#neumeier

[yourdailyqueer]

Shain Neumeier

Gender: Transgender non binary (they/them)

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: Born 1987

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Lawyer, activist

Note: Is autistic, has PTSD and has cleft lip and palate

[lovelyballetandmore]

Derek Drilon | Joffrey Ballet | Festspielhaus Baden-Baden | The World of John Neumeier

[90smovies]

[ofliterarynature]

TBR TAKEDOWN: Week 7 (July 14)

TLDR: I have too many unread books, and I’m asking tumblr to help me downsize. Pick one or none, and comment if you can - a convincing sentence is worth a dozen votes! You’re also welcome to just choose the one that sounds the worst :D Book descriptions below the cut, see my pinned post for more info.

The Naming by Alison Croggon

Maerad is a slave in a desperate and unforgiving settlement, taken there as a child when her family is destroyed in war. She doesn't yet know she has inherited a powerful gift, one that marks her as a member of the noble School of Pellinor and enables her to see the world as no other can. It is only when she is discovered by Cadvan, one of the great Bards of Lirigon, that her true identity and extraordinary destiny unfold. Now, she and her mysterious teacher must embark on a treacherous, uncertain journey through a time and place where the forces of darkness wield an otherworldly terror

Save the Date by Morgan Matson

Charlie Grant's older sister is getting married this weekend at their family home, and Charlie can't wait--for the first time in years, all four of her older siblings will be under one roof. Charlie is desperate for one last perfect weekend, before the house is sold and everything changes. The house will be filled with jokes and games and laughs again. Making decisions about things like what college to attend and reuniting with longstanding crush Jesse Foster--all that can wait. She wants to focus on making the weekend perfect.

The only problem? The weekend is shaping up to be an absolute disaster.

There's the unexpected dog with a penchant for howling, house alarm that won't stop going off, and a papergirl with a grudge.

There are the relatives who aren't speaking, the (awful) girl her favorite brother brought home unannounced, and a missing tuxedo.

Not to mention the neighbor who seems to be bent on sabotage and a storm that is bent on drenching everything. The justice of the peace is missing. The band will only play covers. The guests are all crazy. And the wedding planner's nephew is unexpectedly, distractingly...cute.

Over the course of three ridiculously chaotic days, Charlie will learn more than she ever expected about the family she thought she knew by heart. And she'll realize that sometimes, trying to keep everything like it was in the past means missing out on the future.

The White Road of the Moon by Rachel Neumeier

Leigh Bardugo meets The Sixth Sense in this story of one girl’s perilous journey to restore a lost order.

Imagine you live with your aunt, who hates you so much she’s going to sell you into a dreadful apprenticeship. Imagine you run away before that can happen. Imagine that you can see ghosts—and talk with the dead. People like you are feared, even shunned.

Now imagine…the first people you encounter after your escape are a mysterious stranger and a ghost boy, who seem to need you desperately—though you don’t understand who they are or exactly what they want you to do. So you set off on a treacherous journey, with only a ghost dog for company. And you find that what lies before you is a task so monumental that it could change the world.

[80smovies]

[naomilibicki]

So a while back @mage-pie recommended Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier, and as I do when I hear about a book and it sounds vaguely interesting, I chucked it on my want-to-read shelf on goodreads and mostly forgot about it.

Somewhat more recently, I went scrolling through my want-to-read shelf looking for something to buy to tide me through a family function that I expected to be boring (it was) and I decided on Tuyo, and I started reading it, but it was going pretty slowly and it's a long book so I was mostly picking away at it.

Then, yesterday, due to a confluence of circumstances including computer troubles and being at my parents' house, I found myself with a lot of time to read, and I finished the last 80% or so of the book in one gulp.

Anyway! I really enjoyed it. It opens with the main character being left as, essentially, a sacrifice to the forces that defeated his people in battle; he expects to be killed, but the enemy commander, only passingly familiar with the custom, decides he has other uses for him.

It's a very slow burn (not burn in the sense of romance; there are some hints of (het) romance towards the end of the book which might possibly become more prominent in the later books in the series, but the focus is firmly on non-romantic relationships), very much interested in exploring the culture clash between Ryo's home culture and the one in which he finds himself. There are, inevitably, parallels to real-world cultures, but the author seems to be deliberately avoiding setting up anything 1:1, and rather letting the cultures (and different physical types of humans) be their own thing. The reasons behind the conflict that kicks off the book, and the resolution of it, what in some sense might be called the "plot", has to take a back seat. This suited me just fine, but I can imagine some readers getting frustrated with it.

I really enjoyed the subtle yet pervasive magic of the world itself. One review I happened to see on goodreads mentioned wondering how the physics works, which strikes me as beside the point--of course the physics doesn't work in a world where the moon is always full on one side of a river and has phases on the other side of it. But I eat that shit up, the sense that magic isn't just something that you can do if you're a wizard, but something inherent in a world, bigger and stranger than people can comprehend or hope to control.

Anyway! I have a bad habit of not continuing series even when I like the first book and am looking forward to the next ones, so who knows when or whether I will read the rest, but I also felt that this book doesn't really need the rest; it has a perfectly satisfying ending of its own. Would recommend.

[kazz-brekker]

was chopping potatoes for dinner last night when i had the realization that it was extremely inevitable i would become an adar and galadriel enjoyer during season 2 of rings of power considering the number of books i like enough to have a permanent spot in my brain which contain the romance dynamic of "we are fundamentally opposed enemies who deeply distrust each other but we must set aside our differences to unite against a common enemy, develop a grudging respect for each other, and then fall in love." i am predictable in my tastes but at least i know myself!

[ungekvsst]

"Ich habe sehr wenig Gefühle. Und ich weiß, dass der Satz nicht stimmt. Also ich habe eine Menge Gefühle. Ich habe aber erstens nicht nur keine Ahnung wie man die äußert, sondern ich habe nicht mal eine Ahnung davon wie man die empfindet. Also ich habe dann viele Gefühle. Ich fühle sie überhaupt nicht. Ich komme gar nicht an den Punkt."

Moritz Neumeier im Podcast Hotel Matze (Juni 2023)

[theoscarsproject]

Robocop (1987). In a dystopic and crime-ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg haunted by submerged memories.

This is a) so much better than I was expecting, and also b) so much better than it has any right to be? Sure, it's partly copaganda, but it's also a pretty scathing indictment of corruption in the police force and how capitalistic interests inherently treat people as disposable. Plus! It's a fun sci-fi movie! Plus the VFX are pretty darn sick. 7/10.

[elaine-of-shalott-blog]

Alina Cojocaru as Marguerite Gautier and Claudio Coviello as Armand Duval in La dame aux camélias by John Neumeier.

La Scala Ballet, 3 October 2024

[shsenhaji]

📚 January Reading Round-Up 📚

January was a pretty great reading month! Finished a few books I'd started in December, while also binging some new ones.

- Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (good, very funny and bittersweet, full of detailed and lush descriptions, loved the last part the best, very different than the movie's plot)

- Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher (Delightful, funny, characters were a bit too self-deprecating but it worked nonetheless, all the feels)

- Manacled by Senlinyu (Very good, cried at a lot of parts, not my favourite iteration of this trope but a great addition, loved the fanart, interesting take on Draco Malfoy that I did enjoy)

- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Very good, loved the audiobook, funny and smart and heartfelt, MC has ADHD vibes, some cool twists, great intertwined flashback story structure)

- Fullmetal Alchemist Fullmetal Edition Vol. 5 by Hiromu Arakawa (Very good, thankfully some of the scenes didn't hit me as hard as the anime, loved the humour and the art style)

- The Theft of Sunlight by Intisar Khanani (Good, very intense, loved the second half of the book more, great character development and themes)

- A Darkness at the Door by Intisar Khanani (Very very good, binged it in a day, very poetic and lyrical and angry and cathartic, loved the romance and the friendships and the ending)

- Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier (Good, loved the beginning, not quite what I was expecting for the ending, great characters and communication)

[beanie-on-a-string]

i get gender envy from the weirdest stuff, and when i say the weirdest stuff i mean the faun from the neumeier ballet nijinsky

[lovelyballetandmore]

Joffrey Ballet | Festspielhaus Baden-Baden | The World of John Neumeier

[90smovies]

[postpunkindustrial]

Moebius Plank Neumeier - Zero Set

[mild-lunacy]

The Women in Refrigerators

I've been reading a fantasy that's not a romance by an author I didn't know for decades (for whom I make exceptions), and it's the Tuyo series I recently talked about considering. I was thinking further about books I used to read before my romance fixation began, many more of which had been written by male authors, and the issues that led me-- again and again-- to quit those books in disgust. These are books I really enjoyed-- I considered them well-written, fun, engaging. I'm still a fan of Jim Butcher and Robert Jackson Bennett and haven't written them off entirely in my mind. I plan to come back to them, but. But. The trust has been broken, with these and other male fantasy and sci-fi authors, more than once. More than twice. Many times.

Thinking about how they broke my trust-- Bennett and Butcher specifically, but also others-- I realize what they have in common is the use of fridging, or the Women in Refrigerators trope.

If you read the book(s) in question, it's not like it stands out so horribly-- I mean, there's a plot reason for what happens to kill the female love interest. (Though in one egregious case I remember, the female main character dies after she actually has a baby, with the man who becomes the male main character after her death). It's not like I can't see why the woman 'has to die'. And yet-- mysteriously-- the male best friend almost never dies. The male love interest almost never dies in a non-romantic fantasy/sci-fi that nevertheless has a love interest, written by a female author. It's always that the men feel the need to do this. It just never clarified itself to me that this is what led me to quit reading and retreat to fanfic and/or romance, again and again.

In the case of Jim Butcher, this is an author I had trusted for decades (since the Dresden books are an old series). He has killed a love interest before, but she wasn't a major character, so it wasn't so bad. It's okay to kill minor love interests-- to be clear, plenty of female authors, even female authors writing fantasy romance do this. By 'minor', I mean they aren't super integral to the series, the books don't set them up at any great length, and they're 'just' a love interest.

For example, Sarah J Maas really loves killing off early male love interests in all her fantasy book series-- like clockwork. Same with Kim Harrison. The thing is, though, these early lost love interests-- while painful-- are nevertheless very clearly not that important overall. I don't even know how to explain this properly-- but there's a way to kill off love interests that doesn't feel gross. I don't know if I'd call it 'respectful'. Maybe? The Kim Harrison Hollows books have Rachel's vampire boyfriend, Kisten, die early on. It's a big character impact moment for Rachel, just as Dresden's girlfriends die and have an impact on Harry Dresden. But not so much of an impact on him. Or perhaps it's just a more self-centered kind of impact, possibly.

I don't want to tempt fate, but I'm reasonably certain female authors in general, and Maas or Harrison in particular, wouldn't kill off one half of an 'endgame' pairing. They'd face a reader rebellion, of course. But it's not even that.

I think it's the way these women die, and how they die no matter how important they are. No matter what, the feeling becomes, a woman is just not that important. Not even if she's the main character (though that's going a little far, to be fair).

It's not that I'm saying endgame pairings should have to be sacred or untouchable. It's more subtle than that, although maybe I'd even argue that. If you've spent book after book setting up a character arc and a relationship and built many arcs on top of it, to just discard it is disrespectful both to your characters and your readers, who've been there every step of the way. I guess it's just this sudden realization that they're 'just' characters, and on top of that, 'just' a love interest, and even, possibly, 'just' a female character. That last part is almost certainly uncharitably harsh-- it's just impossible to avoid the feeling.

The thing I like about series about a single character-- the thing I look for entirely outside any interest in romantic pairings-- is just this feeling of being with characters in other worlds that I know well, that I'm enjoying spending time with. They're my friends, almost. I'm 'friends' with Harry Dresden, in a sense, moreso than a 'fan'. And this is the context in which things happen. It's not that I take things personally, but rather that I want things to resolve in a way that's satisfying and comfortable, even if death is involved. With the death of Kisten in the Hollows series, that comfort is about the main character's memory of Kisten, the way he's framed and understood and contextualized later on. Just like in real life, death exists as part of the tapestry of life, and sometimes it's sudden, shocking and raw. But in stories I enjoy, it is... appropriate.

It's a hard thing to explain, except that I know when there's a lack of that respect, that sense of appropriateness. And I know this happens with some regularity with male authors writing about women. How very cliche.