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zalrb · 3 years

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hi! same anon from before, hahah. first of all thank u so much for answering - i'm a big steve mcqueen fan too and i was wondering if you were ever interested in reviewing your favourite mcqueen movies? a few words for each kinda thing. i love your movie reviews because way more often than not, i find myself agreeing with you and you seem to find the exact right words. of course, it's merely a request you don't *have* to take seriously.i hope u have a great day!

OK so here is my list, starting from favourite to least favourite. The only feature film of his that I haven’t seen is Hunger.

What I will say are general Steve McQueen characteristics that I like about all of the movies is the fact that his films require patience and attention. If I’m tired or not really in the mood to devote my focus but I want to watch something, I’m not putting on a Steve McQueen film. I want to be fully present. His work demands that. I appreciate that.

I have also come to respect that there are what you would consider holes in his movies. Like we don’t really know anything about Brandon’s backstory in Shame, we know his sister says that they come from a bad place but we don’t know what that place is and the movie doesn’t find it necessary to divulge that information. Widows has a lot of loose ends that a typical heist movie may at least attempt to sort out but I don’t think McQueen really concerns himself with those details, he concerns himself with the emotional present and he concerns himself with the present to such an intimate and almost unbearable degree that it can make you flinch and cringe as a viewer because it’s uncomfortable to kind of stew in emotional truth like that, it’s uncomfortable to stew in the present that way.

There is an artistry and a poetry to his movies, it reminds me of paintings and I can say without irony or without being corny or without being pretentious, that these movies really do examine the human condition, do deep dives into emotion or deep dives into emotions that a particular event or issue would bring about.

1. Lovers Rock

I love this movie for so many different reasons. It means so much to me as a woman of Jamaican descent to see an ode to Caribbean party culture in the diaspora

and even though it’s in London and even though it was in the 80s, there is so much overlap in Canada, it was basically like a spiritual experience watching this movie and on twitter, there was so much outpour of gratitude and feeling seen by Caribbean Canadians, it was like a whole moment, so this movie makes me super emotional.

Like this scene, where they yell “Jah!” “Rastafari!” it got me in my chest and I had never experienced feeling so seen in film before because it’s specifically Caribbean, in this case Jamaican, and what I usually see is African American or movies from the Continent and this was diasporic and it was Caribbean

But what I also love about it is that even though it takes place over one night, it’s a love story between two young dark-skinned Black people and it’s handled with the kind of grace and beauty and weight that I like in my love stories, like it’s not Atonement, it’s not POTC, but it’s this culturally specific courting and coming together and it’s super sweet and just very nice

2. Alex Wheatle

There is this scene in this movie that is excruciating to me in its simplicity and it’s one of McQueen’s techniques or choices. So this installation in Small Axe is about Alex Wheatle who is an author and in the beginning we see his life in an orphanage and how he’s abused and ridiculed and how as a child he would be thrown in a room for hours just lying on his side

Then we get to him as an adult and we see the way the police harass Black youth and they take Alex throw him in the back of their van and he’s bloodied and beaten and he’s just lying on his side for hours. And I cried because that callback to his childhood was so brutal to me even though we don’t see excessive violence onscreen, it was just him lying on his side like when he was a kid and how systems upon systems are failing him and failing Black children, Black people and I didn’t need that spelled out for me, I just needed to see him lying on his side for minutes. And that’s kind of the power of McQueen’s directing/storytelling to me?

Another reason I really like Alex Wheatle - and the Small Axe anthology as a whole - is showcasing Black history in other countries

and it’s a great story about identity and figuring out your history, your roots, where you come from and how it informs you

3. 12 Years A Slave

I didn’t know if I was going to watch 12 Years A Slave or not, I kind of make it a point not to watch movies about enslavement now and I haven’t seen a movie about enslavement since (I did watch the show Underground though). What I love about this movie is how it examines the human condition, how it examines resilience, how it examines the soul, really, through many of the characters but particularly Solomon. It’s that unflinching portrayal of emotion and the present that really stuck out to me. And also again some of McQueen’s choices, like when they’re on the slave ship, for a lot of it we don’t see inside, we see the rudders

but that inspired such dread in me? We see the trees a lot.

We see the setting. We see the environment and that just adds a whole other layer, Lupita Nyong’o spoke about that when filming, about just thinking about the trees and what they witnessed. But I watched it, I didn’t cry until the third act then I wouldn’t stop crying then I pulled myself together and a week later, my roommate was playing it in her room and I could hear it and I was trying to write for workshop and it was just the score that I could hear and I got so emotional I had to ask her to put her earphones in so I could work.

4. Education

This installment of Small Axe was again an educational one for me (pun intended) because I know the ways in which the education system in my country and in my province and in my city fail Black children and I know enough about how that happens in the States, I didn’t know so much about how it happened in England and this was very illuminating for me without it taking on the tone of a docu. There is this scene that is just so uncomfortable to watch because it’s long and it’s boring and it’s irritating and that’s exactly what you’re supposed to feel because you’re supposed to feel exactly what the characters would feel in those moments:

Education also has a scene where we hear an entire song, but it’s deliberately not fun, when the teacher torments all the kids with his acoustic version of “House of the Rising Sun.” Why that song? That happened with me!

Oh my god. The teacher brought in his guitar, and he started to strum. We’re this captive audience. That was it. But it’s interesting, about that sequence. Because it’s funny, and then it gets irritating, and then you get bored. You have to go through boredom to get to the other side of it, and then you get to something else. And then there’s another understanding of it. So it had to play out that way, in real time.

and you know by the end, the movie explores how to engage children, how to encourage children, how to advocate for children and the different ways you can educate children so it’s an optimistic movie and I appreciated that

5. Widows

My second best experience at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) was watching Widows. TIFF screenings tend to be very quiet. But there’s a scene in Widows where after the protagonists (four women) do the work and get the money, Daniel Kaluuya watches them, holds them at gunpoint and takes the money, then leaves in his car. Then you’re with him in this car and he’s feeling good about himself and he’s laughing and he’s listening to this speech his brother makes then you see another car gain on him, run into him and it’s the protagonists and they take their money back and the entire theatre cheered and clapped and it was awesome. And that is the type of “girl power” scenes I like that aren’t “girl power” scenes? Where it’s just this man thought he could take what he wanted from these women and leave and they were like ummmmmmm?

I would say Widows is McQueen’s most commercial movie and it still doesn’t read very commercial and unfortunately Liam Neeson is in it but again I like the choices he made, I like that when Colin Farrell’s character is going on this racist rant in his car, we see the exterior of the car with his dialogue as a voiceover.

I like how controlled and tight the direction is and how throughout the movie I was on the edge of my seat in a different way, I was just tense until it was all over. It was also interesting watching his direction with Gillian Flynn’s screenplay interact with each other.

I had issues with this movie, mainly one moment which is when Alice, who is white, slaps Veronica (Viola Davis) -- Veronica slaps Alice first but Alice is a character who has been abused and who has been controlled by the men in her life, by her mother and she’s finding independence and so she exerts that by slapping Veronica back and I just thought there were other ways to show that.

6. Red, White and Blue

Another installment of Small Axe. My first husband stars in it and won a GG for it

and has this gem in it

It’s a good representation of what it looks like trying to right a system from the inside, since this is about Leroy Logan who became a police officer and ended up policing the neighbourhood he grew up in and how he was trying to be a positive change in the environment and in the police force and the racism he experienced as an officer

7. Mangrove

The first installment of Small Axe. To be quite honest I wanted to like Mangrove more than I did. It’s Steve McQueen so it’s a good movie, although the accents had some Trini people I know be like mmmmmmmmmmmmno, and again it’s also an educational movie because you learn about the Mangrove restaurant which was a Caribbean restaurant and hub for the community and for artists and authors and the police saw it as a threat so they constantly harassed the costumers and did raids and did everything in their power to shut it down.

And there are some great lines in this movie, I was most compelled when it became a courtroom drama, because that was some masterful directing

8. Shame

Shame was definitely uncomfortable for me to watch haha and it’s interesting because there were reviews that were like the title doesn’t match what we see because are we really expected to believe that the protagonist feels shame when we see him in New York having anonymous sex with [conventionally] attractive strangers and he has awkward moments with his sister and I was just like ............ if there’s anything McQueen is able to do is show how mechanical and compulsive Brandon’s sexual conquests are and his inability to actually connect because once he does he becomes impotent and pushes Marrianne away, his life is sterile and unfulfilling

so, I don’t know, some of the reviews had me like, what movie were you watching?

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aethelflaedladyofmercia · 4 years

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Alright, I’ve been saying I’m going to do some Masterposts for my 25 AO3 fics, so here we go...

For those who don’t know me, I write Acespec Ineffable Husbands, and my specialities are historical adventures, character studies, and gut-punching angst. My main series, Sawdust of Words (SoW) contains all of these in spades! Check the TW on anything rated T, as that usually indicates non-graphic violence, threats of violence and physical/emotional abuse.

Please select desired angst level:

I just want something warm and fluffy!

Finding the Words: G, 4509. Aziraphale has something he rather desperately wants to tell Crowley. Immediately after the Ritz. (SoW)

Blizzard! Broken Thermostat! Only One Bed!: G, 1438. It’s snowing — I mean BLIZZARDING — and Crowley has no choice but to pull over at a conveniently located luxury hotel. No choice! Will his cunning plan succeed?

Perception: G, 715. Crowley puzzles over one of the great mysteries of the universe: why isn’t EVERYONE in love with Aziraphale?

Reflections: G, 1229. Aziraphale’s simple question, Do you think I should change, hides a world of doubt. Fortunately, Crowley knows just what to say.

Quarantine: G, 554. Aziraphale and Crowley are quarantined in the bookshop! Wait...why? Half PSA, half clueless flirting!

I want some feels and a happy ending.

Early Days: G, 19,459. In the Beginning, an Angel and Demon met on the Wall of Eden. The next day they really started getting on each other’s nerves. See the very beginning of this relationship for the ages! (SoW)

Careful: G, 1664. For nearly 6,000 years, Aziraphale has been careful to control his actions, his feelings and his thoughts. Until Crowley makes a request that could destroy them both. Divergent AU starting with the fight at St James’s Park.

The Dark of Eden: G, 2980. On their last night in Eden, Aziraphale and Crowley walk together trough the Garden, each reflecting on what he’s lost. But perhaps there is something they have gained. Intended to be fluff, came out sort of melancholy. Direct follow-up to Early Days (SoW)

Sealed: G, 5835. London, Three weeks after the Apocalypse: Crowley finds a certain document tucked away in a forgotten book. / Mercia, 1020 CE: An angel and a demon meet to finalize an Arrangement... (SoW)

Reckless: G, 6303. After Aziraphale's reckless confession, he and Crowley must make plans to keep themselves safe. But the worst happens when certain uninvited guests arrive at the bookshop... Sequel to Careful, one more part expected.

Mystery Science Theater 6000: The 1992 Screenplay: G, 8528. An angel and a demon sit down to watch (and mock, and analyze) a movie that probably shouldn’t exist. A little heavier on the feels than originally anticipated. (Only covers the first 30 pages of the Screenplay, so there may be another chapter or 3 in order.)

Of Poetry and Valentines: G, 3435. Crowley can’t stand what Valentine’s Day has become. If he has to look at one more heart-shaped cake, he’s going to be sick. But it wasn’t always that way. Guess which holiday this was written for!

Our Side: G, 1172. After the end, on the bus ride home, Aziraphale despairs. But Crowley shares a new dream... A ButterOmens fic started by @sani-86!

Anniversaries: G, 2422. Just over a year after the apocalypse didn’t happen, Aziraphale and Crowley’s picnic is interrupted by an old enemy. A ButterOmens fic started by @n0nb1narydemon!

A Cunning Plan: G, 11,275. Two angels and two demons decide to get their revenge on the traitors. But holding Aziraphale captive turns out to be harder than expected. Can they break through his defenses before Crowley mounts a successful rescue? ButterOmens fic begun by @kaz3313!

I want LOTS of angsty feels! (Note: endings range from happy to hopeful)

Give Them Hell: G, 1179 words. After the Apocalypse, Aziraphale and Crowley discuss plans for their upcoming trials... (SoW)

Someplace You Belong: G, 5326. London, 1800, Aziraphale finds he must come to terms with the unexpected emotions of his near-promotion. With gentle prodding from Crowley, he reveals a secret. Something of a follow-up to Obedience, but you will likely still feel sad! (SoW)

In Love with My Car: G, 3287. London, 1933, After 70 years of naps, Crowley meets someone who just might change his life. It’s the Bentley! (SoW) Also has a podfic by @exmarks

What it Means to Be A Demon: T, 32,284. Mesopotamia, c. 2400 BC. After an especially harrowing trip to Hell, Crawley arrives in a tiny Mesopotamian village, where he encounters a familiar face. But Aziraphale soon realizes Crawley isn't acting like his old self. Between his foul mood, his mysterious injuries, and his refusal to talk, the demon is certainly hiding something. What has brought Crawley to Gu'Edena? And is there anything Aziraphale can do? So many TWs — please tread carefully! (SoW)

Boundless Love: G, 54,200 (some chapters approach a T rating). 17 stories of Aziraphale and Crowley, 17 chances to fall in love. Written for @drawlight’s Advent Challenge. (Note: these stories are thematically connected, but they are separate stories, not a single plot.)

Aziraphale’s Path: G, 524. Many years later, Heaven and Hell come for them. Aziraphale returns home too late. Is Crowley gone forever? Part of a ButterOmens chain started by @holycatsandrabbits — links are in the fic!

Never Alone Again: G, 9577. They're on their own side now. But they aren't free yet. After the Apocalypse, Aziraphale and Crowley risk everything in one final, desperate gamble to break free of their old sides and truly start their life together. Bus Ride, Body Swap and Trials, overlaps Give Them Hell and ends just before Finding the Words. (SoW)

Kindly rip out my still-beating heart.

Obedience: T, 1797. Before Eden, before the Fall, there was a War in Heaven. Somewhere amongst the eternal fighting on the endless battlefield, one angel learns the consequences of disobeying an order. This one is an absolute gut punch you have been warned. (SoW)

Three Little Words: G, 3361. London, 1849, Crowley has something he rather desperately wants to tell Aziraphale. But there are some things a demon can never say. Sad ending! But only because this is part of a larger series! It’s going to be ok! (SoW)

Claimed: T, 4182. A dinner of crepes. An angel who's ready to talk. But Crowley's evening is interrupted by the arrival of two demons. And they're not here to deliver a rude note. Made for @whiteleyfoster’s contest. Downer ending, though this one may get another chapter or two in the future to mitigate that.

—

Please feel free to save/reblog to help spread the word!

#good omens #ineffable husbands #good omens fanfiction #master list #masterpost #aziraphale #crowley #good omens prime #my writing #sawdust of words #ao3 fic #ao3 link #sorted by angst level #asexual ineffable husbands #ace omens

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stevesharrlngtons · 4 years

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Hello!!! please let us know if it is worth watching Battlecreek because I am ready for Henry but I may not be ready for the rest of whatever goes on and need your review 😂💗

ok! writing this as the credits roll lmao. this will have no spoilers, cross my heart. also, this is just my opinion, so pls take with a grain of salt.

overall? it wasn’t the worst movie i have ever seen, but it wasn’t good. it was chalk full of stereotypes and overused tropes, which i don’t mind when done right but like, they weren’t done right here so --

allison (the female lead) and henry have very little romantic chemistry. a lot of the movie seems very forced/unrealistic bc of this. i feel like this movie would have been better if they were siblings or friends? idk. forced hetero romance makes me sigh lmao. allison could have been a really well developed and nuanced character had the writing and pacing of this movie been better, which is disappointing. to me, she (and sadly all of the characters) were very one dimensional.

the southern accents in this movie, goddamn, some were so just bad... again, lay on the southern stereotypes and tropes!

every character, with the slight exception of henry, is a character you’ve seen a million times before and just done worse here. the message/plot -- same thing (felt very fake deep). the dialogue for the most part is mediocre and at some points cringe, i said this in my original post, but it reads like very melodramatic fanfic dialogue. for me, the big selling point in a drama like this, is strong character connections (good or bad) and well written dialogue to move the audience and bring on emotion, and we get neither in this film (beside the relationship between henry and arthur) there were points in the movie were i felt baffled that someone read this screenplay and decided to buy it and then make it. though, it is just a run of the mill romantic drama, so i guess it makes sense, its commercial. but it felt like a knock off nicholas sparks movie.

i did feel like if the three main characters (henry, tallulah, allison) had been given better dialogue, directing and pacing, this movie could have been a lot better. like the premise is basic, but all three actors are talented so i know they would have really relished in being able to stretch their legs in these roles, if the writing had been better and their characters had not been half baked.

second to last thing, again with no spoilers, but WHAT THE FUCK is the last fifteen minutes of this movie??? it felt like the beginning to a totally different movie, or the ending to a movie i certainly didn’t just watch??? and like it’s just forgotten, immediately??? just... not good, anyways...

last thing: mr. henry pearl, the real reason for this ask and not my very poor movie review. he is adorable, so fucking cute, i probably said “he’s so cute!” out loud a million different times watching this movie (thank god no one was home lol). not bill’s best performance (writing was bad im a broken record lol), but he is a good actor so he still does a good job! he is a very kind, gentlemanly man who loves to paint and read and loves poetry like???? how can i not love???? 10/10 would love and cherish forever.

tldr: would i watch this movie again? no. if i want more henry, i’ll probably just youtube clips rather than watch this movie again. should you watch this movie? only if you’re bored or really want to. like i said, it’s not terrible, but it's pretty meh. if you don’t feel like watching 90 minutes of this just for cute soft baby henry, i’d just head to youtube and watch clips there. but, if you do watch it, it’s fun to just talk about loud at the screen and laugh at your own jokes.

i feel bad that i sorta just ripped this movie a new one bc like it said, not the worst thing in the world! just not for me. if you want my thoughts with spoilers, i’ll do another post lol

#answered

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drivingsideways · 4 years

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I LOVE YOUR WORK! For meta asks, 4, 17, 24 please?

Hello, hello fair demon, thanks for being so kind and also asking questions that I have no satisfactory answers for, oooops.

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

This was actually part of a Black Sails tumblr ficlet I wrote once, and it suddenly came to mind when I saw this question, so, top-of-mind reply:

The first time James undresses entirely in front of Miranda, he feels awkward, ungraceful. Here, in her bedroom, where every object seems carefully chosen and precisely placed- each painting and statuette, the delirious yellow bloom of roses that fill the deep blue-and-white vase by the bed-even the books that- on first glance- seem carelessly scattered, even those seem part of a design, at the heart of which is Miranda. Miranda, with her wicked smiles and soft, sure, hands; her eyes, so warm and full of mischief- eyes that are laughing (a little) at him, as he stands there, bare-I don’t belong here, he thinks, almost overcome by an urge to run-hands clutching his shirt- the finest one he owns that feels, in this elegant place-common-

-but Miranda is right in front of him (when had she moved from the bed?) and her hands are moving over his, gently-gently!-prising his fist open-and her eyes aren’t laughing anymore as she takes his hand and places an open mouthed kiss on his roughened palm, before placing it on her breast-

-the bed is silk and cool against his skin that has become a conflagration in the wake of her questing hands that wander every inch of it; asking, taking-an unremarkable geography turned into something wondrous, as she tells him how she wants him, and arranges him into the precise shape of her needs; finds a place for him in her room of beautiful things, unerring in this, as always.

7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

Overlong sentences, too many em-dashes and parentheses, or more recently, semi-colons, either too subtle or too on-the-nose and nothing in between.

Uh.

Ok, gosh. So I know you had, Thoughts ™ about me calling my prose workman like, but basically I think that does fit my writing the most. I'm often writing on sheer instinct, feeling my way through the story. I think I remember telling you once that I write to find out what I feel? Yeah, so, given that, and idk, that I tend to write shippy things, I do think my writing style is quite- emotional? Evocative? But not literary or lyrical about it, which is often frustrating to me, because somewhere in my head, I want to write poetry (which is my favourite form of literature), all the time.

But I also think that years of watching tv/movies has basically overwritten a bit of the wiring in my brain, so I often find myself writing a scene the way one should, perhaps, write a screenplay. This is also a bit frustrating to me!

I don't know what other people would think, I'm constantly surprised by the kind and generous things they say about my writing. 😊

24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?

Oh yes! For starters, I used to write mostly non-fiction or poetry, and have found myself writing fiction with any degree of commitment only in the last few years? (Thanks a lot Netflix, for putting The Rise of Phoenixes in my eyeballs!) But honestly, the things I'm interested in now, politically, personally, are different from what I was in, say, my twenties and early thirties, so that is reflected, one way or the other in my writing. I also hope I'm getting better at the actual craft, the more I write, though I suppose I'm still writing mostly by instinct and with zero training for it, outside of high school education. 😊

#rain-hat #writing ask

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euphoriecs · 5 years

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11/11/11 tag !!!

thank u sm for tagging me @yikescomma, @buckaroowrites nd @yikeskimi !!!

rules: answer 11 questions, write your own 11, tag 11 people !

under the cut bc its a Lotta questions KSKSKSHK

yikescomma’s questions!!

1. what’s your favourite place to write?

oh this is ?? kind of a tough one bc i feel like i never Branched out in my spaces when it comes 2 being productive,, like a lot of my work is done in my bedroom just bc my desk is there and it’s the most convenient,,,, honestly im jus gonna say my favorite place to write would be from . my desk . bc it faces the window :-)

2. which character(s) from your wip(s) is your favourite?

since i only have wtsf confidently worked out ,, i’ll use those ocs !! but i think , quite Honestlie ,,, that wendy is my favorite character !! im rly in love with how she progresses as a person nd also she’s jsut . she gets it u know .

3. what are some inspirations for your wip(s)?

I TALKED ABT THIS BEFORE but b/ts’ hyyh series, my neighborhood, spring day by b/ts are a few inspirations for wtsf !!!

4. how did you start writing?

my dad got me hooked on reading when i was really really young !! and being able to read abt all these huge worlds nd being given an opportunity 2 fall in love w them rly inspired me to want to write worlds of my own . plus , i watch a lot of different shows nd animes that feed into my daydreams nd sometimes im like ‘yo,,, that was a good daydream,,,,, time 2 story it’ .

5. which of your ocs is most difficult to write?

uHGHHGHGS ARTHUR ...... trying to capture this like . enigmatic feeling while keeping close 2 his reasons for acting That way is actually ,, rly hard?? hes a tough cookie 2 crack but i will crack it .

6. what aesthetic do you associate with your wip(s)?

for wtsf ,,, quiet towns , lonely beaches , sunset nd sunrise ,,, running through the streets ??

7. do you like planning?

YEA !! i see it more as like . being able to explore ur wip and what directions it can take nd its also jsut rly helpful to have a solid foundation .

8. what is your favourite quote from your wip(s)?

i pulled this from my drabbles but: “Slow down.” Wendy grabbed Arthur’s wrist, pulling him down to sit on the sand. “This world can’t keep up with you.”

9. do you like to listen to music while you write?

yes and no ?? im very particular to the kind of music im listening to nd more often than not, i write in complete silence ,,, but sometimes i’ll find a song that i feel rly fits the vibe of what im writing nd i just put it on repeat HGSHJK

10. what do you like most about your own writing?

i think i like the descriptive aspects of it ?? like how i describe places nd feelings ,,,, :-) !

11. what are/were/would be your ocs favourite subjects in school?

everyone except piper in wtsf is graduated from high school but ,, wendy liked english class the best bc it was fun nd she got good grades !! rafael definitely loved psychology nd took it at an ap level ,, arthur liked math nd chemistry .. chemistry he liked More bc he got 2 blow stuff up SKKSKSEH and piper likes world history!! tho shes not good at it . but she likes it!!

buckaroowrites’ questions!!

what is your favorite subgenre to write? to read?

i lov urban fantasy and low fantasy JGHDSHGJKS like its my favorite to write nd read bc like .. o heck ?? ghosts nd ghouls nd just overall supernatural stuff irl ?? that’s the way 2 go

if you had to be trapped on a desert island with any of your ocs, who would it be and why?

if i had 2 be trapped on a desert island ...... i’d probably choose rafael . honestlie he just seems like he always knows what’s up nd my chances of survival would increase w him JHGJKSJKS

what is your favorite medium to write?

definitely novels !! its a format i’ve pretty much grown up w and im more comfortable w this medium than any others GHSHJKS but i’d love to explore like ,, screenplays nd see where that takes me

who was your first oc?

HYLLY SHITTTT THIS BRINGS ME BACK SJHJHJGJKS i used to draw a lot back when i was younger nd so i had this oc JHJS his name was ian and he was meant for the maximum ride universe but he was a dumb dude who was 2% cat . nd he had an adopted sister ,, i forgot her name but she was part bird .

what was your first wip about?

world end club is supposed 2 be abt a group of teens who work together 2 take down a corporation that wants 2 essentially control the artificial island they live on thru engineered soldiers . ITS A CONCEPT ,, nd it requires a little Too Much for my one brain cell to think abt

thoughts on shakespeare?

uhhh no thots bc i never read his work in high school i jus know macbeth is cursed .... wow i rly dont know anything abt shakespeare huh .

poetry or prose?

o this is TOUGH i rly adore both .......... im gonna . im gonna go w prose . i lvoe poetry so much sometimes there are lines that just rly fucken punch u in the face but im gonna go w prose bc its familiar !!

would you ever co-write a story?

nO ..... i wouldnt b able 2 compromise i’d jus b like oH ACTUALLY SKSKKS MY IDEA’S DUMB LETS JUST DO URS

write what you want to write or write what you want to read/watch?

oh . fuc .... i feel like its important to have a good balance of both but . honestlie im very partial to what i want to read/watch ..

do you like to write violence?

i dont Like 2 write it but its In My Wips !

what is your favorite trope?

oH ,, probably ‘fire forged friends’ or like . mutual pining ... i have too many favorite tropes nd somehow im gonna incorporate them all .

yikeskimi’s questions!!

Tell us about the main character(s) in your current WIP!

oKAY SO im gonna try to not make this too long SJKHJGS !! wendy is a very like . prickly character . shes like a cactus . nd she’s not too fond of letting ppl get close, but the ppl who do manage to get close to her are happie 2 learn she would actually die for them . loyalty is a Huge Huge part of her character, and she cares very deeply abt the people she calls family . shes also v sarcastic nd like . ‘open ur eyes dummy’ .

arthur is a kind of person who lives heavily on false pretenses . like he projects this image bc its an image that he can control nd he jsut Rolls w it , but hes actually someone who likes 2 tease his friends nd be friendly to them ,, hes got Issuez nd is very much the type of person to be like ‘o lol im ok :-)...’ nd prioritize the needs of others

rafael is , in all honesty , just babey . he studied a lot during high school nd rly pushed himself beyond his limits bc he wants to be able 2 go 2 a good college on scholarship nd get a job 2 support his family , nd hes just ?? very responsible nd sweet but that can also manifest into him taking on more than he should nd burning out .

piper is a very ,, honestlie kinda sad character kjHGJSJ she spends a lot of time just trying 2 appeal to other ppl bc she knows her interest in the supernatural make her a ‘weird’ person nd she wants to be able 2 have real friends ,, but when she learns 2 let go of this she’s very silly nd always making jokes During The Right time ..

Do you have an all time favorite OC? Tell us about them!

hMMMM i dont think i do ??? my memory of my ocs is rly bad JHSJ so more often than not i just ,, rip i dont remember them </3

If you could be best friends with one of your OCs, who would it be and why?

ms piper chaiyathan !!!! shes a very open nd kind individual nd i feel like our humor nd joking style would match V v v well !!!

Last line you’ve written in your WIP?

Wendy, unlike her brothers Adam and Nate, had inherited her father’s rough touch, and that made them both unwanted in the high stakes setting of a diner kitchen.

If you have a chosen title for your WIP, were there any titles you considered before it? And if not, what are some titles you’re thinking of?

when the sun falls went through SO many titles nd i actually have them all here: where the sun goes / fever dreams / above the sun / where the sun follows / the drowned sun ... as u can see the sun was smth i Needed .

What is an important element in the world your WIP takes place in?

uHHHH the supernatural element is . Very important but i cant be too specific about it but i will tell u it involves a dead tree on the beach .

Tell us an out of context spoiler.

arthur gets a cool new set of eyes.

Any power couples/ships in your WIP?

wendy nd arthur babey ,,,,,, bat nd molotov cocktail duo ,,,, last name central until the important moment nd THEN they use each other’s first names ..

Any music you like listening to while you write?

uHHHH specifically for wtsf i listen 2 a lot of hozier, lorde, conan gray, khalid nd halsey :-)

What would your main character(s) favorite song be?

oH okay i got this in the BAG ... wendy’s favorite song would Absolutely be work place by hozier or more than sorrow by a-lin ,,, arthur would definitely b listening 2 like . free spirit by khalid .. piper, since she p much spent all of middle school nd 2 years of high school in thailand ,, i think she’

Which character in your WIP could you relate to the most?

honestly? all of them !!! a lot of the characters in wtsf have little bits nd pieces of me bc thats how all my ocs come into existence nd theres no One character thats like “oh,,, das me”

and here are my 11 questions !!

Which one of your OCs do you think could survive a zombie apocalypse? Why?

What’s something you’ve been itching to write about?

Share the last paragraph you wrote!

Do you prefer coming up with plots or characters? Why?

Do you have any abandoned WIPs? Tell us about them!

What are some favorite themes/tropes to write about?

How do you get into the zone for writing?

Tell us a random fact for any of your OCs !!!

Are you someone who needs a visual for your WIPs?

What are some influences to your writing style?

If you had to be a character in one of your WIPs, which WIP would it be and what role would you play?

i’m gonna tag @babyreeds @holotones @alejandroistyping @noloumna @faerisms @omniawrites @aslanwrites @ashesconstellation @thegrievingyoung @glittcrpeach @syposium !!! no pressure to do it if u dont want to tho <3

#tag game.#AAA this was fun :-) !!!

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unbearablylight · 5 years

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11/11/11 Tag

i thought these had died out tbh, but hello @synwrites thanks for ze tag and ze questions

1. If you want to be a published author, what are you doing towards that aim?

i mean i have self-published before, but rn it’s not like my main focus since i’d prefer to write for tv/film. but mostly i’d just like my will to write to return from the war

2. How many books have you read in 2019?

o..one? a half of one?? my reading has been bad this year

3. Do you track how many words you write? If so, what are your metrics for the year? For longer than this year?

screenplays/tv scripts track pages over words, so i have no idea how many actual words i’ve written this year whoops

4. Who is your favourite writeblr blog?

oh man oh man i mean i’m friends with quite a few but looking at this just at a writeblr angle i adore @reeseweston @noloumna @pinespittinink @lilquill (although i’m not sure that’s sakshi’s actual writeblr but i could just be confused and thinking of someone else with a separate writeblr and either way sakshi is cool so worth a follow)

and there’s probably many more that i’m forgetting lmao

5. What is something about writeblr that you don’t like?

engagement rates lol but i’m just as guilty as anyone else so i can’t really complain about it

but like i wish reblogging was the hot thing to do again

6. Do you change your writing style, or are you consistent in how you write?

i tend to change style to fit whatever i’m writing. there’s probably, almost definitely stuff that carries over, but i like the style to reflect the work and complement it

7. Do you like writing by hand? How many notebooks do you have?

i only like writing poetry by hand but i rarely do it, but i have like two small notebooks/journals that i use

8. What is your favourite dinosaur?

i honestly have never considered this but my first thought was brontosaurus because i like a long-necked boi

9. Do you like time travel plots in media?

look i’m still a slut for doctor who, so yeah

i also wrote a screenplay that was based around time travel

depending on how it’s done, it can be so fun

10. Which character, in any media format, completely infuriates you?

ok i couldn’t think of a specific like archetype, but any female character that’s one-dimensional is usually gonna make me mad especially if you can tell that they’re just there to be a bitch/mean girl with no depth or if they’re just like bland and wasted potential (and they’re like..... the only women.....)

or also a bad man in power who just keeps getting away with doing shit because the writers are too lazy to think of a better plot (looking at you veronica’s dad in riverdale. actually i’m just looking at everyone in riverdale. why do they all suck.)

11. Have you ever pranked someone? What was it?

i don’t think i have? i’m not really good at pranks lol

i am too lazy to do the rest of this as always! whoops! plus davy tagged a lot of people in his so i’m just gonna let it go

#tagged #tag games #thanks davy

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sundaynightnovels · 6 years

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11/11/11

i was tagged by the lovely @aslanwrites, who has just undergone a name change which confused me a LOT because i was like... who is this person.. with that familiar icon... what happened to quiescentwriting????????? but my slow mind caught up and yea!! thanks for remembering me even with your new identity hahahha and thanks for tagging me in this!! <3

Rules: Answer 11 Questions, Ask Eleven Questions, Tag Eleven People!

Why did you start writing? I honestly don’t remember. i’ve just been writing since young... and it might have to do with reading books, i really don’t know. but when i was younger my sis and i used to play with our stuffed toys and we created this entire world surrounding the 6 of them (used to be 4 but we added 2 to the gang), including an entire class of 22 people with names, distinct personalities and relationships, and also multiple AUs such as a superpower one and a living-together one, which was really fun. so yea i guess i’ve been creating stories since young!

What writing advice do you adhere to? i actually don’t adhere to writing advice HAHA i’m a rebel . okay kidding aside, i really don’t refer to them or read them at all, like i’m not really bothered with advice. i just want to do what i wanna do, yknow?? i guess the only advice that i know and follow is to not read back on what you’ve already written. i think i’ve quoted that a lot of times before HAHAHA but yea, that’s really the only one.

What writing advice do you disagree with? refer to above hahaha i can’t really disagree with anything when i really don’t know anything!! ( i mean, of course i can if i want to be an ass but yknow, i’m not. well, not all the time)

Do you think “Said” is dead? nah. i use ‘said’ all the time. sometimes you just need it yknow? it’s like an old best friend that you’re so used to, you don’t even notice its presence in your life but you need it like you need air. you can pry my best friend away from my cold dead hands!!

Favorite drink when writing? i mainly drink water. i don’t really drink anything else. ooo ~~healthy ~~~ nah i’m really not i just like water.

What’s your favorite app to write on? Or do you prefer notebooks? i write mainly on MS word, which i know ain’t the best but i’m used to it and my OLD LIMBS WILL NOT TAKE ANY OTHER ok jk i am up for other options but it’s working fine for me now, so i don’t feel the need to change. i write sometimes on notebooks when i’m really stuck, or i just feel like writing something by hand, but that’s rarely, usually when i’m overseas without my laptop or bored to death at work.

Who or what is your biggest inspiration? other creators i guess, and not just authors but also filmmakers or musicians or whatever. right now i just want to be like taika waititi, yknow. i just wanna do what i want to do and what i have fun doing and maybe eventually others can jump onboard and enjoy my work with me!

What do you wish writers would do more of? PLATONIC RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MAIN CHARACTERS!!! i mean, i love romance as much as the next person, but it always seem like the main characters always end up in a romantic relationship with each other when sometimes they are a lot better as friends. another of my wip (the only other wip i have with first drafts written... since years ago) has three main characters who remain in platonic relationships with one another throughout, and while retrospectively i could see how some might ship certain characters together, i really liked that i kept them as purely friends and it worked so much better and idk, i just feel like a lot of times when you see main characters it’s like an immediate, oh they are gonna get together, and yknow, that doesn’t always have to be the case.

What do you wish writers would do less of? uhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i don’t really know right now. hmmmmm.

What turns you away from a story? well. unnecessary plot twists. like, sometimes it’s okay for a story to be predictable and for readers to expect what is happening, because that just means the story makes sense and whatever’s happening is coherent with what happened in the past, yknow???? and sometimes i feel like people stress too much about being unexpected and subverting expectations and wanting to surprise readers that... they throw too many plot twists into a story until it doesn’t make sense, until the flow is disrupted and it ruins the story as a whole. being predictable is not a bad thing!!!!!! and vice versa, shock value isn’t inherently good for your story!

Thoughts on the whole “Mary Sue” topic? ah. well, i don’t like them, but that’s mainly because mary sue’s are so flat as characters that i don’t think any story will happen around them, yknow what i mean? like if they’re so perfect and can do no wrong, there’s not much conflict to be had and the story won’t be as strong. also, i just don’t think they’re particularly realistic or relatable characters, they’re mostly self-indulgent... which is not a bad thing (my whole damn wip is self-indulgent tbh), it’s just... they’re not particularly entertaining to read about either.

OKAY i am tagging: @cawolters @kidsarentallwrite @focusdumbass @inexorableblob @insearchof-solace @kaigods @nyxnevin @inkpot-dreamer @elusiveink @usuallydecentwriter @purplepenblog && anyone else who wants to do this! my 11 questions are:

What is your favourite type of character to write (in terms of trait, personality, trope, or just basically what you find yourself writing the most)?

What kind of a writer do you aspire to be?

What kind of book do you really want to write, and why have you not written it yet?

What is the one thing you like best about your own writing?

What is the one thing you want to improve most about your writing?

Do you write things other than conventional novels (e.g. poetry, screenplays, non-fiction)? If no, do you wish to venture out into other forms of writing?

Do you let the people around you read your writing? At which stage do you let them read it (outline, first draft, polished piece)? Why or why not?

What aspects do you like best about writing in general?

Do you tend to stick to what you know when writing, or do you like to write about things outside of your real life?

What do you think about plot twists?

What do you want to see more of in the publishing industry in general? Why?

(had to include that second last one HAHAHA) alright!! hope y’all enjoy answering these questions!!

#writing tag #writeblr #writers on tumblr #personal

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thortunes · 7 years

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I’m gonna deconstruct this scene because I’ve been thinking about it ALL DAY and what the hell, I’ve got time. This clip demonstrates what I love most about Taika Waititi’s filmmaking and it shows off Chris and Tom’s chemistry in the fiercest way. It’s hilarious, sweet, bittersweet, surprising, and poignant.

1) “Loki, I thought the world of you.”

Even though there was an instinctive part of me that screamed, “OK, WELL, YOUR ACTIONS TOLD A DIFFERENT STORY, THOR” due to residual bitterness over what a dickbag Thor was in the first film, I’m 1,000% here for this line. I’m proud of how much Thor has matured, thrilled that these two are actually talking to each other, and happy that Loki’s hearing something he’s probably always wanted/needed to hear even though it’s bittersweet because Thor’s using the past tense.

Tom’s reaction here is SO GOOD. Just the tiniest shift in his eyebrows to indicate that Thor has Loki’s attention and he’s fucking locked in and hanging on to every word.

2) “I thought we were gonna fight side by side forever, but at the end of the day you’re you and I’m me.”

I know there was a minor (?) uproar over Chris’ comments that Thor will be “indifferent” to Loki in Ragnarok, but this scene seems to suggest a kind of acceptance rather than indifference. Maybe for the first time, Thor truly seems to have accepted that he and Loki are fundamentally different beings--and by extension, he’s accepting Loki’s nature. Yes, part of that acceptance means letting go and moving on (note: I did not say giving up) and that’s sad, but realistic I think. How many fakeout deaths and stabbings can a person be expected to withstand? “You’re you” is a significant break in pattern for Thor and Loki appears genuinely taken aback by it.

“You’re you” is a huge deal because to me, the brothers’ central conflict has always boiled down to the fact that Loki isn’t Thor (thanks, Odin, for exacerbating this tension). For Loki, that fact is a source of self-loathing and resentment, something that he can act out against and, as Tom has often said, define himself in opposition to.

By the same token I think it’s become clearer that what Loki thinks of Thor matters to Thor. For an older sibling, having a younger sibling who looks up to you and wants to be like you is perhaps one of the biggest indicators that you’re a good--dare I say worthy--person. Ever since Loki let go of Gungnir Thor has struggled to make sense of Loki’s rejection, to define himself without the security of having his brother by his side. With that in mind I’ve always seen Thor’s past attempts to bring Loki back to the “good” side as heartfelt and genuine, but also somewhat ego-driven and shortsighted because it came at the expense of Loki’s autonomy and self-identification.

Cut to now. By acknowledging that he and Loki are each their own person, Thor’s relieving Loki of the pressure and expectation to be anyone other than himself. In a way that’s a gift, but it’s also terribly sad because it’s accompanied by loss for both of them. Which brings me to:

3) “I dunno, maybe there’s still good in you but let’s be honest: our paths diverged a long time ago.”

It’s in this moment that Loki really seems to realize where this conversation is headed. And he doesn’t like it.

We know Loki lives to test Thor. It’s his (super dysfunctional and unhealthy) way of making sure Thor still cares about him. In The Dark World, Loki tests Thor’s assertions that he doesn’t trust him and has lost hope for him by ... getting himself impaled. Yeah, “dying” was also his “get out of jail free, usurp the throne” card, but it’s not insignificant that he calls Thor’s bluff in the process.

4) “Yeah. It’s probably for the best that we never see each other again.”

Speaking of calling Thor’s bluff, I think Loki--because he’s a smart little fucker--says this in order to get ahead of the conversation. He knows what’s coming, so he pulls the classic “I’ll reject you before you reject me” move. But I don’t think he means it. It’s more likely that he’s trying to balance the scales so he’s not on the utter losing side of this conversation. And honestly? Deep down I doubt he can bear to hear Thor say it and by proactively agreeing with him he’s holding out hope that Thor will pull a “JK!” and change his mind.

5) “That’s what you always wanted.”

OMG THOR HAS GOTTEN SO SMART. I mean, I guess it’s within the realm of possibility that Thor is still really dumb about Loki’s feelings/motivations, but personally it’s more fun and satisfying to think he sees Loki’s test and raises him an even bigger one.

Loki’s face is so sad-funny. His plan backfired, he’s panicking a little, but he’s got to save face and play it cool, and he’s also legit sad because he knows this outcome is the culmination of his past actions and he did his part in paving this road for both of them. And at the end of the day he’s still the younger brother who doesn’t want to appear weak, so he’s doing his best to match Thor’s tone and attitude.

The moment when Loki lifts his chin and gives a little nod is a dead giveaway; never seeing Thor again is the opposite of what he wants, but he’s prepared to accept that it’s too late for anything else. It’s SO far from an apology, but for Loki it’s about the most mature thing we’ve seen him do.

The fact that for once they’re not arguing with each other is what made me tear up. It’s like they both know they should’ve had this conversation years ago, when it could have made all the difference, but at the same time they know that moment has passed. THIS IS FUCKING TRAGIC.

(If I wrote this movie, this would be the moment where they both dissolve into tears, fall on the floor, and cry-hug it out, which is why I write poetry and not screenplays.)

6) “Hey, let’s do Get Help.”

This was the beginning of the death of me, I will never be the same. I laughed so hard. On the surface this whole exchange may seem like just a gag--and it IS funny as hell--but I feel like it’s working on so many levels and reveals something deeper about Thor and Loki’s bond.

First of all, if you’re me, everything that preceded this moment was really uncomfortable and sad and almost unbearable to witness so I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that Thor and Loki were feeling some of that too.

What I love about this transition is that Thor immediately cuts through the tension, probably to put both of them at ease and bring them back into the more familiar territory of their rapid-fire banter. Loki seems a bit surprised but relieved.

IMO, this brief exchange of dialogue does more to convey Loki and Thor’s bond and establish their history than anything we’ve been shown in the previous films (not counting that deleted scene from the first movie). I thought it was really poignant to see them revert to/rely upon something from their distant past. You can tell this is an argument they’ve had a zillion times before. You can tell from the stunt itself that it’s something they’ve had many opportunities to perfect.

Even though Loki is reluctant to participate, he does, because he still craves inclusion and acceptance. Even though Thor is no longer quite as overbearing and arrogant as he once was, he regresses into that role so that he can get his younger brother back for just a moment. It’s like they’re consoling themselves without admitting that they want to be consoled. And yeah, on a practical note they also need to find a way off of Sakaar.

In conclusion, they’ve both just conceded that their relationship has reached an impasse with no real way forward, yet in the immediate aftermath of this supposed acceptance they choose to revert to an older dynamic that reflects presumably happier times. They don’t want to quit each other. This is fine. It’s fine. I’m not crying. I love them. The end.

I’m deep in my feels right now and probably projecting a lot (HI, HELLO, I HAVE A TROUBLED YOUNGER BROTHER, I’VE NEVER USED HIM AS A PROJECTILE BUT I UNDERSTAND THE IMPULSE), but even without having seen this scene in the full context of the film, it’s my favorite Thor/Loki moment to date. It’s what I’ve always wanted. It actually brings “We were raised together, we played together, we fought together” to life in a meaningful way, whereas in The Avengers I felt like those were just words.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

#loki #thor #thor ragnarok #headcanon #i'm on antibiotics and steroids #word vomit #taika waititi

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smallpressdistribution · 6 years

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Wazzzzzap internet. Feast your eyes and your shelves on May’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles from the 90's that continue to rock our world. boo-ya.

Scrunchies, Beverly Hills 90210, Ryan Gosling’s long hair, Xena, The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan, all those Bagel Bites commericals...just a small glimpse into humanity's greatest feats. It's not a coincidence that all these feats took place in the 90's either. That's because the 90's were great. It only makes sense that literature in the 90's was great too.

So hold tight to your Tamagotchi, Furby, or Beanie Baby collection: The 90's are back in the form of 10 awesome SPD backlist titles. These titles will leave you glowing brighter than any glow-in-the-dark star on your bedroom ceiling ever could. feat. New Star Books, Talisman House, Publishers, Kelsey Street Press, & more!

1. Debbie: An Epic by Lisa Robertson (New Star Books, 1997)

Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. As arresting as the cover image, Robertson's strong, confident voice echoes a wide range of influences from Virgil to Edith Sitwell, yet remains unique and utterly unmistakable for that of any other writer. Brainy, witty, sensual, demonstrating a commanding grasp of language and rhetoric, Debbie: An Epic is nevertheless inviting and easy to read, even fun. Its eponymous heroine will annihilate your preconceptions about poetry - and about the name "Debbie."

2. The Tower of Babel by Jack Spicer (Talisman House, Publishers, 1994)

An established writer from an Eastern college returning to his former San Francisco haunts becomes entangled in a labyrinthine series of events that culminate in the sudden violent death of a respected poet. Described by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian as "a satiric look at the private world of poetry gone public in the wake of the Six Gallery HOWL reading of October, 1955," The Tower of Babel includes finely detailed sketches of the San Francisco poetry world and gay life as they existed then.

3. Four Year Old Girl by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (Kelsey Street Press, 1998)

In this extraordinary new collection of poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, writing reflects human presence in the phenomenal world. Physical sensations of experience—a horizon, moisture, a child, a piece of quartz, a loss—become objects of focus and poetic elements. Her written lines, like strings of protein, both create and destroy bonds. Reading affords moments of exquisite vulnerability in which the perceived world is suddenly exposed to the quick. The pace of everday life slips into that of a waking dream. Winner of the 1998 Western States Book Award.

4. Brooklyn Bridge by Leslie Kaplan (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 1992)

This is the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan's haunting novel about the meaning of childhood and the mysteriously intimate interworkings of child and adult. Here four adults and a child come together in a chance meeting in New York's Central Park, where the child's presence is a question to all of them. The novel pursues the erotic complexity of their various relationships with a special focus on the disturbing interaction between Julien and the child Nathalie. Woven through the affecting depictions of human characters, is the extraordinary depiction of the city, its tensions, its unexpected necessities, its urgencies. Written in a rhythm as electric as its setting, Brooklyn Bridge is a novel for the questioning child in us all.

5. WHATSAID Serif by Nathaniel Mackey (City Lights Publishers, 1998)

Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, WHATSAID Serif, is comprised of installments 16 through 35 of Song of the Andoumboulou, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in his two previous books, Eroding Witness and School of Udhra. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and lived apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kalapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology are "a rough draft of human being," that "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft." The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself.

6. Another Smashed Pinecone by Bernadette Mayer (United Artists Books, 1998)

"It's OK that poetry won't save us from circumstance, or pave our road to what we're tempted to call Heaven, but it doesn't matter—because reading Bernadette Mayer's poetry is where I always want to be. Here, within the playfulness of her language, is where consequences of daily living are histories of heart and mind. Poetry is in life and life is in Bernadette's poetry, and that's all the reassurance we need."—Kristin Prevallet

7. Sight by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (Edge Books, 1999)

Equal parts poetry and philosophy, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's collaboration is organized around the act and idea of seeing, written in the form of a literary dialogue. "We were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience," writes Hejinian in the introduction, "how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (perceiving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us." Visual descriptions interact with meditations on contemporary life, Western intellectual history, dream, film, poetry, and collaboration itself.

8. Close to Me & Closer...(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere by Alice Notley (O Books, 1995)

Alice Notley's two books collected here, Close to Me & Closer...and Desamere, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape measure. She's invented a measure. The text is a rich current crossing, as at the moment of imagining, into being in death and in an expanded life. Notley transgresses conventional contemporary categories of genre; rather than genre, the form of the writing is the mind's inner sense and motion. "Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets...infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfullness, full of heart, intensity and wonder, provocatively addressing forever unsolved questions of form and identity, life and death, imagination and gender, Notley's poems are unsettling and inspiring"––the San Francisco Chronicle.

9. Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child by Elva Trevino Hart (Bilingual Review Press, 1999)

A vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. It brings to life the day-to-day existence of people facing the obstacles of working in the fields and raising a family in an environment that is frequently hostile to those who have little education and speak another language. Assimilation brings its own problems, as the original culture is attenuated and the quality of family relationships is comprimised, consequences that are not inevitable but are instead a series of choices made along the way. It is also the story of how the author overcame the disadvantages of this background and found herself.

10. Local History by Erica Hunt (Roof Books, 1994)

"Erica Hunt's Local History blows the public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip."—Harryette Mullen

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bomethius · 5 years

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INADIQUIT: A STORY

Bomethius, inadiquit (2020) A full-length collaboration between Jonathan Hodges and his uncle, Dave Hodges

My uncle Dave and I have been close for most of my life. He used to dip my pacifier in Jack Daniels — to “strengthen my immune system” — and he taught me to eat ants in my Mormor’s (grandmother’s) pantry, play chess, shoot pool, and debate my Sunday school teachers.

Our relationship has always been equal parts silly and serious, and we’ve always seemed to understand each other. The distance that frequently separates adults and children never seemed to come between us. We often sat at the piano and plunked about until we were sufficiently bored with our ideas and then listened to Paganini or Chopin, mutually cringing at our ineptitude and mediocrity. We debated over philosophers, history, and theology. Above all, we laughed.

Things changed around my 14th birthday, though, when my family moved from Atlanta to Austin, Texas. My dad was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the move, and I started writing music to cope. After Dad made a full recovery, we took a road trip to Atlanta to see our extended family. On that trip, I listened to Chopin’s entire catalogue. The drive is about 17 hours, and Chopin wrote about 17 hours of music.

I sat down at the piano as soon as we arrived at Mormor’s house. It was Sunday, and Dave was over. After lunch, I showed him my ideas for a piece. We messed around and ended up finishing a draft together. About a week later, my friend dropped by and recorded it. The result was my first professional recording, “Improvisation No. 1,” which is the fourth track on inadiquit. Dave and I had ironed out the song’s structure, but the performance was mostly improvised — I had never played it that way before, and I’ll never play like that again. As it was last played and recorded seven years ago, “Improvisation No. 1” represents the first time I had something to say with my music.

Years went by, and I left for college. I only got to see Dave whenever we were in the same town. We exchanged emails and texts now and then, but we could never talk the way we needed to. It’s impossible to spend all the time you have with only the people you want to see, so we just accepted that and moved along. Each of us became a story for the other: I’d do impressions of my ridiculous uncle for my friends, and he’d tell his friends about his semiserious violinist nephew.

Before college, I released an album called The Dressing to My Salad with my good friend Nate Zivin. We wrote and recorded the whole thing on a whim in about a week and a half, but Dave really took to it. He showed it to friends and family, and a few people actually listened to it, which was pretty neat. Nothing serious came of the record, though; it was just a fun little thing that happened.

A couple years later, when I was halfway through undergrad, I released a self-recorded album called Gender is a Fluid and sent it to Dave. He was confused.

“What are you doing?” he asked me. “You’re a violinist, right?”

I told him I wanted to do more than violin. It was a short conversation, and Dave left scratching his head. Regardless, he kept up with my releases and periodically sent me listening suggestions. We started talking over the phone a lot more frequently — often about music that made us cry. Our conversations became a monthly event.

After I released Sweet Nothings and the reviews started to come in, I began to feel stuck. While the record did really well, considering I’m nobody, I wondered if I’d written Bomethius into a corner. The music was all so serious, and the laughter I’d always tried to maintain didn’t come through as much. I remember telling Dave I hadn’t had a new or decent idea in a while, to which he responded, “Here’s a stack of things you need to listen to.” I needed the next Bomethius album to be different. I needed to stave off all the Elliott Smith and Andrew Bird comparisons and prove to myself that I wasn’t just another sad minimalist.

As I was finishing my last semester of college, Dave called me to see if I had any interest in setting an old poem of his to music. It was called “A Mazing Tonic,” which he described as an initialistic acrostic that touched on his experiences with an hallucinogen called AMT. I jumped at the opportunity, and we hung up. (Here's that poem!)

I heard nothing from Dave for several days, which meant he was probably having second thoughts about showing it to me, so I badgered him until he gave in and sent me the poem. I spent three days reading the poem aloud — and wondering if it even needed music — before I began to set it.

A few weeks later, Dave called again to tell me he’d be coming out to Dallas for a business project and that he’d like to stay at my place. So, he came over, and three bottles of wine later, we’d unpacked our adolescence, early frustrations with the church, drug experiences, regrets, love for Kierkegaard, and discovery of a God who’s completely different from what we were told to believe in as children. It was an amazing night. I woke up the next day with a terrible hangover and the beginnings of what would become the worst case of laryngitis I’d ever had, but I was beyond excited.

About a week later, I finished a demo for his “A Mazing Tonic” poem and emailed it to him. I heard nothing for a few days, and then he called me to say that he couldn’t stop crying the first time he heard the demo. We were both ecstatic. He shared some ideas for making the song better, and we hung up. After I finished a second draft of the song, I showed it to my roommate Travis. He asked me what we were planning to do with the song, and I said I’d probably just release it as a single. Over Christmas, I told him, I happened upon some old photographs of Dave and me hanging out when I was about 3 years old, and we could probably use those as cover art. Travis thought about this for a moment and then remarked that we should do an entire album together.

I got so excited I called Dave right then to suggest it to him. There was complete silence on the other end, and then he inhaled deeply — the way he does when he’s unsure about something — and finally replied with some hesitation. “Ok, I’m not going to say anything about this yet. Give me some time to think about it. My gut reaction is absolutely not, but I might just be scared. Let me call you back.”

He called me back fifteen minutes later. “All right, I’m in. Might just be an EP. I’d be surprised if we’re able to put enough material together for a full album, but I have to tell you that I’m in. Hold me to it. I know tomorrow I’ll hate myself for this. Tomorrow, I won’t want to do this.” As soon as we hung up, I immediately opened a Google Doc so we could start writing and discussing our album.

Dave has spent much of his life ashamed of his creativity. He might spend a few hours composing a piano piece, stop to take a break, and then come back to the piece only to be so completely disgusted with his efforts that he prints it off, sets it on fire, deletes the file, and reformats his hard drive. As hilarious as this sounds — and it is funny — it’s also terribly sad. A big part of this project came from the need to show Dave his ideas don’t have to stay buried and hidden — that he doesn’t have to be ashamed of what he can create.

As the project unfolded, Dave steadily grew to be more confident, and his ideas became stronger. It was a beautiful progression. Dave came into this project with some experience as a poet but not as a lyricist, so working with his lyrics was often challenging. The difference between good poetry and good lyrics is difficult to pin down, but I think it has something to do with the fact that, like a screenplay, you actually have to sing a song — whereas a poem is sustained by the words alone. I’ve never needed to hear Robert Frost read one of his poems. They’re already complete on paper. A good reading might add something, but it isn’t essential. Good lyrics only come alive when set to the right tune and sung. And that’s what I had to do on this album: I had to wring the music out of the poetry.

Neither of us can take 100 percent credit for any of the songs on this album. This album is a true, complete collaboration from beginning to end, and it was a joy to create something with Dave that captures our relationship, our personalities, and our experiences.

#newmusic #bomethius #theknewslyweakletter #inadiquit #context

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heylabodega · 7 years

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Books Read, Age 26

Previously: 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18 (holy shit)

Enigma Variations–Aciman I talked to Robbie about this one a bunch bc he’s always looking for good novels about gay people by gay people and I thought this might be that but this is…not that. It had promise and the first section is really kind of lovely but it veers off and just…I don’t know, mileage will vary, but it didn’t feel True to me. idk idk either like he misunderstands love and sexuality or I do and it honestly could more than likely be me.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–Adams One of those books I had just always kinda pretended I read. I mean not that people like frequently check to make sure I’ve read AHGttG but just like in my mind whenever it was mentioned I checked it off. You know the dealio you don’t need my thoughts on it (as opposed to most things, on which you definitely do).

All Grown Up–Attenberg My favorite of the Attenberg novels I’ve read. Of particular use and relevance to me, an aging single woman and unlikeable protagonist. I enjoyed this very much, it was sharp and warm and mean and tender.

Queen of the Night–Chee Hmm. Ok. I felt for most of this book that it like…thought it was a different, more important book than it actually was? It is overwritten–both in prose style and in that it could have been at least 100 pages shorter–and you know how sometimes you read a book with a female protagonist and you’re like ‘I can’t believe a man wrote this!’? Yeah this isn’t that. But the ending line is really good? idk. Someone else read it and tell me your thoughts.

Too Much and Not the Mood–Chew-Bose First of all, excellent title. These essays reminded me, and I mean in this in the lease self-important way possible, of my own writing. Just in that way where writing doesn’t have to be traditionally literarily linear. These essays are good and filled with the kind of sentences that make you know the writer loves words, you can feel her placing them carefully with the satisfying click of scrabble tiles, sliding them into the right order.

Who Killed Roger Ackroyd–Christie Typical Agatha novel and very good. I can’t tell you any more without spoiling it.

Murder in Retrospect–Christie This is one of my fave Christie’s. It was dark and smart and pithy.

Rule Britannia–Du Maurier I found this in a used bookstore in Portland, Maine, just after the Brexit vote. She wrote it in like the 70s and it’s speculative fiction based on if the UK left the EU and formed a union with the United States. It’s kind of really good but it also ends kind of abruptly, like maybe it could have been the first of a trilogy or something.

Plum Bun–Fauset This was my favorite book from my Harlem Renaissance class. I wrote my term paper on it. I love this book. I want to write it as a screenplay and someone to make it into a movie and I want Troian Bellesario to play the lead.

A Coney Island of the Mind–Ferlinghetti A book of (I think?) beat poetry that I found in a used bookstore in Saugherties at Thanksgiving. I love these poems, especially one called “The World is a Beautiful Place” which I read out loud to Robbie one night while we were walking between bars in the snow at like midnight.

Wishful Drinking–Fisher Carrie Fisher is one of those people whose very existence makes me feel braver and weirder and funnier. She’s a truly good soul and I don’t have anything else to say except that you should read this and also that you should Postcards From the Edge first it’s better.

Difficult Women–Gay I prefer Roxane Gay’s fiction to her nonfiction and these are very good, very interesting stories full of sadness and love.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) I have never had so many people approach me while reading a book in public as this one. It is, unsurprisingly, an extremely compelling and upsetting book. But I was very surprised by it. I’m not sure quite what I expected from it, but it wasn’t what it was. I think about this book at least twice a week. I think everyone should read it and I think they’ll all enjoy it.

How To Be A Person In the World–Havrilesky I think maybe Ask Polly columns are better in smaller doses than a whole book, but nevertheless, for better or for worse, she shaped a great deal of my early-twenties self esteem and the essays translate to the page much better than a lot of internet writing I’ve read.

Girl on the Train–Hawkins This felt…cheap somehow. Like I got really into it and then felt like I’d been cheated or fooled because it’s truly not very good.

Bright Lines–Islam This is a fascinating book. It’s the most Brooklyn summery, felt the most like my Brooklyn summers despite describing a Bengali Muslim family and smoking weed and other experiences that are not specifically mine. I’d recommend it. Highly.

Intimations–Kleeman Man, I’ve recommended this book of short stories to so many people. It’s weird and interesting and it does something I think is hard, which is write surreal stories where the stakes still feel real, if that makes sense. She came and spoke to our class and she told an interesting question to ask of short stories which was, “what are the satisfactions of this story?” and all of these are satisfying and visceral. There’s one long one in the middle that I skipped and you can too, I give you permission.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet–L'Engle Hey, um, you know what’s p upsetting to read? A plot where a crazy dictator is gonna drop a nuclear bomb and start the end of the world (this isn’t a spoiler it’s introduced like five pages in).

A Wind in the Door–L'Engle This was not as good as A Wrinkle in Time–what is–but it was a bright easy read, her books are so–loving, I guess. Good if you need a little palate cleanser.

Passing–Larsen We read a LOT of books in my Harlem Renaissance course. This a very good, short novel about, well, guess. It’s like a painting somehow, like a 20th century painting.

Sister Outsider–Lorde I have taken none women’s studies courses so this was a pretty important text I had never read. It is very Good and everyone should read it if they have not already.

Cruel Shoes–Martin I LOVE Steve Martin and still on a few of these I was like “I don’t know, Steve.” But many others (they’re very short stories) are funny or clever or great.

Bright Lights, Big City–McInerney ughhhhhhh a book that is entirely written in second person and is about how womens’ existences and deaths have like ~made a man feel~ but it’s a short quick read and–I am E X T R E M E L Y reluctant to admit–the end is a really good image that did lowkey make me cry but also fuck this book

The Hopeful–O'Neill This I didn’t like much, in a way that I thought it needed a stronger editor and I want Eleanor or Robbie or someone I trust to read it to tell me if I’m wrong.

The Bed Moved–Schiff Weird and good little stories. I don’t think about them often, but they were elegant and sharp as I read them.

Eligible–Sittenfield It’s nice that they’re publishing Modern AU Pride and Prejudice fanfic now in a bound book. This was enjoyable tho tbh not the best Modern AU Pride and Prejudice fanfic I, a cool and chill person, have read in my life.

Swing Time–Smith I think this is my fave of the Zadie Smith books I’ve read. I wasn’t sure by the end quite what the point of it was, but I guess also what’s the point of anything? idk this is a useless description of a book. It was immersive and interesting but I’ve also not told anyone “you *have* to read this you’ll love it.” We did go see her read from it and in person she is enchanting.

The New Woman–Sochen Nonfiction about what I think we’d call first-wave feminism? It was really fascinating about an era I knew nothing about but also had some, um, glaring omissions ahem any mention of race whatsoever.

Action. A Book About Sex–Spiegel Ok look yes fine I am an adult sexually active woman who still reads books about sex whatEVER. I missed sex-ed and I also like to hear, in a non-prurient (or sometimes prurient w/e) way what other people are up to, sex-wise. I mean there’s no real like advice about sex in the world, I think, except that everything consensual and fun is fine, but I think it’s important to occasionally remind yourself of that. This was a good book.

Missing, Presumed–Steiner A crime book that I neither loved nor hated and generally enjoyed reading. Big enh.

The Girls From Corona Del Mar–Thorpe Robbie gave this to me for my birthday last year. A beach read with an edge, page-turner-y but sharp. Seems like it’s going to be a light read, but there’s a bite to it, a reminder of the cruel randomness of fate and of our inability to really know other people or ourselves. I loved this.

Cane–Toomer So this is an important text from the Harlem Renaissance and it’s kinda…never classified? It’s a series of related but not continuous short stories, as well as poetry, and little like plays? idk it’s very evocative and beautiful and dense and bears up to intense overreading. One of my favorite books I read for my Harlem Ren class.

The Blacker the Berry–Thurman Ok so Wallace Thurman apparently worried his whole life that his writing style was too journalistic and he maybe wasn’t…wrong. This is NOT a bad book and it’s well written and novelistic exCEPT when sometimes it feels pedagogical or expository. It’s a short, well constructed novel about colorism and worth checking out.

Killer–Walters Lovely and weird poems. I went to go follow the author on Twitter and discovered I already was. I love these.

The Underground Railroad–Whitehead An extremely. upsetting. book. Here’s the thing and I understand the presumption of my criticism of a book that won the national book award, but: if you’re going to make your conceit that the Underground Railroad is a real railroad, I think that you should do more with it. THAT SAID the rest of this is truly wonderful, somehow at once a page turner and viscerally upsetting.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger–Wilder I love Gene Wilder. I’d read Gilda Radnor’s memoir a couple years ago so part of this was sort of an interesting other side of the story. Anyways he seems like a genuinely strange, slightly neurotic, flawed but mostly warm and kind person.

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bpellerin · 7 years

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Kids who enjoy reading? Imagine that...

Great little rant in the Boston Globe magazine about summer reading programs libraries have.

"In June, my 6-year-old son got very excited about our town’s summer reading program, in which kids who read for a certain number of hours vote for a movie that gets screened at the library. For several days, he reminded me we had to track the time we spent reading and check boxes off his chart so he could participate. But then he spent time with a California friend whose library’s summer reading program offers passes to Disneyland. A free movie suddenly seemed lame by comparison. He lost interest in the program and, for a while, in books, too.

Across the Commonwealth, public libraries encouraged schoolchildren to read this summer by offering prizes, often related to the big screen or sports, for those who met the minimum number of hours or books. In Arlington, we had the free movie. In Boston, if you read three books, you were entered into a raffle for Red Sox tickets. Maynard’s raffle was for a new bicycle.

There’s nothing wrong with movies, or sports, or amusement parks — or with programs aimed at spurring children to read. What’s wrong is the underlying message that books are a chore and that kids who endure them deserve payback.

Why, I wonder, are civic programs framed around this assumption? Is it because most kids don’t like books? Because adults don’t like them, either? Or because parents and educators and even doctors talk so much about The Importance of Reading that we have forgotten it once was (and still could be) a widely enjoyed activity?

Couldn’t agree more. But also: What else did you expect? The entire North American educational culture has been slowly but surely moving in the direction of making everything related to learning a chore for many long years now, with the result that kids grow up not valuing playing with their imaginations because that won’t be on the test. It’s been so long now that many of those young kids’ parents and teachers were raised that way. Kids are surrounded by people who think learning and reading is a hassle to get over with so we can get back to sucking screen.

Children start pre-school programs earlier and earlier; it’s not uncommon for two- or three-year-olds to begin their pre-K education in school-like settings where parents very much expect they will learn skills that will give them a leg up when the time comes to start junior kindergarten. Once there, little kids are swallowed up by an educational machine that makes them sit in rows and pay attention to what the teacher is saying. Oh sure, there’s play involved. But the playing is relentlessly didactic, because the adults involved worry about educational achievements above just about everything else.

I’m all for educational achievements. But they don’t come from programs designed to measure and track children on flowcharts designed by a committee of educationators. Real learning happens when children themselves want to learn, in settings where their natural curiosity hasn’t been dulled by overly didactic programs.

In plain English: If you stick your toddlers and young children in a classroom and make them drill (with a song! and a dance! or a screen!) until they can regurgitate something measurable, you will kill their natural curiosity and make them think that everything you want them to do is a chore.

I have three daughters whom I’ve been homeschooling since birth. They are now 10, “almost 9” and 7. If they went to school they’d be entering grades 6, 4 and 2. But if you heard them speak or read out loud, you’d think the eldest was half-way through high school already. Both parents are writers, and we both put a lot of emphasis on reading, writing, and oral expression. This is not to boast (well, OK, but not much), but to illustrate my point.

My kids don’t have to sit around learning things for much longer than 60 or 90 minutes a day, which we tend to break up in chunks of 20-30 minutes, in between which they are allowed to stretch or play or read. They don’t have goals to meet, as far as their educational achievement goes. I do, but they don’t know what the goals are. They just keep learning stuff until I send them off. They’ve never had to take a formal test in their lives, and I believe it’s one of the main reasons why they are still excited to learn things, especially if it involves story-telling. (Math and piano practice, not so much.)

When they are not made to sit down and listen (i.e. the bulk of their average day), they are left to play by themselves. We don’t tell them what to do, we let them figure out their own games. They also read a lot. For fun, I mean. They have books we assign to them (we loosely follow a classical education curriculum and their assigned reading books tend to be classics of literature), but they are free to pick anything they like for their free reading. They have library cards and they use them like little fiends.

Our local library branch has one of those summer reading clubs where the kids earn stickers and small toys every time they finish a book – and then they get entered into a draw for a free book. I never pressured my kids to join it, but they’re all enrolled. And they love nothing better than to rush there to tell Kelly, the friendly and incredibly patient custodian of the kids’ section, about the books they’ve read.

They don’t do it to get the toys and stickers, although they enjoy those. Nobody would read three novels just to get stickers. If baseball tickets and Disney passes aren’t enough to entice non-reading kids to get lost in a book for fun, stickers certainly won’t do it. But my kids really do enjoy the reading, precisely because to them it’s not a chore.

One important point: with very rare exceptions we do not insist that they finish a book that doesn’t interest them. Instead we ask them to explain why they don’t like it. The explanation does not have to convince us but it must be coherent and grammatically correct. Some books are terribly dull, and often it’s a matter of taste whether we like a style or not. Sometimes a person isn’t ready for a particular title, for no obvious reason, and they’ll like it a lot a year later. Heck, it took me three tries and a dozen years finally to enjoy Les Misérables, who am I to push Little Women on kids who aren’t, at the moment, digging it?

Fortunately, for parents of children who are not so keen on reading, there is a remedy, and it involves getting your kids immersed in stories. Here’s how you do it: If they are young (it helps a lot to start this when they’re babies), read stories out loud to them. Not just bedtime stories either. Real stories that involve character development, heroes slaying beasts and people succeeding despite long odds. When our kids were little we read all the Dr. Seuss books to them, over and over again. We eventually graduated to the Narnia Chronicles, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Swallows and Amazons, that sort of thing. It didn’t matter that the kids were too little to understand the story. The point was for them to get used to hearing stories. To fill their little heads with sounds, poetry, rhythm, and images. We didn’t shy away from stories that featured bad people and tragedies. Real life is full of those and little ones need to know this, provided the stories make moral sense and preferably end well, because nightmares are no fun.

Nowadays we still read out loud to them. We also let them listen to audiobooks until their ears fall off. They now insist on doing some of the reading we do themselves, which is something we encourage because it lets them practice speaking properly and also because it gives us a chance to spot problematic words and correct their pronunciation where needed. We let them watch movies (not educational TV programs; those are banned around here), and every now and then we’ll pick up a screenplay and act it out together. Macbeth is a favorite; you should see the delight they take in impersonating those witches.

The result of all this is that my kids love being immersed in stories. When they play freely they often re-enact movies they’ve watched, and they have their own parallel Harry Potter universe. Their imaginations are engaged and they eagerly seek out new stories.

It’s never too late to engage your children in good storytelling. But you have to do it with them. Kids have a very annoying habit of ignoring what we say and paying attention to what we do. If they never see us excited about a story, they’ll just think we’re trying to get rid of them when we send them to read. Watch movies together and discuss them – play with alternate endings, ask them how they’d want certain characters to behave instead, and see where their imagination takes them. Don’t expect too much at first. Treat imagination like a muscle; if your kids have already spent a few years in a school system that privileges measurable achievements over free play, they’ll need some practice. But the payoff is amazingly worthwhile.

Plus you’ll save loads of money on Disney passes.

#education #kids #books #homeschooling #learning

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farrresidency · 6 years

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Artist Interview #4: Cheyenne Beh & Nazar Klepatskyy

William: So introduce yourselves, like one at a time say what you guys do-

Nazar: She’s good at English so I’ll follow her lead.

William: Yeah like your practice

Cheyenne: My name is Cheyenne Beh, I’m 22 and I study English Literature at Concordia. I’m currently in my last year and my favourite veins of English would Aestheticism, modern fiction, gothic literature. But I’m sort of veering towards decadent era because I find that most of my writing is very, it’s sort of like a borderline obsession with Aestheticism. Super decadent, it’s incredibly dark and nihilistic even. I would say a combination of Kafka, Tolstoy, big names-

William: That’s a pretty good list

Cheyenne: Yeah big names. Currently I’m trying to write a really good screenplay. I’ve named it Modus Operandi. I’ve heard it’s sort of a… god who’s that director?

Nazar: Anderson?

Cheyenne: No, no… it’s, he does sort of absurd British comedy. But anyways I’m trying to recreate that and have this modern feel to it.

Nazar: I’m Nazar Klepatskyy and I graduated at Concordia in music, classical composition. I play in a rock band, write the songs, sing and play guitar.

William: What’s your band called?

Nazar: Hoozbah! We play rock and roll. Big emphasis on groove and not so much about rock and roll persay to be within those standards. But just trying to make good music. Without really trying to… like genre isn’t so important, just the quality. I guess the best judge of that is my taste. That’s only criteria thus far!

William: Were you guys looking for an apartment with spaces to be able to have your own music room or writing room?

Nazar: Well I was definitely pushing towards a two bedroom place because I knew I needed an enclosed space to do my music. I still get on her nerves because it’s loud but at least I’m not self conscious about belting out in an open space. Now I have my own little private room where I can be as loud as I want and do as many weird sounds as I want.

Cheyenne: Yeah I sacrifice my own sanity for Nazar’s sake. But luckily this place came with a little nook.

Nazar: Yeah that was just an added advantage.

Cheyenne: For me yeah

William: Ok, so you were mostly looking for a room for you and it was just happenstance that-

Nazar: Happenstance! Third day in a row that we hear that word!

Cheyenne: That YOU hear that word! I’ve heard that one before

Nazar: You’ve heard it before?

Cheyenne: I study english literature

Nazar: I’ve never heard it, I literally learned about this word two days ago-

Cheyenne: He’s going to start using it now

Nazar: And yesterday we watched another movie and it had it again and today boom. Third time in a row. I always say that whenever you learn a new word-

William: You start to hear it

Nazar: You’ll hear it immediately after

William: Yeah because you’re aware of it

Nazar: I don’t know if it’s because it’s coincidental or if it’s pure happenstance

Cheyenne: wow

Nazar: You know what I mean... What was the question?

William: It was, like did it just turn out that-

Cheyenne: Yeah it just turned out that my nook came with the place and it was right next to the balcony which is always a nice bonus. It’s open air and I can just open the door whenever I want, step out-

Nazar: Except it’s cold as shit in the winter because it doesn’t heating

Cheyenne: Yeah whatever, but that’s why if you go to my little nook you’ll see tons of furry carpets and I’ve hand sewed my own pillow cases and everything’s really fluffy. It’s kind of small but I, I’m not claustrophobic at all

William: So you like a more enclosed cozy space?

Cheyenne: I do! Sort of like Roald Dahl’s creative space. I don’t know if you’ve seen a video of him and his little shed

William: No I haven’t

Cheyenne: He basically has this huge chair and he has his little leg stand and he’s got a tray for him and pencils. Everything is close with his cigarettes and ashtray. So I can just turn around and everything is there. It’s just really accessible and I love being sheltered. Like a little nest

William: Do you think it’s because, because you’re discipline with writing and literature you don’t need that physical space? Or is it just more of preference?

Cheyenne: I guess in English Lit I do a lot of close analysis so I guess form informs content. Sort of like a concrete poetry meets an actual real life space and entity that can embody that. But yeah, I use my room more as a space of comfort more than I would actually go to. There’s a magnetic flow to it and it’s definitely extremely, like a nest, I feel very protected in there. But that’s the only reason why I like it small.

William: And so did you have any other characteristics you wanted in your music room? Or was it something isolated?

Nazar: I mean yeah something isolated, it’s good that it’s not a full square shape. There’s a little 45 degree wall which helps with reverberation. But it’s a bit small for what I want and it’s annoying how not soundproof it is. Because literally everyone hears it it’s completely useless to have it except for my own perception of what’s going on in my own environment

William: So there’s a lot of sound bleed then?

Nazar: There’s a bunch of that, I wouldn’t call it the ideal place but it definitely helps

William: It serves its purpose

Nazar: Yeah it serves its purpose

Cheyenne: Yeah with a post-grad pay I’m not sure you can have exactly what you want just yet! Look at this boy!

Nazar: But that’s the thing it’s not fully set up yet. Because I’m always advocating how it takes at least 6 months for an apartment or a room or whatever to find its true form

Cheyenne: Yeah to flourish completely

Nazar: So at my old apartment on Prince where you were, that one was a lot… we’ve done a lot more wackier musical shit there and it was really cool because I had the piano there. Another big downfall here is it’s not big enough to have an actual acoustic piano. That’s a really big bummer.

William: So you’re still adjusting to being able to create in your room?

Nazar: Yeah well I’m building a table currently to put in the corner to facilitate my musical needs.

William: So do you find in that case that you’re more compatible with working in different spaces (pointing at Cheyenne) and that for you (pointing at Nazar) it takes a while before you get comfortable enough to able to have that creative flow?

Nazar: Yeah it definitely takes time setting up the right environment to feel like it’s mine and a comfortable place. Here in this place I haven’t really done too much in there. Like I practice in there but in terms of the creativity that comes with it, I haven’t fully garnished the movement for me to able to get what I need.

William: How would you say you organize your space? Are you messy or clean?

Nazar: Disorganized. Organization is disorganization

Cheyenne: I think it’s easier to find things and find objects when your room is in a disarray because I feel as if you’re more susceptible to remembering where exactly you put it. For me I have a significantly smaller space that Nazar, like it’s so much easier for me to find whatever I need but-

William: So you guys don’t have any problems with like a difference in organization?

Nazar: No I mean honestly it just depends on the mood. Like I literally just cleaned up that place before you came here but before it was just all my shit just in a random pile and that’s just how I’ve been in there. I can’t say that it’s been making my process any easier because it’s cramped and-

William: Do you think after, like forcing it to be clean by having me come over and take pictures, do you think it’ll help or hinder the process?

Nazar: Well I like to keep it organized but seldom does it work out that way

Cheyenne: I think I’m a lot more adaptable than you (Nazar) in spaces

Nazar: Yeah well definitely too because let’s say if I was just doing music compositions and if I had the music in my head and just writing it it would be a lot easier but for it’s a lot of experimentation with the sounds. Literally just doing it over and over and over like obsessively for me to be able to get something out of it

William: So you have to concretely play it, you’re more practical

Nazar: I have to play it like 40 times until I get it right and then-

William: Then you can write it down?

Nazar: I don’t even write it down I just record it. I write the lyrics down but yeah.

William: So I guess, do you feel as though your space is done evolving (pointing to Cheyenne) do you think it’s where you want it to be and you’re comfortable with what it is?

Cheyenne: Definitely. I think for me what’s very important is that it’s aesthetically pleasing but also for it to exude this comfort. Not only do I want myself to be comfortable, but I want whoever that walks in to be impressed with it. I guess that ties into my fascination with decadence. Sort of the beautiful entities in life

William: So for you it’s less of like pure functionality, it’s as though aesthetic is function in a way?

Cheyenne: It is! And I think I have organized it into a way where it is very pleasing to the eye but also super accessible and I can function completely normally. Like I sat in that nook and I wrote my entire creative portfolio in the time span of two days and I was fine because I had everything there. I was just so comfortable. It’s light, the air control is good, I’m much more in my head, I rely more on my mentality like my psyche to push me throughout unlike Nazar, like Nazar needs to be very handsy and grab onto things. To be physically stimulated. I’m more mentally stimulated.

Nazar: It’s why I hate working on music on computers

Cheyenne: Yeah, like I’m heavily reliant on using my right hand and just a pen. It’s all I need. I can work anywhere practically.

William: And for you Nazar you feel like you’re space is still evolving

Nazar: Definitely, it’s still a work in progress I don’t feel comfortable in there yet I’d say

William: And that hinders your creative process?

Nazar: Yeah but overall I feel like I’ve been missing something and I think the biggest factor in that is just not having a acoustic piano. Because it’s so much-

William: You relied on it a lot?

Nazar: I really did yeah. Because whenever you feel like it you can just sit down and you play something. It was in the living room too so it was more of a social thing to. It wasn’t isolated but that also didn’t get in the way so it was just really easy and accessible and nothing beats a real piano. Having that, or rather not having that form of expression is hindering the process a bit I feel. Also not having the table so all my gear is laid out in a way that’s easily accessible. So sometimes I just don’t do it-

Cheyenne: Except we sing

Nazar: Yeah instead we sing sometimes

Cheyenne: We sing in the living room. Because this is also essentially like a creative space for us. I think both our creative processes flourish in this area. It’s colourful. I think we’re both very very dependent on colour to stimulate us. Right wouldn’t you say so (looking at Nazar)? Like Nazar needs his blue lighting and there’s a red lighting in this living room and we also love candles and the ambient lighting.

Nazar: Well I’m a strong believer that it’s all inspirational, productivity or whatever it just comes to you like that but it’s very important to have a place where once it comes to you you can just go there and hone it in.

William: So you feel like the spark can come from living room here but-

Nazar: Exactly! The spark always comes from the living room actually. Very often when we’re just sitting here I’m like okay bye I want to play guitar but then I go there and I’m kind of turned off by the space a little bit because it’s not in its final form. Probably also because it’s a fucking pig sty most of the time.

William: And is it the same for you (Pointing to Cheyenne) do you get your sparks here or?

Cheyenne: Honestly I get my sparks everywhere-

William: Well would you say the social aspect of the living room helps?

Cheyenne: Oh definitely, I’m a strong believer in energies and whoever comes over to the house they sort of have something or something that they emit and permeate in the air then I’ll definitely go to my nook and write. But sometimes I’m just very happy here. I guess it just depends, the lighting for me is really important. Like sometimes I just really want his presence around me and that works a lot.

William: So you feed off his energy in a way?

Cheyenne: Sometimes, yeah depends whether if he’s in a good mood or not. Sometimes it’s like ok fuck off I’m donezo with you mate.

Nazar: And I just realized, because you’re talking about the social aspect. To be honest the only reason why I need that room is because I’m living with her. If I was living alone then I really wouldn’t need that space. In fact I’d prefer to just be able to do it wherever whenever. It’s kind of how my old place was but the advantage, I had a roommate, but it was a really big apartment and it was too floors. So the first floor, whenever I wanted to do my shit it was mine. So yeah it’s like a cave for me to hide from external eyes and ears.

Cheyenne: Except I’m still always there

William: Yeah even though she can still hear it

Nazar: Yeah she can still hear it! (Looking at Cheyenne) Have you noticed that I always had a hard time being creative at your old apartment?

Cheyenne: Well it was open concept

Nazar: Well it was open concept but the problem was that you were there. If you weren’t there then it would be super cool.

William: So you have to have your own space?

Nazar: Like I need to be completely closed off from other people because then I get too worried about opinions.

William: I think I’m the same

Nazar: Because I do some weird shit, I’m making weird sounds and practicing and making a bunch of mistake. I just don’t want to get self conscious about people hearing me do that. It’s just something for me alone but I have a great time doing it.

Cheyenne: Yeah I’m the opposite I was literally here doing Karaoke here by myself belting out good songs. I don’t know, what’s the problem (looking at Nazar)?

Nazar: That’s just how it is when it comes to art I’m a lot more introvert. Like a lot more so.

Cheyenne: Yeah I mean I think as we grow older inspiration is for amateurs the rest of us just have to get to work you know what I mean?

William: Yeah I operate in the same mentality, I just want to force it

Cheyenne: And I think if you were to cave yourself in constantly, if you were to only isolate yourself in one space you don’t train yourself to be adaptable so that when inspiration does hit you

William: But then also it can have an advantage of when you walk into that space *snaps* you’re productive

Cheyenne: Yeah immediately triggered by it which is fantastic

Nazar: Not there yet though

Cheyenne: Not there yet

William: So having been through the experience of building your spaces, obviously you’re still building yours (Nazar)

Nazar: I’ve built a previous one that worked really well

William: Oh okay, so for the both of you do you have any advice for anyone building in your case (Nazar) a music room, or in your case (Cheyenne) a writer’s nook?

Cheyenne: Yeah I think if you’re building a writer's nook you have to have a lot of images like paintings, little canvases. Because it depends, say for me I have tons of little paintings of Japanese art because I’m really inspired by how beautiful it looks like the Hokusai wave and these Japanese demons. They allude to something else, something deeper and darker and when I stare at them I’m just fascinated. You also need a really good table with tons of compartments. Pull out papers and have tons of pens.

William: Do you feel like you work better on paper?

Cheyenne: Yeah definitely I’m actually technologically inept like I don’t know how I even run, like I haven’t even looked at my website in a month

William: Yeah I’m the same

Cheyenne: Yeah I think pen and paper is the most solid way of getting anything done because you’re processing what you’re thinking and putting onto a piece of paper. What better way to cement that. Like you can’t lose a piece of paper, well you can but it’s there and it’s tangible. When I look at a computer screen I can’t grab onto it whereas [on paper] I can look and trace my fingers, what’s going on where’s my thought process, my creative process. Stream of consciousness type thing. I would also recommend having tons of books because then you can refer to certain books. Like I just annotate all over my novels even if it’s just for leisurely purposes and not for academia I’ll just remember instantly one quote or instance in the chapter that I want to go and garner inspiration from this or a certain phrase that I’d love to… what’s that word you used before?

William: Incorporate?

Cheyenne: No it’s sort of a collage

William: Pastiche?

Cheyenne: Yeah Pastiche, pastiching different quotes from different books and creating this new story. It’s fantastic.

William: I’m curious actually this is a small tangent but have you ever tried using a typewriter because I feel like that might be a middleground

Cheyenne: Yeah I mean I would love one but I can’t… I feel as though if I were to get a typewriter I would need to really commit. I can’t just get a cheap one or else if it gets stuck mid page

William: Right I’m the same I want a typewriter so bad

Cheyenne: But you want good quality you know, like if you get a cheap one and it starts being faulty mid sentence and you’re inspired what do you do then!? You’re like ah shit! But definitely when I do get a typewriter what I’m doing has to be precise and that would force me to try to attain perfection no matter what

William: And for you Nazar would you have any advice for building a music room?

Nazar: Well I’d say don’t rush it because from my experience it always, you have this one idea, you set it up and then you just got to-

William: You have to use it and learn how to use it

Nazar: Exactly, you have to listen to the room speak to you in a way. Because it’s going to evolve into something, eventually it’s going to take its final form. That’s why I say the 6 month approximate thing, at least that’s how it is with me. Because we jumped in here and put a whole bunch of art up and we ended up taking it all out and I restructured the room and now the ideal form is different from what it was initially and that’s because I set it up. Tried it. Realized it didn’t really work for so and so reason and so it just evolves. So I think the perfect space comes with time and patience.

Cheyenne: And preferably some usable instruments considering this is a music room right?

William: Right

Cheyenne: Completely neglected that fact

William: If you could change one thing about your space what would it be?

Nazar: Change how? Because I’ve got change coming

William: You’ve got like full omniscient power you can change anything in the room

Nazar: Can I give two?

William: Sure

Nazar: Can it be three things?

William: Sure

Nazar: More natural light, bigger, and soundproof. Or like more isolated. Like a basement would be cool

Cheyenne: A basement with more natural light?

Nazar: Well no because my friend Jordan has a really really cool basement

William: Yeah like I live in a basement apartment and the windows are like half my height so it lets in a lot of natural light

Cheyenne: Oh then in that case that’s fantastic

William: But yeah if it’s one of those Montreal basement apartment where the window is a tiny cube just no

Cheyenne: It’s scary

William: Yeah, I don’t know how people can do it

Cheyenne: I wish my nook was just a glass nook. Like four dimensional with all glass

Nazar: Wish you could just float around

Cheyenne: I would love like even the floors made out of glass

William: Do you think it would be so that you could look at the world or so the world could look at you?

Cheyenne: I guess both. I think I thrive off being open and allowing myself to be seen and to also see. I want to be the observed and the observer. I find a lot of inspiration that I’ve personally garnered from my protagonists or antagonists comes from a deeper personal space. So trying to write from the lens of other people who perceive me and make myself a lot more warped. Just a little hint to my creative process

William: So you feel like you could work pretty much anywhere? (Cheyenne)

Cheyenne: I could work anywhere except at a cafe, a really noisy cafe. The minute I hear footsteps around me that are excessively loud I just get, I just shut off. I think I’m also highly irritable. Also depends if someone’s looking at me weird and staring at me I’m like ah fuck please just stop. I don’t like when someone accidentally touches me especially when I’m in the element it grinds my gears but other than that I’m fine you could leave me in a car park in a car for three hours and I’m pretty sure I’d be able to write a little short story

William: And you’re not at all like that right? (Nazar)

Nazar: No for me I think I need to be in a place where I feel comfortable. Where I know my music isn’t getting on anyones nerves or that anyone is criticising it. It has to be a comfortable space where I feel comfortable producing sound and experimenting with creative ideas and implementing them. A place where it doesn’t get heard or judged by ears that I don’t want them to hear or if there are ears that are hearing it then it would be ones that don’t care. You know who are conscious of what I’m doing and are in and out

William: So you (Cheyenne) mentioned Roald Dahl but was that one of your inspirations while building your space?

Cheyenne: I mean not really Roald Dahl’s creative space is a little shed where he’s all cooped up. I mean it’s a nest

Nazar: It’s the size of your nook

Cheyenne: Yeah but it’s very dark and dreary. I’d imagine his is more of a hibernation type area. For me I guess… I mean I suppose I went on pinterest and looked up ‘cute nook ideas’ but I didn’t really draw from anything in particular. I just knew. Whenever I walk into a space I have a knack for knowing what would look good and for me, I guess the only inspirations that I drew from is that I don’t like rooms that don’t have your corners filled. I just don’t like any sharp corners. I feel as if it’s too jarring I want it to have a soft blur effect. I guess I want my nook to look like an instagram filter just picture perfect but also super functional how great is that

Nazar: My opinion on her nook, the one thing that really opened it up for me at least is the world map. Because I feel that the world map is just an inspiring… you realize that your life and where you live and everything that goes on in your individual life that’s just happening to one person but it’s so much shit. There’s literally 7 billion of that going on. And if you look at world map you’re just in one place but you see there’s so much that it really opens up your perspective I think. Maybe I’ll steal it and put it in my room

Cheyenne: That was Nazar’s idea I find that these world maps are a little cliche. It’s a little generic white girl wants to go-

Nazar: Well they just want it for aesthetic purposes you know they probably never look at it and actually wonder.

Cheyenne: Yeah it’s just it’s what sort of comes to mind for me. If it was up to me I’d just have blocks and blocks of those little cupboards and have books crawling from the ceiling down. Just tons… but I guess the atlas does open it up I look at Malaysia back home and I’m like cool

Nazar: Like that’s where I’m from I’m literally halfway around the world

William: Did you have any inspirations? (Nazar)

Nazar: From where?

William: Like building your room or was it really just for your own function?

Nazar: No this one, I’d say the most inspiring part of that room is in the early afternoon when the sun is shining into it, into that window

Cheyenne: It’s gorgeous

Nazar: So that’s why I knew the main focus, or where most of my attention goes in the room when I am working has to be from that spot which in front of that window. Because when the light is coming in it’s really inspiring. Especially since I put the piano there, or well the electric keyboard because then sitting and playing out into the window, obviously it’s closed but playing out into sunlight and looking onto a courtyard is very-

William: You feel like it’s less closed off?

Nazar: Yeah, it also feels like it’s recharging you or something

Cheyenne: So lighting is important

Nazar: Lighting is very important

Cheyenne: Now he says it!

Nazar: And I think that one spot is the most inspiring

Cheyenne: That’s why I loved my old place because it was all just glass and my table, I’d just write there. Balcony in the front windows on the left, windows on the right sort of panoramic

Nazar: Yeah like that idea of what she said about being in a glass booth, I fucks with that it was really cool but me I wouldn’t want to be seen

Cheyenne: I’m an exhibitionist

Nazar: Like I feel very naked in a piece of glass

Cheyenne: What’s wrong with being naked?

Nazar: Well if they’re just looking at me like that

William: You’d want it to be like a way one mirror?

Nazar: No but that’s why from that window

William: It’s still inclosed?

Nazar: Yeah like you’re in this little thing but you’re looking out at the world the world isn’t looking out onto you. It’s nature in a way

Cheyenne: But why should you be able to look at nature without nature looking back at you?

Nazar: No no no nature yeah but not other people

William: Nature doesn’t judge

Cheyenne: But nature is a living breathing entity no?

William: Yeah but it doesn’t say ‘hey you suck!’

Cheyenne: But it can feel your energy!

Nazar: The ideal room would probably be a big window and there’d be the piano and you just sit at the piano and the window is all you see with lakes and trees behind it. But the window wouldn’t be full lenght they’d be waist height just so you feel like that thing is grounded

William: Like you’re above?

Nazar: Well no it would be higher and I’d be very comfortable you know

William: (looking at Cheyenne) I can tell you’re just thinking ‘I don’t get this guy’

Cheyenne: No no I do! I’m just admiring him for actually getting on board with this idea of having this glass area it’s just amazing

Nazar: It’s really really… especially the nature.

Cheyenne: Well I wouldn’t even mind having it at like the 35th floor in New York, imagine just looking down and seeing all these pedestrians and seeing life going on. Just minute specs in the chaos

Nazar: Right but if they could see you

Cheyenne: I wouldn’t care I’d flash them this is my body I’m human I’m here let’s go

William: Reminds me I’ve been listening to this song by Courtney Barnett

Cheyenne: Does she have a song called Depreston?

William: Yeah! There’s this song I forget the name of it right now [Elevator Operator] and I was listening to it on the way here, there’s a lyric that’s like don’t worry I’m not depressed I’m basically going to the roof to look at people and imagine I’m playing SimCity

Nazar: Oooh that’s so cool

Cheyenne: Well Courtney knows what she’s saying

William: Do you feel as though you work better in a situation of controlled chaos or neat tidiness?

Cheyenne: Controlled Chaos definitely

Nazar: Same here, absolutely

Cheyenne: I think we’re just chaotic

Nazar: Neat tidiness doesn’t quite cut it

Cheyenne: It’s beautiful to look at, like you have to admit when something is extremely tidy you’re like ‘wow this person must have their life completely organised’ like they go to the gym at 6:15 before class or before work. But I think there’s a beauty to chaos

Nazar: To create things can’t be black and white and square. It can’t be straight edges

William: So for you (Nazar) you wouldn’t be able to

Nazar: I wouldn’t want to

Cheyenne: Although we were having this discussion in New York actually in our hotel and Nazar was just saying that everything has to have its little outline and boundaries and I was arguing that no everything… like what you create has to have no boundaries at all. There’s no square that you have to pander to but then we came to this united decision that in order for us to really create is we need a very brief skeletal outline but the ability to transcend out of it. So I guess that’s what controlled chaos is isn’t it, like you’re teetering on the edges of it and you’re still over but you still come back to this controlled core

Nazar: Me paraphrasing on how she put it; I’d say-

Cheyenne: Was it hard to understand?

William: No no

Nazar: I’d say you need to put boundaries on creativity because if you put no boundaries then the possibilities are endless and whatever stream you go off it isn’t going to be precise. But if you put some sort of boundary that’s when the creativity happens because you have confinements and rules in which you have to work and that’s when you get creative

Cheyenne: But you need that center core to come back to always that’ll be the heart of it

William: So not too much confinement where it’s all too neat and tidy but still something to ground you?

Nazar: Yeah well to give you a really good analogy say look at the Beatles in the 60’s, their imagination was endless but the only technology they had to record with was a 4 track tape machine. They could only record 4 tracks and then bounce those four onto one and then they had a maximum of 7 things they could record. Having that limitation, that confinement, really sparks your creativity and your creative process. Because then they have to work out ways how do it, right now you can just have 100 tracks or more, a thousand even. You can record every single aspect individually and have that freedom, but then I feel like something is wasted there

William: Do you sometimes try to confine yourself to 7 tracks?

Nazar: Well yeah that’s why I got a 4 track tape machine and having that was really cool and fun until it started breaking and now it’s broken. So maybe that’s part of the reason why I don’t feel that that room has come together yet, because I don’t have my medium in which to record on. Because now I’ve got my iphone, but I can record as many things as I want

Cheyenne: It’s so clinical

Nazar: But then I can’t really layer them over one another while there (on the 4 track) I only have a limited amount of options and it’s how I work with those options, what I do with my amount of choices is what matters I think

William: What is the prevailing emotion you experience while in your space?

Nazar: For me it’d just be frustration

Cheyenne: It’s just a side thought that I think will help formulate my answer; in the Cree language most words that they use when directly translated into English use two adjective or two verbs. So instead of saying ‘I think this way’ it would be like ‘I’m think feeling’ or I ‘see say’, ‘I see dream’. I feel that with the two corresponding emotions that I predominantly feel in my room is deep deep concentration and also frustration. Because I think those go hand in hand when you’re deeply invested in something and frustrated because you’re trying to bring it out of you. As a job as a writer, to capture that je ne sais quoi that no one else can it’s to extract that essence… god I’m getting frustrated thinking about it I don’t know how to put it

Nazar: It’s like to tell the simplicity of life in a way that hasn’t been told before. Something that’s everyday but say it in a new way, something so relatable

Cheyenne: But not even for me mine is just to capture that I don’t know what, god I wrote it in my manifesto and now I’m getting all these feelings and concentrating so hard, I’m so deeply zoomed into it and yet I’m getting so agitated with the fact that I can’t explain it

William: Do you… when you come out of that, do you feel like you need to decompress?

Cheyenne: Yeah I open this window and take three deep breaths or I’ll listen to some music but yeah definitely it always comes out after a few hours of this ebb and flow of creativity. So yeah those are mainly the two feelings or emotions that I feel

William: And so for you it’s just frustration? (Nazar)

Nazar: I think so, for now yeah

William: How does that compare to your past space?

Nazar: To create you need to feel a certain way and I think that just depends on your creative process not on the space

William: So you think the creative process informs the space and not the space informs the creative process?

Nazar: I mean it hasn’t been the latter yet. I haven’t had a space that informs the creative process so far. I would love to have a space like that and one that would be would be like I explained to you; looking out onto mountains or trees on a lake, that would do that

William: What do you use most often in your studio?... Before the 4 track was busted

Nazar: The guitar. I would love to…. At the old place it was the piano which I don’t have here I just have an electric keyboard and guitar but I would much… one of my favourite things to do in life is to sit in front of a piano and just sing, I think there’s nothing quite like that

William: Is there an acoustic piano at your jam space?

Nazar: No, only at Concordia in those practice rooms and that was why I can get something out of a very clean space. Because you’ve been to those spaces they’re really uninspiring, very clean and proper. But just having that piano there-

William: It’s all you need?

Nazar: It just didn’t matter. Like even the amp, it really… see again for me with music I don’t think it’s so much the space that informs the feeling it’s the process

William: And for you what do you use the most? (Cheyenne)

Cheyenne: Just pen and paper. A good pen, for ideally I need a felt tip. Really thin felt. It just looks beautiful on paper. I think I’m really motivated by aesthetics

William: So do you also try to write neatly and nicely too?

Cheyenne: I ironically enough have doctors handwriting so I guess it’s a controlled chaos once again. I guess the creative space is an extension of myself in a way. You can also add that an important element to take into consideration when building your creative space is to make sure it’s an extension of yourself. Somewhere that you’d be proud to sit at or show people and work. You feel as if you’re actually delivering to your craft and paying homage to it. It’s kind of shit if you’re in a room and you’re making this beautiful music but the room in which you’re in is crappy. Sometimes it’s fine when you’re in some random place and you’ll never visit it ever again. But when it’s at home it has to be a place that you feel is representative of yourself

Nazar: I think yeah somewhere to be comfortable. Where you can be yourself

Cheyenne: And proud

Nazar: Yeah

Cheyenne: I think pride is a big motivator for all artists actually. So as artists we all have special snowflake syndrome, I guess that’s why I like being a bit of an exhibitionist because I want people to appreciate

William: Well it’s also interesting because Nazar is almost the opposite in the sense that you (Nazar) want to only show the perfection. When you’re experimenting you don’t want people judging your experimentation

Cheyenne: But experimentation is also part of the process, it is faulty at times

Nazar: Yeah it is and I love it but for my ears only. I would feel uncomfortable knowing someone is hearing these imperfections

Cheyenne: Yeah I’m more of a sharer

William: So to go off on that since you guys share your spaces in a way, you have your own enclosed space but it’s in your apartment and there is this social aspect to the living room. And you (Nazar) feel more productive when you’re alone and you’re (Cheyenne) productive when there’s some social aspect to it? Would you say that’s true

Cheyenne: Honestly it all depends on mood. There’s been times where we had people over and I’m just like let's write a poem. We had Xander over, Nazar’s keyboardist, and he and his boyfriend we were a little inebriated and we were like let’s write something! Xander used to be in English lit so it all just worked and I was looking at it the other day and I was considering allowing this to manifest into something larger

Nazar: Xander had the best points “stop, stop, stop”

Cheyenne: Yeah just the most beautiful sound poetry coming out of his mouth. But when it comes to writing anything analytical, I need to be alone. When it comes to English Lit, just the craft of it and the dissertations I have to write, I have to be in a place where it’s just me and my thoughts alone. But I guess with creativity it’s good to have a social aspect to it

Nazar: It’s just something that takes you outside of the world

Cheyenne: Yeah like in creative writing you’re looking from the perspective of different characters, to immerse yourself with people and different trains of thought and philosophy, it’s a great way of going about it.

William: And would you say that that’s true for you Nazar where you feel that you can only be really productive where it’s like no other ears are hearing-

Nazar: Yeah well I definitely feel more at ease, creatively at least I don’t know about productive but I’m creative when I am alone. Just the fact that sometimes we’re hanging out here and we’re watching TV in here and I feel like playing, I’m a little more hesitant about it than say if I were alone

William: Right because you don’t want to bother

Nazar: Yeah and just I feel like it would be a lot more comfortable

Cheyenne: Ok Nazar is literally making it seem as though I am not part of his creative process but the fact of the matter is that I write some of his songs! And also I sing and help him sing so can you please own up to that?

Nazar: Yeah ye-

Cheyenne: Not to mention I fuel his inspiration I mean ‘Be my Queen’ who the fuck is that about, me!

Nazar: I’m not saying be creative in general because there’s many ways to be creative but your own innate creativity comes from within and that would be away from the outside world and in a way is done in a place of isolation but this doesn’t undermine creating with other people because there’s so much of that as well. Like so many times I was playing organ with her where she’s just bouncing back ideas at me because she’s there and then they end up changing the song and evolves in a completely different way

Cheyenne: Like remember when I told you to do it in the major key and then you did it and now that’s the song, I’m not crazy

Nazar: Yeah

Cheyenne: Yeah Nazar’s got a… you should hear what he says at night like ‘baby I’m so grateful that you’re here and there listening and watching

Nazar: Having her around really influences the creative process

Cheyenne: In a good way!

William: Universally, what do you think is a must for any studio? I guess this can be a two part question, either with music and then writing in particular, and then maybe if you both have something in each of your spaces that’s similar that you think you have to have

Nazar: For me it would be the right gear and the right set up in the way that it’s easy for there be a flow of ideas. So like you’re playing guitar, spark boom it’s easy for you to turn around, press something turn a knob and all of a sudden you can record it and play it without having to spend minutes that distract you to try to set something up and boom everything is at your disposal. Then boom you stop then you got something else, you want to play piano, you want to play it back, you play sit down at an actual piano or actual keyboard of your preference

William: Yeah there’s a good quote by a photographer that I really like called Richard Avedon and he said ‘In a way I wish I could work without a camera, I wish I could work with my eyes’ like that’s the goal to make the camera just an extension of yourself

Nazar: Yeah yeah, and you gotta make that the room the extension of yourself. Something that allows it to have that flow

William: And what about you? (Cheyenne)

Cheyenne: For me definitely from a writer's aspect it’s books. I can’t even stress enough that if you want to be a writer, if you are a writer you always have to have either poetry on hand if you’re into that or even the classics like Shakespeare. It depends on your craft and what you’re interested in. And I would say a blanket, or like a little wrap you gotta feel cozy you gotta feel comfortable and that nothing external is going to penetrate your thoughts. Nothing is going to enter your mind and corrupt it or put confabulated ideas into it, it’s just you, your hand, and your piece of paper or your laptop. Books and a blanket for me, simple things, it’s cute

William: So you think in writing that it’s important to know and be well read about what’s come before in your practice and being aware

Cheyenne: I definitely think so, we all have to buckle down and learn our basics before we go out on our own. There’s always that off person who is able to create without having learnt anything

William: Or like rejecting

Cheyenne: Yeah and they can reject but there will be a point where they will be stagnant, history repeats itself. Hemingway said it’s ok to write about cliches it’s about how you deliver it or how you execute the idea and to be well versed in even the most basic and simple ideas, it’s honestly a skill and it’s a tool that will eventually help you flourish and write these bigger topics. It’s like stepping stones. With English Lit, to also know a bit of Philosophy is important; Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, even Immanuel Kant from the period of Enlightenment. It all comes hand in hand. I do think we should pay homage to the precursors, even Ezra Pound, I don’t like him personally as a man he’s a fucking fascist or he was but he was an amazing poet. There are writers, poets, and musicians that people will reject because they didn’t like their philosophies or what they lived for but we have to understand that we can separate the artists from the art

Nazar: Like the Italian Futurists

William: Yeah burn everything

Nazar: Yeah like war is good! War is Art!

Cheyenne: Yeah and from our precursors we can learn what not to do or what not to write. There’s always a lesson and a point in learning anything in your art

William: And do you guys notice anything that you guys both have in your rooms?

Cheyenne: Yeah we both have carpets and we both have painting and canvases

William: So you guys both draw from a visual-

Nazar: Yeah well I definitely like having wall art, have the space be cool. Like I like the lighting, candles and stuff

Cheyenne: Like eventually Nazar’s room will be a hybrid of… what’s that place downstairs you wait before a show?

William: The Green Room?

Cheyenne: The green room and just cool vibes, kind of like a shag pad 70’s vibe. But yeah me and Nazar both share a love of visuals. See even Nazar likes the visual of my face

Nazar: She brought that back with her from Malaysia

Cheyenne: No I didn’t! I’m gonna fuck you up. Nazar actually bought that for me for my 22nd birthday, or well he got it made for me. So I guess you’re (Nazar) surprised that I like to exhibit myself but I have my boyfriend literally paying someone to paint a picture of my face how can I not be both the artist and the art!

#artist interview #art residency #artist series #art residence #montreal #montreal art #montreal artist #artstudio #art studio #farr #farr concordia #fine arts reading room #concordia #concordia university #musician #writer #writers nook #music room

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

Text

Translating into Poetry: Boots Riley on Sorry to Bother You

A cultural hit ever since its first showing at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, Boots Riley’s enigmatic “Sorry to Bother You” is now a blockbuster for those who crave explosive ideas, as articulated by off-the-wall filmmaking. Lakeith Stanfield stars as Cassius “Cash” Green in the film, playing an average guy that we all recognize: someone working a crummy job, in this case in telemarketing, just to pay the bills, while society at large continues to crumble piece by piece, everyday. As one of many employees of color being exploited for their labor, Cash starts to advance beyond his peers when he’s advised by a co-worker (Danny Glover) to use his “white voice” when making his calls.

The breakthrough sets off a bonkers tale of Cash’s ascension through a cruel capitalist system that dehumanizes lower-level employees and customers alike, while freer spirits such as his radical artist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) and unionizing co-worker Squeeze (Steven Yeun) fight back against their not-so-far-off dystopia. Offering plenty of riffs about about capitalism, race, entertainment and so much more with sci-fi, horror and comedy rhythms, Riley’s film defies convention as much as it does a mere plot synopsis.

The film is Boots Riley’s first as a feature writer and director, but as he tells me in this interview, it doesn’t come from a place too different than that of his songwriting. His band The Coup had been his previous main artistic outlet, a group that takes a similar kitchen sink perspective by blending funk, hip-hop, punk and pop for songs that equally defy categorization and the powers that be, and are filled with lyrics of a visual quality. Before "Sorry to Bother You" was a feature film, it was also the basis of a 2012 album by The Coup that comes highly-recommended.

On the morning of the film’s official release, RogerEbert.com spoke to Riley about some of the nuts and bolts in constructing the movie, the time that Taco Bell wanted to buy one of his songs, bending the reality in his storytelling and more.

The first time this was shown at Sundance. What was the moment you felt people got it, or were on the same wavelength as you?

Dude, I don’t know. I wasn’t present. It was nerve-wracking, you know. I’m used to performance, where you can say, “Ok we need more energy for this crowd,” or "let’s cut to the bridge. Here’s a song we’re going to play next." I was sitting there, I was physically tense, my muscles were … I had never done that performance wise. I can kind of now remember, “Oh, people were laughing at this part” but it felt bad [laughs]. After that screening, though, and seeing the Q&A, kind of let me know how people were feeling and in a bit more detail. Then all of the screenings of that during Sundance were a lot easier.

Is there any similar creative aspect to writing a catchy song with writing a scene?

For me, often I am translating—when I’m writing songs—I’m translating scenes, things that happened in real life, things that I’m picturing that I’m translating those things into poetry. For me, it was just getting rid of one.

They feed off each other?

Throughout my whole career of writing songs, I’m picturing things like scenes, and even when it’s not a story song, I’m picturing, “What is the poetry, what is the meaning behind this idea or this thing that’s in the real world?” So this felt like I didn’t have to do any translating. I can imagine this thing. It was a lot easier for me to write a screenplay than it was to write songs.

I can’t think of many musicians-turned-filmmakers who would say that.

I do quite think a lot of people don’t put a lot of effort into writing songs as I do [laughs].

You’ve always been a storyteller.

Not always. Some of them aren’t storytelling. But, it’s about, with songs you’re dealing with getting to the essence of something, striking upon something new that illuminates. You’re also dealing with identity, because how people listen to it is like, “This is me, this is my song.” You’re dealing with all of these things that I don’t have to deal with when writing a screenplay.

How precise is your visual planning when it comes to filmmaking?

So much of it is in the script. And then what wasn’t in the script, I storyboarded a lot of the stuff out. However, we didn’t use any of that. During the director’s labs, I started learning my lesson. One example is, I originally had for the opening interview scene, I had this whole storyboard and diagram set up where it would be a figure-eight around Cassius and Anderson. We were going to start on Anderson’s face, and then go around his head and reveal Cassius for the first time, and then go around his head, etc.

That’s a crazy move.

Yeah, I was like, this is going to be my calling card. I’m this new director in town, that sort of a thing. And the week that I was gonna shoot that thing in the labs, [“The Wolf of Wall Street” cinematographer] Rodrigo Prieto was one of the advisors. So when we got there, I had shown him—I had spent all of these years preparing this movie, and I had all of these things done out on a book. And I go up to him thinking, he’s gonna love me. So I show him this crazy move, and he’s like, “Oh, wow, OK. I can’t wait to see you do that.” [laughs]

So I’m talking to him about it throughout the week, excitedly, and then at Sundance you get to rehearse the day before you shoot. And so it was clear right away that we were going to miss people’s faces at the right times, it was just going to lose so much of the energy from that, and it was going to distract. So I threw the idea out, and when I saw Rodrigo I was like, “Hey, you know we're not going to do that move tomorrow.” And he was like, “Well, I’m going to have to insist that you do it. You’re right, but, you’re gonna have to do it because the risk is that if you don’t do it here, you might try it when you try to shoot the movie. And so you’ve been talking about it all of this time, you’re gonna need to prove it to yourself because you might leave here unsatisfied, and you might think it’s because, ‘Oh, I didn’t do do that thing.’”

Was that humbling?

I don’t know if humbling, but it made sense. Well, besides that, there’s so much you can get from the actors doing their thing, and figuring stuff out that changes how you might shoot a scene. You can have a prepared thing, and get the actors to fit into the boxes that you want. But it’s not going to be better than playing it off the performance, and let the performance lead.

Compared to music, how do you feel filmmaking works when it comes to autonomy?

Well, you’re working with less people with music. This is like, I’m talking to the production designer, and I’m like, “I want to do this to this room,” and he’s like, “Well. Here’s how much time that will take.” [laughs]

As a story you’ve been working on for so long, how immediately did the title come to you? f

I think it came in after I wrote the first scene. At some point it was called something really indie sounding, like “Little Victories,” I think. Then this was something that I felt not only fit what was happening and had other meanings, but sounded broad, and kind of sounded like a Judd Apatow title, or something like that.

How much of you can we see in Cassius?

I wrote all of these characters as pieces of me. There’s the artist, there’s the organizer, there’s the guy trying to make funny quips, and then there’s the guy trying to make his life mean something.

Have you ever encountered the idea of selling out?

It’s always … well, I don’t know what that actually means. But there are always choices I have had to make around what I will and won’t do for money. Like, Taco Bell wanted our song “Magic Clap.” They were so sure that we were going to do it that they made the commercial before they asked us—part of their presentation was the commercial they had made [laughs]. And it was like, even with that it was going to be THE song. I wouldn’t have been able to perform it without anyone thinking about Taco Bell.

Were you thinking about that when you were writing this movie?

That was for “Magic Clap,” so I already had this movie. But many other things like that have come up. We’ve turned down money.

I'm very curious if there were any ideas that you didn’t get into the script.

You see, my writing style is, I move up a little bit at a time, I move up and go back a little bit. I’m not just like ... [gibberish sound].

But there’s so much going on with the story.

All of the weird things that are in there are needed. I didn’t set out to write something with all of these fantastical or absurdist elements. It was just, as I went along, I realized that … part of my writing process is to parse out what ideas of the world I have that are given to me from other people’s artwork. So like, for instance, the noon-time cafe date. Why is that in so many people’s movies? I’ve never had a noon-time cafe date. But it gets in so many movies, because in someone’s head they’re like, “Oh, they have to meet!” Or they’re going to go on a date, and it’s a noontime cafe date. But it’s been in other movies, and that’s where it comes from. It’s not from their real life.

And so, with songs I’ve always liked to, that’s how you avoid cliches, to think about what you really think about the world, to think about what you really think about that subject. And for me, a lot of it when I think about something has to do with the context. And so, the context of that action in the world are something larger, things that are thoughts. How are you going to get that in there, are you going to have voiceover with what someone’s thinking, or someone is going to say what they’re thinking? It’s going to be pretty cliche. So what I realized is my way of context is to bend the reality of what is happening, because then it brings this idea.

How did this inform the biggest turn in the third act (which I won’t spoil)?

So, as I went along, it was things that were needed. At certain points it would be like, “I want us to be going through this as well. So how do I visually make the audience feel like they’re going through what he’s going through?” And so these were things that I felt were needed, like how do I make this urgent. I really needed him to see himself. I wrote the rap performance, and then I was like, that doesn’t make sense in the context of … he’s in this world where there’s chattel slavery and people are accepting it, and he’s selling them. Why would that change his mind? I realized that I’ve created this big world, and for it to be realistic to me, it needed something that shook him to his mortal core, that was so out of where we were, that it made sense.

The absurdity makes sense, and it’s interesting that it’s not where you start. It’s kind of crazy backwards, in the best way.

You see, I don’t know how anyone else did it.

As someone who has had the spirit of this movie in you so long, across different mediums, what keeps you believing in the idea of protest, rebelliousness?

Well, I see it. West Virginia teachers just shut down the whole state. A couple years ago, Wal-Mart workers went on strike and were met with militia. There’s rebellion going on, people are doing stuff, they’re trying. The object of the news is to put all of these problems out there like, blah blah blah, and there’s no analysis to it. There’s no analysis of how the economic system works, and which is what’s making all of these things happen. It puts it all into, “This personality did this, and they’re crazy.” And “This personality did that.” It makes it be this jumble of bad noise, and I think having this analysis of the way the system works.

Does that mean better journalism? Or more overall discussion?

It means a class analysis, that shows what the primary contradiction in this system is, and what that primary contradiction boils down to is the exploitation of labor. Knowing that contradiction gives you the insight of how things can change.

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