#no one can figure out if she truly loved Hamlet because she literally says 'i do not know what to think' and drops him the moment

[servuscallidus]

Gtting excessively mad over stupid Hamlet analysis

[beesmygod]

what do u think are the top 5 stand fights in jojo

this is very hard. at first i thought it was bc there were so many to choose from but when you narrow them down it's a pretty short list of bangers. the problem is the short list is extremely good. here is my best attempt at what ive read so far

READER BEWARE: SPOILERS ARE THERE

star platinum vs the world

example: oh? you're approaching me?

like, obviously, you have to put this one up really high. its The Fight of All Time. it has everything:

a dramatic character death that is NOT in vein......rip to kakyoin the sickest little boy in all of egypt

the apparent death of beloved bastard joseph joestar, in which he gives the longest dying speech since hamlet that sounds like "jotaro! press the A button to punch dio really fast and reffill your meter!" only to be returned to full health at the end so he can do the single greatest prank of all time.

jotaro finally says something so cool it makes you want to stand up and scream for him in sheer rapturous joy

polnareff gets a good hit in.

dio becoming subject to the exact same torment that he inflicts upon others right before a death that definitively underscores that he is lesser than he knew himself to be is perfection. honestly an incredible end to one of the greatest villains of all time. it feels very, very earned and satisfying

killer queen: bite ze dusto vs. the entirety of the town of morioh

example: yoshikage kira traumadumps about getting a boner to a stranger

i actually think this one is my absolute favorite of them all. the communal effort to take out yoshikage kira is a monumental undertaking; he is an absolute bastard with a seemingly endless string of luck. living members of the community who have good hearts, his victims who have been waiting for justice, strangers from far away dedicated to righting wrongs, and a completely powerless 10 year old powered entirely by the raw energy of a child's pure conscience band together to end a literal cycle of violence. how the fuck do you defeat a man who has already killed you and you don't even know it?? how do you stop someone who can turn back time?? it truly fucking seems like hes going to get away with it at the end. and then AGAIN you're like "oh no oh my god hes going to-" and then the single greatest villain death in the history of manga happens lol. ohhhhh its so fucking good.

its another battle thats made all the better by the sum of its parts. the entire yoshikage kira arc is near perfection. the set ups, pay offs, and who it chooses to celebrate as the heroes in the end creates a very satisfying cap to a great series.

osiris vs the stardust crusaders

example: jotaro loses a hand, and increases his bet

i love the stand fights that barely end up being stand fights. star platinum throws i think a single punch in this fight and its to light jotaro's cigarette, a mere taste of the sheer, near impossible speed of star platinum. how fast IS star platinum anyway....would you.....bet your life on it...??!!!!

a friend online told me about the "jotaro has autism" fan theory, and i was like "hm. whatever" until this episode, when i fully 100% believe that jotaro not only has autism but has figured out how to hone and weaponize it against his enemies. all these morons have to do is win a game of chance against a professional gambler who also openly cheats. i love this shit. this is the part of the story where jotaro really, really starts to shine and his unique strengths as a little badass piece of shit start to come through. i think he really starts to solidify his personality here when he finally gets a win that isnt based on "punch something really fast".

oingo and boingo/hol horse and boingo vs themselves

example: hol horse, noted woman respecter, does a flying jump kick on a random rich woman and she's so grateful she pays him in jewels

im counting these as one because i can and i want to. these episodes are fucking tops. easily top 5 eps of the entirety of stardust crusaders. i dont think anyone involved in the anti-dio squad had any idea oingo or boingo existed. bringing back that stupid asshole hol horse is literally always going to be appreciated as he's one of the best recurring villains even though his stand fucking sucks lmfao. boingo's too actually. his stand is he has a book but the book is an asshole. great goofy shit. what is fucking wrong with polnareff and joseph

da morioh boyz vs rohan kishibe

example: rohan makes every comic artist in the world mad

speaking of "whats wrong with him", ive posted a lot about rohan so i'll spare you it again but it's all highlighted best in his first ep. the one where he eats a spider, tears a child's face off for artistic inspiration, and tells another he has a whack ass haircut.

~honorable mentions~

jotaro vs literally two rats: the man who defeated dio and all of his minions almost gets completely smoked by jerry the mouse of tom and jerry fame.

koichi hirose vs yoshikage kira: aka the sheer heart attack fight. clever solution, funny jotaro moments, explosions, koichi levels up, THREE FREEZE, etc

joseph joestar and avdol vs bastet: a rare comedy stand where the joke is good. mariah is a fun antagonist. its also a rare pair up that turned out to be a lot of fun. they play off each other well (badly)

yoshikage kira vs stray cat: foil ep to jotaro's rat episode. weird perspective, fun to see kira play the hero briefly.

team bucciarati vs pesci and prosciutto: aka fighting old lol. the twist on how araki keeps prosciutto's power going while making him inaccessible is twisted. beach boy is also a skin crawling stand. very dangerous boys.

[incorrect-ikevamp-quotes]

Comte’s 4th Birthday Story Event: Before the Clock Strikes Midnight

REEEEEEEE Ik it was a long time ago but life has been a [redacted], so I figured better late than never HAHA

So without further ado, anybody who’s curious feel free to click for more--I’ll put it under a cut for spoilers as per usual~

So in this story it’s the usual, a few days before his birthday, and they’re discussing a bump in the road. Essentially, it appears a friend of Comte’s is going to be celebrating a wedding, and as such he’s going into the suburbs/affluent part of the region to be able to attend. It’s only a few hours away from the mansion, but he will be gone for a few days with the arrangements made for his stay. 

While this wouldn’t typically be an issue, MC has some things to take care of and opts out of attending with him (preparing for his bday probably LMAO) and Comte is immediately big sad. My favorite dramatic fool is already pouting, though he fully accepts and respects her decision. Besides which, he fully intends to be back in time to celebrate his birthday as well. He notes that he’s always admired how driven and independent she is, and has no intention of getting in the way of that. He’s just going to miss her, is all.

He says as much, figuring there’s no point in hiding it: “I really wanted to bring you with me to attend…but I suppose it simply can’t be helped” … “That’s not it…I guess I’m just wondering if you’ll miss me as much as I’ll miss you while I’m away.” 

And MC’s just like “Aw, it’s okay it’ll only be a few days.” While Comte’s response is a very mature, high-pitched whining sound at a frequency only King (Theo’s dog) and Theo himself can hear. When MC tries to reassure him once more, his Hamlet impression continues: “Even the prospect of a few days away from you feels unbearable.” 

Naturally, as any man do that loves his wife, he draws her close and proceeds to bang the living daylights out of her. I would offer details, but I have no deets to give beyond: [Well MC, it appears I won’t be letting you get much sleep tonight.] 

Brief intermission for the vague sounds of fangirl cardiac arrest. 

The scene opens again to him doing his walk of shame (the slut) down the walkway and into the carriage that will take him to his friend’s house. His thoughts carry the regret of burdening her with his desire, though MC is pretty much on cloud nine and unable to stop thinking about the heady night they shared in a good way. Bruh and the sly look when he figures out why she looks like that--I’m boutta call the police, he is going to make women and men alike act up. 

MC scrambles to cool his already returning desire by insisting he will be late if he indulges any further, and he laughs and agrees easily–albeit with the slightest hint of reluctance. My favorite part in this exchange is that he kisses her forehead, adding that it’s because she’s the most adorable person in the world to him (a moment of silence for our uwus). 

Fast forward to Comte trying to get home after the festivities are over. Problem is, it’s been raining like a mOTHERBLEEPER, and as such carriages have no safe way to traverse the roads at the moment. He waited out the first day as patiently as possible, but after the second–and no sign of stopping–his Leeroy Jenkins instincts kick in. He notes to the coachman that he’s aware he’s asking a lot, but they fully intend to take the long way which invites the least risk–and the rain is ebbing, even if the progress is slow. 

It’s interesting because there’s another echo of his main story in this moment. He essentially showcases a desperation to return before the day ends, though without context it’ll probably seem a little strange, so I’ll do my best to explain. Basically, in his main story, MC notes that she doesn’t really care how different they are. Different time, different species, different experiences, so on and so forth. She hammers home that what matters is that the present is something that they actively share. It’s theirs. And no amount of divisions he desperately tries to draw will change that fundamental reality. 

And it’s a little moving to see how deeply he takes it to heart? I think it’s one of those wonderful phenomena, personally–the way a person can influence how you think and act with their sentiments. Sometimes someone says precisely what it is we need to hear, and it changes us–while it can be for the worse, it can also be for the better. He notes that he spent so many birthdays; among the people serving his house when he was little, raising hell with his friends in his younger days, so on and so forth. Not unlike Leonardo, he says that after so many “special” days the faces become a blur, the festivities lose their luster. It’s just another day, at this point. 

Note, one interesting thing here that stands out to me is that I feel like this is a reflection of both of their larger struggles. Where Comte can’t stand the relentless flow of time rendering him the only constant (and something of a ghost, never fully present), Leonardo can’t bear birthdays because it means remembering people who still mean the world to him, but are long gone. People he can never see again, never laugh with again, never share his life with again. And I think that’s a very profound pain, an anguish that just keeps on settling its weight. (Oh, Sisyphus…)

Comte’s is similar, but different. He actively works to keep his distance-- unlike Leonardo, he approaches immortality in the pragmatic way. He knows getting close will hurt, so he opts out of that–keeps a step behind, an easy smile on his face. Betrays only fragments to anyone, always has his guard up. But the downside of being so guarded means you eventually feel hollowed out and alone; nobody truly knows or understands you. There is a distinct loneliness in that approach, where memories only become reminders of how nothing ever improves and how bereft you are of warmth. 

Leonardo, at least, gets to have the joy of being known from time to time. But loss and estrangement from those people means double the pain in the long run, because he loved them fully. Comte chooses to live in the cold to protect himself, but ends up in a kind of catch-22; the cost of forgoing loss means a constant deadening of his own feelings. It means living in a kind of fog, where there is a distinct discomfort in the silent obscurity of your own heart. 

There’s something I’ve come to believe in my short course of living, so I guess I still need time to determine how true it is. But…I feel like, when people live this way, where who they are is a lie or it’s at the very least carefully concealed, we in part start to become that lie. I think it’s fascinating because Comte seems to have so much personality to him. He’s dramatic, he’s thoughtful, he has a sense of mischief about him, he has strong ideals, and he has an even more ironclad moral grounding. And yet, when he talks about himself, he always uses descriptions that hinge on emptiness. Like he’s worth so little, worth nothing. And that’s what I mean–he’s been trying so hard to glide on the surface that he has come to believe he really is equivalent to something that ephemeral. Like there’s nothing more inside him, or if there is, that it will never be worthy of much. I think it really speaks to the ways behavior impacts the psyche, even though the opposite tends to be considered the only possible cause and effect relationship. 

He’s so determined to live for and in the future while he’s in the present, that he forgets to enjoy himself and really live. And while that approach is certainly understandable, I do think he loses parts of himself along the way. Only to be rediscovered and placed back into his hands by MC: [Today–this moment–our now, I don’t want to miss it for anything.] And that's not even touching on how quick she is to make them a we; she's not letting him keep that distance. It’s not “you have the ability to share this day with me” it’s “we’re here and in this together.”

I feel like what I love about this is that it’s not only about how sweet he is on MC, but also about how much he’s truly living again for the first time. His defenses are slowly inching their way down, he’s letting himself hope and want things and look forward to things again. The thing about being a responsible person is that–while responsibility is all well and good–sometimes you become so mired in doing the right thing and planning the most optimal outcomes that you just aren’t thinking of yourself anymore. That is, if you ever were to begin with. He went from the careful cultivation of a life as an aristocrat, to a life that spoke of more freedom and fun beyond those iron wrought gates, before he returned to the structure of what he knew. Freedom speaks to him I’m sure–we all need it in some measure to survive. But I do think a good portion of that was unfulfilling for him after a point. It was only feeding the void that was beginning to form inside him. He was instinctively retreating into himself to avoid pain, and in doing that the only result was feeling like a coward and a fake. He wasn’t happy, he wasn’t able to be himself, and nothing was fulfilling–every single day just another forward march. 

I think it comes as no surprise he took up Vlad’s initial invitation so willingly. 

But then I digress, back to the story. There’s another timeskip and it finds him racing down the hall of the mansion. He’s hoping to make it in time but knows he’s racing against the clock, and fully expects MC to be asleep by this point in the night. Midway along his path he thinks he spots MC and falters in his step, blinking. He decides to hang back, watching the figure enter his room with a great deal of curiosity and resists every urge to burst in after her. He hears MC speak into his pillow, her voice muffled but clearly despondent: “I miss you, Comte. I hope you get back home soon…” 

Comte pretty much dies right there. I literally have no better explanation for it. He freezes, his heart sputters and stops. He’s just completely taken aback. 

And then, naturally, he goes about feral with desire as is his modus operandi: “Oho, I heard something incredibly cute just now. Were you also having a hard time spending so long apart?”

MC: “…!”

[Startled, she turns around and her eyes widen and widen.]

MC: “Comte, how...”

Comte: “Took a detour in areas with less rain.”

MC: “?? Wouldn’t that still be hard in weather like this?”

Comte: “I told the coachman I wanted to see you as soon as possible. Even if it was only for a second, I wanted to spend today with you…”

[Everything I was thinking while in the carriage spills out of me long before I can help it. I am reminded again of just how utterly irreplaceable an existence MC is in my life.]

Comte: “Even so, it seems interesting that I would find you in my bed”

MC: “...! A--Ah, I’m so sorry for entering without permission!”

[I quickly grab hold of her before she can scramble out of my bed, coaxing her to sink back into the sheets.]

In between a lot of intense making out and [redacted], the larger overtone is that her reciprocated ardor just destroys him inside:

MC: “It was...because I couldn’t stop thinking about you, about wanting to see you…”

Comte: “!”

[You know just how to drive me mad with desire.]

Comte: “I’m the same...the first thing I did was look for you. Even though it was only a few days, your voice, your body, everything...I missed you”

[Because today, our ‘now’--I never want to lose a single moment with you as long as you’re by my side...]

Comte: “I’m so happy to be able to be with you, right here and right now.”

It gets funny too because Comte is trying to take it slow, but when she tells him “Happy birthday” and goes on to say she was so glad to greet the day he was brought into the world by his side, he just loses all control LMFAO. It ends with them getting more heated and [redacted], to the point where he doesn’t even hear the clock strike midnight. 

And if him being the cutest and sexiest romantic wasn’t obvious enough, he spends the next morning just sighing blissfully with her in his arms:

[The next morning, when I wake up, MC is still fast asleep. I mean, given she only fell asleep a few hours ago. I’m still reveling in the afterglow of a sweet night filled with her cries, the way she looked at me and held me. MC...]

[I relax to the sound of her breathing steady with sleep, stroking gently at her hair as I hug her from behind.]

Comte: “I’ve had countless birthdays. In an endless life, I was convinced it was just a day that would come and go every time.”

Comte: “It was only after meeting you that I could understand there was no such thing as an overlapping or identical moment. I don’t want to miss a single second by your side...that’s what I think now.”

[I admit the truth of my heart, brushing a kiss against her cheek. Over and over and over again, showering her in my affection--]

But dun dun dun!!! MC was awake the whole time, so when she fidgets a little at how ticklish his kisses are, he 👁

[Oh, I see. Well then, two can play at that game...]

Comte: “Your punishment is to stay in my arms just as we are...how’s that?”

He gets his mischievous (and hilarious) revenge for being revealed (HORNY TIME), though it’s so suffused with love it’s hard to call it revenge hahaha. She reminds him to go easy on her because they have his birthday party to attend later, and he agrees~

Honestly after such killer hurt/comfort spice fluff, I can only tremble at the thought of what his 5th year bday story will be

It’s either going to be Some Angst^TM or even more killer fluff, and either way that means my days are numbered

[exciting]

As requested, books / series I read in 2020 in the order I read them, with a few brief thoughts. (This took me a hot second because there are a few and also I moved cities) Should I keep a consistent goodreads? Yes I should but I didn’t think of that at the time, so bone apple teeth & sorry if I offend you abt your faves x

P.S. I can’t figure out how to do a read more on mobile so long post ahead!

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas - This is one of the most vivid published fantasy books I have ever read... I read it twice in rapid succession. The fandom POPS off. I must say I have issues with certain aspects e.g. fae lore completely ignored à la Twilight, all love interests 500+ years old and technically a different species, etc (I’m not going to deconstruct the entire series here but just know that I could... Nesta deserves better)

Cruel Prince by Holly Black - This fucking slaps, HB clearly has done her research, the lore is near immaculate, and it explores the Fae in such a unique way, tying it to the modern world subtly and seamlessly. My only qualm was that the books felt quite short; truly wish there had been more content.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas (6/7) - So basically I read this in one single, hyperfixated fit which meant I literally locked myself in my room for three days straight and read all six books back to back in a row from morning to the wee hours. Which is not to say it was spectacular; although it was a VERY rich world, sometimes it was too much... this felt like 6 stories in one. Ik she was young when she wrote this but it is my humble opinion that SJM needs a better editor & I personally think Rowan is a grade A asshole / straight up abusive (& personally think the ACOTAR Tamlin plot was born from that?). It’s good but not as good as ACOTAR. Skip-read the last book. 

Grishaverse (Shadow and Bone) by Leigh Bardugo (3) - This is essential to read before SOC but was very much simply a YA fantasy book, although the world was cool and the way the love plot played out was, imo, a subtle middle finger to the fantasy trope. Felt very much aimed at younger readers though? Really liked the sandwhich structure of the Proluge and Epilogue, especially in #2

Six of Crows series by Leigh Bardugo (2) - INCREDIBLE continuation of Grishaverse, better than the original series by a mile. It has the range, the diversity, the representation (the male lead is a disabled asexual and still the most cunning of the entire cast of characters), the plot is phenomenal, and it manages such a well rounded plot in only two books which means nothing is stretched out or squeezed in more than need be. Deserves all the praise it gets.

King of Scars series by Leigh Bardugo (0.5/1) - Personally I don’t consider this book canon, and while it’s nice to see the rest of Nina’s journey & the world again & everyone else, I don't like it. I will, however, be reading book 2 when it comes out, so shame on me, I suppose.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (1/1) - this was incredibly cool although it went off in a completely different direction than I thought it would based off the first few chapters? One of my favourite YA-author-debuts-New-Adult novels in 2020 though!

Crescent City by Sarah J Maas (1/1) - This was supposed to be SJM/s New Adult debut, although personally I would put her other series in New Adult, and I can’t say a remarkable amount was different with this except they said “fuck” and “ass” a lot. WHY is the romantic interest 500 years old AGAIN. I just... don’t... I just don’t think it was necessary... the world was cool though, and the last half of the book was riveting, but the beginning was quite slow and I thought the sword thing was predictable. I am interested to see where this goes though.

A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab (3) - This world is so fucking cool... four Londons aka parallel universes & the one in ‘our’ world is set in industrial era London. Magic, girls dressing up as boys, thieves, pirates, royalty... it all just slaps. Schwab is an incredible writer & I was completely immersed.

Midnight Sun by SMeyer - I didn’t think anything could possibly detract even further from the Twilight story but I was sorely mistaken... seeing the stalking from Edward’s POV - and it was worse than depicted in Twilight, for the record - completely obliterated any sort of romance the first half of the original book may have portrayed. I still hold the opinion that the entire series would have been better if some kind of vampire lore had been abided by, if only to see all of the villains thwarted by someone dropping a bag of rice on the ground, forcing them to have to count them all.

An ember in the Ash by Sabaa Tahir  (3/4) - This was just a very stereotypical ya fantasy series, emphasis on the YOUNG... it wasn’t anything to write home about but I remember quite enjoying it at the time. 

The Power by Naomi Alderman - This book is FUCKING incredible and EXCEPTIONALLY thought provoking... essentially women alone develop a power of electric shock etc. and then take over the world from men, and it explores feminism and the balance between equality & tipping the scales in the other direction. Written by a friend of M.Atwood in a similar tone to handmaids tale, I would say? Content warning; there are some exceptionally graphic scenes in the latter half of the novel. 

Hamlet by Wllm Shksp - I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read it but Ophelia is my favourite name in the entire world & we love to see a woman go batshit (although she didn’t deserve that). 

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas - this was unsettling in the best sense of the word... it was a little slow & honestly more of a concept than a big reveal, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I finished it? A Secret History vibes but make it blurry like the memory of all those dystopian novels you read when you were young?

The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue by V.E. Schwab - This is without a doubt my book of the year, and probably the best book I read in 2020? I stayed up all night on a friend’s couch reading it, got a book hangover and reread the ending, and then thrust it upon my mother who doesn’t usually read but read this, and loved it just as much. HIGHLY recommend and you HAVE to read it, it’s beautiful and endearing and just plain wonderful.

Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat (3/3) - I went into this knowing it was going to be terrible, because I had received a blow by blow telling me as much; although I must say that it did learn a remarkable amount of new words, the books did get better as the series went on, and it did have a rather charming ending? BIG content warning for almost everything.

Sapiens by Yuval Harari - mind-expanding & must recommend for everyone, there is everything in this and I daresay everyone should posses this kind of knowledge? I listened to it as an audiobook (which I recommend because it’s rather hearty) but will be buying this in hardcopy & rereading it with annotations. 

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - Without a doubt, one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read, and certainly the most beautiful portrayal of the story of Achilles and the battle of Troy I have ever seen. Patroclus deserved the justice that was given to him in this book; indeed, all of the characters were written with justice and grace. Highly recommend.

Trials of Apollo by Rick Riordan (3/5) - Apollo is my favourite Greek God, and the sexiest greek god, and Rick Riordan’s writing slaps, as always. It did pain me to see Apollo, the sexy immortal, have to be forced back into a 16 year old’s body but everything else? Whimsical & wonderful, as expected. 

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong - a retelling of Romeo and Juliette, except it’s set in Shanghai in the 1920′s, and the protagonists already have a history. Very well done, characters are incredibly diverse in race, sexual orientation, gender, and ability / disability (and honestly, representation has never appeared so effortless and elegant). Also it includes a monster and possible magic. Incredibly underrated and highly recommend.

The Once and Future Witches by Alix. E Harrow - this was such a unique concept, and truly captivating, the story was charming, and felt like the kind of beautiful fairytale you would read as children but with more grit? ABSOLUTELY recommend this one

The Pisces by Melissa Broder - I hated this so much, not my vibe at all. Mermaid smut x therapy but make it cynical and judgemental (I know there was a moral in there but that’s not my point) also the dog dies.

Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith (1/2) - really interesting & unique concept (all unwritten novels / ideas reside in a special library that is part of Hell and then sometimes the books can come to life) however, my first thought upon reading this was “this reads as if it’s stemmed from one of those writing prompt tumblr posts” bc of the tone and whatever and as it turns out I was somewhat correct, it did stem from a short story (not bad just obvious). It did kind of settle down as it went on but I found reading it kind of a drag, and I don’t think I will read the second one.

Abandon by Meg Cabot - 1. Meg Cabot’s writing always fucking slaps 2. Hades and Persephone but make it modern & very 2000′s & somehow kind of unique 3. I literally loved this, sue me

Medusa Girls (Sweet Venom) by Tera Childs - Like Percy Jackson except they are descendants of Medusa so they are Gorgons and have fangs & venom (hence the title). Gave me very 2000′s vibes? Quite cool but tbh I found the books quite short (like two hours each, if that)? Do NOT read the GoodReads description of the book before you read it, you will spoil it for yourself.

Bring me their Hearts by Sara Wolf - In my opinion, this is one of the most underrated YA series I read in 2020. The heroine is endearing, self aware, witty, and loves to look pretty even while kicking ass which in my opinion is an incredibly underrated trait. Also, immortality without being hundreds of years old? VERY sexy. HIGHLY recommend. 

A Deal with the Elf King by Elise Kova - High commendation to be given for the fact that it is a standalone and yet manages to fit in the plot of what would usually be a full fantasy trilogy without cutting corners or being a million miles long? Also sweet storyline & beautiful ending? If you liked ACOTAR you should read this as a “what would have / could have been had SJM had a different editor” (No shade I promise).

The Iron Fae by Julie Kagawa (4/4 + novellas) - Incredibly detailed faerie set around the modern world & our current use of technology & iron in it. Very neat adventure-style series, by the time I read the last novella I was well and truly done with the world (aka provided enough content to be fulfilling). Was definitely aimed at a younger audience though, NO smut / smut was brushed over.

The Modern Faerie Tales by Holly Black (3/3 SS) - This is technically the prequel to Cruel prince, set in the modern world, but with the fae world inside it as it traditional? All I have to say is that it is excellent & I highly recommend it.

Bridgerton series (The Duke and I) by Julia Quinn (9/9) - I read this after watching the Netflix show twice through and I am obsessed, although the books were not quite as elegant as the show, and some parts that made me cringe either by their portrayal (it is very firmly set in the 19th century and thus some things are not handled with tact or grace), the characters were exceptionally loveable and I am so excited to see where the show takes them! Lovely language & an abundance of words I had never seen before (always a plus). 

[goose-books]

Hii i have like the start of an idea for a fantasy Hamlet retelling and thinking about it automatically made me think of you and darkling (which I absolutely love), so i was wondering if you had any tips?

first of all. 😳thank you 🥺

second of all!! i am not an expert by any means, but i do read a lot of retellings (particularly shakespeare) and i also write them like you’ve said! so! i do have some thoughts!

[obligatory disclaimer: your mileage may vary. i am not a professional; i am just a bitch with adhd who thinks about writing and shakespeare an awful lot. the opinions expressed in this post are mine and i don’t intend to shove them down anyone’s throat and please don’t call me out for cyberbullying any authors because i’m vaguely about to do just that.]

i think, boiled down to its core, my advice would be: the heart of the story is what matters. and you can do whatever you want with everything else.

just yesterday, i finished watching “twelfth grade (or whatever),” which is a youtube webseries retelling of twelfth night, set in the modern day. there are multiple plot/character elements that were changed (everything from “x character is now nonbinary” to changing some endgame romantic relationships). yet, in my opinion, it was still a wonderful adaptation, because it struck at the character dynamics that make twelfth night work! plus it was just... so much fun. as a comedy should be. (of course i have my gripes, but i have my gripes about everything.)

what i’m saying is it’s all right to shift things around. it’s all right to change characters and settings and plotlines and endings. in fact, i personally find retellings more fun when they don’t stick to the original story on a one-to-one level. my favorite king lear retelling is set on a midwestern farm in the 1970s; my favorite macbeth retelling is set at a modern private school. my favorite hamlet retelling is... well, i guess it’s rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, but if we’re talking out-of-the-box adaptations that more than fits the bill.

the thing is that you can change whatever you want. that’s the point of a retelling. in my experience, what makes the retelling work will have far less to do with the plot (and even the end!) and far more to do with the core of the story. let me get on my shouting-about-books soapbox for a moment and take a (relevant i promise) detour to tell you why dunbar by edward st. aubyn, aka half the reason i think cishet men shouldn’t write about the lear sisters*, fucking sucks.

[*the other half is fool by christopher moore, but you didn’t hear it from me.]

the thing is that dunbar should work. it’s a king lear retelling that adapts lear’s kingdom into a multi-billion-dollar media company, and that MAKES SENSE. beyond a political position of some kind, lear-as-CEO is the obvious route to take. the plot also follows the original story: the old man starts losing his grip; he disowns the daughter who truly loves him and is mistreated by the daughters who kowtowed to him; he fucks off out into a storm and has a character arc and gets reunited with his daughter and then she dies before they can take the company back. and i literally could not possibly have cared less.

because this book, despite hitting all the clear notes of a lear retelling (old powerful man? check! three daughters? check! madness? check! tragedy? check, check, check!) has no core. it is a book about which millionaire is going to inherit a megacorporation. and maybe i’m just a gay communist, but i don’t care. and yet i do care about king lear, the play. i care very, very deeply about king lear.

and that’s because king lear isn’t just about who will inherit lear’s kingdom. king lear, at its heart, is a story about people who are power-hungry because they are desperate for love - because they just want to be loved, and in a world where love is quantifiable and limited and there’s never enough to go around, grabbing for power seems like either the best way to get love or the best alternative. in dunbar everyone’s squabbling over money (except dunbar’s Angelic Good Pure Virgin Daughter, i guess; don’t get me started about the women in this book); in lear, what everyone wants is love. and that’s why i care about one and not the other.

of course, anyone reading this post can go off and read king lear and come back and go “max, what the fuck, that’s not what king lear is about. king lear is about X and Y and Z.” and they’d be just as right as i am. arguably this is all up to interpretation. That’s Literature. but for me, king lear is about love. and so, despite being set in the modern day and centering on a bunch of mentally ill gay and trans people and also having magic and whatever, my king lear retelling is about people who are power-hungry because they are desperate for love. even with characters’ names changed, even with the setting shifted, even with major elements of the plot changed (because major elements of the plot are definitely changed), it’s a king lear retelling not ONLY because it shares the original story’s setup/concept, but ALSO because it shares (my perception of) the original story’s heart.

so my advice would be to figure out what, to you, is the heart of hamlet. why do you like hamlet? why are you invested in it? what is your personal connection to this story?

anyone can retell hamlet; i mean, i’m going to do it one of these days, allegedly. but your hamlet retelling is not going to be the same as mine or anyone else’s; it’s going to be yours, because to write a retelling is to climb inside a story and make it your own! so whatever makes your hamlet retelling Yours is something you should lean all-into!!! what’s a retelling except saying, “all right, this story is my city now, and i’m going to explore it my way?”

so what is your way?

how can you make this story yours?

how can you tell this story like no one else can?

what, to you, is this story really about?

the answer to that last question? keep that. and do whatever the hell you want with everything else.

[closing notes: you should 1) put gay people in it (joke; do what you want) and 2) definitely tag me / hit me up if you ever post about it (not a joke; i fucking love hamlet and i would love to hear more about your retelling 👀👀👀)]

[class-wom]

Legion Chapter 24 “Morning After”-Thoughts – SPOILERS!!!

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 SPOILER TERRITORY

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Okay, as I mentioned in a previous tag from a previous reblog, where Shakespearean tragedy analogies/comparisons are concerned, this is looking less and less like Romeo and Juliet (doomed star-crossed lovers, but hey, at least their folks kissed and made up at their funerals, so to speak!) or Hamlet (huge “pile o’ bods,” including the struggling title character, but hey, at least he finally avenged Daddy’s death and left Horatio behind to tell the tale!) and more like MacBeth.  And frankly, that’s really hard for me to take, because I hate MacBeth!!!  (That being said, yeah, Lenny is now officially a classic Lady MacBeth figure.  Out damned spot indeed!)  And it seems rather ironic to me now that the body count we thought was “a thing” by the end of the Pilot -- dead Lenny, dead Clark -- really is a thing now.  (...or is it?!?  Duh-duh-DUHHHHHHHH!!!)

On the bright side (yes, I’m determined to find one -- LOL!), good and/or bad, there was a lot that happened in this ep that imo needed to happen if we’re going to reach a halfway-decent conclusion for better or worse.  And let’s not make the decision there just yet, though we’re kind of left in a position to anticipate the latter imo.

Clark’s fate? love him or hate him, yeah, he had to go imo, because to me he was a vengeful fly in the ointment who only back-burnered his David-grudge from Chapters 9 to 19 due to lack of sufficient evidence of David being a threat (a terribly useful tool in Farouk’s “bag o’ tricks;” please let us remember how casually Farouk literally flicked him off in the closing scenes of Chapter 18!), and consequently only succeeded in his relentless pursuit and obsession in making a bad situation ten times worse and more complicated in the long run.  I’ve mentioned before that Daniel’s lines in Chapter 20 made the consequences of Clark’s one-track mind perfectly clear, which brings me to Daniel’s fate:  Yeah, this is definitely one to file under “Okay, if you want me to badmouth David, I’ll go with this one; what he did to Daniel was (borrowing from Clueless) way harsh and completely unnecessary and cruel.”  Funny that it happened before he took down Clark, who again did have to be removed if any headway is to be made in any direction imo.  But maybe that’s part of the point being made here:  Okay, fine, go ahead and hate David for savagely taking down Daniel’s mental capacity as collateral damage, if you like.  But in the end, what put him in the line of fire in the first place?  His love for and loyalty to the obsessed (”focused”) Clark.  So could it be possible that, consciously or otherwise, Clark was so focused on taking down David by whatever means necessary that he was willing to put his partner at risk in the process? and doesn’t that make him as bad as David, allowing his obsessions to distract him from and ruin what he holds dear?  Not an excuse, mind, but just a thought.  It’s just that there are so many more of David at this point that it’s easier to spot in his case! LOL!

Which leads me to the next batch of things that happened that needed to imo:  The long-overdue Sydvid talk and Syd’s discovery of David’s alters.  Now regarding the former, this brings me to a tiresome sore point in light of the Chapter 23 gulag scene, namely the “one step forward/two steps back”-type of scenario where David has a much-needed confrontation that reveals his deep-seated pains and struggles beneath his dark persona, but GOTCHA! -- the whole thing turned out to be a trick, and David’s back to his guarded ruthless self as a result.  Still, hopelessly optimistic viewer that I am, I’d like to think some much-needed seeds were planted during the talk:  Even if Syd was deliberately attempting to lull David into letting his guard down (via SK’s Chapter 21 cringe-worthy promise to “teach you to lie so well that he’ll thank you as you stab him in the back”) by saying everything he wanted (and imo needed) to hear.  (Yeah, since David made a point of mentioning how he used to trust her, we’ll see how well he trusts her in future after that stunt!!! 🙄)  I’d like to think that, whatever state she may be in at this point (there’s the possibility that she may not take a literal physical form, but hey, after the whole Lenny S1-S2 Saga, who knows with this show?), she’ll know a lot better than to trust Farouk from now on.  (David was right about that when he said she shouldn’t have trusted him!!!)  I like the fact that she at least admitted that she had been jealous!!!  So at least she came out and stated the obvious; I was pleased about that!

And now that it’s happened, I can go ahead and say it:  Yes, the Sydvid Body Swap, Syd-trick or otherwise, needed to happen, because Syd needed to see what was/is driving David and making him behave the way he has been all this time.  I was shocked as to how quickly it transpired:  I wasn’t expecting it for a few more eps, tbh, and yeah, I was kind of hoping it would end a little more optimistically, with Syd and the Davids eventually talking things over, but depending on wherever Syd is mentally now (in David’s mind? somewhere in the stratosphere? I know that the next ep, which I may miss altogether but follow up on via summaries in the name of continuity, will follow her on the astral plane, so idk, maybe she’s just in a deep coma right now physically), maybe it could still happen with three eps to go? 

Also, on a side note, I liked watching DS’s “Syd-as-David” drag RK’s weakly protesting “David-as-Syd” down the halls muttering, “It’s okay, David! I gotcha!”  Took me awhile to figure out wtf Syd was up to and what she was really trying to pull during the discussion, complete with her tipping her hand about Switch’s whereabouts; I concur with a tweet I read dismissing it as a stupid plan on the part of Syd, quite frankly, thereby minimizing sympathy somewhat imo for her current position.  But I still enjoyed watching that post-swap part for some reason; acting-wise, that had to be a challenge for both DS and RK, so props there!  (And okay, yeah, Syd using David’s powers to blast his knife-wielding followers?  On the one hand, I feel sorry for them, but on the other, I concede with reluctance that it was kind of cool, if for no other reason that I no longer have to listen to them call him “Daddy”!  ROTFL!  Not sure what annoys me more, their calling him “Daddy” or Farouk calling him “My son” or “My baby.”  Let’s put it at a photo finish, shall we?  LOL!)

Okay, on to the Lenny Shocker -- and to me, it was a shocker!  Yet there was a huge dropped ball in this scene that annoyed me:  As Lenny was calling David out on his narcissism, why the heck didn’t he point out that the only reason he was keeping her around and/or she had a body in the first place -- a body destroyed by Syd, accidentally or otherwise, using David’s body and powers, I might add!!! -- was because Farouk destroyed the only tangible family, adopted or otherwise, in order to grant her request for a physical body and freedom?  He would have certainly had grounds to do so, Heaven only knows!  Okay, fine -- not saying that Hawley & Co. had to call up Katie Asleton to get her to film new scenes; a few flashbacks and/or at least the name-drop of Amy would have been good enough for me.  But I’ll give NH credit:  There may have been a case in which he did write such a line in this scene for David, and heck, maybe it was even filmed, only to be cut at the request of the FX execs who argued that it would cause the ep to run too long to ironically run that Twizzlers ad during the commercial breaks.  (Anyone else catch that in the “Lenny Swan Song”-ep with regard to a sponsor choice? that couldn’t have been a coincidence! LOL!)  Perhaps the best part of the scene (at least imo), David shedding visible and genuine tears as Lenny slowly bleeds to death, was supposed to indicate this, that the closest thing he had nearby to remind him of a true family was slipping away from him.  Interesting ref during the Sydvid talk that he later describes this as “abandonment” and equates it with his parents.  I guess that’ll work for now, but I would have liked to at least hear the Amy-ref, since it’s safe to call that moment the turning point in S2, David’s realization of Lenny’s true identity.  JMO.

And while the World Wide Web is crying “There’s no doubt about it, David truly is a villain now!” can we just take a look at Farouk in this ep once and for all and say “Yeah, okay, whatever, but that doesn’t mean that Farouk is good by default!”?  (I know, I know -- two wrongs don’t make a right, as I keep saying, but again, Farouk’s old enough to have a better idea of what he’s doing, and apparently for all his coolness, even he in the end underestimates his competition!) Puppet master, master Chess player (oooh, a Xavier/Magneto ref! LOL!), etc., etc. -- we definitely see Farouk as nothing more than a master manipulator.  Yet he’s not completely successful in his control over D3, and since the D3/Summerland gang has changed so dramatically and frustratingly over the course of this show to the point where I’m not even sure I can root for the Loudermilks anymore (Kerry’s excitement about going to space was kind of fun, though!), I’m not sure whether to be pleased or disappointed in this turn of events and the inevitable parting of the ways.  (Or at least I would hope so; perhaps he’ll use Syd’s apparent condition to his advantage, idk.)  Frankly, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that there is going to be no true winner at curtain’s end no matter how you slice it; at best, perhaps some parties will come away with a bittersweet sense of closure, and that’ll be about it.

Regarding Farouk’s underestimation of his control over the situation, I liked Switch’s suddenly popping up to help David, but if she’s incarcerated in a hibernation chamber, how the heck did she manage to snap out of it so quickly?  That had a rather deus ex machina-feel to it imo.  I may have missed something, idk; quite possible with this type of a show.  LOL!

And as often happens, I guess I had a little more to say the morning after than I thought I did! 😂

[fluff-a-fluffs]

Going to add, as someone who had (though it has been a long time) read the whole of Wuthering Heights that's... that's not what the story is saying at all.

If anything the story seems to suggest that you should follow your heart, damn societal norms and class bullshit. Catherine rejects Heathcliff because his status is viewed as "too low" despite her admitting she loves him, and he works to obtain status so he can get revenge. Their doomed romance is the consequence of classism.

It's why the story ends with the sort-of adopted son of Heathcliff, Hareton, who is in many ways like Heathcliff when he was younger (and has at that point due to his father lost his wealth and status), being betrothed to the daughter of Catherine, Cathy (who still has wealth and status) because the two fell in love and could give less of a fuck what other rich people have to say.

Also, love the "incest is ok" shtick because... where do I begin?

I don't remember Heathcliff being fully recognized by the family as a son/brother; he was at best a ward of the family before Catherine's older brother turned him into a servant. I distinctly remember Catherine's father often playing into the "You're a secret missing prince" shtick when he was young, kind of emphasizing to me that like... maybe they saw each other as father figure-son figure but never as literally related. Like, he may have been like a father to Heathcliff but I don't know if they ever saw each other as truly related more than that. Not forgetting Hinley hated Heathcliff and Catherine saw him as a friend. But even if they did...

People in that age married into each other. Like... it's accurate both in regards to WHEN it was written (people still married cousins in around the mid 1800s) and the setting of the story too.

Love that Heathcliff and Catherine's romance- two people who are NOT AT ALL BIOLOGICALLY RELATED counts as incest... but they don't mention that Hareton and Catherine are cousins. Like it's clear they're complaining about Heathcliff and Catherine, who are not related at all! But no that's the problem. And not like... Heathcliff's extreme vengeance, his manipulation of a woman, all the bad shit he did. Nope, it's the "incest".

I know a lot of these stories have problems, but the stories these authors have written... give it 100 years and THEY will have problems. Nothing stays stagnant, the world changes- ideals change, it's the overall message that needs to be looked at (if there is one; as someone pointed out some stories are just... the author wrote a story, no message/moral/whatever in mind). Yeah, there are some ick stuff in Wuthering Heights for example (it is sort of implied that Catherine is the catalyst/therefore at fault for why Heathcliff becomes vengeful, and of course the disgusting way Heathcliff sets out for his revenge) but the story never frame's Heathcliff's revenge as just and seems to be emphasizing the tragedy of letting status blind you to what you want.

And nothing against criticizing authors; it's good to analyze the flaws and faults of stories and the people who wrote them. It can allow for greater growth within genres or interesting concepts to come from novels/plays/shows/etc (i.e. extensions of stories like the making of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead as an extension of Hamlet many, many years later). Or even allow people to take concepts and make it their own (i.e. taking Eldritch Horror and making your own horror concepts of that nature separate to the really fucking racist, anti-semitic author Lovecraft) But the utter dismissal of anything because they use words you hate to hear or dislike that certain things happened in history (incest) and see it acknowledged in a story without having anything else to go on is not a reason to overlook the positives of a story, or certainly not as a way to dismiss entire stories based on one aspect without more information to go on. Like, you won't read Huck Finn because the language can be uncomfortable, fine. Fair point, some stories are too uncomfortable to read. Trying to summarize the story based JUST on the language as "it's racist" without any proof/reasoning/explanation as to why is ridiculous.

Plus you also do history and the world a disservice when you try to cover up hard, honest depictions of the past. You likely wouldn't get just how bad racism was in Huck Finn if all the characters never used slurs and bigoted language. Sometimes ugly things need to be maintained, not because "Oh they're lovely" but because it shows how cruel we were, can be, and why we need to strive not to do that ever again.

[blackphoenixalchemylab]

It’s Time for 2017′s LILITH & FATHERHOOD Updates!

Every year, BPAL and Trading Post founders Elizabeth and Ted Barrial look back over the past year in their daughter Lilith's life, isolating moments and sense memories worthy of enshrining in scent. This year, the result amounts to thirty-five unique, limited edition blends. Behold: ++ FATHERHOOD 2017 ++ LILITH 2017 Happy ninth birthday, Lilith! These will be available at tonight's Lunacy event at the Lab, and for a limited time beyond.

++ LILITH 2017

Lilith, my angel, I love you with all my heart. I love the hiccup’ing snorts of your bellylaugh, I love the strange stormy grey of your eyes. I love your fart jokes and your songs, I love our late night talks. I love everything about you, from your taste in shoes to your moral fiber. I love your kindness and your strength of character, I love your sense of humor and your sense of justice.

I love you, I love being your mom.

Happy birthday, Lilith. ADMETE

On the last day of school, some of the families get together at the beach to celebrate the onset of summer break. It was cold, grey, and overcast, but that was hardly daunting for this little Oceanid. Lilith and her friends splashed and played in water I couldn’t put a toe into. She boogie boarded for the first time that day and fell in love. The beach bunny I have now is a far cry from the Tiny Virgo who wouldn’t go near the sand because she didn’t want her Doritos to get dirty.

Driftwood and sea salt submerged in a marine layer, a touch of sweet carnation, bright neroli, and a sandy strip of kelp.

APOCALYPTIC HORSEPRINCESS

Lilith has always enjoyed the company of monsters. She grew up at Dark Delicacies, and two of her favorite toys when she was a baby were a Freddy Krueger rubber mask and a matching Freddy doll (with razor hands that were blunted by Grandma Sue so Lil didn’t poke an eye out). She has fears just like any other kid, but her monster friends help protect her from “real life” dangers. When she gets scared late at night, we talk about her ghost friends that roam the house, the vampires that live in our basement, the werewolves that hang out in the yard, the zombies that keep spare brains in our garage freezer, and all the other monsters (imaginary monster friends?) that love her and keep her safe from “real world” dangers. When we vend at horror-centric conventions, the monsters are always so nice to Lilith. At Midsummer Scream, she gets tons of high-fives from shambling ghouls and radioactive plant horrors, and she gets hugs from demented clowns and slobbering werebeasts.

Ever since Lilith was in kindergarten, we’ve helped with her school’s Halloween party, so she’s grown up loving setting up and working in haunted houses and horror mazes.

This photo is from this year’s Midsummer Scream. Lilith was inspecting a headless horseman scene, getting ideas for this year’s Halloween maze.

Crushed mint and neon lime, sour candy powder, and wild plum.

BABY’S FIRST CON PANEL

On July 20th, Lilith went to her first SDCC panel. As a carny kid and the tiniest Lab Rat, she’s been to tons of cons and events, and we’ve been taking her to San Diego Comic Con since birth. While she’s always had a good time, this was the first year that she was independently invested in her enjoyment there. She tore up the vending area, played video game demos, went looking for Arthas’ ice cream shop, and sat through several panels of her choosing. It was an experience that was truly /hers/ for the first time, and that was a really amazing piece of magic that I was privileged to witness.

The scent of the soft pretzel we hid in our backpack, plus a bit of leftover chocolate chip cookie.

BRUNCH WITCHES

Dressed in her witchy best for brunch with the fam!

Pumpkin pancakes and berries in cream.

CEMETERY CREEP

This summer, Brian got married at the Mountain View Mausoleum. As a side benefit, the Barrials got to spend hours skulking around its beautiful, cavernous halls in the weeks leading up to the event. Lilith loves the vast quietness of the mausoleum almost as much as she enjoys playing tag in the cemetery, and wandered the halls doing impromptu math equations to figure out how old people were when they passed.

I love this little cemetery creep with all my cobwebby heart.

Marble-white musk, orris root, and vanilla blossom.

CLOSET RAID

Funny how much better Lilith looks in my clothes than I do! This is the scent of generations of children raiding their parents’ closets: my grandmother and mother’s Chanel No. 5, my father and grandfather’s Lilac Vegetal, my Snake Oil, and Lilith’s lavender blossoms.

DANCING AMONG THE TOMBS

Autumn at Lilith’s favorite cemetery, Lafayette No. 1.

Osmanthus and jasmine, Spanish moss and dandelion, Snake Oil and Dorian.

DAYBREAK

Just a photo of Lilith and Pickle that I took one morning. I love this little human so, so much.

Last night’s lavender drops and a whiff of Pickle’s vanilla coconut pupper shampoo.

DO ALL THE GOOD YOU CAN

Lilith has been involved with our humanitarian and philanthropic work for several years, helping with fundraising events like our food, toy, and feminine napkin drives; she has taken the initiative a few times now, setting up her own fundraisers for the UNHCR and Pasadena Humane Society. This year, we decided that she’s old enough to do the footwork, and she volunteered with us twice in serving those currently experiencing homelessness. This photo is from Christmas Day 2017: Lilith spent several hours helping us distribute food, toiletries, and sleeping bags in Hollywood.

Madagascar vanilla and sweet patchouli with Yule pine, white fig, and almond blossom.

DO YOU LIKE CLOWNS?

Lilith has been watching Drag Race with me since she was teething, and she has worked with us at every Drag Con. She loves filming promo videos with Tom for the Nobodies events. She loves watching drag makeup tutorials, UNHhhh, and Alaska’s videos, and one of her goals in life is to pull off a reveal like Violet Chachki’s tartan runway look on the first day of school. So when she heard that Bob the Drag Queen was looking for a little girl for a comedy video, she was all over it. She loves Bob, she loves drag, and she loooooooooves being a big funny ham on stage. I’m the worst stage mom in all of Los Angeles history, and she has no headshots and no reel—so I sent over a funny photo of Lilith jetlagged and one of her Nobodies vids, and somehow she got the gig. It was one of the best days of her life. Bob and the crew were incredibly nice and friendly, and Lilith had the time of her life. To say thank you, she drew this picture for Bob of the two of them together on a bus bench.

Raspberry ice cream and a smear of black cherry lip gloss.

EGO SUM LUX MUNDI

Doing her work at the grotto, the International Shrine of St Jude at Our Lady of Guadelupe Chapel in New Orleans.

Frankincense and myrrh with golden amber, green apple pulp, and white pear.

GAS MASKS AND SNAILS AND PUPPY DOG TAILS

My offspring loves crossbows, gas masks, and kittens. She loves unicorns and rainbows and rhinestones and glitter, insects and Spongebob and fart jokes and whoopee cushions. She has a Nerf arsenal that would make her great-great-great-great-great (so many greats) Grandpa Attila proud, and a sea of big-eyed, rainbow-poofy plushies you could (probably literally) drown in. She loves fashion dolls as much as she loves anatomical models, Legos as much as she loves jewelry, and Hamlet as much as she loves My Little Pony. I love the diversity of her interests, and that—over the years—she is finding peace with loving what she loves, regardless of what anyone else might think.

Cotton candy and jellybeans with sugar cookie crumbles and vanilla frosting.

THE GODDESS OF MISCHIEF

Lilith has a ton of empathy for the God of Mischief. I think many kids identify with Loki because they know what it’s like to be passed over, to be ignored in favor of a shinier relative or friend, and what it feels like to not be as strong or powerful as some of your peers. He may be evil(ish), but he has a sense of humor and a grasp of irony that kids relate to, and that’s worth its weight in Alfheimian gold nuggets.

Thor is great and all, but Loki has /gone through some shit/, and Lilith respects that.

But what are the main reasons why Lilith digs Loki? “He looks like me, and he’s really funny.”

Girl!Loki costume by Chrissy Lynn!

White lavender and sweet amber, green oudh, and inky musk.

HECK ON WHEELS

Sometimes I make a perfume just because I love this kid. Red velvet confetti cupcakes and bubblegum.

HUNTRESS

This was the day that we discovered that Lilith was likely a sharpshooter crossbowman in another life. She was startlingly accurate, even with the handicap of using a clumsy carnival weapon.

Funnel cakes, baked apples, and strawberry cream.

LITTLE PHOTOJOURNALIST

Lilith Barrial, budding photojournalist, at the Cathedral-Basilica of St. Louis, King of France, New Orleans, LA. She’s been snapping photos since she was a toddler; we have whole photo albums of blurry photos of shoes and pavers from those days. She loves taking her powder pink instax on trips, and loves to document playdates with her friends.

Cathedral incense and rock candy.

PAYING HER RESPECTS

Lilith’s annual visit to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

Star jasmine and tobacco leaf.

PEW! PEW!

There is nothing that sparks joy for me quite like sharing something I love with Lilith. She’s been playing console games with me on and off since she was five, though she took a break from Diablo for a while after Brian bailed on her to chase after a treasure goblin.

Blue raspberry slushy, a bowl of strawberries, and microwavable popcorn.

POKE!

On December 30th, Lilith went with a gaggle of her Grownups, her plush alligator, Crocky (there’s a story there), and one of her besties, Camilla, to get their ears pierced by the wonderful people at Studio City Tattoo. When the needle went through, she didn’t scream and she didn’t cry… she growled “FFFFFFFFFffFFfffFfffFffffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh” in an attempt to repress the impulse to yell FUCK in the middle of the tattoo shop. Tom and I got new piercings in solidarity, but Crocky, Teddy, and Brian all declined.

Coconut and red currant, red musk, and a pop of surgical steel. POTAMIDES

Thanks to the much-needed winter rains this year, my little river nymph was finally able to see the creeks in Eaton Canyon as something other than dry, fawn-beige, tumbleweed-strewn strips of sandwash. In the past, she’s always been ambivalent about hiking, but something about the rushing streams and sparkling waters enchanted her, and she fell in love.

Honeysuckle and honey, water lilies and white sage.

THE SPECTRAL FLOWER GIRL

The ghosts swarm.

They speak as one

person. Each

loves you. Each

has left something

undone...

With love to Rae Armantrout for the poem. Black lilies, red roses, and baby’s breath.

Lilith has been taking kiddo Shakespeare classes for the past four years, and absolutely loves them. Last year, they did a mini-series focusing on Julius Caesar, King Lear, and the Tempest. The kids analyze the plays, and perform scenes from them; then, at the end of the cycle, they put together a play of their own based on the themes in the works of Shakespeare that they have studied. Their play this time around was entitled Evil Bunny.

STORYBOARD: JULIUS CAESAR

Lilith performed as Marc Antony, and showed off her orator skills. Hearing Lilith speak at Caesar’s funeral gave me the chills. She came to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Macerated myrrh, rose petals, and iris with frankincense and a splash of blood.

STORYBOARD: THE TEMPEST

Lilith played Ariel and Miranda, and said she liked playing Miranda more. She said it’s easy to relate, because her mom is a lot like Prospero.

I’m still trying to figure out whether that’s a compliment or an insult.

Ivy and lime rind, marigold and moss.

NYC SNOWBALL FIGHT

Last winter, we took Lilith to New York for the first time. We were en route to the march in Washington, DC, with our friends, and made a few pit stops on the way. This photo was taken a split second before I got snowballed in the face at the East 72nd Street Playground. The handsome devil in the background is one of Lilith’s best friends in the world, Kyle.

Snowballs and vanilla ice cream.

VALUABLE, POWERFUL, DESERVING

In a hotel in Baltimore, Lilith helped me color in my sign for the Women’s March in DC. She had made her own two signs — brimming with Girl Power and featuring a unicorn, of course — but finished in time to help me get mine all dolled up.

There are many criticisms of the march that are valid, but I will tell you this: being able to show my daughter thousands upon thousands of people that were demanding a government built on justice, compassion, and acceptance was something incredibly powerful. The experience she had meeting other children who were there in the hopes of a kinder, brighter future was invaluable. It was a pivotal moment, this ability to demonstrate for her /how to show up/ and how to /work/ for a better country and a better future for marginalized and under-represented groups. It was incredible being there in Washington with her, and I will never forget it. I hope this experience helped to reveal her own inner strength to her, and the strength she can find in her allies.

Golden amber, vanilla oudh, and orange blossom.

VAMPIRE PRINCESS

Last Halloween, Lilith wanted to be Maleficent, so we hooked her up with a Maleficent costume. The horns were imbalanced, though, and she was frustrated, so she decided to wear the rest of the costume—sans horns—and be a vampire. She looked amazing (in my motherly opinion), but when the time came to trick or treat, her voluminous skirts and flowing cape made it difficult for her to keep up with the other kids. We tried knotting it, hiking it up, everything…and in the end, she vowed never to wear another costume that she can’t run and jump in.

Blood musk and lavender with bourbon vanilla, plum oudh, black patchouli, and Romanian wildflowers.

WINTER AT THE CAPITOL

It was a cold, cold day, and a thick fog obfuscated everything. It was tremendously symbolic in myriad ways.

It’s funny. Lilith was two months old when Obama was elected, and I remember how I felt that night as the election returns were coming in. When his presidency was announced, it was like a fist surrounding my heart unclenched, and I could breathe again. With Lilith in my arms, I inexplicably wept with relief, suddenly believing with all my heart that she was safe, and that her future—all of our futures—were on a trajectory of kindness and justice buoyed by hope. The country is flawed and imperfect, but we were on our way to making things right.

Then November of 2016 happened, and in January, a thick fog descended on the National Mall and the fist clamped around my heart again.

++ FATHERHOOD 2017

Expressing my love for Lilith in words will always be hard for me because my skill set does not include this word-and-spelling thing. At least I know that I am on the right track when I have to stop because I am crying. Here goes nothing… Happy ninth birthday, Lilith. You are the best part of me and Elizabeth, you are my partner in crime, you are my best little friend, you are my love and joy and I treasure every single second that we spend together. I do my best not to, but sometimes, I cry when I think about how much I love you. I would do anything to shield you from the sadness of the world and it hurts to see shed any tears.. Every so often, I have this huge fear of you outgrowing me and not needing me. It is usually during those times when you run off with your friends and I find myself standing there alone. I am afraid that you might have moved on from your dad but, thankfully you still return and ask me to join in and play with you. I will forever cherish these moments. I love the time we share while we are walking and you reach out to hold my hand. As I have always said, as long as you want, I will continue to hoist you up on my shoulders. You might be getting a little heavy to carry but I promise I will carry you down the aisle for your wedding if you ask me to. I know that you might not realize it now but I hope that when you are a woman, you will look back at your ninth year and remember it with happiness and joy because I sure will. All my love, Daddy THE PILLORY Captain Lilith is a harsh taskmaster and her first mate has been put him up for public humiliation. His crime must have been not making her buttered pasta fast enough. Can he escape? Will people come by and throw tomatoes at him? Caramelized rum ice cream with a splatter of berries. SPINNING ON GRAVES Late at night, as you walk through a dark and creepy cemetery, all is quiet except for the giggling of two kids: one is eight and one is fifty-eight. They are standing in the middle of the tombstones; the bigger kid is spinning the little kid around by her arms. They spin and spin and then fall down laughing. What could be more fun than falling down on people’s graves? Dorian and lavender mist, crushed grass, cypress leaf, and a drop of clove. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 Lilith “All-Night Party Bean” Barrial begged us to allow her to stay up past midnight and ring in the New Year at the Los Angeles Zoo with her oldest friend Novi. How could we refuse? We all danced, we sang, we drank apple cider, and we partied all night long. They would have stayed until the dawn if the zoo had not kicked us out. You know what they say, you don’t have to go home but the monkeys want you to leave. Vanilla cake with sprinkles and red velvet cupcakes, with a touch of climbing wisteria and sparkling apple cider. A CUTE KID Near the end of last semester, we arrived to pick her up from school and she was hanging out in her classroom drawing pictures on the white board. Of course I joined in and wrote “funny looking kid” with an arrow pointing at her. She changed it and wrote “a cute kid”, and gave me her big giant smile as if to say I WIN! Pale lavender and Tahitian vanilla with a smudge of chalk dust and a pop of strawberry bubblegum. WEDNESDAY'S CHILD IS FULL OF WOE Our friend, Lee Moyer, asked if Lilith could be a model for an illustration of Wednesday Addams that he was working on, They wanted a photo of her in a lab and of course I jumped at the chance to take a photo of my baby. I grabbed my camera and we set up a little table. We had so much fun decorating the table. Lilith was running around grabbing things and saying, “Can we use this? Can we use that?” Luckily for her, there's no shortage of creepy things scattered around her house. A little kid’s interpretation of a gothy goth perfume: sugared clove and vanilla patchouli with cacao, dried Avignon rose petals, and a bit of black cherry. MY LITTLE THEMYSCIRAN PRINCESS As I was carrying Lilith around the San Diego comic con, people would stop us and ask to take a photo of her cosplaying Wonder Woman. As I set her down, a change would come over her: she would light up, engage the person, and charm the hell out of them while the photo was being taken. She would be so charismatic and charming, and then would then come back to me, this shining, happy little kid, and ask to be picked up all over again. I was so proud of her, and I love my lil Themysciran princess. Rich, sweet, valiant amber, coconut milk, honeyed saffron, LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER Raisin' 'em right! The t-shirt that Lilith is wearing is Alaska Thunderf*ck's Lil' Poundcake. Lilith, I am your real dad and I always will be! Pomegranate cotton candy. ZIP LINE My Danger Baby loves to do crazy things and for some reason, I am always chosen to accompany her on these adventures. (Editor's note: it's because her mother possesses an actual survival instinct.) At the Renaissance Faire, we rode the zip line.... and let’s just say that it rode up a bit on my naughty bits. As we stepped off the ledge, I screamed MY BALLS, and Lilith thought it was soooooo funny. Brown leather and bourbon vanilla with honeyed oudh and cinnamon buns. MORNING IN THE CITY OF ANGELS Walking and holding hands with my Lilith as we joke and giggle is one the greatest joys of my life. She is growing up fast, and these moments will happen less and less, but I will forever treasure them. I hope that when she is an adult, she will look back on these memories and feel 1/100 of the happiness that she brings to her father. Sunflowers and California poppies, vanilla-tinged oak bark, and a spill of sugary breakfast cereal.

[serceleste]

my victory over hamlet

I expect everyone who follows me knows about my Hamlet saga because I won’t shut up about it (sorry not sorry) but I really wanted to write down my experience, mostly for me, but I’m sharing it because so many of you have been amazingly supportive all the way through my disastrous first attempt to my eventual victory. So here it is, and if you just want to hear about Oscar and the play you can skip a ways down, lol. 

I wanted to see this play from the moment it was announced. I mean, it’s obvious that I love Oscar’s beautiful face and he just appeals to me in general, but I absolutely love him as a performer. So the idea of seeing him live, in Shakespeare, was just… But I kind of pushed it off, because it would have been an enormous expense. The tickets weren’t cheap, I live halfway across the country so there would be airfare, hotels, Uber/taxi fare, food… I’m not where I thought I would be in life at this particular point so it just didn’t seem feasible.

And then.

The play began. I started hearing about it. And I thought… if I don’t at least try, I’m going to regret it forever. I have far too many regrets in my life for still being young, stemming from my natural introversion and anxiety and from the fact that I have always, always tried to be responsible and level-headed and do what’s expected of me. But I just thought… fuck it. I am going to do something ridiculous for once in my life just because I want to.

The tickets were sold out, obviously, so I started searching for inevitably over-priced secondhand ones. I found one that wasn’t too bad. I found a hostel a mile away from the theater, I booked a flight, I took off work. I went to NYC by myself to see Oscar Isaac play Hamlet.

And then it got cancelled. I was devastated, guys, I think you all know that. The theater employee told me Oscar was ill and I just thought… you know what? That figures. It figures that I would do this crazy thing and it would crash to hell.

So I went back home. I’d had a nice time beforehand exploring parts of the city on my own but the memory of standing there and hearing that lady tell me it was cancelled and going back outside and just… It soured the whole thing.

I called my mother. I told her I was so disappointed that all I could think about was trying to go back. She told me that I should take a few days and let it settle, think about it, but it was my money.

That was Thursday. On Friday I was checking StubHub again and figuring out what day I could make it work. August is our busiest month of the year and a blackout period where no one can take off. Because of my promotion last year I don’t work weekends anymore but in August I do. I thought, okay, I’m working weekends the second half of the month, but if I go just before then, on a Friday evening or Saturday morning, see the play Saturday, and come back on Sunday, that won’t affect anything. Saturday the 12th was squashed right in between undoable time periods and literally the only day all month I thought I could make work.

On Saturday I went back to looking for tickets and flights and the hostel. I found one ticket, more expensive than last time but not overly ridiculous (and I had had my first ticket refunded) for Saturday the 12th. I found plane tickets only slightly higher than before. The hostel was 20 bucks a night more than when I’d stayed during the week but still cheap. I dithered.

Then chelliaphra told me that was the day she and her friend were going, and then she offered to let me stay in their hotel room, and I went !!!!!

I dithered a bit more, the seller upped their ticket price (BASTARD), I bought it anyway. I was going to fucking see this fucking play if it killed me, which seemed better than stewing in regret and disappointment.

This time it was a physical ticket they mailed to me. It arrived and the seller had SCRATCHED THEIR NAME OUT SO IT LOOKED LIKE I FUCKING STOLE IT. I mean, the name on the ticket was bad last time, it gave me anxiety, but at least it was a woman’s name so unless they ID’ed me, which seemed unlikely, it would have been fine. But this was SCRATCHED OUT LIKE I STOLE IT OH MY GOD. I had to call StubHub because I was freaking out. StubHub, or at least the woman I spoke with, has excellent service and made me feel better. I was still going to freak out until my butt was actually in my seat in the theater, but I felt reassured.

My dad’s reaction was the greatest. I told him, hey, so you know how I went to New York to see a play and the play was cancelled? Well, I bought another ticket and I’m going back. My dad just went, ‘oh no’. LMAO. Then he said he hoped it was a hell of a play and I was too embarrassed to admit that I cared less about what the play was than who was in it. :D (I mean, Oscar could have been in the shittiest production of fuck knows what and I would have wanted to see it.)

So I went back to NYC! I was so anxious I was nauseous, I slept maybe 4 or 5 hours, I got up at 3:30 am Saturday morning to catch my flight. I wandered around midtown partly to pass the time, partly to do the tourist thing because it was a different part of the city from what I’d seen last time, and partly to distract myself from how badly I was freaking out, to minor success.

I met chelliaphra and brehaaorgana, who were totally lovely (and I know this wasn’t your intent but thanks for actually making me eat! I was in NYC roughly 48 hours last time and ate exactly one actual meal, and I know myself enough to know I would not have eaten at all this time if I hadn’t been with you so thank you, lol) and we went to our hotel, which was AMAZING, I will never stay anywhere that nice again for the rest of my life, I am sure. Yay accidental free upgrades! \o/ There was a pillow menu!!

I got my period in the hotel, of course, which helped contribute to my severe nausea, like, omg, I was dying. I was so anxious over everything, over my ticket, over the play actually happening, over every stupid thing I could be anxious about. No even the truly magnificent comic book store (next to door to the magnificent bookstore I explored last time) could do much for me.

Actually arriving at the Public made me feel worse, if that can be believed, I was having flashbacks of how utterly shitty I had felt, looking at the corner where I’d called my mom and cried, remembering how fucking horrible I had felt walking down the street and figuring out what the hell I was going to do now. Thankfully we didn’t pass the awful bench I’d sat on feeling miserable, lol, before I walked to the park and wrote fanfic.

We took obligatory pics next to the poster of Oscar. We went inside. I was dying. Chelliaphra went with me to the desk to see if they could reassure me about the ticket but mostly it was down to StubHub. The announcement that the doors had opened came over the speaker and we went up so at least if there was a problem I’d be at the front. I thought I might vomit.

When the woman scanned my barcode and the “good!” beep happened I almost cried I was so relieved, it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard in my life.

And then my butt was in the seat!!!!! It was fine!!! I was going to see the play!!!!

Chelliaphra and brehaaorgana had seats in the front row and my jealousy was epic, tbh, but honestly I was so happy just to actually be there, after everything, that I would have stood in the doorway or something and thought that was good enough. The theater was very small, anyway, so all the seats felt pretty intimate. I was in the first row at the top of one of the aisles so it was actually rather nice, though I did end up having a bad angle for a little bit of it, Oscar had his back to me for one of the really key emotional scenes, which was a bummer, but whatever.

And the play! If you are looking for a critical evaluation of the play, this is not it. I had never seen Hamlet performed before and I read it once in school but that was a while ago. The closest I’ve come to seeing it was watching the movie version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, lol. I had zero expectations of how it should be.

I fucking loved it. It was wild. It clearly was a non-traditional staging and I dug every minute of it. Oscar was phenomenal. Just… OMG. He is such a brilliant performer and seeing him live was something else, I will never forget it. He has so much energy and intensity and he knew how to play to the entire room; he made you feel like he cared about every person in the audience and he made eye contact with EVERYONE, no matter how crappy your seat was.

He speaks Shakespeare as naturally as you or I would speak to each other, like it’s how he normally talks, so it feels conversational and everyday. You forgot he was actually speaking Shakespeare because it just rolled off his tongue as if that’s how he always speaks. His comedic timing is SO GOOD, I did not know Hamlet could be that funny. He pushed troll!Hamlet to a whole new level. His gestures, his body language, everything. A few favorite moments were when he makes this mocking kissing gesture to his mother, and when he was running around dragging Polonius’ body in a sheet before stowing it in the audience, and the ‘may I lay my head in your lap’ bit, when he’s joking about his, uh, parts, and he just like raises his leg up and gestures and I died for multiple reasons. I also loved the use of the comfy sweater, Ophelia wears it, and then throws it back at Hamlet when she’s returning his gifts, and then Hamlet wears it.

And he was so moving, dear lord. Watching him play Hamlet’s grief and loss was incredible. Knowing that he lost his mother this year really gave it an extra emotional impact, because you know that had to have informed his performance, I mean, the thrust of the play is the loss of Hamlet’s father. (Also I would just like to say that I was attacked by the playbill, like, it literally says the play is dedicated to Oscar’s mother, and in his little bio bit it says it again, ‘dedicated to my mother’, GOD I HATE FEELINGS.) When he cried it was impossible not to cry with him, he was so heartbreaking and moving. You could literally hear the sniffling across the audience. The scene where he sees his father’s ghost was amazing, and he was so good in Act Two in the big emotional part with Gertrude.

And, you know, Oscar with blood on his face is the most Extra.

Everyone knows about the lasagna but watching it was… I mean, he sat on a table and railed at a tray of lasagna with a knife and you could not look away, and when he says, ‘why what an ass am I,’ it was like you could finally breathe again.

(The lasagna was an A+ prop, btw, for the way Oscar murders it and for the way Ophelia just digs into it post-spurning Hamlet. And my friends informed me it smelled amazing, lol.)

And, yes, he spends a lot of time in his underwear (very small well-fitted underwear that sometimes rode up a bit one side and obviously I noticed, sorry not sorry). Um. He looked great in it. His ass is FINE, and I feel like this post would be lacking if I didn’t call attention to that. (He killed the lasagna in his underwear, for the record.) There was a bit in Act Two when he was watching the players where he was leaning over the back of a chair just in front of where I was sitting and that was indeed a perfect angle because DAMN. His shirt fell down to cover the front most of the time but yeah, that was not bad either, lol (and my friends confirm the answer to the question is cut, in case you were wondering). But all that being said, he was running around in his underwear and you couldn’t not look but he is also just such a fantastic performer that he was in his underwear and you were still mesmerized by the actual performance. Also I just liked it as a dramatic interpretation, I mean, he comes out when Hamlet’s meant to be a bit mad, no pants, a toilet seat protector around his neck, his hair sopping, reading the newspaper. It worked. Later on when he’s dressed again he whips the sweats back off to show his madness (or, as can be debated, his “madness”) again and I just really bought it.

Plus, he sang! Having never seen it, and only read it the once, I have no idea if that’s common practice or if it was just Oscar (I feel like it was just Oscar??), but I Approve. God his voice is lovely, I have witnessed Oscar singing in person, I can die happy.

Also I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about his hair because it’s me, hair is my thing, and Oscar’s hair… It was shorter but it was on point, and let me tell you, his hair just does that naturally. You know what I mean. It got wet a bunch of times and he would run his hands through it and it just curls like that, like, ridiculous, his hair is fucking amazing.

Of course I was there for Oscar but I greatly enjoyed the cast in general. I thought Gertrude and Claudius were amazing playing off each other and off Oscar, Ophelia was lovely (and what a beautiful voice!), Polonius was especially amusing in his ‘imparting wisdom’ bits (and looool at the bathroom as set piece), I really liked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Laertes was from Preacher! The gravediggers were played by Ophelia and Polonius and they were very funny. Ophelia knocked me in the head with her potted plant when she came down the aisle to cover Polonius with dirt and flowers and I felt blessed, lol.

But Keegan-Michael Key, OMG. What a fabulous actor. I knew he would be hilarious but I wasn’t expecting to be moved quite so much by his drama, his closing lines were especially good. I loved how much they played up the Hamlet/Horatio relationship, all the face touching, dear lord, and Oscar kissed him on the mouth! I kinda ship it now, tbh. I know Hamlet/Horatio fic exists and I feel like this performance should inspire more, lol.

But, you know, I have to note the play within a play, the reenactment of the murder of the king to try to provoke Claudius, with Keegan as the king and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the faux Gertrude and Claudius. It was EPIC. They were all great, with their large, overdrawn movements, but Keegan was… The audience was in hysterics watching his over-played parody of a death, and damn if he didn’t go Extra for us. Oscar was sitting there covering his face to try to hide that he was laughing (we all saw you Oscar) and you could just see his OH MY GOD. Keegan did a ‘thank you!!’ to us at the end.

Oh, and the cellist! There was a cellist playing background music and they used him quite amusingly at times, like when Claudius basically tells him to fuck off.

For the gravediggers scene, Oscar and Keegan came down the aisle to sit in the audience, and Oscar was perfectly diagonal to my seat and let me tell you, his eyelashes are INCREDIBLE. So fucking long. Ridiculous. How is he real, seriously. But that was an impressive bit, Oscar is stunning in the famous ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio’ monologue, and the actual funeral, fucking hell, he killed it and he killed me, and the way it cuts out after he and Laertes have just wrestled over the burial ground with Horatio trying to stop it and Hamlet is just lying there clutching Ophelia to himself killed me again.

And there was fencing, of course! I loved the fencing. Oscar put on the white shirt with the codpiece thing and I approved. Damn the fencing was excellent. And obviously then it was sad because it’s Hamlet and everyone dies. The finale was all rather gutting, good job all around.

So the play was wild and I loved it in a very non-judging way, I was just immensely entertained and I loved the cast and Oscar was fucking phenomenal. Obviously we gave them all a standing ovation.

I feel like I should mention now just how fucking tired I was. By this point I’d been awake about 20 hours on almost no sleep, and had spent the day an anxious, nauseous wreck. I was SO TIRED. OMG.

THEN. OSCAR. We asked an usher about seeing the actors and she told us that unfortunately, if we were hoping to see Mr. Isaac, he usually didn’t stay on Saturday nights. So we were bummed and went outside to find somewhere to get food. But I had to pee horribly so I went back inside and I won’t lie, I was totally taking my time because I was thinking maaaaaaybe, maybe if I stay long enough he actually will come out, or maybe the other actors will, and then I came out and thought damn, it’s louder than when I went in, and there was a crowd, and I looked, and THERE WAS OSCAR OH MY GOD OMG!!!!!!!!!

Chelliaphra and brehaaorgana had already come back in on account of the commotion so yay! We waited for Oscar! There were so many people! He looked fucking exhausted! I felt so bad, actually, at taking up his time when he probably wanted to go eat and be face first in his bed, but he was such a sweetheart and stayed and smiled for everyone, he was so lovely and gracious.

I tried taking some pics of him standing there but there were seriously so many people. But I got my moment! He was so nice!! He smiled at me and made eye contact and John Boyega is 10000000% correct, it is really hard to look away from his face, he is so damned handsome. Like, fuck. He is a beautiful man. No one should be that beautiful in real life, it is unreal, like, you look at celebrities and you know there’s make-up, there’s photoshop and airbrushing, but goddamn, he is so beautiful up close. SO BEAUTIFUL. Also he smells great. And he is so small! I did not expect him to be so small! Like, I knew he wasn’t actually very tall but it’s just startling in person how small he actually is, he’s just tiny and compact and cute, I love him.

So it is a miracle I actually formed words. I was so nervous my hand was shaking and my brain would not function properly, IDK, partly how tired I was, partly how shy I am, partly OSCAR ISAAC IS LOOKING RIGHT AT ME FUUUUUUUCK. I also was so anxious not to bother him any more than I already was, or take up more of his time, because I felt so bad, he looked so tired and he was being so sweet, I felt guilty at bothering him. So I really barely could make myself say anything beyond asking for what I wanted and thanking him five thousand times, I don’t even know if I ever told him how much I loved the play, like, damn, I hope I did.

He took a pic with me, I think you’ve already all seen it!! I stood right next to Oscar and he took a pic with his face next to my face!!! And he totally signed my Kylo Ren journal, that is full of fanfic, a good deal of which is Poe/everyone, I am deeply, deeply amused by this. I had originally wanted him to sign my playbill too but I felt guilty asking so I just got the journal. I’d thought about bringing a Poe comic for him to sign, maybe the #1 variant that has him on the cover, but it wouldn’t fit in my purse and I had like this tremendous embarrassment at the idea of having to carry it around and keep it on my lap during the play (I was already a bundle of anxious nerves so this probably sounds stupid to everyone else but I just did not need the added anxiety), so the journal worked because I always have it in my purse anyway, and it just really really amused me to have Oscar Isaac sign my Kylo Ren fanfic journal. I half want to never touch it again because I’m afraid of wrecking it but I also want to, like, write something particularly trashy in it now, haha. (Of course, a lot of what it currently contains is plenty trashy!!) Because I am an awkward dork when I went to the comic shop and was struggling to think of something to say to not-boyfriend beyond ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ I blurted out some nonsense about wondering if he knew how to take care of autographs, and I ended up showing him my Oscar Isaac signed Kylo Ren journal (WHY AM I LIKE THIS I HATE MYSELF), but I might take his suggestion and put it in one of my comic protector bags.

Oh, also! He was wearing that backpack he always has, that he clips in the front like a 5 yo whose mom made him do it except he’s a grown ass man and chooses to do it, he is so adorable and dorky, I love him.

As we were leaving we saw Gayle Rankin (Ophelia) by the door so we stopped and talked to her and she signed our playbills. I’m a bit bummed we didn’t see anyone else but tbh, Keegan-Michael Key could have been standing right next to me and I would not have noticed because OSCAR OH MY GOD.

We found out later that Lupita Nyong’o had been there too, and I’m so sad I didn’t see her, her bone structure is sooooo lovely, it would have been so cool to see her beautiful face in person, plus I think she and Oscar are so cute. But alas. I suppose at least I can say I was in the same room as Lupita!

So we went for pizza (again, thanks for making me eat guys, even if you didn’t know you were doing it!) and went back to the amazing fancy hotel and I sent my pic to like everyone I know, and I was just so blindingly happy, and I was fucking exhausted but I was so hyped I barely slept anyway, I would doze a little and go back on Tumblr and doze a little and text my mom, it was ridiculous, lol.

And that was my adventure with Hamlet and Oscar! It was so stressful and I was ridden with anxiety and I spent way too much money I shouldn’t have spent and at times it was crushingly disappointing, but in the end it all worked out and I had an amazing time, definitely one of my greatest experiences ever that I will cherish forever. I’m so glad I got to meet chelliaphra and brehaaorgana, as much of an introvert as I am and as much as I did like wandering around NYC on my own without any socialization pressure, it was so great getting to nerd out with them over Oscar and the play and they made it so much more fun. Plus, I appreciated the moral support when I was dying beforehand, lol. Thank you so much to everyone who put up with me through this whole thing, when I was freaking out and when I was miserable and when I was exploding with nerdy joy. <3 I’m sorry this is so long! I feel like I am leaving things out anyway!

Bottom line: OSCAR ISAAC IS BEAUTIFUL AND A FANTASTIC ACTOR AND A LOVELY HUMAN BEING AND HE HAS A GREAT ASS.

Sometimes being utterly ridiculous and just saying ‘fuck it’ totally works out, guys!

[uomo-accattivante]

A little over a third of the way into the modestly dressed, disarmingly brilliant production of Hamlet now playing at the Public, Oscar Isaac as the iconic prince turns to us before one of his famous soliloquies and calmly tells us, “Now I am alone.”

I caught my breath at these four words. They were not a statement of fact — they were an invitation to the audience to imagine.

Not every Hamlet calls attention to its own theatricality. This Hamlet — beginning with its use of the company onstage as a second audience, a mirror for us out in the seats — engages us in a game that makes us contemplate the very nature of performing. When Oscar Isaac tells us, still surrounded by his fellow actors, “I am alone,” he is not describing but instructing. He is working on our imaginary forces — or, as he might say, our mind’s eye — telling us, These are the rules of this game. Come, play.

It is a mark of this production’s intelligence that its rules are inscribed in its aesthetic from the very beginning by a set of design choices that blur the line between audience and stage. The Anspacher is a strange space: a thrust configuration — which is Shakespearean enough — but surrounded by raked banks of red upholstered seats that come from an entirely different era of spectatorship. Hamlet’s set (by David Zinn), like the production itself, is unassuming and very, very smart: It extends the feel of the seating banks by covering the whole stage in red carpet. The chairs used onstage are a match to those in the front rows of the audience: modern, institutional, more red upholstery. Hanging above the playing space are additional house lights mimicking those above the audience (these the domain of lighting designer Mark Barton, whose work is a subtle, powerful complement to Zinn’s).

The main playing area — apart from the chairs and a table that looks like it could have been pulled from one of the Public’s conference rooms — is empty. The back wall is unadorned. Props are few and almost all present at the back of the stage at the show’s beginning, waiting for eventual use. There is a station for a musician (the incredible Ernst Reijseger) who creates the entirety of the production’s sonic landscape on a cello and a set of wooden pipes that play like an eerie organ. Each actor has only one costume, and if designer Kaye Voyce has not pulled directly from the actors’ own closets, she has quietly and cleverly curated a palette that feels as if she has done so. Director Sam Gold and his team of designers seem to have constructed their world in alignment with Hamlet’s advice to the Players:

--- …O’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. ---

The actors likewise adhere to these instructions: Their attack on the language is clear and often conversational. They carry us deftly through the poetry without bluster or bravado — we follow the threads of their thought, and when great emotion flows it flows naturally, from a wellspring of grief or rage or shame that feels real.

Real. Ay, there’s the rub. Nothing onstage in this Hamlet is “theatrical” in the way that we have come to understand the term — as a synonym for spectacular, outlandish, or exaggerated. Rather, Sam Gold and his company are interested in a different and perhaps deeper definition of theatricality: Their Hamlet is playing a game with our notions of real and pretend, of sincerity and falseness. After all, you might think that by following Hamlet’s advice to the Players you could simply end up with a realistic TV drama — but Hamlet isn’t asking for realism, he’s asking for truth. He’s asking for honesty wrapped in the artifice of play. The heart of Gold’s production — and its genius — lies in its obsession with the paradox of the Honest Performance.

Hamlet insists that he “know[s] not ‘seems.,” but any good actor will tell you that you can feel all day long, but without seeming — without the show of that feeling — there’s no play. And Hamlet, the character, is a good actor. (This Hamlet, in the person of Oscar Isaac, at once mischievous and deeply soulful, is exceedingly good.) Part of the character’s tragedy is that he is a thoughtful comedian trapped in the bloody, archaic genre of the Revenge Play, forced into playing a role his very nature abhors. Imagine if Othello or Hotspur had been Old Hamlet’s son. Claudius would be dead and young Fortinbras defeated by Act 2, Scene 1.

Gold’s production dispenses with Fortinbras and with all references to any wider political conflict. (In interviews, he and Isaac have repeatedly described the show as “intimate.”) It’s a vision of a Hamlet in which the wider world is not Scandinavia but the theater. The company’s members are aware on some deep level of their existence both as actors and as characters in a play. Keegan-Michael Key (who makes a charming Horatio) begins the performance with a casual, endearingly silly curtain speech to the audience, but this is no mere lark: It introduces us to Horatio as a kind of narrator, a role that he will return to with much more gravity when, at the play’s end, he assumes responsibility for telling Hamlet’s story. He even adopts one of Fortinbras’s lines at the finale — “[Let] these bodies / High on a stage be placed to the view” — and when he says it, we hear not a dictator organizing a military funeral but a stage manager preparing for a literal eternity of performances of Hamlet.

In cautioning Ophelia not to trust Hamlet’s declarations of love, Laertes shows a similar subliminal awareness of the play-world he inhabits. He warns his sister that Hamlet “may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself, for on his choice depends / The safety and health of this whole state.” By “whole state” he typically means Denmark, but in this production Laertes (the compelling Anatol Yusef) gestures to us, the audience, and around the room at the chairs, the table, the lighting grid. Laertes is warning his sister, This story depends on him, and there’s only one way it can go. Likewise, when plotting to send Hamlet to England, Claudius (the superb Ritchie Coster) growls that he can’t outright punish his troublesome stepson, because “he’s loved of the distracted multitude.” Those last two words can only mean us. We, the audience, love Hamlet, and our imaginary forces hold sway in this room; Claudius, Laertes, and the rest of this ensemble maintain an understated awareness that they are acting in Hamlet’s play. This is not nudge-nudge-wink-wink mugging; the actors are not nodding their heads at us and mouthing, as Hamlet might have it, “Well, well we know.” A showier self-consciousness of theatrical artifice is fairly common on the stage these days. There is something subtler at work here — an investigation of the paradoxical alchemy of sincerity and deceit that lies at the heart of Hamlet and of theater itself.

The layers of this theatrical onion are further multiplied by the fact that the nine-person company of players doubles as … the Company of Players. By limiting the number of bodies onstage and letting each one accumulate valences of meaning, Gold sounds Shakespeare’s play like a great resonant bell. Seeing the Player King/Player Queen scene played out in the bodies of Gertrude and Claudius (who is also the ghost of Old Hamlet) is a revelation: Often delivered with self-conscious puffy artifice, here the scene feels like a moment out of time, like watching Hamlet witness a moment that might truly have taken place between his mother and his sickly father. And the Player King’s warning to his Queen — that she won’t be able to keep her vows never to remarry — rings with pathos and prophecy: “Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.” So says this false king — this actor — prefiguring Hamlet’s recognition of the “divinity that shapes our ends” and summing up in a single line the tragedy of the prince’s character. What is Hamlet if not a creature of thought, doomed to an end none of his own?

Or take the doubling of Laertes and the Lead Player, who enters into a friendly competition with Hamlet over their shared delivery of the great Pyrrhus speech. The Player astounds Hamlet with his ability to “force his soul so to his own conceit” — he can make himself weep on cue! “For nothing! For Hecuba!” — which drives Hamlet to the frenzied contemplation of his own inaction. By this point, the Hamlet who could clearly separate performance from substance is gone: He now longs to act in all senses of the word, even if it means conflating those senses. In attempting to follow the Player’s example, Hamlet substitutes performance for the real action he so craves (and fears), winding up screaming melodramatically into the winds (“Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! / O, vengeance!”) and, here, doing great violence to a dish of lasagna. No wonder Isaac looks up afterwards — the clown who tried to play the avenger — and cracks a wry, abashed smile: “Why, what an ass am I!”

Though Hamlet knows in his most lucid moments that the performance of a thing is not the thing itself, he remains obsessed with the enactment of his own feelings, as if performing them paradoxically proves their honesty. When this Hamlet confronts Laertes at Ophelia’s grave (“What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis?”), we have already seen these two men compete in the performance of grief. First, it was for Hecuba, a mere fantasy, a play. Now, it is for Ophelia, a real woman whom they both loved. Laertes and Hamlet are both wracked by real anguish, and they are also playing at it: Who loved her more? Who can mourn her better? It’s a wrenching thing to watch — who among us has not felt something deeply and simultaneously felt ourselves performing the feeling? Acting is in our nature; we long to be witnessed.

Is such ore always there for the mining in this scene between the grieving lover and the grieving brother? Yes. But does every Hamlet mine it? No. It is the mark of a deeply intelligent production when it makes you hear anew a work encrusted with so many barnacles of historical, literary, and theatrical precedent.

They don’t call it “Poem Unlimited” for nothing. The glory of Hamlet is its unsoundable depth. Another director with another production might strike its great bell from a slightly different angle and produce completely different resonances. Another director might be as fascinated by kingship, war, and affairs of state as Sam Gold is by layers of theatricality. Still, while Gold might have stripped the play of its original political context, this “intimate” production has not been stripped of politics. Its seeming domesticity is deceptive; it has something pointed to say about the political state of our world, but its tool is a needle, not a bludgeon. By its indirections, we find directions out.

“Ay sir,” quips Hamlet to Polonius, “to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” It’s a great line, always, but at this moment I heard it cut the air with a new sharpness. That word, honest, rings out over and over in this production. The politics of this Hamlet is a politics of performance, of being and seeming, of sincerity and hypocrisy, truth and corruption. In this way, Gold’s production may well be an abstract and brief chronicle for our time. After all, how many of our highest politicians might currently be asking themselves, “May one be pardoned and retain the offence?”

Hamlet is at the Public Theater through September 3.

###

@poe-also-bucky

[donalsgirl]

A Hamlet Where Everyone’s Onstage

A little over a third of the way into the modestly dressed, disarmingly brilliant production of Hamlet now playing at the Public, Oscar Isaac as the iconic prince turns to us before one of his famous soliloquies and calmly tells us, “Now I am alone.”

I caught my breath at these four words. They were not a statement of fact — they were an invitation to the audience to imagine.

Isaac was not alone, not in this moment nor ever. Hamlet as written contains seven soliloquies, but the Hamlet who is now wrestling with his fate on the red-carpeted boards of the Anspacher Theater is never a solo figure: He always has an audience. During each soliloquy, members of the ensemble sit or stand strewn about the stage, still present, giving their prince a quiet, serious attention — a company of players, watching and listening.

Not every Hamlet calls attention to its own theatricality. This Hamlet — beginning with its use of the company onstage as a second audience, a mirror for us out in the seats — engages us in a game that makes us contemplate the very nature of performing. When Oscar Isaac tells us, still surrounded by his fellow actors, “I am alone,” he is not describing but instructing. He is working on our imaginary forces — or, as he might say, our mind’s eye — telling us, These are the rules of this game. Come, play.

It is a mark of this production’s intelligence that its rules are inscribed in its aesthetic from the very beginning by a set of design choices that blur the line between audience and stage. The Anspacher is a strange space: a thrust configuration — which is Shakespearean enough — but surrounded by raked banks of red upholstered seats that come from an entirely different era of spectatorship. Hamlet’s set (by David Zinn), like the production itself, is unassuming and very, very smart: It extends the feel of the seating banks by covering the whole stage in red carpet. The chairs used onstage are a match to those in the front rows of the audience: modern, institutional, more red upholstery. Hanging above the playing space are additional house lights mimicking those above the audience (these the domain of lighting designer Mark Barton, whose work is a subtle, powerful complement to Zinn’s).

The main playing area — apart from the chairs and a table that looks like it could have been pulled from one of the Public’s conference rooms — is empty. The back wall is unadorned. Props are few and almost all present at the back of the stage at the show’s beginning, waiting for eventual use. There is a station for a musician (the incredible Ernst Reijseger) who creates the entirety of the production’s sonic landscape on a cello and a set of wooden pipes that play like an eerie organ. Each actor has only one costume, and if designer Kaye Voyce has not pulled directly from the actors’ own closets, she has quietly and cleverly curated a palette that feels as if she has done so. Director Sam Gold and his team of designers seem to have constructed their world in alignment with Hamlet’s advice to the Players:

…O’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

The actors likewise adhere to these instructions: Their attack on the language is clear and often conversational. They carry us deftly through the poetry without bluster or bravado — we follow the threads of their thought, and when great emotion flows it flows naturally, from a wellspring of grief or rage or shame that feels real.

Real. Ay, there’s the rub. Nothing onstage in this Hamlet is “theatrical” in the way that we have come to understand the term — as a synonym for spectacular, outlandish, or exaggerated. Rather, Sam Gold and his company are interested in a different and perhaps deeper definition of theatricality: Their Hamlet is playing a game with our notions of real and pretend, of sincerity and falseness. After all, you might think that by following Hamlet’s advice to the Players you could simply end up with a realistic TV drama — but Hamlet isn’t asking for realism, he’s asking for truth. He’s asking for honesty wrapped in the artifice of play. The heart of Gold’s production — and its genius — lies in its obsession with the paradox of the Honest Performance.

Hamlet insists that he “know[s] not ‘seems.,” but any good actor will tell you that you can feel all day long, but without seeming — without the show of that feeling — there’s no play. And Hamlet, the character, is a good actor. (This Hamlet, in the person of Oscar Isaac, at once mischievous and deeply soulful, is exceedingly good.) Part of the character’s tragedy is that he is a thoughtful comedian trapped in the bloody, archaic genre of the Revenge Play, forced into playing a role his very nature abhors. Imagine if Othello or Hotspur had been Old Hamlet’s son. Claudius would be dead and young Fortinbras defeated by Act 2, Scene 1.

Gold’s production dispenses with Fortinbras and with all references to any wider political conflict. (In interviews, he and Isaac have repeatedly described the show as “intimate.”) It’s a vision of a Hamlet in which the wider world is not Scandinavia but the theater. The company’s members are aware on some deep level of their existence both as actors and as characters in a play. Keegan-Michael Key (who makes a charming Horatio) begins the performance with a casual, endearingly silly curtain speech to the audience, but this is no mere lark: It introduces us to Horatio as a kind of narrator, a role that he will return to with much more gravity when, at the play’s end, he assumes responsibility for telling Hamlet’s story. He even adopts one of Fortinbras’s lines at the finale — “[Let] these bodies / High on a stage be placed to the view” — and when he says it, we hear not a dictator organizing a military funeral but a stage manager preparing for a literal eternity of performances of Hamlet.

In cautioning Ophelia not to trust Hamlet’s declarations of love, Laertes shows a similar subliminal awareness of the play-world he inhabits. He warns his sister that Hamlet “may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself, for on his choice depends / The safety and health of this whole state.” By “whole state” he typically means Denmark, but in this production Laertes (the compelling Anatol Yusef) gestures to us, the audience, and around the room at the chairs, the table, the lighting grid. Laertes is warning his sister, This story depends on him, and there’s only one way it can go. Likewise, when plotting to send Hamlet to England, Claudius (the superb Ritchie Coster) growls that he can’t outright punish his troublesome stepson, because “he’s loved of the distracted multitude.” Those last two words can only mean us. We, the audience, love Hamlet, and our imaginary forces hold sway in this room; Claudius, Laertes, and the rest of this ensemble maintain an understated awareness that they are acting in Hamlet’s play. This is not nudge-nudge-wink-wink mugging; the actors are not nodding their heads at us and mouthing, as Hamlet might have it, “Well, well we know.” A showier self-consciousness of theatrical artifice is fairly common on the stage these days. There is something subtler at work here — an investigation of the paradoxical alchemy of sincerity and deceit that lies at the heart of Hamlet and of theater itself.

The layers of this theatrical onion are further multiplied by the fact that the nine-person company of players doubles as … the Company of Players. By limiting the number of bodies onstage and letting each one accumulate valences of meaning, Gold sounds Shakespeare’s play like a great resonant bell. Seeing the Player King/Player Queen scene played out in the bodies of Gertrude and Claudius (who is also the ghost of Old Hamlet) is a revelation: Often delivered with self-conscious puffy artifice, here the scene feels like a moment out of time, like watching Hamlet witness a moment that might truly have taken place between his mother and his sickly father. And the Player King’s warning to his Queen — that she won’t be able to keep her vows never to remarry — rings with pathos and prophecy: “Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.” So says this false king — this actor — prefiguring Hamlet’s recognition of the “divinity that shapes our ends” and summing up in a single line the tragedy of the prince’s character. What is Hamlet if not a creature of thought, doomed to an end none of his own?

Or take the doubling of Laertes and the Lead Player, who enters into a friendly competition with Hamlet over their shared delivery of the great Pyrrhus speech. The Player astounds Hamlet with his ability to “force his soul so to his own conceit” — he can make himself weep on cue! “For nothing! For Hecuba!” — which drives Hamlet to the frenzied contemplation of his own inaction. By this point, the Hamlet who could clearly separate performance from substance is gone: He now longs to act in all senses of the word, even if it means conflating those senses. In attempting to follow the Player’s example, Hamlet substitutes performance for the real action he so craves (and fears), winding up screaming melodramatically into the winds (“Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! / O, vengeance!”) and, here, doing great violence to a dish of lasagna. No wonder Isaac looks up afterwards — the clown who tried to play the avenger — and cracks a wry, abashed smile: “Why, what an ass am I!”

Though Hamlet knows in his most lucid moments that the performance of a thing is not the thing itself, he remains obsessed with the enactment of his own feelings, as if performing them paradoxically proves their honesty. When this Hamlet confronts Laertes at Ophelia’s grave (“What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis?”), we have already seen these two men compete in the performance of grief. First, it was for Hecuba, a mere fantasy, a play. Now, it is for Ophelia, a real woman whom they both loved. Laertes and Hamlet are both wracked by real anguish, and they are also playing at it: Who loved her more? Who can mourn her better? It’s a wrenching thing to watch — who among us has not felt something deeply and simultaneously felt ourselves performing the feeling? Acting is in our nature; we long to be witnessed.

Is such ore always there for the mining in this scene between the grieving lover and the grieving brother? Yes. But does every Hamlet mine it? No. It is the mark of a deeply intelligent production when it makes you hear anew a work encrusted with so many barnacles of historical, literary, and theatrical precedent.

They don’t call it “Poem Unlimited” for nothing. The glory of Hamlet is its unsoundable depth. Another director with another production might strike its great bell from a slightly different angle and produce completely different resonances. Another director might be as fascinated by kingship, war, and affairs of state as Sam Gold is by layers of theatricality. Still, while Gold might have stripped the play of its original political context, this “intimate” production has not been stripped of politics. Its seeming domesticity is deceptive; it has something pointed to say about the political state of our world, but its tool is a needle, not a bludgeon. By its indirections, we find directions out.

“Ay sir,” quips Hamlet to Polonius, “to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” It’s a great line, always, but at this moment I heard it cut the air with a new sharpness. That word, honest, rings out over and over in this production. The politics of this Hamlet is a politics of performance, of being and seeming, of sincerity and hypocrisy, truth and corruption. In this way, Gold’s production may well be an abstract and brief chronicle for our time. After all, how many of our highest politicians might currently be asking themselves, “May one be pardoned and retain the offence?”

Source

[beesmygod]

this is what riverdale is about (part 4)

part 1

part 2

part 3

i’m back, to continue from where we left off. obnoxiously, i’m going to take a minute to plug my patreon, which is primarily for my webcomic but i also do movie reviews and talk about bad books i find so if you like these posts, you’ll probably like those as well. all i ask....is one dollar a month.

anyway fuck that let’s get back into this.

images are from the riverdale wiki

SEASON ONE (PART 2):

the last picture show: immediately this show reveals that our beloved jughead has been living in a nearly abandoned drive-in that he also works at. too bad for him, because it’s closing down. hilariously, literally nobody in his circle of friends cares and call his make-shift house a crack den. owned. its revealed an anonymous buyer purchased it from the town and the mayor decided to sell it to whoever.

archie brings flowers to his teacher-girlfriend’s recital and when he and grundy (and his dad) head to pop’s for a good ol malt or whatever, betty confronts him about his relationship. betty is hurt when he says grundy believed in him when no one else did and goes home with renewed purpose: take grundy down.

veronica’s mom is caught having a heated argument with a member of the southside serpents gang next to a dumpster by cheryl who, as she delights in misery and disaster, captures it all on camera. she shows veronica, who confronts her mother who brushes her off.

betty lures grundy into a fake interview for her school paper instead of going to the police. betty seems to be determining all of this based on the fact that she didnt have any social media until a year ago, which really makes me question betty’s journalistic bonefides. its framed like this means she didn’t exist before she got a twitter or whatever. its really weird. more relevant is that the only record of a geraldine grundy.....WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO DIED 7 YEARS AGO!!!!! she takes this information to archie as well, who doesn’t care at all. he’s way too horny to care.

betty breaks into grundy’s vw bug and finds a gun and her real i.d. with her real name. archie is still too horny to care, even though betty (again, really overstepping her journalistic bounds) says that grundy might have killed jason (BASED ON THE EXISTENCE OF A GUN BETTY!!! COME ON). archie finally asks grundy straight up what the fuck is going on and she cops to trying to escape from an abusive husband, hence the gun and fake names.

jughead finds out that archie’s dad’s construction company won the bid to destroy the drive-in. its a bad time to be jughead. he tries to ask archie’s dad not to tear down the drive-in. through this convo we learn that jughead’s dad was fired from andrews construction several years ago for theft. a scene after this reveals that veronica’s mom is facilitating the purchase of the drive-in with the mayor pn behalf of her incarcerated husband.

i’m so glad the wiki reminded me of this line, word for word: everyone (and i mean literally everyone in town) goes to the drive-in for one last hurrah, where the southside serpents are guffawing up a storm. veronica somehow silences them by saying “You know what happens to a snake when a Louboutin heel steps on it? Shut the hell up or you’ll find out.“ it sucks so bad. veronica then witnesses her mother having an encounter with the same gang member who she is revealed to be paying to drive down the value of the drive-in property so hiram lodge can buy it for cheap.

archie and grundy are caught in a passionate embrace after betty’s mom reads her diary and goes on the warpath, rightfully telling her to get the fuck out of town or she’ll reveal her to be a child molester. grundy agrees to leave and archie is heartbroken. the last show of geraldine this season is her ogling two teen boys. horrible. leave, woman.

jughead leaves his shitty home and on his way out is accosted by the same gang member who was talking to hermoine lodge and is revealed to be....JUGHEADS DAD!!!!!!!!!! whatever.

heart of darkness: the town is abuzz with jason’s upcoming funeral and the teens of riverdale are fighting over who gets to take the dead kids spot as captain of the football team in a really normal and not at all super ghoulish way. archie is working his heart out now that his favorite teacher/pedophile has fled town. he has his time wasted by a member of the pussycats, valerie, who nets him a meeting with a music songwriter who tells archie he doesn’t have time for his shit. its a weird and totally pointless scene in the long run. it doesnt matter because archie’s music thing never comes to anything. the guy tells archie later, when he returns with sheet music, that his songs suck shit and he hates his music and to get out of his office.

jason and polly’s (betty’s sister) relationship seems to be at the center of whatever happened to jason, so betty starts asking around town about her sister, by using dates as a cover to ask probing questions to members of the football team. she also tries asking her father, who explains that polly and jason had a fight, polly tried to kill herself and so was shipped off to a mental institution. learning about jason’s death fucked her up again so they shan’t be exposing her to more sordid info about the events. the only information they get is that jason was selling drugs to raise money to leave town.

betty and jughead trace this thread to find out why jason would want to leave town but veronica is already finding out firsthand after she is invited to the blossom mansion for the world’s worst sleepover before the memorial (cool timing): the blossoms are all insane. they make their money on maple syrup, using the funds to build riverdale as we know it. veronica and cheryl bond over their awful parents and versonic encourages cheryl to act out at jason’s memorial FOR SOME REASON. KNOWING FULL WELL WHO CHERYL IS.

demonstrating extremely normal judgement, betty and jughead plan to raid jason’s room during the memorial to find clues. cheryl goes full hamlet, throwing herself on the coffin and weeping during her eulogy. they use this as cover to sneak away and go commit the worst social faux-pax you truly can do. however, they are interrupted by cherly’s senile grandmother, nana rose, who mistakes her for polly and reveals polly and jason were engaged. 

betty takes this information to her father who reveals he already knows but forbid the arrangement because the blossoms and the coopers have been trying to kill each other for decades over the whole maple syrup empire thing. betty and jughead later suspect her dad broke into the sheriff's office to steal his files related to uhhh everything i guess; a hunch which turns out to be correct.

meanwhile veronica’s mom is sent a live snake by the serpent gang, calls big strong fred andrews to come save her and then asks him for a job.

faster pussycats! kill! kill!: first of all fuck, the name of this ep.

archie, for some reason because i guess he doesn’t know what embarrassment is, decides he’s going to play an original song he wrote for the school talent show. he immediately gets stage fright at the try-outs and wusses out. veronica goes behind his back to sign him up anyway. thanks, asshole!

valerie, from the last ep, quits the pussycats because josie is slightly more stressed than usual about uhhh the talent show. also because she has a crush on archie for some reason.

hermoine, while acting as fred andrews’ new secretary, realizes he’s fucking BROKE. why’d he hire her? who knows. too late now. she suggests firing some people (for example............her, maybe, fred) but fred cant bear it...and is hoping to be saved by the newest construction job he doesn’t know that hermoine is manipulating under the table. much like his son, fred is now too horny to care and they make out while veronica watches awkwardly.

the remaining pussycats try to figure out what to do about their missing member problem. josie’s mom helpfully lays out that they need a strong woman of color, but not one prettier or more talented than josie. enter...VERONICA!!! who is miffed because archie replaced her with valerie in the talent show duet. veronica is now scientifically less pretty and talented than josie by show standards, which just rules because i love thinking that there are teen power rankings in riverdale.

betty and jughead make their way to visit polly at The Sisters Of Quiet Mercy which is literally the best name for a goth cover band in the world. surprise! polly is pregnant with jason’s baby. polly reveals she and jason planned to run away together, but she was caught by her parents and sent away. she then awkwardly asks how jason is and someone has to break the news to her.

josie’s dad makes a brief appearance, which i absolutely do not remember at all. i thought he only showed up in season 3 which makes mayor mccoys character arc way more awkward. anyway, the mccoy family, the andrews and the lodges all have dinner together to discuss business and its awkward as all hell. no one at the table likes the andrews.

betty straight up asks her dad if he killed jason and her mom laughs her ass off at the idea of betty’s soft white suburban ham shank looking dad being able to kill a weed much less a human. keep that in mind.

veronica’s mom forges veronica signature on a form allowing andrews construction to move ahead with the job.

jughead and betty kiss after talking about how they arent their parents. keep that in mind. anyway, betty takes jughead to a car polly mentioned that full of EVIDENCE. they take picture of it and leave the car to go tell the sheriff because i guess suddenly no one has cellphones.  jughead and betty return with the sheriff later to find the car has been light up by an unknown person. almost immediately after, bughead tries to rescue polly at the institution only to find she’s already bailed. welp.

josie and valerie make up and all four pussycats perform. josie’s dad walks out on her performance? harsh. cool dad moves.

archie sings and the crowd loves it. who gives a shit.

a kid died, guys. come on.

[rndyounghowze]

Hamlet by Aquila Theatre at Stockton College in Galloway, NJ

Something's rotten in the state of Jersey with Aquila Theatre’s touring production of Hamlet by William Shakespeare which stopped at Stockton College for a performance. This production directed by Desiree Sanchez brings something more than Shakespeare but the question of existence itself. Hamlet is the center of a 400 year old story of woe and intrigue. Someone has murdered Hamlet’s father. Gertrude, his mother, has married Claudius, his uncle. What's worse Horatio has seen his father’s ghost has come back from the dead with a message: “I have been murdered and you must avenge my death” Add in the schemings of Polonius who thinks Hamlet is just a lovesick puppy over his daughter Ophelia, the meddling of his parents who use Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to keep tabs on him, and the well wishes of his friend Horatio and you can tell that Hamlet is soon to be torn at the seams by everyone’s expectations of him. How is he going to fulfill every obligation? Does he even want to go on at all? Desiree Sanchez as director worked together with the cast and crew to bring something visceral to the play. When someone watches Hamlet it is easy to watch with your upper brain, the one that wants to dissect it as literature. But through skillful work with actors and long work with designers to shape sound and light she presented a piece that brought us back to the caveman’s campfire. We’re watching Shakespeare in modern dress but we're also talking about the oldest questions of life, family, legacy, and what would we do to preserve each if death were crouching just outside the light in the darkness. I think that she did a wonderful job bringing actors to that dark edge while still making it something that they can do over and over while on national tour. She also seems to curate the whole picture using physical bodies, light, set, and costumes to make the whole experience. Some directors you can tell whether they favor working with actors more or whether they are just putting bodies on stage under pretty lights. Sanchez rides that line down the middle and uses all the resources at hand. That's a perfect skill to have while designing a national tour.

Our cast of eight may as well have been a cast of thousands with the kind of energy they brought to the production. Lewis Brown (Hamlet) gives us a character of struggle. He brings the full body and voice into what he does. I once always thought that Hamlet’s soliloquies were purely verbal and mental but you could tell he was leaning his whole body into it. He turned the iambic pentameter into a physical effort and showed us not only struggle with people but the struggle between the forces in his head. Lauren Drennan’s (Ophelia) did something that I never knew could happen. She made me feel sorry for Ophelia. There is always a sense of naive innocence when you talk about Ophelia and in her voice and her tone she started there but then as things got real and her life started falling apart she turned that innocence into a train wreck. She melded her voice and her body and her energy to become something that made me shiver. During her talk about the flowers I wanted to look away but found I couldn't. I wanted to run onstage, scoop her up, and take her away. Drennan brought her whole acting training to bear to make a character that made me feel guilty for sitting still. Now that was talent! Tyler La Marr (Horatio) served as a Sergeant in the Marine Corps and did two tours in Iraq. What better person to play a man do torn between duty to his country and duty to his prince. Immediately I found a man who was honorbound and struggling with those convictions usually willing to die for them but in his case brave enough to live for them. Kudos! My hat goes off to Guy de Villiers (Claudius) and Rebecca Reaney (Gertrude) who made me feel dirty as the king and queen. But it's also hard to play a king and queen that people hate but they still are captured by and have to take notice of onstage. There were times where I didn't believe their chemistry but I didn't know if that was because their characters literally had none in the story or if their performance was slightly off. I do feel however that it's something that is not as vague in most of their performances of this play. James Lavender played a host of characters from Polonius to the Ghost to the Grave Digger (as well as Osric). I want to focus on the work that he did as Polonius and the Ghost though. Playing both those fathers he brought forth the theme of legacy in the face of mortality. He brought a warmth to Polonius that I haven't seen and a tragic anguish to the Ghost that I've never seen. It really is a touching performance from such a versatile actor.

My hat is also off to Harriet Barrow and Michael Rivers who had to both play the parts of the players and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I felt that they did the best that could playing two characters that seemed to have conflicting emotions. And motivations. In fact I don't know if the director made the right choice putting the characters together at all. But I so admire the actors for pulling off the feat this mashup presented. Barrow pulls off a wonderful performance as Marcellus and the priest. I feel that I loved Rivers’ Bernardo far more than I did his Laertes and I'm not sure that's supposed to happen. Rivers was obviously at home in Shakespeare and while one of his characters left something to be desired I truly admired his professional caliber performance.

I also want to give a lot of credit to lighting design by Joel Moritz, sound design by Andy Evan Cohen, projections by Lianne Arnold, and Lara de Bruijn’s work on costumes. Together they took a minimal touring production and made every little element have meaning. Even a shift in costume, a square of light, and a piercing shriek of sound could be a major change in psychology or plot. It's such a breathtaking piece of art that these guys have collaborated on and you must go see it!

When you're directing or producing Shakespeare you’re always wearing two hats. The first hat is the director who must become an advocate and lover of this story and bring together a team of artists on one solid mission to bring it to the stage. The second hat is one of an adaptor who must turn a five act Elizabethan script intended for an ancient stage into a two act piece of modern theatre. Unless you're directing museum theatre you're no longer performing Shakespeare in the way it was originally intended. Director Desiree Sanchez also wore these two hats and I don't envy her that job even while I celebrate her work. To adapt Shakespeare in one sense is to make no one happy. There is half the audience that is having flashbacks from years of English teachers shoving the bard down their throats and half the audience are Shakespeare devotees who have seen or read it several times and will swoon the minute they hear a soliloquy or get outraged the minute they see something they love get cut. But like I said earlier to produce Shakespeare today is to change it. So essentially half the audience won't care and half the audience wants to take you out back after the show and punish you for your “crimes”.

This is what made Sanchez’s adaptation so surprising. I first noticed something was awry when the first act was over and I saw some clamor amongst some audience members around us. The person next to me and my wife asked us “Did you notice that they cut “To Be or Not To Be”? My first reaction was to shrug and go “wait did they?” My wife, who is often far faster on the uptake than me snapped her fingers and went “that's what was missing!” The circle of humanity around us seemed a buzz. As if they were saying, “How dare they cut that one piece?” But I was desperately searching my brain trying to figure out where it was supposed to be. You have to understand that I'm a mixture of these two types of people in the audience. I was force fed Shakespeare in high school and then became a lover or him in college and grad school. I went from saying we should never produce Shakespeare again to saying we should desperately revive him and the old canon. The through line of this is that I've had to read, memorize, and discuss that speech my whole academic life. How could I have been watching Shakespeare so intently that I forget that soliloquy!

Right as the lights were going down for the second act my wife said, “We saw what they did with ‘Murder on the Nile’ I bet they’ll put it somewhere in the second act.” I was dubious but found myself silently rooting for her as the show went on. Then it came to the scene at the graveyard. We know that Claudius and Laertes have hatched a plot to kill him. We have already seen him hold the skull of a dear beloved Yoric in his hands. We see Hamlet and Laertes fight over the body of Ophelia. Most of us know the ending is coming. We know that most of these characters are not long for this world. We know that Hamlet will soon go to a grave of his own.

And then Hamlet comes on stage again with these images of life and death fresh in our minds. He comes onstage at a time where both of these predescribed factions of the audience know the plot and then begins to utter those immortal words. A silent hush fell over the audience. My wife grabbed my arm and I was shocked. Not by the audacity of changing the script but because how much weight those words had in that moment. In a graveyard of dry bones with murder plots abound where we know death is imminent Hamlet doesn't talk about life or death. He talks about existence and whether he wants to be on this or not. The sheer weight and density of that moment became so palpable that it lay like a heavy blanket over the whole audience. Sanchez didn't just awake our visceral selves in this play but got two steps ahead of our brains and played our emotions like an instrument. She made Shakespeare new to people who had seen it a million times. Maybe there were some people left in the torch and pitchfork contingent but the standing ovation at the end of the play tells me there weren't many. I got home home and looked up Hamlet and there it was in Act Three. “To be or not to be that is the question”.originally the lamenting of a young man (what my wife calls an “emo teen”) Sanchez made it into the heavy thoughts of a suffering adult. Hamlet seemed to grow up in this version. I also found a myriad of characters that I had totally forgotten were in the play. Aquila Theatre managed to make an old play, not one of my favorites even, and make it hit me where I live. Not only that it hacked my memory and made me watch the play with my emotions not my theatre degree. And for that rare and special gift I give them thanks.

[totesmccoats]

Dark Nights Metal #2

Batman has stolen the most dangerous weapon in the universe, and the Justice League give chase. Meanwhile, the council of Immortals plan to find a way to kill Barbatos before his cult can summon them through Batman.

They may be too late.

There’s this saying in storytelling that you should start a scene 5 seconds into things so that your action has a running start. This issue exemplifies that perfectly, starting with Batman already having outsmarted the League, and baiting them with decoys upon decoys. It’s a genius way to remind us just how well prepared Batman really is without much actual set-up. And watching the League essentially open boxes within boxes until they reach the crunchy Batman center pays off like gangbusters.

And when Superman and Wonder Woman eventually do catch up with Bruce, the reveal is one of the best sight gags in comics history. Highlight below if you really need spoilers: Baby Darkseid in a baby bjorn 😀

And in the final pages of the issue, the shit hits the fan, and the real Dark Souls Nights Metal begins.

  Mister Miracle #2

Scott and Barda lead many successful campaigns against Darkseid’s forces, but none of it earns any respect from the new Highfather – Orion.

Instead, Orion sends Scott and Barda on a new mission – to kill Granny Goodness, the woman that tortured them through their childhood, while pretending to negotiate a treaty. But a half received message from Metron casts doubts on which side Scott should be fighting for.

Another great issue that probably couldn’t turn any more upside down than it does. The issue goes through stages: exhaustion by the endless warfare, then an unease while in Orion’s court as he compels his brother to bow to him, and finally uncertainty when Scott and Barda are “graciously” welcomed by Granny. You would think that GG would be the creepiest part of the issue, especially considering the reunion of abuser and abused, but she has nothing on Orion’s massive egotrip.

Luckily, King is skillful enough to break up the discomfort of the issue with one sweet, and incredibly relatable, scene of Scott and Barda trying to figure out how showers on New Genesis are supposed to work. Part of that sweetness is soured when it’s implied that one of Barda’s continuing insecurities was seeded by GG, and that GG knows it; but it’s the initial thought that counts, right?

Right now, Mister Miracle is an almost Hamlet-esque family drama above everything else – a deadly and divine Thanksgiving; and its completely gripping.

  The Flash #30

Infected by the black suit Negative Speed Force, Barry finally snaps at Singh and his fellow crime lab workers after they chastise him for investigating the missing samples alone. Luckily, Kristen won’t be pushed away so easily, and manages to talk him down in private, which leads Barry to a break in the investigation, which he follows up on as the Flash. Waiting for him is the thief, but he’s more than Flash bargained for.

I love everything about this issue. It’s just classic comics. Negative influenced Barry finally reaches his breaking point and angsts out in front of everybody! And then we get a new villain using a classic formula: after experimenting on himself, Bloodwork manages to turn his hemophilia into a psychic control over all blood. So good!

The Flash is on a roll right now, largely going back to superhero fundamentals, and knocking them out of the park.

  Wonder Woman #30

After being persuaded to be part of Hamilton Revere’s experiments to use her blood in regular people, Wonder Woman is told that he plans to use it to make super soldiers, not cure diseases. Realizing she’s been duped, Wonder Woman rescinds her help. And, realizing Diana has been led into a trap, Steve and Etta make their way towards rescuing her.

Following Fontana’s pattern so far, the prolonged fight scene in this issue is better than everything that comes after it. Diana’s running monologue where she says she will be a hero for humanity, but not a weapon, really works for her character, especially as she fights off partial Wonder-ized super soldiers working under Revere’s orders to – quite literally – bleed her dry. Wonder Woman will not be made an object.

But, the issues quality takes a sharp downturn almost immediately after the villain’s base explodes. It’s almost as though there were two writers on this book, it’s that drastic. Thankfully, it’s only for three pages, but it’s a sour note to leave this story, and this creative team, on.

  Amazing Spider-Man #32

Defeated, Norman Osborn searches once again to re-awake the Goblin inside himself, a search that leads him to the Temple With No Name, high in the Himalayas, to begin studying the arcane arts.

This is a one-shot, and a relatively insignificant one, all things considered, but a fine enough story in and of itself. I love the art of Smallwood and Bellaire, fresh off their run with Rucka on Moon Knight, and that meta-reference also is a small hint towards how this story winds-up.

But, honestly, Osborn isn’t as compelling a character as Slott would like him to be in this issue, and acknowledging that the story is similar to those of other magic users in the Marvel Universe isn’t an excuse for the lack of anything novel in this telling.

  Ms. Marvel #22

Just having found out that Jersey’s newest villain is one of her school friends, and revealing her own secret identity as a way to reach him, Ms. Marvel is just barely able to escape from Lockdown. Totally exhausted, and opposed by half the city, Kamala is lucky that the other half has her back, and also, that she’s friends with a teleporting dog.

Between this and Black Bolt, Lockjaw is in the running to be this month’s Marvel MVP. The rest of the issue is fantastic, too, demonstrating the power of a community to rise up against the parts of it that would destroy them from within. More heroic than Kamala are Nakia and Tyesha, who lead a march to the mosque where KIND has their kidnapped inhumans surrounded, and present them with a document from the court proclaiming their actions to be illegal. She’s also backed up by the rare good cop, and recently former mayor Marchesi.

After a quick refueling at a friendly neighborhood Mediterranean restaurant, Ms. Marvel hops back into the fray, but in this issue, the day is truly won by the people, whom, united, can never be defeated.

  Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #24

Ultron is a T-Rex now! That’s all you need! Also, Squirrel Girl teams up with Antonio the Doombot to try and stop Ultron, who is a T-Rex now.

Henderson and Renzi do some neat things with Ultron’s iconic face-lights cutting through the darkness in the beginning of the issue, and it’s almost a shame they don’t keep it up longer. But, almost as quickly as they finish doing that, North introduces us to Antonio the Doombot, who continues this series’ tradition of scene-stealing robots; although Ultron doesn’t let Antonio do so easily.

  Kill or Be Killed #12

After killing the guy who threatened Kira, Dylan realizes that if he really wants his newly improved relationship with Kira to last, he’s going to have to bring down the entire Russian mob before they can harm her or himself.

What strikes me most about this issue is the contrast between happy Dylan and vengeful Dylan. On Halloween, Dylan realizes that every moment he gets to spend with Kira is a miracle, and joyously wonders the city with her until they settle into each-other’s arms at the end of the night.

But then he’s consumed by vengeful Dylan, who compels him to stake-out a Russian Mafioso until he can lead him to his boss and tell him everything he knows before killing him in cold blood. He ruminates on how he’s learned to ignore his fear response because he’s realized that he’s not the first or only murderer among humanity. He’s ruthless, calculating, and single-minded. And you being to wonder how these two Dylans could possibly be the same person.

  Redlands #2

OK, this series is going in a very different direction than I expected. Having successfully liberated the town of Redlands, Florida; Bridget, Alice, and Ro became the new police force. Their latest case is chasing “Redbrant,” an “artist” murderer who poses his victims in symbolic positions while stuffing their bodies with alchemically treated rose-petals, and paints solid red canvases with their blood. Moreover, he knows about Bridget, Alice, and Ro’s witchcraft, and wants to expose them to the world.

If this series decides to settle into Witch Law & Order, I am totally here for that if this issue is any indication of how that would pan out. But Bellare has also clearly built a much deeper world with Redlands, full of – besides witchcraft – artistically predisposed murderers, and perverted high-school principals that prey on their students. Redlands may be run by witches, but men still be creepy.

Coming off its explosive cold-open of an issue, Redlands is still warming up, but I’m excited to see where else this series decides to go.

Comic Reviews for 9/13/17 Dark Nights Metal #2 Batman has stolen the most dangerous weapon in the universe, and the Justice League give chase.