. to be taken seriously, but not for long (at least for him). hes nearly all-knowing and on another plane of reality than the rest of the magic community. he operates more like a brick wall than anything (with some teasing here and there to entertain himself), but the merchant….,.,.,..he does not like him. 

- the merchant knows Sullivan doesn’t like him. he has no comment on the matter other than an ominously cheerful laugh and an “Old horn-brains gotta lighten up a bit! Maybe buy some lizard tongues from Fichard Mire! Fresh in stock!” 

- i cant emphasize or convey how much the ability to unnerve Sullivan is terrifying to me. 

- i dont know how else to describe that Sullivan is both an unstoppable force and an immovable object, and this one fucking guy, who poses no outward threat to anything but your wallet, upsets that. 

- honestly, i personally am horrified of the merchant i have no idea what he is and im terrified to delve deeper into him to find out

[lilacmoon83]

Lightning in a Bottle

Also on Fanfiction.net and A03

Chapter 20: Off Radar, Pt 2

"Doctor...I'm not sure the patients can take much more. We risk losing them if we continue at this voltage," one of the technicians warned.

"We are not stopping," the doctor replied. He was short, with glasses and dark blond hair. His eyes were cold and unfeeling, as he examined the raw data. His life's work had come down to this. He had always walked a thin line between medicine and what was considered very fringe, experimental practices within the field of medicine. Before now though, much of his work was theoretical. He had never had the funding or clearing to conduct his experiments on living specimens. Especially such intriguing specimens.

He didn't know what had happened up on that plane, but the people that came back were definitely different than they were before. That's where he came in. They wanted and needed to know if the reported gifts these people might have now could be used, exploited and most importantly controlled at will.

"Keep proceeding as planned," he said, as he went upstairs to his office, while the patients were continued to be put through hell.

~*~

Henry was still feverish, but the fever reducer medicine and addition of ice packs had brought him down out of the danger zone for the moment. He wasn't out of the woods yet, but he seemed to be calmer, though he was still muttering various phrases in Spanish.

"I would say this is more evidence that something indirect is going on here. I've never seen anything like it," Regina mentioned to them quietly.

"You think he has a mental link to one of the passengers and he's feeling what is happening to them?" David whispered.

"It sounds insane...but there is nothing wrong with Henry besides this fever. Nothing else makes any sense," she replied.

"Then we have to hope Emma finds this man and helps him. That's the only thing that will help Henry," Margaret said, as David put his arm around her shoulder.

"Emma won't let us down," David assured her with a kiss to her hair.

~*~

Killian looked at her out of the corner of his eye and saw that she was preoccupied on her phone.

"Emma...this could lead nowhere. I need to know what's really going on," he finally said, just as he saw her crane her neck.

"Wait…" she said, as he slowed down.

"What do you see?" Killian asked.

"I see the bus...it's up there on that farm," she replied, as he pulled the car off on the side of the road. They got out and observed the structure from a distance, as Emma snapped some photos with her phone. It quickly became very clear that this was no ordinary farm, for they could clearly see armed mercenaries guarding the property.

"Okay...government black site. Come on Emma...level with me. What the hell is this all about?" he asked, a bit crossly. She was about to answer, but saw a vehicle from the property approaching them.

"Crap…" she hissed, as she opened the trunk and grabbed a screwdriver, before driving it into one of the front tires.

"What the hell are you doing!?" he hissed.

"Making it look like an accident that we are pulled over!" she hissed back, as two armed men got out of the now stopped vehicle.

"What seems to be the problem?" one of the men asked.

"Flat tire…" Emma called. Killian looked at her and went to the trunk to pull out the spare.

"Fortunately, we have a spare and then we'll be on our way," he said, gauging the reaction of the two men. They didn't give much away, but it was clear there was no trust. Whatever they were guarding...they didn't want anyone coming near the property. Unnervingly, Killian changed the tire under their watch and once it was finished, they got back in the car. He nodded to them and started the engine, as he slowly drove off. They found another enclave and pulled off again. Killian looked behind them and got out of the car when he was satisfied that they were not following them. Instead, it seemed like they were heading back to the property and there was much movement.

"Okay...we just found a government black site. Out with it, Emma," he said. She sighed and looked at him, before proceeding to tell him everything.

~*~

"Doctor…" one of the subordinates called.

"What is going on?" he asked.

"We have reason to believe this location may be compromised," the man replied. The doctor cursed inwardly and retreated into his office.

"I will contact headquarters…" he hissed. He didn't like the idea of having to relocate everything and delay his experiments further, but getting caught would ensure no experiments at all.

"See to it that our operation continues for now. The less interruptions, the better," he said, as he sat down at his desk and made the call.

~*~

"And that's why we're here," Emma finished with her explanation and carefully studied his features to gauge his reaction.

"You think Henry is sick...because of one of the missing passengers?" Killian asked.

"I know what it sounds like...but these Callings, we've saved people. We've helped people with them," Emma replied.

"You also almost screwed up my career as well," he reminded her.

"And I didn't force you to take the fall for that! These things...whatever they are...I got that one wrong," she said. He was about to say more, but they saw the car with the mercenaries from before approaching again.

"Get in...they won't be as friendly this time," Killian said, as they got in and a bullet clipped the mirror.

"Bloody hell!" Killian cried, as they fled and Emma sent the photos to her brother, before calling him while they made their escape.

~*~

"A government black site?" David asked, as he was in the hallway on the phone with Emma, as Margaret stepped out with him in time to hear that. He looked at her in concern and her arms went around his waist.

"Are you okay?" David asked, as he continued to listen and then sighed.

"Okay, thanks Emma...I got the photos. I think I know what I need to do next," he replied, as he hung up the phone and looked down at her.

"She found the missing passengers?" Margaret asked.

"She only saw one outside, being led inside a red door, but she did see one of the vans there on this property, which was crawling with mercenaries, possibly military," David replied.

"Oh my God...then they might have them, after all," she realized.

"It's possible...the mercenaries were wearing a patch on their uniform for something called the Unified Dynamics System, but I haven't had a chance to look into the company yet. Emma's going back to the station to do so...but," he said.

"But?" she asked.

"There might be only one way to find out more...but I would need to leave for a while and I don't want to," he said.

"I don't want you to either...but if it can help Henry…" she replied.

"Then I have to try. I just don't know if it will help and I hate the idea of leaving you both," he replied.

"I know...me too, but I also know that you're doing so to save one of our babies," she said, as she slid her arms around his neck and rested her head against his shoulder.

"I know that you're our hero and that you'll be out there trying to save our family," she assured. He looked into her eyes.

"I love you so much…" he said, as he pressed his lips to hers in a passionate kiss.

"I won't be long," he said, as they went back into the room. Henry was still sweating and restless. David kissed him on the forehead and then kissed Margaret one more time, before hurrying out.

~*~

Emma and Killian arrived back at the station and he parked the car.

"You didn't have to hide it, you know...this thing," he said.

"I just told you that I hear voices in my head and that my nephew might be channeling something that's happening to another missing passenger," Emma replied.

"And from anyone else...I wouldn't believe it. But from you...I would and I've never betrayed your trust," he reminded her.

"I know…" she admitted, as they went inside and they began to research the Unified Dynamics System.

"That logo matches what was on the uniform," he said.

"And they employ special ops for security," she replied.

"Looks like they do a lot more than that...a company with a lot of tentacles," he agreed.

"Then I guess we wait to hear from David," she said.

"Wait...what is your brother going to do?" Killian asked.

"He's going to confront Vance," she replied.

"That sounds like a terrible idea," he warned.

"He doesn't care. He's a father trying to save his son," she said gravely.

~*~

David arrived at the Department of Homeland Security building and stormed inside, but was immediately stopped by security.

"My name is David Nolan. I was on Flight 828 and I need to see Director Vance, immediately," he demanded.

"Unless you have an appointment, Mr. Nolan, you need to leave," the security guard said, but over the man's shoulder, David saw another man there and attempted to place him. He could have sworn he had seen him before, but couldn't place him.

"You...can you get me in to see Vance?" he asked. Gold smirked.

"Gentlemen, I can take it from here," Gold said, as he hobbled forward on his cane.

"Director Vance will be more than happy to see Mr. Nolan. I can take him there," he said. The guards were reluctant, but had been ordered to obey any orders from this man as if they were Vance's. They stepped aside and David followed the shorter man.

"Have we met before?" David asked.

"Actually, we have not, but I know a great deal about you, Mr. Nolan. A pleasure at last," he said, as he put his hand forth. David looked at him suspiciously, but then shook it with reluctance.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"My name is Mr. Gold," he replied and David's eyes widened, as the elevator door closed.

"Mr. Gold…" he uttered, as he remembered that name from all the legal and financial forms after his mother died. Mr. Gold's pawn shop and holdings had always sent Jefferson to take care of their financial and legal items necessary. But they had never met the actual financial adviser behind it all.

"You...you're our financial adviser?" he asked in disbelief. He made a gesture with his hand that seemed to confirm that.

"What do you have to do with any of this?" David asked.

"Nothing, except that I have been brought in to consult on the mystery of flight 828 and I must say, the whole thing fascinates me," Gold replied.

"Well, it doesn't fascinate me. It might be killing my son," David snapped. Gold frowned.

"That is unfortunate. Perhaps you can explain it to me then," he said, as they arrived on the top floor and David followed him to Vance's office.

"What is this?" Vance asked curiously, as David stormed into his office with Mr. Gold.

"This is about my son and the government abducting passengers," David said.

"What are you talking about?" Vance asked with scrutiny, as David showed him the photos on his phone.

"This...there are ten missing passengers and we think they are being kept at this black site," David answered.

"Know anything about that?" he asked. Vance looked at the photos and then at David.

"No…I'm afraid I don't," Vance replied. David scoffed.

"As if you would tell me if you did. They're doing something to these missing passengers and it's killing my son!" he claimed.

"Mr. Nolan...I don't know what's going on with your son, but I have no idea what you are talking about," Vance said, as a couple security guards arrived.

"Please see Mr. Nolan out," he said. David shrugged the men off and stormed out, but not before giving both men a hard look.

"Send me the coordinates...I'll see what I can do," Gold said, as he handed his card to David. He looked at him one more time, before being led out.

"What the hell is going on?" Vance hissed.

"Possibly the break in all this that we've been waiting for," Gold said.

"All the passengers are accounted for," Vance insisted.

"Are you positive? What do you know about this Unified Dynamics Systems?" Gold questioned. Vance sighed and picked up the phone, but then set it back down.

"I have the coordinates...let's take a drive," Gold suggested and Vance agreed.

~*~

The doctor slammed the phone down and stormed out of his office and down to the lab where the passengers were still withstanding the grueling experimentation.

"We've been ordered to relocate. Prepare to move the patients," he said crossly. He was very unhappy about the orders, as it meant delay in his work, but they had been exposed and couldn't afford to be caught.

~*~

David arrived back at the hospital room, feeling defeated. He had seemingly made no progress with Vance and now had to face his wife and tell her that he had failed.

"David!" Margaret called, as she rushed to him and he hugged her tightly.

"Baby...he's awake and his fever broke," she said, as her face was alight with hope. He became perplexed at that, but hugged her again, before going to their son's bedside.

"You did it…" Margaret said, as she brushed Henry's hair away from his eyes.

"Except I didn't...Vance claimed he knows nothing about the missing passengers. He barely listened to me," David confessed.

"Then...how did the connection between Henry and Anton break?" she wondered.

"I don't know, which means this might not be over. I'm sorry, my darling...I failed," he said.

"No...you absolutely did not fail. Whatever you did...it stopped the threat to our son," she replied.

"But for how long?" he wondered.

"Maybe long enough to find the missing passengers," she said.

"I hope so," he said, as he held her tightly, while Regina checked him over.

~*~

Vance and Gold drove out to the coordinates that David had given them and found a small farm off the beaten path. They pulled up to the property and looked around, before getting out. Vance motioned for his agents to move in and they cased the entire area.

"It's abandoned, Sir!" one of them called back soon after entering the premises.

"Something tells me not for long," Gold mentioned. Vance looked down and spotted something in the dirt. He took a glove out of his pocket and gently picked up the item with it, finding that it was a bandage, complete with blood on it.

"I would say that you're right," Vance said, as everything David had claimed was suddenly starting to come to fruition.

"So...we have missing passengers and it's being hidden from the NSA. That's not easy to do," Vance said.

"It is if the people that are hiding it are from within your own ranks," Gold surmised. That thought disturbed Vance greatly and he was determined to get to the bottom of this now.

~*~

After Henry's temperature returned to normal, he was normal again, like there had never been anything wrong with him in the first place, Regina discharged him and they took him home. Robert brought Olive home that evening and they spent the night all cuddled together in the same bed. David held Margaret close, as the kids slept on either side of them in their bed. Every few moments, Margaret would brush her hand across Henry's forehead just to reassure herself that he was no longer feverish.

"I still feel like I failed...like whatever is going on has only been delayed," he murmured.

"Even if it is...you did not fail, my love and I know you. You don't give up," she replied, as she pecked him on the lips.

"You're right...I won't give up, until I'm sure our family is safe," he promised. She smiled and cuddled against him and they found themselves quickly falling asleep with their kids.

~*~

Killian poured over the maps and photos that they had taken of the small farm that was turning out to be a black op sight and he caught sight of a photo of Emma. He stared at her photo for a moment and sighed, before looking away. Despite his reluctance to get involved in this and initial skepticism of Emma's explanation, they really appeared to be onto something.

"Hey...I just got word. Turns out that Vance went to the farm...and it's deserted now," Emma said, as she came back with fresh coffee.

"Then we were right...they have missing passengers and Vance wasn't involved," Killian said.

"Which kind of puts us back at square one," Emma replied.

"True...but we found them once. We can do it again," he said.

"I hope so...David is certain that we need to find this Anton Garcia or Henry is still in danger," Emma replied.

"If Vance doesn't know about this...that's telling. I mean, the NSA pretty much knows all...unless," Killian said.

"Unless?" she asked.

"Well, if the military wanted to hide it from the NSA, they have their ways," he replied.

"It would make sense that the military would have an interest in the passengers. It's no secret that they've already suggested that we might be a threat to national security," Emma said.

"Still...to break away from the NSA on a matter of supposed National Security violates protocol," he replied.

"Our history is littered with the government doing shady stuff in the name of National Security," she reminded him.

"Very true...let's keep digging into this Unified Dynamics Systems. They seem like the perfect front if there ever was one," he agreed, as they returned to work.

~*~

Anton muttered something unintelligible, as his bed was wheeled into the new underground facility. The doctor oversaw the set up from above and answered his cell phone as it rang.

"Yes…" he answered.

"The interruption was an unfortunate delay, but we will soon be back online and resume our operation," he reported...

[courage-a-word-of-justice]

Fate/Zero 1 - 25 (FINAL)

Most of these notes stayed intact during Fate/Stay Winter posts, but I’m releasing them in an unedited version here (aside from the dotpoints and read more, of course).

Fate/Zero 1

For some reason, I have it recorded that I’ve watched F/Z ep. 1, but I don’t remember it!  I only remember Saber fighting someone…that’s why I have notes for this ep too.

Ewwwwwww…what’s that in the Macedonian box…?

Oh! Heaven’s Feel is the name of one of the movies that came out this year or last.

LOL, the grandparents of Waver literally refer to him as “Waver”. I thought it was a title. Is it really his name???

I’m very good at making connections between seemingly disconnected things using only the things I know. I predict Kariya’s in for a verrrrrrrry bad time and will probably die in this Grail War, if not go bananas. I already know Rin, Ilya (the Einzbern child) and Sakura are already part of the Fate/ canon, so they’re probably going to fight in a Grail War as well.

Ahhhhhhh! B*stard Archer (that is, Gilgamesh)! He’s hereeeeeeeee!

What’s that counter on the ep title card…? Is it the time until the Grail War…?

Fate/Zero 2

I’ve seen enough spoilers being bandied about that I already know Rider is Alexander the Great.

Like, seriously, why do we call the dude “Waver Velvet”? What’s his real name?

Kiritsugu acts as Ilya’s dad, but…I’m pretty sure he isn’t her dad. Kiritsugu’s surname is Emiya, right? He’s Shirou’s dad, as far as I know. Then again, I only know what I know from being around Fate/ fans for so long.

LOL, there are far too many dragons in this name – Ryuunosuke Uryuu.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh! Is this Giant B*stard Archer???? Is this Giant B*stard Archer??? (i.e. Gilgamesh) Oooooooooh! No wonder people like Gilgamesh, even though they call him a giant loveable b*stard.

Fate/Zero 3

Thy don’t call Rider that for nothin’, eh?

I wonder how Saber managed to get a passport…? She’d need one, eh?

Oh…CGI car…it’s burning my eyesssssssss! (although I do believe Troyca didn’t do any better with El-Melloi’s Case Files)

“Hotel in Fuyuki” – They couldn’t be any more explicit with this stuff, could they…?

“…Highness.” – I can see why Saber is so popular with the Fate/ fans now.

Huh? I seem to remember the battle that comes next! Damn *bleep* <- (censored name of anime club manager responsible for the anime marathon that caused me to go from the beginning of F/Z in the first place)! I definitely remember Saber fighting Lancer.

Fate/Zero 4

(sorry, seen this one! That’s where the confusion was! So no notes here!)

Fate/Zero 5

Berserker looks like Goblin Slayer covered in smoke…LOL.

…Well, they don’t call that guy Berserker for nothin’ either.

Rider would make a great Santa Claus, LOL.

Fate/Zero 6

Isn’t there a Joan of Arc in the Netflix Fate/ (Apocrypha)?

Dang, that Kayneth is an evil b*stard, alright!

Kirei is basically Wolverine…?

No wonder you never hear about Caster when people talk about Fate/…he’s neither hot nor a waifu…so nobody gives a s*** about him.

Fate/Zero 7

Is that a Gantz?

Wait, y’mean Rider is motivated…by pants? *spits* Hahahaha…

You can see Ufotable’s much-praised CGI at work here, too.

I can definitely see why Ufotable was chosen for Katsugeki and why they chose Izuminokami for their protag.

Had to google Jeanne to remember what she looks like in this universe, but yeah…she does look like Saber.

For some reason, I had a fleeting thought that Lancer would be the one to be on the mountain alongside Saber…I was right.

So basically, the entire Fate/ series is this: who would win? A mage or an assassin? (Or something like this.)

Fate/Zero 8

I still think Kirei is basically Wolverine.

Kiritsugu = “to cut and tie”.Update: It’s “to tie” and “to inherit”, apparently.

F/Z 9

I wonder…just what is Lancer’s motivation for the Grail? Surely, Servants have their own motives…

I literally covered my eyes when Sola-Ui bent Kayneth’s finger back…it was almost as bad as seeing Nozomi get tortured (Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka)…*gulp*

“Not well” is an understatement, Sola-Ui.

I had to google how old Waver was in this Grail War…he’s 19, apparently, so right in my strike zone right here, so to speak~.

Beleaguered Waver is what you cool kids would call the 2020 Mood…and yes, I’m watching this on the 1st of January, 2020 (but you’re reading this after I put it up later in the month), so I’m keeping the comment.

“What kind of moron would go busting in?” – *facepalm* It seems Rider would.

What the heck is Rider riding his chariot over on the floor, anyway? What’s up with these sewer creatures ? They’ve got tentacles…!

F/Z 10

Rin reminds me of Asuka (NGE)…*gulp* That can only mean bad things for her.

Zenjo? I’ll make a note of that name.

That one glowing sign says “Fuyuki Station”.

Rin no Bouken = Rin’s Adventure. I don’t see why the subbers included “Big” in there, tbh.

F/Z 11

Uh-oh. Why do I get the feeling Saber’s going to get very, very drunk…?

Gee whiz, the great b*stard is a narcissist…

Well, sometimes I forget I had “Archer = Gilgamesh” spoilt for me ages ago…probably because he’s all over Babylonia, not to mention he seems to be one of the more popular characters precisely because he is the great b*stard.

“I wish for my homeland’s salvation.” – An interesting thing to say, considering Brexit.

What the f*** is a Gordius…oh, okay. So that’s Rider’s chariot.

How many Assassins are there??? I thought there was just the one, but there were 4 last time.

This discussion is interesting…no wonder Saber got mistaken for Joan of Arc back in the day.

Welp, Assassins gotta assassinate…*shrugs*

Eyyyyyy…there’s this one guy who looks basically like an older Waver Velvet! That explains a few things, I think.

F/Z 12

“Ramasonic” (sic).

I still think Gil-I mean, Archer’s snakeskin pants are hilarious.

I feel like last episode was a lot better in regards to how good Fate/ could be. This episode is just Ufotable animating talking Gilgamesh and Kirei heads.

Why do I get a bad feeling something bad’s going to happen to Maiya…again?

Kirei trying to look bada*s while leaning against a wall…it looks sort of funny, to be honest with you…because he bends his neck at a funny angle.

F/Z 13

This is the end of the 1st cour, apparently…according to AniList, at least.

“…5 billion people.” – I think the number is 7 billion now, but okay.

Never leave your Servant unsupervised, amirite?

I saw one of the bookstore’s shelves has science fiction on it…hmm, in a show with magic, that seems ironic…or was that non-fiction? Also somewhat ironic.

Oh, this “Don’t you want to do anything fun?” from Rider to Waver is an interesting parallel to Kirei’s episode (the previous one).

Dragon guy’s off his rocker…seriously.

Paraphrasing here, but “…if you want to use the Grail to make yourself taller…” – then stick to milk and other calcium products, Waver…LOL. I mean, other anime characters do.

Even Saber Naruto runs! There are no aliens here…but that car does have gull-wing doors (<-had to google what the doors were called), so…is it a DeLorean or something? Then someone could time travel instead.

I thought one of the previous commands from the overseers was to defeat Caster…?

Fate/Zero has become a kaiju movie, LOL.

Scared Waver is also a 2020 Mood…LOL.

F/Z 14

What’s this “Giant of Light” business…?

Geesh…If Ufotable did a Godzilla movie, I would watch that…(now that this monster makes me think of that possibility.)

This is a small quibble, but is it “Diabolo” or “Diablo”?

Somehow it didn’t even hit me until the fight was halfway over…but does Gilgamesh control a flying airship as part of his Noble Phantasm?!

Pretty scenery or not, talking people standing still are just that…not very entertaining, for sure. It’s basically the only flaw of this series, aside from the fact it hasn’t plumbed the depths of its themes yet.

Ufotable’s clouds look kind of like Gainax’s in Houkago no Pleiades, huh?

Tokiomi seems to blame Kariya for the whole sister vs. sister thing. Hmm, it really just shows how demented the guy is.

F/Z 15

Berserker is only ever in CGI, huh? No wonder Ufotable was given the job.

“That’s…from King Arthur’s legend…” – Can I please interrupt with the Excalibur song? (I’m annoying like that and want to ruin your level of immersion, that’s why.)

Hey, who knew? We get to see Joan in this anime, too. Thank you, Ufotable and Type Moon for saving me a Netflix subscription.

F/Z 16

“Things have been rather hectic this evening.” – Well, you don’t say…

*Saber and Lancer start their fight * - I detect signs there may have been people shipping Saber and Lancer at this point in time, what with their mutual ideas of honour and such.

Kayneth is kind childish, LOL – he’s like a kid peeping at his parents while they complain to each other about a hard day’s work or something.

Uh, this curse from Lancer here is definitely gonna be relevant later, right…?

I was muttering, “Oh goodness” (<- I’m self-censoring here, but you get the point) a few times over when Kiritsugu and Maiya finally got around to killing Kayneth, Lancer and Kayneth’s fiancee. By the way, were those two ever married…? Also, this makes me wonder…what would happen if you got a completely useless Servant? Like “King of Fools” or something. It would sound like the Familiar of Zero, sure, but it would be an interesting exercise in making a compelling narrative.

F/Z 17

Dangit, B*stard Archer. Disappearing just after you provoked Kirei…

Oh! I found the Avalon scene confusing at first, but now that they explain it, it makes a lot more sense.

“As I live and breathe, Kirei!” – Sounds mighty ironic for a meant-to-be-dead historical figure to say that.

F/Z 18

We jump to someone else’s story…or do we?

For some reason, I think this beach place is based on Okinawa. (It seems like the best match.)

“This isn’t a game.” – Seems highly ironic, given his current situation.

I know Kiritsugu is probably looking into Shirley’s eyes, but all they show is the boobs downwards, so I imagine it to be fanservice.

That shaking was just to disguise the bad animation, wasn’t it…?

…and suddenly, zombies!

Well, that’s great, Kiritsugu. You ended up burning down a village by association. Good job…

“Vampires.” – Well, that wasn’t the word I was expecting…

For some reason, I think this new arrival is a woman, but now that I get a proper look at their face, they kinda look like the Great B*stard (Gilgamesh). Update: It looks like they have cleavage, but then they also kinda resemble Samatoki (Hyp Mic)…so, uh…I dunno. Update 2: Okay, she’s a woman…Natalia, to be precise.

The houses on fire look a lot like the ones in Katsugeki, come to think of it.

F/Z 19

Wait, what’s a Mystic Code again…?

Oh, I didn’t think this show would do it, but there’s a good few seconds of recap. I know, because I had to skip it.

Oh, the reason Kiritsugu doesn’t seem to ally with the Association or the Church is because Natalia wasn’t part of either. Right…I’m so dumb.

Am I just reading into Kiritsugu’s pose here too much, or does he look like Christ the Redeemer a bit…?

There’s something oddly pretty about Vorzak. Then again…it’s too bad he’s designated to be dead.

I could tell Kiritsugu was CGI for a second…but he was in fog. Dangit, Ufotable. You know how to disguise your CGI well.

…Okay, those bees were very CGI. Scrap what I just said.

Bees on a plane. What a way to die.

I’ve noticed Kiritsugu’s eyes don’t have any pupils in them. They’re always kind of dead, but not in th same way En’s (<- from Boueibu) are.

What happened to Kiritsugu’s mother…?

The extended flashback seems to be the best way to my heart, assuming you can pull it off properly.

What’s with that “sometime, somewhere”?

F/Z 20

There hasn’t been a proper OP since 3 episodes ago.

Was Maiya ever interested in Kiritsugu as a woman? This vague pseudo-harem sorta annoys me, which is why I need answers.

The crows in this show aren’t very fluffy. Not that I have a problem with that…it’s just a bit random (and I’m saying that as I operate without much sleep and will have a huge period of getting up early in my near future, so you’re probably going to see even more randomness coming from my brain).

Modanyaki. Never thought I’d be googling a Japanese concept for this anime.

This sleeping bag Waver reminds me of Aizawa, but this is at least 4 years too early for that.

That cloud in the top left is shaped funny…like a knight, maybe? (There’s a triangular bit that looks lik a helmet.)

I believe the bird is a bush warbler (uguisu), based on the colour.

So this is where you learn what the f*** a Gordius Wheel is…right.(sounds a bit pissed)

Seeing Kariya squirm…it makes me thank my lucky stars I had the sound off. My imagination makes the scene worse, though.

So fakers beget fakers and killers beget killers, huh? Not surprising.

“I’ve always told him he was doing the right thing.” – Because you didn’t know any better, huh, Iri?

F/Z 21

“Knight on Two Wheels” – What would that knight be riding, a bike…? (somewhat sarcastic)

…A motorbike. Close enough. (not sarcastic anymore)

The motorbike’s plate says “Fuyuki - Te” – instead of a licence plate combo, Japan has a single hiragana.

Well, at least now I know why you never hear of Kariya outside Fate/Zero much…those worms don’t give him long to live.

Isn’t Tokiomi dead though…?

Holy s***, Kariya, you just got framed! *yells in the tone of voice as if Kariya got owned…which he did, in a sense*

*brow furrowed* What’s up with the framing of Aoi’s killing that makes this seem like attempted rape…?

Kirei looks all dead inside. (LOL) I know it’s the animators’ fault that they didn’t bother with him in that scene, but…he has the eyes of a dead fish there, y’know? I can’t help but laugh.

F/Z 22

Never in my life have I seen a grandpa want to talk on the roof.

The grandpa reminds me of Rider…that’s probably where part of their relationship comes from.

You can see the lack of sleep is getting to Kiritsugu right now…his face looks a little sunken…

…Fate/ is apparently pretty infamous for treating its women badly from a feminist persepctive and I think I get why now…(referring to the death of Aoi and now Kirei’s treatment of Iri)

I think the scariest part of F/Z is watching th emotionless guy learn how to feel…kinda like Equilibrium, y’know?

Hmm? I wonder how this show will choose to end, since it’s signalling its end from 3 episodes out?

I predicted Rider would say something along the lines of “…befitting of the Rider class” and lo and behold! He did!

So Rider can summon a single horse as well as the entire chariot? *Saitama face* Okay then.

Number of Times Waver Appears: 1, Number of Times Waver Cries: 1, Number of Times Waver Blushes: 2

Come to think of it, even though I had that weird “Ohhhhhh! Great B*stard Archer!” reaction at first, Gilgamesh has shown up in most of the worst scenes of this show so far (basically, most of the “talking heads” scenes where he talks shop with Kirei). Then again, my change in feelings probably because I’ve had to keep a special eye out for Waver and knew Saber was the poster girl for the entire series.

The counter appears to be “time until the Holy Grail War”…well, that or its final conflict.

F/Z 23

I like how Waver’s joining in with Rider’s yelling.

I have the sound off, so now I’m just mentally narrating Sakura with this creepy child voice and it’s spooking me out…the Urobutcher could really go toe-to-toe with Stephen King if it weren’t my imagination…(LOL…?)

I feel sorry for that car’s owner…the car wasn’t meant to be wrecked…

I fully expect Berserker to be Lancelot or some other guy in King Arthur’s canon, judging by Saber’s reactio-hey, who’s Arondight…? Update: Oh, f***. It really is Lancelot. Turns out Arondight is the name of Lancelot’s sword. How did I know? There’s that upcoming Camelot adaption, isn’t there? Connect the dots.

Oh, f*** me – I feel conflicted. On the one hand, Lancelot’s hella handsome (and his dark hair is exactly my kinda thing), on the other hand…doesn’t he look like he came out of Castlevania or Vampire Hunter D or something??? F***in’ vampires!

Oh, f*** again, I stand corrected. Lancelot was handsome, before he became a Caster-looking…thing.

*bursts into spontaneous laughter* The new Lancelot looks kinda like Tsukasa from Dr Stone, LOL.

Number of Times Waver Cries: 2

Wait, isn’t Bucephalus Greek??? Update: No, he wasn’t. He was Alexander the Great’s horse. That explains why he’s Rider.

I was wondering how Waver managed to live long enough to be El-Melloi II when he was stuck in a battle to the death. Welp, that’s how he did it, folks! *points at screen*

Number of Times Waver Cries: 3…but…anti-climax, much, f***in’ Gilgamesh???

Uh, what’s up with Psalm 23:4? (I had to google that snippet of the Bible to find out its citation.)

LOL, Kirei and Kiritsugu have very similar faces. Didn’t realise that until now.

F/Z 24

It’s weird seeing Kirei full of fighting spirit…He’s still frickin’ Wolverine, though.

Is this taking cues from the Matrix? I bought it from the charity store the other day because I haven’t seen it yet, but I know Bullet Time from TV Tropes.

Now Kirei is channeling Bruce Lee, LOL.

Ouch…the bullet to the hand reminds me of the nail gun scene in The Island (which still freaks me out to this day). (…and now I’ve gone and done it – every time I think of that movie, I get the song The Island – part 1, at least - in my head as well.)

I can almost see Sakaido (from ID: Invaded) in some of these scenes instead of Kiritsugu…trust Ei Aoki and associates to do that.

I went to dump a screenshot in Paint and one of my Fate/ backgrounds from one of the previous posts was set to my background! (I have my backgrounds set to rotate every 12 hours and I have over 600 pictures for that purpose.) *sighs happily and incredulously* Well, whaddaya know…sometimes the stars do align.

I almost expected Shirley to appear, but it turns out it was Iri instead.

Kiritsugu still has his Command Seals so he’s still connected to the Grail War somehow…hmm…

C’mon, I predicted Gilgamesh would compliment Saber when she was down and bleeding.

F/Z 25 (FINAL)

Who’s Lord Justeaze?

Sakura has the same eyes as Kiritsugu. Dead, lifeless eyes.

Did Kariya just throw himself to the worms???

The Great Naked B*stard Gilgamesh.

A priest is a zombie, huh? How ironic.

Isn’t Gilgamesh annoyed by his lack of clothes…? Update: Never mind. He gets a cloth soon enough.

Wait, if Saber destroyed the Grail, who won…?

Huh? The timer ran out.

Aw, even Waver’s growing up.

One of the books says 零戦 (reisen) which apparently means “Zero Fighter [Plane]”. One of the sets of books says “William Shakespeare”, who I know is a Servant somewhere in the Fateverse.

The Bible verse is Job 19:25.

Lancelot’s head doesn’t disappear when the rest of him fades away…It’s pretty poignant.

Jubstacheit is the head of the Einzberns. Update: Think I had to google that.

“Becoming a hero has an expiration date.” – As much as I know that in my creative heart to not be true, my adult heart says yes, it’s true.

Welp, that’s the end of one series. Time for another.

[hannah-deserved-better]

My fandoms and my favorite characters and ships

I’m going to talk about all my fandoms and my top one or two characters from each fandom, and my top OTP from each one, if I have any. I’m going in order from when they entered my life. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation

I watched TNG when it first aired in 1987. It was my first fandom and my most time honored fandom. I literally grew up watching it as a child, until it ended in about 1994, when I was about 10. I didn’t know about ships or OTPs or anything back then (no internet cuz you know... it was the 80′s and I was a child). But I did have my favorites: 

Favorite Characters

Captain Picard: Seriously Picard is awesome. He was my first role model. He always had an important lesson to teach and he always did the right thing. I had tons of different Captain Picard action figures.

Dr. Crusher:  She was probably my very first girl crush. I seriously loved Dr. Crusher. I thought she was tough and smart. In the 80s, when women were beginning to be able to go to college and stuff, she was especially important because she was the Chief Medical officer. She had an important role on the ship.

OTP: It shouldn’t come as a surprise that my OTP for TNG is Picard and Crusher. I wanted them to get together so bad!! My favorite episode was “attached” an episode in season seven where the two of them were stranded on a deserted planet and could hear each other’s thoughts. They learned about their intimate dreams and their feelings for each other.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: 

Deep Space Nine is near and dear to me because it was MY show. I watched it as a young teenager. It was there for me when I was dealing with some dark times in my life, and dealing with the challenges of being a teenager. it was the first fandom that I wrote fan fiction for. Of course, there was no internet then either, so it was just on notebooks and those notebooks have been lost in time. But even now, Deep Space Nine is my default when I can’t decide what to watch. Its my comfort zone, it’s where I feel safe. It was also one of the first times I felt moved by a show ending. I mourned TNG but I was too young. DS9 left just a void and there was no netflix to take comfort in, so no reruns.

Kira Nerys

I loved Kira so much! She was so bad ass. I seriously wanted to be her back in the day. She had a quick temper and she could be stubborn but she had a very tough past. She was a terrorist. She fought for her people’s freedom and she cared deeply for her planet. She dealt with some serious trauma and PTSD because she had been fighting as a resistance fighter since she was a child. It’s all she knew. Living in caves, starving, surviving. She taught me how to be resourceful, my favorite quote is when she said if you need a hammer, use a wrench. 

Constable Odo

Odo was the sheriff in town. He cared about justice and getting at the truth and he tended to be very hardline about it. He took his work very seriously. I loved his banter with Quark. Odo was the observer, he was on no one’s side but he didn’t hesitate to give his opinion and he wasn’t a fan of authority. He did things his way.

OTP: Kira and Odo! I shipped them so hardback in the day! I knew they had something from the very beginning. In season one I shipped them. I was waiting through the whole show to see them be canon, only to be crushed when Odo left in the series finale! That kiss on the promenade was probably the best thing that ever happened to me!

Star Trek Voyager

I admit I didn’t get into Voyager right away. I was mourning for DS9 and couldn’t handle any more Star Trek spin-offs at the time. So I didn’t get into it until it had already been syndicated. But when I did, it definitely hit me hard. I was going through my early community college years, making friends, I met my husband around this time. I moved away from my parents. There were a lot of changes in my life so VOY came into my life at an important time.

Captain Janeway

Of course, I love her! She’s the captain! She’s smart, she’s tough, and she doesn’t take crap from anyone. She was another huge role model in my life. She was a scientist and a leader. Her crew mattered the most to her and it was through her that I learned about sacrifice and bravery. 

Commander Chakotay

I liked Chakotay. I liked his spiritual side. I happen to be part Native American so that’s something I related to him with. He was a strong sensitive type. The warrior. 

OTP: Janeway and Chakotay of course! I wanted them to get together so bad! It kills me when they had so many close chances that never happened. I mean it was so clear that they loved each other and that Chakotay/Seven thing at the end was a total slap in the face to us Janeway/Chakotay fans! I still hate the writers for that! it totally ruined the series finale for me.  

X-files: So begins the era of stuff that husband introduced me to, starting with X-files. I had never watched it back when it was on because I only had eyes for Star Trek, but my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, introduced me to pretty much every fandom from here on out. X-files was his show, its what he grew up on. 

Scully: I’m a total Scully girl. I love her! She’s a scientist and she wears a gun. Total badass! And I love that even though her scientific mind, she was also spiritual which, as a pagan, I can relate. She knows that she is in a male-dominated occupation but she doesn’t let it bother her and isn't afraid to give people a piece of her mind.

Mulder

You can’t have Scully without Mulder! I love how dedicated to the cause he was. And my husband and I have this on going joke that whenever you see a top secret secured area you have to wonder if Mulder has broken into it yet. Cuz he always manages to get to places where he isn’t exactly supposed to be. 

OTP: Mulder and Scully of course! Mulder may be a goof ball but he has said some of the most romantic, amazing things. “You were my constant” that whole speech right there was amazing.

Lord of the Rings

My husband introduced me to Lord of the Rings. I never read the books until I met him and even then, I’ve only read the Fellowship, but I loved the movies. They are my ultimate sick day splurge. I plan a LOTR/hobbit marathon when I get sick. 

Aragorn: I think we are seeing a pattern. I like the leader types. The warriors. Which is why I love Aragorn! Also, I’ve always had a thing for guys with long hair so there’s that. But yeah, Aragorn is the sensitive, courageous warrior but he also has this self-doubt. He worries that he won't live up to what everyone knows he must become. 

Faramir

The younger brother to Boromir. I hate how Faramir’s father treated him and I think it’s sad how he still looked up to him and to his brother. He was brave but he had a kind heart and he deserved better than Denethor.

OTP: To be honest, I didn’t really ship anyone from Lord of the Rings. 

Rurouni Kenshin

I’ve never really been into anime but this is the one exception. And of course, my husband introduced me. He’s been a fan of the anime and the manga. I like this anime for it’s historical content. I am a history major and I love fandoms that make the setting a big part of the show. Like the setting itself is a character too, and this was certainly true in Kenshin. Meiji Japan was a character in the show in many ways. I really loved how it tied history into everything, describing Japan’s beginning of imperialism and its rise that would eventually put it on the world stage.

Kenshin

Kenshin is my favorite character! The wandering Samurai who just wants to protect people. He’s the warrior type just like all my other favorites. 

OTP: I didn’t really ship anyone, although I did have a soft spot for Kenshin/Kauru and Sanosuke/Megumi.

The Legends of Drizzt

My favorite book series of all time! I got so obsessed with the Drow through reading these books. My favorites were the first books about Drizzt and his homeland. This is also the first fandom my friend and I got really into and started RPGs with. WE had done RPGs with Voyager and X-files crossovers but this was probably the longes RPG series we did.

Drizzt Do’Urdon: Drizzt and Kenshin have a lot of similarities. Drizzt is another warrior type. He was abused by his female-dominated society until he finally had the courage to do what few drow ever did- leave. He faced hatred and discrimination on the surface because everyone feared the Drow.

OTP: I didn’t really ship anyone. I liked Drizzt/Cattie-brie and I thought it would have been nice if he got to reconcile with Ellifain and maybe they could have been together, but that’s all.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

I wouldn’t say I am a hardcore Buffy fangirl, but I love the show. My sisters were really obsessed with it back in the day and they both know every single episode by heart. My husband is a huge fan so he finally got me to watch it. 

Willow Rosenburg

Willow’s my favorite! She’s nerdy, geeky, and witchy. She’s been Buffy’s number one and she’s no side kick, she can handle her own. I was a nerd in school, and still am so I get her.

OTP: I liked Buffy and Angel and Willow and Tara. I also thought maybe Xander and Spike would have been cool, or maybe Xander and Andrew.

The Hobbit

I loved the Hobbit movies despite the criticism. They were my first attempt at publishing fiction online. I have a bunch of my old Hobbit fics on Fan Fiction.net still. I also have saved some of my all time favorite Hobbit fics. I love the brotherly love between Fili and Kili and fan fic writers did such a good job of capturing it!

Fili

I am on the ‘justice for Fili’ team for sure. I seriously feel like Fili deserved way more than what he got in the movies. The third movie irritated me because Fili hardly got a part. It’s like he wasn’t even there. Fili was Thorin’s heir and I just think fan fiction does a way better job of giving him the love he deserved. 

Kili

I loved Kili. He’s the younger brother so he feels he has to prove to Thorin- his hero- that he can do what needs to get done. I think it hurt him to be left behind.

OTP: No OTPS here, I don’t really ship anyone. I wasn’t a fan of the Kili/Tauriel thing at all. When I write Hobbit fics, I have these OCs I have been using for years that I ship with Fili and Kili but that’s all.

Supernatural

Last but not least! Supernatural is my last fandom. I’ve been a part of it for about three or four years. It’s my most current, the one I’m into the most at the moment. After it ends, that will be it! No more fandoms for me, all my fandoms will be things of the past. But my husband introduced me to it. He and I both have an interest in theology so that’s why we got into it, for all the angel and religious aspect. I like the mystic stuff, and I like how angels and demons are these different species with their own rules and such. That is the thing I’ve always loved about science fiction and fantasy- I love learning about non human cultures. I like learning how their society is. 

Hannah

Hannah is my current crush these days. I love her. I pretty much think she is a goddess. I have so many reasons. I love that she is a soldier and she’s tough, I love that she has flaws but that she’s brave. Her inner conflict was the best part of her character, how she struggled with her sense of law and justice and with her emotions. She seemed to struggle a lot with trying to process the things she felt. I can honestly say that she is the closest I’ve ever seen to a female person with autism in any of my fandoms. That’s why I love her so much, I relate to her on such a personal level, being autistic myself. She inspires my writing and my art so much. She’s probably my favorite character out of all my fandoms right now. I’ve never related to a character more than I do to her. She is the character I love to play the most because she feels comfortable to me. 

Castiel

When it comes to team free will, I am a Cas-girl all the way! Who doesn’t love that adorable little angel? I feel like Castiel’s whole time on the show has been so sad. He rebelled for his friends and ever since then, it’s been one disaster after another with him and even now when season 15 is about to come out, I don’t think he’s ever found true happiness, and that hurts. He misses being an angel and it hurts that they don’t accept him for who he is. I’ve tried to touch upon Castiel’s emotional health a lot in my writing because I don’t think the show does a good job of addressing it. He has done so much for the Winchesters but I don’t think he’s happy with how his life is now, especially after the end of the last season. 

OTP: Castiel and Hannah! My ultimate hardcore forever OTP. I truly believe Castiel loved Hannah and its clear that she loved him. She is one of the few people in Castiel’s life who seemed to truly, honestly want to address his needs. She literally begged him multiple times to take care of himself, and in true Winchester fashion, was willing to let Metatron out and this sacrifice the world, just to save Cas. She’s one of the few angels who cared about Castiel, even knowing what he’s done, none of that bothered her. In the beginning when they first met, when all the other angels wanted to kill him, she didn’t care what he had done and only left when she thought he had betrayed them and was quick to come back to him when she found out the truth. I love Castiel and Hannah, pretty much all my fics focus on them. 

NOTE: Before you start getting all upset about the fact that all my OTP ships are m/f, I want to point some things out to you. First off, I am bi. Second of all, m/f doesn’t always equal straight and m/m or f/f doesn’t always equal gay. STOP IT WITH THE BI ERASURE!!! I have plenty of other ships but these are my top ships and yes I mostly ship m/f. Just because they all just happen to be my favorites. Maybe because all the above characters tend to have certain characteristics and certain traits and it's their personalities that I ship not their gender. Also, I have huge crushes on the above female AND male characters so again, it’s probably why I ship them. Also, I am demisexual so sex doesn’t really play a huge role in who I ship. A lot of these characters also have similarities to me and my husband, so I tend to ship what I see in real life. I actually ship plenty of other ships other than what’s listed, yes most are still m/f, but some are f/f and some are poly. I don’t ship a lot of m/m because, well, I just don’t. I haven’t found any m/m ships that I really ship. I am all about chemistry first and if I don’t feel it I don’t feel it. Since sex doesn’t play a factor in my ships much, I need them to connect mentally and emotionally much more than physically. I also value equality in relationships. I am not into the whole ‘opposites attract’ thing. Characters have to be compatible. 

And one other thing. Chemistry is in the eye of the beholder. What one person sees as chemistry someone else might not agree and that’s okay. It’s okay to disagree it's not okay to be a hater.

[theintrinsicwarrior]

The ‘Benefits’ of Uncertainty

Hey guys! So here is my first official post on this blog, and surprisingly, it’s not to do with men’s emotional wellbeing although it’s something that I think can relate to it. This is something that I’m currently learning about and experiencing in my life as we speak... Uncertainty. It’s that feeling that can make you say to yourself: “what the actual F is going to happen now!?”, or “Geeez, I hope this is not as scary as It seems!” All while your body slowly gets overwhelmed by physiological reactions to what ‘might’ happen. As I am writing this, the world is literally going in a state of panic over the Coronavirus. Sounds like the perfect time to write about Uncertainty, don’t you think? So let me define what uncertainty is first, for all those who may be hardcore academics and need a definition (I’m studying at the moment and have an understanding of how anal academic folk can be! Anyone who has studied anything feels what I’m saying!). So, the definition: "Uncertainty refers to epistemic situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown" Thanks to wikipedia for that definition (The one time I can reference wikipedia and not have anybody shit all over it!). The last word of that definition: “Unknown”, stands out to me. All through our lives, we go through changes. Changes create a sense of the “Unknown”. “Anything” can happen. It’s these things that have the potential to create fear and feelings of anxiety within us, to the point where we can’t handle it, avoid decisions and it becomes problematic for our daily lives. I want to share my personal example of uncertainty and also certainty, because I think both sides are equally important. Recently, I resigned from my full time job as a storeperson. I had been working at this company since 2012, so nearly eight years now. The thing with this job was that, while it provided me with money and a routine, there were countless times I knew I had to quit and pursue something else. You might already know the answer to “why didn’t you just resign earlier”, and yes, the answer is obviously uncertainty. The ambiguity of uncertainty created a deep sense of fear and worry within me, mainly revolving around “what if the next job is worse than this, I’m actually comfortable here!”, and “what if I don’t get paid as much as I do here, then I’d struggle to pay for anything”. These “what if's” kept circulating till inevitably my focus changed, time went by and my wellbeing slowly started declining and my growth was stifled. Which leads me to my next point: Because I was at this job for over five years, I knew how to do most of the things there. I knew almost everyone. Conversations with people were the ‘same’. Team meeting content was the ‘same’. Experiences were always the ‘same’. This is called ‘Certainty’. When you go through life having the same experiences, handling it the same way every time it creates a comfort zone. If you know anything about comfort zones, you’d know that its the place where growth is surpressed and limitations are built. Back to my example: It was late December, 2019 when I was at work, early in the morning and was about to put way some stock. All I can remember was this profound blasé feeling pass through my body. The thought of me going to another mundane stock location to put away another mundane product that I had been around for years and could not care any less about had me fed up. It was this moment. This profound feeling that had my entire physiology screaming: ‘ADEN! SERIOUSLY!? NO MORE! THIS IS STRAIGHT UP DEPRESSING!’ was enough for me to respond and make the decision. Those underlying ‘what if’s’ that plagued me for years before now took a back seat to what I actually valued: my mental health, my own personal growth and my career studies. Long story short, after many conversations regarding whether I had ‘thought it through’, I did it. I decided that I would focus on my studies full time and work part time somewhere else. I put in my resignation and decided to face the unknown. Ok, so right now I’m going to flex my three semesters worth of a psychology degree I’ve done so far (I think I’ve earned it!). When we think about the major life decisions we have to make, our minds tend to go into what’s known as a ’negativity bias’. This is our brains tendency to only focus on negative aspects of things and discount the positive. Psychologists believe it's an exaggerated version of a defence mechanism our species used for survival back in our caveman days, which makes sense: stress about a potential threat (a hungry sabre tooth, for example) could effect the chance of the tribe surviving. This is where the ‘what if (insert something irrationally negative here) happens’ type thoughts are coming from. But the trick I’ve learnt is to challenge this. When that irrationally negative thought presents itself, we have every opportunity to question the validity of that thought. So for example: you have the thought ‘What if my boss didn’t approve my leave and now I can’t get time off for my holiday’. We have every chance to question that and say ‘okay, how do we know for sure they haven’t approved it?’ And ‘whats stopping me from finding out if they’ve approved it or not’. Rather than dwell in ‘what if my boss didn’t…’ and jump to conclusions, we can evaluate the validity of this thought, leading us more than likely to a place of control or no control. It’s this mentality that helped me put those ‘what if’s’ behind me because I could always flip it and come back with a ‘what if I’m happier being out of this job because I’ll have more time to do things that actually matter to me?’ Or ‘what if the part time job I get pays better than this job?’ (Which was the case!). The entire point of this post is not to tell stories about my experience or to show off my ‘sophisticated’ psych knowledge (I already know you’re impressed!); I wanted to really express the ‘benefits’ of uncertainty. Like I expressed before, if our lives are filled with too much certainty, it creates a comfort zone which negates any sort of profound growth to be experienced. The example of me going to the same job for years, having the same experiences with little to no difference makes it very easy to fear the unknown after some point. The risk we take when we look into the unknown and say ’screw you! I’m not afraid of you, I deserve better and I know that everything will some how work out!’ Is one of the greatest things we can ever do for ourselves, especially when fear is in our ear. In the time I am writing this, it has been over a month and a half since quitting my job and I can safely say that my wellbeing has dramatically increased (just like I knew it would!). The ‘catastrophic’ events that my ego liked to show me pretty much never happened. The experiences I’ve had so far were things I was wishing for when I was working; wishing to be in a classroom learning about something I truly love and connecting with like minded people. Now, I cannot fathom working a 9-5 job doing something that I have zero interest in. This is what facing the unknown did for me: It helped me connect me to my values even more to the point where it was so much more clearer (I value a meaningful career/job more than money) in turn, building some level of confidence. What I wish for you as the reader is to really challenge your negative thoughts about the unknown, which might be affecting an important decision you know you should be making! You never truly know until you make that move. Until you do, your liberation from fear will be harder to achieve. It will be harder to see the potential happiness you could have. Last thing I wanted to share with you is a reference from one of my favourite ‘Black Panther’ stories that I think is relevant to this talk of uncertainty. Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a die-hard fanatic of this character and he means a tremendous amount to me (which is a whole other post on its own!), so get used to seeing a whole lot more references!. Here, in the ’Secret Invasion’ storyline, the shapeshifting aliens known as the ’Skrulls’ have attempted to invade Wakanda (Black Panther’s fictional homeland in Africa). They genetically engineered a Skrull that was trained from birth to face the King and protector of Wakanda; He who wears the mantle of the Black Panther. The genetically engineered Skrull taunts my guy T’Challa (Black Panther) by saying: “I have trained my entire life to face you”. King T’Challa says right back to him: “Then you have already lost, for I have trained my entire life to face the unknown”. Bad-ass as that quote is, this is something we can reflect on in terms of how we approach our lives. The Skrull that taunts him can be viewed as our negative thoughts and our fear, and all we need to have is Panther's attitude: “You have already lost, because I face the unknown” 

[theresgloryforyou]

It's mine. We can put the question to rest. Israel belongs to me. Or so I was raised to believe. I've been planting trees there since I can remember. I have memories of my mother's breast--of hunger (she was sick and weak); of having my tonsils out when I was two and a half--of the fear and the wallpaper in the hospital; of infantile bad dreams; of early childhood abandonment; of planting trees in Israel. Understand: I've been planting trees in Israel since before I actually could recognize a real tree from life. In Camden where I grew up we had cement. I thought the huge and splendid telephone pole across the street from our brick row house was one--a tree; it just didn't have leaves. I wasn't deprived: the wires were awesome. If I think of "tree" now, I see that splintery dead piece of lumber stained an uneven brown with its wild black wires stretched out across the sky. I have to force myself to remember that a tree is frailer and greener, at least prototypically, at least in temperate zones. It takes an act of adult will to remember that a tree grows up into the sky, down into the ground, and a telephone pole, even a magnificent one, does not.

Israel, like Camden, didn't have any trees. We were cement; Israel was desert. They needed trees, we didn't. The logic was that we lived in the United States where there was an abundance of everything, even trees; in Israel there was nothing. So we had to get them trees. In synagogue we would be given folders: white paper, heavy, thick; blue ink, light, reminiscent of green but not green. White and blue were the colors of Israel. You opened the folder and inside there was a tree printed in light blue. The tree was full, round, almost swollen, a great arc, lush, branches coming from branches, each branch growing clusters of leaves. In each cluster of leaves, we had to put a dime. We could use our own dimes from lunch money or allowances, but they only went so far; so we had to ask relatives, strangers, the policeman at the school crossing, the janitor at school--anyone who might spare a dime, because you had to fill your folder and then you had to start another one and fill that too. Each dime was inserted into a little slit in the folder right in the cluster of leaves so each branch ended up being weighed down with shining dimes. When you had enough dimes, the tree on the folder looked as if it was growing dimes. This meant you had collected enough money to plant a tree in Israel, your own tree. You put your name on the folder and in Israel they would plant your tree and put your name on it. You also put another name on the folder. You dedicated the tree to someone who had died. This tree is dedicated to the memory of Jewish families were never short on dead people but in the years after my birth, after 1946, the dead overwhelmed the living. You touched the dead wherever you turned. You rubbed up against them; it didn't matter how young you were. Mass graves; bones; ash; ovens; numbers on forearms. If you were Jewish and alive, you were--well, almost--rare. You had a solitary feeling even as a child. Being alive felt wrong. Are you tired of hearing about it? Don't be tired of it in front of me. It was new then and I was a child. The adults wanted to keep us from becoming morbid, or anxious, or afraid, or different from other children. They told us and they didn't tell us. They told us and then they took it back. They whispered and let you overhear, then they denied it. Nothing's wrong. You're safe here, in the United States. Being a Jew is, well, like being an American: the best. It was a great secret they tried to keep and tried to tell at the same time. They were adults--they still didn't believe it really. You were a child; you did.

My Hebrew School teachers were of two kinds: bright-eyed Jewish men from New Jersey, the suburbs mostly, and Philadelphia, a center of culture--mediocre men, poor teachers, their aspirations more bourgeois than Talmudic; and survivors from ancient European ghettos by way of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen--multi-lingual, learned, spectral, walleyed. None, of course, could speak Hebrew. It was a dead language, like Latin. The new Israeli project of speaking Hebrew was regarded as an experiment that could only fail. English would be the language of Israel. It was only a matter of time. Israel was the size of New Jersey. Israel was a miracle, a great adventure, but it was also absolutely familiar.

The trick in dedicating your tree was to have an actual name to write on your folder and know who the person was to you. It was important to American Jews to seem normal and other people knew the names of their dead. We had too many dead to know their names; mass murder was erasure. Immigrants to the United States had left sisters, brothers, mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins behind, and they had been slaughtered. Where? When? It was all blank. My father's parents were Russian immigrants. My mother's were Hungarian. My grandparents always refused to talk about Europe. "Garbage," my father's father said to me, "they're all garbage." He meant all Europeans. He had run away from Russia at l5--from the Czar. He had brothers and sisters, seven; I never could find out anything else. They were dead, from pogroms, the Russian Revolution, Nazis; they were gone. My grandparents on each side ran away for their own reasons and came here. They didn't look back. Then there was this new genocide, new even to Jews, and they couldn't look back. There was no recovering what had been lost, or who. There couldn't be reconciliation with what couldn't be faced. They were alive because they were here; the rest were dead because they were there: who could face that? As a child I observed that Christian children had lots of relatives unfamiliar to me, very old, with honorifics unknown to me--great-aunt, great-great-grandmother. Our family began with my grandparents. No one came before them; no one stood next to them. It's an incomprehensible and disquieting amnesia. There was Eve; then there is a harrowing blank space, a tunnel of time and nothing with enormous murder; then there's us. We had whoever was in the room. Everyone who wasn't in the room was dead. All my mourning was for them--all my trees in the desert--but who were they? My ancestors aren't individual to me: I'm pulled into the mass grave for any sense of identity or sense of self. In the small world I lived in as a child, the consciousness was in three parts: (1) in Europe with those left behind, the dead, and how could one live with how they had died, even if why was old and familiar; (2) in the United States, the best of all possible worlds--being more-American-than-thou, more middle class however poor and struggling, more suburban however urban in origins, more normal, more conventional, more conformist; and (3) in Israel, in the desert, with the Jews who had been ash and now were planting trees. I never planted a tree in Camden or anywhere else for that matter. All my trees are in Israel. I was taught that they had my name on them and that they were dedicated to the memory of my dead.

One day in Hebrew School I argued in front of the whole class with the principal; a teacher, a scholar, a survivor, he spoke seven languages and I don't know which camps he was in. In private, he would talk to me, answer my questions, unlike the others. I would see him shaking, alone; I'd ask why; he would say sometimes he couldn't speak, there were no words, he couldn't say words, even though he spoke seven languages; he would say he had seen things; he would say he couldn't sleep, he hadn't slept for nights or weeks. I knew he knew important things. I respected him. Usually I didn't respect my teachers. In front of the whole class, he told us that in life we had the obligation to be first a Jew, second an American, third a human being, a citizen of the world. I was outraged. I said it was the opposite. I said everyone was first a human being, a citizen of the world--otherwise there would never be peace, never an end to nationalist conflicts and racial persecutions. Maybe I was 11. He said that Jews had been killed throughout history precisely because they thought the way I did, because they put being Jews last; because they didn't understand that one was always first a Jew--in history, in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of God. I said it was the opposite: only when everyone was human first would Jews be safe. He said Jews like me had had the blood of other Jews on their hands throughout history; that had there been an Israel, Jews would not have been slaughtered throughout Europe; that the Jewish homeland was the only hope for Jewish freedom. I said that was why one had an obligation to be an American second, after being a human being, a citizen of the world: because only in a democracy without a state religion could religious minorities have rights or be safe or not be persecuted or discriminated against. I said that if there was a Jewish state, anyone who wasn't Jewish would be second-class by definition. I said we didn't have a right to do to other people what had been done to us. More than anyone, we knew the bitterness of religious persecution, the stigma that went with being a minority. We should be able to see in advance the inevitable consequences of having a state that put us first; because then others were second and third and fourth. A theocratic state, I said, could never be a fair state--and didn't Jews need a fair state? If Jews had had a fair state wouldn't Jews have been safe from slaughter? Israel could be a beginning: a fair state. But then it couldn't be a Jewish state. The blood of Jews, he said, would be on my hands. He walked out. I don't think he ever spoke to me again.

You might wonder if this story is apocryphal or how I remember it or how someone so young made such arguments. The last is simple: the beauty of a Jewish education is that you learn how to argue if you pay attention. I remember because I was so distressed by what he said to me: the blood of Jews will be on your hands. I remember because he meant what he said. Part of my education was in having teachers who had seen too much death to argue for the fun of it. I could see the blood on my hands if I was wrong; Jews would have nowhere; Jews would die. I could see that if I or anyone made it harder for Israel to exist, Jews might die. I knew that Israel had to succeed, had to work out. Every single adult Jew I knew wanted it, needed it: the distraught ones with the numbers on their arms; the immigrant ones who had been here, not there; the cheerful more-American-than-thou ones who wanted ranch houses for themselves, an army for Israel. Israel was the answer to near extinction in a real world that had been demonstrably indifferent to the mass murder of the Jews. It was also the only way living Jews could survive having survived. Those who had been here, not there, by immigration or birth, would create another here, a different here, a purposeful sanctuary, not one stumbled on by random good luck. Those who were alive had to find a way to deal with the monumental guilt of not being dead: being the chosen this time for real. The building of Israel was a bridge over bones; a commitment to life against the suicidal pull of the past. How can I live with having lived? I will make a place for Jews to live.

I knew from my own urgent effort to try to understand racism--from the Nazis to the situation I lived in, hatred of black people in the United States, the existence of legal segregation in the South--that Israel was impossible: fundamentally wrong, organized to betray egalitarian aspirations--because it was built from the ground up on a racial definition of its desired citizen; because it was built from the ground up on exclusion, necessarily stigmatizing those who were not Jews. Social equality was impossible unless only Jews lived there. With hostile neighbors and a racial paradigm for the state's identity, Israel had to become either a fortress or a tomb. I didn't think it made Jews safer. I did understand that it made Jews different: different from the pathetic creatures on the trains, the skeletons in the camps; different; indelibly different. It was a great relief--to me too--to be different from the Jews in the cattle cars. Different mattered. As long as it lasted, I would take it. And if Israel ended up being a tomb, a tomb was better than unmarked mass graves for millions all over Europe--different and better. I made my peace with different; which meant I made my peace with the State of Israel. I would not have the blood of Jews on my hands. I wouldn't help those who wanted Israel to be a place where more Jews died by saying what I thought about the implicit racism. It was shameful, really: distance me, Lord, from those pitiful Jews; make me new. But it was real and even I at 10, 11, 12, needed it.

You might notice that all of this had nothing to do with Palestinians. I didn't know there were any. Also, I haven't mentioned women. I knew they existed, formally speaking; Mrs. So-and-So was everywhere, of course--peculiar, all held in, reticent and dutiful in public. I never saw one I wanted to become. Nevertheless, adults kept threatening that one day I had to be one. Apparently it was destiny and also hard work; you were born one but you also had to become one. Either you mastered exceptionally difficult and obscure rules too numerous and onerous to reveal to a child, even a child studying Leviticus; or you made one mistake, the nature of which was never specified. But politically speaking, women didn't exist, and frankly, as human beings women didn't exist either. You could live your whole life among them and never know who they were.

I was taught about fedayeen: Arabs who crossed the border into Israel to kill Jews. In the years after Hitler, this was monstrous. Only someone devoid of any humanity, any conscience, any sense of decency or justice, could kill Jews. They didn't live there, they came from somewhere else. They killed civilians by sneak attack; they didn't care who they killed just so they killed Jews.

I realized only as a middle-aged adult that I was raised to have prejudice against Arabs and that the prejudice wasn't trivial. My parents were exceptionally conscious and conscientious about racism and religious bigotry--all the homegrown kinds--hatred of blacks or Catholics, for instance. Their pedagogy was very brave. They took a social stance against racism, for civil rights, that put them in opposition to many neighbors and members of our family. My mother put me in a car and showed me black poverty. However poor I thought we were, I was to remember that being black in the United States made you poorer. I still remember a conversation with my father in which he told me he had racist feelings against blacks. I said that was impossible because he was for civil rights. He explained the kinds of feelings he had and why they were wrong. He also explained that as a teacher and then later a guidance counselor he worked with black children and he had to make sure his racist feelings didn't harm them. From my father I learned that having these feelings didn't justify them; that "good" people had bad feelings and that didn't make the feelings any less bad; that dealing with racism was a process, something a person tangled with actively. The feelings were wrong and a "good" person took responsibility for facing them down. I was also taught that just because you feel something doesn't make it true. My parents went out of their way to say "some Arabs," to emphasize that there were good and bad people in every group; but in fact my education in the Jewish community made that caveat fairly meaningless. Arabs were primitive, uncivilized, violent. (My parents would never have accepted such characterizations of blacks.) Arabs hated and killed Jews. Really, I learned that Arabs were irredeemably evil. In all my travels through life, which were extensive, I never knew any Arabs: and ignorance is the best friend of prejudice.

In my mid-thirties I started reading books by Palestinians. These books made me understand that I was misinformed. I had had a fine enough position on the Palestinians--or perhaps I should say "the Palestinian question" to convey the right ring of condescension--once I knew they existed; long after I was 11. Maybe 20 years ago, I knew they existed. I knew they were being wronged. I was for a two-state solution. Over the years, I learned about Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners; I knew Jewish journalists who purposefully suppressed the information so as not to "hurt" the Jewish state. I knew the human rights of Palestinians in ordinary life were being violated. Like my daddy, on social issues, the policy questions, I was fine for my kind. These opinions put me into constant friction with the Jewish community, including my family, many friends, and many Jewish feminists. As far as I know, from my own experience, the Jewish community has just recently--like last Tuesday-- really faced the facts--the current facts. I will not argue about the twisted history, who did what to whom when. I will not argue about Zionism except to say that it is apparent that I am not a Zionist and never was. The argument is the same one I had with my Hebrew School principal; my position is the same--either we get a fair world or we keep getting killed. (I have also noticed, in the interim, that the Cambodians had Cambodia and it didn't help them much. Social sadism takes many forms. What can't be imagined happens.) But there are social policy questions and then there is the racism that lives in individual hearts and minds as a prejudgment on a whole people. You believe the stereotypes; you believe the worst; you accept a caricature such that members of the group are comic or menacing, always contemptible. I don't believe that American Jews raised as I was are free of this prejudice. We were taught it as children and it has helped the Israeli government justify in our eyes what they have done to the Palestinians. We've been blinded, not just by our need for Israel or our loyalty to Jews but by a deep and real prejudice against Palestinians that amounts to race-hate.

The land wasn't empty, as I was taught: oh yes, there are a few nomadic tribes but they don't have homes in the normal sense--not like we do in New Jersey; there are just a few uneducated, primitive, dirty people there now who don't even want a state. There were people and there were even trees--trees destroyed by Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians are right when they say the Jews regarded them as nothing. I was taught they were nothing in the most literal sense. Taking the country and turning it into Israel, the Jewish state, was an imperialist act. Jews find any such statement incomprehensible. How could the near-dead, the nearly extinguished, a people who were ash, have imperialized anyone, anything? Well Israel is rare: Jews, nearly annihilated, took the land and forced a very hostile world to legitimize the theft. I think American Jews cannot face the fact that this is one act--the one act--of imperialism, of conquest that has support. We helped; we're proud of it; here we stand. This is a contradiction of every idea we have about who we are and what being a Jew means. It is also true. We took a country from the people who lived there; we the dispossessed finally did it to someone else; we said, They're Arabs, let them go somewhere Arab. When Israelis say they want to be judged by the same standards applied to the rest of the world, not by a special standard for Jews, in part they mean that this is the way of the world. It may be a first for Jews, but everyone else has been doing it throughout recorded history. It is recorded history. I grew up in New Jersey, the size of Israel; not so long ago, it belonged to Indians. Because American Jews refuse to face precisely this one fact--we took the land--American Jews cannot afford to know or face Palestinians: initially, even that they existed.

As for the Palestinians, I can only imagine the humiliation of losing to, being conquered by, the weakest, most despised, most castrated people on the face of the earth. This is a feminist point about manhood.

When I was growing up, the only time I heard about equality of the sexes was when I was taught to love and have fidelity to the new State of Israel. This new state was being built on the premise that men and women were equal in all ways. According to my teachers, servility was inappropriate for the new Jew, male or female. In the new state, there was no strong or weak or more or less valuable according to sex. Everyone did the work: physical labor, menial labor, cooking--there was no, as we say now, sex-role stereotyping. Because everyone worked, everyone had an equal responsibility and an equal say. Especially, women were citizens, not mothers.

Strangely, this was the most foreign aspect of Israel. In New Jersey, we didn't have equality of the sexes. In New Jersey, no one thought about it or needed it or wanted it. We didn't have equality of the sexes in Hebrew School. It didn't matter how smart or devout you were: if you were a girl, you weren't allowed to do anything important. You weren't allowed to want anything except marriage, even if you were a talented scholar. Equality of the sexes was something they were going to have in the desert with the trees; we couldn't send them any because we didn't have any. It was a new principle for a new land and it helped to make a new people; in New Jersey, we didn't have to be quite that new.

When I was growing up, Israel was also basically socialist. The kibbutzim, voluntary collectives, were egalitarian communities by design. The kibbutzim were going to replace the traditional nuclear family as the basic social unit in the new society. Children would be raised by the whole community--they wouldn't "belong" to their parents. The communal vision was the cornerstone of the new country.

Here, women were pretty invisible, and material greed, a desire for middle class goods and status, animated the Jewish community. Israel really repudiated the values of American Jews--somehow the adults managed to venerate Israel while in their own lives transgressing every radical value the new state was espousing. But the influence on the children was probably very great. I don't think it is an accident that Jewish children my age grew up wanting to make communal living a reality or believing that it could be done; or that the girls did eventually determine, in such great numbers, to make equality of the sexes the dynamic basis of our political lives.

While women in the United States were living in a twilight world, appendages to men, housewives, still the strongest women I knew when I was a child worked for the establishment, well-being, and preservation of the State of Israel. It was perhaps the only socially sanctioned field of engagement. My Aunt Helen, for instance, the only unmarried, working woman I knew as a child, made Israel her life's cause. Not only did the strong women work for Israel, but women who weren't visibly strong--who were conformist--showed some real backbone when they were active on behalf of Israel. The equality of the sexes may have had a resonance for them as adults that it couldn't have had for me as a child. Later, Golda Meir's long tenure as prime minister made it seem as if the promise of equality was being delivered on. She was new, all right; forged from the old, visibly so, but herself made new by an act of will; public; a leader of a country in crisis. My Aunt Helen and Golda Meir were a lot alike: not defined in terms of men; straightforward when other women were coy; tough; resourceful; formidable. The only formidable women I saw were associated with and committed to Israel, except for Anna Magnani. But that's another story.

Finally in 1988, at 42, on Thanksgiving, the day we celebrate having successfully taken this land from the Indians, I went to Israel for the first time.

I went to a conference billed as the First International Jewish Feminist Conference. Its theme was the empowerment of Jewish women. Its sponsors were the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the Israel Women's Network, and it was being organized with a middle-class agenda by middle-class women, primarily American, who were themselves beholden to the male leadership of the sponsoring groups. So the conference looked to secular Israeli feminists organizing at the grass-roots level--and so it was. Initially, the secular Israeli feminists intended to organize an alternate feminist conference to repudiate the establishment feminist conference, but they decided instead to have their own conference, one that included Palestinian women, the day after the establishment conference ended.

I went because of grass-roots Israeli feminists: the opportunity to meet with them in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem; to talk with those organizing against violence against women on all fronts; to learn more about the situation of women in Israel. I planned to stay on--if I had, I also would have spoken at and for the rape crisis center in Jerusalem. In Haifa, where both Phyllis Chesler and I spoke to a packed room (which included Palestinian women and some young Arab men) on child custody and pornography in the United States, women were angry about the establishment conference--its tepid feminist agenda, its exclusion of the poor and of Palestinian feminists. One woman, maybe in her sixties, with an accent from Eastern Europe, maybe Poland, finally stood up and said approximately the following: "Look, it's just another conference put on by the Americans like all the others. They have them like clockwork. They use innocents like these"--pointing to Phyllis and me--"who don't know any better." Everyone laughed, especially us. I hadn't been called an innocent in a long time, or been perceived as one either. But she was right. Israel brought me to my knees. Innocent was right. Here's what compromised my innocence, such as it was.

[lefilmdujour]

500th movie celebration

Last month I have quietly passed the 500th movie landmark on my Tumblr, so I decided to make a post with text instead of pictures for a change.

Five and a half years ago, I have decided to create a Tumblr, my own personal space where I would upload film frames, mostly so I could remember all the many movies I watch. By associating an image to a title, it helps to maintain my mind fresh and pinpoint exactly why I loved or despised a certain movie, linking them to the people I have watched them with and the surrounding circumstances.

The criteria is simple but methodical: no more than one post per day, all films I watch are represented even if I am ashamed of having spent time with them, all films are represented only once regardless of the amount of times I’ve re-watched them throughout the existence of the Tumblr.

I like to watch Artsy Avant Garde movies. Trash movies. 80′s “classics”. 70′s sleaze. Documentaries, a whole lot of them. Surrealism. Nouvelle Vague. The occasional Hollywood blockbuster. Skin. I usually get complaints from people about the amount of nudity represented in the Tumblr. 

Movies, regardless of how bad they are to the viewer, always mean something special to someone, so I respect them all.

To celebrate the 500th movie landmark, I decided to pick 50 of the ones that evoke the most vivid memories in me. Quality and circumstance were the deciding factors. Random order. I recommend them all.

The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman) - An inspirational exercise on mythology, symbolism, and pacing.

Philanthropy (Nae Caranfil) - Romanian New Wave is my latest passion. This one is a highlight. A very entertaining tutorial on how to scam and be scammed.

Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders) - Poetry in motion. Falling in love every day.

The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Stefan Komandarev) - A road movie, on a bicycle. Friendship, memory gaps, backgammon.

The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit) - If a movie makes me cry, it goes to the favorites bucket. The story is simple, the animation is fluid, the outcome is expected. Yet, its message is always powerful.

The Imposter (Bart Layton) - More than a very compelling story of deception and manipulation, this documentary shines due to its brilliant editing. Made me feel pity, anger, compassion and repulse, often at the same time.

American Movie (Chris Smith) - If you love movies, then you cannot skip this documentary about a film director who makes his life mission to finish his crap movie, despite lack of funds, means, and talent. Funny and heartfelt. Highly quotable.

Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven) - Growing up as a woman in traditional Turkey. A feminist look on a closed society. Beautifully shot.

Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller) - A throwback to a time when action movies were being made with a sense of movement and a requirement for suspension of disbelief. Amazing cinematography, highlighted in the recent “Black & Chrome” edition.

Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini) - The fruitless search for true love. Finding it, losing it, finding it again, losing it again, getting up, trying again. “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks in it”.

Bicycle Thieves (Vitorio de Sicca) - A masterpiece. The importance of a bicycle as an instrument of survival in 40′s Italy. Puts things into perspective. Nothing can be taken for granted.

Underground (Emir Kusturica) - In my opinion, the greatest Kusturica movie. The sad story of a country that no longer exists.

The Hourglass Sanatorium (Wojciech Jerzy Has) - A very surreal experience where time and space are meaningless. Living in a lucid dream.

Despair (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) - The only Fassbinder movie I ever watched to date. I always want to watch more of him, but somehow keep forgetting. This movie makes justice to it’s title, despair creeps in slowly, but overwhelmingly by its end.

Mary and Max (Adam Elliot) - A claynimation film about friendship and mental health. Funny and melancholic. People should write letters to their friends more.

Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche) - A beautiful love story.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) - Twee as fuck, like all Anderson’s movies. This man can do no wrong.

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen) - I have a special interest in movies related with mental health. The last great Woody Allen movie to date.

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata) - I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I claim that this is the saddest movie ever made. It took me days to recover from the emotional impact it left in me. War makes victims of us all.

Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini) - What would you do if you have been touched and subsequently abandoned by Divinity? The final scene is one of my all time favorites.

Forbidden Fruit (Dome Karukoski) - Two girls escape from a oppressive religious cult and experience life for the first time. The scene when one of the girls watches a movie for the first time, in a theater, left a good memory in me.

Forbidden Zone (Richard Elfman) - I like musicals too! This one in particular was scored by Danny Elfman, who also plays the devil in its most memorable scene. A weird freakout of a movie. Specially recommend the colorized version that adds up to the surreal atmosphere.

 Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé) - To be seen on a big screen with the best speakers money can buy. Intense psychedelic experience. Stay on the safe side, remain sober while watching this one.

My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog) - I find most of Herzog’s documentaries to be very relaxing. Not this one. Klaus Kinski was a fabled asshole. Werner Herzog is an eccentric lunatic. How these two geniuses managed to work together without killing each other (although both came very close to it) is definitely documentary material. An intense story about friendship, respect, and guttural hate.

The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) - My favorite Coen brothers film. The week from hell on an otherwise quiet and unremarkable life. Improves with repeated viewings.

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch) - Spent years analyzing and trying to make sense out of this movie. I only understood it upon giving up on my quest. My favorite Lynch movie.

Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Shunya Itō) - 70′s Meiko Kaji is a Goddess. A talent wasted in exploitation movies. Her eyes talk louder than all of the movies’s dialogue. This film is a Pink Women-in-Prison Japanese cheap thrill on surface, but the amount of symbolism and surrealism adds weight to a paper-thin plot. And the title song was borrowed to Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Truly one of my favorite movies ever.

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) - Soviet Propaganda? Yes. Compelling gut-wrenching story? Yes. Cinematic masterpiece? Yes. Regardless on how you feel about the topic, there is no question that the Odessa steps sequence is a work of art. 

The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky) - Watch in on psychedelics, or don’t bother.

Heima (Dean deBlois) - A documentary about Sigur Rós’ return to Iceland. Even for people who are not fans of the band, the landscape is undeniably beautiful.

Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) - I am finding the latest Tarantino efforts to be a tad boring on repeated viewings. I usually love them when I see them on cinema, but then abandon them half-way when I try to watch them at home. But this one passed the home test, so it gets my thumbs up!

Disquiet (João Botelho) - Squeezing in a Portuguese movie due for national pride reasons. Not that I care much about those things. But I believe more people should watch this movie. The dialogue is lifted from my favorite poetry book, written by Fernando Pessoa. Heavy, dark, contemplative narrative.

Baraka (Ron Fricke) - There is a particular documentary style associated with both Ron Fricke and Godfrey Reggio that I find very appealing. Visual snapshots of people in their homelands. The silent contrast between traditional and modern. And the omnipresent feeling that all life is meaningless and mankind is a just a random occasion on a ball floating in space. Baraka is the best of all.

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa) - There is nothing in the World like Kurosawa’s samurai movies, and no better samurai than Toshiro Mifune. Rashomon rises above the other excellent Kurosawa movies by its symbolism and usage of light. A murder story told by four different characters. The truth is somewhere in between the lies.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos) - A perverse tale of innocence and isolation. 

Gomorra (Matteo Garrone) - Disturbing stories from Napoli’s crime underworld. Realistically shot, no sugar coating, no happy endings, no poetic criminals.

Kids (Larry Clark) - I had this one on VHS, a double feature that also included Trainspotting. Found memories attached to this movie, I saw the actors as a parallel to the kids in my street. Several of the participants in the movie are dead or living miserable lives nowadays. Just like the street kids from my youth.

A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes) - It is not easy to get into this director. And this is a psychological scarring movie. The audience is led to descend into madness like its main character. 

Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch) - “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”

Daisies (Vera Chytilová) - My most popular post for some reason. An excellent, imaginative, innovative, playful, senseless fun movie to watch. 

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami) - A man’s quest to end his life. The ultimate taboo.

Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus) - Greek Mythology meets Brazilian Slum. A wonderful, poetic ending makes up for some dull parts in between. Excellent soundtrack!

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene) - Insane expressionist film with lovely painted backdrops that add a sense of depth and misdirection to its scenes. Timeless movie experience!

Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) - Modern Fairy tale. Inspirational. Makes me want to enjoy life more.

Oldboy (Park Chan-Wook) - Part of the Vengeance trilogy, I picked Oldboy because I now realize that I haven’t seen Sympathy for Lady Vengeance again ever since I started this Tumblr. Both films are excellent tales of twisted revenge. Oldboy’s fight scene has inspired a generation of copycats.

Spring Summer Fall Winter... And Spring (Kim Ki-duk) - Episodes of the life of a Buddhist monk, from childhood to old age. The wheel of life and rebirth. As Buddhist as it gets.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam) - This got me into Hunter Thompson. There’s no such thing as too much drugs.

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku) - A high school class is taken to a remote island and instructed to kill each other until only one survives. Classic 80′s video game plot, tickles the nostalgia bone just right without resolving to remakes and rehashes. Incredibly fun!

House (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi) - A horror movie, a comedy, a fever dream, an art-house lysergic extravaganza. Don’t know what to make of this movie, just that watching it is an amusing experience.

Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard) - I love all Anna Karina’s movies with Godard, so it’s hard to pick one. I went with Band of Outsiders because of its dance sequence. Godard had fun while experimenting with filming techniques, and this feeling is contagious to the audience. 

Thanks for reading and sticking around.

[gramilano]

Yasmine Naghdi in rehearsal for Tarantella, The Royal Ballet © 2017 ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper

I’ve interviewed The Royal Ballet’s principal ballerina Yasmine Naghdi several times over the past five years. The first time, she was a soloist and preparing to debut as Juliet with Matthew Ball as Romeo. The last time was 18-months ago, a few months after her debut in Swan Lake, a role she was scheduled to reprise this spring, but then The Royal Opera House closed its doors.

She is currently on holiday in my adopted homeland, Italy. However, while I’m in the north by the Ligurian Sea, Yasmine and her Italian boyfriend are in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot. I spoke to her via Skype in early May and asked her whether she was with him in lockdown.

We’re in quarantine in our flat. I think when we last spoke, it must have been early on in our relationship. We’re now coming up to two years together.

How’s your Italian?

I’m actually learning Italian. I love languages, and as his parents don’t speak much English, it’s a good incentive for me to be able to speak their language and communicate with them.

I need to speak as it is the best way to learn, so I’m jealous of people like you who are there often. I spent a little bit of time in Sicily with his family over the new year and just hearing them speak was the best way for me to absorb it and try and speak back. I felt that I’d made really good progress over those three days, but then you take a step back when you come home again. I have one or two lessons a week via Skype at the moment, now that I have a bit more time on my hands.

It’s good to have another language in my pocket. I speak a good amount of French and a little bit of Flemish. My mother’s Belgian so I grew up hearing [the family] speak, and although I never learned to read or write Flemish, I spent holidays there and I learnt it quite well, hearing it all the time. I’ve been around languages all my life, so I just love to have another one.

It’s a good outlet for me as well, as the ballet work uses a different part of the brain. So finishing the day and studying written and spoken Italian is very stimulating, and I enjoy it.

Yasmine Naghdi as Kitri in Don Quixote, The Royal Ballet © 2019 ROH. Photograph by Andrej Uspenski

Yasmine Naghdi in Dances at a Gathering, The Royal Ballet ©2020 ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper

So tell me about life in lockdown.

Well, it’s definitely been an adjustment. As a dancer, you’re constantly working to a schedule. You always have a goal in mind, the performance you’re working towards, a deadline. When I was a student, it was the same thing: schedules, deadlines and goals. For that all to come to a complete halt is a real shock, and there’s nothing you can do about it. We can’t work from home as we need the rehearsal studio. We need each other to dance with. We need the stage and the audience to be there for us. So for dancers, it’s impossible, and I think the acceptance of that is the first step.

How have you been coping without a schedule?

I just needed to find a way to have my own daily schedule. I love having structure. I make lists every day – maybe I’m a bit OCD. Whether cleaning my flat, doing a ballet class, cooking a new meal, researching something, or having an Italian lesson, I’ve structured my day to give me a little schedule. That helped me a lot in the early days of lockdown. What’s been really great is Kevin [O’Hare], our director, together with The Royal Ballet health care team, has arranged for us to have ballet classes, Pilates, yoga and strength training through Zoom.

We’ve got an amazing weekly schedule: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, floor barre and ballet class. And we’re all kind of logging on and seeing each other in our various homes with people holding onto the kitchen counter, people holding the sofa. It’s really fun. As you know, there are dancers from all around the world, in all the different time zones, so you’ve got someone who logs on at 5 am in Miami or in Brazil or Japan. It’s really fun to see everyone come together and it feels family orientated with all of us joining in for our daily ballet class. And then on Tuesday and Thursdays, we’re provided with a yoga session, and strength training, like cardio and weights. People use tins cans as substitute weights! And then we also have Pilates, so we’re being provided with a really great way to maintain some fitness at home. Hopefully, it won’t be a complete shock to the body when we eventually go back to the opera house.

How does Pilates and so on work on Zoom?

Well, for example, the Pilates teacher will set an exercise doing the first step with us, and then she’ll come and look at the screen to see all of us and then give us some corrections. It’s really nice that it’s quite intimate and that just with The Royal Ballet members. But I know that Kevin has made these classes also available to external companies, which is so wonderful. So they’ve organised it so that everyone can have an allocated time.

Corybantic Games. Lauren Cuthbertson & Yasmine Naghdi. © ROH, 2018. Photographed by Andrej Uspenski

Lauren [Cuthbertson] told be about the delivery of Harlequin dance flooring and a barre?

That is a saving grace because pointe shoes on a wooden floor is a no-no. So for weeks and weeks, I wasn’t able to do any form of a pirouette because I was worried about slipping. But then Kevin spoke with Aud Jebsen who very generously helped get Harlequin deliveries to everyone’s home, even in Brazil and the States. Everyone now has these Harlequin floors, which is very, very helpful for pointe shoes especially because it gives just the right amount of grip and friction without it being sticky, if you see what I mean. We were quite spoiled by that delivery.

I imagine that a grand jeté isn’t possible, but how much can you do?

Well I can jump on my exercise mat, which is quite thick, and first of all, it is kind to my neighbours – I haven’t had any complaints about loud jumping! It absorbs the sound, and I can do first position échappés and some sissonne side, for example. And secondly, it’s kind for my bones as well, because if you jump on a hard floor, there’s a risk of getting a dropped metatarsal or a strain in the shin. So I didn’t want to risk any of that. I also try to do a little bit of plyometric training every so often just to ensure that those muscles are still there and active. But like you said, grand jetés aren’t quite possible, but what I do do is kind of mark jetés, just for the muscle memory.

As you can’t travel far on your mat, what do you do for cardio and your stamina?

I always thought that running was not good for dancers: it’s bad for knees, it’s bad for ankles, and it’s in parallel, and we’re not really used to having that impact in parallel position. But when we went into lockdown, we got an email from our healthcare team saying that they wanted us to be open-minded about running. They said that they wanted us to give our muscles and bones the feeling of impact. That way, it’s not a complete shock to the system when we do return to work because, of course, that’s our biggest fear. None of the dancers has ever had a break this long unless they’ve been injured, so everyone’s fearful about coming back to work and then getting injured.

So I started running a little bit and, of course, I panicked at first because I thought, oh my god, I’m going to be exhausted. I’m used to working anaerobically, which is very stop-start with intense bursts and then rest. With running, it’s just consistent cardio. But once I started doing it, and I started quite slowly, I really surprised myself at how long I could run for. One day I was running with my boyfriend, and he encouraged me to run for nearly an hour [she laughs], and I hated him a little bit after that! I would never have thought I would be able to run an hour in my life, but I did it. So there’s a first, and I’ve also invested in a skipping rope because I’ve heard that it’s a really good way to get your heart rate up as well. I’ve been enjoying different ways to stay fit and exercise during this time.

Matthew Ball and Yasmine Naghdi as Romeo and Juliet ©2015 ROH. Photographed by Alice Pennefather

Have you ever had injuries that have kept you off stage for a lengthy period?

I have been incredibly lucky with injuries. I had one injury, which was shin splints, when I was 16 years old, and I put that down to training at the same time as growing with the body having to keep up with the demands. I never stopped dancing, but I had to stop jumping for about three weeks because of the strain it was putting on my shins. As you’re young, you bounce back quite quickly. That was the only dance-related injury where I had to sort of take a step back. There have been other niggles here and there, which maybe took a day or two, but nothing severe.

However, last summer we were on holiday and I was walking on a rocky beach. I lost my balance when a boulder kind of shook loose and I landed really badly. It was at a bit of a height and I dropped down on my left ankle and, I kid you not, it swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. Of course, being on holiday, I’m panicking, and I thought immediately that I’d broken it. We drove to the local hospital, and I managed to get an x-ray which ruled out a break, but there was a severe sprain.

I had something like five weeks until I was meant to do Swan Lake at the Kremlin Palace. It was something I was really excited about and looking forward to, but of course, you’ve got all the fouettés on that left foot. I’d never had such a severe sprain before, so I had no idea of how long it would take to get that strength back. That was the first injury I’ve ever had that took me completely off dancing for, I’d say, about six to eight weeks. But, in the grand scheme of things, I consider myself still incredibly lucky because that’s not long compared to what a lot of other dancers have had to go through. People that have had a snapped ACL need a year to recover and stress fractures can take a lot longer. So I still consider myself really, really lucky. It’s just silly that it was unrelated to dance.

So many people have said that to me that these things happen when you’re off your guard. I said to my parents over and over that I couldn’t believe the amount of difficult ballets I’ve done, the risks that I’ve taken, the near injury moments that have happened to me on stage and yet I walk away unscathed. And then on holiday I fall badly on my ankle and this happens. It’s unbelievable.

I missed dancing the mistress in Manon, two performances, and I had to cancel the performances at the Kremlin. It took me until January, so a good six months, to dance without pain. My first performance back from that injury was a live cinema relay when I danced the second movement pas de deux of Concerto, so no pressure! And then my second performance back was the opening night of Sleeping Beauty. So again…

The power of the mind and the amazing power of the body to heal… it teaches you a lot to have an injury like that.

Yasmine Naghdi in rehearsal for Don Quixote, The Royal Ballet © 2019 ROH. Photograph by Andrej Uspenski

Yasmine Naghdi and Marcelino Sambé in rehearsal for Don Quixote, The Royal Ballet © 2019 ROH. Photograph by Andrej Uspenski

What should you have been dancing in this in this period? Are you missing out on any debuts?

I had a couple of Wayne McGregor works because what was remaining of the rest of our season was the Live Fire Exercise, Prodigal Son and Corybantic Games bill and I was meant to debut in Live Fire Exercise, so I’ve missed out on that. Also, there were my three Swan Lake performances that I was due to dance with Matthew Ball. That was quite sad because I love Swan Lake as I really connect with this ballet and I was revisiting it for the second time after having danced it for the first time two years ago in 2018.

On the scheduled day of my first performance this year, I got a phone call from Kevin, my director, it was so sweet. It was 7.30, which is usually our start time, and he said, “I was just thinking of you. I can’t believe that now the curtain would be going up on Swan Lake, and we would have all been settling down to watch the show. It’s just so surreal to think that it’s not happening.” Then, for the whole evening, I was looking at the clock going, “OK, it’s 8.30, and the curtain would have been down after the white act,” and, “Now I would have been doing fouettés,” and, “Now the curtain would have been coming down at the end,” and “Now I would have been on the tube home.” I was kind of following it with the timings for everything would have been happening… I couldn’t help it.

It’s thoughtful that he called you.

So lovely. Kevin said he looked in his diary and saw that it was our performance that night. It was nice to get a call from him and just have a general chat.

Also, I think I was going to be involved in the sequel to [Wayne McGregor’s] The Dante Project. No casting had really been mentioned, but it was in the pipeline. Some rehearsals were due to start during the first week of lockdown. Then we had a tour to Doncaster that we would have been doing in July. So not too much, but I felt bad about the Swan Lakes. I have a feeling it might return soon because we missed so many performances and it’s such a wonderful ballet and such an audience pleaser.

Yasmine Naghdi as Odette in Swan Lake, The Royal Ballet © 2018 ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper

Yasmine Naghdi as Odile in Swan Lake, The Royal Ballet © 2018 ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper

Why do you love Swan Lake? Some dancers don’t enjoy its challenges.

You know, you either love it or hate it, I think. I’ve always been someone that loves a challenge and pushing myself to try and achieve something that’s hard to reach. It then feels even better if it goes well, and you just think, “Oh, I’ve done it. I’ve achieved what I dreamed of.”

Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake are the two hardest classical ballets in the repertoire without a doubt. When you dance either of those ballets, and you feel that you’ve done them well, it’s the best feeling in the world to hear that audience applaud after all the hard work you put in.

In Swan Lake, I love the contrast of the roles; being two people in the same ballet. I love dancing very quietly, peacefully, and gracefully as the white swan.

With that wonderful music – especially played live in a theatre.

Of course, the music is so famous and, as you say, live music is just irreplaceable for the feeling that it gives you.

And then you morph into the black swan.

Putting on that costume starts the change, and then the headdress goes on, and the makeup becomes more dramatic, and then you see yourself in this stunning black glittering tutu and you have to be a completely different person. It’s really adrenalin-fuelled. You’ve got that balance in arabesque, and you’re building up to it and, although you’re tired, you have to contain yourself. Then you’ve got this very long solo with the menège at the end, and so you’re even more tired when you have to come on and do 32 fouettés well, so it’s a great challenge. I love that feeling when it goes well, and that’s why I really love this ballet.

Yasmine Naghdi as Giselle in Giselle, The Royal Ballet © 2018 ROH. Photographed by Helen Maybanks

Have you been watching some of the dance videos that companies have been offering online?

Yes, I have. It’s so wonderful. I was just thinking that during this time what’s really helping people is art. That’s why it’s so important for people to have that escapism through various means, be it through music or through movement. Having ballet streamed has offered people a little moment to forget about what’s going on in the world right now and allow themselves to be transported a little. I tuned in to all of the Royal Ballet screenings, the Mayerling from Stuttgart, and the various videos that are coming from Russian companies. I saw English National Ballet’s Dust, which was really beautiful, and Hofesh Shechter’s Clowns – that was really interesting.

Just dance?

I am not a ballet bunhead, so to speak. I’m not someone who watches ballet videos all day. I never really was. They inspired me obviously, and from time to time, yes, but I would never want to be completely immersed in it, day and night. I love having a normal life alongside my ballet life. It’s different for everyone, and some people need to be in it all the time, but for me, I love the balance, that work/life balance. And I think it makes me appreciate it more when I come back to it.

So in terms of non-ballet stuff, we’ve been watching a lot of Netflix – I heard that their shares have completely skyrocketed during this time. I really enjoy watching Killing Eve, which is on BBC iPlayer.

I also watched a documentary about Manolo Blahnik, the shoe designer [MANOLO: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards], which is fantastic. He’s such a character, really upbeat – the kind of guy you just want to be best friends with. I started Ozark because everyone was talking about it, but it didn’t click with me for some reason.

It’s very dark.

VERY dark. I wanted to like it so badly because everyone was just raving and raving about it, but unfortunately, no. We’ve also watched a Spanish series called Elite, which is fun, full of very good looking people at a school, but when three students from an underprivileged background arrive on a scholarship, someone gets murdered. It’s kind of a murder mystery. It’s definitely glossy, but it’s been great for quarantine, and it’s got a really nice soundtrack.

I also love watching Chef’s Table on Netflix. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those.

I’m a fan.

Oh, I’m so glad, me too. I’ve been watching a lot of those because it’s really artistic. I said to my boyfriend that these chefs are artists expressing themselves through their food.

I remember you telling me that you love cooking.

I’m doing a lot of cooking, and this has been the perfect time because I’m not exhausted, and I’m not limited with time. At the end of the workday, when I finish at 6.30 and come home, I just want to make a really quick pasta to get my carbs, with some chicken for example, and I don’t have time or energy to experiment. Now, during this time, I’ve been experimenting with different cuisines: some Chinese fusion food and a lot of Italian food. I’m trying to perfect my spaghetti alle vongole which is really good.

I’ll believe you.

No really! We’re making fresh pasta, and we’ve bought basil plants. Having an Italian around the house has taught me to buy high-quality ingredients all the time, which I really appreciate. So that’s been something I’ve enjoyed. Dinner is being planned right from the morning.

Vadim Muntagirov and Yasmine Naghdi in Le Corsaire, photo Andrej Uspenski

You sound very positive and happy, but I imagine you’ve had some down moments too?

We’re only human. Yes, of course there are down days, most definitely. We’re all going through ups and downs and sometimes I kind of just wake up feeling a bit low and uninspired. On those days, I’ve learned not to get angry at myself at feeling that way, and if I want a day to just sort of be in a slump, I have to let myself and I shouldn’t fight that feeling. I shouldn’t try and push past it because then I irritate myself even more. I’m getting a really good amount of sleep every night, so I can’t blame it on being tired, but I’ve learned to understand myself and those days.

I think that quarantine time has taught me to listen to my body in a psychological way rather than just how it is feeling, like “Oh, I’m tired because I went from 10.30 to 6.30 yesterday,” or, “I had a late performance last night.”

On those days I just try and get out of the house and get some fresh air, because it can be hard staying in all the time. I know that with you in Italy it is even more strict than it is here. We’ve been so lucky being allowed to go up to the park, allowed to do exercise outdoors. So I’ll try and push myself to go for a run, which, you know, get those endorphins going.

Are you keep in contact with friends and share these feelings with them?

Oh yes. It’s been great taking time to call people and chat to people a little bit more. There was a time that I was calling my colleagues on a daily basis and I thought, you know what, I’m actually talking to them more than I would normally at work because I would be in rehearsal here and they would be there. It’s been nice to connect with people.

LA BAYADERE The Royal Ballet ROH Covent Garden, Solor; Steven McRae, Gamzatti; Yasmine Naghdi, Nikiya; Akane Takada, The High Brahmin; Alastair Marriott,

Yasmine Naghdi as Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, The Royal Ballet © 2017 ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper

What other positive things will you take away from this quarantine period?

I hope that coming out of this will give people a lot of positivity. I think it will definitely change the way people think about life in general, about what’s important. All the material things are not as important as people thought, and I’ve been appreciating the simple things in life. Being able to go to the supermarket and then make a good meal is a simple pleasure. I found myself returning to some old ways.

For example?

We bought some board games and have been playing those together. You know, we’ve been playing Scrabble quite a lot. I’ve been really enjoying it, and I would never have done that. I think it’s taking time to do things that we used to enjoy doing back in the day.

It’s definitely made me far more appreciative about things that we have but usually took for granted. Being able to give your best friend a hug, you know, or being able to see your family regularly. It’s kind of crazy, but I’ve not seen my sister since January. She went on a skiing trip before the lockdown and then decided to stay in Normandy with her French boyfriend.

It’s been such a stressful time for so many – especially the key workers who are working to save people’s lives or the people who are ill at the moment. I think it’s made me grateful to be in my position, keeping in mind all of those who are really going through a difficult time. It is a great time for reflection in general.

The Firebird. Edward Watson and Yasmine Naghdi. ©ROH, 2019. Photo by Tristram Kenton

The Firebird. Yasmine Naghdi and Edward Watson. ©ROH, 2019. Photo by Tristram Kenton

[Interview] The Royal Ballet’s Yasmine Naghdi: a time to reflect I’ve interviewed The Royal Ballet’s principal ballerina Yasmine Naghdi several times over the past five years. The first time, she was a soloist and preparing to debut as Juliet with Matthew Ball as Romeo.

[placetobenation]

As I embark to see my favorite band perform with mid 90’s alternate powerhouse bands Our Lady Peace and Live, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the band that has unequivocally changed my life for the better for the past 25 years, and celebrate the monumental 25th anniversary of their first album, Sixteen Stone.

Sixteen Stone, released December 6th, 1994, was somewhat of a cheat album, considering most of the singles were not formally released for public consumption until the following year. However, from the moment this album’s music graced my ears in 1995, I was hooked, and Bush became a steadfast friend, ushering me through my life’s journey.  Bush’s Sixteen Stone, much like Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, which was wonderfully covered by Calum McDougall, is a debut album by a band from the UK. However, their sound and aesthetic put a spin on American grunge rock, and gained a quick following in the US, while remaining virtually unknown in their homeland.  Within a year of Sixteen Stone’s release, Bush was headlining American arenas and bringing much lesser known bands to the forefront. These bands included: The Toadies, The Goo Goo Dolls and a very little known female fronted ska band out of California at the time…No Doubt.

https://youtu.be/Ps317u9Rhl0

The lead single and opening track to the album is a song called “Everything Zen”. Bush first got their big break in America thanks to the influential KROQ radio station in California playing that single for the first time. That’s right, kids! Back in the day, being played on the radio was actually a big deal!. “Everything Zen” is a strong grunge sounding song that hits you in the mouth immediately. It hits people in that ‘Seattle sound’ sweet spot while sounding much more polished and cohesive than what some of those Seattle bands put together. Paying tribute to artists such as David Bowie and Tom Waits, you get a feel instantly of what kind of lyrics you’re going to get from one Gavin Rossdale.

https://youtu.be/02K82uw4lio

“Little Things” is the next single off this album and, like Everything Zen, is another punch you in the mouth hard and fast grunge sounding song. If you are to ever see Bush play live…this is the song that Gavin Rossdale seems to have the most fun playing live as he ends up all over the venue.  The song itself, the lyrics, is a reminder to not to be let down by all the details. To not let the “little things kill”, so to speak. Gavin said in an interview about this song: “That’s just a song about paranoia for the future and paranoia of life. I think it has something to do with trying to be strong in the face of adversity.” Perfectly sums it up.

https://youtu.be/xS3GiUAvjJ8

The next single off the album and the song that made me immediately fall in love with this band is “Comedown”. One of the most popular tracks from the band, I credit this song as REALLY breaking them out and giving them their main notoriety. It is easily one of the most popular alternative rock songs of the 90’s and it is such a catchy tune. Featured in the Mark Wahlberg movie “Fear”, was ripped off for a WCW theme in the dying days for Chris Kanyon and was even covered by our very own Steve and Kelly for an episode of Songs with Friends! The lyrics for the song I’ve always viewed as being on such an emotional high and not wanting to come down from it, so to speak. In an interview with Gavin about this song, he states that “I liked the idea of euphoria. But having that euphoria has a comedown. It’s inside your brain and just says, ‘I’m having the greatest time, and I don’t want to stop.’ But most of the time, people lose that zone and it changes and you’re like, ‘No, I didn’t want this.’ And that’s such a common feeling. I watched it being sung every night – it’s one of the songs where I can step back and let the people sing. It’s the best feeling in the world as a songwriter.” It’s the very first song he wrote when Bush formed, so it’s obviously very important to him. It’s also the song that they close out every concert with.

https://youtu.be/hOllF3TgAsM

Glycerine…oooooooh, my Glycerine. Arguably their most successful and popular song to this day. This is such a beautiful, beautiful song. This would be considered the power ballad of the album and is only Gavin with a guitar without the rest of the band playing with him. This song was, I believe, #2 for the entire year of 1996 on MTV, won the MTV VMA for Viewers Choice, it was even parodied in the 90’s episode of the Simpsons with “Margarine”.

https://youtu.be/2z_gi6AniEo

This song is kind of iconic for my generation. Its also a wonderful live experience. Many of the times the rest of the band comes out and they have a “rock” closing for the song which is interesting and a lot of fun. Many may remember the performance of this song in the pouring rain as part of MTV’s Sprong Break Rocks in 1996.

https://youtu.be/-ehO-hoPDUg

The lyrics to this song are very beautifully written and very melancholy. My favorite lyric is “I’m never alone, I’m alone all the time.” This song was written about Gavin’s then girlfriend. “Something about it was bigger than anything we were doing” Rossdale stated in an interview. If he only knew how right he was.

https://youtu.be/5WPbqYoz9HA

Machinehead is the fifth and final single off of this album. No matter what age you are…you’ve probably heard this song at one point in your life. It’s practically played at every single sporting event known to man, is featured in many video games and was also featured in the movie Fear, for which it won ‘Best Song From a Movie’ at the MTV Movie Awards. It also has a cheap ripoff version used for WWE for dvd menus.

https://youtu.be/76iV2_PxNCQ

As far as the rest of the album goes…I don’t think there is a stoppable track of the bunch. They all hit pretty heavily in the Alternative Rock feels and if you love that 90’s post grunge sound…Sixteen Stone will satisfy that need. From “Body” to “Testosterone” to the beautifully written “Alien”, Sixteen Stone May possibly be the perfect album.

Sixteen Stone went on to sell 6 million copies in the US and 10 million copies worldwide. Not bad for a band that was once told by the record label, “not only are their no singles on here, there are no album tracks either.” While some people say it can be attributed to Gavin’s good looks and charisma, I and many others think the music is the key. Like the cover of Spin Magazine said, “Don’t hate them because he’s beautiful.” After all, there is a reason they are still making music and touring 25 years later.  Now granted, it may not be my personal favorite from the band(in all honesty, that could be from me overplaying it the past 25 years…), there is a reason that it is their most popular. So if you like 90’s rock and you HAVENT listened to Sixteen Stone…what are you waiting for?

[whistlekick]

Sabomnim Alain Burrese is a martial arts practitioner, instructor, and author from Montana.

I know how to fight. I’ve done that. But I wanna become a martial artist and better myself through martial arts and learn the skills and everything else that can go with learning a martial art…

Sabomnim Alain Burrese – Episode 348

It’s so rare to have a guest here on the show that started training by himself. Sabomnim Alain Burrese read martial arts books as a child and started training what he learned in their backyard. Since then, Sabomnim Burrese has trained in multiple disciplines including judo and taekwondo. He was also in the military which prompted him to teach self-defense. There are so much more to learn about Sabomnim Alain Burrese, so listen to find out more!

[app_audio src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/whistlekick/348-alain-burrese.mp3″%5D

Show Notes

If you want to know more about Sabomnim Alain Burrese, visit his websites below: http://yourwarriorsedge.com http://surviveashooting.com http://surviveanddefend.com

You can find him on Facebook below: https://www.facebook.com/YourWarriorsEdge https://www.facebook.com/surviveanddefend/ https://www.facebook.com/SurviveAShooting/

You can also find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below or download here.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Hey there everyone, thanks for coming by. This is whistlekick Martial Arts Radio episode 348 and today, I’m joined by Sabomnim Alain Burrese. If you’re new to the show, head on over to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com to learn more about what we do, to find a whole bunch of other episodes, in fact all of them. We don’t put a single one of them away. No paywalls, none of that here, just martial arts podcast. But if you’re looking for more than podcast, we do sell some stuff. You can head on over to whistlekick.com, check out our uniforms, our belts, our sparring gear, our shirts, sweatshirts. There’s a ton of stuff there and you can use the code PODCAST15 to save 15% on every single thing that’s there.

I had a great time talking with our guest today. We just… we clicked philosophically. There was so much good conversation here and rather than try to sum it up, because I’ll admit I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to find a good way to summarize what we talked about. I’m just gonna let you listen. I love this conversation, I hope you’ll love it as well. So I’ll just step back and welcome our guest, Sabomnim Burrese, to the show. Sabomnim Burrese, welcome to whistlekick Martial Arts Radio.

Alain Burrese:

Thank you for having me on, Jeremy. I really appreciate it.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I appreciate you carving the time out of your day, navigating time zone math to make this happen.

Alain Burrese:

Yeah, it’s certainly uhm… it’s always a challenge when I do interviews or deal with people on the East Coast.

Jeremy Lesniak:

You know, it’s funny. Like you know, when I think back, what is the cliché in pretty much any public school classroom or you know, any high school classroom really, is when am I going to use this? And the irony is the hardest math, in my observation since graduating, has been time zone math.

Alain Burrese:

Yeah, I mean especially you have to make sure you’re going the right way.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Right, right. Maneuvering the right direction and the right number of hours and then if you schedule something for after daylight savings time and then you’ve got those weird stretches that don’t observe daylight savings time, and some countries don’t do it at all and it just…

Alain Burrese:

Exactly.

Jeremy Lesniak:

It is complicated. So that’s why you know, and anyone that has been on the show in the last six months or so knows, Google calendar, to the rescue. Everyone that is scheduled to come on the show gets and invite to my personal calendar because that’s the only way I could figure it out.

Alain Burrese:

Sounds like a good system.

Jeremy Lesniak:

It works, it works. Now of course we are not here to discuss the challenges of the way we’ve decided to arbitrarily slice up the way the sun revolves around the earth. That’s not what we do on martial arts radio. We talk about martial arts, of course, and that’s why you’re here. And I appreciate you coming on so we can talk about martial arts. But before we can talk about the things that you’ve done and the places you’ve been, we have to talk about your start. So let’s go all the way back and why don’t you tell us about your martial arts origin story, if you will?

Alain Burrese:

Well my martial art origin story is a little bit twisted and winding.

Jeremy Lesniak:

03:21

Alain Burrese:

It started in the ’70s. You know, I was a kid and I was reading the Bruce Tegner and Fred Neff martial art books. And I didn’t have an opportunity to train in a school back then, and so I was at home, I’ll look Karate Kid with a book, practicing by myself the best I could in those early years. It wasn’t until early ’80s in high school that I actually had the opportunity to get some formal training and that was in Judo. We had a Judo club in Thompson Falls, Montana. And it only lasted a year, unfortunately, because of work reasons – the instructor left Thompson Falls. But for that year, I got to train and compete in Judo. After that, I went to the military and have the opportunity to train in some Karate at 04:13 Karate at Yadkin Road at Fort Bragg. You know, it was in Fayetteville which is just outside of Fort Bragg when I was stationed there. Then I went to Korea and I went to a little bit of Taekwondo but I was pretty much too busy with Army stuff and I really didn’t like Taekwondo as much so I didn’t pursue that that much. I got out of the Army and was able to train with Dennis Dallas. Shihan Dennis Dallas who ran Karate, Judo and Hapkido classes. And his Hapkido classes were very influenced by Japanese as well. And I went to every class of his that I could, working around my work schedule. Then I moved again, and I was in a Toshikan Karate for a while until that club stopped. So fast forward, here it is, 1995, I’m writing my first book on self-defense and everybody kept saying what are you a black belt in? And I’m like well, I’m not a black belt in anything. All of these different schools I trained at, I went up color belts but never made it to the black belt level. So I said, what art did I like the best? Hapkido for a variety of reasons. I really liked living in Korea with the Army. I’m gonna go back to Korea and study Hapkido, and I did that 1996. Went over there, started as a white belt and I am still under those instructors today. The last time I saw them was this February; went over there, got to train with my instructor Lee Jun-kyu and we got to go see some of the Olympics as his school is only two miles from the one Olympic Park in Gangneung, South Korea. So that’s sort of my history in a nutshell.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Okay so let’s kinda go back because there’s a point there that I think is probably worth exploring, worth digging deeper on, and that’s the point where you’re writing a book on self-defense and people are kinda sounds like questioning your credibility because of your lack of a black belt. Now a lot of people would say, you know, I don’t need a black belt. I’ve trained in these schools, I’ve trained in the military, I’ve got – I’m doing the math – right around 20 years of experience at that point, so what about this black belt? But you didn’t decide just to say okay, I’ll go get a black belt. You decided to seek out Hapkido in the homeland, if you will, and move to Korea. That’s kind of a big jump.

Alain Burrese:

It was and it’s true that the first book that I wrote, Hard-Won Wisdom From The School Of Hard Knocks which is published by Paladin Press, it wasn’t about martial arts. It was about actual fights that I had either been in or had witnessed during years in the military, during years in the university when I was doing security and different things. So it wasn’t a martial art book; it was a book on self-defense based on actual experiences. But there was still always a part of me as ever since that little kid that was connected to the martial arts as well, and I wanted more of that. I told Shihan Dallas once when I started training with him, I know how to fight – I’ve done that. But I want to become a martial artist and better myself with martial arts and learn the skills and everything else that can go with learning the martial art. And that’s what I wanted to do when I went back to Korea, as well. It wasn’t necessarily to become a better fighter although the stuff I’ve learned in Hapkido has definitely helped me in real situations, but I wanted to be more than just a fighter.

Jeremy Lesniak:

And at that time, and maybe it’s even the same definition now, how did you delineate between what a fighter was or who a fighter was and a martial artist?

Alain Burrese:

I think if you learn how to hit and strike and kick, and I can teach you to hammer fist somebody in the nose or kick him in the knee or elbow him, in a very short time, then you can probably defend yourself against a lot of different attacks. Becoming a martial artist to me, it goes way beyond that. You learn skills that aren’t necessarily going to help you in an actual street fight but they help you improve yourself. You go beyond what you think you can. And I really do believe that anybody can obtain a black belt and it’s not necessarily… you don’t have to grade a black belt from Joe and John and Mary and Sue because they’re all gonna be different, and somebody might not have the physical capability to do what another person can do. But if they’re doing their best and they are stretching and growing and learning, then I believe they can advance in the belt system and they’re becoming the best martial artist and the people they can be. Because it’s more than just punching and kicking. There should be character development. There should be, you know, the discipline that you go and train even if you don’t feel like it. There’s the discipline to go through a little bit of pain and discomfort to become better. There’s the discipline of helping those that are coming behind you, to help them reach their best. There’s the fellowship that you can gain with other martial artists. So there’s just so much more than just learning how to fight and defend yourself.

Jeremy Lesniak:

That’s quite a laundry list and certainly a subject that we’ve dug into quite a bit on the show. You know, so you’re preaching to the choir here and I suspect the majority of folks listening today would fully agree. It’s about that development, that growth that makes it so important. Now pretty much anyone that’s come on the show who has traveled around and trained for decades, especially when they’ve trained in other countries, even lived in other countries as you have, they have quite the collection of stories. So I’d love for you to reflect back on your time, training, becoming and being a martial artist, and tell us your favorite story from that time.

Alain Burrese:

I think one of my favorite stories is because we watch movies and we see televisions shows about going off to foreign land and being trained and such, and after I have lived in Korea – and when I lived in Korea, I went to two Hapkido classes a day and one Qigong class a day and then one on Saturday, so literally it was 11 Hapkido and 5 Qigong classes a week when I training. And then I was teaching English to pay the bills. I left Korea, came back to apply for law school. Then that summer before law school started, I went back to Korea. One to train, two to see the woman that I had been dating when I lived there who is now my wife. But when I went over there I thought well, I know this person that owns a hotel. I can probably get a cheap room, you know, tell him I want to stay there all summer. And you know, I’ll do what I can and make it as affordable as I can but I’m gonna go into debt but oh well, it’s something important. When I got over there, Lee Jung-kyu, my Hapkido instructor, and at the time he was still under Kim Young-jong teaching out of Kim Young-jong’s school, then later he left Kwanjangnim Kim’s school and opened his own. But at the time he was still training under Kwanjangnim Kim Young-jong and the lead instructor. When he saw that I was going to stay in a hotel and such, he was like no, no, no, no, no. His parents who he still lived with, this was before he got married, they own what was called a Minbak which is a small type of inn down by the beach. They’re in Gangneung. So they gave me my own room and I ate all my meals with him and his family, and his mother actually did my laundry. She included it with the laundry that she did with everybody. And an interesting little story is that one day, some underwear got mixed up with some colors and my instructor came to me one day and he’s… and his English was not real good, my Korean wasn’t fluent either but we made do. But he came by and he was very embarrassed and his mom was very embarrassed. And he’s like Mr. Alain, and he’s like you can tell he’s not comfortable talking about this, he’s like… in Korea, they call men’s underwear panties, it took me a long time to get my wife to quit calling my underwear panties but that is something they do in Korea. So he’s like uh, your panties, pink. And focus his mom had turned my underwear sort of pink-colored by washing them with some color. So that was just sort of a funny little thing and I could care less. It wasn’t like I was running around in my underwear, nobody could see them anyway. But it was sort of embarrassing for him and his mom until I said it was alright. But that entire summer was just so fantastic because I was living my instructor. He taught four classes a day so I was going to all four classes every day. I wore myself out; there were times he had to say Mr. Alain, rest. But it was one of those things that you know, you dream about it or it’s in the movies to run off to a foreign land and train with a martial instructor, live and train there, and that’s what I got to do for that summer.

Jeremy Lesniak:

That’s awesome. Now one of the things I always ask folks when they’ve spent time training abroad is how did the expectation match up to the reality?

Alain Burrese:

It wasn’t as tough as some people make it seem like or some of the movies portray. I mean I wasn’t Jean-Claude Van Damme being strung between two trees to do the splits, you know? And having meat tied to me and dogs chase me through the woods and stuff. But it was still, you know, the people there were so genuine with me and I formed such strong relationships and that was just incredible. I was the only American to train at that school – the only foreigner. And I remember one time, Kwanjangnim Kim Young-jong telling me, and sometimes he told me through my fiancé, now my wife who would sometimes go and translate some that I couldn’t completely understand, but he said if I would have known him in his younger days teaching, I would have thought he was very mean but times change. And you know, this was in the 90’s, and he’s like being mean is not necessary. And this was the man that was… he would smile, he was happy, genuinely friendly with people. Besides on the mat, you know, we would go out, I’d be invited to different parties and different things even though I wasn’t even a black belt yet, I was going out with these higher rank black belts and been treated a little bit differently because I was a foreigner and because I was so dedicated to Hapkido. And just a very genuine good person that was really friendly. When he would say yeah, I used to be mean but you don’t need to be that way that was the lesson that always sorta stuck with me.

Jeremy Lesniak:

It’s powerful.

Alain Burrese:

And I’ll say something about him, I do remember a time, it was just Kim Hyun, Lee Jun-kyu and me there in the room, in the training hall, it was between classes, and Kim Hyun is a super close friend. He was the one that helped me, he was my partner when I took my first Dan test, and he was like a 3rd Dan at the time, and then he went off and he started his own school. So when I go back to Korean, I visit his school as well as Lee Jun-kyu’s school. But the three of us were there and they were explaining something and all of a sudden Kwanjangnim Kim Young-jong walks in, no, no, no, no. And he walked over, he hardly moved and it floored Lee Jun-kyu. It put him down on the mat. And when he got back up, he had this huge red mark on his chest. And it’s just, the incredible power that he had, and it looked like he hardly did anything. So even though he was such a super nice friendly person, he definitely had the power and the ability to not be nice at the time. And the only reason he was like that with Lee Jun-kyu who’s now a Kwanjangnim Lee Jun-kyu was their relationship as instructor and the student, and that was his top student who was doing the teaching in his school, and he grew up with some of the mean training and so he still knew some of that. But it was just very interesting – to see how he could have both of the side. And I think all of us have the ability to have those sides. And it’s sad when you see people… all they want to be is the militant, militant, militant, and life is more than that. You gotta have that nice side, and you gotta be good with people too.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Yeah, when you think about it, even if you extend that militarism, that let’s say aggression, into your training, your training isn’t even the majority of your life. So to be able to live kindly, I mean when I think about my instructors that I’ve had over the years, the best ones were kind the majority of the time. You know, I mean sometimes you gotta pull out that mean streak especially when you’re dealing with an annoying, obnoxious at times, child such as I was. But to be kind, right? I mean we’re martial artists, we’re trying to develop into better people as you said earlier.

Alain Burrese:

It’s true. I mean I don’t remember… one of the times I was in Korean, I was going back to Gangneung with Kim Hyun cause he had been on a testing board for a different school’s black belt test, and when we were driving back to Gangneung to go to dinner and meet up with Lee Jun-kyu and some other martial artists, you know he told me, the most important thing for a martial artist is to have a good mind and a good heart. And that’s something that I always try to remember and live by and teach as well.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I like that; powerful stuff… When you think about your time as a martial artist, which has been a pretty good chunk of your life, you’ve developed skills, tools that allow you to face, you know, any number of obstacles. I’d like you to tell us about a time in your life now where things weren’t going well and how your martial arts allowed you to overcome it.

Alain Burrese:

That’s a difficult one because… I think it’s the discipline and just the training that you can do things. And so any time that something is difficult, hitting the gym, hitting the training, has been a part of what I do. And so last year, I lost my father… very difficult time. It’s been just a little over a year now but my father was not a martial artist but he was a fighter when he was in the military, and I had learned a lot from him growing up. But to incorporate his lessons to the other lessons that I have learned through the martial arts, which he was very proud of me for the things I’ve done in the martial arts, I think did help me get through that time. And you know, understanding that what would he want me to do? And he would want me to continue do on what I’ve been doing – training, teaching, sharing with others and helping others in the areas of safety and personal development and growth that the martial arts provides.

Jeremy Lesniak:

And how do you he would score you if he was to give you a report card today?

Alain Burrese:

Sometimes high and sometimes low. I think we always, all of us fail at times. I think he’d be very proud with the newest book that I just published this summer, and so I’d get a very high score for that. I think I’d get a high score for reaching out and doing the activities that I’m doing with the local churches and then trying to even get beyond the local churches and the Active Shooter Response and some of the Reflex Protect things which is a product that I’ve been helping introduce in the schools and churches in different places; I’d get really high scores for those. I think I’d get lower scores sometimes when my patience especially with family sometimes. I have a daughter in high school which if anybody has daughters in high school, they probably know what I’m talking about. It can be a challenging time for both the student and the parents, and sometimes I need to back up and be a little bit more patient and use some of the martial art discipline and the breathing and the patience that we learn in martial arts when she’s having one of her times. And so I would probably not score quite as high in that because I think I could do better and I think he would know that I could do better.

Jeremy Lesniak:

You know for me, it’s always been interesting. You know, I have those figures in my life who knew me well, most of them that I’m thinking of have passed on, and I know how they would score me. It’s funny, we can fool ourselves but the moment we start trying to step out of that box and thinking what would this person who helped raise me or this person that I respect tremendously, what would they say about what I’m doing? And I think for most of us, it becomes so much clearer, so much more black and white on what we’re capable of.

Alain Burrese:

I think you’re so correct on that. I remember years ago, I was living in Korea, I was actually training over there but you know, I had the internet, I had a laptop and email and stuff and I shared a joke, you know a lot of us share jokes, now it’s Facebook posts. But the joke wasn’t… it had sort of a violent ending, and a mentor of mine, PhD from Yale, John Madden who was a classics professor when I went to school, in-charge of the Honors College, the Dean of the Honors College which I was part of, he wrote me back and said you know Alain, does that joke really reflect your values and morals? Is that what you want to promote – violence over something that’s probably didn’t need to become violent? And he knowing that I was a martial artist, him not being one though, he said is that the kind of jokes that Mr. Miyagi would share? Is that the philosophy that Mr. Miyagi would teach? And when he wrote me that email back, it really made me stop and think, yeah so do I really want to be promoting that kind of thing? And that’s why you will never see those kind of jokes, those kind of posts, that kind of stuff come from any of my social media pages.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Makes sense. I like it. Now when you think about the collection of people who had influence on who you are today as a martial artist, all that you are as that individual, if you had to choose one, who has been the greatest influence? Who would that be?

Alain Burrese:

I don’t know if I could choose just one because I’m a collection of all of them. The most influential would have to be Kwanjangnim Kim Young-jong, Kwanjangnim Lee Jun-kyu and, he’s actually Kwanjangnim as well, Kim Hyun.  And then Shihan Dennis Dallas. I learned the most Hapkido from Lee Jun-kyu but I also learned one of the most important lessons about teaching martial arts from Shihan Dallas. And that’s when I first started teaching here in Missoula, it would have been around ’98 or ’99 – and he told me he goes Alain, you can teach the physical stuff, no problem. But if you are not teaching the character development and be strong good people, you’re missing the entire point of teaching martial arts and all that good that you could do teaching martial arts in your future. So those are the most influential in my Hapkido journey and my martial art teaching; those four individuals. If Lee Jun-kyu and Shihan Dallas, probably the most.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Now let’s play hypothetical. If you could add someone into that mix, someone that you haven’t trained with, who would you want to train with?

Alain Burrese:

So many people. I mean that’s… I would love to be able to go back and train with Choi Yong-Sool, the founder of Hapkido. I would have loved to train more than one day with Bong-soo Han. I would love to train more with Dr. Kimm. You know, I’ve had a chance to train with him a little but those are some people that I would love to have had an opportunity to train for a long time with.

Jeremy Lesniak:

What would you have… I’m not great with names. The founder of Hapkido, what was his name again?

Alain Burrese:

Choi Yong-Sool.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Choi Yong-Sool.

Alain Burrese:

Dojunim Choi Yong-Sool

Jeremy Lesniak:

Okay. What would you have hoped to gain training with him?

Alain Burrese:

I don’t know if his Hapkido is necessarily better than many others that are training in Hapkido. But I think it just would have been fascinating to train with the founder, you know, if from a historical aspect. Because right now, there’s different stories about this and that in Hapkido’s history and what the real truth is is probably somewhere in between some of the things. I just think it would have been historically… If I could have trained with him and been fluent in Korean to learn directly from, you know, the person that you know, Hapkido came from. So that, I think, what I would have gained. I don’t know if the necessarily physical skills would have been much different than I learned when was in Korea from the instructors I had but from a historical point of going back to the beginning, that just fascinates me there.

Jeremy Lesniak:

For me, the opportunity to speak to a style founder and honestly, this conversation comes up the most when we talk about Aikido on the show. For some reason, when we speak to folks who have deep Aikido in their personal martial arts practice, it’ a discussion of O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba. And to me, it’s… what was in your head as you made these decisions, right? Because every style includes some things and excludes other things, and I just find that that delineation to be fascinating. Why? It’s neat to me.

Alain Burrese:

And that fascinates me, too. And Choi Yong-Sool, his instructor in Japan was Takeda Sensei. So it has the same roots as Aikido but they’re sort of went in different directions when Choi Yong-Soll went back to Korea. And then there were some of Dojunim Choi Yong-Sool’s students that incorporated more kicking into the art which is why it has much more kicking than Aikido. But if you go back far enough, they do have the same roots.

Jeremy Lesniak:

That makes sense. Competition is something that I don’t if I want to say is polarizing but folks have either had a fair amount of experience with it or usually very, very little. Where do you fall in that dichotomy?

Alain Burrese:

I would fall in the very, very little.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Okay.

Alain Burrese:

In Judo, I competed, you know, back in high school. And two tournaments out of the year that I competed until the instructor moved away, two tournaments had the biggest influence on me. One was a tournament in Missoula, you know I was living in Thompson Falls at the time – high school – that’s about two hours from Missoula where I am right now. But the tournament was in Missoula and it was a double elimination tournament and I was able to take a first place. I had to go against the second place guy three times. Because earlier in the day, he beat me. And then the way the tournament bracket round up, we’re facing each other again. If he were to beat me, he would win but he didn’t. I beat him, so that made us go into the final match, a third time we had to meet cause our loses had been to each other and I was able to beat him in that final match and take the first place trophy home. And that was just… it made me really into like, you know, Judo and so that was an important tournament. But probably more impactful tournament was a tournament in Plains Montana where I was choked unconscious. And why it was impactful, and I’ve told this story like in my Chokes and Sleepers DVD, when I got choked unconscious, as I was going out then I was out, I realized that there is absolutely I could do as I’m going unconscious. And at the same time, I read a magazine article and the article happen to be by Loren Christensen. At the time, I never knew Loren and I would become friends and that we would be promoting each other, and you know he wrote the foreword for my newest book just this last summer. But that article and being choked out made me really devote myself to learning chokes and sleeper holds. And I became very good at them and I had to use them on a number of actual altercations throughout my army days and during security and different works. So that getting choke unconscious lit that fire to me to get really good at those and getting really good saved me later.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Nice One of the things that I often say maybe not so much on the show but just in general when I’m talking about martial arts is that a diverse martial artist is a better martial artist. The more things we are adapted to handle, the better, and competition is certainly one of those things that gives us the opportunity to, we’ll say, diversify. Now you’ve talked a bit about self-defense and how it’s separate in a sense or at least you know, not the complete intersection of the Venn diagram with martial arts, and that you’ve written some books. So let’s kinda veer down that side street and let’s talk about self-defense and how you found yourself writing on that subject.

Alain Burrese:

Well it started probably when I was in the Army in Korea and I read Marc MacYoung’s first book, The Cheap Shots Ambushes and Other Lessons, and I read Peyton Quinn’s first books, A Bouncer’s Guide to Baroom Brawling – both from Paladin Press. And reading those books, I was like… I’m seeing the same kind of stuff down in the bars. These guys are, they’re talking sense because I have an experience in the same thing. When I got out of the Army and I was in college, I wrote Marc MacYoung and you know, this is back before email and the internet. It was a real letter, and he wrote me back. And we started writing letters that turned to phone calls that turned to him actually coming up to Montana – I was a student at University of Montana – and through some groups that I was in, we were able to host him to come up and get a crime avoidance seminar for students. So when he came up, we spent a bunch of time in the gym training together and then I actually helped him, assisted him, giving that crime avoidance seminar to the campus. And I told him about the idea that I had about Hard-won Wisdom, the book I wrote. And he was like, that’s a good idea; write it. And so I ended up writing the book, he ended up helping me edit it a little bit, gave me suggestions, and he wrote the foreword. And Paladin Press ended up publishing that book, and that was my first book and my introduction with Paladin Press.

Jeremy Lesniak:

And what is it that you like about writing? Because we’ve had a number of authors on and they’ve all spoken very fondly about the process and production of a book but they’ve also spoken very much to the challenge and the rarity of seeing any kind of reasonable financial return from the time they invest.

Alain Burrese:

I like the aspect of being able to share something with others that may help them whether it’s the book on active shooters or self-defense or if it’s one of my tough guy wisdom books or my novel, they just get some enjoyment out of it. I like the aspect that you know something that II can produce and share with others that will benefit them in some way. And there’s a little bit of the vanity that you know I like seeing wow, you’re gonna go to Amazon and wow there’s 11 DVDs and half a dozen books and, you know, being wow you got some stuff out there; you’re getting out there. I like that. I don’t like the long hours sitting by yourself just belaboring over something cause you just can’t quite get it right yet. I don’t like the editing process and going through stuff over and over to make it better and they find the little mistakes and hope that you’ll find them all and then you publish a book and you find that other mistake that you missed those first 20-some times. But overall, I mean it’s a satisfying feeling to actually hold a book that you created.

Jeremy Lesniak:

There’s a lot of overlap with the mindset it seems that goes into a book as martial arts training.

Alain Burrese:

There is. When it comes down to it, to write a book, you know, it’s a very simple formula. Put your butt in a chair and start typing. I mean that’s what it takes, and it takes a lot of discipline to make sure you do that consistently to the end. Like martial arts, I am sure there are way more people that have started a book just like there are tons of people that start martial arts than those that actually complete a book or those that obtained their black belt. There’s that stick to it-ness that is needed for both.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure if we were to take up some numbers because you know, pretty much everyone has said that they’re writing a book at some point. I’ve said I’m writing a book; I’ve actually written a couple small ones but I’ve said I’m writing far more. There are far more ideas in my head than 39:50 half-finished books. So if we were to… Let’s dig in to the self-defense a little bit because self-defense is a pretty controversial topic within the martial arts. Because so many outside of the martial arts equate martial arts with self-defense. We seem to have taken up this mantel in a sense to say if you want to learn self-defense, you should come into a martial artist and of course that is not the only way. And sometimes, because of the intersection of self-defense and martial arts, there are some folks who are great at teaching it and others who are less so. But if we were to talk about the difference between your perspective on martial arts and your experience and what you teach, what you write about versus some of the, I don’t know, maybe the clichés or the widely held beliefs, you know, what myths might you bust for us, for the listeners today?

Alain Burrese:

I think one of the big ones is that you have to become a black belt or that you have to train for years upon years to make it proficient to defend yourself. Because there are those out there that say the short courses, they’re not worth anything and I think that’s complete BS. I remember Tony Blauer talking on an interview once where… cause he does a lot of short courses, and he has had people in his short courses defend themselves. And it was because of those short courses that gave them the skills and tools they needed. So don’t tell Tony Blauer that short courses don’t work because he has proof they do, and he’s just one example. We could probably find a whole bunch more but his name came off the top of my head because I remember that interview. I have taught a ton of short courses and I think a lot of them, if you can get people’s mindset changed and get them thinking differently, that’s one of the most important things you can do. And then you teach them just a couple of physical tools – with the right mindset and a couple of physical tools – people can defend themselves enough to get to safety in most of the things that are happening to people. And if they have the right mindset and awareness, they can avoid a lot of the violence that happens in the first place.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I get it, I get it. Now let’s kinda open that subject up a little bit. If folks were to, and I hope some of them will, pick up your books, and of course this is a good time to mention… we’re gonna have a bunch of links, bunch of things over at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. So whether you’re new or not to the show you may not know that, you may not remember that, go ahead, head on over. You can check out some of Sabomnim’s books and links and everything. So if we consider the catalog of material that you’ve produced, what other things, you know… give us a few other hooks, you know, what are the things can we share with the audience that might excite them about checking out some of the other things you’ve written?

Alain Burrese:

Well you know, look at my DVDs first. I have DVDs on Streetfighting Essentials which is out by Paladin Press. And that teaches basic striking, basic kicking, you know, things that you can learn pretty fast. But then if you into my Lock On: Joint Locking Series with Aiki Productions, that’s all about joint locks. Joint locks are going to take longer to become proficient enough to use them. It doesn’t take much practice to be able to hammer fist somebody in the nose. It takes a lot more practice to be able to joint lock and escort somebody out. And so depending on your skill set and your goals, do you need a short self-defense class that teaches awareness in a few schools? Do you need a longer course that will teach you skills for law enforcement or bouncing where you have to escort and maybe use joint locks in that arena? Or do you want to become a martial artist and learn a plethora of skills, some which you will never need on the street, but you will become a better person, a more disciplined person, a more educated person on how the body works, and wide joint locks or other different pressure points, whatever skills you’re learning throughout the martial arts, why they were? It just encompasses so much more and it really is a lifetime worth of studying that you can keep learning and improving and growing, and adapting and changing as you age. Because you can’t do the things in your 50s, 60s, 70s that you could in your teens, 20s and 30s so you have to learn to adapt and change and still continue that growth. So the martial arts and some of the products that I put out, that’s for that long-term growing and becoming a better person, better martial artist. Other things are for the short-term – you need to learn some things so you’re safe out in the parking lot or you need to learn a skill if a crazy person comes in and starts trying to kill people and you have to respond. And that’s why I teach these things to different websites and do try to keep things a little bit different although there are some people that want it all, sorta like me – I want to be the best at self-defense but I also want to grow as a martial artist.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Great. I love it. Let people know even though I said we’re gonna drop the links, and why don’t you just let folks know where they can find some of your things – your DVDs, your books, etc.

Alain Burrese:

For martial art related things, yourwarriorsedge.com. I have you know, videos on martial arts; I have the videos for sale, I got the free stuff, I have a blog that focuses more on martial arts, martial art philosophy and such. If you go to surviveanddefend.com, that focuses on safety and self-defense more. And so that blog has a different goal and there’s also a membership site with… there’s now close to 650 different pages of videos, audios, written things that are all on keeping you safe. Then I have survivalshooting.com; that is specifically for active shooter and terrorist threat situations, and things you can do beforehand, during and after that will save lives.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Nice.

Alain Burrese:

And each of those websites has a corresponding Facebook page as well. It includes articles and posts about those specific topics.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Okay, great. And again folks, you know, we’re gonna link those for you so no need to write on the back of your arm or crash into a tree while you’re driving. When you look out over your next however long you choose to spend training, and I’m assuming that it’s not gonna stop… very rarely do our guests plan, in fact never has a guest admitted or even speculated they would stop training at some point. So when you look out over your future, what are your goals? Are there definable things that you’re striving for with respect to you know, your personal training, your professional work, helping others?

Alain Burrese:

I want to keep training, keep writing, keep teaching, and keep helping others on their journeys whether it’s in the staying safe in self-defense or their martial art journey. And that’s gonna change some, and some might be more mental than physical as I age. I’m very fortunate for the last six or seven years, I’ve been one of the instructors at the Korean Martial Art Festival in Crestview, Florida, fantastic three-day event every April, and there’s just some fantastic instructors. And the last couple of years, Dr. He-Young Kimm has been one of the instructors. This last spring when I was down there, besides teaching my class, I like to go to all the other instructors’ classes that I can and learn from them. Dr. Kimm’s class, he held up a couple of magazines. He held up a magazine from back in the ’70s or so when he was on the cover doing this super high flying kick and he talked about when you’re young, you can do all these physical things and you know, I could jump very high. Then he held up a magazine, I think it was from the ’80s… no, it’s probably the ’90s or so. He was on the cover and he was doing more of a throw or a joint lock technique, and he talked about how when you get older, sometimes your techniques start to change, maybe you can’t jump as high so you do something different. And then he held up a magazine cover from sometime in the 2000’s, and the article and the feature about him was more on the mental aspects of training. And he talked about, you know, as you get older still, your training goals and what you’re doing changes. And now this is a man… he’s 80 years old and he was out there teaching joint locks and running a seminar session. But I found that interesting when he held up those magazines and talked about how we change as we age. We don’t stop but we do have to modify and do things maybe differently, and maybe our focus will be different of what we do in the arts. And so I hope I’m teaching when I’m in my 80’s like he is and I understand that things are going to change. I’m in my 50’s now, I’m different from when I was in my 20’s, 30’s, and it’s gonna keep changing but I think martial arts will slow the changes. Continued practice will help slow the aging and will help me age better, and hopefully those are lessons that I can pass on to others so they can train and age more slowly and better and have longer journeys in the arts.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Great, great stuff. I really appreciate your time today. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your stories and just being so open with the audience. It’s meant a lot to me. So if I could ask you just one more favor, if you could send us out with some parting words or something poignant, what last words would you offer to the folks listening today?

Alain Burrese:

I think I would just have to repeat the words of wisdom given to me by Kim Hyun on that drive in Korea a few years back. To have a good heart and a good mind, that’s the most important thing that we can do as martial artists and as people. And have a good heart and a good mind, that’s really the key to life. I really think it is, and I think a lot of the stuff that we see going on in the world right now, so many people fighting and mad and angry with others over different ideas or over this or that, if we could just stop and have open our hearts and have good hearts and good minds, and do our very best to help other people, then I think we would have something. And I think as martial artists, we should have the discipline, the skill sets, the abilities to do that. Well I was gonna mention… I mean for an actor, obviously I watch tons of movies, but I’m still a huge Chuck Norris fan. And an interesting little story is when I met Chuck Norris a few years back, my wife and I went to a book signing. When he was promoting that Against All Odds, and I’m standing in line with a bunch of other people and I looked over and I tell my wife, that’s Howard Jackson. And she’s like huh? Who? I said, the man standing over by the table by Chuck Norris and his wife, that’s Howard Jackson. He’s actually a really good martial artist, too. And I said wait a second, and I opened the book that I was holding in my hand that I was gonna, you know, buy and have him sign, and I look through it and there’s a picture of Howard being kicked with Chuck Norris in a scene for one of the movies they did together. I said that’s him, there, right there. So I get up, Chuck Norris signed the book and you know, talked to him briefly and then I went over and started talking to Howard and I had him sign that picture in the middle of the book. So my book Against All Odds is signed by both Chuck Norris and Howard Jackson. And then when the crowd left, Howard and I went back over to where Chuck was and I got to talk to him a little bit longer and stuff. But yeah, I just thought that… so that’s sort of a special… you know, I have 500 or more signed books in my book collection but that one’s really special cause it’s signed by both of them.

Jeremy Lesniak:

When I talk to folks like Sabomnim, I get the sense that we’re in the midst of this movement of traditional martial arts moving forward, understanding its place in the world today, understanding how much of an impact we can have on ourselves and on others in and out of the martial arts, and that really excites me. So thank you, sir. Thanks for coming on the show today and helping me feel better about the world. If you want to check out the show notes with transcripts and photos and videos and links to social media, a ton of stuff, in fact a lot of stuff today, head on over whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. You get links to books and DVDs and all kinds of cool stuff that this man puts out. It’s great. And just… I say it every once in a while, I’m gonna say it again, we receive absolutely no compensation or kickbacks for any guests coming on the show, for any products that you may purchase from them. We’re just trying to help share. If you want to check out what we do, things that we share, you can find those at whistlekick.com. Use the code PODCAST15 or head on over to Amazon. If you want to find us on social media, that’s @whistlekick – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, those are our main platforms. And you can email me, jeremy@whistlekick.com. If you have a suggestion for a guest, there’s a form on the website, on the Martial Arts Radio website, fill that out and we’ll be in touch. Whether that’s you or somebody else, we want to talk to you. We want to know what your stories are; that’s what makes this show so special. And that’s what I’ve got for you today. Until next time. Train hard, smile, and have a great day.

      Episode 348 – Sabomnim Alain Burrese Sabomnim Alain Burrese is a martial arts practitioner, instructor, and author from Montana. I know how to fight.

[oddsfiche]

So, Die Deutsch Rock Szene, we’ve covered it before, discussed it, referenced it and even become a part of it but what is it and how did it affect the whole Prog Rock movement or at least a good part of it?

Personally I love, LOVE it because it’s so avant-garde and beyond left field at times you don’t know where you will end up and sometimes just be let off the cosmic bus somewhere to wander on your own. In the late 60’s music was too pop and bubble gum for a lot of German musicians and Berlin, Hamburg et al had had its fill of the Beatles playing and rehearsing. The Reeperbahn in St. Pauli’s district in Hamburg where the nightlife and red-light services collide and bands like the Beatles and Tony Sheridan made a name for themselves and in the late 60’s and early 70’s bands like Black Sabbath and The Pink Floyd began to start to wander over from the island and blast their monstrous sounds to the unknowing Deutsch publik. This was all well and good but the German music scene was still in it’s embryonic stages and fast evolving in to a cult underground scene that was growing out of control and with good cause to it as well. Bands like: Amon Düül, Can, Embryo, Faust & Kraftwerk were creeping through the vines of streets and playing clubs and venues bringing the people the “Die deutsche Rockszene” to life. Crowned as Krautrock by the English, the moniker stuck and that’s what it’s been since. ‘Kraut’ being a derogatory term for a German and just for the record, I’m not a big fan of the term “Krautrock”, a moniker invented by the U.S. and U.K. to reference the German bands that were evolving out of the 60’s and 70’s and was a slanderous term the US Army gave the Germans in WWII so yeah not liking that title at all. The German Rock groups weren’t the first to pull out the experimental card but they made it more well known and out there where musician artists like Iannis Xenakis from Greece was doing this type of music in the 50’s and American artists, Pauline Oliveros was expanding the musical spectrum in the early to mid 60’s but it was fashionable and hip to be German in the 70’s now that the whole Third Reich thing was long behind them and they were once again cool to hang out with according to the world and wars were being fought 10,000 miles away in Vietnam, so Germany, why not?!

A good number of German artists had by now left Berlin as it was becomming too much of a hot zone for commercialism and their identity was being lost to it so they moved out and scattered to other cities like Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg etc to harness their raw energy and power of sound. Berlin was a touristy town for English bands and caravaning hippies to converge upon and take in the sites, sounds and smells of the great city of Berlin. Bands like Kraftwerk were hard at werk(!) designing their sound that would later become the grandfather of techno and electronica industrial music decades later through their genius and ingenuity of creation. Thought their first album when they were known as Organisation and the subsequent pylon albums referred to as Kraftwerk one and two (two, green pylon album is still my all time favourite record by them) were played with guitars, drums flute and keyboards and it wasn’t until 1973 where the two founding members Ralf and Florian branched off keeping the Kraftwerk name and the remaining members forming NEU! releasing several albums that was pretty much where KW would have gone musically had they stayed together as a band.

Most people associate the German rock scene with Kraftwerk because they became a household name by the mid 70’s with the huge impact that 1974’s Autobahn Lp made and they toured more extensively than other bands aside from Tangerine Dream throughout both Europe and North America. Tangerine Dream brought us the hypnotic sounds of what synthesizers can do and by having a massive rig to set up they brought forth an all encompassing sound that would have audiences in rapt attention with their looping riffs of four or five notes that were swallowed up by the swirling synthscapes that would go on for the entire performance making it in to one long piece for each show. No two shows are really alike and the bootleg series Tangerine Leaves is proof enough of just how different the band could be live every time. Very much like UK band, Gentle Giant, Tangerine Dream did release albums but they were a live band as opposed to a studio record experience but their albums were still a joy to listen to and escape in to the world of fantasy and make believe. Bands like Can and Amon Düül were tripping minds with their unique style of sound that had a variety of members and different musician styles brought in to one format creating music that was not even thought of overseas. Damo Suzuki was busking on the streets of Berlin when he was found by the band Can and asked to join them and for a few albums Can had some pretty notorious sounds to compete with and their iconic 1971 album Tago Mago is a perfect example of what it’s like to have a band stretch the limits and beyond of the conventional record you brought home from the shoppes. What also gave Can an edge was that Damo is Japanese and in those times it wasn’t very common to see a Japanese person in Germany let alone the lead singer of a band and he’s even mentioned it in several interviews over time how comical it was for people to stare at him whilst on stage because well he looked pretty different to them I guess! By the mid 70’s Damo had left the group and they petered in and out but didn’t have the same grip on sales and the audiences as they did in the early 70’s. but for German bands it was more about the music and not so much about the sales of albums they could do. The listening experience was what it was all about and not Ch’Ching! Though that did help along the way I’m sure.

Some bands never left their home turf like Kraan, a free form jazzy Prog band that again like a good number of their counterparts was more of a live act than an album’s band. They did do some minor travelling to Denmark and once to the USA for NEARfest in New Jersey in 2001 to much acclaim but it’s in their homeland of Germany that the band found their solace and stride. Being a four to three piece over the years they decided to call it quits last year but that was short lived and the band was back playing live again. Once you get bitten by the touring bug you can’t give up the ghost on it, it’s a part of you, in your blood and soul to the very core forever. As a musician I know that feeling of not wanting to stop playing even if it means playing the same thing twice which has happened a couple of times for me because people arrive late and wanted to hear a particular song so the audience was fine with hearing it again and you do that for your listeners when you can. Kraan pretty much is not a household name over here in North America aside from small clusters of people who venture outside the Top40 clap trap that plagues the airwaves. Speaking of Cluster, there’s another band that flew under the radar of North America and is relatively unknown but they released albums right in to the 80’s and one of them collaborating with Brian Eno which is no surprise as he is truly one of the more well known experimental musicians out there who has released albums on his own and with Robert Fripp as well as many other artists throughout the last few decades.

Some of the other lesser known bands like Eiliff that not a single live bootleg album can be found anywhere and all we have to go on is stories and two studio and two official live albums to their legacy leaves us thirsting for more of the band as they were that German Jazz Prog sound that was a blending of everything under the sun as far as song structure and style, sound and experimentation. Their albums are definitely well worth seeking out and played on a regular basis!

We could write an entire book on this of which there is a great one called Krautrock, Cosmic Rock and its Legacy which is worth seeking out! Of course the German Prog scene has continued to evolve and develop with bands like Traumhaus and Rotor to name a couple and still a lot of bands like Kraan still pack in places and give you your money’s worth in a show despite the fact that they tried to call it a day the other year but just couldn’t stay away and will play until they all drop dead on stage or something because once you’ve played live you can’t get off that stage, trust me I know! So many of the German bands tend to have to take a back seat to their UK and US counterparts globally I find but yet they still play and put out some amazing albums that you just cannot deny their brilliance and have last tried and true over the years.

Ideally I would love to see the remergence of the German Rock scene in North America like it partially had in the 70’s but sadly due to over saturated pop culture music making it more difficult for new and up and coming bands to get any headway through the market over here but at least in Europe and Asia bands have the ability to explore the masses and expose their music to a wider and more attentive audience base. Here there are of course the fan base that has allowed a small portion of the album sales to get through to our living rooms and with sites like Bandcamp helping artists, including yours truly, get exposure and albums and songs out there has been a great advantage to musicians.

Explore the world of German Rock and Prog Rock bands and discover what the Germanic countries have to offer because they’re well made, beautifully crafted musicianship and music that continues to take Deutsch Rock to new levels and keep the Old Guard well held high!  ~Enjoy

      ~fin

DEUTSCH ROCK and The Birth of Experimental Sound So, Die Deutsch Rock Szene, we've covered it before, discussed it, referenced it and even become a part of it but what is it and how did it affect the whole Prog Rock movement or at least a good part of it?