#im trapped in traditional art world lately

[vampireofsorrow]

if you've ever felt bloodthirsty...

[abecat]

One of the many sketches I’ve done this summer, trying to figure out how to teach the figure drawing/character design class online. Of course, these indulgent drawings are just for me, but they help me think about the biopolitics of figure drawing in the current moment (of pandemic, of political unrest, of collective trauma)

First some background: From late modernism onwards, the whole enterprise of  academic figure drawing becomes highly suspect. As I understand it, the french academic tradition (that spread through Europe and into the US) established the educational standards of anatomy and naturalistic rendering, with the aim of training artists in the creation of highly emotional images. These images would be used by the state to form cohesive and durable nationalist identities: cheesy neoclassical paintings that drew a connection between France’s III republic to ancient Greece and its idealized concept of democracy. Like Uncle Sam in America’s WWI, these neoclassical mascots have one purpose above all: to rouse the spirit in service of the sovereign (emperor, corporation) for easy manipulation. Now, dear person reading this, you may agree with the project of building a national imagery regardless of how “ahistorical” these pictures may be. But you have give modernist their due: the worst excesses of these canons were embarrassingly in evidence during the Third Reich, with its obsession over "perfect” bodies for a “perfect” race.

So drawing state-sanctioned “perfect” bodies is out of the question, but modernist didn’t really delivered us from sin either. There are just too many examples of asshole “genius” artists who thrived on a predatory relationship to their subjects (Gaugin and Picasso, anyone?) It seems that the emancipatory gesture against the naive bourgeoise taste could not extend to the issues of gender and race inequalities. Postmodern artists, aligned to feminist, queer and anti-colonial projects, thrived on these active biopolitics, engaging them to draw attention to injustice, to deal with false consciousness and internalized opression, and to express long-repressed lust. The question become not whether we should do figure drawing, but who and why should do it. I find the question to be eminently just and interesting, but just as often, paralyzing.

In this context, a class “Figure Drawing/Character Design” may look, from the outside like a puzzling idea. It is like a bad recipe that mixes modernis-postmodernist unresolved issues with total capitulation to market forces. Anime? Cartoons? Caricatures? Stories? And all of it mixed with figure drawing? How can this be insightful?

Figuring the potential for insight in this class, given this context I sketch here, has been my challenge for the last five years. I could simply say that there is a market for it, that students/audiences like it, that gaining skills is pragmatic, that people have been drawing “characters” from prehistory... and just move on feeling justified. But that wont do.

One day I will write something scholarly about this, but here is a sketch of why I think this class has the potential for insight: Character design and figure drawing exist in the context of a complete immersion in capitalist communication technologies. After giving ourselves a moment to mourn the fall fo the Berlin Wall (if that’s your jam,) we must understand that our existence in this soup of capitalist communication technologies has the effect of diluting the membrane that trap us in our bodies. The concept of “Character Design” as something that can be learned and practiced by anyone (the putative project of art education) means that we all have the right toy around with the body. Paradoxically, the fact that we all are here shouting in social media, telling our stories and drawing our traumas, attenuates some of the inequalities that made modernist and postmodernist so anxious. Character Design is a conversational tool, a shared language that a huge mass of “content creators” use to talk about The Other, and by extension, The Self.

To put it clearly, drawing characters reveals a deep longing for The Other - an enormously human need for proximity and validation (just ask Henry Darger). But because, in the “old, real world” The Other is prickly and hurts (and we hurt them), we must negotiate. Like transitional objects, these characters facilitate the exploration of new shared realities, new embodiments.

Here is the secret you should know: every character I draw is me. Is not a portrait of me, is not a realistic or idealized version of me. It is me extending my being into matter, exploring other bodies, and making those explorations have real stakes thanks to erotic, violent or tender psychodynamics. In every choice I make about the design of my characters I detect, after the fact, the longings, traumas and hopes to form my personality. For example: all this skinny catgirls I’ve been drawing since Im 12 (way before I knew what the internet and furry or anime was) are intimatel related to life-long struggle with body dysmorphia. As I draw a crispy ribcage, I can feel the sharp angles as if they were mine, to mention one example.

The figure component of the class comes into play in a very specific way: the ritual of drawing a nude model in person is a perfect illustration of the shared responsibility for reality formation among people. Nude models, who must stay still and never turn their heads around to scan the room, depend on all artists in attendance to hold the world together, to perceive and refigure what the model can’t see. It is a powerfully intimate dynamic in which the model imposes a moral contract. The model says “ you see me naked and I hold you responsible for my well being, as I remain in this vulnerable position, all in service of this ritual that transcends us both.” To bring storytelling and character design into the mix (that is, to bring the vulnerability revealed by design choices, as in the case of my anorexic catgirls), is to up the ante. I’ve seen it in the room: both artist and model disrobe, the model by putting themslves, nude, in the hands of us artists in attendance. The artists by revealing their current negotiation with The Other through their characters.

And now I gotta teach this remotely. The model is not available, and so the stakes feel lower, less challenging. As I was drawing these characters using cheesy nude photos I found on some website, I realized that I missed the sacred contract, the confessional dimension of drawing like this in the figure drawing room. I guess I’m writing all of this precisely because I feel the need to confess.

[heathendolan]

Little Luke McIver (G.D)

Summary: Kindergarten teacher Grayson Dolan is the only one who can crack the shell of Luke McIver, your newest case in social work. So you’ll need him to stick around.

Author’s Note: Hi everyone, this is again a newer branch for me; it’s mainly focused on the relationship between (y/n) and luke and then luke and grayson instead of being complete romance. if that isn’t for you, i totally get it!!! but it was again fun to step out of my comfort zone and try something. extended author’s note

Warnings: PLEASE READ!!! child abuse, social work, a little bit sad. if any of this bothers you PLEASE don’t read, i really did my research to be as precise as i could be!! but it could still be triggering !!!!!

Word Count: 15.2K+ || masterlist

It hadn't changed a bit.

There, a hundred yards away, stood your beloved elementary school in its glory: chipping paint, rusted sign, and all. You weren't one to deny yourself of a smile. It had been eons since you'd visited this place, but it was still nostalgic and vivid and bursting with memories; you'd hardly stepped foot on the property and you'd already spotted the pole Caleb VanDyke stuck his tongue to in third grade.

You crept up the sidewalk with your binder tucked under your arm, hopped about in your heels, and narrowly dodged the forbidden obstacles--cracks--etching the dull pavement. Along the sidewalk were mementos, engraved and painted in the cement, dating all the way back to the early 1980s. It was tradition for the kindergarteners to add their addition with their teeny, tiny, creative brains, and you nearly gasped when you stumbled upon your own handprint, embedded near the benches, basking in the hot August sun. You slumped down to your knees and flattened your hand (now ginormous in comparison) to the shallow crater and marveled. Marveled at how quickly twenty years had slipped on by without you ever noticing the size of your hands.

"Crazy, innit?"

You jumped to your full height, wobbled under the instability of your heels, and smoothed out your pencil skirt with dusty hands. Tucking your hair behind your ears, you turned to face your attacker.

"Jeez Hun, I didn't mean to scare you!" the lady cried, pressing a hand to her heart and enveloping you with the other.

"Mrs. Hoffmann! Oh my god, I'm sorry I just-"

"No, don't apologize, that was completely my fault!"

"No, seriously, I am so jumpy that I just-"

At once, you both realized how unnecessarily kind and apologetic you were being and huffed a chuckle. "My, how you've grown," she simpered, cupping your face between two hands before tugging you into one of her famous bear hugs. You smiled into her shoulder and realized she hadn't changed that much, either; you'd seen her all throughout high school when she popped by the boutique you had worked at, and aside from a few more pairs of crow's feet and some greying roots, she was practically untouched, well into her late forties. She was kind and had a heart twice the size of anyone you'd ever met. And she was beautiful; she always had been. "You're so old now," she said. "Making me feel like some ancient ruin."

You giggled and shook your head. "Not a chance, you're still kickin'! It's going to be so weird counseling little mini-me's," you gushed, wrapping your arms around yourself. You stared at your feet and smirked at the handprints of classmates you'd graduated with. "I feel like I should still be wearing light-up sketchers, not these... death traps," you laughed, kicking your heel up.

She chuckled and slipped her arm around you and escorted you into the entryway. Almost instantly, your brain bloomed with memories upon memories upon memories. "Do you know where you're going, Honey?" she asked as the two of you pulled up to a fork.

You nodded and waved her goodbye with a promise to catch up soon, and then dashed away, beelining for your office.

Your office. What a phrase.

There, you frowned at the blankness, the blandness, the bareness of the walls and decided two things: one, that you had to redecorate this cell, and two, that you would be the best elementary counselor this world had ever seen.

-

Easier said than done.

"Luke, hi!" you cheered as Cory, Principal Larson, coaxed a boy, maybe five years old, into your office.

A few weeks had passed and your job, so far, had been less than flashy. You'd resolved tearful playground disputes and consoled cafeteria tantrums and, well, not much else. It was a blur of meetings, hissy fits, and really bad school coffee. You'd made a mental note to buy your own Keurig.

But Luke was different, and you could see that right away.

Cory hung in the doorway, nearly barricading Luke in as the kid fought his way around the large man. Luke already had tears sprung in his eyes, a pitiful frown, and an overall, seemingly permanent, aura that oozed with fear. His tiny hands were fisted by his sides and his curls dangled protectively over his big doe eyes and something painful, something piercing, poked at your heart when you realized Luke needed your help a lot more than any of those kids on the playground. Luke really, really needed your help.

So, you bounced out of your chair and scurried over to Luke and bent at knee level and swept a warm hand over his shoulder. "Hey Luke, can we talk for a little? Not too long, I promise" you pleaded softly, hoping to catch his eye. But Luke was staring at the floor, blankly, stubbornly. And a tear rolled off his nose. "I've got it from here, Mr. Larson," you whispered, nodding up at Cory.

You held onto Luke's hand as you shut the door, careful to make sure he didn't just bolt right out. "Wanna sit in the beanbag?" you smirked, thumbing to the cushy, plump seat tucked in the corner. It was every kid's favorite. Luke looked at it longingly before shaking his head, hopping on the rigid desk chair far, far away from you, and staring at the ground again.

Luke was small. Smaller than most of his class, you'd assumed, with his skeletal arms and equally skinny legs. He wore a grey Power Rangers shirt that practically dwarfed him and brown cargo pants that rode up his ankles. His shoes were a dull, gunky yellow with dozens of holes and, from the looks of it, Luke's feet were bare of socks. Luke was textbook poor.

And poor-spirited, it seemed as well. You'd seldom seen a kid so quiet. You were so busy studying him you'd hardly realized minutes had passed on the clock without a single word exchanged. No, Luke just sat there, cowering under your gaze, staring at the ground. Luke was well practiced in the art of silence.

And that just wasn't okay, nor was it natural. Kids had technicolor brains bursting with imagination and creativity and words. Kids would scream and shout and run amuck and yell; kids would talk--if you let them.

"Luke," you began, fumbling for words that could fill the dreary silence that suffocated your office. "Luke, what's your favorite color?"

Luke looked up at you with his big doe eyes and a quivering lip and sat on his hands. He kept looking at you, tears in his eyes, tremor in his jaw, and stared. Stared for minutes. Stared for hours, it felt like. You weren't going to rush him, Luke should take as long as he wanted.

But then he was sniffling, and a pitched, strangled whimper echoed from his mouth and you wondered how you could possibly fix this.

C'mon, you went to school for this. Speak!

"Luke, wanna know something cool?" you asked, leaning over the desk as he tucked in on himself. "This room? It's the safest place in the world."

To that, Luke's cries cut off. He was now just staring at you with his big, big brown eyes and waiting.

"I'm serious, this place is protected," you nodded.

In the smallest, most broken voice, Luke asked, "From what?"

You smiled your kindest smile and said, "Can you keep a secret?" He looked to either side of him, made sure the coast was clear before he nodded. "Luke, this place is protected by magic," you whispered. "Fairies and wizards. Swear," you said. Luke's doe eyes got even rounder. "So we can tell secrets and no one will find out. Soundproof," you explained with confidence, knocking on the wall theatrically. "Which is why I can give you this, and nobody will ever know."

You dug in your drawer and pulled out a sucker and tossed it his way, watching as he marveled at the little treat plopped in his lap. "Thank you, Ms. (Y/L/N)..." Luke breathed, stuffing the candy in his pocket.

"You can call me (Y/N)," you grinned. "But only my friends get to call me (Y/N), okay?"

Luke nodded, a ghost of a smile on his lips.

With the full understanding that these things take time, that Luke needed space--and by the looks of it, a lot of space--and that he would work his way up to trust, you asked, "Luke, can I see you in a couple days? Would that be okay?"

Luke didn't answer, he simply leaped from his chair and darted out the door, and left you with a low, low spirit.

-

"Hey," Cory mumbled, tapping on your door. "Get 'im to crack?"

You grimaced and shook your head. "No, I didn't. It's going to take time--and I mean time. He hardly breathes in the same room as me," you groaned, digging your fingers into your scalp. "Scares me to think about what might be going on at home."

Cory sighed. “Yeah, the kid’s a little... I mean, the teachers notice it, you know? I know you know, you’ve dealt with this stuff before,” Cory shrugged, frowning at his polished shoes.

But you hadn’t dealt with this stuff before. You were fresh out of your master’s with minimal experience. Your internship was borderline bogus.

“Yeah, I don’t know, stuff never gets easier,” you mumbled.

And that wasn’t entirely a lie. You imagined you’d feel the same way about Luke as any of the other kids whose shells needed cracking, whose homes needed relocating. No one wanted to deal with this stuff, this heartbreak of a job. But someone had to.

“Just... keep me updated, alright? Let me know if you need help with anything,” Cory said. “And I’ll let Luke’s teachers know what’s going on. I mean, it’s only kindergarten but you never know what tricks Mr. Dolan is pulling,” he chuckled, smirking to himself.

A thick glob of spit lodged itself in your throat at the mention of a ‘Mr. Dolan’, and you began coughing and wheezing and making a scene at once.

Growing in a town that size with a family as known as the Dolans were, there were only two possibilities for who ‘Mr. Dolan’ could be. Grayson, and Grayson.

You’d hardly been keeping tabs, but Ethan had boomed as a traveling photographer and Cameron was most definitely not a ‘Mr.’, and Sean was still the superintendent of the district (and had hired you). And, unless there was a new clan of Dolans in town, ones that weren’t half as gorgeous, you were very, very stressed.

You hadn’t seen Grayson since a small town, Christmas-break party. Limited interaction was how you liked it; Grayson made you (and the rest of the Long Valley population) clutzy, stuttery, and blushy—a few of your least favorite things to be.

It was nothing more than the fact that Grayson was gorgeous. And kind. And so, so polite. Every mom spent their Sundays praying their daughters would woo him and their sons would follow in his golden boy footsteps. He was Long Valley’s most beloved and there was no shame in admitting that you had also fallen victim to his spell; everyone loved Grayson, and that was that. But of course, that fucker picked something as absolutely adorable as Kindergarten education.

“(Y/N)? Are you okay? Here, drink some water,” Cory urged, patting your back and sliding you your water bottle.

Red in the face, you hacked before saying hoarsely, “All good.”

Not all good.

-

"Mrs. Hoffmann, hi!" you cried, stepping into the coffee shop and greeting her with a hug. She buried you in the warmth of he fur-lined parka and you accepted it with appreciation; this October had been particularly chilly in New Jersey with its barren trees and its frosted lawns, and cold meant the need for, well, coats. Your thoughts drifted back to little Luke McIver with his Power Rangers shirt and his brown cargo capris and his canary yellow, many-holed shoes. He needed a hug from Ms. Hoffmann and her big parka.

"Ugh, how are the roads?" she asked conversationally. "Are they slippery? This morning it was just pouring, I'm almost afraid it'll freeze over."

You nodded along. "No, yeah they were slippery. I nearly drifted pulling into Cozy Corner just now," you expounded, pointing to the entrance near the coffee shop.

She shook her head with disgust. "Guess you can't hope for a late winter here in Jersey. I'll for sure be getting a pumpkin spice latte with this weather."

And so, you sat down with your mugs in hand and huddled in the overstuffed loveseat and chatted for hours about the new boutique that had popped up on fifth street and the old bowling alley being torn down. She was, without a doubt, one of the kindest people you'd ever met: she bought your coffee and tipped 50%, offered up her coat as a blanket for the two of you, and complimented your very lazy outfit. This was no surprise to you; this woman was magical, and you'd known it since you were five. It felt like an honor to even sit and chat.

"So, I have to ask and I don't mean to offend, promise," she started. "but what exactly are you? Like, at the school? Do you work outside of the school too? I feel like such a loon, but I've really fallen out of the times-"

"Ms. Hoffmann, please," you snorted, laying a hand on her forearm that was dancing all about.

"And would you quit calling me Ms. Hoffmann! Call me Nancy, Honey."

"Okay, Nancy," you giggled. "I went to school and got my masters in counseling psychology and a bachelor's in social work. So, I work as both in the school. So, if a student were to be dealing with mental health issues, I could, you know, help them out as any counselor would, but if their problems are stemming from their home life, well then I move about and-"

"Hun, you know I'm in the system, right?" she smiled gently.

"What? You're kidding," you gaped. "You're a social worker?"

"Well no," she laughed. "No, I double-majored in elementary education and social work and then when I got out, I decided I'd just be a teacher for awhile and get my feet on the ground, and then I fell in love with teaching. I absolutely love the kids and after I got tenured, I just... I never went back to fulfill that part of the degree. I kind of wonder sometimes, what it would have been like, but I've never regretted it. Of course, it would have been fun if Steve and I could have fostered some kiddos," she smiled sadly. "Or had some. But, things don't always work out in your favor, I guess."

Her eyes glassed over and she clasped her hands tightly under the coat, fisting a wad of the material. It was a tragedy what happened to the Hoffmanns; a few years into their marriage, Nancy miscarried once, then twice. There was only so much gift baskets and get well soon cards could do. She was lonely without kids, that much was obvious. You supposed being a kindergarten teacher was as good as it could have possibly gotten for a woman with her circumstances, but they always left after nine months and change. It wasn't the same.

You grabbed her hand from under the coat and rubbed a thumb over her knuckles.

She laughed breathlessly and said, "Not that- not that we should delve into something so cynical, I-"

You lifted a hand to her to stop her unnecessary apology. "Mrs. Hoffmann-"

"Nancy."

"Nancy, this is my job, being a shoulder to cry on. Never apologize to me for such a trivial thing as uncorking your emotions. We all need to, sometimes. Be my guest," you urged.

And she did. She talked about the ache to buy Christmas toys and back-to-school supplies, how she ached when she received graduation cards from past students and Christmas cards from past families. Ached when people told her to 'get a dog, it's basically the same thing.' Ached when Steve played with little ones and looked so natural, so right. Ached when students accidentally called her mom.

"You're so good at this," she sniffled, wiping her nose with her macaron's napkin. "The words just come pouring out, I haven't told anyone this stuff in years."

You nibbled on your lip, feeling that certain pride that comes with intimacy. "Sometimes I can crack shells, sometimes I can't," you admitted. "There's a student, and I just... can't get him to budge. Not an inch."

She frowned and patted your leg soothingly. "He'll come around. Kids are weird, sometimes," she giggled. "Like Grayson Dolan was telling me about this girl, Piper Conrad, just flopping on the carpet and making a snow angel in the middle of class and- why are you blushing?"

Heat was boiling your face at the mere mention of Grayson Dolan. It was pathetic. "Blushing? I'm not, I'm- this pumpkin spice is just really seasoned, the nutmeg in it is just-"

"Grayson Dolan," she gasped, piecing the bits together. "Oh (Y/N), tell me about it. That man's a hunk. Didn't you graduate with him? I get it, I really do; if he weren't half my age and miles out of my league and I wasn't married I would just-"

"Nancy!" you cried with laughter, shushing her confession. "Nancy, I don't like him. There's nothing there, he probably doesn't even know I exist, it's been like, seven years since I've seen him."

She smirked and nodded sardonically. "But he will. Just you wait until we have a workshop day, oh you are so-"

"I am so nothing! You pipe down, missy."

"Right," she laughed. "Well, let me buy you another coffee for your troubles, listening to this old hoot cry a hurricane, and let's head on out. I think the roads are going to freeze over, after all," she frowned as looked out the window. "Hopefully this latte will keep you warm in place of Mr. Dolan."

-

On Thursday, Luke was again seated in his rickety, uncomfortable chair in the back corner, far as far could be from you. He was wearing his brown too-short pants and his grey too-big Power Rangers shirt and his ochre too-many-holed shoes again. No socks, big brown eyes, and a raw bitten lip—Luke looked about as sad as you’d think.

“Luke, how have you been the past couple days?” you asked quietly, approaching the subject as gently as you’d approach a tortured animal.

Luke looked tired. And lost. And cold; New Jersey’s lawns were crisp with frost on that October morning with a thick mask of fog settling in the air, and the school had yet to crank the heat on in an effort to save money. Of course, this typically wasn’t a problem—most kids had jackets, or at least sweatshirts. You suspected that might be a problem for Luke.

Luke didn’t answer you.

“Luke?” you coaxed.

He tucked his lips under his teeth and clenched his tiny little jaw and visibly fought back tears.

And he sat like that for the whole hour. You would have sat there the whole day with Luke, waiting, pleading with him to let you help him, but Luke had lunch.

When the bell chimed, he hopped off his seat and dashed towards the door, but paused. “(Y/N)?” he whispered, his voice crackly and dry.

“Yeah, Luke?”

“Mommy said fairies don’t exist,” he sniffled, hand on the door handle. “Mommy said you lied to me.”

Your heart wrenched deep in your chest, the physical symptoms of heartbreak bustling within you. Luke looked at you with his big doe eyes and you looked back with all the sadness in the world and then, then you noticed.

You noticed that the collar of his oversized tee had slipped down to expose his shoulder, which had an enormous bruise. It was green and violet and nearly theatrical in size; it was nauseating, this bruise on little Luke’s shoulder.

With a shaking voice, you asked, “Luke, where’d you get-“

Luke beelined out of your office and into the hall. You scooted out of your chair and crept behind him, desperate to just get this one secret out. That would be all it took; one admission and Luke could live such a better life.

But as you rounded the corner, you found Luke wrapped around the leg of Grayson Dolan, sobbing profusely into his dress pants. Grayson had a hand on his head, ruffling the curls that dangled above his eyes with the most sympathetic of frowns. And then, Grayson ducked to eye level and enveloped Luke in a bear hug—one as gentle as himself—and nodded along with his warbles.

“Luke, can you tell me what’s wrong?” Grayson pleaded, searching the boy’s eyes.

Luke grabbed ahold of Grayson’s tie and buried his nose into his chest and shook his head. Luke then heaved a deep breath, scrubbed his eyes of well-deserved tears, and bounded off to the cafeteria, grey shirt flowing behind him.

And Grayson stood and watched him scamper all the way down the hall. And then Grayson rubbed at his eyes and turned back into his classroom and closed the door.

-

Luke was sobbing, absolutely bawling in his stiff, creaky chair, and you had absolutely no way to help.

And you felt like such an idiot, because you went to school for this damn it. Seven years of education in counseling psychology and your first patient wouldn't even talk to you after four sessions. But he was crying. And you were doing nothing.

Panic rose in your throat as you realized how useless, how absolutely incompetent you were sitting there, watching Luke wail in his seat. You'd tried; he had stumbled into your office by the guidance of Cory once more and promptly sobbed. You asked him gently, then firmly, why he was upset, what was wrong, how you could help but Luke was deaf to your pleads and questions.

With hardly any direction, you did something thoughtless. Completely, ridiculously senseless.

You hopped from your seat--abandoned Luke in your office--and sped to Grayson Dolan's room down the hall.

You weren't thinking (clearly), you were just doing, acting, hoping something, or someone, could tear down this child's indestructible walls. Because you hadn't stopped thinking about that bruise--that monstrous bruise--since you saw it, and you wanted him to get help. You wanted this kid to have all the love in the world.

So, you clacked down the hall in your heels and scampered up to Grayson's door, knocking tentatively and then urgently. From outside the door, you called, "Grays- Um, Mr. Dolan, I- I know this sounds crazy, but-"

The door swung open to reveal Grayson a pair of wide eyes and a slackened jaw. "(Y/N) (Y/L/N)? Is that-?"

"I really need you to just, just come with me," you begged, verging tears, grabbing ahold of his forearm and tugging him behind you.

Grayson stumbled behind you, his shoes slapping the linoleum, and rushed up to your side. "Damn, you can walk fast in those heels," he panted to your left. Panicky tears sprung in your eyes and you curled your hand into a fist tight, tight, and pinched yourself a painful distraction. "Hey, what's going on?" Grayson murmured, slow and deep and warm.

You scrunched your face unattractively and pinched the bridge of your nose. "I- Mr. Dolan-"

"(Y/N), it's me. Grayson," he muttered sternly, grabbing your arm and halting the two of you.

You pulled at his hand and said, "No, we need to keep going, I-"

"(Y/N)." he commanded, sternness wired hard in his voice.

You whined oh-so-pathetically and shook your head. "You're going to think I'm such an idiot because I can't do my own job, like I'm over here asking you to do my-"

"You work here?" Grayson asked with a knit in his brows.

With exasperation, you sighed, "Yes. Yes, I'm a counselor and Luke McIver is sitting in my office and-"

"Luke McIver?" Grayson breathed. Without hesitation or a need for any explanation at all, he encased his hand in yours and dragged you down the hall, wordless and worrisome. Tailing behind Grayson (who was obviously handling this much better than you were), you snuck into your office and watched with wonder as he folded himself smaller than Luke, who was still gasping for breaths.  Grayson tucked himself up by Luke's side, wrapped his hands around Luke's forearms and rubbed soft circles in his boney flesh, and said, "Take a deep breath, we aren't going anywhere."

Luke's jaw clamped shut and the last few tears rolled down his rosy cheeks and he nodded his head. Luke felt safe.

His eyes, as doe-ish as they typically were, were soft around the edges. They were usually pried wide; his eyelashes tickled the tops of his brow bones and his beautiful brown irises drowned in a sea of white. He looked alert, always, and his blinks were few and far between. Now, Luke just looked tired. Like he'd never had a chance to just relax. And vulnerable, too. In a good way.

Grayson smiled to him and Luke smiled back. "Luke, we need to talk to you, and we need you to talk to us," Grayson murmured, rubbing a hand down Luke's shoulder.

Luke nodded. Grayson peeked over his shoulder at you and gestured vaguely for you to join them in their little huddle, so you slipped next to Grayson and fell on your knees and left your hands in your lap, far away from Luke. You weren't going to push your luck.

"Luke, how did you get that bruise on your shoulder?" you asked softly.

Grayson grabbed ahold of Luke's shaking hands. Luke said, almost robotically, "I was on the monkey bars and-"

Grayson shook his head. "Luke, please don't lie to me."

Luke's lip quivered and his face crumpled and he collapsed on Grayson's shoulder, burrowed his head into the crook of his neck and cradled himself, let Grayson hold him and just cried. Cried like he deserved to, cried like he wanted to, cried like he had to. Cried so long you had to sneak into the main office and call for a substitute teacher for Grayson's kindergarten class. And that was okay. Luke needed this.

You slinked behind your desk and clicked your pen, dug out your notepad and waited. Waited for Luke to calm down and unfold himself for you--for Grayson.

"She doesn't like when I come here," Luke muttered into the cloth of Grayson's dress shirt.

"Come where, buddy?"

"(Y/N)'s," he whined. "I told her, I told her that it was protected by fairies and wizards and she- she hit me right- right here," Luke blubbered, tugging on his Power Rangers shirt and exposing the battered skin of his skeletal shoulder. Grayson's face fell even more, his eyes downward and his face low. "And she- she told me that- she told me that (Y/N) lied to me and she took my sucker and she stomped on it and- and- and-"

"Luke, is that the only time she's hit you?" Grayson whispered.

"No, Mr. Dolan."

Your throat bobbed with emotion as you scribbled down notes furiously. Your handwriting was godawful and your hand was cramping but you wouldn't stop writing this child's story for the world. Even if it really, really hurt.

"She doesn't like when I come to school, either. She said that- that I shouldn't get all this food and all this heat and that I don't need to be away from home for seven hours. And she-"

You shoved all that emotion down and took the validity out of his words and just wrote. Just wrote, detached and factually.

Grayson had to suck up all the tears, had to soak in all this tragedy first hand. Luke was staring at him like he had all the answers to the world, like Grayson could solve his problems with his bare hands. And Grayson had to act like he could.

After hours of cries and admissions and a whole lot of heartbreak, the final bell chimed in the hall. Grayson turned to you in question, a tear slipping from his eye.

"Luke, can you sit in here for just a second? Just a quick second, we'll be back," you asked, looking at the boy with a cautious smile.

He nodded and you slipped into the hall, beckoning Grayson as you went. Shutting the door as gently as you could, you turned to find Grayson with his head guarded by his hands, his shoulders shaking. "He can't go back," he croaked with a crack in his voice. He lifted his face and it was blotchy and red and tear streaked and he said, "He absolutely cannot go back to that monster."

"I know, I know," you muttered, staring at your heels. "I- I need to make some phone calls and talk to some foster cares around the-"

"No," Grayson interrupted, steel in his tone. "This kid needs someone he can trust. I'll take him."

You laughed in disbelief, shaking your head. "No, that isn't how this works. First, I have to call Morris County human services and have them head over to Luke's house and take his mom into custody, and then I have to go over to Morris County Human Services and find him a caretaker for the next 72 hours.”

"So what, we just drop this kid off? Leave him completely alone? I just told him we wouldn't go anywhere," Grayson growled, flaring his nose.

You pressed your hand to your face with frustration and sighed. "No, I- I couldn't do that to Luke. I don't think I can take him into custody for too long because I'm a conflict of interest, but I'll take him until we can get a judge to sign off on a permanent foster care or a-"

"Luke doesn't need a temporary family. Luke needs a home," Grayson hissed.

Irritation built in your chest and you pinned him with a hard glare. "Do you think I don't know that? How do you think these things work, Grayson, we just throw him into a house, no legal document, no nothing, and send him off?"

"Well, of course not, I don't know what-"

"You're right, you don't. I might not seem like I know what I'm doing, and you've been the best help, but I know what to do now," you spoke evenly. You reached for your office's door handle but Grayson flattened his hand against the wood.

"So what, you're just ditching me? I can't help Luke through this? Last time I checked, I was the only one who could get him to talk, (Y/N). And I just told him I wasn't going anywhere," Grayson fumed, his voice low and cold.

You glanced at your toes and let the wheels turn in your head, round and about, until you sighed and threw caution to the wind. "Okay. Listen, you can... you can come check on him later tonight at my place and whatnot, you can even come to the court hearing. But if he finds a new home, I don't- I can't promise anything, Grayson. This isn't up to me; if it were, I'd just give you the fucking kid."

He breathed a sigh of relief and wrapped a hand around your shoulder, warm and firm and big. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," you muttered. "Here's my phone number... and my address..." you mumbled, rifling through the packet of notes you'd scribbled down while listening to Luke and tearing out a stray paper, jotting down both messily. "Now, I really need to get in there and make some phone calls."

-

There you stood, in Morris County Human Services, hand in hand with little Luke McIver. He was willing to hold your hand, which in itself was a feat, but distantly; the two of you were connected by the full lengths of your arms apart. He was staring at the kid's corner in the waiting room, watching an eight-year-old rumble around with dozens of colorful blocks longingly, frowning. Just as you were about to invite him to go play, a county social worker peeked their head out from the hallway. "Ms. (Y/L/N), come with me, please,"

You looked down at Luke and tugged on his palm, tilting your head towards the lady. "C'mon Luke," you encouraged, taking a step in her direction.

The two of you followed her into the narrow corridor, shuffling behind her as she led you past dozens of rooms. "Luke, you can take a seat in this room," she smiled, popping open a door. Inside was a room abundant with toys, games, and books galore. It was prismatic and bright and Luke looked at it with a glint in his big, big brown eyes and hurried inside. And then Luke plopped on a chair in the center of the room, sat all still, and the social worker shut the door before you could promise Luke that he could play with those toys.

"Ms. (Y/L/N), I'm Emily Bradshaw and I have some terrible news," she hushed, leading you down another hall, and then another, halting at a dead end in a secluded corner.

You weren't in the least surprised.

"Luke... has some bad luck, to put it lightly."

I know.

"There's no one we can put him in for custody. His dad's out of the picture, Uncle's a crack addict, Grandparents are dead, his other Uncle's in jail for felony charges and... well, we can't give him back to his mom, obviously. Not after what you told me," Emily murmured. "We don't have a single--and I mean, not a single--person available for this little guy."

You touched your forehead with heartbreak. "No siblings, right?"

"Nope."

"I- Emily, can I take him for the night then?" you asked, biting down on your lip nervously. "He's so fragile, Emily. He hardly trusts me, and it took weeks to get him to even talk in front of me. I don't want him with anyone else, he'll be absolutely scarred."

"(Y/N), I'm afraid you'll have to. Obviously, you can't take him longer than 72 hours, you're a-"

"Conflict of interest, I know. I- I'll look through the records and see if there's anyone in the system worth calling. This is just terrible," you breathed.

"You're telling me. I know this stuff happens all the time, but it never gets easier. God, poor kid," she whistled, scuffing her shoe on the linoleum floor. "You've got him until Monday, cause we can't collect him on Sundays. So, Monday at... 5:00 PM. Just- I know you don't need to be told, but just take care of him, okay? Kid's been through more than we know."

With that, the two of you walked your way back to Luke's playroom and knocked on the door, creaking it open. Inside, Luke sat on his stool, the room left completely as it was.

With a frown, you and Emily crept over to him and squatted to his level. "Luke, I'm going to take you to my house for the next couple days, is that okay?" you asked, tucking the bulk of your hair behind your ear.

He nodded, slipped off his chair, and grabbed your hand.

-

"Luke, just for tonight, we need to go get some PJ's for you, okay?" you offered, glancing in your rearview at Luke, who was strapped in the middle seat of your car.

"It's okay, I can sleep in this," Luke mumbled, playing with his fingers and glancing out the window. He was talking about his massive grey Power Rangers shirt and his teeny brown cargo pants.

You winced and stared at the road again. "Nope, we're getting you some super fuzzy PJs. And hot cocoa."

"What's hot cocoa?" Luke asked.

You shrugged a shoulder and grinned in the mirror. "You'll have to wait and see, Luke."

Inside the store, you stood in the kid's section, ogling the quality of each fleece lined item. You surfed through nautica-inspired, dinosaur patterned, and hot-wheel styled pajamas, entirely lost on what Luke liked best.

"Luke, which design's your favorite?" you asked tentatively.

"It doesn't matter," Luke mumbled, not even bothering to look from where he sat in your shopping cart.

So you grabbed all of them. And a huge, sherpa blanket, and a set of socks and underwear, and then it dawned on you.

"Luke, we're getting you some new clothes, too."

Ignorant to his declines, you ransacked the whole department of hoodies, long enough pants, tees, and finally, a new pair of shoes. And then, you wheeled him to the checkout, paid, and left for home.

-

Maybe: Grayson: It's Grayson, I'm coming over.

You: Bring hot cocoa I forgot to buy some at the store.

Grayson: Okay. On my way!

Your house was oddly fit just for a kiddo. You'd know; you grew up in this house.

Your parents, after a few decades of living in a town as quaint as Long Valley, wanted a little more excitement and up-and-left to New York City once you dashed off to college. They used this house as a summer home, seeing as they'd paid it off, and spent their springs and falls and winters in the boisterous, cluttered metropolis of NYC. You'd only ever be willing to visit.

It wasn't that you hated the city, no, most certainly not. But it was loud. And cramped, yet so big. You loved the familiarity, the peacefulness, the home-ishness of your little Long Valley. So, after completing your masters, you headed back home and paid your parents what they'd take and redecorated your old childhood bedroom.

At the kitchen island, you sat with Luke, bowls of Kraft Mac n Cheese in hands, forks shoveling the noodles by the mouthfuls. It was alarming how fast Luke was eating his dish; he hardly left time for breathing.

"Luke, there's more in the pot, you don't need to-"

You cut yourself off when you realized he was not listening, just eating his meal anxiously, like you'd take it away at any second.

The doorbell rang throughout the building and you hopped off your seat and slipped into the foyer. Greeting Grayson, you said, "Hey, did you bring the hot-"

"Already got it," he said, waving a family-sized tub of the powder. "And some games. How's he doing?"

Glancing at the hallway that led to the kitchen, you shrugged. "Can't really tell. It seems like he doesn't know what's going on, so he's fine. I took him to the store, bought him some new clothes, got him some PJs. But I forgot about the hot cocoa I'd promised him, so thank you for bringing some," you finished, stealing the container from his hands.

"Well, that was nice of you..." Grayson mumbled behind you, following you out to the kitchen.

"What, you think I'm some heathen?" you smirked, eyeing him over your shoulder.

"Mhm, don't act like you weren't the one who put twenty boxes of Orbees in the school's swimming pool our senior year," he snickered, lifting a brow.

You clamped a hand over your mouth, a flame licking the back of your neck. "I can't believe you reme-"

"Hey Luke!" Grayson called, scooting past you and pressing his elbows against the kitchen island.

Luke was sitting there, staring at his empty bowl of mac n cheese in a melancholic state. "Hi Mr. Dolan," he said in that raspy, weak voice of his.

"Luke, you want more Mac n cheese? And some hot cocoa?" you prompted, grabbing the bucket of pasta. Without an answer, you scooped a helping into Luke's bowl and paraded to the refrigerator for some milk to heat. "Gray, you want some?"

Grayson looked your way with a funny grin and said, "Yeah, I can just eat it from the pan."

You shook your head and repressed a smile. "You are gross."

"Why!" Grayson defended, laughing. With a shrug, he said, "I'm saving you a plate, and I'll definitely eat the rest, anyway."

Once you had fixed everyone a mug of hot cocoa, you ushered the boys into the living room where Grayson excitedly dug out a hodgepodge of games, toys, and books. Spreading everything out on the rug, Grayson prompted, "Alright Luke, I was thinking I could teach you how to play Candy Land. Is that okay?"

Luke looked at you, and then at him, and then nodded.

"Cool. So basically Buddy, you get one of these little guys," Grayson said, gesturing to the colorful figures lying dormant in the container. "And you hop on the color of the card you draw, and we go back and forth, and we see who wins. Okay?" Luke nodded. "And there are traps. So, when you draw a card like- like this one," he explained, grabbing a piece with a lollipop on it, "then you get to move to the spot that has the lollipop on it. Which can be good, unless you're ahead of that spot, then you have to move back. It's really fun," he gushed, folding his legs crisscrossed. "I think you'll like it. What'd'ya say?"

Luke looked at the board, studied it hard, and then nodded his head. "Okay."

Gleefully, Grayson shuffled the deck of cards and plucked two characters from the cardboard box and you realized, almost instantly, why he became a kindergarten teacher. He was a kid at heart.

"(Y/N), are you playing?"

You thought about all the things you had to do, all the paperwork you had to fill, all the phone calls you'd have to make for tomorrow, and said, "Yes."

Grayson smiled at you eagerly. "Perfect, three makes it way more competitive anyway. The more the merrier, you know?" he said, reaching for his mug of hot cocoa.

You looked over at Luke's mug and realized he hadn't drunk a drop of his treat. "Luke, you can have some of your hot cocoa if you haven't yet," you smiled, edging his cup towards him.

He looked at you long and hard, his eyes blown wide, and glanced between you in the drink. And then he looked at Grayson, almost for permission, and lifted his skinny arms and grabbed the mug with both hands. He lifted it to his mouth, oh-so-cautiously, and took a tiny sip.

And then he smiled, grinned comfortably.

"This stuff is- this stuff is really good," he said, setting it back. "Thank you."

You looked at Grayson with confusion and said, "Luke, you can have the whole cup if you want."

"I can?"

"Yeah," Grayson smiled, rubbing a hand down Luke's back. "Drink up, Bud."

And Luke did. And you three played Candy Land for hours, Grayson and you both being far too competitive and Luke hanging on for the ride. You won once, Grayson won twice, and Luke won at least five times. Luke's smile just kept growing.

"Alright Luke, I think it's bedtime for you," you said after a bit of celebratory hot cocoa.

"Want some help getting into your PJs, bud?" Grayson offered. Luke shrugged a lame shoulder, his eyes flickering between the two of you.

"Hey, give me some skin," you giggled, bending at the knee and raising your hand for a high-five from Luke. Tentatively, he lifted his hand to yours, smacking it feather light. "You killed it in Candy Land today."

"Sure did," Grayson laughed. "We'll play again soon. C'mon Luke."

And off they went, into your guest bedroom.

You crept back into the kitchen and grabbed your binder full of documents and splayed them all out on the table, organizing them into piles. You loved this job. You realized it when Luke's big wide eyes lit up at the sight of a Licorice Lagoon card and his character clobbered all the way across the board and he just looked happy. Happy like you'd never seen him. And that made all of this heartbreak a little less awful.

You were ruffling through your binder for names of available foster carers with your pen wiggling between your teeth when Grayson tiptoed into the kitchen. "Hey, how was-"

Your voice fell silent when you looked up to find Grayson crying, feeble with his arms tucked tightly around himself.

"Gray, what happened?" you asked hesitantly, twisting your body and giving him your full attention.

He whimpered pitifully and glided over to you, clearly shameless when it came to crying. He laid his forearms on the kitchen island and looked at you through his soaked eyelashes and screwed his eyebrows together and said, "I don't think I can forget that."

You reached out and carefully laid a palm on his arm. "Forget what?"

Grayson wheezed a deep breath and shielded his face with a hand. He mumbled, "There's a reason he wears that giant shirt every day." Grayson wiped the tears from his cheeks and said, "It was like I wasn't even taking off a shirt. It's like, an outline of the shirt, made of bruises. Tan lines, but instead of pale skin it's just green, and blue, and purple."

Unconsciously, you dug your fingernails into the firm flesh of his arm and clenched your jaw, willed yourself from tears.

"And that's no exaggeration. I don't think there was a spot untouched on his skinny, skinny body. His whole torso is just-" Whine. "Covered. I thought I was going to be sick. And he turned around, and his back was no different. It was like this- this fucking monster he calls 'mom' knew exactly how to hide it. Give him a t-shirt big enough, and it'll cover all the marks. God fucking damn it," he sobbed, his voice thick with emotion.

You pinched at his skin, nails deep enough to really hurt, and lowered your head and cried. Let the tears fall with the realization that no number of board games and no amount of hot cocoa could make up for his trauma, physically, mentally, or emotionally. Luke McIver was a punching bag and a kicking post.

You sat there with Grayson and cried quietly. You prayed Luke couldn't hear you; he deserved all the sympathy in the world, but he looked up to Grayson, and you hoped he didn't give up on himself with how sad his circumstances were.

Grayson walked around the island and engulfed you in a hug. You'd hardly registered how strange this might be, hugging a guy you'd barely known since you needed one so bad. You can't just watch these things and shut everyone out. You would start to see that kind of darkness in everyone.

"I'm sorry," Grayson said, his jaw working against your shoulder. "But I really needed a hug."

"It's okay," you said, your head bowed into the crook of his neck. "I really needed one too."

"Can I stop by tomorrow?" Grayson asked.

Yes, he could.

-

Tomorrow meant Friday, and Friday meant school. You didn't have a whole lot of direction when it came to getting kids off to school, but you figured you would do what you typically did; had him hop in the shower, laid out his clean clothes, and fixed him a bowl of cereal. After a few minutes of thought, you packed him a lunch, just in case his lunch account had frozen along with the rest of his mom's assets.

"Luke, are you okay with a turkey sandwich? Or do you want salami?" you shouted into the refrigerator, raiding the drawers for your lunch meat.

After a few moments without a response, you called out, "Luke?"

Panicky, you pulled yourself out of the refrigerator and hurried off to check on him in the guest room. Inside, he stood sopping wet, dripping on your carpet with a towel wrapped around his shoulders. Upon your arrival, he twisted to look at you. "Where are my clothes?" he whispered, looking around the room.

You pointed to the pile stacked on a chair near the bed. "Right over there, Silly," you giggled.

"No, my clothes," he said.

"The grey shirt and the brown pants?" you asked.

He nodded.

"Do you wanna wear those instead? I thought you'd like to wear something warmer, I have a hoodie and some cozy sweatpants on that chair cause it's going to be pretty chilly today," you elaborated, beginning to stress. It was far too cold to wear that Power Rangers shirt and that Power Rangers shirt alone, and you hadn't bought Luke a jacket. You made a mental note to do so.

"But those aren't mine," he said.

"Yes they are, I bought them for you."

"All of those?" he gasped, his eyes bugging at the outfit. And that was just sad.

"All of those, and a few others, too. Now, come on! We gotta get going to school, do you want some help getting into your clothes?" you offered, walking over to the chair and grabbing the stack.

Luke shook his head and you gave him the pieces, leaving the room and fixing his turkey sandwich. By the time you'd packed everything, Luke was waiting silently with his backpack taut on his shoulders. The hoodie was a bit big, but Luke was tiny for his age. The sweatpants looked about right, and the shoes seemed to fit okay. He hardly looked the same in different clothes.

"Ready?" you asked.

Luke was.

-

As your lunch break neared, your foot began pedaling faster in place. You worried about Luke on his first day back: did he miss his mom? Did his clothes really fit? Did he even like turkey sandwiches? After a plethora of anxiety-ridden questions, you hopped from your seat and dashed off to Grayson's classroom.

You knocked on the door softly and waited with a bitten lip. Grayson creaked open the door and you found that the classroom was, in fact, empty, excluding the six-foot tall man hovering in the doorway. "Oh," was all you said. "I thought maybe Luke was here."

Grayson grinned toothily and said, "No, they just went off to lunch and recess, but I'm glad you stopped by."

He opened the door and ushered you in, shutting it and following you inside. "Ramen?" you asked, scrunching your nose as you noticed the cup of noodles sitting next to his school-issued desktop. "How can you eat that after college?"

He smirked and grabbed it, loading a forkful of the stringy, golden noodles into his mouth. "Never get sick of it," he said through bites.

"Charming," you laughed, rolling your eyes. "How's he doing today?"

He munched for a second before nodding, setting the cup of noodles down and sitting on one of the very tiny desks with his legs stretched out comfortably in front of him. "Good. Great, even."

"That's good!" you exclaimed, smiling big.

"It is good," he agreed. "He even talked to a few classmates, which is new for him. They said they liked his shoes."

You weren't sure whether you were devastated that Luke hadn't any friends or ecstatic that he was trying, and that the other kids liked his shoes. That was a personal achievement. "I've been told I'm a fashionista," you drawled, flicking your hair over your shoulder.

"I can tell. You're always wearing those pretty skirts of yours," Grayson smirked, cocking a brow.

Butterflies burst in your stomach and you prayed a blush didn't stain your cheeks. But, judging by Grayson's obvious smugness, you looked just as bashful as you felt.

"Thank you. Um..." you squeaked, not knowing what else to say.

Grayson chuckled at your discomfort and looked out the window. "It was really nice of you to buy him all those clothes. It's too cold to be wearing those- those rags he was wearing before."

You nodded, following his gaze to the gray, gray sky that was brewing something awful outside. "I didn't think he'd fit in one of my sweatshirts," you joked.

Grayson looked at you and grinned kindly. "I don't think he'd look half as good, either."

Your face broke out in a smile and you said, "Okay, stop, you're doing this on purpose," with a laugh.

"Oh definitely, you're cute when you blush," he pushed, enjoying the upper hand far more than he should.

You stared down at the floor and begged the warmth in your cheeks to subside before saying, "You always were a flirt in high school."

Gobsmacked, Grayson gasped. "Me?" he asked incredulously. "No, you're thinking of Ethan, my twin idiot."

You shook your head. "I don't think so, you had everyone at your beck and call..." you trailed off, giving him a lopsided smile.

"Again, Ethan."

"No, it was you, I know that for certain. Grayson Dolan: Long Valley's Golden Boy," you teased, your hands dancing in the air. "Everybody loved you."

Grayson scratched back of his neck and shrugged his shoulders, flattened out his tie. "Yeah, maybe, but I've closed the yearbook. Now I'm just a kindergarten teacher; don't think that makes me too popular," he chuckled, clamping his hands in his lap and grinning up at you.

"You're definitely popular with the kids--if it weren't for you, I wouldn't have a little kid sleeping at my house tonight," you said.

"That's way better than homecoming king," Grayson smiled, all warmth and honey. "Knowing I saved a kid from some garbage parent like his."

You nodded thoughtfully, staring back at him. In an effort to preserve the lighthearted mood floating through the air, you joked, "Can't be better than scoring the game-winning touchdown against Rocori though, right?"

Grayson's head fell back with a laugh and he shook his head. "Nothing could be better than that. Should've seen their head coach's face when I caught that ball," he smiled with his teeth full in display.

"I guessed so," you giggled back.

"So what, did you keep tabs on me in high school or something? That's a pretty particular thing to remember, Ms. (Y/L/N)," he smirked, running a hand through his fluffy mane.

Though you were painted in pink, you rolled along. "I already said everybody loved you, Grayson."

The door busted open, dozens of kids flowing through its tiny entrance, clambering about with their squeaky shoes and their uncoordinated legs. "Does everybody include you?" Grayson asked over the roar of the children.

You shrugged a shoulder and grinned with mischief. "Mind if I stay for a bit? I still have half an hour of my lunch and I kinda wanna see Luke in his natural habitat."

"Be my guest," Grayson smiled.

Luke ambled in last, a little pep in his step and a boy jabbering off his ear. Grayson looked as surprised as you.

"Everyone get in your seats, please," he instructed, working his way over to his desk. Glaring playfully at you, he said, "I didn't even get to eat my ramen."

"A shame."

Dropping his styrofoam cup in the garbage, he dusted off his hands and hurried to the front, rolling his dress shirt's sleeves up to his elbows. Without much to do, you slinked your way to the play area and seated yourself in a comically small chair, one clearly fit for a five-year-old.

"Alright everyone, could you please grab a pencil from the center of your desk? We're going to learn about shapes," Grayson announced, his eyes drifting around the room.

Your eyes flickered to Luke who in return was staring at you with his big doe eyes. Nervously, you waved a hand, worried of boundaries once more, and felt a certain sense of pride when Luke waved back to you.

"So guys, let's practice. Can anyone tell me what this is?" Grayson asked, gesturing to the giant triangle fixed on the smart board in the front.

Nearly all the kids' hands shot up, excluding Luke's. There he sat, towards the back, with his hands tucked in his lap.

"Kyra?" Grayson called.

"A triangle!" she cheered, dazzle in her eye.

"Very good, Kyra," Grayson smiled, tapping the board and switching the shape. "And this one?"

Again, Luke sat statuary.

"Tyler?"

"A square!"

You couldn't help but frown as you stared at Luke, lonesome and quiet with his big brown eyes staring blankly at the screen.

"And this last one? Luke?" Grayson asked, eyes weaving through the sea of hands to find Luke.

Luke sat quietly, his chest rising and falling quickly. After a few seconds, all of the students twisted in their seat to stare at him with beady, pressuring eyes. Almost reflexively, Luke spun and looked to you for help. 'Circle,' you mouthed, breathing out the word inaudibly.

"C-C-Circle," Luke spat, grabbing the sides of his desk.

All of the kids turned forward once more and waited for Mr. Dolan's confirmation. "Awesome job, Luke," he said with the proudest of smiles. "Now I have a worksheet for you all and I want you guys to bring it back to class on Monday after this weekend, signed by your parent."

Luke again strained his chin over his shoulder and you nodded back, assuring him you'd sign it, or help it, or just be there.

-

Your Fridays were typically reserved for wine night at your friend Carina's house, but you had no such plans with a five-year-old sitting on your couch. So, you were a little lost on what to do.

"Luke, do you want a snack? I'm not sure what we have in the cupboards, but..." you trailed off, bounding into the kitchen.

You had no use for pudding cups or fruit snacks up until this point, and to your knowledge, all you had was a ginormous can of hot cocoa. You scoured the pantry and found some surely stale Reese's Puffs and prayed he didn't notice once you doused them in milk.

Luke eyed the bowl skeptically, glancing between you and it before eventually scooping the cereal into his mouth. After that, it was a race to drain the bowl, and he was slurping away at the milk. You hardly cared about manners.

Grayson: Can I come over?

Instantly giddy at the idea of Grayson being in any close proximity, you texted him and assured him that would be fine. Luke was still tongue-tied, and you assumed it'd be that way for a long time. Perhaps he'd never grow out of his shyness, and that would have to be okay with you.

Looking at the little boy sitting on your couch, chomping on a spoonful of cereal like it could be his last meal, your heart broke. There was so much you didn't know about him, so much you didn't know about what he went through. You doubted anyone would ever know the full truth besides him and his 'mom.' Just thinking of her in a maternal sense made your tummy lurch sideways; she should have never even considered kids.

But, in some twisted light, you were so glad she did. You'd take a bullet for this little guy on your couch. And you didn't even know how that happened so quickly.

Grayson's knuckles rapped against your front door and you jumped from your spot on the couch beside Luke to allow him in, but by the time you'd gotten there, Grayson was already standing in your foyer in a pair of joggers and a hoodie. It was somewhat strange seeing him out of his office clothes. Frowning, you said, "How did you get-"

"You should really keep this door locked all the time," Grayson said sternly, abandoning his shoes on your welcome mat. "For your safety, and for Luke's."

You rushed over and locked the door behind him, feeling a little naive. "Luke's upstairs, I was going to start on that worksheet you gave everyone today but now that you're here, you can do all the hard work," you grinned.

He rolled his eyes playfully and elbowed your side. "I work all day with little kids and I come back to your place to slave away?"

"Exactly," you laughed. "besides, bold of you to assume I know my shapes."

Grayson chuckled and swept past you, hurrying over to Luke. You heard them greet one another, Grayson's excitable baby voice echoing throughout your house. Content with their situation, you whisked away to your room to raid your closet for something more comfortable. Then, you returned to your kitchen and began searching in your big stack of files for names in the system that would qualify to give Luke the home he needed.

G. Hammend... R. Harick... I. Helpin... Your finger followed down the column, each name seeming drearier and more hopeless.

"Mr. Dolan?" you heard from the other room.

"Yeah, kiddo?"

"Is (Y/N) your girlfriend?" Luke asked.

Grayson promptly began coughing uncontrollably, hacking and wheezing, and a chill ran up your spine, heat baked the back of your neck. No, you weren't Grayson's girlfriend and his flirting was harmless, but you were curious to know what he'd say, so you leaned in closely and listening keenly to Grayson's next words. "Uh, um, uh Luke it's- it's more complicated than that," Grayson spoke, his voice raspy and cracking.

"How?"

Yeah, how?

"Well, um, I- I don't know how to explain that, Luke."

"Why?"

A giggle escaped past your lips at Luke's determination and Grayson's obvious struggle. "I- I, um,-"

Grayson's stuttering was cut short by a soft rumble overhead followed almost immediately by a burst of lightning. You frowned and glanced at the window, fully aware of the forecast but hopeful that it would blow over. From the looks of the blackened sky, it wouldn't be disappearing anytime soon. Soft pellets of water began showering your room and it's thin shingles, heavy enough to pierce through the silent air. And again, another bit of thunder rolled in.

"(Y/N)?" Grayson called. "You okay?"

As if you'd be in any harm in your own home during a thunderstorm. "Yeah Gray, I'm good. Are you okay?"

There was silence and then a shuffling of footsteps. Then Grayson walked up behind you and said, "We have a problem."

You wheeled around in your chair and furrowed your brows. "What?"

"Luke's afraid of thunderstorms," he whispered, avoiding your eyes.

You slid off your seat and padded into the living room to find Luke tucked in the cushions of your couch, tears streaming soundlessly from his big doe eyes. Your heart wrenched beneath your ribcage and you hurried over, sliding into the spot beside him and grabbing his hands that were shaking in his lap. "Hey Lukey, you doing okay?"

Luke nodded robotically, his nose bouncing and the tears rushing down his face.

"Luke, how can I help?" you asked, stroking the side of his head.

His body went rigid and he shook your hands off him, scooting a few inches away. You felt rejected.

"Hey Bud, do you wanna keep going with our math? Get your mind away from all this noise?" Grayson offered, lifting up his worksheet.

Luke shook his head, tucking in on himself and wrapping his own frail arms around his own frail legs.

"We could maybe watch some TV?" you proposed, cocking your head towards the flatscreen. It seemed like Luke's ears might have perked up at this. He stared at you silently with his big brown eyes and asked for permission, even though you'd just offered. "Yeah, we can watch some TV," you said. "Do you like cartoons?"

Luke just stared, but you got the message. You'd learned his mannerisms over the past twenty-four hours. Flicking on the television, you surfed through the channels in search of a good cartoon before landing on Scooby-Doo.

"Have you ever seen this show?" Grayson asked, nudging Luke.

He shook his head, and you three fell in silence, watching the show chase across the screen.

Lost in thought, you began to wonder if this would be the case for every kid, or just Luke. Would you always take the kids in for 72 hours? Or was Luke just special for you? How often would this happen? Was Grayson always good with the little kids? Could he be a reliable source if you couldn't get them to budge?

Probably not, you decided. You felt incompetent and useless and downright stupid caving and fleeing to Grayson for aid. Not that you regretted it.

Would Grayson ever talk to you after this? Was this just for Luke, or was there some friendship between you two? Or maybe something more?

Probably not, you decided again. Sneaking a glance at him, engrossed in the show, you decided, definitely not. He might not be Long Valley's golden boy any longer, but he was still far, far out of your league.

"It's definitely the bank teller," Grayson said with complete certainty. "He's hijacking his own bank so he can take all the money but remain seemingly innocent."

You stifled a giggle and eyed him incredulously. "For sure, Gray."

"It is!" he whined, pointing at the screen excitedly. "You just wait and see."

"Luke, who do you think it is?" you asked, bumping him with your elbow.

Luke looked between the two of you and then said, so quietly, "Whatever Grayson said."

-

As the night dragged on, so did the storm. Eventually, the power surged out and left the three of you sheathed in blankets, surrounded by candles, and playing Candy Land in the dim glow. Conversation was limited and gentle; Luke was exceptionally scared, though he was too nervous to voice his concerns. So, he just sided up next to Grayson and shielded himself under Gray's big, long arm.

"Grayson, there's no way you're driving home in this weather. You can't," you said with finality, craning your neck to sneak a glance at the buckets of water blurring the sky.

Grayson nodded in agreement, moving his figurine several spaces forward. "Yeah, I don't think so either. Can I sleep on the couch?"

After a moment of thought, you nodded and hopped from your spot under a mound of blankets to fetch him a few pillows. Glancing at the clock, you noticed it was nearing the bedtime you'd given Luke, so you waddled on down to the living room to deliver the mournful news. "Lukey, it's time for bed."

It seemed Luke was unordinary in every sense because he didn't fight you on it. He simply unwrapped Grayson's arm from around his shoulders and glided past you to the guest room.

"He's a quiet one," Grayson noted, tugging his blankets tight on his body.

"Yeah," you agreed quietly, staring down the hallway Luke had slipped through. "I don't know if that'll go away or not."

"I'm going to go read him a bedtime story," Grayson said, his voice gentle and kind.

As he trailed after Luke, Where the Wild Things Are in hand, you decided that maybe everything about Grayson was gentle and kind. You saw it in the way he talked to children, the way he never raised his voice, the way he laid a hand on any person he talked to, his palm huge and warm and soft, just for reassurance. Grayson was a gentle giant with his intimidating stature and his ginormous muscles; he'd never hurt a fly.

You listened to Grayson's voice float through the air, speaking of monsters and trolls tucked in the thickets of trees, and felt a flutter in your chest.

At last, you heard Grayson mumble his goodnights and the creak of footsteps on your hardwood. He hobbled his way to the couch, plopped down, and patted this seat beside him. Sheepishly, you tiptoed over and flopped into the space next to him, your blanket tightly secured around your figure. After a few beats of silence, of you two just staring at each other, you said, "I don't know who is worthy of taking in that boy."

Grayson shook his head, his lips pursing for a moment. "I don't think anyone is. Well, anyone besides you."

You stared down at the cushions with their plain brown fabric, scrunching your brows together. "I don't think I'm very good at this, actually." He snorted about you and you shot him a glare. "I'm serious."

"Maybe, but you're wrong," he argued loftily. "I don't think that kid has ever felt so much love in his life."

You shrugged a limp, lame shoulder. "Probably not, but that's just because any love is better than none. I just don't think I'm handling this well. I'm not sure he really likes me."

Grayson smiled crookedly and cocked his head to the side. "I think he likes you. You guys can talk without even speaking," he noted.

A smile worked its way onto your lips. "Yeah, there's that. But... I'm not trying to take it personally, the kid's been through way more than we know. But I just wish he liked me. It feels like he just tolerates me," you breathed, scratching at your arm.

"Well, he agreed with me that you're pretty, so there's that," Grayson smirked, watching you duck your head in embarrassment.

"Well that's nice of you two..." you muttered, tugging your sherpa around you tighter.

"No, it's just a fact. You're pretty, (Y/N)."

Suddenly, your blanket was entirely unnecessary, because your body was overheating with this romantic attention from Grayson Dolan himself. His eyes burned your skin and his body, a few inches away from you, was like a furnace. "You're pretty, too."

It came out croaky and strangled, but you meant it. You had eyes, after all.

Grayson chuckled, his dimples full in display. "Thank you," he whispered.

Then, you were sharing an awkward beat where he was looking at you and you were staring at the ground with complete determination. And then, you were hopping from your spot and hurrying into the kitchen to grab your binder, ignorant to Grayson's laughter.

"You need to help me find someone worthy of fostering this kid," you breathed, discarding the blanket altogether.

And so the two of you sat there well into the night, flicking page after page, name after name, hopeful to find a soul kind enough for a soul as vulnerable as Luke's.

-

It had to still be night when you awoke, startled, to the shadow of a boy standing in your doorway. You'd seen enough horror films to know that this meant imminent death, but after rubbing your eyes once, twice, you noticed it was just Luke.

"Hey buddy?" you called out, folding yourself upright. "What's up?"

Luke was holding the blanket you'd purchased for him a few days ago in his tiny hands, his knuckles white. "The storm," was all he whispered.

The storm. The wind was whooshing and swirling in every which way, tossing branches into each other and smattering rain against your rooftop. How do you fix that? You couldn't just ring up Mother Nature and tell her to calm down.

"Um," you mumbled, glancing around the room. "Do you- do you want to sleep in here?" you offered, patting the spot beside you. Luke stood and waited for about a minute before slowly creeping toward the empty half of the bed, hoisting himself up on it and peeling back the covers. He turned his back to you, crumpled his knees into his chest, and lied there silently. You had half a brain to screen him with his blanket and tuck it around his small, small body, and then the two of you went to sleep.

-

Slow like a sloth, you opened your eyes and blinked slowly, lazily, letting them adjust to the sunlight pouring through the windowpanes of your bedroom. You'd hardly registered that your jaw was tucked on top of a little boy's head, or that your arm was secured around his tiny frame. He fit perfectly in the cave of your belly, the two of you just a large ball in the middle of your bed, blankets and all.

You lifted your head to see Grayson standing in your doorway, his shoulder pressed against the door frame easily, a smile on his lips. "Morning."

Grayson Dolan standing in your doorway when you first wake up. Now that was a concept high-school-you would have snorted at.

"Morning," you whispered, careful not to wake up Luke. "What time is it?"

"Almost eleven. I was thinking we could all go and get breakfast at the Gingerbread Café," Grayson offered, still gazing warmly at the nest in your bed.

"God, that sounds amazing. Okay, let me get dressed and-"

"No! You have to go in your PJs! That's like, law," Grayson argued instantly.

You glanced down at yourself in your reindeer, well-worn pajamas and shrugged. There was no use arguing; you'd never get out of those pajamas unless absolutely mandatory.

You nodded and unraveled yourself from Luke, shook his shoulder gently, and then zipped out of your home, into the Gingerbread Café and played the best game of iSpy over bacon and eggs.

-

Again that afternoon, you sat on your coach, rifling through sheet after sheet of names of foster carers.

"I don't even recognize one of these names," you whined, flipping a page.

"Me neither," Grayson agreed.

Luke was tucked in the corner of the living room, legos crowding the floor in a clutter. He'd actually been playing with them, to both Grayson's and your astonishment.

"And you don't have any like, social worker friends? Nobody that you know?" Grayson asked, lifting a brow.

"No, I'm brand new to this, Grayson,"  you defended. "Literally the only person I've met in this town that knows anything about social work is Nancy Hoff-" You dropped the book of files you were holding, your blood surging through you. "Nancy Hoffmann! Oh my god, how could I forget Nancy! Oh my god, oh my god," you squealed, jumping to your feet.

"Nancy Hoffmann does social work? No way," Grayson gasped.

"Yes! Yes, she said she's in the system, go look, please, please, go look!"

"N. Hoffmann, right under I. Helpin," Grayson grinned, gazing up at you with hope, hope, hope in his eyes. "Are you going to call her?"

"Yes," you stated, digging out your phone and beelining for your room. "I'm going to call her right now."

And you did. And Nancy was so excited to take care of a little one, especially a little one like little Luke McIver, that she started to weep. And you started to cry. You could have flooded the whole room with your tears. And you absolutely hoped and prayed Luke's life would look up.

-

Later that Saturday night, once Luke was in bed and you and Grayson sat tight on your couch watching reruns of vintage Scooby-Doo episodes (and trying desperately to guess who the villain was each time), Grayson turned to you and asked, "Wanna get ice cream sometime?"

His words alone sent a chill down your spine, cold and then hot, warmth sticking to the back of your neck. "No," you blurted.

And you could see the hurt flinch on his face, the emotions vivid in color on his sleeve. But there was a problem.

"I feel- I feel like it would look... unprofessional, right now, to date a coworker, especially after I royally fucked up with this whole Luke thing. Call it a Fluke," you giggled nervously, biting your lip. "I- Grayson, you know I would love to, you can probably tell how nervous you make me, but this seems just... It just seems unprofessional, especially when I still have Luke in my custody."

Grayson's eyes softened. "Well, what about when Luke's out of your custody? Can we get ice cream then?"

Your hands twitched nervously in your lap. "I... we would still be coworkers, Grayson," you whispered, holding onto your willpower by a thread.  

He inched forward, invading your space in a way that left you gulping.

"We would, wouldn't we? We'd be coworkers just like half of the teachers in this school that are married to other teachers," he murmured, inches from your face.

His body heat radiated onto yours and you worried for a moment that you'd melt right into that sofa. "You think about it," he finalized, smirking and rising from his seat. "Or, sleep on it. I'm heading home."

He thundered into the foyer and slipped on his shoes and glanced back at you, who was hiding behind the hallway's bend. He grinned, shucked on his hoodie, and headed outside.

Were you just going to let this go?

Certainly not.

You dashed out behind him, waving your arms in the headlights of his car manically, acting like a real loon. You skipped over to his car and waited for him to roll down his window, itching to just spit it out. "I don't have to think, I'd love to get ice cream with you, coworkers be damned."

"I was hoping you'd say that," he chuckled, grinning up at you. "I'll see you tomorrow to introduce Nancy and Steve to Luke. Sleep tight, (Y/N)."

-

You awoke again with Luke cradled under your arm and a knocking at your door. Grayson was undoubtedly up at the crack of dawn every day, which would explain why he was pounding on your door at eight in the morning. Both groaning, you and Luke rolled out from under the covers and padded lazily through the halls, separating at the living room where Luke crawled into the nest of blankets jumbled on the couch as you traveled to the entryway to let Grayson in.

"Hey," he announced when you dragged open the door. Glaring at him, you wordlessly spun on your heel and shuffled into the living room. "Don't tell me you're mad because I woke you up," he laughed, on your heels.

You opened your mouth to protest when Luke said, "Yes."

You and Grayson exchanged a look before bursting into laughter. "Luke has spoken, and I agree. Yes, Grayson."

You hobbled over to Luke and curled up next to him on the sofa, stranding Grayson alone to stand and watch.

"What time are we all heading over to Nancy and Steve's?" Grayson mumbled to you, eyeing Luke cautiously.

You sucked in a breath and decided that this was a good time to introduce the idea to Luke. "Lukey," you announced. "we think we found you a good home for a little bit, okay? Would it be okay if we met with them later?"

Luke looked at you uncertainly and said, "No more sleeping with you?"

Your heart dropped into your stomach with the reality that Luke may have gotten too attached--that you may have gotten too attached. "No more sleeping with me," you mumbled, your lower lip jutting out reflexively. "I- but Luke, I'll still visit all the time, promise. And we'll still have our weekly counseling sessions, and-"

"Will Mr. Dolan still visit?" Luke asked, staring at you, his eyes flickering momentarily to Grayson.

"I..." you trailed off, unwilling to make that promise.

"You know it, Kid," Grayson said, squatting to Luke's height. "I'll be over with Candy Land all the time."

"So what do you say?" you asked, grabbing for Luke's hand.

Luke squeezed back and said, "Yes."

And so you went to Nancy's.

The Hoffmann's yanked open the door before you could even knock, dressed in their best formal gear, and you glanced down at your jeans and hoodie and winced. This was why you weren't very good at this stuff. "Welcome!" they cheered, ushering the three of you inside. Nancy gave you a sidelong look as Grayson filed in behind you, a glint in her eye.

Luke was holding onto your hand tight, tight, tight, and you bent down and picked him right up, setting him on your hip. "Luke, this is Mr. and Mrs. Hoffmann," you introduced, pointing to each of them respectively. "Mr. and Mrs. Hoffmann, this is Luke McIver." Luke clung to your sweatshirt's fabric, fisted the material and pulled himself closer. "Don't be shy Luke, say hi," you said.

They waved brightly, big smiles on their faces and Luke waved back.

"Everybody can come to the living room, we have fruit snacks and pudding cups," Nancy said.

You knew they'd be better than you already.

-

On Monday, the five of you (Luke, Grayson, Nancy, Steve, and you), caravanned to the Gingerbread Café with a court document in your briefcase with plans to head over to court after, skipping school entirely, much to Luke's (and your) excitement. Once you arrived at the courthouse, you met with Luke's assigned social worker, Emily, the judge, and that was it.

Standing in the echoey area, the judge asked, "Are all parties present?"

Glancing around at the tiny, tiny group, you giggled. "Uh yes, Your Honor," you said with complete seriousness.

"Who is the legal guardian in question?" she asked, scanning over her document. "Is Alexa McIver here?"

You bit on your lip and said, "No, Your Honor, she's currently in custody."

"Alright," she nodded. "Who is the present carer, and the preferred foster carers?"

"Um, I'm the current carer and Steve and Nancy Hoffmann are the foster carers," you said, pointing to the couple standing beside you. They waved giddily, hardly pressured by the legalities.

"Okay," the judge said, a lack of formality in her tone. "Let's get this show on the road."

The judge handed over a packet, 'In the matter of the welfare of Lucas McIver: CHIPS/EPC' titling the top. Beneath it was what seemed like hundreds of documents, all waiting for their own special signature from their own special foster parents, Nancy and Steve Hoffmann.

And after half an hour of "sign here"s and "initial here"s, the judge turned to Nancy and Steve and said, "By the law of Long Valley, I formally grant Steve and Nancy Hoffmann full foster care custody of Lucas Christopher McIver. Court, dismissed."

And you turned to Nancy and found her with tears in her eyes and you turned to Luke and found him with one big, toothy grin.

"Time for ice cream, everybody!" Nancy squealed, throwing her arms around you tightly.

You shared a smirk with Grayson and said, "Definitely."

"(Y/N)," Luke said, tugging on your pants.

"Yeah Luke?" you said, ducking to his level.

Luke leaned in close and cupped his hand around your ear. "My favorite color is yellow."

-

You sat at Moo's with a cone of cookie dough ice cream in hand, chatting with livelihood with the group. It was, by definition, perfect. Grayson kept sneaking glances at you, looking away when you caught him, dimples dotting his cheeks. Nancy and Steve demanded--and more miraculously, received--a full autobiography from Luke himself, as shy as he was. What his favorite class was (which, to Grayson's dismay, was not any of his, but instead gym class), what his favorite animal was, and so on.

Luke offered you a taste of his delicious cookies 'n' cream ice cream (in exchange for a lick of your own, of course) and grabbed for your hand a few times. It was bittersweet to have him be so affectionate right as you were about to let him go.

When five o'clock rolled around, the Hoffmanns said, "Staying true to our legal work, we are removing Mr. McIver from your custody," with all formality and then some.

Giggling, you nodded. "Take 'im away, coppers."

Luke turned to you and wrapped his arms tight around your neck and you kissed his cheek and willed yourself not to cry. This was so, so good for him.

"Do you guys need a ride home?" Steve offered, seeing as you all banded together to get to court and Moo's.

You opened your mouth to graciously accept when Grayson said, "Nah, we can walk."

Looking at him excitedly, you clamped your mouth shut and nodded, a ditzy grin on your mouth.

"Right," Nancy chuckled. "Well, we'll be on our way then, bye everyone!"

"Goodbye Luke, see you tomorrow!" you cheered, waving him away.

Watching the car zip out of the parking lot, you sat beside Grayson, your senses heightened with anxiety. "And then there were two..." Grayson joked, leaning back in his seat. "Ready for our date?"

You turned to him and shook your head, gleeful and nervous. "Yeah, I could use another cone," you giggled. "Even if it's freezing out and we have to walk home now."

"I'll keep you warm," he smiled, propping his chin on his fist.

You were sure the butterflies bursting in your stomach or the blush staining your cheeks was more than enough to keep you steaming hot.

-

As you walked down the pavement, slow as snails, Grayson tangled your fingers together. It was adrenaline inducing, holding hands with Grayson Dolan. You had your third helping of ice cream in your hands, licking stripes of it and scuffing your shoes down the sidewalk.

"What is that?" you asked, pointing to the cone in Grayson's hand.

"I don't know, actually," he shrugged, swiping his tongue across the treat. "I couldn't read some of the names so I just pointed to whatever looked promising."

"What do you mean, you couldn't read the names?" you giggled, your brows furrowing. "They're right on the glass."

Grayson nodded, fully aware of that. "I know, but I have dyslexia, I can hardly read at all," he snorted.

"You have dyslexia? I didn't know that," you said, licking a long dribble of ice cream.

"Yeah, why else do you think I teach kindergarten? I'm constantly relearning the alphabet," he joked, snorting and smiling to himself.

You giggled and said, "Well, I don't know, maybe just to make vulnerable elementary counselor's swoon," taking a jab at flirting smoothly.

He looked at you with a blush and a grin. Silence fell over, but not the uncomfortable kind. You could walk sidewalks as the sun set and eat ice cream for the rest of your life with Grayson. The thought alone stirred the frenzy of butterflies in your belly.

"You know, I always thought you were gorgeous in high school," Grayson murmured, his eyes avoiding yours.

"Oh, shut up, no you didn't," you groaned, smacking him with your shared fist.

"No really, I did! And you went to prom with Alec Jenson and I was so mad," he moaned, throwing his head back for dramatics. "I beat myself up over it for like, a month."

You shook your head, gazing far off in the other direction. "You're a terrible liar."

But Grayson wasn't lying, and he made sure you knew it. He halted in place, tugging you back to him. "I'm not lying, I'd be an idiot not notice someone like you," he breathed. "And I definitely know that now."

You bit down on your lip to contain an enormous grin, one the size of the sun glowing in the distance, and looked into Grayson's soft honey eyes. Time slowed down, the world dimmed around Grayson, and all those other cliches. And then, he was dipping in close and kissing you with sugar-sticky lips and soft and gentle, just as you'd imagined. Absent-mindedly, you went to weave your arms around his neck and then realized you had dropped your ice cream in order to do so.

"I-" you panicked, eyes wide and glancing down at the ground. Grayson's shoes were splattered with your cookie dough ice cream, wet and sticky. "Oh my god, I'm so-"

A boom of laughter sounded from Grayson and he shook his head. "They're already messy. Now get back up here, I'm not done kissing you."

You were more than happy to oblige.

-

A year and change later, you tapped your foot outside of the Hoffmann's home, Grayson by your side with party hats adorning the crowns of your heads. You had a cake in your hands and Grayson held four gifts, each stacked wonkily on each other. "Think they went out for his birthday?" Grayson asked, his breath fogging in the chilly December air.

"No, they told me they'd be here! God, it's fucking fr-"

"Hey!" Nancy greeted, pulling open the door. "Sorry, the oven was going off and Steven couldn't find the-"

"It's okay, don't worry," you giggled, stepping inside the home. "It wasn't too cold." Grayson leaned over and pinched your side, confronting your lie. "Where's Lukey?" you asked, your head moving about to look for him.

"He's in the living room surrounded by presents. Steve and I went kind of overboard," she chuckled.

You wandered into the living room after setting the cake down on the kitchen table, eager to spend some time with your favorite little boy and even more excited to give him his gifts. Grayson and you had also spoiled him with lego sets, hot wheels tracks, and a homemade ice cream maker. And, well, something else.

"How's the birthday boy?!" you greeted, opening your arms for a very hyper Luke to jump into.

He wrapped his legs around your waist and pulled you as tight as he could against him, his cheek pressed into yours. He had definitely grown since the last time you held him; you could barely handle the weight.

"Good!" he yelled.

"Luke, inside voice," Steve chastised from the couch, a familiar grin on his face.

"Right, sorry," he said.

"Do you want to open some presents or what, Kid?" Grayson offered, setting down the tall stack.

Luke nodded giddily, detangling himself from you and seating himself on the carpet. One by one he plucked the wrapping paper off, his gasps getting bigger and bigger with every present until he reached the last one. "What's this?" he asked, spinning the fabric in his hands.

"It's a Power Rangers sweatshirt," you said, gesturing to the item. "If you don't like it, we can return it."

"Just like my old one," he gaped. "Is it my old one?"

"No," Grayson explained, "but it's the same design, just warmer. And it'll fit you nicer."

Luke nodded and then slipped the clothing over his head, stuffing his arms through the sleeves. There he was, seven-years-old and yet so, so different. He still had his big brown eyes and his messy, floppy curls, but his face was full and his body was healthy and his mind was creative and open. He was Luke McIver as you'd always wanted to see him; human.

Before you could cry, you said, "Luke, you look handsome!"

"Do I?" he asked, glancing down at himself.

"Sure do, Honey. Now, we have one last present for you," Nancy said, exchanging a look with Steve.

She handed over a little envelope to Luke and he pulled out a slip of paper. "Would... you be... our son? What does that mean?" he asked, reading slow and brokenly.

Your hands flew to your mouth with excitement and love, and you decided crying was the only option at that point.

"Luke," Steve began, grabbing his wife's hands. "Luke, we want to be your parents. Like, forever," he chuckled.

"I thought you already were?" Luke said, glancing around the room with confusion.

"No, Honey, you get to choose if you want us to be or not. We completely understand if not," Nancy said, her voice quavering.

Grayson pulled you into him and you could tell he was holding back a spout of tears. He kissed the top of your head and waited.

"Oh. Well then, yeah. Yes," Luke said.

And by the following Monday, he was little Luke Hoffmann.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: How August Sander and Otto Dix Recorded Fascism’s Rise

August Sander, “Turkish Mousetrap Salesman” (1924-30, printed 1990), photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 260 x 191 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2017)

LIVERPOOL — A stout, late middle-aged man turns to face the camera. His warm, dark eyes suggest his initial suspicion of the photographer’s intentions has diminished. His woolen suit jacket and neatly wound scarf conceal round shoulders and a thick neck. The man’s tired and scarred face reveals someone adept at surviving adverse seasons. The fact that the photographer, August Sander, identifies him as “Turkish Mousetrap Salesman” (c. 1924-30) is mostly extraneous.

In fact, there is a discrepancy between the boundless singularity of each Sander portrait and the narrow sociological label attached to it. His photo portraits are an extensive first act in Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 at the Tate Liverpool, which couples two of Germany’s most prolific 20th-century portraitists, Sander and Otto Dix.

Sander developed his aesthetic in the wake of the 19th-century pseudoscience of human physiognomy. He reached his peak in the 1920s, amid the rise of the Nazi party and cataclysmic racialism of The Third Reich, which was predicated on eugenics. Somehow, though, the artist’s preoccupation with faces, bodies, and social types does not come across as exploitive or repressive to his subjects. It is hard to disagree with German intellectual (and Sander’s contemporary) Walter Benjamin, who lauded Sander’s photography for its “tender empiricism.”

August Sander, “Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne” (1931, printed 1992), photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 260 x 149 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2017)

The nearly 150 photographs featured in the Tate exhibition represent only a small portion of Sander’s open-ended and incomplete project, titled People of the Twentieth Century. Sander thought of portrait photography as “a mosaic that becomes synthesis only when it is presented en masse” and he believed that by taking unsentimental pictures across demographics, the camera can “fix the history of the world.” That lifelong undertaking was first conceived in 1910 and its early results were published in his book Faces of Our Time (1929).

Detached almost to the point of appearing clinical, Sander’s photography offers no explicit critique of Weimar Germany’s economic and sociopolitical climate or considerable class divides. Yet, because he shed so much light on the physical toll paid by the working class, farmers, minorities and displaced members of the upper class, he is hardly a propagandist for capitalism’s status quo.

Born in 1876 into a working-class Cologne family, Sander worked for a time as a miner. Following his military service, he apprenticed as a photographer throughout Germany before coming into his own with photography assignments in Linz, Austria, and eventually opening a studio in Cologne. After serving in the medical corps during the First World War, he departed from his Cologne studio and hit the road on a bicycle to take local portraits in the rural regions outside his native city and, later, in the nooks and crannies of urban spaces.

Sander favored large format cameras that could replicate what he termed the “delicacy of the delineation” in early daguerreotypes, over newer, compact technologies. Using mostly natural lighting, his minimally staged shooting and documentarian ethos — epitomized by a fully frontal approach with limited depth of field — reproduce their human subjects squarely within their milieu.

August Sander, “August Sander” (1925, printed 1990), photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 258 x 195 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland. Presented by Gerd Sander 2009 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2017)

Sander’s photographs are organized chronologically and surrounded with detailed timelines explaining the political and economic fluctuations destabilizing a culturally vibrant and diverse Germany. Details of Weimar Germany’s war debt, hyperinflation, mass unemployment and ineffective domestic policies enrich the emotional impact of Sander’s portraits of ordinary people. How many of Sander’s subjects intuited the slow-burning political catastrophe? And who among these individuals was complicit in that reactionary sway? Who survived it and who did not? These questions reflect back on our own politically desperate era, often with eerie resonance.

And, as in our uneasy times, the material trappings of Sander’s world attest to the precariousness of daily life. The haves and the have-nots seem equally vulnerable. “Beggar” (1926) focuses on an elderly man’s quizzical gaze and serene dignity while foregrounding the dispossessed man’s contiguous space: the sooty pavement on which he sits; the iron gate looming behind him; and the brickwork pillars boxing him in. The up-close, softly lit compositions produce an aura of tranquility even in the midst of disconcerting situations, as with the burly and legless “Disabled Ex-servicemen” (1928) in his wooden wheelchair, alone at the foot of sidewalk steps, or in images of anodyne aristocrats or bureaucrats, like the lanky, nattily-dressed “Public Prosecutor” (1931), with his beady-eyed attentiveness.

Frequently, Sander’s framing of his subjects yields refined abstract effects. “Nun” (1921) shows a ruddy face, barely visible through an ovoid gap formed from the woman’s tight fitting wimple. A religious pendant dangles into the midpoint of her white scapular, which, in its granularity, resembles a painter’s blank canvas. Like many such portraits, these cold symmetries — visible in work implements, interior furnishings, and sartorial particulars — call the viewer’s attention to the far less assured facets of an individual face and body.

Sander knew when to pick his moments. The candor of his subjects challenges the stereotypes enforced in the photographs’ titles. The derisively titled “Cretin” (1924) depicts a dwarf standing between handles of a pushcart. Dressed in a dark three-piece suit and holding a lit cigarette in his left hand, the young man’s mien projects self-assuredness, streetwise skepticism and aggressive irony.

If Sander’s work makes visible the workaday vivacities of academics, bohemians, housewives and children, Otto Dix’s art tears away those surfaces to portray an unruly domain of endless combat and vain materialism, sadistic violence and drunken debauchery.

August Sander, “The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha” (1925-6, printed 1991), photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 205 x 241 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2017)

Like Sander, Dix, born in 1891, came from a working-class family. He volunteered for World War I, serving as a machine-gunner on the Eastern and Western Front, where he sustained serious wounds. By the early 1920s, Dix’s painting began to gain wider notice; the mid-1920s marked his most productive period. The polychromatic dynamism of Weimar Germany runs rampant in his drawings, etchings and paintings, including rarely seen watercolors featured in Portraying a Nation.

Dix’s postwar paintings exemplify the stylized realism of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a predominant art movement in Weimar Germany. His paintings and prints draw on past masters, such as German Renaissance painters Matthias Grünewald and Hans Baldung Grien, as well as Francisco Goya, who retooled traditional realism to his own ends. While studying at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule (Royal School of Arts and Crafts) in Dresden, Dix absorbed the explosive harmonies produced by Vincent Van Gogh. This boisterous impressionism freed him to portray war and its consequences in uncensored physical totalities. His art speaks to infernal traumas and corporal tortures, spontaneous ferocities and methodical brutalities that define humanity as an insatiably war-hungry species.

Otto Dix, “Assault Troops Advance under Gas (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor)” (1924), etching on paper, 196 x 291 mm, Otto Dix Stiftung (© DACS 2017. Image: Otto Dix Stiftung)

Comprised of five portfolios containing ten prints each, Dix’s 1924 etching series War (Der Krieg), based on his experience in WWI, will overwhelm the viewer’s senses. Life and death intermingle. Ravaged corpses resemble suffering bodies, gas masks evoke unburied skulls, human viscera dissolves into earth, and troops are indistinguishable from the fiery trenches and ravaged landscapes in which they advance and retreat, fight and die. Standing before these harrowing images of war, injury, and death, the viewer can almost touch the barbed wire and smell the mustard gas.

Dix’s portraits of Weimar Germany’s social life, including artists, bohemians, and his friends, brilliantly capture the affectations and styles of his subjects. His portraiture documents the hedonism and heady atmosphere that pervaded certain sectors of German life in the 1920s. “Portrait of the Jeweler Karl Krall” (1923) captures the campy arrogance of the nouveau riche in the middle aged, bespectacled jeweler’s ostentatious pose and self-congratulatory air.

Otto Dix, “Portrait of the Jeweler Karl Krall” (1923), oil paint on canvas, 905 x 605 mm, Kunst und Museumsverein im Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal, Germany (Kunst- und Museumsverein im Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal / Photo: Antje Zeis-Loi, Medienzentrum Wuppertal. © DACS 2017)

Krall’s expertly tailored brown suit blends into a velvety backdrop of greens and browns. He appears both hyper-animated and superfluous, just another colorful object in a jeweler’s atelier. His disproportionately large hands, one adorned with a pinky ring, clasp his willowy hips, while his torso undulates upward in a sweep of feminine curves. His pursed lips, reddened cheeks and bald head blaze like gaudy jewels, rippling with pinks and blues.

For a portrait of photographer Hugo Erfurth with his dog from 1926, Dix depicts the man and dog in parallel profiles against a turquoise wall and a brown and gold curtain. As in the Krall portrait, a well-appointed interior serves as a stage for spotlighting the pathos of upper middle-class German life. Dix skillfully attends to the large dog’s vigorous musculature and firm posture, sleek hair, firm ears, half-opened jaw, beveled teeth and protruding tongue, and alert orange and brown eye; each canine feature has a counterpoint in Erfurth’s human figure — his stooped shoulders, sagging cheek, prominent chin and floppy ears, and mild, uncertain and glazed eyes.

Dix frequently conflates the animal and human kingdoms, undermining human civilization’s illusion of progress or superiority. Even the most passionate lovers in his artworks evoke prey and predator. In the frequently reproduced painting, “Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin,” (1927), the scantily clad woman’s bare left arm, vanishing in and out of the leopard skin, suggests a metamorphosis, underscored by her feline gaze. Although she seems to lurch out from the picture plane, she appears to be arrested in her forward motion. As in many of Dix’s eroticized portraits, the viewer is both drawn in and driven back. We are voyeurs, complicit in Dix’s creation of an irresistible human zoo.

August Sander, “National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture” (c.1938, printed 1990), photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 260 x 192 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2017)

The range of human situations and individualized histories in Portraying a Nation are nearly impossible to summarize. For Sander and Dix, as for the rest of Germany and the wider world, the aftershocks of The Third Reich continued for years after the war. Sander’s plates for Faces of Our Time were destroyed by the Nazis, and, in 1946, thirty thousand of his negatives were destroyed in a basement fire. As for Dix, he was dismissed from his teaching position at the Dresden Academy of Fine Art following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and his art was famously paraded in the state-sponsored Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in 1937. Though both men lived on for decades after the war, neither totally recovered the creative momentum of the Weimar period. These images and histories linger in one’s memory long after the visitor leaves the Tate’s sharply curated exhibition.

With fascism on the rise — and, arguably, already governing in the United States and elsewhere — the cliché “it can’t happen here” comes to mind. As Portraying a Nation demonstrates, that it that can’t happen here, does. Moreover, it is hard to comprehend its mechanisms when they are working upon us, and harder still to grasp how what is happening now was already set in motion.

Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 continues at the Tate Liverpool (Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool) through October 15.

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Psycho thrillers: five movies that educate us how the attention cultivate

Power, savagery, fatality and reality the movies can educate us plenty about lifes large-scale concerns. From the Godfather to Groundhog Day, five psychologists pick the cinemas that tell us what realizes humen tick

Ten days ago in London, the Hungarian director Lszl Nemes hosted a preview screening of his film, Son of Saul. He explained that if beings didnt want to stay for the Q& A afterwards, that was fine; he wouldnt take personal offence. The gathering chuckled politely. Thats the last laugh youll have for a while, he told them.

Son of Saul Photograph: Rex/ Shutterstock

He was right: Son of Saul out in the UK on Friday is what you might call a taxing watch. Set in Auschwitz in 1944, it presents a era in living conditions of a Sonderkommando, a Jewish captive forced to work in the gas chambers, disposing of the deaths organizations. Almost every frame is filled by the beyond brutalised face of a mortal fated to die and already living in hell.

The film armies you to grapple with “the worlds largest” frightening moral selections imaginable. Should you delude your fellow prisoners into thinking theyre just going for a shower? Can you square a duty to truth-telling with a responsibility not to justification farther damage? Son of Saul requests topics few dare to pose about the human condition. Numerous movies from the sacred to the debase do the same. Here, five leading psychologists look at the classic movies that explore how human beings work.

Groundhog Day by Philippa Perry

Freud caused his patients the chance to re-edit their narrations

Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Image: Allstar/ Columbia

In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors lives the same day over and over again. At one point, he has a schmooze in a forbid with two drinks: What would you do if you were stuck in one region and every day was exactly the same and good-for-nothing you did mattered? That simply summing-ups it up for me, replies the wino. Summarizes it up for a lot of us.

Freud inspired patients to tell their narratives and got them to free-associate around their narrative to find out how they thought and experienced about themselves. This rendered his patients the chance to relive, re-examine and maybe re-edit their narrations in terms of the room they impart themselves in the present. Our earliest context has a profound impact upon the americans and anatomies, to a great extent, how we watch and interact with the world.

When we firstly satisfied Connors, played by Bill Murray, whatever happened to him in his past has shaped him grumpy, contemptuous, disruptive and insulting. He is trapped in the narcissistic defence of assuming he is superior to everyone else and we consider parties being circumspect around him and not enjoying his company. In psychotherapy, we often talking here self-fulfilling revelation if you expect everyone not to like you, you behave defensively and, hey presto, your prophecy starts true-life. Being caught in the same day is a metaphor for how he is stuck in this pattern.

Groundhog day also illustrates object relations belief: the hypothesi of how we find bad objects( a negative influence from our past) in objectives that are around us in the present. To find our bad object we search for and find negative characteristics even when, in other peoples sees, there used to be none. For precedent, at the Groundhog Day gala that Phil reports on from the small town of Punxsutawney, he can only determine hypocrisy and satire, whereas the TV creator, Rita( Andie MacDowell ), discovers the grace of institution and the delight it brings to the people. In object relations theory, the relevant recommendations is that the psychoanalyst was becoming good object for the patient, and with the psychoanalysts facilitation individual patients learns good objects where hitherto they could not. Rita is Phils good object and the catalyst in Phils transformation. Her influence begins to rub off. He detects the joy of educating himself in literature, art and music. He acquires out about beings, assisting them and befriending them rather than writing them off and finds out that this has its own reward.

The tradition of Punxsutawney is that if the groundhog, too called Phil, can see its shadow on Groundhog Day, the town will get six more weeks of winter. It takes Phil the weatherman quite a long time to see his darknes more, but when at last he does, the working day miraculously moves on. In Jungian assumption, the darknes refers to negative various aspects of your own personality that you reject and project on to others. There are also positive aspects to the darknes that is still conceal from consciousness. Jung said that everyone carries a shadow and that the less it is embodied in the individuals awareness life, the darker and more destructive it has the potential to be.

Although we dont have the indulgence of living in the same day for as long as it is also necessary in order to recognise how we sabotage ourselves, our missteps do have a garb of happening often enough for us to become aware of them. What remains of our lifespan is hour enough to do something about it.

Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and the author of the graphic tale Couch Fiction .

The Godfather by Steven Pinker

It explains why the impulse for savagery derived to be a selective programme

James Caan and Marlon Brando in The Godfather Photograph: Moviestore/ Rex/ Shutterstock

The Godfather is not an obvious choice for a mental movie, but its stylised, witticised savagery alleges often about human nature.

Except in war zones, beings are extraordinarily unlikely to die from savagery. Yet from the Iliad through video games, our species has always apportioned time and resources to destroying simulations of violence.The brain seems to run on the adage: If you want quietnes, prepare for conflict. We are mesmerized by the logic of promontory and menace, the psychology of alliance and sellout, the vulnerabilities of their own bodies and how they can be employed or shielded. A likely interpretation is that in our evolutionary record, brutality be a major enough threat to fitness that everyone had to understand how it works.

Among the many subgenres of violent presentation, one with perennial appeal to brows both high and low is the Hobbesian thriller a storey set in a circumscribed zone of chao that saves the familiar trappings of our times, but in which the exponents must live beyond the reach of the modern leviathan( the police and judiciary ), with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Examples include westerns, spy thrillers, battlefield dramas, zombie holocausts, seat tale and movies about organised criminal. In a smuggled economy, you cant sue your rivals or call the police, so the credible menace( and occasional expend) of violence is your one protection.

The godfather of Mafia movies is, of course, Francis Ford Coppolas The Godfather trilogy. The screenplays are a goldmine for remarks on the human condition in a state of nature, beyond such constraints of modern institutions. Four wrinkles stand out: in the opening stage, Vito Corleone, having promised to mete out some bumpy justice on behalf of a victimised undertaker “whove been” abandoned by the American leviathan, demonstrates how reciprocity provides as the plaster of traditional societies: Some era, and that day may never return, Ill call upon “youve got to” do a service for me. But until the working day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughters wedding day.

The opening panorama of The Godfather

Following the tragic death of his eldest son, Vito addresses the heads of the rival violation households and shows the tactical rationality of evident irrationality: Im a superstitious male. And if some unlucky coincidence should befall my son, if my son is struck by a bolt of lightning, I will accuse some of the people here. Elsewhere, he elaborates: Coincidences dont happen to people who plow collisions as a personal insult.

A foot soldier of one of these adversaries explains why the inclination for savagery advanced to be a select programme , not an indiscriminate bloodlust or a hydraulic pressing: I dont like violence, Tom. Im a businessman. Blood is a big expense.

And for all our hotheaded counsels, Michael explains the knowledge of ensure your ardours: Never hate your foes. It feigns your judgment.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard .

Rushmore by Dacher Keltner

It shows us that to consolidate in dominance, we must unite others

Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore. Photo: Rex Shutterstock

All art, French social theoretician Pierre Bourdieu debates, is an expression of social class, from the music you experience to the trinkets you put on your walls. Few cinemas, though, have undertaken the class subdivide between the haves and have-nots as imaginatively as Wes Andersons 1998 cinema Rushmore.

The film reveals at Rushmore Academy, a prep school in Houston, Texas, and tells the story of the friendship between schoolboy Max Fischer( Jason Schwartzman ), the son of a barber, and rich industrialist Herman Blume( Bill Murray ). They both fall for a lately bereaved teacher at the school( Olivia Williams ), and resort to misguided tactics to triumph her affection. As this timeless strife undoes, the film illustrates various following principles class and dominance uncovered in psychological science.

The first that affluence is rising unethical and socially detached action is on display at a birthday defendant for Blumes sons, who attend Rushmore Academy with Max. The two sons greedily shred through a collection of presents( and are most enjoyed by a crossbow ). Nearby, Blumes wife flirts blatantly with a young man, while Blume sits far away from the mayhem, languidly convulsing golf balls into his dirty pool.

The puddle vistum in Rushmore

This scene captivates recent considers showing that upper-class individuals are more disposed to impulsive and socially aloof behaviour, including misconstruing others ardours, swearing, lying in recreations to win prizes and flouting the regulation of the road.

Navigating power structure, such as prep schools, is the cause of stress for lower-class individuals, and can heighten levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol. To adapt to such social emphasizes, people from lower-class backgrounds reach out and is attached to others a second principle of class and influence. Studies find that it is parties from lower-class backgrounds who share more, collaborate, attend to others carefully and do acts that unite others, a intend by which they can rise in strength when paucity the advantages of lineage. With brilliant detail, Anderson accompanies this principle to life in Maxs defining social inclination: forming sororities. Max is at the head of every imaginable guild, including the beekeepers culture, the kung fu golf-club and the astronomy squad all touching, quaint acts that discover a deeper principle at participate: to increase in dominance, we must unite others in common cause.

Dacher Keltner is a prof of psychology at University of California, Berkeley .

Altered Nation by Sue Blackmore

It plays with the question of what we mean by reality

William Hurt in Altered Regime. Image: Moviestore/ Rex/ Shutterstock

Ken Russells Altered Position is based on a wild time in the 1970 s, when a whole lot of professors took hallucinogenic drugs. One of them, John Lilly, started working with isolation containers where you swim in saltwater in total stillnes, resulting in absolute sensory deprivation with resultant vivid imagery and bizarre sensations.

The films hero is a scientist called Eddie( William Hurt) who starts experimenting with psychedelic drugs to explore other countries of consciousness and our notions of actuality. At one point he emerges from his isolation tank having been transformed into an parrot but Im not so interested in this kind of hopeless fantasy. What interests me is how the cinema manages the altered commonwealths of consciousness. We know that when you take hallucinogenic drugs of this kind, a very early hallucinations are simple, colorful, geometric decorations. Passages and spirals are common, as they are in out-of-body and near-death knowledge. The movie has batch of passageways, and a wonderful maelstrom near the end, where Eddie is being sucked away into oblivion. That is all extravagant cinema material, but the maelstrom leaves a good suffer of hallucinatory know-hows, and is rather well done.

Lilly was trying to understand the nature of actuality, and thats what this movie gamblings with. What do we make by world, regardless? You might say that what we know, and what Eddie in the film presupposed, is that there is a physical actuality and our intelligence interprets it, and that hallucinations are not real. But if you make a hallucinogenic drug into most peoples mentalities, they get remarkably similar experiences.

A lovely detail in the film is where Eddie starts for a formality with an indigenous tribe in Mexico. He is given a tonic, goes into an extreme adjusted territory and considers flows of idols coming out of his body. The hotshots are not real in the sense that there are no white-hot lights flowing from us, but lots of people who take those same doses appreciate the same thing so there is a kind of reality here, a kind of shared experience.

In consciousness analyzes, we struggle with the hard question of consciousness. It is a deep riddle how do subjective know-hows arise from objective intelligence task? We dont know. Numerous people, myself included, say there isnt actually a hard problem. We become dualists in childhood we think that recollection and psyche are divide and thats why we have a problem: how can the knowledge arise from the intelligence? Somehow, we have to see how the two are the same circumstance. Many people have these hallucinatory suffers, or go through intense customs, and claim to have achieved non-duality. We dont get that explanation in this film, but it would be amazing if we did.

Sue Blackmore is a writer, professor and visiting professor at Plymouth University .

The Seventh Seal by Susan Greenfield

Its about the psychology of parties the hope you are going to be better

Ingmar Bergmans film is so striking and implacable, unlike most movies nowadays. A knight, returning from the Crusades to plague-ridden Sweden, is visited by Death, a pale-faced, black-cloaked attribute. They play out a chess coincide which, if the cavalier triumphs, will stave off his demise.

The Seventh Seal

The fact The Seventh Seal is in black and white and was reached in the 1950 s is evidence of its staying appeal, in the same way Greek misfortune weathers it is something that speaks of eternal appraises, folks hopes and anxieties, and is not dependent on current culture. It has been satirised, most famously by Monty Pythons The Meaning of Life, in a sketch in which Death transforms up at a middle-class dinner party. Its funny, but it doesnt detract from the original, where everyone is fated at the end. It is the opposite of the joyous stops of movies we have now.

The film has a very dark, nihilistic feel to it in an age when people are soft and easy. There is one panorama where one of the specific characteristics, an actor, is up a tree, and Death comes to looked through it. He expects him who he is, and Death says he has come for him. The man adds its not his time, he has his performance to do. Death enunciates: Its cancelled. Because of death. All the fantasies and hopes you have are annulled because of death.

Im not recognizing also that Bergman was inevitably expounding any particular mental assumption, but he does talks about the silence of God, which perhaps for many parties echoes true. I think it is about the psychology of beings the hope that you are going to be better and different, to think that you can get away with things.

The knight goes to confession and starts to tell the priest about the chess move he is going make and, of course, the clergyman is Death. You cant overcome fatality and all of us are playing chess with demise, in a way hoping well be the one who wont get cancer, wont have a heart attack, that this happens to other people , not us. I think there is that mentality in numerous parties, and this film brings it home to you. I am an rosy party, and it clears me appreciate life because of its highly transient and arbitrary nature.

Susan Greenfield is a scientist, scribe, broadcaster and a member of the House of Lords .

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From Joni Mitchell to Laura Marling: how female troubadours changed music

Singing about drugs, politics and disappointment was once seen as a male pursuit and almost half a century after female artists began to defy convention, many are still trying break the mould

In the summer of 1969, Newsweek published an articleunder the headline The Girls Letting Go, charting the burgeoning careers of a group of young musicians it termed a new school of talented female troubadours. They sang about politics, love affairs, the urban landscape, drugs, disappointment, and the life and loneliness of the itinerant performer subjects that, hitherto, had largely been the preserve of male musicians. What is common to them to Joni Mitchell and Lotti Golden, to Laura Nyro, Melanie, and to Elyse Weinberg, the writer, Hubert Saal, observed, are the personalised songs they write, like voyages of self-discovery what they celebrate is the natural, preferring the simple joy to the complex, the artless to the artful and, rather than the holding back, the letting go.

There have been many new female troubadours in the years since fromPatti Smith to Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris and Carole King all of them writing and singing across aperiod in which womens liberation made great strides. Today, almost 50 years since Saals article, womens lives are markedly different from the way they were in 1969, but has the world of women in song evolved as markedly?

We are at a peculiar point in the music industry: female artists such as Taylor Swift, Beyonc and Katy Perry have been among the industrystop earners in recent years, yet womens presence elsewhere in the industry is sparse, and female performers are thin on the ground at the summer music festivals. While this has generated much media discussion, how have female songwriters responded?

This early stretch of the year brings releases by several songwriters who might fall into that troubadour category. Artists such as Laura Marling, Courtney Marie Andrews, Julie Byrne and Nadia Reid are writing songs that capture the pulls of both domesticity and the road, and what it means to be living a life that does not entirely tally with convention.

Marlings sixth album, Semper Femina, follows last years Reversal ofthe Muse podcast series, in which she spoke to musicians such as Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Marika Hackman, as well as women elsewhere in the industry, such as guitar shop owner Pamela Cole and recording engineer Olga FitzRoy, to explore femininity in creativity from the challenges of writing, recording and touring, to the masculine design of guitars and the fact that women hear differently from men.

I would say that feminine creativity is inherently different from the masculine, says Marling. Even at its beginnings, she suspects that womens musical impulses have different motivations from those of their male counterparts. I had a lot of chats with Blake [Mills, Semper Feminas producer] when we were making the record, about how we started playing guitar, she says. And he was like: I started playing because I wanted to impress girls. And that was obviously so different from why I started playing guitar that was never in my brain, toimpress boys. So even that crucial difference makes for a different musician. For me, playing guitar has always been tied up with my identity rather than enticing people in, its always been involved in myself.

This album emerged after a time inwhich Marling felt that she had become increasingly masculine determinedly touring alone, lugging her own gear, stepping away from ideas of feminine dress. While this stretch was not long-lived, she believes it gave her an ability to look at women in a different way and consider how Id been looked at. She is resistant to being pigeonholed. I think, when Iwas a teenager, in my head you were either this delicate tragedy or you were a muse, she says. And theyre both such horrifyingly subjugated roles.

She was struck, too, by an old edition of Desert Island Discs in which Marianne Faithfull was the castaway. The presenter said: So, tell me, you must have felt very hard done by that all the Rolling Stones deserted you? And she said: Can you stop trying to make a tragedy of me? Im not a tragedy! Ive lived my life. Obviously, I was a drug addict, but I was always going to be a drug addict. I had an amazing time! And its true, by any other masculine name, all those experiences would be clocked up as experiences and nothing more.

But ideas of what women in music should be are hard to shake. There is animpulse to make an easy tragedy of female musicians who have spent their lives on the road. There is something, too, that expects women to be static, indoor, domesticated and confessional songwriters. As the late John Berger put it: Men act, women appear.

Crucial to this is the idea of women and movement women stepping outside the safe confines of the home and domesticity. For Julie Byrne, the compulsion to keep moving has run intandem with her career as a songwriter. I was always fascinated by thatlifestyle, she recalls. When I was living in Buffalo, New York, where Im from, there was a huge contingency of freight-train hoppers. There was a pretty legendary house in Buffalo called the Birdhouse that was well known in that network. So there was this huge influx of travellers in the summertime, and thered be really glorious parties with music until the early hours I think this was probably where this sense of wonderment camefrom.

In her teens, a year after she began playing music, Byrne toured with some friends, travelling through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee and South Carolina. She remembers the joy of that time the new landscapes, playing live, trying to navigate their way to the next city in the days before Google Maps and smartphones. I think it just strengthened all the curiosity I had, she says. I wanted to continue to learn through my experiences that way.

This is not to suggest it was without problems. We were in my friends old Volvo that had a leak in the gas tank, she says. We ended up running out of gas and were stranded on the highway somewhere outside Memphis. That was my first experience of being outside New York state and everything was enchanted. Breaking down, all of it. There was poetry in everything for me then, and I think a lot about that time, how moving just the most mundane aspects were for me when I was younger.

Her experience of the touring life has changed with the years while she retains some of that early wonderment, she also sees its limitations. Her most recent album, Not Even Happiness, was written largely in the time that Byrne was touring its predecessor, Rooms With Walls and Windows, when she gave up the place she had in Seattle, along with her furniture and most of her belongings, because I couldnt afford to maintain a room somewhere while I was on the road constantly.

That weightlessness brought a new quality to her music. A lot of these songs come from the power and the beauty of travel and of relying on the generosity of other people, she says. But also the pain of not having any privacy and not having anywhere to goto weep for the condition of the world or the condition of my own heart, so that was a time of extreme vulnerability. But I think that brought on some meaningful realisations in my life that you carry your burdens wherever you go, and they dont just fall away just because youre across the country or in a different setting. They stay with you until theyre resolved in some way.

Courtney Marie Andrews left her home in Phoenix, Arizona, when she was 16 and began busking along the west coast of America. I just fell in love with the lifestyle, she says. At that time I was so young and so ready to get out of Phoenix I just felt trapped there, and I realised there was so much more to the world. I loved making music with my friends every day, and being in different cities. I thrive on change, and I really felt drawn to the constant movement.

She soon found work, first as a backing singer for other artists, then playing lead guitar for Damien Jurado, and her life on the road ran on. It was only more recently, after the end of aserious relationship, that she began to consider the drawbacks of a rootless lifestyle. It is a subject she addresses on her latest album, Honest Life, setting all the nights of travelling, playing, eating alone in diners and sleeping in vans against the pleasures of a home and community.

I wrote those songs because Irealised Id spent pretty much my entire later adolescence and early 20s on the road, she says. Id come home and people had cultivated these really in-depth relationships, and I started topine for that. Id be home just for amonth and that would be it. The pluses are playing your songs every night with your friends you cant really complain. But the thing you missis the human connection. That canbecome really hard. You say: Hi, my names Courtney! 500 times on atour.

The trials of life on the road is not an unfamiliar subject for songwriters, but for female musicians there are additional weights: centuries of women being expected to stay at home, as well as the constrictions of time and biology; the music industry is not set up to accommodate parenthood, let alone the physical demands of motherhood. There is also the suspicion that greets women who dont quite conform.

For Byrne, life in freefall is something that can grant womens songwriting extra force and insight. Ithink that women living lifestyles with no fixed home and really having to be at the mercy of that experience will probably transcend that [more traditional] mould, she says. I think women have a certain vision that is so deeply connected to their interior lives, and I think women are inherently willing to be very vulnerable, and have an honesty that theyre willing to share with other people. And thats the most powerful thing there is.

Andrews is similarly hopeful that these songs of the road will still have the capacity to affect their listeners. Its so funny, I always thought, Well, this is just how it is, she says. But its very true [traditionally] men touch on this life in their songs and women talk about domestic issues or their husbands. But I hope that women, or just people in general, can empathise with those stories coming from a woman. Because anybody can live that kind of lifestyle.

Nearly half a century after that first wave of new female troubadours, it seems women songwriters are still muddling out a way to be. But however gradual, what we are witness to is stillan evolution, a slow bucking of convention, women singing songs that tell of a new life and its possibilities; 50 years on they are still letting go.

Not Even Happiness by Julie Byrne andHonest Life by Courtney Marie Andrews are both out now. Semper Femina by Laura Marling is due for release on More Alarming Records on 10March.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2jubIEh

from From Joni Mitchell to Laura Marling: how female troubadours changed music

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Psycho thrillers: five movies that educate us how the attention cultivate

Power, savagery, fatality and reality the movies can educate us plenty about lifes large-scale concerns. From the Godfather to Groundhog Day, five psychologists pick the cinemas that tell us what realizes humen tick

Ten days ago in London, the Hungarian director Lszl Nemes hosted a preview screening of his film, Son of Saul. He explained that if beings didnt want to stay for the Q& A afterwards, that was fine; he wouldnt take personal offence. The gathering chuckled politely. Thats the last laugh youll have for a while, he told them.

Son of Saul Photograph: Rex/ Shutterstock

He was right: Son of Saul out in the UK on Friday is what you might call a taxing watch. Set in Auschwitz in 1944, it presents a era in living conditions of a Sonderkommando, a Jewish captive forced to work in the gas chambers, disposing of the deaths organizations. Almost every frame is filled by the beyond brutalised face of a mortal fated to die and already living in hell.

The film armies you to grapple with “the worlds largest” frightening moral selections imaginable. Should you delude your fellow prisoners into thinking theyre just going for a shower? Can you square a duty to truth-telling with a responsibility not to justification farther damage? Son of Saul requests topics few dare to pose about the human condition. Numerous movies from the sacred to the debase do the same. Here, five leading psychologists look at the classic movies that explore how human beings work.

Groundhog Day by Philippa Perry

Freud caused his patients the chance to re-edit their narrations

Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Image: Allstar/ Columbia

In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors lives the same day over and over again. At one point, he has a schmooze in a forbid with two drinks: What would you do if you were stuck in one region and every day was exactly the same and good-for-nothing you did mattered? That simply summing-ups it up for me, replies the wino. Summarizes it up for a lot of us.

Freud inspired patients to tell their narratives and got them to free-associate around their narrative to find out how they thought and experienced about themselves. This rendered his patients the chance to relive, re-examine and maybe re-edit their narrations in terms of the room they impart themselves in the present. Our earliest context has a profound impact upon the americans and anatomies, to a great extent, how we watch and interact with the world.

When we firstly satisfied Connors, played by Bill Murray, whatever happened to him in his past has shaped him grumpy, contemptuous, disruptive and insulting. He is trapped in the narcissistic defence of assuming he is superior to everyone else and we consider parties being circumspect around him and not enjoying his company. In psychotherapy, we often talking here self-fulfilling revelation if you expect everyone not to like you, you behave defensively and, hey presto, your prophecy starts true-life. Being caught in the same day is a metaphor for how he is stuck in this pattern.

Groundhog day also illustrates object relations belief: the hypothesi of how we find bad objects( a negative influence from our past) in objectives that are around us in the present. To find our bad object we search for and find negative characteristics even when, in other peoples sees, there used to be none. For precedent, at the Groundhog Day gala that Phil reports on from the small town of Punxsutawney, he can only determine hypocrisy and satire, whereas the TV creator, Rita( Andie MacDowell ), discovers the grace of institution and the delight it brings to the people. In object relations theory, the relevant recommendations is that the psychoanalyst was becoming good object for the patient, and with the psychoanalysts facilitation individual patients learns good objects where hitherto they could not. Rita is Phils good object and the catalyst in Phils transformation. Her influence begins to rub off. He detects the joy of educating himself in literature, art and music. He acquires out about beings, assisting them and befriending them rather than writing them off and finds out that this has its own reward.

The tradition of Punxsutawney is that if the groundhog, too called Phil, can see its shadow on Groundhog Day, the town will get six more weeks of winter. It takes Phil the weatherman quite a long time to see his darknes more, but when at last he does, the working day miraculously moves on. In Jungian assumption, the darknes refers to negative various aspects of your own personality that you reject and project on to others. There are also positive aspects to the darknes that is still conceal from consciousness. Jung said that everyone carries a shadow and that the less it is embodied in the individuals awareness life, the darker and more destructive it has the potential to be.

Although we dont have the indulgence of living in the same day for as long as it is also necessary in order to recognise how we sabotage ourselves, our missteps do have a garb of happening often enough for us to become aware of them. What remains of our lifespan is hour enough to do something about it.

Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and the author of the graphic tale Couch Fiction .

The Godfather by Steven Pinker

It explains why the impulse for savagery derived to be a selective programme

James Caan and Marlon Brando in The Godfather Photograph: Moviestore/ Rex/ Shutterstock

The Godfather is not an obvious choice for a mental movie, but its stylised, witticised savagery alleges often about human nature.

Except in war zones, beings are extraordinarily unlikely to die from savagery. Yet from the Iliad through video games, our species has always apportioned time and resources to destroying simulations of violence.The brain seems to run on the adage: If you want quietnes, prepare for conflict. We are mesmerized by the logic of promontory and menace, the psychology of alliance and sellout, the vulnerabilities of their own bodies and how they can be employed or shielded. A likely interpretation is that in our evolutionary record, brutality be a major enough threat to fitness that everyone had to understand how it works.

Among the many subgenres of violent presentation, one with perennial appeal to brows both high and low is the Hobbesian thriller a storey set in a circumscribed zone of chao that saves the familiar trappings of our times, but in which the exponents must live beyond the reach of the modern leviathan( the police and judiciary ), with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Examples include westerns, spy thrillers, battlefield dramas, zombie holocausts, seat tale and movies about organised criminal. In a smuggled economy, you cant sue your rivals or call the police, so the credible menace( and occasional expend) of violence is your one protection.

The godfather of Mafia movies is, of course, Francis Ford Coppolas The Godfather trilogy. The screenplays are a goldmine for remarks on the human condition in a state of nature, beyond such constraints of modern institutions. Four wrinkles stand out: in the opening stage, Vito Corleone, having promised to mete out some bumpy justice on behalf of a victimised undertaker “whove been” abandoned by the American leviathan, demonstrates how reciprocity provides as the plaster of traditional societies: Some era, and that day may never return, Ill call upon “youve got to” do a service for me. But until the working day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughters wedding day.

The opening panorama of The Godfather

Following the tragic death of his eldest son, Vito addresses the heads of the rival violation households and shows the tactical rationality of evident irrationality: Im a superstitious male. And if some unlucky coincidence should befall my son, if my son is struck by a bolt of lightning, I will accuse some of the people here. Elsewhere, he elaborates: Coincidences dont happen to people who plow collisions as a personal insult.

A foot soldier of one of these adversaries explains why the inclination for savagery advanced to be a select programme , not an indiscriminate bloodlust or a hydraulic pressing: I dont like violence, Tom. Im a businessman. Blood is a big expense.

And for all our hotheaded counsels, Michael explains the knowledge of ensure your ardours: Never hate your foes. It feigns your judgment.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard .

Rushmore by Dacher Keltner

It shows us that to consolidate in dominance, we must unite others

Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore. Photo: Rex Shutterstock

All art, French social theoretician Pierre Bourdieu debates, is an expression of social class, from the music you experience to the trinkets you put on your walls. Few cinemas, though, have undertaken the class subdivide between the haves and have-nots as imaginatively as Wes Andersons 1998 cinema Rushmore.

The film reveals at Rushmore Academy, a prep school in Houston, Texas, and tells the story of the friendship between schoolboy Max Fischer( Jason Schwartzman ), the son of a barber, and rich industrialist Herman Blume( Bill Murray ). They both fall for a lately bereaved teacher at the school( Olivia Williams ), and resort to misguided tactics to triumph her affection. As this timeless strife undoes, the film illustrates various following principles class and dominance uncovered in psychological science.

The first that affluence is rising unethical and socially detached action is on display at a birthday defendant for Blumes sons, who attend Rushmore Academy with Max. The two sons greedily shred through a collection of presents( and are most enjoyed by a crossbow ). Nearby, Blumes wife flirts blatantly with a young man, while Blume sits far away from the mayhem, languidly convulsing golf balls into his dirty pool.

The puddle vistum in Rushmore

This scene captivates recent considers showing that upper-class individuals are more disposed to impulsive and socially aloof behaviour, including misconstruing others ardours, swearing, lying in recreations to win prizes and flouting the regulation of the road.

Navigating power structure, such as prep schools, is the cause of stress for lower-class individuals, and can heighten levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol. To adapt to such social emphasizes, people from lower-class backgrounds reach out and is attached to others a second principle of class and influence. Studies find that it is parties from lower-class backgrounds who share more, collaborate, attend to others carefully and do acts that unite others, a intend by which they can rise in strength when paucity the advantages of lineage. With brilliant detail, Anderson accompanies this principle to life in Maxs defining social inclination: forming sororities. Max is at the head of every imaginable guild, including the beekeepers culture, the kung fu golf-club and the astronomy squad all touching, quaint acts that discover a deeper principle at participate: to increase in dominance, we must unite others in common cause.

Dacher Keltner is a prof of psychology at University of California, Berkeley .

Altered Nation by Sue Blackmore

It plays with the question of what we mean by reality

William Hurt in Altered Regime. Image: Moviestore/ Rex/ Shutterstock

Ken Russells Altered Position is based on a wild time in the 1970 s, when a whole lot of professors took hallucinogenic drugs. One of them, John Lilly, started working with isolation containers where you swim in saltwater in total stillnes, resulting in absolute sensory deprivation with resultant vivid imagery and bizarre sensations.

The films hero is a scientist called Eddie( William Hurt) who starts experimenting with psychedelic drugs to explore other countries of consciousness and our notions of actuality. At one point he emerges from his isolation tank having been transformed into an parrot but Im not so interested in this kind of hopeless fantasy. What interests me is how the cinema manages the altered commonwealths of consciousness. We know that when you take hallucinogenic drugs of this kind, a very early hallucinations are simple, colorful, geometric decorations. Passages and spirals are common, as they are in out-of-body and near-death knowledge. The movie has batch of passageways, and a wonderful maelstrom near the end, where Eddie is being sucked away into oblivion. That is all extravagant cinema material, but the maelstrom leaves a good suffer of hallucinatory know-hows, and is rather well done.

Lilly was trying to understand the nature of actuality, and thats what this movie gamblings with. What do we make by world, regardless? You might say that what we know, and what Eddie in the film presupposed, is that there is a physical actuality and our intelligence interprets it, and that hallucinations are not real. But if you make a hallucinogenic drug into most peoples mentalities, they get remarkably similar experiences.

A lovely detail in the film is where Eddie starts for a formality with an indigenous tribe in Mexico. He is given a tonic, goes into an extreme adjusted territory and considers flows of idols coming out of his body. The hotshots are not real in the sense that there are no white-hot lights flowing from us, but lots of people who take those same doses appreciate the same thing so there is a kind of reality here, a kind of shared experience.

In consciousness analyzes, we struggle with the hard question of consciousness. It is a deep riddle how do subjective know-hows arise from objective intelligence task? We dont know. Numerous people, myself included, say there isnt actually a hard problem. We become dualists in childhood we think that recollection and psyche are divide and thats why we have a problem: how can the knowledge arise from the intelligence? Somehow, we have to see how the two are the same circumstance. Many people have these hallucinatory suffers, or go through intense customs, and claim to have achieved non-duality. We dont get that explanation in this film, but it would be amazing if we did.

Sue Blackmore is a writer, professor and visiting professor at Plymouth University .

The Seventh Seal by Susan Greenfield

Its about the psychology of parties the hope you are going to be better

Ingmar Bergmans film is so striking and implacable, unlike most movies nowadays. A knight, returning from the Crusades to plague-ridden Sweden, is visited by Death, a pale-faced, black-cloaked attribute. They play out a chess coincide which, if the cavalier triumphs, will stave off his demise.

The Seventh Seal

The fact The Seventh Seal is in black and white and was reached in the 1950 s is evidence of its staying appeal, in the same way Greek misfortune weathers it is something that speaks of eternal appraises, folks hopes and anxieties, and is not dependent on current culture. It has been satirised, most famously by Monty Pythons The Meaning of Life, in a sketch in which Death transforms up at a middle-class dinner party. Its funny, but it doesnt detract from the original, where everyone is fated at the end. It is the opposite of the joyous stops of movies we have now.

The film has a very dark, nihilistic feel to it in an age when people are soft and easy. There is one panorama where one of the specific characteristics, an actor, is up a tree, and Death comes to looked through it. He expects him who he is, and Death says he has come for him. The man adds its not his time, he has his performance to do. Death enunciates: Its cancelled. Because of death. All the fantasies and hopes you have are annulled because of death.

Im not recognizing also that Bergman was inevitably expounding any particular mental assumption, but he does talks about the silence of God, which perhaps for many parties echoes true. I think it is about the psychology of beings the hope that you are going to be better and different, to think that you can get away with things.

The knight goes to confession and starts to tell the priest about the chess move he is going make and, of course, the clergyman is Death. You cant overcome fatality and all of us are playing chess with demise, in a way hoping well be the one who wont get cancer, wont have a heart attack, that this happens to other people , not us. I think there is that mentality in numerous parties, and this film brings it home to you. I am an rosy party, and it clears me appreciate life because of its highly transient and arbitrary nature.

Susan Greenfield is a scientist, scribe, broadcaster and a member of the House of Lords .

The post Psycho thrillers: five movies that educate us how the attention cultivate appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

Psycho thrillers: five movies that educate us how the attention cultivate

Power, savagery, fatality and reality the movies can educate us plenty about lifes large-scale concerns. From the Godfather to Groundhog Day, five psychologists pick the cinemas that tell us what realizes humen tick

Ten days ago in London, the Hungarian director Lszl Nemes hosted a preview screening of his film, Son of Saul. He explained that if beings didnt want to stay for the Q& A afterwards, that was fine; he wouldnt take personal offence. The gathering chuckled politely. Thats the last laugh youll have for a while, he told them.

Son of Saul Photograph: Rex/ Shutterstock

He was right: Son of Saul out in the UK on Friday is what you might call a taxing watch. Set in Auschwitz in 1944, it presents a era in living conditions of a Sonderkommando, a Jewish captive forced to work in the gas chambers, disposing of the deaths organizations. Almost every frame is filled by the beyond brutalised face of a mortal fated to die and already living in hell.

The film armies you to grapple with “the worlds largest” frightening moral selections imaginable. Should you delude your fellow prisoners into thinking theyre just going for a shower? Can you square a duty to truth-telling with a responsibility not to justification farther damage? Son of Saul requests topics few dare to pose about the human condition. Numerous movies from the sacred to the debase do the same. Here, five leading psychologists look at the classic movies that explore how human beings work.

Groundhog Day by Philippa Perry

Freud caused his patients the chance to re-edit their narrations

Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Image: Allstar/ Columbia

In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors lives the same day over and over again. At one point, he has a schmooze in a forbid with two drinks: What would you do if you were stuck in one region and every day was exactly the same and good-for-nothing you did mattered? That simply summing-ups it up for me, replies the wino. Summarizes it up for a lot of us.

Freud inspired patients to tell their narratives and got them to free-associate around their narrative to find out how they thought and experienced about themselves. This rendered his patients the chance to relive, re-examine and maybe re-edit their narrations in terms of the room they impart themselves in the present. Our earliest context has a profound impact upon the americans and anatomies, to a great extent, how we watch and interact with the world.

When we firstly satisfied Connors, played by Bill Murray, whatever happened to him in his past has shaped him grumpy, contemptuous, disruptive and insulting. He is trapped in the narcissistic defence of assuming he is superior to everyone else and we consider parties being circumspect around him and not enjoying his company. In psychotherapy, we often talking here self-fulfilling revelation if you expect everyone not to like you, you behave defensively and, hey presto, your prophecy starts true-life. Being caught in the same day is a metaphor for how he is stuck in this pattern.

Groundhog day also illustrates object relations belief: the hypothesi of how we find bad objects( a negative influence from our past) in objectives that are around us in the present. To find our bad object we search for and find negative characteristics even when, in other peoples sees, there used to be none. For precedent, at the Groundhog Day gala that Phil reports on from the small town of Punxsutawney, he can only determine hypocrisy and satire, whereas the TV creator, Rita( Andie MacDowell ), discovers the grace of institution and the delight it brings to the people. In object relations theory, the relevant recommendations is that the psychoanalyst was becoming good object for the patient, and with the psychoanalysts facilitation individual patients learns good objects where hitherto they could not. Rita is Phils good object and the catalyst in Phils transformation. Her influence begins to rub off. He detects the joy of educating himself in literature, art and music. He acquires out about beings, assisting them and befriending them rather than writing them off and finds out that this has its own reward.

The tradition of Punxsutawney is that if the groundhog, too called Phil, can see its shadow on Groundhog Day, the town will get six more weeks of winter. It takes Phil the weatherman quite a long time to see his darknes more, but when at last he does, the working day miraculously moves on. In Jungian assumption, the darknes refers to negative various aspects of your own personality that you reject and project on to others. There are also positive aspects to the darknes that is still conceal from consciousness. Jung said that everyone carries a shadow and that the less it is embodied in the individuals awareness life, the darker and more destructive it has the potential to be.

Although we dont have the indulgence of living in the same day for as long as it is also necessary in order to recognise how we sabotage ourselves, our missteps do have a garb of happening often enough for us to become aware of them. What remains of our lifespan is hour enough to do something about it.

Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and the author of the graphic tale Couch Fiction .

The Godfather by Steven Pinker

It explains why the impulse for savagery derived to be a selective programme

James Caan and Marlon Brando in The Godfather Photograph: Moviestore/ Rex/ Shutterstock

The Godfather is not an obvious choice for a mental movie, but its stylised, witticised savagery alleges often about human nature.

Except in war zones, beings are extraordinarily unlikely to die from savagery. Yet from the Iliad through video games, our species has always apportioned time and resources to destroying simulations of violence.The brain seems to run on the adage: If you want quietnes, prepare for conflict. We are mesmerized by the logic of promontory and menace, the psychology of alliance and sellout, the vulnerabilities of their own bodies and how they can be employed or shielded. A likely interpretation is that in our evolutionary record, brutality be a major enough threat to fitness that everyone had to understand how it works.

Among the many subgenres of violent presentation, one with perennial appeal to brows both high and low is the Hobbesian thriller a storey set in a circumscribed zone of chao that saves the familiar trappings of our times, but in which the exponents must live beyond the reach of the modern leviathan( the police and judiciary ), with its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Examples include westerns, spy thrillers, battlefield dramas, zombie holocausts, seat tale and movies about organised criminal. In a smuggled economy, you cant sue your rivals or call the police, so the credible menace( and occasional expend) of violence is your one protection.

The godfather of Mafia movies is, of course, Francis Ford Coppolas The Godfather trilogy. The screenplays are a goldmine for remarks on the human condition in a state of nature, beyond such constraints of modern institutions. Four wrinkles stand out: in the opening stage, Vito Corleone, having promised to mete out some bumpy justice on behalf of a victimised undertaker “whove been” abandoned by the American leviathan, demonstrates how reciprocity provides as the plaster of traditional societies: Some era, and that day may never return, Ill call upon “youve got to” do a service for me. But until the working day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughters wedding day.

The opening panorama of The Godfather

Following the tragic death of his eldest son, Vito addresses the heads of the rival violation households and shows the tactical rationality of evident irrationality: Im a superstitious male. And if some unlucky coincidence should befall my son, if my son is struck by a bolt of lightning, I will accuse some of the people here. Elsewhere, he elaborates: Coincidences dont happen to people who plow collisions as a personal insult.

A foot soldier of one of these adversaries explains why the inclination for savagery advanced to be a select programme , not an indiscriminate bloodlust or a hydraulic pressing: I dont like violence, Tom. Im a businessman. Blood is a big expense.

And for all our hotheaded counsels, Michael explains the knowledge of ensure your ardours: Never hate your foes. It feigns your judgment.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard .

Rushmore by Dacher Keltner

It shows us that to consolidate in dominance, we must unite others

Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore. Photo: Rex Shutterstock

All art, French social theoretician Pierre Bourdieu debates, is an expression of social class, from the music you experience to the trinkets you put on your walls. Few cinemas, though, have undertaken the class subdivide between the haves and have-nots as imaginatively as Wes Andersons 1998 cinema Rushmore.

The film reveals at Rushmore Academy, a prep school in Houston, Texas, and tells the story of the friendship between schoolboy Max Fischer( Jason Schwartzman ), the son of a barber, and rich industrialist Herman Blume( Bill Murray ). They both fall for a lately bereaved teacher at the school( Olivia Williams ), and resort to misguided tactics to triumph her affection. As this timeless strife undoes, the film illustrates various following principles class and dominance uncovered in psychological science.

The first that affluence is rising unethical and socially detached action is on display at a birthday defendant for Blumes sons, who attend Rushmore Academy with Max. The two sons greedily shred through a collection of presents( and are most enjoyed by a crossbow ). Nearby, Blumes wife flirts blatantly with a young man, while Blume sits far away from the mayhem, languidly convulsing golf balls into his dirty pool.

The puddle vistum in Rushmore

This scene captivates recent considers showing that upper-class individuals are more disposed to impulsive and socially aloof behaviour, including misconstruing others ardours, swearing, lying in recreations to win prizes and flouting the regulation of the road.

Navigating power structure, such as prep schools, is the cause of stress for lower-class individuals, and can heighten levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol. To adapt to such social emphasizes, people from lower-class backgrounds reach out and is attached to others a second principle of class and influence. Studies find that it is parties from lower-class backgrounds who share more, collaborate, attend to others carefully and do acts that unite others, a intend by which they can rise in strength when paucity the advantages of lineage. With brilliant detail, Anderson accompanies this principle to life in Maxs defining social inclination: forming sororities. Max is at the head of every imaginable guild, including the beekeepers culture, the kung fu golf-club and the astronomy squad all touching, quaint acts that discover a deeper principle at participate: to increase in dominance, we must unite others in common cause.

Dacher Keltner is a prof of psychology at University of California, Berkeley .

Altered Nation by Sue Blackmore

It plays with the question of what we mean by reality

William Hurt in Altered Regime. Image: Moviestore/ Rex/ Shutterstock

Ken Russells Altered Position is based on a wild time in the 1970 s, when a whole lot of professors took hallucinogenic drugs. One of them, John Lilly, started working with isolation containers where you swim in saltwater in total stillnes, resulting in absolute sensory deprivation with resultant vivid imagery and bizarre sensations.

The films hero is a scientist called Eddie( William Hurt) who starts experimenting with psychedelic drugs to explore other countries of consciousness and our notions of actuality. At one point he emerges from his isolation tank having been transformed into an parrot but Im not so interested in this kind of hopeless fantasy. What interests me is how the cinema manages the altered commonwealths of consciousness. We know that when you take hallucinogenic drugs of this kind, a very early hallucinations are simple, colorful, geometric decorations. Passages and spirals are common, as they are in out-of-body and near-death knowledge. The movie has batch of passageways, and a wonderful maelstrom near the end, where Eddie is being sucked away into oblivion. That is all extravagant cinema material, but the maelstrom leaves a good suffer of hallucinatory know-hows, and is rather well done.

Lilly was trying to understand the nature of actuality, and thats what this movie gamblings with. What do we make by world, regardless? You might say that what we know, and what Eddie in the film presupposed, is that there is a physical actuality and our intelligence interprets it, and that hallucinations are not real. But if you make a hallucinogenic drug into most peoples mentalities, they get remarkably similar experiences.

A lovely detail in the film is where Eddie starts for a formality with an indigenous tribe in Mexico. He is given a tonic, goes into an extreme adjusted territory and considers flows of idols coming out of his body. The hotshots are not real in the sense that there are no white-hot lights flowing from us, but lots of people who take those same doses appreciate the same thing so there is a kind of reality here, a kind of shared experience.

In consciousness analyzes, we struggle with the hard question of consciousness. It is a deep riddle how do subjective know-hows arise from objective intelligence task? We dont know. Numerous people, myself included, say there isnt actually a hard problem. We become dualists in childhood we think that recollection and psyche are divide and thats why we have a problem: how can the knowledge arise from the intelligence? Somehow, we have to see how the two are the same circumstance. Many people have these hallucinatory suffers, or go through intense customs, and claim to have achieved non-duality. We dont get that explanation in this film, but it would be amazing if we did.

Sue Blackmore is a writer, professor and visiting professor at Plymouth University .

The Seventh Seal by Susan Greenfield

Its about the psychology of parties the hope you are going to be better

Ingmar Bergmans film is so striking and implacable, unlike most movies nowadays. A knight, returning from the Crusades to plague-ridden Sweden, is visited by Death, a pale-faced, black-cloaked attribute. They play out a chess coincide which, if the cavalier triumphs, will stave off his demise.

The Seventh Seal

The fact The Seventh Seal is in black and white and was reached in the 1950 s is evidence of its staying appeal, in the same way Greek misfortune weathers it is something that speaks of eternal appraises, folks hopes and anxieties, and is not dependent on current culture. It has been satirised, most famously by Monty Pythons The Meaning of Life, in a sketch in which Death transforms up at a middle-class dinner party. Its funny, but it doesnt detract from the original, where everyone is fated at the end. It is the opposite of the joyous stops of movies we have now.

The film has a very dark, nihilistic feel to it in an age when people are soft and easy. There is one panorama where one of the specific characteristics, an actor, is up a tree, and Death comes to looked through it. He expects him who he is, and Death says he has come for him. The man adds its not his time, he has his performance to do. Death enunciates: Its cancelled. Because of death. All the fantasies and hopes you have are annulled because of death.

Im not recognizing also that Bergman was inevitably expounding any particular mental assumption, but he does talks about the silence of God, which perhaps for many parties echoes true. I think it is about the psychology of beings the hope that you are going to be better and different, to think that you can get away with things.

The knight goes to confession and starts to tell the priest about the chess move he is going make and, of course, the clergyman is Death. You cant overcome fatality and all of us are playing chess with demise, in a way hoping well be the one who wont get cancer, wont have a heart attack, that this happens to other people , not us. I think there is that mentality in numerous parties, and this film brings it home to you. I am an rosy party, and it clears me appreciate life because of its highly transient and arbitrary nature.

Susan Greenfield is a scientist, scribe, broadcaster and a member of the House of Lords .

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