#i like to imagine he is a very visual thinker and it adds to the thoughtfulness of his words

[n4rval]

the way his words are so carefully curated, not only for the sake of precision, but so it fits a rhythm that is breathable for a slow speaker.

to say exactly what he means in a short sentence, with recurring pauses and a clear pronounciation. to prefer periods(.) over commas(,).

not to be needlessly verbose – much the opposite; because this vocabulary serves the purpose of clarity, organization and to hold the attention of the listener.

[tofixtheshadows]

can i ask a thing about kabru as an anime-only... it's become kinda obvious at this point that there's a larger explanation for how he behaves that we haven't reached yet, but i was curious specifically in regards to those corpse retrievers that his party came across during their initial introduction. it makes sense that kabru would want to kill them considering their shady dealings, and we know that people in the dungeon can be revived, but his party did throw their bodies in the water afterwards, seemingly so they wouldn't be found and brought back to life? i was kinda waiting for this to be brought up again, but it wasn't...

Sure. The way I see it, the corpse retrievers are a seriously dangerous group playing with other people's lives for profit. Kabru in particular sees this behavior as unforgivable, and looks down on people who treat the dungeon as a "money pit" and not as a deadly threat that needs to be neutralized as soon as possible.

I'll add some visual aid from the manga, since I'm not gonna go hunting for gifs, but I won't include anything past the point we're at in the anime.

This interaction was cut for time, but early in the manga (after the Tentacles chapter), Namari explains the hazards of resurrection to the twins (and the audience):

...which ups the stakes for us during the corpse retriever confrontation, when Kabru says this:

Which shows that the corpse retrievers aren't merely killing people to revive them for profit- already really fucked up- but doing so in such a reckless fashion that they could easily botch the job and end up with corpses unable to be revived. Imagine if this had been Marcille with her trigger-happy explosion spells? They would have bemoaned the lost payday, then probably just looted what was left.

And then their leader tries to rope Kabru in on their murder-for-money scheme, on the guy's own companions, just to get Kabru to keep quiet? Kabru clearly decided these people were too dangerous to live. Before this moment, all Kabru does is say that he's going to report them! He isn't the one who escalates the situation.

And with the threat to report them hanging over their heads like that, I don't think it would have boded well for Kabru's party if they had given the corpse retrievers a chance to be revived and come after them.

Even if they had miraculously decided not to hunt Kabru's party down (which they had already been doing this whole time), they were just going to keep preying on other adventurers, reducing the dungeon's own imported immune system meant to keep the ratio of monsters stable.

Which is not even as bad as it could be.

Making the choice to execute them is harsh, but honestly I can't judge Kabru that much, as a character in a story whose day-to-day includes life-or-death stakes.

In a storytelling sense, it's also helpful to see the way that Kabru is counterbalancing Laios's story: while Laios is journeying through a biological ecosystem and showing us the dungeon as an organism, Kabru shows the audience the human ecosystem that surrounds the dungeon, the political and social machinations working on it, and how these things are just as deadly as monsters. He's a big picture thinker.

More on that in ... a few episodes, probably?

On the off-chance you'd like to read it, the manga is easily accessible in its official translation here and is a very quick read. You can also see about checking it out through your local library; my roommate read it all on her e-reader that way!

I hope I helped!

[rokhal]

Just watched Scream (2022), thinking about what might be going on with Sam Carpenter.

Young Sam discovered that her mom conceived her in high school with a boy who would shortly thereafter become one of their town's most famous serial killers, and lied to her dad about the pregnancy to get him to marry her. When Sam confronted her about this, Sam's dad left the family. Now, after a spectacular bout of teen angst, adult Sam hallucinates (?) her bio-dad, covered in blood, telling her to kill people.

At the time Sam made her fateful discovery she was at that special age where young girls have only one thing on their minds: boys homicide. Normal little girls write dark poetry and get way too into horror movies and imagine that they are surely the only young woman with similar interests, until they get out of the enforced girlhood pink-and-satin bubble and meet some other heavy metal/horror/goth comic fans. Sam, on the other hand, obsessed about her bio dad, isolated herself, and did drugs. If she didn't have a problem to start with, she does now.

Did Sam have a problem with aggressive urges to start with? I haven't watched Scream VI yet, but there's nothing suggested in Scream (2022). She definitely has intrusive thoughts, but intrusive thoughts and actual interest in carrying something out are very different. It's possible to have both, but so far, all I see is Sam desperately trying to find some way to blame herself for her dad leaving so she wouldn't have to hate him.

She wants there to be something wrong with her, because otherwise the man she loved and respected all her childhood was cruelly abandoned her for something she had no control over, and had never loved her but only stuck around from a sense of obligation. It's less painful if her dad's actions make sense.

Then there's the question of what Sam's visions are. Film is a visual medium, so everything from the supernatural to biologically-based hallucinations to a vivid imagination all tends to be portrayed the same way. The real Billy Loomis didn't care about anyone but himself, but Sam's Billy Loomis seems to be protective and proud of her in a fucked-up way. He is an imaginary Billy Loomis. Antipsychotics don't work on him, and also Sam is...well, let's just say that my impression of schizophrenia is that it's pretty disabling, and while Sam's driving skills leave a lot to be desired, we don't see her struggling with attention, cognition, or motivation. Simplest explanation of Sam's Billy Loomis is that he's an accidental tulpa, providing justification for her self-isolating behavior and her dad's abandonment, while being the fucked-up father figure Sam believes she deserves. And there's plenty of material for Sam to base him on: not just her mother's diary, but also the original Stab movie.

Last and most interesting question is, does Sam actually have any inherited traits that contributed to the real Billy's murder spree? We know she's an over-thinker. She did very much stab her boyfriend to death precisely reenacting a real Ghostface murder, but in context that was a rational and proportional response. Add in Billy Loomis Tulpa, and the availability of the Stab franchise for reference viewing, and it's not surprising that she stepped into the role. Sidney and Gale certainly seem to understand where she's coming from. But does Sam have anything else, like an exaggerated rage response or high prey drive that might have lent legitimacy to her fears?

[clonehub]

Man even the way they're standing in this scene is annoying me like every ounce of their visuals is dedicated to showing how sooooo different they are. Wrecker pls stop speaking

I don't believe Hunter is 5'9 and Tech is 6'4 because in this scene hunter looks like 3 inches taller than Tech.

Having the clones cheer is uh. A Choice. Tech SHUT UPPPP "were such free thinkers" bc ur writers fundamentally don't like u fam

Whiplash going from talking about genocide and the rise of fascism to having ur lil white baby girl show up and having two grown men act ABNORMAL ABOUT A CHILD?

"What's that????" and this nerd pulls out his lil scanner YOU JEAR THE BEEP WHAT???

"you know who we are??" youve established these guys are well known already so like

Hunters face texture is so weird. Y'all saw a CHILD Please calm down 😭

Shout out to this clone on the very end of this row who's standing w his legs apart rather than at attention

I like how the Kaminoans talk tbh.

Again tonal dissonance. How do u go from the news about the end of the production of clones to a food fight

These chairs don't look comfy

"I am merely stating a scientific hypothesis based on factual data".....something about how this line was written. Like the lines. The word choice. Is bad. It's so heavy-handed.

And why is wrecker arguing that his tendency toward destruction might not have anything to do w how he was raised/created huh. He should know that? Not that genes have any bearing on personality but. You know.

But again this is what contrast between like. The logical white man versus the loud and aggressive brown man. Why is wrecker yelling

"we'd never pass a mental evaluation" okay but it's been shown multiple times that tech and crosshair are meant to be smarter than wrekcer like that's a contrast that's been made already. So I really can't see this as a line that isn't about wrecker specifically. Not after y'all just had him yelling about blowing shit up.

I think omega should have been introduced here in this scene. Like imagine some kid just suddenly coming up to y'all and sitting there. That happens irl.

I'm sorry the way hunter is a animated here is so weird. SAD BATCH PLEASE

Girl get OFF the table

No see this is why ppl don't like tbb bc how does someone get food thrown at them and ur telling them to back off like huh. Also also. I'm SORRY I cannot imagine having BEEF with a CHILDDDDDD

As far as I'm concerned this is self defense idc idc

Like idk the whole thing seemed so unnecessary. Because yeah u show echos medical trauma but u never get into it again do you.

I remember. I remember someone said AZ saying that they were defective was meant to be actually a shock to them but it's really just wrecker being surprised. And again like they already know their genes are different. This humor in this show is so WEIRD it's like trying v hard to be funny in this really inappropriate or tonally dissonant ways and it's feeling very repetitive and huh

I'm not even half an hour in

"we're more deviant than we are defective" HWAT THE FUCK HAVE I BEEN SAYING uwwtbb haters whove been calling them defects this whole time need to permanently SHHHHHHH

"and turned into that" SHUT UPPPPPPP

What even is echos eye color tf

No like. Anyone who watches this would say wrecker is just the comic relief he has no depth he doesn't actually add anything to the convo huh like WHAT. Why were people arguing with me on this 😭

Wrecker just. Repeats what everyone says doesn't he. He just repeats it in the Slow Excited Way pls really is caricaturish

Ngl this fight scene is p boring

Wrecker not knowing the hand signals isn't a good look guys it's just so. It's just so annoying.

Omg he called the battle droid a him

Something about the knife still ain't working for me

PLEASE TECHS GRUNT THE NOISE HE MADE????

Oh like did that really fuck up tech did he not just fall a few feet. See if tech were incredibly weak in the body it'd be one thing but I think they just needed to take him out of the fight 😭 unless he's dazed or something

These babies don't have umbilical cords because the animators are cowards

"cellular mutations who's enhanced traits desirable in a soldier" Oh look canon confirmation they're inherently enhanced.

Like they keep pushing the enhancement over anything else. VERY rarely is the word defective used with them.

Okay this is the one time Wrecker saying what's happened isn't a bad thing he's just expressing disbelief but Tech and Crosshair move so quickly to dismiss him

I wonder what Tarkin thinks of the smell of the room

I wonder how we're meant to take wreckers "we both did" bc like it's so. As a line it's so

(I'm sorry the dialogue is punching me in the chest and not in a good way)

Omegas got the shoulder to head ratio of a newborn almost. Like ik kids got big heads but she's dbsmbdmansma her proportions are funny. She's got long legs maybe she's destined to be tall

No why are they so loud on a mission

JEEZ THE WAY HE LAUNCHED TECH?????

this is actually like one of the first times we see like different body types in tcw/tbb

Crosshair is SO ready to start blasting civilians 😭 lowkey I feel like he'd do that even if he didn't have the chip working on him rn

Saw my man saw they PERMED YOUR HAIR AAAAH

Star wars reay hates Black ppl lol

Not tech being the info machine 😭 this is so funny ik theres tbb watches that dk shit about tcw but this is like. HFKSBDMANSKSNS

Oh I can see why ppl say saw looks like a white man tbh I dew nawt trust the animators with animating Black features like at all

PLEASE TECHS FACE WHEN SAW INSILTED HIM AAAHHHH

Hunters eye color annoys me

"I am the only one with clarity of purpose"

Their voices are really annoying. All of them.

PLEASE the drama of the eye level zoom ins

Crosshair conspiracy theorist

"I thought it was obvious" tech ur so annoying

Oh look Hunter caring now that he knows omegas also an enhanced clone. Lowkey I feel like they'd abandon echo without thinking

I wonder if omega thinks their room stinks

Ppl write/say AZI but I feel like in canon ppl only say AZ

Oh hunter has a second pair of boots and another bandanda

PLEASE THIS WAS SO AGGRESSIBE FOR WHAT?

they make good use of silence bht sometimes I feel like there's too much music

Crosshair says later on that they're predictable

Dave Twink army lmao. Now why'd they put the baby in the brig

I'm sure they still stink

Also wrecker should have a gut

The like. The animation itself is good but the models are so weird bc ppl have a natural fall to their shoulders but hunter doesn't. Like they're shaped like toys not people.

Oh right hindsight. Omega knows he's chipped up and that's why he's acting like this.

THATS NOT EVEN CROSSHAIRS XRAY THATS A NORMAL CLONES????

I think they should have zapped him more tbh. No reason

The like. Little sound effects when ppl touch things

I'm sorry this plan is so conspicuous folks are just punching things hard as hell you got these dudes standing in a wall formation 10 feet from dbskndskndksks

No like its so loud

I'm sawrry. The stakes are simply not that high idk. This ep feels v slow. A lot of back and forth.

WRECKER PUNCHINGGUY AHRD ENOUGJ TO CRACK HIS HWLMET IS HE DEAD????

No like this is insane

Oh no he's alive ok

I think their pelvises/hips are too small. That's why they kinda look weird

Crosshairs shape is v dumb soz

Rewatching tbb wish me luck.

S1E1

First thing I've noticed is that the way tbb fights is really inefficent. It looks cool until you realize they're taking out droids one by one and techs droid poppers are only good for one use each. A normal droid popper would take out maybe like 6 droids at once if they're close enough. Tech used three and got three but we saw the whole sequence of it ig bc it's mean to be cool?

And again like I'm confused bc how much of this is their own skill and how much is access to weapons that regular clones don't have.

Like why does tech insist on getting as close as possible to stick these grenades and droid poppers on droids when the more efficient thing is to throw it from a distance?

"if you're done hiding down there" shut UPPPP oh my god

You know how like. Ppl say the Travis books are mean spirited and the jkr books are mean spirited. This feels mean. Like these are clones who were about to be overrun, who needed help, who relied on you to save them and you're immediately berating them for what?? Needing reinforcements? Waiting for YOU to do YOUR job?

No bc like just how like in s7 tbb gets away with breaking chain of command they do it here too. The captains right to berate them for insubordination like huh.

Caleb's voice has me in tears 😭

Geez the way they converse is so annoying. Wrecker is so annoying. I don't like characters that yell a lot sorry.

Kinda crazy that it took tbb that long to run back.

"talk to the reg captain" he has a name

Again the way they say regs just sounds like a slur.

Also like I feel like episode one is just the beginning of everyone else being rewritten in order to prop up tbb like kanans fans were PISSED his entire story about O66 was rewritten to give something to them.

Ah yes the first instance of Wrecker and tech being the dumb/genius trope.

Now that I think about it it actually feels kinda disrespectful to have like. The goofier/funnier moments of like the food fight and all that in an episode where a genocides just been committed???

And like wrecker isn't funny they don't actually know how to write funny. When that one critic said their personalities had been turned up to an almost caricaturish degree they were right.

And tech here asking that one clone what division he's from and naturally being brushed aside and then using that as evidence that they're still the same. Like huh. You see kaminos lockdown you see the Jedi have all been executed you see ppl got shit to do and you step directly in front of someone to ask them a stupid question like that 😭 like what was even the point of that scene they just screen wiped immediately after 😭

Good lord they're so ugly.

"they manipulated preexisting aberrations in our DNA--" ok so like. An aberration implies something bad. Defect implies something bad. But it's clear these aberrations were good differences taken to their extremes. Because in what world is looking at someone's DNA and seeing there actually a genius (barring that this isn't how this works) like actually a defect. "Oh this guy's strong and this one seems to have stronger senses" that's. They started out good and then were taken further??? Like??? And it was done on purpose too, not like the the Batch were unplanned, the Kaminoans specifically made them this way which is a luxury and privilege like no other clones can have.

Which is what annoys me so much about tbb being bullied by regs for being ~different~ bc that's such a shallow read on what differences exatly would make the regs hate tbb so much. Like no kdy gets bullied for being smart or strong they get bullied for being annoying as hell and being arrogant and derisive to ppl they think are "beneath" them. So the bad batch were bullied for their appearance then and the privilege they have over other clones in clone society. So like. These white boys that were made to be better than everyone else and get rewarded for it all the time look down on the """regs""" why am I meant to side w tbb lbr. Like it looks like hyped up white kids getting bullied by jealous brown kids. Huh. Bffr.

This is so bad. IM ONLY 18 MINUTES IN WHAT--

"you're more machine than man percentage wise" die

[imthepunchlord]

Can you elaborate on the Guardian Nino + Turtle and Alya getting the fox?

I understand why you don't like the rest, I don't like em myself but why are those bad in your opinion?

Just curious.

I will acknowledge that these are nitpicks and they are mixture of my own frustrations. Frustration that the miraculous that are assigned to Alya and Nino do not fit them as characters, and with Fu now confirmed to have 15 more miraculous with him, people will still default to those and won’t even consider changing things up. 

We will start with Alya as Nino would be a more lengthy answer. And putting this under cut as Alya got a whole lot more lenghtier than I originally thought. 

Now, I can get the appeal of Alya with Fox. Visually, its one of the more clever color coding designs for a miraculous, you have her big on learning secrets and sharing them with the world, Fox could teach her the importance of secrecy, though would still match that curious nature. And Darkblade shows us that Alya cna be sneaky and use underhanded tactics. Mr Pigeon also adds to this as she was ready to do something about Chloe stealing Marinette’s design. And while not aggressive, Alya is still a very direct and driven character and Fox could help teach her some subtlety, and to put some distance between herself and things, though the Fox itself is a risk taking animal. It can be a challenge of smart vs confidence. 

So there is actual appeal to Alya having Fox, particularly in symbolism and growth. But...

We got to see that the Fox’s power is Mirage, and that Mirage was one illusion and not the multiple that Volpina had initially set up. It not only downgrades the Fox miraculous, but this sets up difficulty for Alya. Especially with Kwamibuster revealing that how elaborate and complex an illusion comes out can depend on the user, and ultimately confirms that Marinette would be a far better Fox than Alya. Power wise, this really doesn’t set up Alya as a good Fox at all... 

Having one illusion to use, you want to make sure its used well. So the Fox would be better matched with an elaborate complex thinker who can make complex illusions that will misdirect their audience. You also want a character who can be more background oriented, if you’re going to be an illusionist, you don’t want attention on yourself as you play your audience. A skilled illusionist like this could even trick an akuma into “accomplishing” their goal and give up the butterfly as they are satisfied. 

Alya though does not meet those qualifications, not to say she couldn’t learn and grow, but if you need an immediate good Fox to help you, there are better picks out there. Marinette, Felix, Luka, and Nino all would be solid Foxes as they are elaborate thinkers, and can settle to be more background oriented. 

Alya though isn’t an elaborate thinker, she’s a very direct instead, so much of her illusions wind up coming out direct and basic. They still serve their purpose and do a good enough job, but there could better matches. Only time I found myself impressed with her illusion was Miracle Queen where she was under influence... that’s not good. And while Alya herself is an imaginative character, she can rival Adrien in recklessness and can latch onto the first idea she likes whether its a good idea or not. You don’t want an illusionist who’s going to latch onto the first idea that comes to mind and consider their options more. 

Now, if Fox had Volpina’s multiple illusions, this can give Alya more leeway to make mistakes and change tactics and allow a learning curve; it’d also work if Fox had other powers that could match her more, like a power of evasion, foxfire, hypnosis, transformation, ect. But its one illusion and how complex it is depends on the user and its not a good match for Alya.

And then there’s the matter with Trixx, and by extension, the issue with Lila: Alya is shown by s3 to be an easily manipulated character. If you are easily manipulated, that doesn’t set you up as a promising Fox. 

We see that Trixx is friendly and diligent, but also very manipulative and easily manipulates Alya. This makes their dynamic less interesting to me, I’d rather Trixx be paired with someone who can match them more mentally. 

And then Lila. Now, I myself wasn’t intrigued by the Alya vs Lila that the fandom was interested in as Volpina didn’t do anything to set them up, and you got the Truth vs Lies theme but Alya is supposed to get the Fox which is an infamous liar? It doesn’t quite match up as a rivalry, and canon proceeded to shoot that down even more as Lila easily manipulatives Alya in the accursed episode that sparked off many of salt fics and is actually still going. How can I embrace Alya as a Fox when she’s easily manipulated and accepts things at face value? I’ll also acknowledge that this is a similar issue with Nino who is easily accepting of Lila’s lies. I still think he’d be a better Fox than Alya, but Fox isn’t my top pick for him either. 

And then there’s the issue with Rena Rouge. 

You got her skin getting lighter and she’s now “sexier” as Rena. This does not add to the appeal of Fox Alya at all and makes me want it even less. 

Over all, there are better miraculouses for her to play off her being a more direct character. And by default, all miraculous would teach the importance of secrecy. 

Cat would really work as its a direct and aggressive miraculous but also requires some thought to it. Plagg can also be a fun and good counterpart to Alya, as he isn’t as invested in hero duties as her and could help her learn to calm down a little. 

She’d be a good Bee, would be smart with Venom and can teach her to be smarter around akumas. Can’t say how good of a match her and canon Pollen would be, she may help Pollen grow or Pollen will end up as an enabler. Pollen just might need a big overhaul as a character though, that might be best. 

She’d be a really good Turtle, its really keeps that support role of watching out for her friends and allows her to be in the front lines where she’d like to be, and can teach her some form of caution or not to be so reckless around akumas. I think of the 5, she and Wayzz could be the most interesting duo as Wayzz is quick to question his humans and can prompt Alya to start rethinking her strategies instead of going with the first idea she likes. But this isn’t a duo that would butt heads a lot as Wayzz is shown to be adaptable and will learn his users personality quickly so he can match Alya in her playful nature. 

And technically should wait to see powers, but, going off symbolism and headcanons, there’s a few of the Zodiac who Alya could use. 

Tiger has a lot of the similar appeals to Fox but with added aggression that could work with Alya better. It’s an animal more associated with the shadows and stealth, but it is a top predator. So if you want Alya to learn more subtlety and stealth but keep that directness, Tiger would be good. It would also keep that clever color coding, and perhaps match it more as Alya has “stripes” in her design. And the kwami we see is shown very curious and bold, similar characteristics that Alya has. 

She’d work as a Dragon, its also very direct and can be aggressive, but not exactly in your face like Cat and Bee. And power wise it has options so can allow a learning curve and can allow her to be direct or more subtle. It would also match that want to help and be a hero, as in the old Zodiac lore, the Dragon didn’t make first place because she kept stopping to help people. Shown to be poised, Longg could help with self-control, though she’s shown to be a rambler so that might get on Alya’s nerves, but could prompt the kwami to be more straight to the point. 

Goat can work as its a very ambitious but gentle animal. It’s also very clever, they are infamous escape artists. If you want another animal that matches in being direct, helpful, and cunning; Goat’s a good pick. The kwami is shown gentle and nice, by default they’d be a friendly pair. 

Dog, which should be a mixture of the appeals of Goat and Turtle, direct and helpful, but also be ready to be a protector and have people’s back. And the kwami is shown to be very on task which will work with Alya nicely. 

And lastly, Pig. While known to be aggressive (especially as a boar), in terms of Chinese Zodiac lore, this animal is actually known to be easy going, a symbol of prosperity and wealth, and in terms of Zodiac personality, is incredibly helpful. Similarly to Turtle, could teach Alya to slow down, and it has promise to be another direct support miraculous. 

Now, Nino with Turtle and by extension, him being Guardian. 

Now Nino with Turtle was never a match that I was ever really interested in, and there was less appeal there than Alya getting Fox. Nino’s not color coded for it, and the things Turtle can teach are things Nino didn’t need to learn or already had. 

One of the earliest suggestions made for Turtle Nino was to teach maturity, as Bubbler suggest Nino likes to party. Only Nino himself, at least the very little shown, is an over all mature and responsible character. 

He went up to Gabriel to request hosting a party for Adrien. 

Pixelator shows him taking over Adrien’s assigned job and doing his homework at the same time. 

Santa Claws he’s one of many to go look for Adrien. 

Captain Hardrock, was helping prepare the boat for the band. 

Not to say he’s mature all the time (no teenager is), but he doesn’t need lessons in maturity from Turtle. Turtle can also teach bravery and standing your ground which Nino doesn’t need either. He’s not the bravest of characters as he’s less inclined to face akumas, but that itself is not a bad thing, its smart to not engage with akumas. And Nino himself doesn’t have issues standing his ground as he was unafraid of Chloe in Lady Wifi nor was he nervous about changing the script in Horrificator. 

Turtle could also teach caution, self-care, and being more conscious of others and helping them. Which Nino also really has down. Much like before, he does watch out for himself with akumas and largely aware of the danger they pose; and he is an already helpful and supportive character, readily having Adrien and Alya’s back. 

Another factor is that Turtle is a direct support miraculous. It needs a user who is ready to be on the front lines and Nino is not that sort of character. He’d be better fit for background support as that’s where he would prefer to be and his strengths can lie better there, especially with his want to be a director who is a more background leader than having the core attention. 

And looking back at Anansi, there’s nothing there to solidify Turtle Nino, cause ultimately, Carapace was pointless. You can entirely cut out Carapace and very little would change. He doesn’t help fight Anansi but was there to root LB in the boxing match. Yeah, Shelter cut the web but, why couldn’t Chat just turn his hand and Cataclysm the web? This was supposed to be an ep to give Nino a “manly boost” but as a miraculous hero he did ultimately nothing and didn’t even need to be there. 

Canon really failed in making me want Turtle Nino at all. Only saving grace is that its for temporary use and not permanent. 

And as for Guardian Nino, this was playing off the headcanon that Turtle = Guardian, simply because Fu as a Guardian had Turtle which was a headcanon I never latched onto and seemed weird to me that this one miraculous was always assigned to a Guardian. But playing off this headcanon and Turtle Nino being popular, Nino got guardianship. 

Which to me was a weird thing to latch onto as, canon wise, there was nothing between Nino and Fu as characters, and Nino himself is incredibly removed from akumas and miraculous. If a best friend HAD to be a Guardian and not Marinette or Adrien, Alya actually would’ve made sense. Her whole thing is learning identities, but also learning the importance of secrecy. And you could play off her being involved but not in the forefront of things, not having full focus and attention, and you do see Fu in the background when Alya is in focus. 

But over all, I was more for Guardian Marinette as she was the most involved in the miraculous work and duties, did her job well, and was involved with other people and knew their strengths and weaknesses, could see potential and know they’re reliable. I am glad canon went for Guardian Marinette, though I wish canon had her passing the earrings onto someone else as she doesn’t need two vital roles to shoulder nor does the Ladybug miraculous teach her anything new anymore and Tikki is not a good kwami for her either. 

But Nino as Guardian just because its a popular idea of him getting Turtle, just doesn’t click with me and feels random, both in miraculous assignment and in role. 

And much like Alya, there are better fitting miraculous for Nino. 

Canon wise, plus being color coded for it, Peafowl would be good. It’s meant to be background support and not in the heat of things, so that matches Nino’s comfort level. This is a miraculous that can also help Nino learn needed observation skills, as that’s one of his biggest issues as a character. Any feelings of distraught can go over Nino’s head, not just in the case of Horrificator, but Nino is also oblivious to Adrien’s discomfort around Chloe and Lila, and has offered to wingman for both once (though Chloe he was an akuma). So a miraculous tied to emotions can help Nino become more conscious of others’ feelings. And giving him beings to command and oversee, this can give him practice in directing as he’ll need to learn to direct his creations. Duusu and Nino would probably get along well, and maybe spice up his life a little as she’s affectionate and expressive. 

By extension and for similar reasons, Butterfly also works very well. This is more designed than canon Peafowl to be on the front lines, but it isn’t required. And can still help Nino learn to be more consciously aware of others and still give him practice in directing as he’s then working with actual people then beings of his own creation. Nooroo and Nino would also be a very sweet pair, though a lot calmer and a tad boring. 

Nino would be a good Fox. Party Crasher shows he’s an elaborate thinker, and again, this can work in his want to be a director as he can learn how to put on a show and sway his audience. Fox can also help Nino catch the smaller details that he can wind up overlooking. And its a miraculous not set to be on the front lines and still works in his favor. Only issue is a similar one to Trixx and Alya, I do see Trixx easily manipulating Nino which doesn’t make them an exactly appealing pair. 

Zodiac wise, playing off headcanons and symbolism. 

Nino would be a good Mouse, as an elaborate thinker, this miraculous is up his alley as it’s about literal mirco management. And can still teach him observation skills as he has to be aware of everything while small. The little bit we’re getting of the kwami is that she appears quite the mischief maker, so she can spice up Nino’s life and we could get a funny dynamic to see. 

Ignoring canon’s take and working more off the Moon Rabbit, Nino would be a solid Rabbit, especially as a healer and support, and still teach him to be more aware of his surroundings and be more active in helping people. 

He could be a good Dragon, as it doesn’t appear to need to be too directly involved, and like (Moon) Rabbit, could teach him to be more actively involved in helping others. I can also see him being more patient with Longg than Alya. 

He’d be a solid Snake as an elaborate thinker, and this can give him the time he needs to think and decide on a plan. And still backs him catching details and encourage him in observing people and his surroundings. I see him and Sass getting along. 

Honorable mentions that can apply but I either don’t see them teaching Nino much or could end up being too direct than he prefer: Ox, Tiger, Horse, Goat, Dog, Pig. 

Soooo those are my nitpicky issues with Nino and Alya and their respective miraculous, plus the idea of Guardian Nino. But these are my nitpicks and issues, if anyone likes these miraculous assignments and the idea of Guardian Nino, cool. Its just one of many popular fanon ideas and tropes that just isn’t for me and I’d rather something else, especially in terms of miraculous assignment. 

[stranger-who-writes-fiction]

Back at it again with my self-indulgent comic posts. This time! It’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #3, perhaps the most tonally-distinct entry yet, with shades of The Twilight Zone. 

Spoilers!

So, as mentioned, this issue is the most deliberate in terms of both its pacing and its tone, IMO.

What is that tone, you ask?

To quote Alex Danvers, from “Midvale”: Hello, darkness.

THE STORY:

Kara and Ruthye are still looking for Krem Clues in the alien town of Maypole.

(Which is actually just Small Town, USA, complete with vintage 50s aesthetics.)

But the locals are clearly hiding something! So Kara and Ruthye continue to investigate, and they eventually discover what it was that the residents of Maypole were so keen to keep hidden. 

Genocide, basically. 

As I said, this issue struck me as very Twilight Zone; a genre story involving the build-up to a dark twist, all set against the backdrop of an idyllic small town. (Think, like, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” but instead of focusing on the Red Scare, it’s classism and racism.)

The wealthier blue aliens kicked all of the purple aliens out of town, and when space pirates showed up to pillage and plunder, the blue aliens made a deal with them: the lives of the purple aliens in exchange for their safety.  

Which is where the episodic story connects to the larger mission; it was Krem who suggested the trade, and then joined up with the Brigands (space pirates) when he was freed by the blue aliens.

The issue ends with no tidy resolution to the terrible things Kara and Ruthye discovered, but they do have a lead on where to find Krem, now, as well as Barbond’s Brigands.

KARA-CTERIZATION:

Ironically, it’s here, in the darkest chapter yet, that we get the closest to what might be considered ‘classic’ Kara. 

Which I think comes down to that aforementioned deliberate pace--this issue is a little slower, a little quieter. It gives the characters some room to breathe.

That’s not to say Crusty Kara is gone. Oh no. She is still very much Crusty. XD 

But anyways. A list! Of Kara moments I loved!

I mentioned a few of these in a prior post when the preview pages came out: I like the moment where Kara blows down the guy’s house of cards, and I like that the action is echoed later in the issue when she grabs the mayor’s desk and tosses it aside. A nice visual representation of the escalation of Kara being, like. Done with these creeps. (Creeps is an understatement but you get the idea.)

Another one from the preview pages: Kara explains to Ruthye that her super hearing won’t necessarily help her detect a lie, especially if she’s dealing with an alien species she’s not familiar with.

It not only reveals her level of competence and understanding of her super powers, it also shows that, you know. She’s a thinker. She’s smart. 

Amazing! Showing, rather than telling us, that Kara is smart! Without mentioning the science guild at all wow hey wow.

(Sorry, pointed criticism of the SG show fandom.)

Anyways.

I dig the PJs! 

And Kara catching the bullet! Not only are the poses and character acting great, it’s also a neat bit of panel composition:

We start with Ruthye’s POV, and then move to the wide shot of the room. The panel where Kara actually catches the bullet is down and to the side of the wide shot panel--we move our eyes the way her body/arm would have to move to intercept the bullet. Physicality in static, 2D images!

Also, like. It’s a very tense moment, life-or-death, but. Ruthye’s wide-eyed surprise at the bullet in Kara’s hand? Kind of adorable. 

I was pretty much prepared for the page of Kara shielding Ruthye from the gunfire to be the highlight--it was one of the first pages King shared and I was like, ‘yeah, YEAH.’ But, shockingly? The TRUE highlight of the issue?

Where do I BEGIN?!?!

EVERYTHING. About this moment. Is lovely.

From Kara holding Ruthye above the bench to explaining the concept of a piggyback ride, to telling her:

“I’m going to hold my hands here, and these hands can turn coal into diamonds, so they’re not going to let go. I’m going to keep you safe.”

HNNNNNNNNNNNG.

Ruthye’s narration--about how Kara had avoided flying as she was concerned it would freak Ruthye out--just adds a whole additional layer of YES, GOOD, YES, and her line on that splash page is great: “You see, all that time, she was worried about me.”

HNNNNNNNNNNNG. AGAIN.

To say nothing of the STELLAR ARTWORK.

And SPEAKING of that stellar artwork, Evely and Lopes continue to knock it out of the park. Each issue is distinct and beautifully crafted, a true joy to look at.

Before I jump into more of the art, a few final notes of character stuff in general.

Ruthye is the one most affected by the experience in Maypole, as she can’t comprehend how a society of people that look so nice and gentle and peaceful could have been party to such a horrible act.

One of the big criticisms of the book thus far is that Supergirl is not the main character, and I guess I can agree with that observation. Typically, in Western media, the main character is the one who goes through the most change in the story. 

And, yeah. That’s Ruthye.

As I was reading the end, where Ruthye sits on the curb and Kara hugs her, I was imagining how the scene would’ve played, had King stuck with the original idea for the series: Kara as the one learning to be tough/experiencing all of this for the first time, and while I think that could certainly work...

I continue to appreciate that King literally flipped the script; that Kara, especially in this issue, is like, ‘I’ve seen this, I know this,’ as opposed to being the one going through a loss of innocence.

*Marge Simpson voice* I just think it’s neat!

Because Kara’s been a teen in DC comics for so long--ever since she was reintroduced to the main DCU continuity, actually--so this is all brand new territory, here. Having an older Kara who’s SEEN SOME STUFF.

(Alsoooooo, since Bendis made the destruction of Krypton not just inaction and climate disaster, but rather, genocide, and the subtext of a Kryptonian diaspora text, the waitress’ derogatory comment regarding the the destruction of Kryton, as well as Kara picking up the bad vibes the entire time, suggests not just a broad commentary on discrimination in all its forms, but specifically allegorical anti-Semitism. The purple aliens being forced out of their homes and into substandard living conditions, then the blue aliens--their neighbors and once-fellow residents--essentially allowing the space pirates to kill them, making them literal scapegoats, Kara discovering the remains of the purple aliens, and Ruthye’s horror at the ‘banality of evil’...yes. A case could be made, I think.) 

(Which would probably require a post unto itself and a lot more in-depth discussion, nuance, and cited sources.)

(Should mention that King has brought up that both he and Orlando--the other Supergirl writer he talked to--are Jewish, and for him personally, that shaped his views on Kara’s origin story.)

I guess my point is that this issue is perhaps not as out-of-left-field as some might think, and just because there isn’t as obvious an arc for Kara, doesn’t mean there isn’t some sharp character work at play. 

(I could be WAY OFF, of course, and I’m not suggesting it’s a clear 1:1 comparison. I’d actually really love to hear King talk about this issue in particular.)

Anyways.

Here’s the final page, which I think works, because as I mentioned before, there is no easy answer/quick wrap-up to the story of Maypole:

THE ART:

I mean. How many times can I just shout ‘ART! AAAARRRRRRRRRRRTTTT!’ before it gets old?

I dunno, but I guess we’re gonna FIND OUT.

There are some panels in this issue that I just. Like ‘em! From a purely artistic standpoint! Because they’re so good!

Like, I just really love the way Kara is drawn in that top panel. Her troubled, confused expression, the colors of the fading light, the HAIR. 

Evely draws the best hair. I know I’ve said this before. I don’t care. I will continue to say it, because it continues to be true.

The issue I find myself running up against when I make these posts is that I really don’t want to post whole pages, as that’s generally frowned upon (re: pirating etc.) but with something like this, you just can’t appreciate it in panel-by-panel snippets.

(Guided View on digital reading platforms is a BANE and a POX I say!)

Anyways.

LOVE the implied movement of the cape settling as Kara speeds in and stops. 

And, obviously, Kara flicking the bullet away is just. A+. 

And the EYES, man. LOPES’ COLORS ON THE EYES???!?! BEAUTIFUL.

Also, should note the lettering! The more rounded letters for the ‘WOOSH’ of Kara’s speed (and, earlier, the super breath) work nicely, and contrast with the angular, violent BLAMS of the gunshots. 

And, I gotta say, the editor is doing a really great job of not cluttering up the artwork with all the caption boxes. Which is no small task.

(I assume the editor is placing them, as editors usually handle word balloon/caption box placement, but I suppose it could be Evely? Sometimes the artist handles it. Either way, whoever’s taking care of all the text, EXCELLENT WORK! BRAVO!)

Okay I think that’s everything.

Ah, nope, wait.

MISC.

Just a funny observation, more than anything else: Superman: Red and Blue dropped this week, and King had a story in there, “The Special” (which was very good, btw.) Both Lois and the waitress swear a lot so I’m beginning to think that this is just how King writes dialogue for any adult character who isn’t Clark. XD

This is absolutely a personal preference but when Kara was like, “And my name IS Supergirl,” I was like nooooo. I know King is trying to simplify all of the conflicting origin stories and lore but I LIKE KARA DANVERS, SIR. XD

It’s almost assuredly a cash-grab/an attempt for DC to get all the money it can out of a book they don’t have much confidence in, but I like the cardstock covers! Very classy, much Strange Adventures.

(OH my gosh, can you imagine that issue 1 cover with spot gloss???? Basically the only way you could possibly improve on it.) 

Okay NOW I’m done. For real. XD NEXT TIME: Kara and Ruthye go after Krem and the Brigands!

[9worldstales]

INTERESTING POINTS TO PONDER FROM INTERVIEWS 14

Interviews might not remain forever available or not be easy to find so I’ve decided to link them and transcribe the points I find of some interest so as to preserve them should the interview had to end up removed.

It’s not complete transcriptions, just the bits I think can be relevant but I wholeheartedly recommend reading the whole thing.

And of course I also comment all this because God forbid I’ll keep silent… :P

Title: Interview: Tom Hiddleston on Being an Eloquent Badass

Author: Jack Giroux

Published: May 2, 2011

BEST BITS FROM THE INTERVIEW

ABOUT THE PEOPLE WORKING ON “THOR”

Getting serious for a second: when you read a script for a film like Thor, is it difficult imagining certain ideas or getting that same sense of scope on the page?

Tom Hiddleston: Amazingly, the writers [Zack Stentz and Don Payne] and all of those guys had painted the picture so vividly. It was like someone describing the dreams I had as a child: the idea of traveling between space and time; that there were other planets; and an advance race living in a parallel universe. When I came onboard the visual effects team were so incredible. At the beginning of the shoot they were all on hand with laptops with sizzle reels of the type of things they were planning. We were so helped in refining and specifying our imaginations, in terms of what Asgard would look like and the Frost Giants and all those things. There were lots of brilliant people involved when it came to bringing Asgard to life.

Do you have to put a lot of trust into Kenneth Branagh, in terms of how he’ll make that world come to life?

Tom Hiddleston: Kenneth Branagh is so brilliant. You just jump in. He’s the captain of the ship and you have to abide by his rules. It’s about trust. Kenneth has such a love for the material and loves the Norse Gods. He seemed to have such an amazing handle on it. He was determined to make it relatable and human, not campy. He wanted to ground it in some intense human drama, and I think that kept us all quite level headed.

ABOUT LOKI

You mentioned at Comic-Con that you gave Branagh a lot of different ideas or tones to play with. What were those different tones and what would you say, ultimately, made it in the film?

Tom Hiddleston: Well, there were so many different sides to Loki that we thought we wanted to play with, in every scene. There’s a side to him that takes a relish in chaos. It’s, in a way, that Loki that doesn’t keep his cards close to his chest at all. He’s a little more revealing of his motivations. There’s another side to him where his cards are so close to his chest that they’re locked in a treasure chest that he’s thrown away the key to. There was another version that was a more emotionally volatile take. We hung these [takes] on great actors. The Peter O’Toole take would be the emotional volatility. The Jack Nicholson take would be our shorthand for relish. And the Clint Eastwood take would be having the cards close to his chest. [Laughs] We used those three actors as a shorthand.

A character like Loki could easily be a very mustache-twirling villain, but from what I’ve heard, there’s a great sense of sadness to him.

Tom Hiddleston: Kenneth and I both love complexity; I think what fascinates us both about acting is that there’s almost a psychological study involved. We’re quite interested in what makes different people do what they do and what makes them tick. We always wanted to make Loki a complicated and multilayered villain. We wanted him to be someone that kept you guessing whether or not he’s telling the truth or lying. We didn’t want to copy anyone else or be two-dimensional. That was really what we tried to do.

So he’s not someone that’s going to kill for the sake of killing?

Tom Hiddleston: No, no. Not at all. I think it all comes from a misguided intention to win the love and approval of his father. Loki is fiercely intelligent and has a chess master’s mind of someone who is capable of thinking six or seven steps ahead. What gives him his credentials as a bad guy is that all of his intelligence is rooted in a deep sadness and a sense of confusion as to what his place is in the family of Asgard. Odin is King and Thor is the eldest son who stands to inherit the throne, but what does that mean for Loki? What is his value? What does that make his place in the universe? He feels rejected, betrayed, lied to, and alone. When you add all that to the cocktail of his intelligence, you get someone pretty badass and dangerous.

Is that where Loki’s hatred for Thor comes from? The fact that he’s the thinker, while Thor is someone that only thinks with his fists?

Tom Hiddleston: Absolutely. Loki is the artist and Thor is the quarterback, which was something [producer] Craig Kyle said. If Thor and Loki were on their way back from the pub and someone started a fight, Loki would be trying to think of the best way to avoid fighting and Thor would probably start the fight. There’s a bit of an infuriation at the center of Loki; he is so frustrated by that instinct in Thor. Loki needs him as physical protection, but he resents the fact he’s so hot-tempered, arrogant, and quick to throw a punch.

MY TWO CENTS

I love how we’re told that “Thor” was so well planned in each term possible, from the visual to the script. You get the idea there’s a lot of work behind it.

I also love how Tom Hiddleston studied his character and can talk about him and how he works. Loki is exactly as complicate and multilayered as he says and it’s great how all this was studied to get to this effect.

I also love how he remarks he’s not killing for the sake of killing but because he thinks this will win his father’s love and approval. Odin really did a terrible job as a parent as both his sons think he wants them to be slaughterers of worlds. I also love how he remarks Loki was meant to be a chessmaster who’s ahead people in planning or how he remarks most of Loki’s problems steems from how he feels rejected, betrayed and alone, without a place in the universe.

Tom Hiddleston says something interesting as well, that Loki needs Thor as ‘physical protection’. It seems a bit weird as Loki seems pretty strong himself.

In another interview though Jaimie Alexander (Sif) will say Loki isn’t as strong as her. Maybe the idea is that Thor is just much stronger and, normally, Asgard is up to fight much stronger enemies than the ones we see, and much bigger in number.

Loki is a planner so with his schemes he can accomplish defeating enemies stronger than him, but maybe, originally, in a direct confrontation he would be at disadvantage, which fits with how Thor is depicted as the strongest when they’re on Jotunheim. In this sense, if the idea was he was usually sent to battle with tons of enemies all stronger than him, having Thor in his team could have been a good thing. This would mean also Thor held back when they fought one against the other, so that we got the idea they instead were more or less matched. Still the whole thing isn’t really developed in the movie so it’s hard to say.

Tom Hiddleston discusses a bit in the interview about how Thor and Loki fight one against each other but I didn’t even reported the scene because it says nothing of interest in this topic so the whole thing is up for speculation.

[my-introvert-hideout]

Fukuzawa Yukichi: INFJ [BSD]

Ni > Fe > Ti > Se

*Based off Season 1 of the anime [Chapters 1-12] with character-based spoilers from the Wikis. I’ve also read a synopsis of “The Untold Story of the Founding of the Detective Agency,” which gives lots of insight into Fukuzawa and Ranpo in particular, and also I know Yosano’s backstory. The Onsen Drama will also make an appearance occasionally. I feel like I have a good enough grasp on their characters for this and will only add more examples rather than changing types in the future. (At least, I think so.)

I’VE ALSO SEEN HIM TYPED AS: ISTJ, ISTP, ENFJ

Ni is a tricky function. It also doesn’t help that Fukuzawa is very well-balanced. Many people reference the fact that he values tradition and the past to say that his dominant function is Si. Which isn’t necessarily true. Both INFPs and ESTPs can be kind from the outside, but the real difference is in their motives and reasons for behaving that way. I like history. So I must be an ISFJ. (And there are plenty of ISFJs who hate history.) It’s the reasons for liking / doing something that differentiates type. For all we know, he could like tradition because he connects to many of their intuitive values and ideas (Ni) or the visual aspects such as clothing design (Se). I know that applies to me, for sure. We also aren’t aware if Fukuzawa’s respect of tradition extends past Japanese culture as an overall Si value. It’s also worth mentioning that respecting others’ traditions, beliefs, and culture isn’t applied to just Si. Fe keeps tabs on exactly that; other people’s feelings, values, etc. Now that we’ve combed through why he’s not automatically an Si-dom, I’ll get to why I think he’s Ni dominant. He continuously thinks ahead. Si also does this, but not to the extent that Ni does. In ‘The Untold Story,’ we see Fukuzawa’s attention focused on the future in more than one instance. He planned about ways to ditch Ranpo and created the Agency to fight for justice even after their deaths. That’s relatively big-picture thinking to me. The difference between Si-dom Ne-inferior and Ni-dom Se-inferior is this: ISxJs need to learn to accept different was of doing / looking at things while INxJs work to bring their vision and ideas into the concrete world. Fukuzawa seems to fall into the second category. (I also think it’s quite obvious that he’s not Fe dominant.) I’m also trying out this theory that generally someone’s likes and dislikes correspond to whether or not they’re a sensor or intuitive.

LIKES: Cats, beef hot pot, alcohol, equality

DISLIKES: Feudalism

Surprisingly quite equal between sensing and intuition. (Or not so surprising, as he’s balanced.) However, I don’t buy Fukuzawa having a large gap between his Thinking and Feeling functions. So, by default, it must be between Sensing and Intuition. It’s also worth noting that his only dislike is intuitive in nature.

When Atsushi was kidnapped, Fukuzawa needed to ask the world’s greatest detective for help. Ranpo mentions not being interested in a promotion or bonus (likely due to past experience with Te-using bosses), but Fukuzawa offers praise (something his Fe knows that Ranpo loves). Which works. Te would behave in the same way that Kunikida responds (duh). We all know that Kunikida is very moralistic -- but he was also the one to suggest Kyōka be handed over to the authorities. In this case, both Te and Ti would be on the same page, which we see with Ranpo and Kunikida. However, Fukuzawa disagrees. While an IxTJ’s Fi could definitely place value on its members, it would likely see the potential threat of Te reputation tarnishing (like Kunikida did) and still side on letting one member that he wasn’t very connected with go, for the sake of the ADA. Ranpo states to “Consider the reasoning behind it.” Fukuzawa answers with “One of our own is in danger. He needs help. Are you telling me that there can be any better reasoning than that?” A Thinker wouldn’t say that. Though developed ones may place more value on Feeling, they’d fundamentally disagree with that statement.  Tertiary Te has an Fe blind spot that, however developed, they won’t necessarily care much about. They may realize its potential, but won’t be worried about using it. And that doesn’t seem to apply to Fukuzawa, in my opinion. It seems like clear tertiary Ti filtering through auxiliary Fe, which is also the exact same judging axis and positioning as Atsushi and Tanizaki (ISFJs).

Again, Ti often filters through Fe with Fukuzawa, but paired with Ni, can create an illusion of Te. However, he doesn’t use logic in the same way that people like Kunikida do. His Ti can often keep up with Ranpo -- at least, significantly more than other people can (other than maybe Dazai). But that does make sense; an xNFx and an xSTx would understand an xNTx pretty well, but not completely. I previously did consider ISTP, but dominant Thinking doesn’t seem right. Even with somewhat developed Fe, IxTPs will still primarilly use Ti in decision-making. They won’t turn into Feelers. And I really just can’t imagine Fukuzawa with inferiro Fe, even if he is well-balanced.

Naomi went to get Fukuzawa because of his position as the organization’s president, but also because she needed his Se push that she wasn’t able to do. And, as stated with the Ni section, he was able to create the Armed Detective Agency as an outlet for his vision. Fukuzawa is also said to be quite skilled in martial arts. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a sensor. I mean, I’m an INFJ who took MMA for three years and was pretty decent at it, but all that did was develop my Se more. I’m not a sensor now. And besides, he’s not only had plenty of opportunities but plenty of time to develop his inferior function.

Te Blind Spot: Ti combined with Ni or Fe can often give the illusion of Te. Of course, he definitely has Te skills due to development, but much of the legwork for this function rests on Kunikida.

Ni-Ti Loop: ‘An INFJ in an Ni-Ti loop attempts to suppress their emotional side, shutting themselves off from others and becoming unable to share their feelings with those around them. They will become extremely withdrawn and private, attempting to become analytical and logical without employing their feeling side. They will attempt to view everything in a logical light while shutting off their tendency to consider things in the light of the feelings and values of those around them. In addition, they will repress their feelings.’ source Just head on over to Fukuzawa and Ranpo’s Dynamic.

[thedreadvampy]

So this was sent to me by @atiredpan weeks ago when the White Jon conversation was very live and I'm posting it (belatedly) with their blessing (they didn't want to put it up publicly and have it seem like an attack which I really very much appreciate but wouldn't have minded) and I percolated for a few days and then got very busy for a few weeks. Response follows.

So I feel weird about how I'm responding to this stuff, I'm launching rapidly into taking about/explaining my own experience in a way I'm worried maybe comes across as a direct comparison. It kind of feels like I'm talking in a way that's like brushing off your experience and saying OK BUT HERE'S WHY I'M RIGHT and that's not what I'm trying to do, it's just that there's not much I can usefully add to what you've said - you know your experience better than I do, and I'm not gonna go around trying to read into it or reexplain it. So I'm going to talk about where I am/have been coming from, but not with the intention of countering your points, all of which I think really resonate.

First off, the post where I was like "Jon is white and if you disagree you're Wrong" was, unreservedly, just a shitty post and I'm not suprised it upset a lot of people. I'm really very sorry about that, it was thoughtlessly written and pretty stupidly posted.

I totally get that my whiteness has fed into how I hced Jon (and as I think I've said before I saw Jon a certain way well before I engaged with any fanworks, just as you did). There's a lot of reasons I imagined Jon as white from pretty early on, a non-negligible one of which was like...That's Jonny. This is a podcast by Jonny, about a character with the same name and mannerisms as Jonny, and Jonny is extremely white. It would have felt weird, when I was listening to TMA as a Friend Podcast, to stick a brown face onto what at least appeared at the time to basically be a self-insert character of my white friend. Now that's a really personal thing informed less by the story and more by the circumstances under which I've interacted with it, but it certainly laid a baseline. I didn't really have a clear mental picture of Jon (or most of the characters) for a looooooong time (for an artist I'm really not a very visual thinker) but I had a few sort of mental sketches (Jon is short white balding and awkward, Martin is tall biracial and scruffy Basira is fat and somali Melanie is my friend from work etc) which I developed a long time before I encountered fanworks.

I saw the alienation you mentioned and I connected it to class and gender, not race, because I’ve met a lot of cis men, white and otherwise, who interpolate trauma, class insecurity, insecurity about their own abilities, and so on into withdrawal, denial and snappiness. So for me I had an interpretation of that element of his personality which was pretty much race-neutral, and then I had these existing cues leading me to assuming he was white (largely that Jonny is white, but also wee stuff in the story that...it’s not like anything substantial enough to remember, let alone justify, but there were certainly interactions that pinged whiteness for me personally)

There are actually iirc a few throwaway references to Jon being promoted above more qualified candidates throughout (or at least I thought I knew that before s5), but the time I decided I thought White Jon was an obvious conclusion was of course the conversation where Sasha expresses frustration about it. and the context of that conclusion (at least as far as I can see) wasn't "people of colour can only exist in subservient positions/defined by oppression" but was informed by two things that were going on with my life around the time that episode aired

I had been having several conversations with friends of mine (and largely friends of Jonny's) who work in London in the museums/archiving sector and who are the only women of colour in whole departments or even whole museums, and who experience so little career mobility compared to their less-qualified white counterparts (we're talking about women graduating top of their class at Oxbridge with anthropology or library science masters and stellar original research, with a decade or more of impeccable work experience and acting up, being left in internship and low-grade positions, while white men who "fit the culture" but have 0 museums experience sail into upper management positions and then stay there until they retire). So I'd come almost directly from these conversations into what to me sounded like exactly the same gripe in TMA.

I'd been at that point working for about a year and a half on co-coordinating the anti-oppression committee in my workplace, which was a very Good Progressive Activist Charity with Good Lefty Principles, and over the course of experience sharing and discussions both with colleagues of colour and along lines of wealth, disability, class etc, I was very much confronted with the realisation of how much 'being adequately qualified' meant different things for middle-class good-university white men vs much more highly skilled and hardworking women of colour or people of different class and wealth backgrounds. Obviously I'd known that before in principle, but not really having been in Salaried Workplaces (as opposed to like. service and retail hourlies) I hadn’t got so up close and personal with it. So that was also very fresh in my mind, this like...big substantial experience of how Good, Well-Meaning, Caring, Thoughtful, Woke white men just........did not need to think about this. at all. and were startled and discomforted to face it. and that this was also true of most white middle-class women. and these conversations were really carved down the middle between white middle-class European women saying ‘this is such a surprise when we have such an equitable hiring policy and diverse staff, that there’s this gender gap’ and women of colour in the room wearily saying ‘yeah, there’s a gender gap, there’s always a gender gap and it is always a racialised gender gap’ so yeah I was definitely thinking about the intersection between being passed over at work because of gender and because of race.

The point about Tim is interesting because I think for me what’s getting lost is that I don’t think Jon is entitled as like...a Character Trait. He’s not like...Toxic Masculinity Man. He is very anxious about boundaries and about his own capacity to do harm. But it has to be pointed out to him where he’s doing harm. He doesn’t notice where he’s been unfairly advantaged, and that’s to me much more reflective of most people’s relationship to white or male entitlement. 

As I say, that exchange with Tim and Sasha cemented the Jon Is White hc in my head specifically because it was so reflective of conversations I had had with women of colour working in similar workplaces, about white men, usually about white men they generally liked or at least didn’t have beef with beyond their unfair advantages. 

It seems odd to me to frame ‘bitching about your boss on your friend’s behalf to make her feel better’ as more similar to white entitlement/white privilege than any of that tbh? That’s just...being friends with someone? 

Anyway I recognise that it’s not white entitlement to accept a job. Obviously it’s not, it’s just sensible under the circumstances, you get lucky and you grab it. For me my sense of Jon as white-because-of-this is not “he took a job he shouldn’t have taken,” it’s more about his obliviousness to the impact he has on others, and also primarily how people react to him. The interaction between Sasha and Tim is saturated with the of course it would be him I mentioned above, but even before that he walks through the world not expecting to have to think about anything but his conscious decisions, and he’s caught aback when people see him as out of place or as having power above his station.

I think it’s impossible to extricate ‘this is where my head was at’ from that interpretation, and also like obviously my own whiteness is a big factor. And not just my own personal whiteness but the place I grew up (which was 98.3% white) and the world which reflects back whiteness. So this is in no way intended as a bolshy This Is The Correct Headcanon the way my Bad Post was bc examining it I’m like...yeah I mean this is about how I personally interpreted this based on where I was at at the time. But I do feel like there’s some communication gap in what it is about this unqualified promotion thing that pinged me - it’s not that All Bosses Must Be White And All Brown People Must Be Downtrod, it’s something quite specific about the tone and tenor of the interactions around the getting-a-job.

But also? Idk. Kind of unrelatedly, and people obviously should feel free to disagree with me on this, it feels kind of off to frame this as defaulting to a white Jon? I sort of think that my idea of Jon as white is very much not ‘white until proven otherwise’ - part of the reason for my original strident tone was that I felt that I was being expected to drop a headcanon I had for specific reasons and default to the fanon version of Jon without actually having any reason other than ‘this is how the community thinks he should look,’ and without really understanding anything about what that means, and while obviously defaulting to a non-white headcanon isn’t like...entrenched in the way that defaulting to a white headcanon is, it does seem to me like this is perhaps part of why white fans slap brown skin onto a character without thinking into what that means or why they’re doing it.

The thing I’m struggling with as regards my personal headcanon here is that I could decide to only ever draw Jon as Fanon Jon, but it wouldn’t be because I had strong reasons to see him that way, it wouldn’t be the same as why you see Jon as brown, or why I see like...Melanie as Indian, it would literally be Default To Standard in a way it isn’t for you. And I don’t feel that I have Defaulted To Whiteness, or where I have it is for reasons specifically to do with Jon (I visualised Jon as white because I visualised him as Jonny, who is white), not because I think every character is White Until Proven Otherwise. Like, my reasons for understanding Jon as white may be bad reasons, but they are reasons, not post-hoc excuses (I can’t like...prove that. but I know it to be true at least on a conscious level). I didn’t go Oh Jon Is White Because Everyone Is Unless I Have Reason To Think They Aren’t, Hooray, Here Is A Post-Hoc Justification For Why It Isn’t Racist To Think That. So while I am totally on board with the idea that it may be shitty, harmful or poorly thought through to hc Jon as white, I’m not sure I can fully see it in myself as being default. But I do understand that that isn’t necessarily what came across in my original short post.

Honestly, the reason I took issue with Fanon Jon and Fanon Martin in such a bolshy way in the first place was that I didn’t get why these characters were universally seen as Asian and white, respectively, and had such strong and consistent fanon images, when none of the other characters did, and when I was seeing people drawing people like Sasha and Melanie and Tim as white way more when in my mind there was no reason to assume they were white. On an emotional level I guess I think either there’s Fanon As Lore, or there’s no fanon (and I prefer the latter) and my discomfort came from the place that the one character I absolutely saw as coded as white in the core cast had this one really specific Ambiguously Brown Fanon Look (which from what I’d seen at the time didn’t seem to be like...backed with anything or coming from any personal interpretation for most of the white fans I was seeing on like Twitter and Tumblr) but white headcanons are everywhere for characters like Melanie or Sasha or Georgie, who seemed to me to be unambiguously people of colour, or characters like Tim or Martin (who could perfectly reasonably be people of colour and who I hc as Rroma and biracial respectively)? I don’t know, it’s difficult to express, but I find it frustrating.

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 6, Number 4

Guided by Voices just dropped record #30!

We enter April wishing all of you good health and financial solvency, though we know that many of the musicians and artists and appreciators that visit our site are in very dire circumstances. Our own crew is, so far, not infected, though we are coping with varying degrees of success to the new normal. Some are writing more. Others are struggling. Almost all of us are listening hard to the music that sustains us, and hope that you are likewise finding some solace. This edition of Dust is a big one, as a lot of us have the attention span for shorter, but not longer pieces. Enjoy it in good health. Contributors included Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell and Tim Clarke.

Aara — En Ergô Einai (Debemur Morti Productions)

En Ergô Einai by Aara

Swiss black metal band Aara offers a very high-concept LP, investigating the European Enlightenment, and the period’s complex and conflicting discourses on human rationality. In some ways, the historical period was enormously optimistic, featuring thinkers like Ben Franklin and Rousseau, who were committed to modes of thought that were scientifically rigorous and grounded in egalitarian ethics. But at the same time, European coloniality ramped up significantly, and capital became a rapacious, world consuming engine, churning out massive wealth and even more massive human suffering. Aara investigate that — or anyways that’s their claim. They haven’t published the lyrics to these songs, and the vocal stylings of singer Fluss are so brittle, so horrendously shrieked, that it’s impossible to decipher the words. The music is suggestive, however. It’s infused with a grand sensibility, and also charged with black metal’s negative intensities. The influence of Blut Aus Nord’s romantic Memoria Vetusta records is strongly present — and Vindsval, Blut Aus Nord’s principal composer, plays guitar on “Arkanum,” first track on this record. Its grandiosity is in tune with the philosophical enthusiasms of the Enlightenment. But it’s pretty cold stuff, like rationality itself.

Jonathan Shaw

 Ryoko Akama / Apartment House — Dial 45-21-95 (2019) (Another Timbre)

Dial 45-21-95 by Ryoko Akama

The one time I saw Ryoko Akama’s music performed, the visual poetry of the concert was at least as compelling as the music that was made. During one piece she, Joseph Clayton Mills and Adam Sonderberg walked calmly up and down a line of tables loaded with instruments and knick-knacks she picked up during her visit to Chicago, making timely sounds that seemed to accent their movements rather than issue from them. While it sounded nothing like the music on Dial 45-21-95 (2019), this album is likewise the work of sympathetic musicians expressing a composer’s impressions of a place and all that comes with it. The source material this time comes from Akama’s visit to the archive of filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski. Objects she saw, words that she read, and the episodic pacing of his works all became part of this cycle of leisurely, gentle movements of music that is small in scale, but not exactly minimalist. The musicians, in this case the English new music ensemble Apartment House, often seem to be passing phrases from one to another, each recipient conveying a reaction to what they’ve heard rather than the same information. In this way they impart the experience of a story without telling one.

Bill Meyer

 Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis — Invisible Cities II (Karlrecords)

Invisible Cities II by Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis

What better time than when we’re all forbidden by pandemic to spend time in the company of others to listen to some quality sonic landscaping instead? Nadja’s ever-prolific Aidan Baker second duo collaboration with bass clarinetist Gareth Davis follows on the first Invisible Cities with a similar structure; Baker, credited on that first LP with just “guitar”, somehow summons up vast or subtle cloudbanks of hissing ambience, covert drones, even sometimes harsh blares (check out “The Dead” here) while Davis plays his clarinet like he’s carefully picking his way across a perilous set of ruins. Whether elegiac like the opening “Hidden” or more mysterious like the fading pulses threading around Davis’s work on “Eyes”, the result is a vividly evocative set of involving ambient music made using slightly unusual materials. Even though Baker and Davis fall into a set of background/foreground roles, both clearly contribute equally to what makes Invisible Cities II work so well (honestly, a little better than their fine debut as a duo), and although unintentional, the result can serve to give us temporary shut ins plenty of mental fodder as well.  

Ian Mathers  

 The Bobby Lees — Skin Suit (Alive)

The Bobby Lees may be from Woodstock, but they definitely do not have flowers in their hair. Skin Suit, the band’s second album, is a blistering onslaught of garage rock fury, at least as heated as last year’s Hank Wood and the Hammerheads S-T, but tighter, nearly surgically precise. Singer/guitarist Sam Quartin has a magnetic, unflappable presence, whether issuing threats sotto voce (“Coin”), insinuating sexual heat (“Redroom”) or crooning the blues. But everyone in the band is more than up to the job, whether Macky Bowman knocking the kit sidewise in the most disciplined way, Kendall Windall jacking the pressure with thundering bass or Nick Casa lighting off Molotov cocktails of guitar sound. Video (above) suggests that the record isn’t the half of it, but the record is pretty damned good. Jon Spencer produced and makes a characteristically unhinged cameo in “Ranch Baby.” Two covers ought to be a misfire—can anybody improve on Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation,” or add anything further to the Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m a Man”? — but instead bring the fire. Helluva a band, probably even better live.

Jennifer Kelly

 Rob Clutton with Tony Malaby — Offering (Snailbongbong Records)

Offering by Rob Clutton with Tony Malaby

Sometimes when one musician gets top billing, that just means they ponied up for the session fees. But on Offering, the words “Rob Clutton with” signal that the Canadian double bassist conceived of a sound situation and procured material suited to that concept. Clutton is well acquainted with the American soprano and tenor saxophonist, Tony Malaby. Their association dates back two decades, when both men were resident artists at the Banff Centre For Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, and they’re both members of drummer Nick Fraser’s band. That common ground gets the nod on “Sketch #11,” a Fraser tune that occasions some of the most swinging music on this wide-ranging and thoroughly satisfying session. But elsewhere the genesis of the material lies in Clutton’s own improvisations, which he recorded, transcribed and analyzed in order to locate nuggets of musical intelligence worth developing into discreet melodies — or further improvisations. Either way, Malaby isn’t just the guy on hand to play the horn parts, but a known musical quantity to be either be written for or set up to set loose. Clutton must have had his tone, alternately ample and pungent on soprano, and his imaginative responsiveness to the melodic, rhythmic, and emotional implications of a theme in mind, for his own purposeful perambulations seem designed to give Malaby plenty to wrap around and climb upon. While the music is ever spare, it’s never wanting.

Bill Meyer

 Pia Fraus — Empty Parks (Seksound)

Empty Parks by Pia Fraus

Empty Parks, the latest album from Estonian neo-shoegazers Pia Fraus, deftly soundtracks crisp, blue-skied, late winter days when buds are emerging on bare trees and the promise of warmer days beckons. The Tallinn based band comprising Eve Komp (vocals, synth), Kärt Ojavee (synth), Rein Fuks (guitar, vocals, synth, percussion), Reijo Tagapere (bass), Joosep Volk (drums, electronic percussion) and Kristel Eplik (backing vocals) traffics in layered harmonies, swathes of synth and roving guitar lines over a solid, propulsive rhythm section. Most of the songs move along at a good clip with a great sense of dynamics and a focus on atmospherics. Sometimes one wishes they would let go a little and explore the hints of noise on standout tracks “Mr. Land Freezer,” “Nice And Clever” and “Australian Boots” which have traces of grit that, if given more prominence, may have elevated Empty Parks as a whole from enjoyable to compelling.  

Andrew Forell  

 Stephen Gauci / Sandy Ewen / Adam Lane / Kevin Shea — Live at the Bushwick Series (Gaucimusic)

Gauci/Ewen/Lane/Shea, Live at the Bushwick Series by gaucimusic

The cultural losses inflicted by the current pandemic situation are so immense that no record review is going to hold the whole story. But this one might clue you in to one culture under unique threat, and also shine a light on the spirit that may bring it back again. Since the summer of 2017, tenor saxophonist Stephen Gauci has been organizing a concert series at the Bushwick Public House in Brooklyn, NY. Each Monday starting at 7 PM up to half a dozen individuals or ensembles will play some variant of jazz or improvised music. This album is the first in a series of five titles, all released as either downloads or CDRs with nicely done sleeves, and each documenting a set that was part of the series. Live at the Bushwick Series is a forceful argument for the mixing of aesthetics. You might know drummer Kevin Shea from the conceptually comedic jazz band, Mostly Other People Do The Killing, or Gauci and Lane from the many recordings that showcase each man’s impassioned playing and rigorous compositions. Maybe you know guitarist Sandy Ewen as a started-from-scratch free improviser. But when you hear this recording, you’ll know that they are a band, one that makes cohesive and ferocious music on full of tectonic friction and fluid role-swapping on the fly. When the quarantines expire, there may or may not be a concert series, or a Bushwick Public House to host it. But it’ll take the kind of commitment and invention heard here to get things rolling again.

Bill Meyer

 Vincent Glanzmann / Gerry Hemingway — Composition O (Fundacja Sluchaj)

Composition O by Vincent Glanzmann / Gerry Hemingway

A composition is both an ending and a beginning. It establishes some parameters, however specifically, to guide musicians’ interactions. But the publishing of a piece can also provoke many different interpretations, especially when the composition itself is designed to be a work in progress. Percussionists Vincent Glanzmann and Gerry Hemingway developed Composition O with the intent to revise each time they play it, so that while there is a graphic score guiding them, it is subject to change. So, don’t expect this music to have the locked-in quality of, say, Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, any more than you might expect it to evince the self-creating form of a free improvisation. It proceeds quite deliberately through sections of athletic stick-craft, sonorous rubbing, and eerie extensions beyond the percussive realm enabled by the distorting properties of microphones and the deeply human communication of Hemingway’s vocalizations, which are filtered by a harmonica. The score keeps things organized; the concept means that this music will evolve and change.

Bill Meyer

 Magnus Granberg / Insub Meta Orchestra — Als alle Vögel sangen mein Sehnen und Verlangen (Insub)

Als alle Vögel sangen mein Sehnen und Verlangen by MAGNUS GRANBERG / INSUB META ORCHESTRA

In a previous review for Dusted, I characterized Magnus Grandberg’s sound world as “unemphatic.” The same applies here, and the accomplishment of that effect is in direct inverse to the size of the ensemble playing this album-length piece. For this performance, the Insub Meta Orchestra numbers 27 musicians, but it rarely sounds like more than four or five of them are playing at any time. The ensemble is well equipped to represent whatever Granberg suggests. In addition to conventional orchestra instrumentation, you’ll find antique instruments such as spinet, traverso and viola da gamba, as well as newcomers like the analog synthesizer and laptop computer. Granberg selects discerningly from centuries of compositional and performative approaches. The piece’s title, which translates to “When all the birds sang my longing and desire,” tips the hat to Schubert, but the way that timbres offset one another shows a working knowledge with contemporary free improvisation. It takes restraint on the part of the players as well as the composer to make a group this big sound so small in contrast to the silence that contains its music.

Bill Meyer    

 Ivar Grydeland / Henry Kaiser — In The Arctic Dreamtime (Rune Grammofon)

If Ivar Gyrdeland (Danes les Arbres, Huntsville) and Henry Kaiser had first met in an airport lounge or a green room somewhere, you might not be able to hold this CD in your hands. They’d have sat down, started talking about strings or pick-ups or their favorite Terje Rypdal records, and who knows where that might have led. But they met in an Oslo studio, and one of them had some means of projecting Roald Amundsen — Lincoln Ellsworth’s Flyveekspedisjon 1925, a documentary of an unsuccessful and nearly fatal attempt to fly two airplanes over the North Pole. So, they set up their guitars and improvised a soundtrack to the film on the spot, which became the contents of this CD. Neither man regards the guitar’s conventional sounds as obligatory boundaries, and much of the music here delves into other available options. Resonant swells, looped harmonics, and flickering backwards sounds alternate with shimmering strums, skeins of feedback, and unabashed shredding, radiating with an icy brightness that corresponds to the unending polar sunlight that shone down on the expeditionaries as they hand-carved a runway out of the ice.

Bill Meyer

 Guided By Voices — ‘Surrender Your Poppy Field’ (GBV, Inc.)

Surrender Your Poppy Field by Guided By Voices

The ever productive Robert Pollard kicks off a new decade with a louder, more distorted brand of rock, his characteristic hooky melodies buzzing with guitar feedback. He’s supported by the same band as on last year’s Sweating the Plague— Doug Gillard, Kevin March, Bobby Bare, Jr. and Mark Shue, who like Pollard are lifers to a man. Songs run short and feverish with only a couple breaking the three- minute mark and the chamber-pop “Whoa Nelly,” clocking in at 61 seconds. And yet, who can pack more into a couple of minutes than the godfather of lofi? “Queen Parking Lot” ramps up the dissonance around the most fetching sort of melody, which curves organically around modal curves. “Steely Dodger,” layers rattling textures of percussive sound (drums, strummed guitars) around a dreaming psychedelic tune. The words make no sense, but tap into subconscious fancies. This is Guided by Voices 30th album. Here’s to the next 30.

Jennifer Kelly

 Zachary Hay — Zachary Hay (Scissor Tail)

Zachary Hay by Zachary Hay

Zachary Hay is an American acoustic guitarist, but please, put aside the associative baggage that comes with those words. If you do so, that’ll put you closer to the spirit that informed the making of this LP’s ten un-named tracks. Like Jon Collin, Hay seems to be intent upon capturing the mood and environment of a particular moment. The sound of the room, or someone turning on a tap while he’s recording — these become elements of the music every bit as much as his patient note choices. Hay likes melodies, but he doesn’t feel bound to repeat them, which imparts a sense of motion to the music. Things change a bit towards the end, when he puts down his guitar and stretches out for a spell on banjo and squeezebox, humming along with the latter like a man who knows that he must be his own company.

Bill Meyer  

 Egil Kalman & Fredrik Rasten — Weaving a Fabric of Winds (Shhpuma)

Weaving a Fabric of Winds by Egil Kalman & Fredrik Rasten

Some music is born out of commercial or communicative aspirations, or philosophical structural prescriptions. One suspects that this music originates from some agreement about what sounds good, compounded by other ideas about the right way to do things. Fredrik Rasten is a guitarist who splits his time between Berlin and Oslo, shuttling between improvised and composed musical situations; he has an album out on Wandelweiser, which should tell you a bit about his aesthetics. Egil Kalman plays modular synthesizer on this record, but he is also a double bassist from Sweden who lives in Copenhagen, and he keeps busy playing in folk, jazz and free improv settings; one hopes that someday, we’ll hear some recordings by his touring project, Alasdair Roberts & Völvur. But in the meantime, give a listen to this record, which patiently scrutinizes a space bounded by string harmonics and electronic resonance. Rasten uses just intonation to maximize the radiance of his sounds and re-tunes while playing to subtly manage the harmonic proximity between his vibrations and Kalman’s long tones. The synth supplies a bit of slow-motion melody. The album’s two pieces were performed in real time, and the effort involved in maintaining precise harmonic distance gives the music a subtle but undeniable charge. The title mentions winds, but this music feels more like a sonic representation of slight but steady breezes.

Bill Meyer

Matt Karmil — STS371 (Smalltown Supersound)

STS371 by Matt Karmil

UK producer Matt Karmil’s latest release STS371 mines a lode of straight ahead acid house and techno laced with enough glitch and twitch to appeal to the head as much as the body. Lead single “PB” is a maximalist concoction of ricocheting hi-hat, blurting bass, the panting of the short distance runner and an undercurrent of soft white noise. Karmil uses just a few simple elements to build his tracks which foreground the beats. Hi-hat and kick drums drop on tracks like “SR/WB” to highlight woozy synth washes. It’s just enough to let you breathe before the high energy tempos return and the strobes flash once more. STS371 touches on Force Inc clicks and cuts and ~scape minimalism beneath the rhythms but most of all Karmil is interested in keeping you on your feet. Mission accomplished.  

Andrew Forell

 Kevin Krauter — Full Hand (Bayonet Records)

Full Hand by Kevin Krauter

Indiana musician Kevin Krauter’s sophomore album Full Hand floats by like a summer breeze. The Hoops bassist plumbs 1980s AOR and coats it in an agreeable fuzz to produce 12 tracks of gossamer dream pop heavy on atmosphere if not always individually memorable. Lyrically Krauter mines his memories and experiences growing up in a religious household, self-discovery and coming of age with poetic grace that his delivers over drum machines, hazy synths, delicate layers of guitar, and low-key yearning vocals.

At his most direct on the title track and “Pretty Boy”, Krauter explores queer identity and his wish to be himself and express his desire. “Green Eyes” and “How” confront the dilemmas of doing just that. The songs are less confessional or revelatory than the sound of Krauter working things out in real time, allowing his audience the privilege of listening as he does so. There are no “big” moments but one comes away inspired by his words and warmed by his music.

Andrew Forell

 Nap Eyes — Snapshot of a Beginner (Jagjaguwar)

Album number four sees Nap Eyes open up to take in broader, sleeker vistas. For the most part, lackadaisical country-rock’n’roll is nudged towards expansiveness by spacey guitars borrowed from My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything. Nigel Chapman steps forward into his front man role with more aplomb than on preceding albums, marshalling his bandmates around him to explore more colorful musical territories. Most successful are the singles, especially opener “So Tired,” plus the canny repurposing of the “Paint It Black” riff on “Real Thoughts,” and the deft guitar work on “Dark Link.” Sometimes there’s a loss of focus, a feeling of stretching for something just beyond reach. But that’s OK; after all, the shrugging acceptance of their shortcomings is right there in the album title.

Tim Clarke

 Peel Dream Magazine — Agitprop Alterna (Slumberland / Tough Love)

Agitprop Alterna by Peel Dream Magazine

On second album Agitprop Alterna, Peel Dream Magazine sound just like early Stereolab, with occasional blasts of shoe-gazey guitar thrown in for good measure. It may come across as reductive, even dismissive, to make such an overt comparison, but there’s no getting round it. With Stereolab’s comeback reminding everyone how beloved the band is, it’s heartening that there are new bands carrying the torch of their glorious aesthetic. To anyone who grew up in the 1990s listening to this stuff, it’ll no doubt be startling how well Joe Stevens has pulled this off. It’s a love letter to the sound of droning organs, guitars hammering away at major sevenths, driving rhythms and zoned-out but tuneful vocals. It’s derivative, sure, but it’s so well done, and the song writing is so solid that the appeal is undeniable. A recording of John Peel’s reassuringly deadpan radio patter even makes an appearance on “Wood Paneling Pt 2,” midway through the album, as if posthumously giving the band his blessing. I can’t argue with that.  

Tim Clarke

 Sign of Evil — Psychodelic Horror (Caligari Records)

Psychodelic Horror by SIGN OF EVIL

Maybe music this astoundingly stupid shouldn’t be quite so fun. But Sign of Evil, a one-man-black-metal-psychobilly-mash-up from Chile, makes a racket that’s so oddly deranged that it’s hard not to be charmed. Imagine if Link Wray somehow managed to walk into a Dark Throne practice session, c. 1995, and decided to jam, and you might conjure some of the strangeness you’ll encounter on the doltishly titled Psychodelic Horror. It’s fitting that the best song on the tape is simply called “Horror.” Nuff said. But check out the whacko piano that Witchfucker (yep) gamely pounds through the song’s first 30 seconds, and then the wheezy guitar tone he abuses your ear with when the metal portion of the song starts. These are not the sounds of a well-adjusted intelligence. Nor are they the sorts of sounds made by jackasses that cynically profess misanthropic allegiance to Satan, even as they enjoy decades-long careers in the music industry. Watain and Gorgoroth and Dark Funeral only wish they could be this legitimately unhinged. It helps that Witchfucker isn’t a loathsome racist. Rock on, you weirdo.

Jonathan Shaw

 Tré Burt — Caught It From the Rye (Oh Boy)

Caught It From The Rye by Tre Burt

Tré Burt has a rough-edged voice and fiery way with the harmonica that can’t help but remind of a certain Nobel Prize winning songwriter, though his words are less oblique. This debut album has a raspy, down-home charm, framed by raucous acoustic strumming and forthright Americana melodies. The winner here is the title track, which glancingly references the J.D. Salinger classic, but mostly reflects a soulful, restless search for meaning in art and life and music. “All my favorite paintings/ they keep on fallin' down/And I need savin' by the grace of god/But I know he's off creatin' /another one like me,” croons Burt with sandy sincerity. It’s a resilient sort of music, where Burt’s yowling voice plumbs emotional depths, but his rambling guitar line maintains a steady cheer. Burt got his big chance from John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, and as that songwriter hovers near death, it’s a good time to celebrate his legacy of leaving the ladder up.

Jennifer Kelly

 Michael Vallera — Window In (Denovali)

Window In by Michael Vallera

Chicago photographer, musician and composer Michael Vallera releases Window In, a four-track album of ambient manipulated guitar and electronic drone. Vallera works in a liminal space between actuality and potential, with continual, albeit almost imperceptible, shifts from the general and the hyper-specific. He brings a photographic eye to his compositions. They are the aural equivalent of seascapes in which one basks before one is drawn to details and the secrets beneath. Vallera’s tracks float by on luxurious oceanic swells with undercurrents of hiss, subaquatic rumbles, the blips and bleeps of luminescent trench dwellers. In the process the source, the guitar, is rendered unrecognizable, erased from the results leaving only disembodied sounds that ironically feel anchored in the real. Fans of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, Fennesz’ guitar based ambient music or Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops will find much to appreciate here. Window In is a meditation on stillness and calm in the eye of powerful natural forces, something we always need but more so now.

Andrew Forell

 Windy & Carl — Allegiance and Conviction (Kranky)

Allegiance and Conviction by Windy & Carl

Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren have been creating ambient space-rock for nearly 30 years now. The couple’s cosmic yet intimate output may have slowed — this is their first album since 2012’s We Will Always Be — but their sound possesses a timeless resonance. Stepping into their river of watery guitar and bass drones in 2020 feels like little has changed since we last left them — and yet, strangely, everything is new. Windy’s voice makes tentative yet emotionally insistent appearances on five of these six tracks, her words hinting at small-scale revolutions (“In the underground, we’ve got a job to do” — “The Stranger”). “Will I See the Dawn” is the only wordless piece, where electric piano and tape hiss manage to speak volumes. At only 38 minutes, this is a short album for Windy & Carl, but one that has enough shadowy depths to qualify as a worthwhile addition to their intimidating discography.  

Tim Clarke

[sandwichpress]

Reflective Journaling - The Kolb Cycle

Describing the Experience: What happened?

A recent creative experience that was meaningful to me was the first week of our second BCT project; Data Objects. I remember thinking that this would be an easy project, especially after our first project Cards for Play. However, I would soon realize that this was not the case and began to struggle a lot during that first week.

Our brief was to create an experience by mapping a data set to an object. We worked individually during the first week, with groups being assigned later. During this first week we were expected to create low fidelity prototypes of our data objects, so I began by brainstorming and writing down any ideas I had on a list.

In the first few days I bounced around between data-sets, from aircraft crash statistics to obesity throughout the world. The data-set I ended up with however was “infant mortality rates in NZ from the last century”. A similar thing happened with the object, I thought up of different ways to modify different objects. For example I thought of using the weight of baby dolls to represent the data, with more deaths equaling to the baby’s weight getting reduced. The prototypes I worked on the most however, were the paper planes. I attempted to modify various aspects of the planes in the hope that the changes would affect how they flew. The final versions of which were simply paper planes with different lengths of string attached to them. Eventually I stopped working on these prototypes and switched to a baby crib instead, but it was too late and soon enough the week was over.

Analysis and Observation: Taking a Look Back

I remember that by the end of the week I felt extremely frustrated with myself. I felt that I had wasted a lot of time on the paper plane prototypes. They didn’t end up being useful, and the time I had spent could have been made creating different, maybe better prototypes.

There were a couple of reasons I stuck with the paper plane idea for so long. They were relatively easy to make and add changes to, materials wise they are pretty cheap to make and finally I thought I could transfer my findings from a low – fidelity prototype to something a bit more advanced (i.e. a flying model plane). While creating the prototypes I expected the changes I made to the paper planes (different wing lengths, overall size, etc) to affect how the flew. It would have been a very obvious visual clue to how the data affected how the object functioned. This was not the case however, during my tests I found it very difficult to see any appreciable difference between how each individual aircraft flew. It was too random.

This randomness and further testing led me to abandon this set of prototypes. When I showed the planes to people, they immediately thought that the data was supposed to be aircraft crashes. I had been so focused on mapping the data to an object that I had inadvertently assumed that they existed in a vacuum. This surprised me at first, but when my testers told me why they thought so (paper planes = something to do with aircraft crashes), it made sense. So I decided to switch my prototyping paper planes to modifying aspects of a baby crib. Alas, this was too little too late and in the following days we were creating groups.

Research and Investigation: What Can I Learn?

One mistake I recognize upon going through what happened was that I immediately got to working and started brainstorming. I did not think critically about our brief or analyze the problem at hand. As stated by Paul &Elder (2009) [2] “the quality … of what we produce, make or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought.” The quality of my thinking was not of a sufficient enough standard, I was too focused on how to map the data to the object I could not see the why of why I was mapping the data to said object. This can be further expanded upon by the first step of the Template for Problem-Solving by Paul & Elder (2009), to be an effective problem solver one first has to figure out and regularly re-articulate their goals, purposes and needs. Since I did not analyze our brief, I was not able to properly recognize the goal of this project and lead myself towards the wrong path.

Related to my first mistake is a second. Since I did not analyze my brief, I was not able to clearly define what my goal was. Thus I did not to take into consideration what the user would experience when they interacted with my object. I made the assumption that the user would do what I wanted them to do, something that is not usually the case. J.J. Garret (2010) [1] explains how the user experience can often be overlooked in design, and how this can make or break product. He also explains how a product can be functional, yet have a terrible user experience, thus driving away the user. In this instance I made the grave error of ignoring the end user, so while my objects (the paper planes) technically functioned, (they show the data through the length of the string) they confused my end users (they thought it had something to do with aircraft).

These two mistakes remind me of the Marshmallow Challenge, an activity the whole class participated in. We split into groups and attempted to create a tower of spaghetti with a marshmallow on top. During that activity most of the groups left the marshmallow till the last minute, often causing the tower to fall.  “What the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them [the participants] identify the hidden assumptions.” Tom Wujec (2010). In this case the marshmallow of my project was the user experience. My initial assumptions of the project being easy and that the user would be fine with whatever object I presented would lead my tower (or project) crumbling into pieces.

Reflection: What Can I Do Better?

So comes the hardest part of any reflection. Asking how one could improve upon oneself. Combing through this experience again, there are a number of things that I could definitely improve upon.

In the future, before I start anything, project or other wise. I should ask myself questions. Questions like:

What is my goal?

Who is this for?

Why is it needed? / What is it’s purpose?

How will I know that goal has been achieved?

What assumptions have I made before starting?

Are these assumptions true or false?

Of course, asking questions only at the start of something is not enough. I have to keep on ‘playing with the marshmallow’, I have to know if I am heading towards the right direction. So using the first week of Data Objects as an example. Instead of creating and iterating on a whole bunch of plane prototypes, I should have made one set and tested them on an end user. See how they reacted, etc. That way I would have known from the start that people would have thought my data was completely different and it would have saved me a lot of time and trouble. So when making improvements upon something, I should perform tests before iterating upon it any further.

I have also learned that in order for a product to be successful, it must not only be functional, but also friendly to the end user. It must confuse and inconvenience them as little as possible. As such, it is important to think of designing something through the eyes of the end user. This is because everybody is different from one another, and it is very likely that your end user will see the product in a different light to you. In future projects I should keep in mind what I want users to experience and try to imagine how they would experience it through testing and asking questions.

I am sure that everything I have learned from this experience would be helpful in times to come.

References:

[1] Garrett, J. J. (2010). Elements of user experience, the: user-centered design for the web and beyond. Pearson Education.

[2] Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2009). The miniature guide to critical thinking-concepts and tools (Thinker’s guide). Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for critical thinking.

[3] Wujec, T. (2010). The marshmallow challenge. Retrieved April, 28, 2019.

[blucmoon]

━  ☾ ⊹  ( kim chungha, cis female, she/her ) say hello to KWON YENA, the TWENTY FIVE YEAR OLD that seems to have a lot in her hands with HER job as an ART TEACHER! beyond that, they seemed CREATIVE AND DEDICATED upon first glance. i heard someone say they’re sort of RESERVED AND IMPRACTICAL though. she seems to live in a 2 BEDROOM APARTMENT in SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA. anything else to add? oh, yeah! she’s also A SINGLE MOM OF A FIVE YEAR OLD GIRL!

– basics

full name: kwon yena

goes by: nana

birthdate: feb 02, 1996

age: 25

gender: female

ethnicity: korean

religion: atheist

spoken languages: korean, english.

current living conditions: 2-bedroom apartment on the 18th floor of her building. decent sized and 15 minutes away from the college she works at and a 10 minutes walk from sooah’s elementary school. 

occupation: teacher at k-arts in the school of visual arts.

– relationships

father: kwon chanyoung (alive) polite.

mother: kwon kyungmi prev. seo kyungmi (deceased) good terms.

older brother: kwon namhyuk (alive) close, good terms.

aunt: seo hana (alive) really close.

– physical traits

height: 161cm

weight: 50kg

eye color: dark brown

hair color: currently dyed black, long.

tattoos + piercings: has her daughter’s birthdate tattooed in roman numerals on her ribcage, peonies on the left shoulder.

– personality

mbti: infp “the mediator”

moral alignment: true neutral “the undecided”; act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion.

strengths: idealistic, seek and value harmony, open-minded and flexible, very creative, passionate and energetic, dedicated and hard-working, loyal, devoted, sensitive to feelings, caring and interested in others, values close relationships.

weaknesses: too idealistic, too altruistic, impractical, dislikes dealing with data, takes things personally, difficult to get to know, sometimes loses sight of the little things.

yena is a true idealist, always looking for the hint of good even in the worst of people and events. she likes searching for ways to make things better. while she might be perceived as calm, reserved or even shy she has an inner flame and passion. she’s guided by her principles, when deciding to move forwards she will look to honor, beauty, morality and virtue, being led by the purity of her intent, not rewards and punishments. fantasy worlds particularly fascinate yena. she can often drift into deep thought due enjoying contemplating about live overall. she relies more on intuition and is more focused on the big picture though she can be particularly meticulous when it comes to her students’ art or her own.

she places emphasis on personal feelings and her decisions are more influenced by these concerns rather than by objective information. When it comes to making decisions, she likes to keep her options open and tends to delay making them just in case something about a situation changes. she experiences a great depth of feelings but she largely processes these emotions internally. yena has an incredible sense of wonder about the world.

– background 

1st momentum  

the kwon family was highly renowned in the business world, not only for how perfect the family seemed to be, but also because the head of the family, kwon chanyoung, was an extraordinary business man with a love for charity and helping others as well as other social reasons. he was a firm believer that the moment to change the future was now. yena was the second child in the family, younger than his brother by 3 years. despite the age gap, both kids always enjoyed one another’s company, that and the mischiefs they always managed to pull with their family and friends. yena was a well-behaved kid despite this, following orders most of the time. those rare times she didn’t were due they not making a lot sense or being correct in her own books. since young, she’s always questioned every single thing and wondered out loud the reason to do this or that. her parents always fed her curiosity with the answers she sought, fully knowing that it was better to let that inquisitive spark live than having a girl without her own criteria.

2nd momentum

as they grew up, the siblings became even more inseparable even when they weren’t in the same school or years. as for yena, she started to show her love and talent for arts and her parents enrolled her in a high school with a prestigious art program which allowed her to experiment different mediums and techniques to find out that she was extraordinary when it came to oil painting and sculpting. there she met her first love and dated him for around 2 years before breaking up. high school helped her to get prepared for college life in both, the art department but also in the entrance exam, which she successfully passed and enrolled in the korea national university of arts.

3rd momentum

college. the place where one truly finds themselves. this period in her life made a huge difference in who she was going to become in the future. upon arriving, yena noticed how competitive and extremely ambitious everyone was when it came to their art… which further motivated her to excel in every aspect. soon, yena managed to become a hot topic as someone labelled her as a “freshman prodigy”. her artworks proved to be top quality and exquisite, minimum details and corrections were pointed by her professors, but what marveled everyone the most was how it seemed like the title didn’t get to her head and she always remained humble and kind to anyone who asked her for help. this caught the attention of several guys who wanted to have at least a date with her. at the end of her first year, she started going out with someone from the design department. no one knew how or why it happened, but it did and yena was completely head over heels for the guy. he was kind, polite and liked to go full-on nerd mode when it came to topics that interested him, which was utterly endearing for her and so they dated for around a year and a half before everything changed.

4th momentum

suddenly, at the end of her sophomore year things went downhill. desperation took the form of mascara tears running down her cheeks as the two lines in a cheap pregnancy test, which she got in a haste from a convenience store, confirmed her fears. she was pregnant at the age of 19. yena was well aware that it could potentially change her relationship with her boyfriend and family. still, she decided to keep it a secret until she visited the doctor to confirm the results. 

when telling her boyfriend about it, he acted in a way yena never expected him to. he was surprised, to say the least, and didn’t want to believe he was the father as he was always careful to bring protection with him. yena explained that it wasn’t a 100% effectiveness rate… and then he accused her for cheating, claiming that he wouldn’t take responsibility.

heartbroken, yena decided to go home that night to also tell her parents the truth whom were extremely disappointed. nonetheless supported her when she decided to keep the baby. their relationship, though, wasn’t the same as it used to be. her father was cold and drew a line yena knew she’d never be able to cross and her mother constantly looked at her with what she recognized as pity and disappointment.

not being able to take it anymore, she decided to move with her aunt, who completely understood the situation as it was similar to what she went through years ago. her parents didn’t stop her and other than paying for her college, only because it was something they didn’t want her to leave unfinished, they rarely talked ever again. yena was able to finish the following semester but decided to temporarily leave school as her last trimester approached.

5th momentum

in march, her baby was born and she named her sooah. thankfully, both of them were healthy. yena became a single, 20 years old mother. despite her young age, she matured as her baby grew up and became completely devoted to her without dropping school. with the help of her beloved aunt looking after the baby in the mornings, yena picked up her education and managed to finish in time after cramming a whole semester. after that, she decided to get a masters degree so she could become a teacher. all this while taking care of her baby and having a part-time job to support them both. her parents noticing how hard she was working to give sooah a better life, decided to help her for a little bit until she got back on her feet, but it was also because they little sooah won both of their hearts in their very first meeting.

now, at the age of 25, she’s a renowned teacher at her alma mater while sooah is in kindergarten.

– her daughter

full name: kwon sooah

birthdate: 27/03/2016

age: 5

gender: female

personality: sooah is smart, creative, and unconventional. she is also laid-back, disorganised, and non-judgemental. out of chaos comes genius, but due to her lack of organisation she often has trouble applying her energy and finishing projects. she is quiet, reserved, and a thinker. prefers to stay at home rather than go out and make friends. has a rich inner fantasy life and is a fan of science fiction and fantasy. prone to eccentricity. she is polite, compassionate, and thoughtful. goes out of her way to help people, and is sympathetic to the plight of people she has little in common with. does not mind a messy environment. she is quiet and does not make friends easily, but she cares deeply for the friends she does make. she is emotional and anxious. her imagination can work to amplify her fears, because she considers all the ways in which things could go wrong. she is strongly affected by horror films. sooah is hard to get to know as she is shy and sensitive. she naturally prefers to be alone or to have just one or two friends, and her tendency to be anxious and afraid makes her nervousness around people more intense.

[sethshead]

Why are extramission beliefs so difficult to overcome by training? One answer lies in the explanation of the origins of this misunderstanding. Our account is based on the contributions of diSessa (1993), who claimed that underlying scientific misconceptions are primitive, phenomenological experiences (termed p-prims), and on Werner’s(1948, 1957) theory of development. One phenomenological experience, very much evident in vision, is an orienting response. Vision is generally thought of as directed outward, away from the self, toward specific objects. This outer-oriented, dynamic quality of seeing might be at the heart of the extramission bias, because it may be that when asked about vision, people may syncretically fuse their phenomenological, outer-directed experience of vision with their beliefs about the nature of the act of seeing (Werner’s, 1948, 1957, approach adds the notion of syncresis to diSessa’s, 1993, approach). Presumably these erroneous notions also coexist with scientifically acceptable ones, without people seeing the inconsistency. Evidence consistent with our interpretation has shown that extramission beliefs increase in conditions that are designed to stress the outer-directed quality of visual experiences (see Winer & Cottrell, 1996b; Winer, Cottrell, Karefilaki, & Gregg, 1996).

I am reminded of an apocryphal anecdote about Wittgenstein: He and some students were out taking a day stroll. One looked up at the sky and wondered aloud how foolish people once were to imagine all that above revolved around earth. Wittgenstein replied that, if one didn’t know otherwise, how could anyone tell?

In fact, there is an easy way to tell: Mercury and Venus have irregular orbits that only make sense in a heliocentric model. But that’s beside the point. Extramission is very poetic, very evocative of the inescapability of psychological projection. It is true as a metaphor of the human condition. It is consistent with all those corruptions of quantum physics about collapsing wave functions. Which is what makes it so dangerous that we can’t turn around and say that it is not physically true. Within my lifetime the arts and humanities have grown ever more hostile to thought not grounded in phenomenology. Holding that there is any actionable reality or salient rules outside of an individual’s perception will at best provoke eye-rolls of contempt for so plodding and pedestrian a thinker; more likely they will be associated with white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, scientism, or any number of other sins against the whole human race.

Among my peers and colleagues, doctrines, articles of faith, affiliations and associations can be wrong; statements of fact cannot be, since there are supposedly no objective, universal facts to begin with. The reader constructs the text, and life is a text. As a technique of literary analysis, this is limiting enough (after all, isn’t an interpretation enriched by seeing a work though another’s eyes, especially those contemporary to its authorship, with their awareness of the signifiers embedded throughout?). When we prioritize such an attitude towards the physical, natural world, we erode students’ capacity for real, critical thought. Far from the existence of facts requiring the passive consumption of facts, reinforcing the authority of traditional power structures, understanding the processes whereby those facts are establishes provides us a logical framework for absorbing information. Conversely, relying exclusively on one’s senses and intuition for conclusions renders one vulnerable to misinformation, to propaganda and manipulation by those reading to pander to how one wishes to imagine the world, rather than reveal how it truly is.

Yes, how could you guess I’d steer this ‘round to any number of Trumpian lies?

From Birtherism to “Stop the Steal,” the Trump cult is impervious to fact. Their allegations are very poetic expressions of their discontent, with Barack Obama’s perceived “Otherness” to the shock of defeat; BUT THEY ARE STILL WRONG! There are processes more pertinent than bias confirmation. Granted, I doubt many Trumpsters studied under my colleagues, but these ideals still define our cultural Zeitgeist. Whether grade schoolers teachers embracing the ethos that there is no such things as a wrong answer to anti-maskers choosing to believe they put no one at risk, we have been hit with an epidemic of extreme relativism and solipsism. In such an environment, adult, college-educated study respondents certain that we see by emitting light from our eyes and resistant to contradiction, is entirely predictable.

If our academic dogmas and philosophies do not allow us to dispel, absolutely, this error as a flat-out error, then of what use are we to the purpose of inquiry?

[georgiablacklidge-blog]

Romanticism

This erie is based around a depended appreciation of the beauties around us. It is not to do with love or romance but it is all about passion, in their beliefs and their feelings. It is an act of personal expression, which changed the course of art. Romanticism was all based around being yourself, expression of powerful emotion, passion and revolution. This movement could be seen as the rejection of the precepts of order, calm, idealisation, and rationality. Instead individual expression, the irrational, the personal and the spontaneous. The Romanic movement originated in Germany, then it spread to England, France and the rest of Europe. It was at it’s height during the period 1780 to 1830, but continued to be an influence long after that. French poet Charles Baudelaire described it, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

While looking into this movement I found that there was an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic culture origins and in the medieval era. Furthermore I've noticed an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth, also a liking for the occult, the mysterious, the monstrous and a lot of relation to satanic. For example John Henry Fuseli ‘The Nightmare’ (1782). This painting draws on folklore, science and classical art to create a new kind of sexually charged image. Fuseli wanted the painting to shock and intrigue, as well as to make a name for himself. He defiantly succeeded in this. The work is made for your own interpretation. Some people believe that it is some sort of sexual desire however I believe that this is a physical effect of a nightmare. The incubus, is a type of spirit said to lie on top of people in their sleep. Or in fact sleep paralysis. I believe this because the image is just how I felt when experiencing sleep paralysis. Fuseli’s painting is suggestive but not explicit. It seems be quite a frightening image. There has been many different reproductions of his work in many medias, from artists like Thomas Burke, William Blake and Thomas Rowlandson. ‘The Nightmare’ became an icon of Romanticism and a defining image of Gothic horror.

This movement was somewhat a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and Neo-classicism, which focused upon reason, rationality and order. Classicists believed art should every simplistic and calm grandeur. So this movement embraced the struggle of freedom and and equality. The movement affected philosophical thinking, literature, music, and art. After the French Revolution of 1789, a significant social change occurred within a single generation. Europe was shaken by political crises, revolutions and wars. New ideas and attitudes had taken hold after this. Jacques-Louis David was an artist deeply committed to the French Revolution. ‘The Death of Marat’ (1793) was one of his paintings that is essentially a piece of Propaganda. The government asked him to paint a series of three images that would heroicize martyrs. This was the beginning of a new republic that lets society participate in the government. The image shows Marat in a gruesome way, he is a victim of political violence.

Romanticism didn't just influence Visual Arts but music and literature too. This period ended around 1830 and then the was followed by realism. Beethoven 5th symphony is known to be what started romanticism in music. When listening to this piece there is a range of different emotions tracing through, from excitement through to the feeling of danger. The piece was all about expressing emotions which is what Romanticism is all about. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s, is known to be a very famous writer. One of his greatest plays and some people credit to launch his success is Faust (1808 -1832 ) and is one of the most influential exponents of the movement. It is a play where Faust sells his soul for knowledge and to the devil. It expresses deep emotion and suffering in this play. Too add it inspired many great writers, musicians, and artists in their own work.

‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich. Is one of the most popular paintings of this movement. The wanderer is dressed in gentleman’s attire, garments wholly unsuitable for such a climb, suggestive that his task was accomplished. The cloudy sky and the man looking into the distance is as a sign of danger and fear of the unknown. Joseph Mallord William Turner was one of the most prolific english artists. He is best known for his studies of both urban and rural scenes including powerful seascapes. Such as ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (1839). Showing a stunning sunset which highlights the transition between new and old technologies, between the warship and a black tugboat. He has painted around 96,000 watercolours, sketches and engravings. Turner is less interested in fine detail, so his pictures often have the hazy, dreamlike quality and private interpretations.Their is Romanticism in Contemporary culture too. Such as in Art, music, film and gaming. In the post-modern world, their is interest in landscape and its symbolic qualities prevailing our mood. Peter Doig ‘Figure in a Mountain Landscape’ (1998) is a great example of this.

The key thinkers of this art movement were William Blake (1757 –1827). Who was a poet, artist, and mystic. Blake is not considered a classical romantic poet, but his new style of poetry and mystical experience of nature had a significant influence on the growth of romanticism. John Constable (1776 – 1837) was also another key thinker in the romantic movement. He was an English painter. Popular for his landscapes of Dedham Vale. Moreover Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863) a french romantic painter was influential for the use of expressive colour, movement, imagination and romantic content. He was also influential to the impressionists.

Above all, Romanticism emphasised individuality, pure passion and emotion. Romanticism in Visual Arts explore both powerful emotion and also powerful sights of scenery in this erie. It shows that work can be interpreted rather than just representing something. As the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846 “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”  Romanticists believed art should excite the emotions, and in particular the emotions of fear. The romantic movement has permanently changed our sensibilities.  

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/gothic-nightmares-fuseli-blake-and-romantic-imagination/gothic

https://www.biographyonline.net/famous-people-of-the-romantic-period/

Roe, N. (2005) Chapter 5. Oxford University Press Romanticism: an oxford guide pg. 68-75

[chiseler]

CRAIG BALDWIN IN RETRENCH MODE

By way of brief introduction for the unfamiliar, San Francisco-based filmmaker, archivist, curator and artist Craig Baldwin is widely regarded as a kind of figurehead, a holdover crazy beatnik artist from SF’s pre-tech boom days. He’s also been hailed as one of the country’s most respected culture jammers, and a brilliant American original.

While most Hollywood films, he says, simply regurgitate the same tired old stories over and over, “old wine in new bottles,” as he puts it, Baldwin is trying to put new wine in old bottles, telling new stories in a new way. Referring to himself as a media cannibal, since the late ‘70s he’s been doing this by plundering the culture itself, salvaging discarded, forgotten movies and media clips, industrial and educational films, archive footage, TV ads, soundtracks, infomercials, found images, anything he can get his hands on, repurposing, recombining and reorganizing them. He edits all this cultural detritus together to create video collage essays and narratives which put these old recognizable faces and scenes into a whole new context, turning this existing media back on itself, telling stories that interweave historical facts, conspiracy theory, critical theory, science fiction, anti-corporate and imperial commentary and film history, all with a sly sense of grim humor.

His 1992 film Tribulation 99, for instance, maps out the dark and frighteningly true history of American foreign policy in Latin America from the end of World War II through the Reagan Era and beyond. Far from being another dry PBS doc, the whole thing is disguised as a sci-fi conspiracy film about evil android replicants (like Castro) and a race of alien lizard people living in the hollow earth. But that’s merely a simple-minded thumbnail sketch of a film which, like his others, is a deeply complex artistic experiment.

But on with the story.

While touring with his 1999 film Spectres of the Spectrum, Baldwin says he began receiving some strange emails. The film, in his own inimitable style, was an exploded narrative documentary which traced out the intertwining evolutions of electronic telecommunications and military technology, this time disguised as a low-budget sci fi time-travel film about an underground revolutionary on the run from the government with his psychic teenage daughter.. For the first time here Baldwin included narrative sequences with sets and actors, those scenes interwoven with a collage of old TB shows, educational and industrial films, genre pictures and commercials. Along its tangled route, Spectres included a passing reference to pioneering rocket scientist Jack Parsons and his one-time close friend L. Ron Hubbard, who embezzled Parsons’ life savings before sailing off to found the Church of Scientology. That was all it took to get on the scientologist’s bad side, it seems, and when Baldwin returned home to San Francisco, he found a vaguely sinister letter waiting for him on Church of Scientology letterhead. That’s when he started developing the idea for his next film.

“You’re going to threaten me?

He recalls thinking at the time. “Okay then, I’m going to come right at you.”

The idea came into sharper focus not long afterward when he stumbled across John Carter’s biography, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Feral House). Parsons, along with being a seminal figure at the dawn of the U.S. aerospace program and founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was also deeply involved with the occult. Beyond his relationship with Hubbard, Parsons was also connected with Marjorie Cameron, who would play such a major role in what would come to be known as the New Age movement. On top of it all, Parsons was being groomed by Aliester Crowley himself to take over the OTO. Then everything went to hell.

“When I saw Sex and Rockets in a bookstore in Olympia, Washington—I was on tour, and I remember that day—my hair stood on end,” says Baldwin, now 65. “My father worked for Aerojet, the company that Jack Parsons founded. I’m not making this up. I’m so close to this aerospace story and I am where I am right now because my father moved to Sacramento and took this Job. I also understood the whole thing with the psychedelics and the connections and the subcultures. So it was a perfect thing for me.”

The resulting film, Mock Up on Mu, was released in 2008. Again employing his trademark media collage with newly-shot narrative scenes, and again disguised as a low-budget sci-fi thriller, the film not only explored the tangled relationships between Parsons, Hubbard, Cameron and Crowley, but also traced out the deeply interconnected growth of the space program and the spiritual movement in post-war California.

In the years  following Mock Up on Mu’s release, another major Parsons biography came out, as well as a couple high-profile films (both narrative and documentary) about Scientology. Now Ridley Scott is working on a miniseries of his own about Parsons.

“So he’s entered the public consciousness, at least far enough that Ridley Scott can get ahold of him,” says Baldwin, who has always been cursed to be a few years ahead of the curve.  “This may have changed, but I heard Scott was going to make a twelve-part miniseries. There’s so much material there, so many twists and turns it’s almost impossible to embrace. I’m not beating my chest here, I’m just saying X marks the spot. In the end, though, it may have been all that material, all those twists and turns, that caused trouble for the film in his mind.

In retrospect, he says Mock Up on Mu was too long,, took too long to make, and took up too much of his time and energy in general. In the nearly ten years since Mock Up on Mu was released, Baldwin has made a few shorts, began staging film performances involving multiple projectors on lazy Susan’s enhanced by avant-garde soundtracks, and put much of his energy into overseeing Other Cinema, the film collective and microcinema that showcases the work of other documentary filmmakers. He also became embroiled in an epic legal battle after the landlord announced an astronomical rent hike on the storefront space that serves as not only his home, office and studio, but also home to Other Cinema as well as housing his massive film archive. Although he eventually won a five-year lease extension (accompanied by a forty-three percent rent hike), the wounds inflicted by the case still linger, and he admits things have been very rough. Through it all, however, he’s been planning out his next feature. This time  he knew he had to change his approach.

“I struggled to get the whole thing into a story and then I overdid it,” he says now of the Parsons film. “I was stung by it. It was too overdetermined, it was trying too hard.  There were too many things that didn’t work out. It was two hours of people talking. Walking around in these silly spacesuits spouting all this information, because I tried to include everything.  I was wincing, so I decided I wanted to contract. I’m showing short films all the time, I’m doing these performances. The scale is perfect. Mu was too ostentatious, too bombastic. An experimental sort-of biopic. There’s not even a name for it. So I call it a compilation narrative or a collage narrative. I can’t name another person who’s doing this, so I get an A for effort. But I had to retread a little bit.”

Guy Debord

Baldwin says the two books that had the greatest impact on him were William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Guy Debord’s Situationist manifesto Society of the Spectacle, which were released originally just a few years apart on Paris’ Left Bank. As an artist long obsessed with, as well as a product of, post-war subcultures, it was Rich territory. So his next film. Invisible Insurrection, began as the idea of an imagined  meeting between two of the twentieth century’s most radical thinkers at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

“I don’t want to make the same mistake with Invisible Insurrection, but it’s the same thing. In the case of Parsons it was the post-war milieu in Southern California. Invisible Insurrection is about ten, fifteen years later, but it’s the post-war milieu in Paris. But that’s a good thing. It’s based in social history, which is what my films are supposed to be about, kind of dissecting them. It’s good if you have a story, especially if it’s a true story. For me it was already getting too complicated, because you had Burroughs, but there were already too many films about Burroughs. Then there’s Debord, and that’s problematic, because I can already see I might fall prey to being accused of spectacularizing Debord. Exactly what he was opposed to. But he’s the one who held copyright on himself, he’s the one who made all these films about himself. He made seven films, and some of them contain details about his life. So he already committed the sin of trying to make a visual representation out of it. I don’t want to make another biopic about a very interesting intellectual. I mean, I do, but don’t dare. So I’m going to add a third guy just to confuse things even more.”

Alexander Trocchi

The third figure in question is Scottish expatriate writer Alexander Trocchi, author of Young Adam, Cain’s Book, and a handful of pornographic novels published by Maurice Girodious’ Olympia Press. Like Burroughs and Debord, Trocchi was a deeply damaged character who had his own struggles with heroin addiction and a troubled and troubling home life. But as editor of the Paris-based literary journal Merlin, Trocchi introduced English-speaking readers to the work of Samuel Beckett and countless other new and radical voices. Over the years, Trocchi had direct involvement with the Beats, the Situationists, and later the hippies, and for Baldwin that was the key.

“This guy Trocchi is the way in,” he says. “Burroughs has been covered, so that would look derivative. Debord is good, but it would look like I tried to gloss him up, to doll him up. No one’s covered Trocchi. There was that movie Young Adam based on his first novel, which was just a so-so movie. But you can see it’s deep, it’s a complex story. I don’t know that I could make a film about Trocchi that people would respond to same way they respond to the other two guys. Trocchi’s kind of a lesser figure, but he crossed through all these subcultures, he helped form the triangle connecting the Beats, the Situationists and the hippies. You couldn’t invent someone who was more central to the subcultural changes in this whole period I’m talking about.  So I’m thinking the perspective should be moved, more through a person who could be Trocchi. I could do it in the first person.”

One possible, if limiting, route into the material, he speculated, might be an adaptation of Trocchi’s best known work, the notorious 1960 novel Cain’s Book.

“Maybe that would give me my personal entry,” Baldwin says. “But then again do I want to cover that book? No. The stories should be told about ‘great men,’ but I’m not the one to do it. I want to do something about the relationships, the juxtaposition, the collage of different ideas in a particularly overheated environment, where you’ve got May ’68 on the horizon, you’ve got people writing these super radical experimental works , you’ve got this fantastic publishing house, you’ve got gangsters involved. The little cafes, the Beat Hotel and on and on. I want to create a hall of mirrors, so to speak. There can’t be that much depth, but it’s all in the interaction. So I’m not going to do Cain’s Book, because I want to talk a little bit about what Trocchi did with LSD, and his ideas about the School of the Streets when he started writing for the Situationist International journal. I don’t want to be stuck in that period when he was on the barge on the East River.”

The idea for another way in came after seeing Abigail child’s recent documentary, Acts and Intermissions: Emma Goldman in America.

“I know Abby and love Abby. We have an understanding,” he says. “She’s a way better filmmaker than me. She did this first person thing where she was Emma, and that’s where I got the idea. And the film she made is an hour long. Maybe that would be a better way.”

Another hint toward a change in direction came through the work of prolific activist filmmaker Travis Wilkerson.

“He inserts himself into his movies, kinda like writing. A level of personal subjectivity you don’t see enough in my movies. I want to make something with more personal subjectivity., to tell the story from within instead of hurling it like a collage against the wall. So I’m kind of shifting the axis. It’s not going to be a big wrestling match between Burroughs and Debord. I’m going to enter into it as if I was a hanger-on. I haven’t made much progress with the film. I live with it every day. There’s a tower of books here that’s ten, fifteen books high. It’s gonna fall at any moment. I’m sure you’ve read most of them. I really have to take a little more time to study the material and find my way in. I want to keep it under eighty minutes. My thing is maximalism, that’s for sure, but I don’t need to tire people out. I think my last one was a hundred and twelve minutes of just maximum collage. I’m going to be a little more intelligent and nuanced.

Still from Spectres of the Spectrum

“The way I work is on paper, by the way,” Baldwin went on. “I’m not really a computer guy. I mean I’m surrounded by people who are much more capable than me on the computer. Thank god I got them. So I write little scribbled notes. It’s very Beat. I have mountains of these notes. I need to go through them. I need to create the space where I can concentrate on the material and find a way in. It’ll be a roman a clef, based on a true story, but slightly fictionalized. It could be very personal. I could go in as Trocchi or as someone else. Maybe his son, who committed suicide by jumping off a building. It would be a little easier on people’s systems than this bold barrage thing. I’m committed to that aesthetic, but you need to control it somehow. So I’m gonna try and reign the thing in.

“I have plenty of material here, about a hundred films are sitting there that are just awesome. I have this German Invisible Man, if you can believe such a seedy movie would come out in Germany in black and white in the early Sixties. It’s impossible to imagine. And back to the whole ventriloquism thing, I got my actors in that and another thing. Who was the woman who just died, the transvestite from the Warhol crowd? {Maria Montez} She went to France and was in this terrible existential movie where both of the leads die. I’m using that as source material as well, and about a thousand black and white films from the late Fifties and early Sixties. I have all these travelogues so I have all these locales and don’t have to go to France to shoot them myself. I don’t have to go climb the Eiffel Tower—I already have the Eiffel Tower.

“It will take more nuance. More subtlety. More poetry, and less bombast. Less bells and whistles. More of a literary style, more emphasis on the writing. I’m going to do something about this period in history that lead to me. But it’s not going to be a straight on profile., it’s going to be something from within. It’s gonna be more of a personal diary or confession.”

At this point, all these years after the idea first began simmering, he says he’s relieved he didn’t get a two-year burst of energy early on and start working immediately. As things stand he’s had the chance to think it through more carefully, especially in the wake of Mock Up on Mu.

Stills from Mu

“Well, I took it back into the shop,” he says. “It is a true underground film, like back in the day, like Jack Smith, just getting his friends to shoot or be in the movie, doing their own things. That’s authentic, that’s legit, that’s one way to make a movie. It’s hardly done anymore now, because of the emphasis on professionalism. You can’t get things like that out anymore. I mean you can put it on YouTube where it would be seen by all these people twenty years younger than me who don’t have a clue what ‘experimental’ means. Like the people on my street, just to get me pissed off again. There are three ice cream stores within one block. Three! Can you believe it? That’s what people are doing.  That’s the world I’m living in, constantly tearing my hair out.”

Given all that Baldwin has faced over these past few years, it’s easy to understand why progress on the film has been slow. Apart from the legal battle to remain in what has been his home and studio for the past quarter-century, he’s also had to contend with renovations which left the building without a working bathroom for four months, ongoing economic pressures, the recent election, the recent deaths of several friends, and the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, which sent lingering shockwaves through the Bay Area’s DIY community. It’s been a lot to deal with and scrabble through.  “So the film’s in retrench mode right now,” he says. “But it’s going to come out.”

by Jim Knipfel

[geekgirlnavigatingtheworld]

I expect spectacle when I see a Luc Besson movie. My eyes will be exhausted from trying to track a thousand and one things at any given moment, and my brain registers a plot and story are in there somewhere, but, quite frankly, I’m in so much visual ferret shock, the first viewing of the movie is pretty much a giant exercise in saying “OOOO! Lookitdat!”. I don’t just accept this, I go gratefully along for the ride.

“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” is based on a series of French graphic novels. I know, I know, being Madam Obvious, there, but, just in case someone reading this doesn’t know, there it is.  This movie is essentially about Valerian and his partner Laureline trying to save Station Alpha, a giant conglomerate of space stations created by thousands of different species (including humans) which has been released to float through space to avoid crashing it into the Earth. A mysterious zone of contamination has cropped up in the middle of Alpha Station. Nobody seems to know what caused it or why, and the Commander of Alpha Station is determined to stop it. Valerian and Laureline are the best agents the government has to offer, so, naturally, they’re called in.

Visually, the movie is stunning. World building is done through progressively more fantastic images, piling on sensory input to provide the eyes with a bountiful feast. The costuming and set designs, as well as the animation are done gorgeously. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I have no complaints.

Story-wise, however, well, let’s start with it. If the plot seems a bit simplistic, that’s because it is. I understand there are different types of stories with different driving mechanisms. Valerian is written as though it’s intended to be character-driven, however, it’s clear from the outset the setting is the driving force, which is emphasized and reinforced through the scenery. This one suffers from poor and inconsistent writing which would only be acceptable in the framework of a parody.

The characters aren’t really anything new here. Valerian is an overconfident cad, Laureline is a verbally and physically abusive woman who seems to mistake bitchiness for toughness and strength, Clive Owen’s character is-exactly what you peg him for the moment he steps on screen and, in the climactic reveal, ends up elevating his two-dimensionality to glossy standee levels. It’s all predictable. Really predictable. I knew what was going to happen as soon as all our principal players were introduced, which I found both sad and frustrating. I’m also going to more than quibble with a character set up like Valerian’s, where, one minute, he’s got to be chewed out by everyone on the mission with him for not reading his memo, then in a pivotal scene claiming he’s a soldier who’s all about the rules and going by the book. What. the. actual. fuck? No. No. Character development (which there’s zero in this movie) requires character consistency. A truly dedicated by the book soldier would have read that memo so many times he had it memorized, not obstinately, willfully stayed clueless so as to endanger everyone else on the mission with him.

Canonically, Valerian’s pretty much a dick. Besson didn’t mess with that character description much at all. However, with a character like Valerian, he needs to be played by an actor who has the charisma and screen presence to pull it off. Dane DeHaan was not the guy to do it. He just couldn’t pull off the necessary swagger, and instead of seeming laid-back, he comes off as sedated. I’m still not sure if he as an actor was confused or phoning it in.

When it comes to Laureline, I don’t think Cara Delevigne was miscast. I think she got bad direction. Laureline is intended to be the capable one who gets things done. She’s supposed be tough and feisty. She can GET mean, but I was never under the impression Laureline was practically as bad as everyone she’s attempting to save the world from. In the opening scene, which is supposed to be one of those fighting as foreplay kind of scenes, there’s a total lack of chemistry between DeHaan and Delevigne, to the point that, rather than flirty or playful (trust me, there is an arctic desert of playfulness going on there), it’s really uncomfortable and awkward. These two actors are wrestling for superiority and beating the shit out of each other while trying to normalize it in a context of “playing hard to get” and jockeying for dominance. There’s no sexiness. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch. I will forever point to this as a scene of “No. Just, no.”

Laureline charges through the movie beating people up and shooting things while either screaming or barking at people. She’s supposed to be intimidating. I found her mostly psychopathic. I wanted to see her have more facets than “Generic Kick-Ass Unattainable Soldier Girl”. I wanted her to use some diplomacy and some eloquence to solve some problems, instead of violence, especially given Station Alpha’s intent (which is stated several times, explicitly with the EXACT SAME PHRASE EVERY TIME) to be a place where all species come together to share knowledge and intelligence. It’s really not the kind of place where violence first seems like an acceptable or effective policy. But, you know, as a woman and a feminist, I’m supposed to be totally satisfied with Laureline showing a tiny bit of tenderness when she’s designated the caregiver of an alien creature, which, of course, she knows exactly how to nurture back to health. Dammit. She’s a Mommy to an alien pet. Did I mention this happens when it’s established she’s the only woman in a room full of dudes? No? Well it does. Three more dammits in a slumped formation, let me tell you.

So, in addition to writing issues, we also have two massively unlikeable characters we’re supposed to somehow develop empathy for and root for to ultimately get together. They’re set up as so laughably toxic I can’t hold out any hope for their relationship to survive. 

Clive Owen shows up to chew through scenery and snarl, which he does pretty well, especially given what he had to work with. At least he had a couple of different emotions I could find believable. 

And yet...I still don’t feel as though my ticket was a waste of money.

Rutger Hauer made a return to the big screen in a blink and you might miss it role, but I’m still very happy to see him. He does cranky old bastard well and it’s fun to see him play it.

Herbie Hancock shows up as the Defence Minister. I didn’t  know he acted, but he did and he was easily one of my favorite parts of this film. He had an air of wise gravity and common sense “Valerian” desperately needed. Yes, I admit it, every time he came on screen, I thought to myself “Oh, thank god, there is an adult running things here after all!”

Ethan Hawke’s turn as a sleazy space pimp was inspired and hilarious. He gave himself over to the part with complete, gleeful abandon and it showed in every second of screentime. He was having fun and, honesty, I needed to see someone in the movie looking like they were having fun being in it.

Rhianna also did a great job as Bubble. I’m not sure if this was her movie debut, but she was also great fun to watch. She definitely seemed to be having fun there, too. I was impressed with the impact she gave her character’s relatively small part. She was memorable in all the best ways.

I do like that Luc Besson is a Big Picture kind of thinker. It shows in his movies. He sees the forest and he’s so very excited to show you the entire thing, he sometimes forgets why a single tree might gain importance. He gives his audience credit for being able to follow him when he makes time and logic jumps, and he’s obviously not afraid to try new things. As a filmgoer, I find when I watch his movies, he gives me so much to look at, I see different trees and follow a different path every time. I can appreciate his style and his enthusiasm.

I had a discussion with a friend just yesterday. We were talking reviews of “Valerian” and, of all things, Michael Bay. I don’t like Michael Bay and my friend had to ask, “But why? What’s different about a Michael Bay spectacle versus a Luc Besson one?” 

Admittedly, when I watch a movie, it’s a visceral, emotional experience for me. I watch first, as a rapt starry-eyed little sprocket. Then, I turn around and analyze the hell out of it. My friend was asking me to articulate a difference I hadn’t actually tried to verbalize before.My answer surprised me.

I don’t like Michael Bay movies because he condescends to his audience. His disdain for the public he can so easily shill for their money drips out of his movies more and more obviously with each new sequel. It’s so obvious in the trailers they string together I don’t even have to bother with the movies anymore. He doesn’t care about the franchise. He doesn’t care about the fans. His movies have a rote list of checkboxes and standard-issue explosions, car chases, and female body exploitation scenes in order to distract from the lack of plot and character development. He does his best to shiny thing away the plot holes and inconsistencies.

I’ve never felt as though Besson was throwing cheap tricks at me to keep my butt in a seat and make his box office. Instead, his movies, at least his true spectacle movies feel like someone who opened up a toy box and is trying to show his new friends every wonderful thing he just discovered and convince you to come and play, too. He’s tripping on the thrill of his own imagination and doing his absolute best to bring everyone else along on the ride with him.

So, yes, I loved the eye candy. The alien designs, especially for the inhabitants of Mul (which should have umlauts, but I don’t see how to add them in Tumblr) are very striking. The glimpses of the worlds within Alpha are interesting and intriguing. I found myself wanting to watch this movie again for inspiration for stories I want to tell because it’s so full of sheer concept. 

“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” is a beautiful romp in a Luc Besson sandbox. It comes with some frustrations attached, but I’m glad I saw it.