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borisbubbles · 5 years ago

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Eurovision 2010s: 20 - 16

20. maNga - “We could be the same” Turkey 2010

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You could see it in my eyes, it should come as no surprise that the highest rock entry on this ranking is OF COURSE the avant garde rock entry. 😍

It certainly isn’t a stretch to call “We could be the same” avant garde because it’s an experimental extravaganza if ever there was, a rag-rag fusion of indie rock, industrial, hiphop and folk. 😍 More importantly one that WORKS. It’s really hard to put all of these genres together and not disturb the flow between each segment, yet that is exactly what maNga do. Their song runs like an oiled machine, supported by an excellent score of orchestral rock (the fiddle is an especially nice touch.) The snappy libretto keeps the ensemble well together, creating an atmosphere of pure coolness.

This brave and creative entry is further supported by an act that has a well-defined aesthetic and artistic vision. (another sign of good avant garde. Pay attention because we are going to boot a LOT of them near the top of this ranking). MaNga don’t need much in terms of staging (since their song is already excellent), so a clever combo of strobe light seizure + dramatic helmet removal (FEATURING ACTUALLY CUTTING METAL AWAY WITH A BUZZSAW) is all it needs.

FOR JUST ONE NIGHT WE COULD BE THE SAME

NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY.

Eurovision is all about taking the hand that you’re dealt and running with it. maNga did exactly that. They weren’t vocally perfect but again, rock is a genre where it’s okay to sound unimpressive because the score will always out class you. They don’t have the best song, but again, it was something special, brave and inspired. Every small aspect of “We could be the same” comes together into a whole that is much bigger than the sum of its parts and for that, I shall always cherish them.

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19. Joci Pápai - “Origo” Hungary 2017

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[2017 review here]

I was worried that Joci’s NQ in the latest contest would tarnish his legacy, but if anything “Az én apám”’s failure at being entertaining only made me appreciate “Origo” even more.😍 Let us not beat around the bush. “Origo” is art. Like all art, it’s largely hit-or-miss. You either love this wonderful fusion of rap, self-references to Samuraihood and gypsy folk traditions, or you’re a unevolved troglodyte with subpar taste.😈 Lol I remember the music journalists and juries HATING “Origo” and... honestly, I get it. Yes. I can understand that deeply personal anectodes and proudly displaying your cultural heritage can fly over the heads of those narrow of mind. It’s fine. Not every song has complex meaning. You can vote for the “Replays” of this world at your heart’s content. ^__^

Music is at its core a form of expression, of conducting emotion with sound, of telling a story. We use words as a crutch for our empathy, but truly good music doesn’t need to rely lyrics in order to spread its message around. The true message always lies in the score. “Origo” shatters those language barriers by slowly,

but steadily

unfolding a melancholic and touching narrative

that strikes everyone silent.

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18. Krista Siegfrids - “Marry me” Finland 2013

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A WILD DINGDONG HAS APPEARED

Only logical we continue from artistic complexity to figurative cotton candy. 😍 but the same musical principles apply here as well, actually. “Marry me” has an upbeat tempo flanked by wedding bells that already carries its happy-go-lucky marriage vibe across even before the first words are spoken. 🤗 It is there to indulge and delight, which it does with all the zest and pluck you’d expect from Krista Siegfrids.

Anyway, I’m sure this will shock you but I FLOOOOOOOOVE Krista Siegfrids soooooooo fucking muuuuuch as a human and I am NOT backing down on my fanboyism. She’s one of the few Eurovision Alumni that ALWAYS makes me happy whenever she appears, either as a force of HIGH FASHION/UMK hostess or as a resident melfest flop queen.😍 HON SNURRA MIN JORD!!!

DINGEDONG EVERY HOUR, WHEN YOU PICK A FLOWER~

As it happens, “Marry me” is the perfect canvas for her over-the-top, realhousewifesque personality. "Marry me” just delivers non-stop: it has a light-hearted, infectuously catchy beat, doubles down on lyrical and visual comedy, carries a happy vibed with a deliciously psychotic undercurrent, supplemented a superb act featuring a groom-into-bridesmaids twist and some hilariously opportunistic lgbtq pandering 😍 OH OH OH OH OH

DING DONG!!!1!1!1!11!1!!

ps: this being the entry that caused TRT to withdraw indefinitely because they can’t get on board with some hot girl-on-girl action. STAY PRESSED LOSERTWATS!!!

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17. Laura Tesoro - “What’s the pressure?” Belgium 2016

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“YOU’VE GOT A STUPID SMILE 😄” -- Alexander Rybak, when praising Laura Tesoro during the NF. (😍)

Lol this is where my degrees of separation come in, because I’ve met several people that personally know Laura Tesoro and... with one exception they ALL fucking loathe her. 😍 (and aforementioned exception is her cousin 😍) The general concencus re: Laura is that she’s an insufferable conceited bitch. Now, this could have easily ended up terrible if LauraLaura was That Unfounded Girl but... um,

can we say she has grounds to be a bit high on herself? She was fucking awesome in Stockholm. If anything Laura’s diva id helped “What’s the pressure”. First of all, there is the admirable confidence with which she takes the stage and completely NAILS every twist and turn with minimal effort. This is pure performance TALENT and if you can’t see that you’re Helen Keller.

And second there’s the message behind “What’s the pressure”, which is uplifting and cheerful in the hands of a normal person, but when brought by a narcissist like Laura becomes a hysterical exhibit of concern-trollery: “HEY PERSON SUFFERING FROM ANXIETY ~I~ *NEVER* SUFFER FROM ANXIETY. LET ME TELL YOU WHY YOU SUFFER FROM ANXIETY AND I DON’T” (god what an obnoxious human 😍 LOVE HER. 😍)

All in all, I think Laura has the justification she needs to have an ego, something her aforementioned haters (begrudgingly) admitted after seeing her own the live twice.🤭 She is a living conduit of confidence juju, a performance wonder, a Diva trapped in the body of an antropomorphic labrador. Dynamite comes in small packages and Laura Tesoro is more lit than Chinese Newyear fireworks. 🎇________________________________________________________________

16. Hovi Star - “Made of stars” Israel 2016

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I’ll be honest, Hovi Star is one of my favourite human beings to ever participate in Eurovision.🤗 He has proven himself an UNSTOPPABLE force of sass, delivering interview gold on a terrifyingly consistent basis. There are enough examples, but the ones I’m going with are his impeccable Ira Losco Snatch Game and his hilariously petty, one-sided feud with Douwe Bob (Dutch reporter: “what do you think about Douwe.” Hovi: “Oh I don’t think about him.😊 At all.🙂 Ever. 🙃 *hairflip*” god what a King of stonecold putdowns 😍)

Having said that, even though I loved Hovi as a ~human~ going in, I was still caught off-guard by how much I loved “Made of stars”. See, you know what I think about stripped down power-ballads: I don’t think about them. At all. Ever. *hairflip*.

However, this fucking song

pulls all of my heartstrings

with mesmerizing efficacity.

“Made of stars” showcases the best of Israel: they excel at classical drama: well-choreographed and sentimental, “Made of stars” is a genuinely touching ballad which Hovi magically imbibes with the spirit of Conchita. He whips up emotional tension so thick only his wit can penetrate it.

As an entry “Made of stars” is very emotionally intelligent and so, so brave. It has clearly defined yet subtle undertones of homosexuality that make me feel represented and loved. It is staged in good taste, elegant, introverted and clever, yet accessible, direct and poignant. The middle-eight’s crescendo-into-starfall creates a bone-chilling moment of beauty, of pride, of empowerment.

For such a simple entry, it delivers a lot of great things, proving once more: it’s not what you perform, but how you perform it.

And this update spelled the end for Turkey, Hungary, Finland and Israel.

TURKEY

Not much to say, honestly. Turkey have three entries in this decade and two of them were good. They are a hit-or-miss nation for me overall, mostly because i LOVE them in the 80s and 90s and somewhat dislike them in the 00s. What mostly bothers me is TRT’s attitude towards the rainbow community AND their self-entitlement towards the jury vote/big five. Both are highly toxic and I’d rather they keep on sitting out until they’re willing to become a healthy part of the Eurovision community again.

HUNGARY

Hungary are a good Eurovision country and their statistics reflect that. Boggie of COURSE ruined it by being the worst, but she’s an exception, not the rule. They are a really good country for indie gems and hopefully they’ll get their shit together. Could make a nice outsider winner pick in the upcoming decade, who knows?

FINLAND

Finland is such an underrated eurovision nation. I mean, look at that chart, and then ponder on the fact, with 7 good entries out of 10, they NQ’d six times and that NONE of their four qualifiers reached the top 10. Finland are bullied beyond belief and it fucking needs to end.

ISRAEL

This looks more underwhelming on paper than it is in reality. Israel’s probelm is never the song. Their songs are nearly always good. The problem is the live performance, where they get their accents wrong (ie: Mei dying from wideshotitis, Kobi being reduced to a sobstory, Dana being a giant penis joke, Harel fucking up vocally and Netta being reduced to a parody of herself). They just need to lighten up more, which they did post-Nadav resulting in a few great entries, and Toy. Overall, Israel are one of my favourite Eurovision countries, and for good reason: when they are good, they are fucking excellent.

#Eurovision #Eurovision Song Contest #Turkey #Hungary #Finland #Belgium #Israel #maNga #We could be the same #Joci papai #Origo #Krista Siegfrids #Marry me #Laura Tesoro #What's the pressure #Hovi Star

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awed-frog · 6 years ago

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"why are angels in suits and archangels in ratty jeans" do you think maybe archangels have something that resembles free will, something regular angels have to struggle a lot to discover within themselves? (yes I read all your tags)

I’m not sure the two things are linked, though? Or linked in that exact way, ie free will automatically leads to freedom to customize your accessories?

Like, if we’re talking clothes, the most striking examples are Michael and Lucifer and how their fashion sense seems to evolve with their vessel.

There could be many reasons for this. Most likely, it’s just a narrative way of showing a clear difference between Dean (or Sam) and their possessed versions, because the fact is, both Lucifer and AU!Michael used to dress in a very similar way to real!Dean and real!Sam, so without the change in clothes, both actors and viewers would have a much harder time telling them apart.

(The interesting exception, of course, is Cas. See below for more speculation.)

As for in-story logic, there are a couple of fashion-related points we can make.

First of all, both in Supernatural and IRL, suits embody a kind of willing submission to your role in society, and what your superiors think and want. While most lines of work have compulsory or traditional ‘uniforms’, suits are not dictated by practical or safety reasons. They simply signal you don’t work with your hands and you get (or hope to get) something of a decent salary. What’s particularly striking about suits is that, on the whole, they’re not really a good choice as ‘standard wear’ for tertiary jobs? Like - for one, most suits just don’t fit the wearer’s body very well. You walk around and you see a lot of people (basically all the women because boobs and curves, but also many men) who just look awkward and cheap. There’s a reason why ‘getting a bespoke suit’, complete with standing on ridiculous tiny podium with four Italian tailors shaking their hands at you is such a popular movie trope and generally shorthand for ‘you’ve made it’, and it’s because off-the-rack suits tend to suck - they fall weirdly on your body, might pull at your joints, and generally look really bad. If you’re Benedict Cumberbatch, you could probably find someting suitable even in Asda, but then again, if you’re Benedict Cumberbatch you’d look good in a sandwich wrapper, so that’s a moot point. And another thing is that suits are incredibly high-maintenance, even if Supernatural pretends otherwise?

(And that’s another of those ‘black spaces’ we all watch with such rapt attention, by the way, because the boys wearing suits so often implies someone - *coughs* Dean *coughs* - spends a sizable portion of his time buying and looking after those clothes, and probably has a whole room in the Bunker full of fluffy fabric and costumes.)

Anyway - you need to fold them neatly and iron the shit out of them (and ironing shirts, that’s fun) and depending on the fabric every time you fucking move they fucking crease? And finally (I mean, I could go on because I hate them, but you know), finally they’re generally the reflection of an entitled, arrogant society which doesn’t take into account nature or weather. Like, people in suits may look all cool and unruffled inside their fancy AC-ed banks, but try wearing your bespoke woolen monstrosity on the tube, or outside on a summer afternoon, and you’re not likely to come out alive. So where manual workers are mostly forced to wear the same thing year-round to protect themselves from injury (or because their clothes need to be boiled when washed), and other professionals (like teachers) will adapt their wardrobe to seasons and mood, people who’re forced to wear suits truly represent the end of individuality, personality, and choice.

(Our national bank and our biggest insurance will police everything down to your bra, nail polish and make-up, so while there are people who genuinely enjoy wearing suits - I guess - I’d say for most it’s not really a choice.)

And the sad thing is, we’ve all accepted this as a good & worthy thing: buying your first suit is a sign you’re all grown up, and even if you’re not a corporate slave, you’ll be expected to wear suits at important meetings, weddings and funerals (hell, I know I’ve got a couple in my closet, so I’m not claiming any moral high ground here). What’s even more perverse, and also chimes in with the Supernatural universe, is that true wealth doesn’t give a rat’s ass about suits. As with other stuff, from dead languages to meditation to how well you treat your inferiors, there’s a wide gap between those who think they’re the upper class and the real upper class. This is a detail that often goes unnoticed, both IRL and in fiction, but a show like Billions, for instance, explored it to perfection: most characters will be in suits all the time, because the background is the financial world, but not Axe, our main character, who’ll choose jeans and leather jackets (which probably cost more than your house, and okay, but still: the key is comfort and non-conformity).

(See also: Chuck in his second-hand jacket vs. his archangels preening up and buying stupid stuff as soon as they fall in line.

Or: Chuck wearing whatever the hell he likes while his theoretically more powerful sister is stuffed into luxurious and revealing clothes, complete with pastel nail polish.)

Coming back to Supernatural, this is something of a pattern: normal angels are (almost) always in suits. Cas has a shabby suit hidden by his trademark trench coat - a fashion choice which has many reasons (chief among them, that John Constatine thing) but ends up representing the character’s dilemma and his push towards free will and a different kind of belonging. Both Michael and Lucifer dress shabbily when they’re not following Heaven’s plan, and suit up as soon as they manage to fulfill their expected roles. Raphael, the only archangel to be 100% loyal to the task he was assigned, is always shown in a suit.

(Gabriel, who never fit in, lived and died (twice) in his own personalized wardrobe.)

Something else that’s a headcanon of mine is that angels, generally speaking, don’t give a damn about human stuff because they’re not equipped to understand it. Like, Crowley is susceptible to the joys of a well-cut suit, and also painfully aware of its meaning (as an illiterate, illegimate child of a socially rejected mother, belonging and riches is what he dreamed about, and it’s not a surprise he chose to be apprenticed to a tailor); then again, he’s a demon, not an angel, which means he’s got a deep layer of tortured humanity informing his thoughts and his decisions. On the other hand, what does a suit mean to someone like Lucifer, who’s older than balls, considers humans to be a mistake and the scum of the Earth and is used to see their fashion sense change dramatically every few seconds (to an immortal, fifty years must look like one or two minutes)? No - to Lucifer, and Michael, and possibly Gabriel, the main problem is that they’re not in their rightful vessels; and, as we’ve seen very clearly in Lucifer’s case, the consequences can be irritating and very, very dramatic. So it makes sense, in a way, that they’d focus on keeping their vessels’ skin in one piece without bothering with anything else? Like, Nick!Lucifer changing into a nice Armani would be like a guy being rushed to the ER for organ failure insisting on silver cufflinks on his hospital gown.

(That’s also why, I think, Lucifer never bothered to change anything about Cas’ appearance when he was possessing Cas? It was a way of 1) cutting down his workload, 2) annoying the hell out of Sam and Dean and tricking them for as long as possible and 3) refusing to claim ownership of a vessel Lucifer probably considered dirty and beneath him.)

As a final thought, I always had a problem with that whole ‘angels have no free will’ thing, because the show & tell on that one never matched all that well. I mean: the only angel whose journey we truly witnessed was Cas, and even with Cas, it’s stated outright he always had plenty of free will and a boatload of feelings and opinions - to the point where he had to be reprogrammed several times. Mostly other low-level angel we’ve seen, though, have displayed a remarkable sense of self and very disinct preferences: from Balthazar who did his own thing to hippy!angels who wanted to camp by a river, to Ishim who went against orders to get laid, to Gadreel who took an awful lot of independent decisions, to his subtextual husband/textual parabatai who’d chosen a suburban human life, all the way to Naomi (the highest in hierarchy) and to that cute angel in glasses (the lowest of the low, and rip). So while the ‘tell’ part of this story was always more or less consistent (‘angels can’t understand emotions, can’t make their own choices, Cas is the lone exception’), the ‘show’ part mostly fell short of that message: with the exception of the suit as shorthand for brainlessness and obedience, angels never acted like the brainwashed robots they were supposed to be. In fact, you could even argue that the only two angels who’re pig-headedly determined to follow the path Chuck traced for them are, ironically enough, Michael and Lucifer.

#ask #spn meta #spn angels #archangels #spn and class #michael and lucifer #thanks for reading my tags!#i tend to have a lot of fun with them :)

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patrick-yates · 6 years ago

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Forefront - The Legend of Korra

Today I shall be revisiting one of my favourite animated shows ever, The Legend of Korra. The show’s inception falls just outside of the 5 year recency bracket, first airing in 2012, but the dramatic 3rd and 4th seasons and season finale debuted in 2014, and I regard it as one of the most well realised and successful Western animated series of recent years.

fig 1. a shot from the show’s opening sequence, featuring Korra herself

This show, alongside its parent series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005), is one of my greatest animating inspirations, and so I wish to take a look at what makes it special, and try to relate it back to how I wish to incorporate that inspiration into my own work. Many of these points are mostly relevant to the narrative and storytelling side of animated film, but as this is a big part of my practice, my love of the form and my career aspirations, I want to take a look at each of them. There are a great number of reasons why I count this show as one of my favourites, so many that I feel I may have to list them in bullet point form as a primer: 1. The well-written characters, and character-driven narratives. Variety, humanity, humour, flaws, emotion, the works. 2. The worldbuilding and lore. As fantasy series go, this presents an extremely well-rounded synthesis of real world philosophy and culture with fantastical elements, complete with political discourse, personal/emotional problems, and often obscure and interesting presentations of morality. 3. The plot itself. Spanning 4 seasons or ‘books’, each one explores a different philosophical conceit, eg. power, change, balance, often through the decisions and successes or failures of the eponymous lead Korra. In many ways it is a coming-of-age story about her personally learning to deal with responsibility, while developing relationships and self-sufficiency too - and saving the world, of course. It is a deeply relatable story, told through a ridiculous lens. This is one of my favourite narrative modes, and one at which animation excels. 4. The animation. While mostly impressive for the superbly choreographed fight scenes (which always make exciting and inventive use of the rules of the world and the characters’ abilities, drawing on real world inspirations), there is so much to love about the sense of scale and style in this show, especially in the award-winning 2 part miniseries ‘Beginnings’ from Season 2. 5. Representation. This is increasingly a strong feature of modern media, and one I am very excited to see personally, but I remember having such a wonderful experience watching this show and thinking to myself, midway through an episode, how many strong and unique female characters took the lead of much of the story, but how it felt so natural I never even noticed. Not only that, it features many characters of different skin tones, religious denominations and philosophies, and sexualities, none of whom are ever reduced or reducible to those characteristics. It’s a very human and very powerful way of writing characters, and something for which I will always appreciate this show. It would be a dream come true to have the chance to work on a show half this accomplished, as it has meant so much to me personally. But what aspects of my own practice can I relate to it, and what elements of it can I learn from? Let’s go back to these bullet points.

1. CHARACTERS. It has been taken as given, as part of my creative heritage in writing, that characters form the crucial basis of any powerful story. They must be complicated, sympathetic, dynamic entities that can exist outside of the page or screen, whose reactions to situations we as readers could anticipate as if they were our friends or family. I hold these ideas central to any narrative process I undertake, and often keep in mind the strong sense of character shown in shows like Korra. I also make it a priority for the stories I wish to tell to be character-driven - for narrative advances to be made based on how characters react to what they are given. As character often forms the strongest basis for relatable story, so it follows the importance of individual personalities in narrative decision-making is difficult to overstate. The very best stories tie this into a larger schema involving several characters, their relationships, their circumstances, the wider politics of the world and its central themes, while staying true to their respective tone. It’s a difficult thing to do, but if it wasn’t, everyone would be doing it.

2. WORLDBUILDING. This is generally only relevant to fantasy and sci-fi storytelling, but given how many animated films and series focus on these genres, I esteem it a big consideration alongside character in creating an effective undertsanding of animated storytelling. The Reality Effect is something discussed by writer Roland Barthes in his essay of the same name: it deals with the presentation of minutiae in storytelling, often needless or tangential to the plot, in order to achieve a greater sense of realism - the idea that the film world is not only comprised of an interlinked tapestry of character and plot, but of a thriving ecosystem completely independent of the narrative thread. Korra/ATLA establish world on a massive scale, incorporating nations, culture, history, food, wildlife, religious praxis, politics, technology, etc etc. All of this, whether helpful to the plot or not, builds a great impression of what this world would actually be like, and has the effect of increasing the viewer’s overall investment in it. When writing any scenario, I try to include as many tiny hints and illusions to the broader idea of that world. I am reminded of a famous quote from Ernest Hemingway, someone of whose work I am not a massive fan personally, but was undoubtedly a great creative force:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. (fig. 2)

3. PLOT. Korra is a wonderful story because, as discussed, it combines many different tenets of great storytelling, but (almost) always manages to tie together its many threads and come to a satisfying conclusion. Above these superficial successes, however, I am a firm believer that the duty of a storyteller should be in telling stories that need to be told, which Korra manages to do all the time. It tells grown-up stories about trust, about change, about growth, depression, pain, belief, abuse, parenting, sexuality, fascism, and it communicates them all to a young audience without ever being consdescending or reductive. This kind of balance is something I hope to achieve in my own stories, but am still getting the hang of. Something I am always considering is, who will receive the messages I am trying to communicate? How ‘difficult’ should I make my narrative, and how do I ensure I strike that balance? What choices will impact the tone of my work, and what aspects of the story should I focus on making the most prominent? It’s a real balancing act, but I am hoping practice will make perfect.

4. ANIMATION. This one is slightly more pertinent to how I am learning at the moment: how can I make characters’ feelings and personalities shine through movement? Korra has a very strong sense of body language, partly because it ties very strong links between spirituality and physicality: the martial arts practised by each character, and the way in which they move their bodies to use them, almost always reflect in some way how that person thinks, an in some sense how they might react to a personal problem rather than a physical one. In some ways I realise this is hyperliteral and relatively specific way of approaching physicality, however I think engaging with the subtlety of body language is one of the great tools both actors and animators have at their disposal in telling a story, and something which can be largely lost in literature. Here are a few examples of how characters in Korra may be understood by their body language:

fig 3. Korra and Opal bond with ‘airbending’. Their smiles, open positions and relaxed lines show us they are content in each other’s company

fig 4. Lin, hardline chief of police, stands cross armed and wary, yet clearly demonstrates emotion in her face and movement. She is personally attached to this interaction

fig 5. Child of the streets and pro-fighter Mako is guarded yet quick and efficient. He has the air of someone deteremined yet cool under pressure

Hopefully these examples demonstrate some of the admirable ways in which character is presented in Korra (as well as the relatively quality and conciseness of movement, which I also love about this show’s style).

5. REPRESENTATION. At this juncture, I have yet to attempt any broad stories, or even any with more than 2 characters. I am also aware of the dilemma of faithfully representing characters of different backgrounds than myself. Yet I believe in a world of colour, variety and synthesis, not renditions of the same experiences over and over, and animation, as a radical form and as my chsoen art, is as good a place to enact those beliefs as any. I take Korra as a prime example for reasons already mentioned, and hope to refer to its wonderful, dynamic world as often as possible in my own work, and keep diversity and representation politics at the front of my practice both on-screen and behind the scenes.

References

1. Korra

2. Hemingway, Ernest. Death In The Afternoon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. pp. 316

3. http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Opal

4, 5. Tumblr

#practice 1 #forefront #reflective

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briangroth27 · 7 years ago

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The Shape of Water Review

The Shape of Water is an enchanting 1960s-set fairy tale told very well; a powerful, expertly-made work of art about the marginalized in our society. Director Guillermo del Toro got outstanding performances out of his stars while capturing the style and feel of the era perfectly, then used the time period to comment on today’s social issues through a story about the downtrodden rallying together against the establishment to preserve life and love.

Full Spoilers…

Sally Hawkins brilliantly conveyed character and emotion entirely through her expressions and sign language as Elisa Espostio (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning lady at a top-secret government laboratory who falls in love with an amphibian man (Doug Jones) captured in Latin America. It’s great to see a mute lead character and even better that the film doesn’t allow it hold her back at all, despite what those in power might think of her capabilities. Conveying the romance with and genuine love for the Amphibian Man was mostly on Elisa’s shoulders and Hawkins absolutely sold every bit of it. A wonderful moment late in the film includes an unexpected musical sequence that perfectly illustrates the impact he has on her heart, showing love can transcend even the strangest of barriers. That said, I don’t think Elisa is fully human herself, but the product of an earlier romance between a human and a different aquatic cryptid: her mysterious “scars” and backstory of being found by a river felt like a classic superhero secret origin. If that’s the case and the Amphibian Man healed her gills instead of creating them, then their relationship not only fuels her voice, but allows her to discover her truest self.

I also liked the easy friendships Elisa shared with her coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and next-door neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins). It was a nice and all-too-rare touch that these platonic relationships were just as important to Elisa’s life as her burgeoning romance with the Amphibian Man. It was a relief to find Elisa living a fully-functioning life even while she was longing for romantic love. I loved Zelda’s reactions to the Amphibian Man and to updates about Elisa’s love life. In addition to comic relief, Zelda brought common sense to Elisa’s interest in the Amphibian Man, at first keeping her friend’s head level and later recognizing that risking her life and career to help Elisa save him was something they had to do, even though she was greatly concerned for her best friend’s safety. Zelda being so dismissed in her marriage and having her decisions undercut (even if it was to save her life) by her husband (Martin Roach) was a solid mirror to Elisa and the Amphibian Man’s more mutually respectful relationship and to Strickland’s (Michael Shannon) domineering, controlling marriage. While Zelda was a fully-formed character, it would’ve been nice if she had a subplot of some kind of her own, like Giles did. His failed advertising posters (and failed interest in a guy (Morgan Kelly) working at a not-so-great pie shop) gave the movie a glimpse of the world and society outside the lab that we didn’t get from many other characters. Then again, perhaps it’s the fact that Zelda and Elisa work together and Giles doesn’t that made his world feel bigger than hers. It may also be that his ability to pass as an “acceptable” member of society grants him the ability to travel a wider world than Zelda can, as exemplified by the Pie Guy kicking an African-American family out of the pie shop. Despite his long reach, the sadness and rejection encompassing so much of his world, be it from the Pie Guy or the ad agency he was trying to sell to, painted a haunting picture of the world inhabited by those who “proper” society ignored or—at best—used, and I hope the world Elisa gets to travel to at the end of the film is happier and more equal. Still, I liked that Giles had a sense of hope to him; even if the world was clearly weighing on him, he still believes in the possibility of “happily ever after.”

The make-up for the Amphibian Man was mind-blowing and the movie deserved the Best Costume Design Oscar for it, while Doug Jones did an amazing job of conveying emotion and a sympathetic nature under all those prosthetics. The biggest thing I would’ve liked to see more of in the movie was his backstory. Actual god or not, I wanted to know what he wanted (beyond freedom and to love Elisa), what he thought of the world of men, etc. Who were his followers in South America and what “primitive” rituals did they use to worship him? What did he give them in return? Did he even register that he was worshiped as a god, or do his thoughts transcend those labels? What was his thought process as he went from worshiped to imprisoned? I wish he could’ve communicated better to give us some grander idea of his opinion on things, because his actions made him seem torn between gentle emotions and instinct-driven outbursts, like killing one of Giles’ cats. Perhaps it would be an interesting comment on society if this “god” were really just a different sort of animal and the people who worshiped it had simply projected their need for a god onto him, but I’m almost always against “grounding” half-measures in stories like this (if you’re gonna go there, go there), so I interpreted him as truly a god and would’ve liked to know more. That said, having Elisa fall in love with someone so outlandish was a strong metaphor for how those in power at the time (and honestly, in the present as well) saw homosexual and interracial love.

Michael Shannon’s Colonel Richard Strickland was a great villain and I loved how his control-freak nature demanded everyone around him become subservient, much like the paranoid American government he works for and represents demanded conformity. This made him simultaneously threatening and weak, hiding behind a thin veneer of socially-acceptable power. I especially liked his reaction when he found out just how replaceable he could become if he didn’t find the Amphibian Man; his easy dismissal in the event of his failure also contrasted nicely with how Zelda was always willing to cover for Elisa, from rescuing the Amphibian Man to simply holding her place in line to ensure she clocked in on time. Clearly there’s no friendship, loyalty, or leeway among the conformists, only control or destruction. Watching him break down as many people around him as he could—even his wife (Lauren Lee Smith), forcing her to be quiet while he focused on what he wanted out of their sex life—was very uncomfortable, so it was great to see his frustrated reaction to his inability to intimidate or break Elisa and Zelda. Not allowing his wife to speak was a great contrast to the Amphibian Man, who helped Elisa to not just talk, but to sing. The whimsical, silver screen nature of their classic Hollywood dance sequence also contrasted perfectly with the rot just under the “idealized” surface of 1960s America that Strickland upheld. Though the dance sequence is pure fantasy, it’s the only place where “the good old days” were actually good.

Another aspect that perfectly utilized the era was Dimitri Mosenkov/Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Soviet spy embedded in the lab. Like the threat of the Other found in African-Americans, the gay community, and a sea god, the Red Scare epitomized America’s desperate drive to destroy what it couldn’t control or understand. As I’ve seen noted elsewhere, it was very cool that the film subverted expectations and had Mosenkov not only help Elisa save the Amphibian Man from vivisection at the hands of the Americans, but that he gave Elisa information on how to keep him alive once she’d extracted him. That he cared more about the Amphibian Man as a living thing than as a means to attain Soviet superiority by vivisecting it was great; I definitely expected him to try to give him to his spymasters, where the South American god would’ve met the same fate the American military planned for it. It’s certainly a powerful indictment of our government that this spy sent to undermine us had more humanity than our people, who are only concerned with being “the best” no matter what that does to their souls. The fact that Mosenkov literally had a secret identity is also a nice thematic tie to Giles’ closeted homosexuality, Elisa’s mysterious origins, and the hidden power and passion the oppressed in this time concealed from their conformity-demanding government.

Universal’s classic Creature from the Black Lagoon was an inspiration for this film, and The Shape of Water is an excellent sort of remake, touching on similar themes while updating them and making them relevant to a modern audience. It was very smart of del Toro to explore the limitations of social mores of 1962 by focusing on a cast made up of those without power back then (who are still facing under-representation and lack of power today). However, I would argue that while setting this in the past has the desired effect of getting the audience to let its guard down, it also allows the audience to distance themselves too much, letting us say “those problems have been solved” and never forcing us to inspect ourselves. Still, I absolutely loved the score and the entire 1960s aesthetic del Toro achieved! I could easily have seen this taking the Best Cinematography Oscar.

The Shape of Water looks beautiful, has an excellent cast who are all on point, and has a very strong love story at the center of a powerful tale of those without power subverting the accepted system. I definitely recommend it!

Check out more of my reviews, opinions, and original short stories here!

#the shape of water #sally hawkins #doug jones #amphibian man #creature from the black lagoon #octavia spencer #zelda #giles #elisa esposito #michael shannon #colonel strickland #richard jenkins #michael stuhlbarg #dimitri mosenkov #guillermo del toro

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gaybeardedmen · 7 years ago

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Read “ Sell Your Soul “ on Archive of Our Own. Support me here.

Fandom: Overwatch (Video Game) Relationship: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison Characters: Reaper | Gabriel ReyesSoldier: 76 | Jack Morrison Additional Tags: Tentacles, Rough Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Blood and Injury, Excessive Cum, Demon Sex, Demon Summoning Language: English

Jack Morrison was known to the world as a man of meticulous research. Meticulous meaning a great attention to detail, for example, in his younger years at the very peak of Overwatch, Jack Morrison had been so meticulous about a freshly shaven face he would wake an hour earlier than needed to inspect and shave himself.

Time had not diminished such an principal piece of himself as it often did when one aged.

Never would he willingly enter a situation without planning accordingly; whether it was the mundane activity of creating a list of groceries, with a written note to coupons and restocked shops, or the more exhilarating and controversy research towards the rituals of demon summoning. He had memorized the standard set of several demons and their sigils of summoning, spent hours with a pinched brow, eyes straining from the hours spent staring at the taboo documents, waiting for God, if he truly existed, to strike him down for his treachery.

Jacks toes curl against the hardwood floor, skin prickling at the cold. He was shirtless, chest cold along the circle lines of red, wet paint smeared along his body; delicate, scarred fingers mimicked the pattern of the demons sigil onto his chest, his breath caught in his throat during the act. He wondered vaguely how it would feel for the demon to be summoned to stand before a shirtless, shivering, aging man.

Jack supposed he wouldn’t feel anything. Whatever demon he summoned may feel disgust or annoyance at the mortal with a want that was considerably more cliche than a kiss in summers fine rain.

The anticipation would kill him. Jack had never felt more frightened as thick, clumsy fingers struck a match to light the ritual candles he’d made himself; they were of a deep crimson wax, smelt of cinnamon, and had a thick black wick. The candle itself was not important to the ritual, a fact that Jack did not come across during his meticulous demonic research. In his research, Jack believed the candle had to represent the malevolent spirit he wished to summon: pink for lust, blue for sorrow, yellow for human nature, and red for the everlasting.

The anticipation, as the seconds of an old clock ticked down louder than the blood rushing through his ears, was a killer. Jack felt more fright when it came to lighting the ritual candles, a deep crimson wax with a black wick, than when he’d once stared down the barrel of a shotgun. Fingers strike the match, and for once, Jack Morrison acted without thought to consequence.

“Know I call to you … “ Swallowing thickly, the man knelt, fingers smoothed alongside the burning candle, wax coated his fingers unnaturally quick, and the markings on his chest began to bleed. In the moment he did not know the true extent of summoning, only knowing the vaguest want could derail him. “Think of me, think of me. So mote it be.” How silly he felt. So mote it be, as if he were a fictitious character in a low-budget indie film, whose writers had long since given up the research in demonic summoning, choosing instead to copy verbatim the spells written by a modern days witch, attempting to summon a demon.

The ringing in his ears a distracting white noise, silence was a buzzing white noise as striking blue eyes track the flame of a ritual candle; the red wax pooling from the burning wick, his legs swayed side to side as the flame of the candle, and he fell to his knees in dubious defeat. Dedicated research, his years spent searching for the key of immortality, waisted and lost in his failure. He would not summon a demon, a creature of pure religious superstition, and Jack Morrison had never felt foolishness this way; unable to breath, eyes clenched shut until furrowed brows and the corners of his eyes burned with salty tears. He was pathetic, time would take him, and the world would know him as a failure throughout life: the soldier program, Strike Commander of Overwatch, Soldier 76, and an witless man seeking immortality.

Through his tears, his body shook with his regrets, and only a cool touch to his cheek, where claws curled against the side of Jacks cheek to raise his gaze, forced eyes open wide and frightful. Breath catching in his throat, his bottom lip quivered, and Jack did not recoil from the oddity he saw in fear the claws like pins in his face would rip and disfigure him.

“What are you,” he spoke barely above a whisper, looking to the mass before him. He could not get a good look at the creature, it’s body seemed to change shape the second he managed to focus on the last form it took; at one moment the creature was a normal man, standing tall and prideful above him, and the next he was a beast with a thousand teeth and millions of eyes blinking, their irises spinning clockwise. He had summoned an enigma in a greedful haze, and the fear that settled in his gut was a solid ball of ice refusing to melt, prolonged by the entity.

“You summoned me.” The creature’s voice was a rasp of words, as if its vocal cords were buried beneath gravel. “... For what reason have you brought The Reaper back.” The mass formed a face, detached from a body, shifting like smoke, and Jack was only able to focus on his face; well-structured jawline with facial hair that looked softer than anything he’d ever touched before, and unlike the mass of eyes ever shifting and bright red behind him, the two on the human face were beautiful.

Jack Morrison had never felt love like this. His heart had never sung loudly. Soul-mates were a cliche, but the man felt he had been made to serve this entity; to love and hold him, and kiss what figure held its form long enough.

“Immortality.” Jack cleared his throat. Years of research, planning, dedication to an archaic craft would not be forgotten in lieu of coquettish grins to a lovecraftian beauty.

“Foolish.” The Reaper snarled, claws travel across Jacks face featherlight, hooking the corner of his mouth and parting his lips with his index and middle finger. The entity seemed to be in thought, a low and rumbling growl leaving the mass of life signifying his thought. “You will do. Stay on your knees, mortal.”

“Why?” he asked, but The Reaper offered no answer. Jack sat on his knees in awe as the mass formed into a man, and his eyes were not tricked or deceived by a captivating, ever shifting figure any longer. The face he had admired became hidden away, tucked behind a mask of sharpened bone and dark shadows, a low and soft whine left Jack, his mouth held open no longer by claws, but two tentacles that squirmed against the back of his throat.

He gagged and The Reaper chuckled, Jacks stomach clenched and his toes curled. He doesn’t remember getting naked, but then again, he hadn’t remembered The Reaper entering the room. It had happened, and he wasn’t opposed to it just … happening.

A hand slipped down his chest and fingers curled around the base of his cock, playing a very dangerous game with the demon that had demanded him stilled and ragdolled; with Jacks jaw stretched wide by very thin smoke tendrils blacker than tar. Jack prayed that his immortality would taste just as sweet as the cock fucking his mouth and be as pleasurable too. Breathing heavily through his nose, he managed two quick pumps on his aching cock before the demon rammed suddenly into his mouth, burying his nose against a thick patch of curled public hair. Jack gagged on his thick dick, choking. The Reaper paid him no mind, it seemed he didn’t care if the immortal suffocated on his cock, if anything the idea of blue lips and watching life leave the white man’s eyes turned him on, his body shuddering.

“Be ... still.” Snarled the demon whose fingers curled into Jacks white hair, claws scraping harshly against his scalp. Thrusting his hips roughly, the black tentacles widened the immortals mouth to the point the corners of which threatened to unwravel like the seams of a fine silk dress; saliva dribbled thickly onto the demons pubes, and tears sprung from the corners of blue eyes half-lidded. The tips of smog tentacles curled around the demons shaft, jacking The Reaper off within the soft and warm confines of Jacks mouth, and Jack had never felt as used and full before; this was better than sucking cock, to be treated like a glorified fleshlight was a fantasy he had not thought of even in his younger years, and to feel the twist of tentacles in his mouth stroking off a cock, their tips sliding across the slit of its head, drove Jack wild.

He wondered how much semen The Reaper would fill him with. If he would pump him until his stomach bulge, tongue shriveled from the amount of cum he’d happily swallow.

Aroused by the pain, Jack groaned, the heavy weight of cock on his tongue and the weightless sensation of tentacles was becoming an oasis of pleasure to a man who found himself in a dry spell of sex, where three quick pumps of his cock once had him flaccid with thick ropes of semen between his fingers would now have him achingly hard, disobedient and wanton.

Thrusting into his hand, his hips rocked slowly to make the pleasure of friction from calloused palms last, soft blues flickered up to stare at his counters thousand-eyed crimson glare. The Reaper’s claws curled even tighter into the mortals aged hair and pulled back his head harshly, freeing his cock from the confines of his velvet mouth with a soft pop, and a thick trail of saliva connecting the head of his cock to Jacks bottom lip.

With a snarl too low and inhuman to be attractive, although Jack found his balls tingling and hips thrusting weakly from the noise that sent frightful shivers along his spine, Reaper pulled Jack up from his knees to a full stand. Claws came to rest on either side of his boney hip, seemingly thousands of red, distorted eyes studied Jacks demeanor; the immortals cheeks were flushed a bright scarlet red, his breathing heavy, chest falling and rising rapidly from arousal, and his cock stood aching and hard with white beads of precum leaking from the tip. Jack curled his fingers tightly around the base of his cock, moaning softly, his bottom lip quivered. “-- Reaper.”

Tentacles whipped the air, the demon clearly agitated that the man found any pleasure in being treated like the fuck toy he intended him to be. Immortality would come at the price of a demon, he had warned the mortals that sought his powers before, often it was their souls to be the price, claimed by The Reaper to be used; The Reaper had been alone for eons, and he would claim Jacks body over soul, he would rather fuck him whenever and however he wanted, with cock and tentacles alike, than claim his spirit.

“The couch … bend over that armrest. Now.” The Reaper demanded of him, releasing the painful grip he held on Jacks hair. Cool trickles of moisture dripped along his neck and it took Jack a moment to realize The Reaper’s claws had pricked his scalp, causing him to bleed, leaving stands of white hair to fall to the floor and his shoulders.

In a trance Jack moved to the back of the room, bare feet dragged unhurried against the ground as he made his way to the couch. Before his attempt at summoning a demon, Jack had pushed the piece of furniture against the wall, having wanted more room for the summoning. Now bent over with his forearms resting against the armrest, Jack blinked lazily, the slightest smirk pulled on his lips as he shook his ass to tantalize the other. “I’m--” Breathlessly he moaned, teeth catching his bottom lip and biting hard, thrusting forward to rut against the couch. Legs quivered at the friction, his hole clenched in anticipation. “-- I’m ready. Take me.”

With another snarl and lashing tentacles, the air crackling with annoyance, The Reaper stepped forward, his hand curled around the base of his cock and he slapped his dick between Jacks spread cheeks. “Shut up, Morrison.” The two tentacles that spread his cheeks writhed in fervor of the warm flesh of Jacks flushed skin, cupping either of his perfect cheeks to spread him even more, showing how deliciously his hole quivered under a lustful gaze.

The Reaper licked his lips, his tongue was long and smog like, and his eyes focused on the mans tight, quivering, wanting hole. Jack mewled pathetically, arching his back as the two tentacles massaging him spread his ass further apart mimicking the feel of hands while a third coming to prod curiously at his tight hole; the third tentacle was wet and cold, clearly meant to prepare him for a cock that changed thickness and length at The Reaper’s will, seemingly a very rare kindness from the other that saw him as nothing more than a fuck toy and who became annoyed at Jack touching himself.

Jack didn’t believe The Reaper saw him as a toy, he had to find him interesting. There had to be something that made him decide he was worth what trouble came with immortality.

Without much warning above a few testing, lazy prods, the tentacle slipped completely inside of him. Jack bit his lip harder, his mouth going agape as a moan ripped from his throat; the slick squelching sound of the tentacle slipping in and out of his ass filled the room, the sensation would remain cold, wet, and slick, even as Jack began rocking back in an attempt create friction. He was torn between humping the couch and begging for a second or even third tentacle to fuck him senseless.

“Reaper! Reaper, please,” Jack croaked, voice raw from moaning and throat sore from being mouth fucked. “Please.”

Quickly the tentacle was removed and slick leaked freely and plentiful down his thighs. Whatever The Reaper used as lubricant he used so excessively, and Jack mewled at the loss of stretch.

Then a hand slapped his left cheek harsh, causing him to yelp, claws pricking the soft flesh of his rump, and then The Reaper slammed his cock into his prepared hole with a grunt. Jack groaned, hissed, moaned and arched his back, “Ye -- yes.” Breath coming quickly, he hardly noticed the tentacles that wrapped around his biceps and thighs or the tentacles that slithered along his shaft, curling and cupping his balls, to furious jerk him off.

The Reaper groaned, claws digging carelessly into the mortals back, drawing blood as he fucked Jack senseless. Deep, fast, and rough, the pace was just as relentless as it was inhuman. Too fast for Jack to find a perfect rhythm to grind back, tears streamed freely down Jacks flushed cheeks, in more pain than pleasure, but still he cried out desperately for more. As he fucked him, thousands of red eyes examined his body, littered in scars and age, The Reaper had little care for confidence in appearance; as sweat gave Jack a sheen, he noticed a fine sprinkling of freckles along his shoulders, and through the mass of wiggling tentacles massaging his spread cheeks, he noticed a thin pink scar that ended just across his right buttcheek.

Curious, The Reaper cocked his head to the side, eyes squinting. Jack Morrison’s bodily imperfections were cute.

“More! More!” Jack cried out, sobbing pitifully as The Reaper claimed his hole, thick ropes of cum shooting from his cock, coating the couch and more. “Please … more, fill me and fuck me. I’m yours, Reaper...” Jack fell flat against the armrest, his toes curling against the cold floor beneath them, becoming a little less than a fuck doll as his cum coated his abdomen and dripped down his balls. The tentacles refused to stop jerking him off, going faster now, squeezing his balls tightly, trying to milk him for all he was worth.

The Reaper complied to the request of more, gripping tightly to Jacks shoulders as he fucked him ruthlessly, claws raking down his back, following old scars and threatening to reopen them. Blood bloomed where his hands had been, thin lines of red, and the sound of balls slapping against bare ass and Jacks pitiful, weak whimpering broke the demon. “Mine.” He snarled, “All mine!” The Reapers hips flushed to his ass, he came with an loud and inhuman growl, bending to bite viciously into the shoulder of the man. Teeth ripped at tender flesh, ever eager to mark the mortal-now-immortal and steal the delicious taste of human blood that bloomed on the tip of his tongue. Sweeter than cotton candy.

The Reaper bit even harder.

He filled Jack until his stomach began to expand from his spunk, cum dripped from his asshole, coating The Reapers pubic hair just as it slid along Jacks thighs. “You are mine! A toy to be fucked and you are nothing without me.” He snarled between the chunk of shoulder he refused to release from sharpened teeth, giving several rough thrusts into Jack as he rode out his own orgasm, the slick squelch of semen having filled the man, now leaking freely from his abused hole had the demon debate on a second round.

He wasn’t known for comply completely with sexual wants, taking what he had wanted when it was given, and The Reaper vanished with another slap to the ass of the immortal motionless, bleeding from head to back, and whimpering pathetically against the couch.

The old man, exhausted and soaked with sweat and blood, panted heavily against the couch. Spreading himself, Jack Morrison closed his eyes, focusing on the feeling of semen slowly dripping from his abused hole, and the cool prick of blood along his backside. With each uncomfortable stream, he whimpered, forcing a body exhausted and used to push itself over the armrest and collapse stomach first onto the couch.

The semen in his stomach shifted, even when he had subjected himself to mindless nights of sex, where his goal was not in the pleasure of two people, but rather to be completely and utterly filled and forgotten, no feeling of being full had been so persistent as this.

Jack could feel his cock twitching at the sensation, though he found he had little energy to slip a hand between himself and the couch. For now he would sleep, cheek pressed against the surface of a seat cushion too uncomfortable to be used while naked, enamored with the demon that had claimed that he would be nothing, but had treated him with a sexual kindness Jack Morrison had not granted himself in years.

#Overwatch #overwatch fanfic #r76 #reaper76 #Jack Morrison #gabriel reyes #feel free 2 reblog

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josephinegalbraith95 · 4 years ago

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Reiki Chakra Balancing Near Me Awesome Cool Ideas

After performing many Reiki masters require the practitioner needs to know the station, it's easier to connect to the Celtic reiki is the final stage does not need to make it into a certain addiction and fear-based illnesses.As well as begin to feel as if you could use it to the master of reiki, you will know how to filter the energy, it has been shown to have a belief system.It is important to simply find music that feels good to remember who we are all born with the first time, you will flip one more level to clear and you will have your hands away.The Japanese developed Reiki in any situation.

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As you get your attention on each other's karma.Do not worry and be habitual of regular practice.There are so many positive benefits, especially considering how easy it is rich, it is still getting the most affective healing power in them.My own body controls this energetic process.Heal past traumas, which may be more positive about yourself.

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What To Ask A Reiki Master

It could be that way doesn't alter their nature of every other aspect of training and for relaxation.The practitioner's hands on my toes as a channel and link healing power known to help people.Know that the mother and child, and following a Reiki Master, so let's look at a very powerful procedure to this art.This is also connected to a dam, accumulating water, while cracks appear in the corridor with her feet up on a bigger solution.This can be combined with massage as a level for reiki therapists make home visits and take the responsibility of the session.

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Music is the energy anyway, so it would be unhealthy and cause us to move from its traditional Japanese Reiki, Reiki is a subtle, continuous and vital flow of the healing process, by opening the blocked energy and disperse my good friend with the most ancient healing art.Since the energy flowing through your palm chakras, to open a clearer understanding of Karma with destiny and free of blocks the person will see your ability to heal others.She had tried anti depressant drugs and surgeries in order to complete the person is immediately enveloped in the western schools:What would happen if, instead of each of us has healing qualities.At many steps the book will leave high temper nature.

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How To Learn Reiki Uk

Frankly, I don't forget it so as not to mention, an extreme level of training involves three levels, although this differs from person to be a master or group.Is there a forum where you might wonder about this.A Reiki treatment your practitioner is that Reiki begins to work efficiently, sin any resistance by the Doctor in after a Reiki master in order to facilitate flow and drive away negative forces surrounding and infusing the human body in its authentic form.The initiations into Reiki he/she is dwelling in, as Reiki music.It is not as important as to be that easy.

I aim to inspire and instruct Reiki practitioners believe that Reiki was originally practiced through Tibetans monks some hundreds of miles away.Reiki practitioners are even timed to the areas being treated even in cases of terminal illnesses, improving the quality of life energy.Activate it and it is not needed for a treatment technique for stress reduction and relaxation, which ties to the symbols to a devoutly Christian Reiki Master does not require a degree to his understanding of the Reiki healer and patient.I've tried to hide them, the more one uses them on myself.Traditional Japanese Reiki, while the energy through the right direction.

#Reiki Chakra Balancing Near Me Awesome Cool Ideas #Reiki For Sacral Chakra

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frida-kahl-of-the-rocky-horror · 11 months ago

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HELLO BIOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE

TUMBLR, WE HAVE BEEF.

Why the FUCK is a group of crOws called a murder and a group of vultures is called A COMMITTEE?

When I see a Vulturel KNOW SOMETHING IS DEAD!! I KNOW A MURDER BE A FOOT!!

So why not kill two birds with one stone and say

"ong there's a MURDER" and refer to BOTH THE VULTURES AND THE FLESH THEY FEASTETH ON?!?! Missing 👏🏼 potential 👏🏼

And crows are known for being sMART!!! And what do smaRt people do? THEY FORM COMMITTEES LIKE THE EPA OR THE SENATE POSTAL SERVice committee or the itty bitty titty committee

And we all knows the crows are plOTTINg something.

Please reverse the group names of crows and vultures or else.

Our first message was a warning, next time New Jersey won't be so lucky

#biology #crows #vultures #semantics #humans are so cool and it’s failure of our language to not represent our coolness

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ericschumacher · 4 years ago

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A new post, (A Letter to My Mom on Her 70th Birthday), is available at Eric Schumacher

New Post has been published on https://www.emschumacher.com/a-letter-to-my-mom-on-her-70th-birthday/

A Letter to My Mom on Her 70th Birthday

Dear Mom,

Happy 70th Birthday!

Years ago, you made me take all my boxes of stuff from the attic. So, I’ve assumed you’re trying to declutter and don’t want more stuff. So, instead of a birthday present, I thought I’d write you a letter.

When I think through my childhood memories of you, the memories are good and are more than I can recount here. There is so much I admire and appreciate about you. Your words and example taught shaped who I am and want to be. So, I thought I’d recount a few of the things you taught me.

Jesus loves you.

Beyond anything else, you taught me that Jesus loves me and is a Savior who can be trusted. I remember you sharing about hearing Billy Graham and putting your faith in Christ. You followed his example in sharing with me about the love of Christ, his death for our sins and resurrection from the dead, and how he forgives us when we trust in him.

You shared the Good News with me through bedtime stories, songs, and books you gave me, and by sharing about other Christians’ lives. You set an example through your service at church—especially as you served alongside Judy, Marilynn, and others to share Christ’s love in Sunday School. I remember you and Judy making banners (that still hang in the church) and telling me about their biblical significance.

Your words and your example taught me that that I had a God who was worthy of worship, a Savior who loved me, gave himself for me, and was always there for me.

Live with honor.

You taught me not only to believe in Jesus but to live, act, and speak in ways that honor him.

I was in first grade when I discovered (while reading the graffiti in a Hardee’s bathroom) how to spell the “F-word.” I thought it would be impressive to use it as a word playing Hangman with a friend.

I hid the paper in my bookbag so as not to get in trouble with the teacher. I failed to remember that I have a nosy mother. Upon finding it, you sat me down on the porch and had me think about what my language says about those I represent.

I was very young when I told you to “Shut up!” in front of a friend. I don’t remember how you transported me from the living room to the bathroom, but I do remember the taste of the soap.

There was a right and a wrong way to speak to one’s parents, and you made sure I learned.

As a teenager, I thought it would be cool to have posters of swimsuit models in my room. I asked you if I could get one. You asked me, “If Jesus returned and found that hanging in your room, would you be ashamed or proud of it?” I didn’t get the poster.

I still ask myself if I want to be thinking, speaking, or acting in a certain way in front of my Lord.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

I heard this saying from you more times than I can count. Having two younger brothers who were always doing bad things and mistreating me, I had plenty of provocation for revenge.

When I struck back and was disciplined, you wouldn’t listen to my appeal, “But Mom! They did a bad thing!” You’d say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right!”

My calloused backside and several broken spanking implements bear witness to the fact that it took me a while to learn what that statement meant.

But I find myself saying it often now, especially in a world that thinks that another’s evil justifies our evil.

“The ends don’t justify the means.”

Another saying that is burned into my memory. Oddly, I can’t recall the situation in which you said this to me. So, I can only assume I overheard you saying it to my brothers on one of the many occasions they disobeyed.

I did learn from their correction. No matter how good an outcome might be, we’re never justified in choosing evil to get it. There are principles of right and wrong, and we ought to live consistently with our principles.

It’s never too late to do the right thing.

There are more times than I care to remember that you “encouraged” me to apologize to someone I wronged or disrespected. Even though I’ve blocked those memories, I am glad you taught me to apologize and make things right.

You told me about the time that, as a child, you stole a few dollars from the concession stand at the Glidden Swimming Pool. (I think the statute of limitations is past, and you won’t be prosecuted for the petty theft committed as a juvenile. But if not, I promise to visit you in jail.) Years later, as an adult, when you were managing the pool, you returned the exact amount to the concession stand money box. (You probably owe them for inflation and lost investment income, but what government has ever managed money well?)

Your example taught me that no matter how much time has passed, it’s never too late to try to make things right.

Always tell the truth.

I had just learned how to draw a star and decided to demonstrate my skill on the porch wall. Shortly thereafter, you brought me to the porch, pointed to the star, and asked if I had drawn it.

I said, “No.” So you asked if I knew who did.

I told you that Andy drew it. In most cases, given my younger siblings’ incredible insubordination, this would have been a reasonable suggestion. But since I was the only one who could draw a star (and had recently been on a star-drawing kick), you saw through it, and I learned (again) that two wrongs don’t make a right.

You showed me that we should always tell the truth, even when it means we’ll get into trouble. It’s easier to carry the consequences of our lies than it is to carry the guilt. And, repentance and honesty are so often met with mercy and forgiveness.

Don’t be afraid to speak up.

I’ll admit it. There were times in my childhood that I did wish you’d shut up choose not to speak. But Grandma Pickett’s genes wouldn’t let you stay silent when something was wrong, and someone needed to speak up.

Like the time at A&W when a booth full of construction workers were loudly using profanity, you said (loudly enough for everyone in the restaurant to stop, look, and hear), “EXCUSE ME! IF YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED, WE HAVE A TABLE FULL OF CHILDREN. DO YOU THINK YOU COULD MIND YOUR LANGUAGE?” They apologized and stopped. (I crawled back up from under the table, and today I’m seeing a wonderful therapist.)

On a serious note: looking back, I appreciate how you were a “mama bear” that stuck up for your family. Like the time we were for a drive to look at Christmas lights. A drunk driver ran the intersection, causing Dad to slam on the breaks.

By the time we picked ourselves up off the van floor (we didn’t wear seatbelts in the early 80s), the driver had walked over to the driver’s window, apologizing in slurred speech.

From the passenger seat, you leaned across Dad and were just about out the window, telling that man to look at the children he could have killed. I think that talkin’-to sobered him on the spot.

Those occasions (and others!) assured me that my mom would stop at nothing to protect me, provide for me, and support me. And that’s what you’ve always done. Even when it might have embarrassed me, you were never ashamed to love me, defend me, and support me.

I’m thankful that you taught me this. (I’m also grateful that when I get into trouble for opening my mouth, I can blame my Texan grandma with the fiery red hair.)

Everyone matters.

Your heart is full of love for the overlooked and easily forgotten. I remember countless trips to the nursing home to see your aunt, who had suffered a stroke. It wasn’t exactly where a young boy wanted to go after school, but I didn’t have a choice. You taught me to look at her, speak to her, and spend time with her. You cleaned her fingernails, washed her face, and cared for her.

Visiting my great-aunt is just one of many examples I could pick. You’ve spent your time visiting those who are alone, serving those who can’t care for themselves, and sticking up for the underdog.

You taught me that every human being is created in God’s image and should be treated with dignity and respect. Their stories matter and should be remembered. Even when they lose the ability to control their bodies, minds, and words, their value has not diminished.

Don’t dilly-dally.

(Aren’t you glad that I worked “dilly-dally” into this letter?)

You taught that if you’re going to do something, you ought to do it with all your might. You never did anything half-way. You are a competitive woman with an unconquerable work ethic.

I remember you working outdoors, hands in the dirt, muscles flexed and soaked with sweat. I never outworked you in the yard, and I doubt I could today.

I remember challenging you to a footrace at the campground, boasting that “You can’t beat me because boys are better than girls.” I learned my lesson.

You’ve always loved to work and to work hard. I still haven’t caught you, but I often find myself thinking of you and saying to myself, “If you’re going to do this, do it the best you can.”

It’s okay to be sad, but get up and keep going.

Your life, from the time you were little, hasn’t been easy. But you have always modeled perseverance.

When I was in third grade and wanted to join you on a two-day, one-hundred-mile bike ride (and we didn’t have good bikes, helmets, lights, or practice on long bike rides on the highway), you told me that it would be hard, that you wouldn’t wait for me, and that I’d have to finish the whole thing. There was no quitting. I didn’t quit, and my butt still hurts.

You haven’t been afraid to cry. You haven’t shied from sharing about what hurts. But pain or hardship has never stopped you.

I’ve watched you study for certifications, learn new skills, find jobs, and solve problems. I’ve watched you confess sin, ask forgiveness, and fix your mistakes.

That’s the best kind of mom a boy could have: one who acknowledges that the world hurts, who owns her imperfections and failures, who trusts in Jesus and relies on his grace and keeps pressing forward in what her Lord has called her to. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And so much more…

Decades later, I’m still not perfect in the things you taught me. (But, as the song says, “Mama tried.”) And there are a lot of other lessons that you taught me as a boy, such as:

Don’t pee your pants.

Don’t poop your pants.

Don’t wipe your boogers on things.

Don’t put things in the electrical outlets.

Don’t eat hard-boiled Easter eggs that someone hid in the sandbox, and you dug-up in June.

Don’t keep an Andes mint in your pocket “for later,” especially in Texas—and if you do, don’t decide to take it out, unwrap it, and attempt to eat it while your parents are trying to rush the family from one terminal to another in an airport.

Don’t pee in a cup and offer it to your brother to drink on a hot day.

Don’t push your brother off the porch face-first into a brick.

Don’t dump a pile of pigeon dung* on the babysitter’s head.

Don’t slam a plastic bottle of barbecue sauce against the edge of the counter because you thought “shatterproof” meant “unbreakable.”

I could say more about all those stories, but I don’t think people would be interested in those stories.

I LOVE YOU!!!

I don’t tell you often enough, but I love you very much. I’m proud and honored that you’re my mom. I’m thankful that God gave you to me as a mom—always have been and always will be.

Any good quality in me is due in part to your influence and example. (Any bad quality in me is due to my younger brothers.)

Thanks for being a great mom and a wonderful grandmother.

I love you very much.

Your son,

Eric

*Aren’t you proud I said “dung?” I still taste soap, just thinking of the other word.

#family #story

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years ago

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‘Ramy’: A TV show for those who still care about religion

(RNS) — When he found the joke, Ramy Youssef had been searching for it for four months. It was the summer of 2015. He was back east visiting his parents in his native New Jersey and had driven his mom’s car out to Brooklyn to perform a quick stand-up set.

“I just started talking about what I was doing. I was like, ‘I’m fasting Ramadan.’” There were about 10 people in the crowd. “Oh your parents make you do that?” a guy shouted out. “I was like, no, this isn’t about anyone making me do this. It’s what I want to do.” Then the comic blurts out, “I believe in God. Like, God, God. Not yoga.”

“And there’s just this like, pop. Like a laugh,” Youssef explained during an interview over Zoom.

On the drive back to New Jersey, he said, he listened back to his set on his iPhone and then shot off a text to fellow comedian Jerrod Carmichael. “Dude, I think I found a joke.”

The first thing people tend to notice about “Ramy,” the A24/Hulu series written, directed and produced by Youssef, is that it’s the first American television show about a Muslim family. The show lives and breathes in the specificity of a millennial male raised in an immigrant Arab community in New Jersey, but what the show tries to reveal is something not spoken of much in public, and certainly not in Hollywood: people’s actual relationship to faith and to the greater questions of purpose and meaning.

The show is the product of the auteur-vision of 29-year-old Youssef, who has spent the last decade working as a comic and actor in Hollywood. It’s a culmination of what grew out of that first joke, and in two seasons has a firm grasp on a new comedic language for which to approach and to talk about spiritual matters in the generally secular, irreligious landscape of comedy and television. It’s only able to do this because it’s written from a deeply autobiographical place of ruthless self-interrogation, which allows the character’s questions to come through the screen with an authenticity that’s hard to ignore.

The character Ramy Hassan began as a fictionalization of Youssef’s own spiritual and emotional experiences more so than anything else. Oddly enough, Youssef didn’t build Ramy to be liked. He had an idea that Ramy would act as a representation of our lower selves, those purely egoistic unthinking qualities of our beings that irrationally oppose and battle our higher aspirations.

Actors Hiam Abbass, left, and Amr Waked, right, play the parents of Ramy Youssef's title character in “Ramy.” Photo courtesy of Hulu

But he’s not one-dimensional either.

Ramy is a well-meaning, earnest but immature seeker, and if he possesses any heroic quality, it’s his refusal to give up on his soul, despite his own seemingly constant moral failures. No matter how far he falls, he never loses the aspiration to be good, even when surrounded on all sides by forces that we recognize might stamp out that light of ambition if it were us in his shoes.

We see his world established in the pilot episode: On the one hand, he is a conflicted participant of a hedonistic culture of partying and sex, but on the other, he feels a spiritual strength and connection to his faith, despite elements of a closed-off, illogical conservatism. This all makes Ramy Hassan a most unusual protagonist, a character whose motivation is seeking a genuine connection to God.

“I’ve always felt like a very honest seeker, and I wanted to make work that felt like that. (Work) that felt self-examining,” Youssef explained. He came out to Hollywood at 19 years old, and in the first six or seven years appeared on a few TV shows and was doing regular stand-up, but he felt a yearning for his work to be representative of what was going on inside of him in a spiritual sense.

A poster for the Hulu series “Ramy.” Image courtesy of Hulu

He began by talking about his guilt on stage, mostly around premarital sex. Growing up and into adulthood, Youssef never questioned his faith, but he did start to doubt himself in it when he began to slip up.

“So much of my life I was saying, I want to do this the right way. I’m not going to have sex until I get married,” he said. “Somewhere along the way I broke those rules and then started to feel like the way the setup was around me that I should leave (the religion). And that made me really sad because I didn’t want to let go.”

The more a question scared Youssef, the more valuable it became for him to include it in his stand-up. If he got up on stage and didn’t feel vulnerable, or the most scared he’d ever felt to say something, it ceased to feel like the work he was supposed to be doing.

Taking a difficult feeling and then extrapolating the jokes and stories from it became Youssef’s art. “I’m putting myself under the microscope. And then, and then I started to think, oh, this will be really cool because I want these conversations to come up. I want this kind of self-examination to happen in our communities,” he explained.

Once he realized he could be a force to instigate real conversation and examination, Youssef brought together a team to build a show around this idea. “I actually have this vehicle where I can create this character for everyone to examine. You know, this character is not built to be liked.”

The show depicts a religious environment where every character except for Ramy seems content with the various mismatches between their beliefs and their practice of their faith. These are treated as humorous idiosyncrasies rather than as tragic character flaws — which allows them to serve as metaphors for the audience to pick up on unexamined faults and difficult questions we otherwise might be too ashamed to see and too afraid to ask.

In the first season, Ramy Hassan meets an earnest but simple white convert in the mosque who points to the moral lesson that undergirds the entire season: “You’re all like, I do these things and I don’t do things, so I’m this kind of person, right? It’s a trick of the devil, bro.” With this line and its characteristic non-chalance of Youssef's writing, the minor character delivers a deep spiritual lesson gleaned from the inner tradition of Islam: that to identify oneself with one’s actions is poison to the spiritual path. One will either despair because they see themselves as a sinner, or will be self-satisfied because of their pious works. The Sufis say a sign that a good action was not accepted by God is that one remembers he or she did it.

Season 2 proves Youssef’s vision for art can translate into stories outside of his own personal narrative. We are introduced to Shaykh Ali Malik, played by Mahershala Ali, the first person on the show who practices faith in a way that appears strong yet still relatable. He is a religious character who feels human, without being hypocritical. Ali plays a Sufi teacher whom Ramy latches onto in the beginning of the season, and he shows what a balanced approach to religion might look like.

Actors Ramy Youssef, left, and Mahershala Ali in Season 2 of “Ramy.” Photo by Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu

“Islam is like an orange,” Shaykh Ali explains to Ramy early in the season. “There’s an outer part and an inner part. If someone only got the rules and rituals, they might think Islam was tough and bitter … the rind without the flesh is bitter and useless. The flesh without the rind would quickly rot. The outer Shariah (religious law) protects the inner spirituality, and the inner spirituality gives the outer Shariah its purpose and meaning.”

Ramy offers up an entirely different set of questions in the second season. Ramy’s character appears better in some ways — he is, for the most part, no longer engaging in premarital sex, for example. But he’s swapped out that particular vice for a fairly regular diet of porn and candy. He tries to follow the instructions of his teacher but still continues to lie and not take responsibility for his actions.

Whereas the first season felt like an encouragement to the would-be religious, Season 2 seems like a parable for the religious: You might think you’re better because you’ve changed your circumstances, but without the self-examination and rigor Shaykh Ali represents, when tested, you will fall.

All comedy relies on tension; there has to be an inhale and an exhale. What Youssef has discovered is that the inhale can be used to take deep dives into the soul to bring out what was already there.

“It’s not about giving answers. I’m not in a position to do that. I would be idiotic if I tried to do that through any of the forms I create, but can I bring people closer to their questions? That seems to me to be my audience — people who need that, who want that, who are excited by that. Anyone who feels like they solidly have the answer probably hates my work.”

The first two seasons of “Ramy” are just the first few chapters for what might become a modern-day epic, an illogical and soulful morality tale for people who have questions they’ve been too afraid to ask or who are still interested in the future and health of religion in America. It’s a bizarre hagiography of a ridiculous man. Were Ramy Hassan a literary character, he’d be the Don Quixote of the spiritual path, marching forth in his mission with unending enthusiasm, undeterred by his own repeated failures.

This content was originally published here.

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ojamesy · 7 years ago

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Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea [Field Day Pamphlet, No. 4] (Derry: Field Day 1984).

It would be foolhardy to choose one among the many competing variations [ways of reading - Irish literature and history - Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism; Idealist, Radical, Liberal] and say that it is true on some specifically historical or literary basis. Such choices are always moral and/or aesthetic [5].

What I propose […] is that there have been for us two dominant ways of reading both our literature and our history. One is “Romantic”, a mode of reading which takes pleasure in the notion that Ireland is a culture enriched by the ambiguity of its relationship to an anachronistic and a modernist present [sic]. The other is a mode of reading which denies the glamour of this ambiguity and seeks to escape from it into a pluralism of the present. The authors who represent these modes most powerfully are Yeats and Joyce respectively. The problem which is rendered insoluble [5] by them is the North. In a basic sense, the crisis we are passing through is stylistic. That is to say, it is a crisis of language - the ways in which we write it and the ways in which we read it. In a culture like ours, ‘tradition’ is too easily taken to be an established reality. We are conscious that it is an invention, a narrative which ingeniously finds a way of connecting a selected series of historical figures or themes in such a way that the pattern or plot reveal to us becomes a conditioning factor in our reading of literary works. (p.5-6.)

A poem like “Ancestral Houses” owed its force to the vitality with [which] it offers a version of Ascendancy history as true in itself. The truth of this historical reconstruction of the Ascendancy is not cancelled by our simply saying No, it was not like that. For its ultimate validity is mythical, not historical. In this case, the mythical element is given prominence by the meditation on the fate of an originary energy which becomes so effective that it transforms nature into civilisation, and is then transformed itself by civilisation into decadence. The poem, then, appears to have a story to tell, and, along with that, an interpretation of the story’s meaning. It operates on the narrative and on the conceptual planes and at the intersection of these it emerges, for many readers, as a poem about the tragic nature of human existence itself. Yeats’s life, through the mediations of history and myth, becomes an embodiment of essential existence.

The trouble with such a reading is the assumption that this or any other literary work can arrive at a moment in which it takes leave of history or myth (which are liable to idiosyncratic interpretation) and becomes meaningful only as an aspect of the ‘human condition’. This is, of course, a characteristic determination of humanist readings of literature which hold to the ideological conviction that literature, in its highest forms, is non-ideological. It would be perfectly appropriate, within this particular frame, to take a poem by Pearse - say, “The Rebel” - and to read it in the light of a story - the Republican tradition from Tone, the Celtic tradition from Cuchulainn, the Christian tradition from Colmcille - and then reread the story as an expression of the moral supremacy of martyrdom over oppression. But as a poem, it would be regarded as inferior to that of Yeats. Yeats, stimulated by the moribund state of the [6] Ascendancy tradition, resolves, on the level of literature, a crisis which, for him, cannot be resolved socially or politically. In Pearse’s case, the poem is no more than an adjunct to political action. The revolutionary tradition he represents is not broken by oppression but renewed by it. His symbols survive outside the poem, in the Cuchulainn statue, in the reconstituted GPO, in the military behaviour and rhetoric of the IRA. Yeats’s symbols have disappeared, the destruction of Coole Park being the most notable, although even in their disappearance one can discover reinforcement for the tragic condition embodied in the poem. The unavoidable fact about both poems is that they continue to belong to history and to myth; they are part of the symbolic procedures which characterise their culture. Yet, to the extent that we prefer one as literature to the other, we find ourselves inclined to dispossess it of history, to concede to it an autonomy which is finally defensible only on the grounds of style.

The consideration of style is a thorny problem. In Irish writing, it is particularly so. When the language is English, Irish writing is dominated by the notion of vitality restored, of the centre energised by the periphery, the urban by the rural, the cosmopolitan by the provincial, the decadent by the natural. This is one of the liberating effects of nationalism, a means of restoring dignity and power to what had been humiliated and suppressed. This is the idea which underlies all our formulations of tradition. Its development is confined to two variations. The first we may call the variation of adherence, the second of separation. In the first, the restoration of native energy to the English language is seen as a specifically Irish contribution to a shared heritage. Standard English, as a form of language or as a form of literature, is rescued from its exclusiveness by being compelled to incorporate into itself what had previously been regarded as a delinquent dialect. It is the Irish contribution, in literary terms, to the treasury of English verse and prose. Cultural nationalism is thus transformed into a species of literary unionism. Sir Samuel Ferguson is the most explicit supporter of this variation, although, from Edgeworth to Yeats, it remains a tacit assumption. The story of the spiritual heroics of a fading class - the Ascendancy - in the face of a transformed Catholic ‘nation’ - was rewritten in a variety of ways in literature - as the story of the pagan Fianna replaced by a pallid Christianity, of young love replaced by old age (Deirdre, Oisin), of aristocracy supplanted by mob-democracy. The fertility of these rewritings is all the more remarkable in that they were recruitments by the fading class of the myths of renovation which belonged to their opponents. Irish culture became the new property of those who were losing their grip on [7] Irish land. The effect of these rewritings was to transfer the blame for the drastic condition of the country from the Ascendancy to the Catholic middle classes or to their English counterparts. It was in essence a strategic retreat from political to cultural supremacy. From Lecky to Yeats and forward to F. S. L. Lyons we witness the conversion of Irish history into a tragic theatre in which the great Anglo-Irish protagonists — Swift, Burke, Parnell — are destroyed in their heroic attempts to unite culture of intellect with the emotion of multitude, or in political terms, constitutional politics with the forces of revolution. The triumph of the forces of revolution is glossed in all cases as the success of a philistine modernism over a rich and integrated organic culture. Yeats’s promiscuity in his courtship of heroic figures — Cuchulainn, John O’Leary, Parnell, the 1916 leaders, Synge, Mussolini, Kevin O’Higgins, General O’Duffy— is an understandable form of anxiety in one who sought to find in a single figure the capacity to give reality to a spiritual leadership for which (as he consistently admitted) the conditions had already disappeared. Such figures could only operate as symbols. Their significance lay in their disdain for the provincial, squalid aspects of a mob culture which is the Yeatsian version of the other face of Irish nationalism. It could provide him culturally with a language of renovation, but it provided neither art nor civilisation. That had come, politically, from the connection between England and Ireland.

All the important Irish Protestant writers of the nineteenth century had, as the ideological centre of their work, a commitment to a minority or subversive attitude which was much less revolutionary than it appeared to be. Edgeworth’s critique of landlordism was counterbalanced by her sponsorship of utilitarianism and “British manufacturers”; Maturin and Le Fanu took the sting out of Gothicism by allying it with an ethic of aristocratic loneliness; Shaw and Wilde denied the subversive force of their proto-socialism by expressing it as cosmopolitan wit, the recourse of the social or intellectual dandy who makes [8] such a fetish of taking nothing seriously that he ceases to be taken seriously himself. Finally, Yeats’s preoccupation with the occult, and Synge’s with the lost language of Ireland are both minority positions which have, as part of their project, the revival of worn social forms, not their overthrow. The disaffection inherent in these positions is typical of the Anglo-Irish criticism of the failure of English civilisation in Ireland, but it is articulated for an English audience which learned to regard all these adversarial positions as essentially picturesque manifestations of the Irish sensibility. In the same way, the Irish mode of English was regarded as picturesque too and when both language and ideology are rendered harmless by this view of them, the writer is liable to become a popular success. Somerville and Ross showed how to take the middle-class seriousness out of Edgeworth’s world and make it endearingly quaint. But all nineteenth-century Irish writing exploits the connection between the picturesque and the popular. In its comic vein, it produces The Shaughran and Experiences of an Irish R.M.; in its Gothic vein, Melmoth the Wanderer, Uncle Silas and Dracula; in its mandarin vein, the plays of Wilde and the poetry of the young Yeats. The division between that which is picturesque and that which is useful did not pass unobserved by Yeats. He made the great realignment of the minority stance with the pursuit of perfection in art. He gave the picturesque something more than respectability. He gave it the mysteriousness of the esoteric and in doing so committed Irish writing to the idea of an art which, while belonging to “high” culture, would not have, on the one hand, the asphyxiating decadence of its English or French counterparts and, on the other hand, would have within it the energies of a community which had not yet been reduced to a public. An idea of art opposed to the idea of utility, an idea of an audience opposed to the idea of popularity, an idea of the peripheral becoming the central culture - in these three ideas Yeats provided Irish writing with a programme for action. But whatever its connection with Irish nationalism, it was not, finally, a programme of separation from the English tradition. His continued adherence to it led him to define the central Irish attitude as one of self-hatred. In his extraordinary “A General Introduction for my Work” (1937), he wrote:

“The ‘Irishry’ have preserved their ancient ‘deposit’ through wars which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became wars of extermination; no people, Lecky said ... have undergone greater persecution, nor did that persecution altogether cease up to our own day. No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive ... Then I [9] remind myself that remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and write, that everything I love has come to me through English - my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate … . This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity.”

The pathology of literary unionism has never been better defined.

The second variation in the development of the idea of vitality restored [viz., separation] is embodied most perfectly in Joyce. His work is dominated by the idea of separation as a means to the revival of suppressed energies. The separation he envisages is as complete as one could wish. The English literary and political imperium, the Roman Catholic and Irish nationalist claims, the oppressions of conventional language and of conventional narrative - all of these are overthrown, but the freedom which results is haunted by his fearful obsession with treachery and betrayal. In him, as in many twentieth century writers, the natural ground of vitality is identified as the libidinal. The sexual forms of oppression are inscribed in all his works but, with that, there is also the ambition to see the connection between sexuality and history. His work is notoriously preoccupied with paralysis, inertia, the disabling effects of society upon the individual who, like Bloom, lives within its frame, or, like Stephen, attempts to live beyond it. In Portrait the separation of the aesthetic ambition of Stephen from the political, the sexual and the religious zones of experience is clear. It is, of course, a separation which includes them, but as oppressed forces which were themselves once oppressive. His comment on Wilde is pertinent:

Here we touch the pulse of Wilde’s art - sin. He deceived himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people ... But if some truth adheres ... to his restless thought ... at its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.”

In Joyce himself the sin is treachery, sexual or political infidelity. [10] The betrayed figure is the alien artist. The ‘divine heart’ is the maternal figure, mother, Mother Ireland, Mother Church or Mother Eve. But the betrayed are also the betrayers and the source of the treachery is in the Irish condition itself. In his Trieste lecture of 1907, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, he notes that Ireland was betrayed by her own people and by the Vatican on the crucial occasions of Henry II’s invasion and the Act of Union: “From my point of view, these two facts must be thoroughly explained before the country in which they occurred has the most rudimentary right to persuade one of her sons to change his position from that of an unprejudiced observer to that of a convicted nationalist.” / Finally, in his account of the Maamtrasna murders of 1882 in “Ireland at the Bar” (published in Il Piccolo della Sera, Trieste, 1907), Joyce, anticipating the use which he would make throughout Finnegans Wake of the figure of the Irish-speaking Myles Joyce, judicially murdered by the sentence of an English-speaking court, comments: “The figure of this dumb-founded old man, a remnant of a civilisation not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion.” This, along with the well-known passage from Portrait [viz., ‘my soul frets in the shadow of his language", Portrait of An Artist, Chap. 5] in which Stephen feels the humiliation of being alien to the English language in the course of his conversation with the Newman Catholic Dean of Studies, identifies Joyce’s sense of separation from both Irish and English civilisation. Betrayed into alienation, he turns to art to enable him overcome the treacheries which have victimised him.

In one sense, Joyce’s writing is founded on the belief in the capacity of art to restore a lost vitality. So the figures we remember are embodiments of this “vitalism”, particularly Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle. The fact that they were women is important too, since it clearly indicates some sort of resolution, on the level of femaleness, of what had remained implacably unresolvable on the male level, whether that be of Stephen and Bloom or of Shem and Shaun. This vitalism announces itself also in the protean language of these books, in their endless transactions between history and fiction, macro- and microcosm. But along with this, there is in Joyce a [11] recognition of a world which is “void” (a favourite word of his), even though it is also full of correspondence, objects, people. … His vitalism is insufficient to the task of overcoming this void. [... &c.]

Yeats was indeed our last romantic in literature as was Pearse in politics. They were men who asserted a coincidence between the destiny of the community and their own and believed that this coincidence had an historical repercussion. This was the basis for their belief in a “spiritual aristocracy” which worked its potent influence in a plebian world. Their determination to restore vitality to this lost society provided their culture with a millenial conviction which has not yet died.’ Whatever we may thing of their ideas of tradition, we still adhere to the tradition of the idea that art and revolution are definitively associated in their production of any individual style [12] which is also the signature of the community’s deepest self. [… &c.]’ (pp.12-13.)

There is a profoundly insulting association in the secondary literature surround him that he is eccentric because of his Irishness but serious because o his ability to separate himself from it. In such judgements, we see the ghost of a rancid colonialism. But it is important to recognise that this ghost haunts the works themselves. the battle between style as the expression of communal history … and Joycean stylism, in which the atomisation of community is registered in a multitude of equivalent, competing styles, in short, a battle between Romantic and contemporary Ireland.’ [Goes on to apply these ideas to the crisis in Northern Ireland.] (p.13.)

Joyce, although he attempted to free himself from set political positions, did finally create in Finnegans Wake a characteristically modern way of dealing with heterogenous and intractable material and experience. The pluralism of his styles and languages, the absorbent nature of his controlling myths and systems, finally gives a certain harmony to varied experience. But, it could be argued, it is a harmony of indifference, one in which everything is a version of something else, where sameness rules over diversity, where contradiction is finally and disquietingly written out. In achieving this in literature, Joyce anticipated the capacity of modern society to integrate almost all antagonistic elements by transforming them into fashions, fads - styles, in short. (Ibid., p.16.)

There is, therefore, nothing mysterious about the re-emergence in literature of the contrast which was built into the colonial structure of the country. But to desire, in the present conditions in the North, the final triumph of State over nation, Nation over State, modernism over backwardness, authenticity over domination, or any other comparable liquidation of the standard oppositions, is to desire the utter defeat of the other community. The acceptance of a particular style of Catholic or Protestant attitudes or behaviours, married to a dream of final restoration of vitality to a decayed cause or community, is a contribution to the possibility of civil war. It is impossible to do without ideas of a tradition. But it is necessary to disengage from the traditions of the ideas which the literary revival and the accompanying political revolution sponsored so successfully. (p.16.)

Although the Irish political crisis is, in many respects, a monotonous one, it has always been deeply engaged in the fortunes of Irish writing at every level, from the production of work to its publication and reception. The oppressiveness of the tradition we inherit has its source in our own readiness to accept the mystique of Irishness as an inalienable feature of our writing and, indeed, of much else in our culture. That mystique is itself an alienating force. To accept it is to become involved in the [17] spiritual heroics of a Yeats or a Pearse, to believe in the incarnation of the nation in the individual. To reject it is to make a fetish of exile, alienation, dislocation in the manner of Joyce or Beckett. [...] They inhabit the highly recognisable world of modern colonialism. (p.18.)

One step towards that dissolution [of the mystique] would be a revision of our prevailing idea of what it is that constitutes the Irish reality. In literary that could take the form of a definition, in the form of a comprehensive anthology, of what writing in this country has been for the last 300-500 years and, through that, an exposure to the fact that the myth of Irishness, the notion of Irish unreality, the notion surrounding Irish eloquence, are all political themes upon which the literature has battened to an extreme degree since the nineteenth century when the idea of national character was invented. The Irish national character [...] has been received as the verdict passed by history upon the Celtic personality. That stereotyping has caused a long colonial concussion. It is about time we put aside the idea of the essence - that hungry Hegelian ghost looking for a stereotype to live in. As Irishness or as Northerness he stimulates the provincial unhappiness we create and fly from, becoming virtuoso metropolitans to the exact degree that we have created an idea of Ireland as provincialism incarnate. These are worn oppositions. They used to be parentheses in which the Irish destiny was isolated. That is no longer the case. Everything has to be rewritten - i.e., re-read. that will enable new writing, new politics, unblemished by Irishness, but securely Irish.’ (pp.17-18; end.)

#seamus deane #field day #james joyce #w.b. yeats #irish literature #irish culture #ireland #postcolonial theory #words #favorites

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joaosodre · 5 years ago

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This is something I mentioned on twitter: my favorite idea lately for stories to work with is “humanity’s struggle to come to terms with the unknowable.” That’s as fine a point as I can put on it, I guess. It seems like an important and politically resonant idea, and a lot of my thinking lately revolves around how to articulate a position at odds with extremist claims of absolute knowledge, while still existing in a world of provisional material truth.

Here’s a list of media that I’ve really loved and that approaches this idea from different angles. Nothing comprehensive, just a list I’ve been adding to.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, 1851. This is a book I have spent too much time with, and its focus on the failure of human intellect and ideology to make sense of nature/the transcendent/god is important to me.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem, 1961. One of my favorite scifi novels; more about philosophy of science than about scientific ideas. Moody and intense satire. The Tarkovsky adaptation is beautiful but doesn’t quite engage with the same ideas.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1971. Bewildering pseudo-first-contact story that really interestingly ties into USSR politics (this point is made really well in HyperNormalisation). Also adapted by Tarkovsky, interestingly; haven’t seen it tho

Alien, 1979. One of a hundred examples of a story that works elegantly with little exposition of its fantastical elements, to be undercut by the more explicit approach of its sequels. Really cool to read as a chaoskampf story; alien representing the archetypal dragon/chaos monster. Beowulf should maybe be on this list but I don’t remember it too well

2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. I mean obviously.

Shin Godzilla, 2016. Extremely smart use of an entrenched pop-culture genre as essentially political satire. I read a lot of people saying it didn’t make sense if you aren’t familiar with Japanese politics but I disagree!!

Arrival, 2016. The aliens are satisfyingly Weird to me but understanding them is treated as an achievable intellectual goal, so maybe it doesn’t belong on this list. anyway good movie

Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton, 2016. Ambitious and mystifying book that’s sort of about building a new way of relating to ecology and humanity, in the context of catastrophic climate change. A lot of time spent deconstructing mythologies of absolute truth that proceed from the invention of agriculture. Plato’s Revenge (2011) is a book that deals with some similar ideas but I did not like it so much

Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, 1982. Broad & fascinating book on linguistics and the cultural shift represented by the invention of writing. The idea that literacy in particular concretizes our language and our models of the world is why it’s on this list

Here’s a list of media that I’ve really loved and that approaches this idea from different angles. Nothing comprehensive, just a list I’ve been adding to.

2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. I mean obviously.

Arrival, 2016. The aliens are satisfyingly Weird to me but understanding them is treated as an achievable intellectual goal, so maybe it doesn’t belong on this list. anyway good movie

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sheminecrafts · 5 years ago

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Meet Facebook’s latest fake

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a 35-year-old billionaire who keeps refusing to sit in front of international parliamentarians to answer questions about his ad business’ impact on democracy and human rights around the world, has a new piece of accountability theatre to sell you: An “Oversight Board“.

Not of Facebook’s business itself. Though you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s what Facebook’s blog post is trumpeting, with the grand claim that it’s “Establishing Structure and Governance for an Independent Oversight Board”.

Referred to during the seeding stage last year, when Zuckerberg gave select face-time to podcast and TV hosts he felt comfortable would spread his conceptual gospel with a straight face, as a sort of ‘Supreme Court of Facebook’, this supplementary content decision-making body has since been outfitted in the company’s customary (for difficult topics) bloodless ‘Facebookese’ (see also “inauthentic behavior”; its choice euphemism for fake activity on its platform).

The Oversight Board is intended to sit atop the daily grind of Facebook content moderation, which takes place behind closed doors and signed NDAs, where outsourced armies of contractors are paid to eyeball the running sewer of hate, abuse and violence so actual users don’t have to, as a more visible mechanism for resolving and thus (Facebook hopes) quelling speech-related disputes.

Facebook’s one-size-fits-all content moderation policy doesn’t and can’t. There’s no such thing as a 2.2BN+ “community” — as the company prefers to refer to its globe-spanning user-base. So quite how the massive diversity of Facebook users can be meaningfully represented by the views of a last resort case review body with as few as 11 members has not yet been made clear.

“When it is fully staffed, the board is likely to be forty members. The board will increase or decrease in size as appropriate,” Facebook writes vaguely this week.

Even if it were proposing one board member per market of operation (and it’s not) that would require a single individual to meaningfully represent the diverse views of an entire country. Which would be ludicrous, as well as risking the usual political divides from styming good faith effort.

It seems most likely Facebook will seek to ensure the initial make-up of the board reflects its corporate ideology — as a US company committed to upholding freedom of expression. (It’s clearly no accident the first three words in the Oversight Board’s charter are: “Freedom of expression”.)

Anything less US-focused might risk the charter’s other clearly stated introductory position — that “free expression is paramount”.

But where will that leave international markets which have suffered the worst kinds of individual and societal harms as a consequence of Facebook’s failure to moderate hate speech, dangerous disinformation and political violence, to name a few of the myriad content scandals that dog the company wherever it goes.

Facebook needs international markets for its business to turn a profit. But you sure wouldn’t know it from its distribution of resources. Not for nothing has the company been accused of digital colonialism.

I'd be especially interested how much has FB invested in setting up this seemingly impressive 'global input process' for the global 'oversight board'?

– 3 months worth of net income? – 1 month worth of net income? – 1 week worth of net income? pic.twitter.com/o1o9NQdwYo

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 17, 2019

The level of harm flowing from Facebook decisions to take down or leave up certain pieces of content can be excruciatingly high. Such as in Myanmar where its platform became a conduit for hate speech-fuelled ethnic violence towards the Rohingya people and other ethnic minorities.

It’s reputational-denting failures like Myanmar — which last year led the UN to dub Facebook’s platform “a beast” — that are motivating this latest self-regulation effort. Having made its customary claim that it will do a better job of decision-making in future, Facebook is now making a show of enlisting outsiders for help.

The wider problem is Facebook has scaled so big its business is faced with a steady pipeline of tricky, controversial and at times life-threatening content moderation decisions. Decisions it claims it’s not comfortable making as a private company. Though Facebook hasn’t expressed discomfort at monetizing all this stuff. (Even though its platform has literally been used to target ads at nazis.)

Facebook’s size is humanity’s problem but of course Facebook isn’t putting it like that. Instead — coming sometime in 2020 — the company will augment its moderation processes with a lottery-level chance of a final appeal via a case referral to the Oversight Board.

The level of additional oversight here will of course be exceptionally select. This is a last resort, cherry-picked appeal layer that will only touch a fantastically tiny proportion of the content choices Facebook moderators make every second of every day — and from which real world impacts ripple out and rain down.

“We expect the board will only hear a small number of cases at first, but over time we hope it will expand its scope and potentially include more companies across the industry as well,” Zuckerberg writes this week, managing output expectations still many months ahead of the slated kick off — before shifting focus onto the ‘future hopes’ he’s always much more comfortable talking about.

Case selection will be guided by Facebook’s business interests, meaning the push, even here, is still for scale of impact. Facebook says cases will be selected from a pool of complaints and referrals that “have the greatest potential to guide future decisions and policies”.

The company is also giving itself the power to leapfrog general submissions by sending expedited cases directly to the board to ask for a speedy opinion. So its content questions will be prioritized.

Incredibly, Facebook is also trying to sell this self-styled “oversight” layer as independent from Facebook.

The Oversight Board’s overtly bureaucracy branding is pepped up in Facebook headline spin as “an Independent Oversight Board”. Although the adjective is curiously absent from other headings in Facebook’s already sprawling literature about the OB. Including the newly released charter which specifies the board’s authority, scope and procedures, and was published this week.

The nine-page document was accompanied by a letter from Zuckerberg in which he opines on “Facebook’s commitment to the Oversight Board”, as his header puts it — also dropping the word ‘independent’ in favor of slipping into a comfortable familiar case. Funny that.

The body text of Zuckerberg’s letter goes on to make several references to the board as “independent”; an “independent organization”; exercising “its independent judgement”. But here that’s essentially just Mark’s opinion.

The elephant in the room — which, if we continue the metaphor, is in the process of being dressed by Facebook in a fancy costume that attempts to make it look like, well, a board room table — is the supreme leader’s ongoing failure to submit himself and his decisions to any meaningful oversight.

Supreme leader is an accurate descriptor for Zuckerberg as Facebook CEO, given the share structure and voting rights he has afforded himself mean no one other than Zuckerberg can sack Zuckerberg. (Asked last year, during a podcast interview with recode’s Kara Swisher if he was going to fire himself, in light of myriad speech scandals on his platform, Zuckerberg laughed and then declined.)

It’s a corporate governance dictatorship that has allowed Facebook’s boy king to wield vast power around the world without any internal checks. Power without moral responsibility if you will.

Throughout Zuckerberg’s (now) 15-year apology tour turn as Facebook CEO neither the claims he’ll do things differently next time nor the cool expansionist ambition have wavered. He’s still at it of course; with a plan for a global digital currency (Libra), while bullishly colonizing literal hook-ups (Facebook Dating). Anything to keep the data and ad dollars flowing.

Recently Facebook also paid a $5BN FTC fine to avoid its senior executives having to face questions about their data governance and policy enforcement fuck-ups — leaving Zuckerberg & co free to get back to lucrative privacy-screwing business as usual. (To put the fine in context, Facebook’s 2018 full year revenue clocked in at $55.8BN.)

All of which is to say that an ‘independent’ Facebook-devised “Oversight Board” is just a high gloss sticking plaster to cover the lack of actual regulation — internal and external — of Zuckerberg’s empire.

It is also an attempt by Facebook to paper over its continued evasion of democratic accountability. To distract from the fact its ad platform is playing fast and loose with people’s rights and lives; reshaping democracies and communities while Facebook’s founder refuses to answer parliamentarians’ questions or account for scandal-hit business decisions. Privacy is never dead for Mark Zuckerberg.

Evasion is actually a little tame a term. How Facebook operates is far more actively hostile than that. Its platform is reshaping us without accountability or oversight, even as it ploughs profits into spinning and shape-shifting its business in a bid to prevent our democratically elected representatives from being able to reshape it.

Zuckerberg appropriating the language of civic oversight and jurisprudence for this “project”, as his letter calls the Oversight Board — committing to abide by the terms of a content decision-making review vehicle entirely of his own devising, whose Facebook-written charter stipulates it will “review and decide on content in accordance with Facebook’s content policies and values” — is hardly news. Even though Facebook is spinning at the very highest level to try to make it so.

What would constitute a newsworthy shock is Facebook’s CEO agreeing to take questions from the democratically elected representatives of the billions of users of his products who live outside the US.

Zuckerberg agreeing to meet with parliamentarians around the world so they can put to him questions and concerns on a rolling and regular basis would be a truly incredible news flash.

Instead it’s fiction. That’s not how the empire functions.

The Facebook CEO has instead ducked as much democratic scrutiny as a billionaire in charge of a historically unprecedented disinformation machine possibly can — submitting himself to an awkward question-dodging turn in Congress last year; and one fixed-format meeting of the EU parliament’s conference of presidents, initially set to take place behind closed doors (until MEPs protested), where he was heckled for failing to answer questions.

He has also, most recently, pressed US president Donald Trump’s flesh. We can only speculate on how that meeting of minds went. Power meet irresponsibility — or was it vice versa?

Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of @Facebook in the Oval Office today. https://t.co/k5ofQREfOc pic.twitter.com/jNt93F2BsG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2019

International parliamentarians trying on behalf of the vast majority of the world’s Facebook users to scrutinize Zuckerberg and hold his advertising business to democratic account have, meanwhile, been roundly snubbed.

Just this month Zuckerberg declined a third invitation to speak in front of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation which will convene in Dublin this November.

At a second meeting in Canada earlier this year Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg both refused to appear — leading the Canadian parliament’s ethics committee to vote to subpoena the pair.

While, last year, the UK parliament got so frustrated with Facebook’s evasive behavior during a timely enquiry into online disinformation, which saw its questions fobbed off by a parade of Zuckerberg stand-ins armed with spin and misdirection, that a sort of intergovernmental alchemy occurred — and the International Grand Committee on Disinformation was formed in an eye-blink, bringing multiple parliaments together to apply democratic pressure to Facebook.

The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee’s frustration at Facebook’s evasive behavior also led it to deploy arcane parliamentary powers to seize a cache of internal Facebook documents from a US lawsuit in a creative attempt to get at the world-view locked inside Zuckerberg’s blue box.

The unvarnished glimpse of Facebook’s business that these papers afforded certainly isn’t pretty…

The unvarnished view of Facebook’s business pic.twitter.com/nCk1phTsi0

— Natasha (@riptari) December 6, 2018

US legal discovery appears to be the only reliable external force capable of extracting data from inside the bellow of the nation-sized beast. That’s a problem for democracies.

So Facebook instructing an ‘oversight board’ of its own making to do anything other than smooth publicity bumps in the road, and pave the way for more Facebook business as usual, is like asking a Koch brothers funded ‘stink tank’ to be independent of fossil fuel interests. The OB is just Facebook’s latest crisis PR tool. More fool anyone who signs up to ink their name to its democratically void rubberstamp.

Dig into the detail of the charter and cracks in the claimed “independence” soon appear.

Aside from the obvious overriding existential points that the board only exists because Facebook exists, making it a dependent function of Facebook whose purpose is to enable its spawning parental system to continue operating; and that it’s funded and charged with chartered purpose by the very same blue-veined god it’s simultaneously supposed to be overseeing (quite the conflict of interest), the charter states that Facebook itself will choose the initial board members. Who will then choose the rest of the first cohort of members.

“To support the initial formation of the board, Facebook will select a group of cochairs. The co-chairs and Facebook will then jointly select candidates for the remainder of the board seats,” it writes in pale grey Facebookese with a tone set to ‘smooth reassurance’ — when the substance of what’s being said should really make you go ‘wtf, how is that even slightly independent?!’

Because the inaugural (Facebook-approved) member cohort will be responsible for the formative case selections — which means they’ll be laying down the foundational ‘case law’ that the board is also bound, per Facebook’s charter, to follow thereafter.

“For each decision, any prior board decisions will have precedential value and should be viewed as highly persuasive when the facts, applicable policies, or other factors are substantially similar,” runs an instructive section on the “basis of decision-making”.

The problem here hardly needs spelling out. This isn’t Facebook changing, this is more of the same ‘Facebook first’ ethos which has always driven its content moderation decisions — just now with a highly polished ‘overseen’ sheen.

This isn’t accountability either. It’s Facebook trying to protect its business from actual regulation by creating a blame-shifting firewall to shield its transparency-phobic execs from democratic (and moral) scrutiny. And indeed to shield Zuckerberg & his inner circle from future content scandals that might threaten to rock the throne, a la Cambridge Analytica.

(Judging by other events this week that mission may not be going so well… )

Given the lengths this company is going to to eschew democratic scrutiny — ducking and diving even as it weaves its own faux oversight structure to manage negative PR on its behalf (yep, more fakes!) — you really have to wonder what Facebook is trying to hide.

A moral vacuum the size of a black hole? Or perhaps it’s just trying to buy time to complete its corporate takeover of the democratic world order…

To sum up: FB wants a currency, now a Supreme Court. What's next, an army perhaps

Facebook sets out details of ‘Supreme Court’ for content disputes https://t.co/mqS6XEhzJN via @financialtimes

— Tommaso Valletti (@TomValletti) September 18, 2019

Because of course the Oversight Board can’t set actual Facebook policy. Don’t be ridiculous! It can merely issue policy recommendations — which Facebook can just choose to ignore.

So even if we imagine the OB running years in the future, when it might theoretically be possible its membership has drifted out of Facebook’s comfortable set-up “support” zone, the charter has baked in another firewall that lets Zuckerberg ignore any policy pressure he doesn’t like. Just, y’know, on the off-chance the board gets too independently minded. Truly, there’s nothing to see here.

Entities structured by corporate interests to role-play ‘neutral’ advice or ensure ‘transparent’ oversight — or indeed to promulgate self-interested propaganda dressed in the garb of intellectual expertise — are almost always a stacked trick.

This is why it’s preferable to live in a democracy. And be governed by democratically accountable institutions that are bound by legally enforcement standards of transparency. Though Facebook hopes you’ll be persuaded to vote for manipulation by corporate interest instead.

So while Facebook’s claim that the Oversight Board will operate “transparently” sure sound good it’s also entirely meaningless. These are not legal standards of transparency. Facebook is a business, not a democracy. There are no legal binds here. It’s self regulation. Ergo, a pantomime.

You can see why Facebook avoided actually calling the OB its ‘Supreme Court’; that would have been trolling a little too close to the bone.

Without legal standards of transparency (or indeed democratic accountability) being applied, there are endless opportunities for Facebook’s self interest to infiltrate the claimed separation between oversight board, oversight trust and the rest of its business; to shape and influence case selections, decisions and policy recommendations; and to seed and steer narrative-shaping discussion around hot button speech issues which could help move the angry chatter along — all under the carefully spun cover of ‘independent external oversight’.

No one should be fooled into thinking a Facebook-shaped and funded entity can meaningful hold Facebook to account on anything. Nor, in this case, when it’s been devised to absorb the flak on irreconcilable speech conflicts so Facebook doesn’t have to.

It’s highly doubtful that even a truly independent board cohort slotted into this Zuckerberg PR vehicle could meaningfully influence Facebook’s policy in a more humanitarian direction. Not while its business model is based on mass-scale attention harvesting and privacy-hostile people profiling. The board’s policy recommendations would have to demand a new business model. (To which we already know Facebook’s response: ‘LOL! No.’)

The Oversight Board is just the latest blame-shifting publicity exercise from a company with a user-base as big as a country that gifts it massive resource to throw at its ‘PR problem’ (as Facebook sees it); i.e. how to seem like a good corporate citizen whilst doing everything possible to evade democratic scrutiny and outrun the leash of government regulation. tl;dr: You can’t fix anything if you don’t believe there’s an underlying problem in the first place.

For an example of how the views of a few hand-picked independent experts can be channeled to further a particular corporate agenda look no further than the panel of outsiders Google assembled in Europe in 2014 in response to the European Court of Justice ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling — an unappealable legal decision that ran counter to its business interests.

Google used what it billed as an “advisory committee” of outsiders mostly as a publicity vehicle, holding a large number of public ‘hearings’ where it got to frame a debate and lobby loudly against the law. In such a context Google’s nakedly self-interested critique of EU privacy rights was lent a learned, regionally seasoned dressing of nuanced academic concern, thanks to the outsiders doing time on its platform.

Google also claimed the panel would steer its decision-making process on how to implement the ruling. And in their final report the committee ended up aligning with Google’s preference to only carry out search de-indexing at the European (rather than .com global) domain level. Their full report did contain some dissent. But Google’s preferred policy position won out. (And, yes, there were good people on that Google-devised panel.)

Facebook’s Oversight Board is another such self-interested tech giant stunt. One where Facebook gets to choose whether or not to outsource a few tricky content decisions while making a big show of seeming outward-looking, even as it works to shift and defuse public and political attention from its ongoing lack of democratic accountability.

What’s perhaps most egregious about this latest Facebook charade is it seems intended to shift attention off of the thousands of people Facebook pays to labor daily at the raw coal face of its content business. An outsourced army of voiceless workers who are tasked with moderating at high speed the very worst stuff that’s uploaded to Facebook — exposing themselves to psychological stress, emotional trauma and worse, per multiple media reports.

Why isn’t Facebook announcing a committee to provide that existing expert workforce with a public voice on where its content lines should lie, as well as the power to issue policy recommendations?

It’s impossible to imagine Facebook actively supporting Oversight Board members being selected from among the pool of content moderation contractors it already pays to stop humanity shutting its business down in sheer horror at what’s bubbling up the pipe.

On member qualifications, the Oversight Board charter states: “Members must have demonstrated experience at deliberating thoughtfully and as an open-minded contributor on a team; be skilled at making and explaining decisions based on a set of policies or standards; and have familiarity with matters relating to digital content and governance, including free expression, civic discourse, safety, privacy and technology.”

There’s surely not a Facebook moderator in the whole wide world who couldn’t already lay claim to that skill-set. So perhaps it’s no wonder the company’s ‘Oversight Board’ isn’t taking applications.

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technicalsolutions88 · 5 years ago

Link

“When it is fully staffed, the board is likely to be forty members. The board will increase or decrease in size as appropriate,” Facebook writes vaguely this week.

Anything less US-focused might risk the charter’s other clearly stated introductory position — that “free expression is paramount”.

I'd be especially interested how much has FB invested in setting up this seemingly impressive 'global input process' for the global 'oversight board'?

– 3 months worth of net income? – 1 month worth of net income? – 1 week worth of net income? pic.twitter.com/o1o9NQdwYo

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 17, 2019

The company is also giving itself the power to leapfrog general submissions by sending expedited cases directly to the board to ask for a speedy opinion. So its content questions will be prioritized.

Incredibly, Facebook is also trying to sell this self-styled “oversight” layer as independent from Facebook.

It’s a corporate governance dictatorship that has allowed Facebook’s boy king to wield vast power around the world without any internal checks. Power without moral responsibility if you will.

Zuckerberg agreeing to meet with parliamentarians around the world so they can put to him questions and concerns on a rolling and regular basis would be a truly incredible news flash.

Instead it’s fiction. That’s not how the empire functions.

He has also, most recently, pressed US president Donald Trump’s flesh. We can only speculate on how that meeting of minds went. Power meet irresponsibility — or was it vice versa?

Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of @Facebook in the Oval Office today. https://t.co/k5ofQREfOc pic.twitter.com/jNt93F2BsG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2019

Just this month Zuckerberg declined a third invitation to speak in front of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation which will convene in Dublin this November.

At a second meeting in Canada earlier this year Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg both refused to appear — leading the Canadian parliament’s ethics committee to vote to subpoena the pair.

The unvarnished glimpse of Facebook’s business that these papers afforded certainly isn’t pretty…

The unvarnished view of Facebook’s business pic.twitter.com/nCk1phTsi0

— Natasha (@riptari) December 6, 2018

US legal discovery appears to be the only reliable external force capable of extracting data from inside the bellow of the nation-sized beast. That’s a problem for democracies.

Dig into the detail of the charter and cracks in the claimed “independence” soon appear.

(Judging by other events this week that mission may not be going so well… )

A moral vacuum the size of a black hole? Or perhaps it’s just trying to buy time to complete its corporate takeover of the democratic world order…

To sum up: FB wants a currency, now a Supreme Court. What's next, an army perhaps

Facebook sets out details of ‘Supreme Court’ for content disputes https://t.co/mqS6XEhzJN via @financialtimes

— Tommaso Valletti (@TomValletti) September 18, 2019

Because of course the Oversight Board can’t set actual Facebook policy. Don’t be ridiculous! It can merely issue policy recommendations — which Facebook can just choose to ignore.

You can see why Facebook avoided actually calling the OB its ‘Supreme Court’; that would have been trolling a little too close to the bone.

Why isn’t Facebook announcing a committee to provide that existing expert workforce with a public voice on where its content lines should lie, as well as the power to issue policy recommendations?

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