#look to the east look to the west

[inthewindtunnel]

Camera Obscura

Look to the East, Look to the West

-album-

<3<3<3

[dustedmagazine]

Camera Obscura — Look to the East, Look to the West (Merge)

Photo by Robert Perry

A plangent guitar, a shuffle of drums and then the voice. The crystalline clarity slightly weathered and more lovely for it. After the 2015 death of keyboard player Carey Lander, Traceyanne Campbell and Camera Obscura took an extended break before reconvening for some live shows in 2019. On Look to the East, Look to the West, their first album since 2013, Campbell’s voice and her ear for melody remain undiminished. As does her ability to write and sing lines that take your breath away, make you well up or smile, the eye for a telling detail that encapsulates everything about a person or situation. Joined by guitarist Kenny McKeeve, bassist Gavin Dunbar, drummer Lee Thomson and new keyboard player Donna Maciocia, Campbell dissects love, loss, and heartbreak with elegant candor.

That opening track “Liberty Print” tells the story of the classic bad boy now passed. The humor is gentle and self-directed playing on the band’s twee image —  “then you’ll see I like Liberty Print/Is that shallow of me?”  The song fills out and the tempo quickens as Campbell builds the narrative of regret for lost love. Her denouement is devastating in its simplicity “I had to visit your mother/You were her only son/I went to visit your mother/You were her only son.” The band eschews the perky jangle of their previous albums for a country soul feel. Guest pedal steel guitarist Tim Davidson echoes Campbell’s Patsy Cline crying notes over Thomson’s brushed snare railroad rhythm and Maciocia’s almost honky-tonk piano on “The Light Nights.” On “Big Love” McKeeve lays down a wandering Nashville riff as Campbell describes a watching a friend’s tortured relationship (“We watched you swoon/As she peacocked the room”) before switching perspective with the repeated closing line “Just let your hand slip down, imagine I’m there now” over Hammond organ and harmonizing sighs. The loveliest moments come during “Sugar Almond” in which Campbell memorializes Lander. Maciocia provides minor key accompaniment as Campbell remembers her friend -  “I was always such fan of your rabbity eyes/Sugar-coated almonds as grey as Glasgow skies”  and sings her loss with “I’ll match Bette Davis drink for drink/I’ll cry like Tiny Tears over your favorite pink/I’ve had the worst thoughts I could ever think/Won’t you sing to me, Carey”

Camera Obscura’s comeback album is a thing of real beauty. Campbell writes movingly about memory and friendship. Looking at what was rather than regretting what might have been with an honesty that goes directly to the heart of things. Look to the East, Look to the West is one of the most poignant albums of the year so far.

Andrew Forell

[gastricotv]

Camera Obscura | Liberty Print

[mrspeacockwasaman]

Oh yeah… the other day Camera Obscura played like 2 streets from the store I work at and Tracyanne and the new keyboardist Donna walked in and browsed for a second and I was literally so starstruck that I didn’t say a word… even though Look to The East, Look to The West was literally playing 🫢 they looked at each other and kinda chuckled hearing their music playing in some random Texas gift shop….but I literally couldn’t make eye contact 😭 Anyways the show was super chill, and they played Honey in the Sun at the end 🌞 💛

[azural83]

I'm so happy they're getting more content

[biscuitscheesebiscuits]

Reading physical copies of The Queen's Thief series for the first time and realizing that the maps in them are inconsistent???

[perplexingly]

"East of the sun west of the moon" is such an incredibly good line even Tolkien had to use it 🤭

[griancraft]

I'm struggling to word this but I'm finally ready to talk about it and I want people to listen.

I've noticed a type of racism in leftist communities I don't see talked about a lot. I am Quarter Japanese and I am visibly mixed, but a lot of leftists see "quarter" and assume that I don't have the right to an opinion on issues that effect me. The sentiment I've gotten from mostly white leftists is that I'm not "POC enough" for a lot of discussions.

There's this weird thing in a lot of leftist spaces where your appearance and percentage, not your experiences based on your race, are considered above all.

Meanwhile, in reality, all aspects of my identity are affected by my race and my family's experience with Japanese internment. An event which stripped them of any wealth they had acquired since moving to Canada over 50 years before the war.

An event that cause the intermarriage rate of Japanese-canadians and white Canadians to be over 90 percent post internment because we viewed proximity to whiteness as safety. An event which left them in severe poverty until my dad and aunt worked their asses off to get a degree. The generational trauma goes so deep my dad didn't want me transitioning because he was worried about what the government would do to me.

Because of my race I experienced negligence from authority figures related to pretty severe racially based bullying at 12. That negligence could have killed me. I've had to deal with microaggressions and straight up racism related to my last name on multiple occasions.

One time I was out with a friend and he grabbed my arm tight and dragged me to walk faster. A man wearing a white lives matter T-shirt was standing in the middle of the path looking directly at me when I turned around.

I'm pretty sure this wasn't based on me being feminine and goth that day, I live in a city with a decent amount of people in alt subculture and my friend was way more gothed up and queer than me. I was barely passing as a guy at that point so it wasn't because I was a man in a dress. I know this is a weaker point, but it made me realize just how unsafe I am in my own community even though I'm a mixed person in a heavily multicultural city.

Obviously, this isn't on the scale of someone who is less white passing than me and/or has more compounding marginalizations. However I've found that the fact I'm mixed race has been used against me to devalue my experience and knowledge regarding what it's like to be a POC in Canada.

I can assure you I am aware of how bad it is, and I am aware of how good I have it. I also want you to be aware that it's not all sunshine rainbows and bunny farts to be more white, it doesn't make the racism go away. It often just makes it more covert and easy to explain away because I'm "not really Japanese"

[boiledegghole]

another attempt on the concept of salmonid traditional art

[peonycats]

What are your favourite kinds of Japan content? Or alternatively, what are your least favourites?

I'm a huge aph Japan fan, and I'm always curious abt this stuff.

Hmmm, well honestly I could talk all day about this topic LMAO but for your sake and mine I'll keep it brief and focus mostly on two especially grating depictions i dislike. I have some posts queued up down the line for how i tend to see japan so feel free to ask me about that when i get around to posting it ehehe

"Polite, cute, shy, quiet" japan depictions reallllly don't work for me. Like it's one thing to say that Japan is a reserved guy who puts value in having good manners and doesn't want to come across as rude, but it's another to turn him into a wilting flower who's easily dominated by louder personalities and turns into a side character. Besides it falling into ur typical trope of the "diminutive east asian who needs to be taught by their loud non easian (usually white) partner how to stand up for themself and live life a little," I think it's just patently false, both canonically and historically lmao. Like hima has called Japan a stubborn old man before, and history will tell you that Japan is nothing if not resourceful and very very proud, lol. He may bite his tongue, but I imagine that hes not someone who easily gives up or submits or at least without a fight 😂

Germany-Italy-Japan trio, or "Axis" trio, depictions never go over well for me, lol. I'm of the mindset that you can't really divorce them from their history in WW2, especially if you're going to call them the Axis, like lol the least you could do is call them something new. Furthermore, Geritapan depictions in my opinion are terrible with tokenizing japan as the sole character of color/east asian in the group, but the Worst Geritapan Depictions as of late are shipping gerita with japan off in the cuck chair?? I'm not saying we need to give Japan bitches (because lord knows he doesn't deserve any) but wow, congrats, you made your only East Asian man an emasculated yellow guy who just pines and copes over a white love interest who dgaf about him <3 a win for diversity!!!

anyways, if you're going to ship gerita but treat japan like this, i would rather you ship germany and italy together like a normal person and leave japan out of it 🙏

[fictionadventurer]

🌠

[synchodai]

My post about "girlboss eugenics" has reached 10k+ notes, and while i understand i can't control how people take a post once it's escaped containment and will ultimately interpret it to fit their personal blog and tastes, i can't help but resent that a good chunk of reblogs have completely ignored that i was complaining about the trope promoting eugenics. Instead, it's been read to be about chosen one narratives in general which oftentimes aren't about eugenics at all.

Just to be clear, chosen one narratives are not inherently eugenicist! ATLA is a chosen one narrative and explicitly anti-eugenics. The main character being special because she's secretly related to a special person is not eugenics! The Last Skywalker is not eugenicist and its core message that Rey can reject her Palpatine side and choose to be a Skywalker actively goes against bioessentialism. Eugenics isn't when a character is born special because of blood ties, genetic inheritance, or just being magically chosen.

Eugenics is actively breeding people to promote "desireable" traits and neutering, disenfranchising, or even just outright killing those with "undesireable" traits so they won't "pollute" the gene pool. Eugenics is the numerous amount of times I've heard someone casually saying "dumb people shouldn't breed." Eugenics is using genetic disability and illness as a narrative shorthand to convey that a character is twisted and evil, and that the kindest fate for such a "wretched creature" is death. Eugenics is a character saying she never wants to have children so she won't pass on her curse, dwarfism, or whatever else it is to her offspring and being lauded by the story for making the right, selfless choice. Eugenics is calculating how much percent race X character is compared to Y character and using them being more Valyrian/Illyrian/whatever race to justify why X is the better ruler instead of Y.

I get that some people are tired of biological and divine determinism and just want to see characters reject that and carve out their own path, but chosen one and secret princess tropes by themselves are hardly as deleterious as what I noticed in the recently published books I read that have this obsession with breeding. It's English royal family fanatic level of obsession over maintaining the continuation of a bloodline and calculating who's even distantly related to who to justify who gets to receive fame and wealth for basically just existing. It's glorifying a woman's womb and her pregnancy as something absolutely necessary for the continuation of a good and civil society. THAT is what I find absolutely horrific in what's supposed to be my escapist, meant to empower women readers, fantasy fiction.

[gastricotv]

Camera Obscura | We're Going to Make It in a Man's World

[capt-zjaybird]

Need CoD voice ASMR in my life, the Ghosts kind. Wanna hear Hesh and Elias voice collection.

[thorsenmark]

It Isn’t Hard to Imagine a Beautiful Place in Guadalupe Mountains National Park by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: A view looking to the east while walking the trails in the Salt Basin Dunes portion of Guadalupe Mountains National Park. My thinking in composing the image was to capture a sweeping view looking across those white sands with the growing vegetation. The Guadalupe Mountains would then seemingly tower above all with some blue skies and clouds to complement the west Texas landscape and national park setting

[orcelito]

minor details, but in chapter 68 of trimax we do see this bit:

the items that vash kept in his coat.

a "funbari doll" (which i cant find anything definite online about what that is with just a cursory look, so im going to run under the assumption that theyre some kind of collectable in-universe) & it's a red one, which is apparently rare. he still has the same pen radio that connects to his earring that's used waaay back on the sandsteamer. a swiss army knife, a random key, a used tissue (?), and...

a lighter? blow torch? i still cant tell what that last bar thing is tho. & i guess he had some kind of (normal) coin too? but Only One.

love the characterization implications for this lol. definitely the kind of pocket contents i'd expect from a silly immortal with a big coat