#nor is it a historical piece. it is still a masterpiece though)

[mexashepot]

"Jews control the media"

Ok why is there not even one musical about ANY of the fascinating events that took place during the era of the 2nd temple then, huh?

[gardenofkore]

When Gelon became tyrant of Syracuse (485 BC) the productivity of the Syracusan mint was enormously increased in order to provide a great stock of such coins for the warchest, with en eye to the inevitable struggle for power against Carthage, which came to a head in 480 BC. Gelon’s victory at Himera in 480 is supposed to have occurred on the same day as the defeat of the Persians at Salamis. Whether or not this was so, it was a victory which in the words of the poet Simonides ‘rescued Hellas from the heavy yoke of slavery’, and ensured the safe development of Greek civilization in the west for at least a couple of generations. Perhaps in connection with this victory, there were minted the famous quasi-metallic coins known as the Demareteion. This was a large decadrachm or ten-drachma piece, similar in essentials to the ordinary coins of quite extraordinary quality. On the obverse there are the slim lean horses and eager charioteer; below them, in separate panel, a running lion which, it was formerly thought, symbolyzed Carthage in defeat, but whose precise significance is somewhat still elusive. In a similar position on a later tetradachm, there is shown a sea-monster or ketos which may allude to the Syracusan victory over the Etruscans off Kymai. On the reverse of the Demareteion, the head of Arethusa is crowned with laurel wreath to signify victory. Firm and precise in modelling, there is almost and ethereal delicacy of touch which extends to details such as the eye and the pendant necklace. The dolphins go clockwise round the head but the descriptions runs the other way. Here beyond doubt a great and sensitive artist bas able to use the accepted forms of the Syracusan coin to create a masterpiece, the surviving specimens of which are extremely few. The splendid preservation of the British Museum’s example enables us to appreciate its quality to the full. The name of the coin, the Demareteion, is taken from that of Demarete, Gelon’s wife. Our sources relate that she interceded with Gelon to moderate the terms imposed on the Carthaginians vanquished at Himera in 480 BC, and that their envoys in gratitude presented Demarete with a golden crown; and that subsequently she had made coins each worth fifty litrai, that is ten drachmai. The coins in question were identified as such by the Duc de Luynes early in the nineteenth century and his theory has generally been accepted. Recently, however, it has been argued from circumstancial evidence that we should reject this tradition and place the coins ten years or more later, which would of course change their historical significance. The controversy continues, but it is difficult simply to reject the tradition outright. Whether or not the date can be fixed accurately, the so-called Demareteion, forms a notable landmark in Syracusan art. the lovely head was not of course in any way intended to be a portrait of Demarete, though it does give a vivid impression of an individual model, meditative yet hinting at reserves of strong personality. Although Gelon and the other Sicilian tyrants of this time were virtually kings, neither their names nor portraits ever appear on the coins; indeed, portraits occur on coins sporadically only from the end of the fifth century and regularly only after the time of Alexander the Great.

Jenkins, G. K. Coins of Greek Sicily, p. 20-21

[300iqprower]

I found the Schindler’s List of video games. No I’m not joking.

Okay kinda, look i wrote a mini thesis when i found out TLOU2 deadass won GOTY, which is absolutely hilarious cause it’s beyond even my expectation, I didn’t expect them to give it the full RDR2 treatment, btw I picked a very good year to wizen up to the fact TGA is basically a circlejerk and the popular vote has no influience on the outcome [[So apparently its Golden Joystick which actually is people voted. “Gamers” really are just the definition of “Fuck you, Got Mine” and I hope everyone who voted for Naughty Dog under any circumstance has to work retail crunch until they learn empathy.]] BUT ANYWAYS I genuinely wrote the following out of interest, not anger. In fact I cant wait for all the people to explode because they still dont realize the game awards are a sham.  this is ALL off the cuff, be warned, cause I basically rambled to friend about having stumbled onto a thesis prompt, I cut out the first half of it for that reason so here goes:

So then.

this entire thing?

It proves that "critics" don't actually want video games to be video games. They don't want video games to be art either. They just want video games to be movies

Writing is not a universal constant, because every medium tells stories in different ways

Do you judge the writing of a book the way you judge the writing of a movie? Does the fact a book wont have voice actors or background music make it movies but worse? of course not

so why do people keep acting like that's how it works for video games?

A video game will never, NEVER be able to be as well written as a high tier film, not in terms of pure standalone writing. The same way a movie will never be as well written as a book in terms of pure standalone writing.

Undertale is probably the best written game ever made. the writing isn't remotely as good as a B grade movie

because in a movie writing and acting are how you tell the story. That's its strength

Video games have a different. fucking. strength: GAMEPLAY

When you think of "art" in video games, what comes to mind?

Maybe Shadow of the Colossus? Undertale? Braid? Journey? These all work.

And ya know what they have in common?

They are not "cinematic" and they are not "masterpieces of writing and acting”

in fact of those 4 games, 3 don't actually have dialogue unless you seriously count those messages from Dormin

You know what they all have in common though?

They don't use writing to convey their story, messages, themes, etc. They use gameplay

Movies treat videogame qualities to be detrimental in a film. people attribute this to contempt. It isn't those people who say a movie being like a video game is bad? they are absolutely right.

And in that Exact. Same. Vein. VIdeo games shouldn’t be actively trying to be like movies

not if they want to be anything more than a B movie

Let’s just start with several examples of different ways video games create “artistic” narrative and experiences:

Shadow of the Colossus tells its story by having you realize that your actions as the player have unleashed a terrible evil. Braid sets its time travel gameplay mechanic in reverse at the end for its big story reveal. Journey has zero dialogue and through the way you traverse environments alone tells a grand epic. Undertale applies the idea of metanarrative to video games in a way unlike any other, something plenty of movies have done but no movie has ever been able to do to an even remote degree that Undertale did, because unlike a film the audience has direct input. Does that make metanarrative films like Fight Club, Inception, or far more historically famous than, either, a “Citizen Kane” type film if you’re gonna bring that stupid notion out, Sunset Boulevard, does that make it bad metanarrative? NO. IT MEANS ITS A DIFFERENT VERSION OF THAT STYLE.

Bastion is dialogue heavy, with constant narration, so is stanley parable, but both games have that narration dictated by the player's action. In a movie narration can only dictate predetermined action, even if that means unreliable narration or outright lying in the narration, that won't change the fact what it describes is predetermined because it's a movie. In a game, it could be different every single time.

There are far more examples of artistic games that are art specifically because they arent trying to be art in the same sense as a movie

Papers Please for example

THAT could genuinely be equivalent to Schindler's List

Because you are deciding who lives and dies, you TECHNICALLY aren't, but you know what happens to the people you deny. You know exactly what will happen to them.(edited)

so do you let them in even if it's not legal, deducting your own pay and making it that much more likely you can't afford food or heat that night for your family? or do you send them knowingly to the gulag?

In a film that already is a powerful message and like I said it genuinely isnt that far off from schindler's list. As a movie done right, papers please could be a harrowing story about those kinds of things. But it wouldn't be any better, nor would it likely be told in a way remotely similar to how you experience games.

because again: they. are. different. mediums.

That's what it means to have different mediums, you can tell the same story in completely different ways to elicit different, equally meaningful responses

In schindler's list what makes it harrowing is that its a man who was on his way to wealth who is sacrificing that wealth and his own safety to save the lives of innocents being persecuted

the emotional response is from seeing how Oskar Schindler deals with the situation he's ended up in and whether he has the resolve to save those people or if he would sell them out to secure his own prospects

In Paper's Please it's not even close to the same

You have no idea how grand scale the things going on are, you only have bits of info to piece together with the only context given being you are a border patrol guard who will serve your authoritarian "country"

There's a game called Not Tonight that has the same gameplay but gets these details wrong

it makes the resistance obviously the good guys, there's little to no penalty to helping them over the state.

in that aspect its MORE like Schindler's list because obviously the nazis are the bad guys

so why isn't the comparison Not Tonight and Schindler's List?

because the idea of a straightforward story where you know sheltering them is good and its bad to sell them out is part of film storytelling, where you are an onlooker

In Papers Please the way you're torn between what to do and who is worth saving and who isn't, whether you should back resistance or serve the state? That struggle you as the player feel is the struggle Schindler's List puts on screen for you to OBSERVE, not to be a part of.

Not Tonight in terms of its story and writing is more similar to Schindler's list. And that's why it's explicitly less artistic than Paper's Please. *Because if you make a game more similar to a movie, you lose the strengths of the medium of games without actually gaining the strengths of the medium of film.*

[monsieur-hadrien]

Quarantine Harry Potter Fanfiction *READING LIST*

I’ve spent the past months reading copious amounts of fanfiction and now my amount of AO3 bookmarks is absurd. I really need to share these because if I don’t I think I might implode. Drarry-centric but not all!

These are in no particular order nor is there a particular time frame that these were all posted. I have a little bit of everything in here just you wait.

On Punching Gods and Absentee Dads by Enigmaris 

56 Chapters, 247k Words, Complete, no slash, T Rating

Marvel, Norse Mythology, Harry Potter Crossover

TW: Past Abandonment

Harry finds out that his dad is alive, has been the whole time. Instead of being overjoyed, Harry's disgusted. His dad left earth and abandoned his friends. Every painful thing he's ever gone through can be traced back to one man. Now Harry's got super strength he can't control and an almost unnecessary amount of magical power. His dad might be living it up with the Avengers now but not for long. With the help of his friends, Harry comes up with a plan for revenge. Get ready Avengers, Harry's out to punch a god.

We’re starting off strong with a Marvel crossover fanfic wow. Who knew that crossovers could be done tastefully as 2013 Wattpad kind of ruined it for us. However, this fic changed my mind! This fic is funny as fuck and is just a goodass time. I love a good multi-chapter fic (as you’ll soon see) and this one is a showstopper.

The Man Who Lived by sebastianL

42 Chapters, 254k Words, Complete, Draco/Harry, E Rating

TW: Major Character Death, Graphic Deptictions of Violence

Draco breaks a cup, and one thing leads to another. A story of redemption, tattoos, dreams, mistakes, green eyes, long conversations, and copious amounts of coffee.

With all of the Black Lives Matter protests happening right now, I think that this fic is super relevant. Draco has moved to New York City and is working as a receptionist at a tattoo shop and a mentor for inner city kids, but he accidentally gets forced to work out his differences with Harry, who at this point hates his guts. This fic is pretty serious, tackling themes of mental health, suicide, and police brutality. Every OC in this story is completely lovable and I cried my eyes out many times. When people ask me for a fic reccomendation this is the one I give people. Dare I say that this is my all-time favorite fic.

Warm Bodies by Betty_Hazel

Work in Progress, 37 Chapters as of 6/12/2020, 108k Words, Draco/Harry, E Rating

TW: D/s Dynamics, Graphic Porn, Dubious Relationship with Food

Draco Malfoy has spent his whole life wanting to go down on his knees for other men, and that's by far the least of the depraved things he fantasises about. He's wanted it all for so long that he's stopped believing that there might be someone out there who might be able to give it all to him; it comes as something of a surprise to find that maybe Harry Potter can, and that maybe Harry's looking for something too.

ALRIGHT MY PORN LOVERS THIS ONE IS FOR YOU! Don’t lie I know you’re horny. Somehow this fic is so fucking gorgeous and sweet yet so sinfully hot. It’s literally two boys who have never felt like their emotional needs have been satisfied learning to help and love each other like how much more wholesome does it get. I mean it’s all fine and wholesome until you get to the kinky sex which is WONDERFULLY WRITTEN MIGHT I ADD! I always say that if porn can make you feel something other than just horny, you’ve found a winner, and this story does just that.

Definitely check all the tags and I mean all the tags before you read this, but this is definitely one of my favorite porn with plot stories.

Running On Air by eleventy7

17 Chapters, 75k Words, Complete, Draco/Harry, T Rating

TW: No Archive Warnings

Draco Malfoy has been missing for three years. Harry is assigned the cold case and finds himself slowly falling in love with the memories he collects. 

Might I just say that classics are considered classics for a reason. This is one of those stories that has the vibe of high school summer after senior year where all you do is try to escape reality and figure out your place in the world. While the plot is wonderful and the characters are great, I think what shines the brightest from this story is the writing style. It’s so enchanting and poetic with the best one-liners that make your heart hurt. On my AO3 bookmark i captioned it, “This just ripped my soul in half and restitched it together again,” and I still stand by that.

Lokison (Series) and How To Train Your Godling (Series) by sifsshadowheart

Main Story (Lokison): 33 Chapters, 244k Words, Completed, Harry/Various Characters, E Rating

14 Spinoffs/ Sequel Stories, Completed, Harry/Various, Various Ratings

Norse Mythology, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Various Fandoms Crossover

TW: Major Character Death, Graphic Violence, Underage Sex, Spiralling Mental Health

James and Lily Potter had a secret, one which led to Thanatos saving young Harry from a dreary life with the Dursleys and changed the face of the Second British Wizarding War before it ever began.

This story feels much more like a 12 season television show than a two hour movie if you know what I mean. The plot is pretty slow going but the character development and interation makes it worth it. The story blends the lore and events of the HP and PJO to make a completely new story without making it feel like a goddamn recap. The reader follows Harry from when he’s young all the way into adulthood and it’s a fun time to watch him grow as a character and bond with his parental figures. Also some of the spinoffs are really wild and I never would have thought of the pairings but they just work somehow?? My personal favorite spinoff is the Pirates of Caribbean/Calypso and Leo arc like HELLO?! hot pirates. The total word count of the two series is 465k so beware it takes a hot second to chug through this one.

This Worship of an Extinct Fire by Lomonaaeren

Oneshot, 30k Words, Draco/Harry, M Rating

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Emotional and Physical Abuse, Deppression

Unspeakable Draco Malfoy has planned for nearly six months how to take down Thomas Linwood, a man who has discovered the secret of converting wizard bodies to pure magic. He was prepared for anything--except the discovery of the missing Harry Potter in Linwood's compound.

This one, I don’t know how it’s not considered a classic. I’ve seen it floating around on drarry tumblr and wow is it good. I especially like the detailed magic system and mechanics that Draco is investigating. How the author managed to have so much detailed and gracefully planned out backstory in 30k words is beyond me. Also gentle Dracoo Malfoy is my favorite Draco Malfoy :) absolute angel mode.

Little Compton Street (One Rainy Night in Soho) by LLAP15 and Writcraft

Oneshot, 66k Words, Draco/Harry, Past Sirius/James, E Rating

TW: Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Light D/s Dynamics, References to Cancer, References to HIV/AIDS

Draco is lonely, Harry hates the press and it won’t stop raining in London. Harry discovers a magical street that’s close to disappearing forever and Draco realises he’s one rainy night in Soho away from finding everything he’s been searching for.

This fic is, in every sense, a masterpiece. Especially for pride month, the story surrounding LGBTQIA+ activism, the AIDS Epidemic of the 80s, and the gentrification of historically queer communities is one that should be read by everyone. Every single place, OC, and historic event has real world ties and is historically accurate, making this fic even more enchanting. Everything about this fic is graceful and slow burning I can’t help but fall in love with it. I’ve only seen this fic once on HP tumblr, but I feel like it should be considered a classic as it is truly a moving piece. This fic is one of the biggest reasons why I became so enthralled with LGBT history and am writing a fic that takes place in a wizarding version of the AIDS epidemic.

Sensitive Touch by Raserwolf

45 Chapters, 194k Words, Complete, Draco/Harry, E Rating

TW: Racism and Racial Slurs, Homophobic Slurs, Ablism and Ablist Slurs, Rape and Sexual Assault, Sensory Overloads and Mental Breakdowns, Extreme Bullying and Hate Crime, Past Abuse, Anxiety Disorders, PTSD wow this is a long list

When Draco Malfoy encounters a struggling and frustrated Harry desperately trying to tie his shoes after a meltdown in the Great Hall, his curiosity regarding the incident leads him to seek the help of the two people closest to Harry: Ron and Hermione.

After even they are shocked to hear the extent of Harry's issues, though Hermione had her suspicions, he discovers more about the man than he ever thought he knew before.

As a Neurotypical, I found this fic to be absolutely wonderful. I don’t know much about the typical traits of those who are one the autism spectrum and how they affect their everyday lives, but from what I was reading in the comments from those who are on the spectrum or who have family who are, this fic was pretty accurate and realistic. Harry, who lives with aspergers, goes without a known diagnosis until 8th year and it’s just heightened by his PTSD and anxiety and ugh I just want to hug the boy. The story follows Harry and Draco and the rest of the 8th year gang through the year and has multiple arcs in which the wizarding world are just dumbass bitches who can’t fucking seem to accept people for who they are. Not only is Harry on the spectrum but he’s also Desi with a purpose and not just mentioned and forgotten which is wonderful. The boys go through a lot of trauma in the story but there’s also a lot of teeth-rotting fluff that I live for. This is one of the fics that I have read and reread because I love it so much.

This definitely is not my full list I have a ton more stories in my bookmarks if you are curious. I’ll probably post a part two to this just cause I have so much and read so often. These, however, are definitely the biggest highlights.

[schmergo]

Informal (and sorry, very long) review of ASSASSINS at Signature Theatre

ASSASSINS is famous for its provocative concept—telling the story of nine people who assassinated or attempted to assassinate US Presidents in a series of songs and vignettes—and it feels even more daring when staged only 15 minutes from the White House. But this musical isn’t a tasteless exercise in shock value for the sake of shock, nor is it a misguided attempt to portray assassins as ‘just misunderstood.’ These nine central figures are alternately pathetic, disturbing, funny, repulsive, charming, and eerie. Some are clearly delusional, others simply disillusioned. But together, they represent the dark side of the American Dream.

Americans are raised with a sense of exceptionalism, a belief that we deserve everything we want simply because we’re Americans. At some point, we realize that only a few people have the luck, money, skills, and connections to achieve their dreams. Most of us accept that it’s not really true that “anyone can become the President.” But some troubled people throughout the country’s history cling to a distorted corruption of this dream: anyone can kill a President.

That doesn’t mean we should agree with their horrifying choices. But it does let us examine what aspects of life in America make some people so desperate to be seen and remembered, by any means necessary. “Where’s my prize?” is the childish refrain these assassins sing over and over again as they wander through the grey purgatory they’ve been consigned to.

Historically, productions of ASSASSINS are set in a ghastly carnival where contestants are encouraged to ‘step right up’ and shoot a president! A wonderful community production at Dominion Stage created a masterpiece of vivid Americana in which an electric chair or hangman’s noose were reimagined as theme park rides. This production took the opposite route by setting the action in a grimy, industrialized, empty stage in which pieces of furniture like a bench, the steps to a gallows, or a sofa float on and off like ghosts. Through this strange empty world, assassins interact unbounded by time or space, cursed to constantly repeat their most famous actions and relive their frustrations. Garfield assassin Charles J. Guiteau instructs would-be Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore in the finer points of shooting. McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz reprimands attempted Reagan assassin John Hinckley for carelessly breaking a bottle.

The only set piece that remains throughout the show is a weathered and ghostly replica of the Presidential box at Ford’s Theatre, plunked onto the stage as though fallen from the sky. Here, the brooding spectre of John Wilkes Booth sits and watches the show unfold—and yes, he recreates his famous jump from the box. He serves as a kind of ringleader to the assassins, weaving through crowds, advising that everyone try their hand at assassination as a cure for all of their ills—even chronic stomach pain. After all, he was the first to pull off the historic act. We even see him convincing Lee Harvey Oswald to change the course of history by bringing assassination into the age of television.

As Booth, there’s a whiff of the rock star about Vincent Kempski—fitting, because Booth was a celebrity and even heartthrob in his day even before shooting Abraham Lincoln. Most of the time, he seems at ease, in control, erudite—we might even be seduced by his words until he explodes in fits of rage and reminds us how twisted and monstrous his views really are. Kempski only occasionally unleashes the full power of his singing voice, and when he does, it feels like a punch in the gut.

One minor gripe with his performance, though not limited to Kempski’s portrayal alone: his Booth, like most I’ve seen, delivers his lines with a thick Southern drawl. Not only did that occasionally make it difficult to understand his words, I doubt the real John Wilkes Booth would have spoken with such a heavy accent. For one, although he supported the Confederacy, he was from Maryland. For another, his father was British. And most importantly, he was a professional stage actor before the era of microphones and would have been well-trained in diction. Still, his charisma was palpable throughout the show. The moment he set foot on stage, a chill ran down my spine: it really was like seeing a ghost.

Lawrence Redmond plays the disgruntled worker Leon Czolgozs with gravitas and stoic desperation. He is perhaps the most sympathetic—or pathetic—of the assassins, and he gives us a sense of the loss of human potential. As the crass Sam Byck, attempted assassin of Richard Nixon, Christopher Bloch is horribly funny, spouting commercial catchphrases and leaving professional advice to Leonard Bernstein on an audiotape recording.

Some of the most enjoyable scenes of the evening were those between the two attempted assassins of Gerald Ford, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Rachel Zampelli) and Sara Jane Moore (Tracy Lynn Olivera). These are two deeply kooky women—a ditzy Manson groupie and a frumpy mom who’s been married five times and is endlessly losing items in her oversized bag. Together, they shoot at a bucket of fried chicken and bond over an unexpected shared acquaintance in Manson himself.

Zampelli may not be the childlike pixie we’d expect as Squeaky Fromme, but she totally inhabits the character of a lost soul, a flower child whose brains, if she ever had them, are long-since fried and warped. Her voice isn’t a high-pitched girlish squeak but has a distinctive creaky vocal fry to it that makes her sound utterly deranged. She’s so intense in her devotion to Manson that she ranks among the most unsettling characters on the stage. She also shares a strangely beautiful duet, “Unworthy of Your Love,” with sad sack John Hinckley (Evan Casey), a failed songwriter who’s obsessed with Jodie Foster.

As Sara Jane Moore, Olivera is absolutely hysterical in both senses of the word. A chatty, scatterbrained housewife, she seems to represent the mundane and trivial compared to Squeaky’s revolutionary furor— but she can also burst into tears or pull a gun on you at any second. Her utter lack of self-awareness and deadpan one-liners like “I couldn’t hit William Howard Taft if he was sitting on my lap” made her an audience favorite. Ms. Olivera has a special talent for making dialogue sound totally natural, as if everything she says is an ad-lib. I’ll jump at the chance to see any show she’s in because she makes every character completely her own.

But the performer who truly stole the show, and my other favorite local actor, is Bobby Smith, as the lifelong loser, Charles Guiteau. Guiteau is a comically tragic figure, a man who failed at everything he did and still retained the grandiose belief that his actions were divinely inspired. He was so consumed with his delusional belief that President Garfield would make him the Ambassador to France that he shot him. As Guiteau, Smith does a jaunty dance up and down the steps of the gallows before he is to be hanged, singing a refrain of “Look on the bright side!”

Guiteau is a man of extremes, euphoric and despondent at the drop of a hat. Smith, whose appeal as a performer often lies in his unassuming, everyman demeanor, gives amazing nuance to those abrupt transitions. We see real tears shining in his eyes beyond his too-wide smile, a tremble of the lip or shaking of the hands that betray his instability. He’s incredibly entertaining to watch every moment he’s onstage, yet you’re always simultaneously concerned for and creeped out by him. There’s something so obviously ‘not right’ with Guiteau. The last character to make me feel that way was Gollum.

Tying the whole story together is Sam Ludwig as the Balladeer, who serves as a cheery narrator for the show, delivering songs that span the gamut of American music styles. These are some of the most toe-tapping tunes in Sondheim’s catalog, contrasted sharply with the discordant numbers that run between them. Ludwig also inhabits a second role, which may come as a surprise (and isn’t listed in the program). He embodies the saccharine spirit of an American narrative that sees assassination attempts as isolated incidents rather than a symptom of a deeper illness. I occasionally found his piercing tenor voice a little grating to my ears, but it suited his character well—and I was sitting very close to the stage. An increasingly mangled rendition of ‘Hail To The Chief’ ties the musical numbers together.

This show runs almost two hours with no intermission. It’s so immersive that it gives you the curious sense of waking up from a vivid dream as you leave the theatre. You almost feel that the assassins linger behind you, reliving their crimes and failures in the abandoned theatre once you’ve gone home to bed.

Assassins plays through September 29. Don’t miss this show. You’ll find yourself laughing at the most unexpected lines and thinking about the most minor moments long after the curtain call.

[theculturedmarxist]

     By    Barry Grey    

       26 September 2019  

On Monday night, the New York Metropolitan Opera opened its 2019-2020 season with a new production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This production has a particular distinction in that it is the first ever based on a critically researched and authoritative performance edition of Gershwin’s score, the product of 20 years of work led by musicologist Wayne Shirley, who is currently at the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative.

There is no doubt that the poignant love story of the crippled beggar Porgy and the beautiful but abused and addicted Bess, and the suffering and struggle of the African American working class community of Charleston’s Catfish Row, is among the world’s most beloved operas and Gershwin’s masterpiece.

Yet the fact that the current production is the first in 29 years to be staged by the country’s most prestigious opera house is indicative of the trials and tribulations that have confronted the work since it premiered on Broadway in October 1935. These have come not from the broad public, which has embraced the opera (and many of its numbers) since its inception, thrilled by its glorious and complex music and moved by its deeply democratic ethos, but from within certain more privileged constituencies—the American classical music establishment, academia, sections of the black professional upper-middle class, including certain African American artists, composers, writers and actors.

Gershwin, the prolific composer—along with his lyricist brother Ira—of hit Broadway musicals and dozens of memorable songs that have become part of the Great American Songbook, rejected the artificial separation of popular music from “serious” or “classical” music. He wrote concert classics that incorporated elements of jazz such as Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F and An American in Paris, which have become part of the symphonic repertoire the world over. He called his Porgy a “folk opera” and deliberately had it debut on Broadway in order to appeal to a broader audience. But what he wrote was a musically dense and dramatically powerful opera in the full sense of the word.

One example of the dismissal of Porgy by much of the American music establishment was a savage review of a production at the New York City Opera written in March of 1965 by the then-music critic of the New York Times Harold C. Schonberg. He wrote:

“Porgy and Bess”—Gershwin, you know—seems to have taken root as an American classic, and everybody accepts it as a kind of masterpiece. It turned up last night as given by the New York City Opera Company. All I can say is that it is a wonder that anybody can take it seriously.

It is not a good opera, it is not a good anything, though it has a half-dozen or so pretty tunes in it: and in light of recent developments it is embarrassing. “Porgy and Bess” contains as many stereotypes in its way as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

In more recent decades, with the domination of racial and identity politics on the campuses and within what passes for the American intelligentsia, its promotion by the Democratic Party and elevation as an ideological bulwark of bourgeois rule, the opera has been repeatedly accused of denigrating and exploiting black people. It is, according to the terminology of African American Studies departments and a well-funded industry that—with the aid of pseudo-left organizations—churns out racialist propaganda, a prime example of “cultural appropriation.”

We will deal with the retrograde concept of “cultural appropriation” further on. First let us examine how this racialist approach to Porgy and Bess is reflected in the media reception to the new Met production.

The table was set, so to speak, by the New York Times, which led its Sunday arts section with a full-page photo of the two leads, Eric Owens and Angel Blue, and the headline “The Complex History and Uneasy Present of ‘Porgy and Bess.’”

Taking pains to raise the standard racialist arguments against the opera and its composer, while simultaneously acknowledging the greatness of the work, the author, Michael Cooper, wrote:

More urgently, is “Porgy” a sensitive portrayal of the lives and struggles of a segregated African-American community in Charleston, SC? (Maya Angelou, who as a young dancer performed in a touring production that brought it to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1955, later praised it as “great art” and “a human truth.”)

Or does it perpetuate degrading stereotypes about black people, told in wince-inducing dialect? (Harry Belafonte turned down an offer to star in the film version because he found it “racially demeaning.”)

Is it a triumph of melting-pot American art, teaming up George and Ira Gershwin (the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants) with DuBose Heyward (the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family) and his Ohio-born wife, Dorothy, to tell a uniquely African-American story? Or is it cultural appropriation?...

Or is the answer to all these questions yes?

The first wave of reviews published Tuesday (the WSWS will publish its own review of the Met production at a later date) have generally been highly favorable. All of the reviewers, however, feel obliged to qualify their enthusiasm for the performance by cataloging the opera’s supposed “baggage,” viewed from the standpoint of race. It seems they allow themselves to be moved by the piece only reluctantly, and sense its humanity and truth despite themselves.

George Grella, for example, writes in New York Classical Review:

Since its debut, Porgy and Bess has been consistently hectored by two questions: is it an opera and is it some combination of condescension and racial exploitation (lately termed cultural appropriation)?

The debut of a new production of Porgy and Bess, which opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera Monday night, could leave no objective listener with any doubt as to the answer to the first question. And based on the excited responses from the audience during the performance, and the rapturous applause and shouts at the end—from the kind of patron mix one sees in everyday life in New York City but rarely in a classical music venue—the work has gone quite a ways toward settling the latter in a heartening and beneficent way.

There are charges of stereotyping and caricature of the inhabitants of Catfish Row, but the real problem of the opera, the irredeemable original sin of Porgy and Bess that every reviewer is duty-bound to raise, is the fact that its creators were white. (Even worse, three of the four—George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward—were men.)

Thus, the Washington Post ’s Anne Midgette writes: “Like so many operas, ‘Porgy’ is dated: written by white men and rife with stereotypes of its time.”

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times writes: “But ever since its premiere in 1935, the work has divided opinion, and the debate lingers. … ‘Porgy’ was created, after all, by white people. … That ‘Porgy and Bess’ is a portrait of a black community by white artists may limit the work.”

Justin Davidson of Vulture.com notes: “True, the only depiction of African-American life that makes it to the opera stage with any regularity was written by three white guys.”

The very fact that the race, gender or nationality of the artist is today uncritically presented as a central issue in evaluating a work testifies to the degeneration of bourgeois thought in general and the terrible damage inflicted over many years by identity and racial politics. The use of such criteria in past periods was associated with the political right, which employed them to promote anti-democratic and racist agendas.

While today the attack on Porgy and Bess on grounds of the “whiteness” of its creators is cloaked in the supposedly “left” trappings of Democratic Party politics and post-modernist (that is, anti-Marxist) criticism, the earlier practitioners of such an approach were more frank in giving vent to its ugly sources and implications.

Reviewing the premiere of Porgy and Bess in 1935, the prominent American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson wrote:

The material is straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles. … [Gershwin’s] lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources. … I do not like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor gefilte fish orchestration.

Most critics and professors who attack the opera for the “whiteness” of its authors are not anti-Semites, but, whether they like it or not, there is an objective link between their approach and that of Richard Wagner, one of the pioneers of anti-Semitism in the field of music. In 1850, he authored the infamous tract “Das Judentum in der Musik” (“Jewishness and Music”), in which he denounced Jewish composers in general and Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in particular.

A racial approach to art has a definite logic. It leads in the end to abominations such as the Nazis' Aryan art, with its book burning and banning of Jewish- and black-infected “degenerate art.”

It is a historical fact that the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled tsarist persecution composed an opera that expressed in a powerful and beautiful way both the poverty and oppression of blacks in the segregated South and their nobility of spirit and burning desire for genuine freedom and equality. What is so strange or problematic about that?

George Gershwin was a genius and without doubt the greatest American composer of his time. That is an important factor to reckon with. There were and are many talented black composers—Duke Ellington and William Grant Still, to name just two—who produced great music, but none has to date produced a musical piece about the black experience in America that compares to Porgy. Unfortunately, in the attacks on the opera by some black artists—initially including Ellington, although the great jazz composer later changed his opinion—there was an element of jealousy. The same applies to composers of the academy who dismissed Gershwin’s work as technically deficient and low-brow.

How many jazz greats have performed and improvised on Gershwin tunes, including his opera? Miles Davis produced an entire album based on it. The list includes Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday and many more. It also includes country and pop artists such as Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson.

More than 80 years after its premiere, history itself has demonstrated the universality of Porgy and Bess. It is about black people, but, more fundamentally, it is about the human condition. Its basic themes are universal. It is a love story. It is a story about oppression, community, struggle, loss and the will to fight.

Do not songs such as “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and the exquisite love duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” express the most profound and universal of human aspirations and emotions? Those who attack the opera for its “whiteness” generally avoid discussing the music.

Nor can there be any doubt that Gershwin’s own background, in the context of the convulsive social and political conditions of the Depression 1930s—the spread of fascism in Europe, revolutionary upheavals internationally and mass struggles of the American working class, and the approach of the Second World War—played a significant role in inspiring him to write Porgy.

During the summer of 1934, Gershwin stayed on Folly Beach, located on a barrier island near Charleston, South Carolina, collecting material and ideas for his opera and visiting revival meetings of the Gullah blacks who lived on adjacent James Island. He wrote to a friend: “We sit out at night gazing at the stars, smoking our pipes. The three of us, Harry [Botkin], Paul [Mueller] and myself discuss our two favorite subjects, Hitler’s Germany and God’s women.”

Dubose Heyward, who spent part of the summer with Gershwin on Folly Beach, published an article in 1935 in Stage magazine in which he described Gershwin’s interaction with the people who became the prototypes for the characters of his opera. “To George it was more like a homecoming than an exploration,” he wrote. “The quality in him which had produced the Rhapsody in Blue in the most sophisticated city in America, found its counterpart in the impulse behind the music and bodily rhythms of the simple Negro peasant of the South.

“The Gullah Negro prides himself on what he calls ‘shouting.’ This is a complicated rhythmic pattern beaten out by feet and hands as an accompaniment to the spirituals, and is indubitably an African survival. I shall never forget the night when at a Negro meeting on a remote sea-island, George started ‘shouting’ with them. And eventually, to their huge delight stole the show from their champion ‘shouter.’ I think that he is probably the only white man in America who could have done it.”

Gershwin himself was not overtly political, at least in his public life, but his sympathies and associations were with the liberal and socialist left. He penned Broadway shows of a broadly anti-war and socially dissident character, such as Strike Up the Band, Of Thee I Sing and Let ’Em Eat Cake. The impact of the Russian Revolution, only 18 years prior to the debut of Porgy, contributed to the generally optimistic and democratic impulse behind his music. The sister of Ira Gershwin’s wife Leonore, Rose Strunsky, translated Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution into English.

The singers who worked closely with Gershwin on Porgy, including the original Porgy and Bess, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, spoke with affection of their interactions with the composer, insisting he never evinced the slightest prejudice or condescension. They were always among the most ardent defenders of the opera.

The Gershwins insisted that the singing roles go only to black performers, in part because they wanted to break down the exclusion of African American artists from the concert hall and because they did not want the opera to be performed in blackface.

As for the element of caricature in Porgy and Bess, what opera does not have caricatures? The vengeful dwarf in Rigoletto, the seductive gypsy in Carmen, the tubercular seamstress in La Boheme, the rascally but clever servant in The Marriage of Figaro. One could go on and on. The issue is: Do the inhabitants of Catfish Row transcend their “types” and express genuine humanity? The opera’s audiences all over the world have answered in the affirmative.

And what of the charge of “cultural appropriation?” Could there be a more banal, reactionary and anti-artistic concept? What is art, if not the interaction of multiple influences of many origins, conditioned by social and historical development and distilled in the creative imagination of the artist to produce works that have universal significance?

Should we denounce Shakespeare, a male, for inventing Ophelia? Should we reject Verdi for writing operas about Egyptians? Should we ban blacks from playing white characters? What about that racist Mark Twain who had the impertinence to create the escaped slave Jim?

The balkanization of art is the end of art.

Here is how Gershwin, who aspired to create a genuine American idiom, described his own development. In an article titled “Jazz is the Voice of the American Soul,” published in 1926, he wrote:

Old music and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, ragtime ditties combined in a mighty chorus in my inner ear. And through and over it all I heard, faint at first, loud at last, the soul of this great America of ours.

And what is the voice of the American soul? It is jazz developed out of ragtime, jazz that is the plantation song improved and transformed into finer, bigger harmonies. …

I do not assert that the American soul is Negroid. But it is a combination that includes the wail, the whine, and the exultant note of the old “mammy” songs of the South. It is black and white. It is all colors and all souls unified in the great melting pot of the world. …

But to be true music it must repeat the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today.

[andreasweaver-blog]

Improvements AND RENOVATIONS TO Ancient BUILDINGS USING Modern STYLE

Should you foolishly ignore beauty, you may invariably find yourself without them though if you put money into beauty, it's going to remain along with you every one of the era of your health - An artist. Precisely what is simple a shape to it's possible to be described as a masterpiece to another. Get an architect to generate the total amount between what used to be as well as what something must become is naturally a challenge as they design addendums to and rehabilitate historic properties. It might be is not only challenging and also exhilarating with an architect. The Palm Beach architects, Boca Raton architects and Palm beach gardens architects’ guidelines for preserving, rehabilitating, restoring and reconstructing historic buildings are discussed from the Secretary of Interior Standards for the Historic Properties. Those to blame for developing and promulgating preservation standards and guidance, specifically because it pertains to historic buildings, is the office of Technical Preservation Services (TPS) from the Cultural Resources Directorate from the Park Service. There is no formula for designing a fresh addition or related new construction with a site, nor is there generally just one design approach. Due to the task to make a new addition or add on to a preexisting structure the architect must take into account the proportions between your original historical building along with the current new addition. Dresden’s Military History Museum in Germany, developed by Daniel Libeskind, is an excellent example of how the architect considered the massing scale and detail with the original building however the new addition is clearly unlike the main neoclassical structure.

Rex Nichols, the chairman of historical preservation board in Boca Raton, says “one from the tougher facets of a design is always to will include a fresh, clean, minimalist, contemporary style that is certainly compatible to the historic building. Portion of an architect’s responsibility since they plan their design is to bear in mind the use of current technology and sustainable materials and practices for example impact doors and windows with low E glass, maximum insulation and solar power panels for energy conservation”. The topic of sustainability shaped by Florida architects are also offered at length from the Secretary of Interior Standards for the treatment Historic Properties. New additions and related new construction that fulfill the standards may be any architectural style, traditional, contemporary or a simplified form of the historic building. To keep the historic character and also the identity with the building being enlarged many architects would believe that there should be an equilibrium between how different the newest addition is as well as compatibility on the original historical building. The danger with this approach could be the possibility of there not any among the old and the new design producing predictable, dull solutions. Together looks around at many contemporary buildings, the excitement in the design may be the expression of the architectural proportions and forms that don't necessarily relate with the function from the building. Through the use of contemporary architecture the architect gets the freedom to produce a less predictable plus much more exciting design solution while still making the most of probably the most current and up to date intelligent materials and technology available. The last design of the new construction is really a clearly distinct piece of architectural style that stands since it's own and both compliments the initial historical building yet simultaneously doesn't distract from or hinder the integrity of the original. By Michael Hutchinson and Rex Nichols To learn more about West Palm Beach architects check out the best website

[neriad13]

Best of the Best - Media Consumed 2018

Books - Fiction

The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

I devoured the entire series in a series of months this year and what I’m about to say holds true for all of them (probably more than for the latter two than the first)...but I have a particular soft spot for the plot twists and humor of the beginning. So, it’s my choice for the year, though it is representing the series as a whole.

This is the series that showed me what inclusive fantasy can be like. It’s a story predominantly about straight white dudes written by a straight white dude (a comfort zone I am struggling to break out of) and yet, it is one that purposefully skirts the tropes of the genre and plays with them in such a way that it makes the world feel welcoming to a reader who is neither straight nor male. There’s lesbian pirates, multiple queer characters, copious well-written women and non-white characters as major players in the narrative. This was a book that gave me hope and help as I struggled to bust out of my old patterns of thinking and writing. And yet, it was familiar enough that it was enough of a comfort zone to retreat to in times when I needed to seek comfort in fiction.

And it’s so much good fun. Half a year later and I’m still cracking up at “Nice bird, asshole.”

Books - Nonfiction

Dictator Style - Peter York

This book was weirdly heart-wrenching. There’s something so melancholy and strange about surveying the living spaces of these paragons of human misery and trying to figure out what they were thinking through medium of their wallpaper choices. That, and the knowledge that even the seemingly all powerful are far more tacky and slipshod than commonly believed, stuck with me.

Fic

Batya - Valya

I didn’t read a whole heck of a lot of fic this year and only counted those that were above a 30k word count. There were plenty of short fics that I loved, but alas, I did not write them down. Goals for next year!

So, Batya, BioShock fic - AU in which Ryan discovers Jack far earlier than intended and decides to adopt him as his son. Once this fic gets going, it’s intense. And sad. And beautiful, all of which apply heavily to the relationship between Jack and Kyle. The final scene between them is pure poetry and had me thinking of them dancing as Rapture fell apart around them for days afterward.

Film

I saw so many hecking good movies this year. I’m just barely able to pare it down to a top three.

Black Panther - Ryan Coogler

This movie was exhilarating. The design, the energy, the acting, the humor, the primal drama of two types of activism duking it out in the bowels of the earth...I walked out of the theater in a daze, hardly believing that I’d seen what I had.

When Marnie Was There - Hiromasa Yonebayashi

This movie contains the most accurate portrayal of social anxiety I have ever seen in fiction, period. It hit especially close to home for me, as this year was the one in which I faced and struggled with my own lifelong anxiety. I watched it wondering how on earth filmmakers half a world away got the details of my own childhood down so precisely on film. When the credits hit and “Fine On the Outside” played, I bawled at my computer screen.

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse - Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

This movie was a staggering technological accomplishment. It pushed the boundaries of animation and filmmaking in ways I have flat-out never seen before. It was joyful, it was dramatic, it was tragic, it was gorgeous. It was a celebration of everything animation is capable of. And the fact that a brown kid is at the center of it?

Stunning.

Comics - Webcomics

Alethia - Kristina Stipetic

This is beautiful world in which the characters are forced to make terrible choices, as the main character struggles to find the meaning in such things.

Also, it’s all lesbian robots. The artist drew the comic specifically because she wanted more women in fiction that she could relate to. It’s a fascinating, meditative piece of work.

Comics - Fiction

Akira - Katsuhiro Otomo

This manga is a masterpiece of destruction and resurgence. The art is stunning, the characters are charming and the action is absolutely unbeatable.

But my favorite section was the one which focuses on Chiyoko - an unapologetically masculine woman with an arsenal of heavy weapons - while she’s on desperate rescue mission in hostile territory. My eyes were glued to the page as she blew away her foes and struggled against them in turn, her plight given the gravity and intensity that is so rarely bestowed on female action heroes.

For that alone - best fiction comic of the year.

Comics - Nonfiction

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me - Ellen Forney

I read so many fantastic comic memoirs this year. It was difficult to choose from among them - almost all of them were highlighted as among my favorites of the year. But there’s something about a seasoned artist drawing and talking about her own battles with mental illness after a long (and ongoing) war that stood out to me.

It’s a tale of seemingly endless medication adjustment, therapy and the breaking down of personal stigmas surrounding mental illness and the drugs used to treat it. Though I don’t share the artist’s diagnosis, it was a book that gave me confidence in choices about the treatment of my own mental illness.

Shows

A Series of Unfortunate Events S2 - Barry Sonnenfeld, Bo Welch, Mark Palansky, Allan Arkush, Loni Peristere, Liza Johnson, Jonathan Teplitzky

What can I say about something that is perfect? Every joke hits. Every bit of wordplay makes me burst out laughing. The absurdity and surreality of the situations are a sight to behold. The acting is phenomenal. The writing improves upon the books in every possible way. And in all of this, not an inch of the story’s darkness is ever given up.

Games

This was the year I played the first Fallout (the ending destroyed me), That Dragon, Cancer (very much hit home), 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (can you make a historical game that both teaches, entertains and reveals the human cost of a complex conflict? Yes. Yes, you can.) Pillars of Eternity (A well-written Atheist in my video game? It’s more likely than you think.) and Tales From the Borderlands (the humor! The art! The voice cast! The rock-solid writing!). All of them were top contenders and yet...there was really only one choice for me.

Papo and Yo - Vander Caballero

This is a game about the relationship between a boy and his alcoholic father. It is heavily based on the lead developer’s own experiences. It’s a fraught relationship - torn between the sober moments when the hero’s father loves him, protects him, takes care of him, plays with him - and the moments when drinking turns him into a monster of rage.

The hero sets out to find a cure for his father’s addiction and after great trial discovers…

*spoilers, though the answer is probably pretty obvious, though no less painful for its obviousness*

...that no such cure exists and that the only thing he can do is let him go.

I sobbed uncontrollably at the ending of this game and sniffled long after. The message stuck with me months after I’d played it.

All of the hurt, confusion, anger and grief of letting go of my own toxic person - there it had been, on the screen right in front of me. This game helped me come to peace with that decision in my own life and for that, I am astounded and humbled by the simple artistry of this game. If you have your own toxic person in your life - be the problem alcohol, religious fundamentalism, intolerance or any other form of abuse - play this game and know that it’s okay to leave them behind. 

[ifuckinglovestvincent]

NEWSTATESMAN: “It’s cool that some people hate my show”: St Vincent on fan backlash and Chinese massages

The singer messages me on Twitter the next day. “Dude!” she says, “I’m sorry I was a cock.”

By Alexandra Pollard

9 November 2017

Maybe if St Vincent and I had got massages together, things would have been different. If we’d gone for a hike in the scorching midday sun of Burbank, California, or sat in a small pink box getting high off paint fumes, perhaps we’d have had a better time. She’s done those things with other journalists during this press cycle, in an effort to disrupt the stale dynamic of interviews  –  of which, she told BBC Music from inside that newly painted box, she’s done “a million”. As it is, we’re sitting in her room on the 12th floor of a London hotel, and things aren’t going well.

St Vincent, AKA Annie Clark, is in the early stages of a 37-date world tour in support of her new album, Masseduction. The shows –  which she’s doing without a band, opting instead to accompany her own fearsome guitar with rearranged backing tracks  – are fascinating, sometimes exhilarating affairs. She doesn’t throw herself around the stage in a self-flagellating fervour, as she did a few years ago on the Digital Witness tour, nor this time has she employed the shuffling, robotic choreography of Annie-B Parson.

Instead, Clark exposes herself in a different way –  by carrying the show alone. As a blue curtain gradually pulls back to reveal nothing in particular, she places herself in various positions across the stage. Sometimes she faces the audience, sometimes she stands side-on as if utterly unaware of their presence. At one point she curls up in the foetal position on the floor. The idea, she says, is to plot the trajectory from fear to freedom.

“Some people loved it and were brought to tears and thought it was the best thing they’d ever seen, and then some people were incensed by it,” Clark explains. She was in Manchester last night, London the night before. Now, she’s draped over a black chaise-longue, demonstrably exhausted, her feet spilling on to the armchair beside her (when I ask if she’s tired, she says flatly, “I don’t care, my emotions are irrelevant.”)

Does she mind that the shows, particularly her decision to play without a live band, have received such a polarised response? “Whatever,” she says. “I think it’s cool that some people hate it.” She rolls her neck around to glance at me –  the semi-horizontal position she’s taken has thus far meant minimal eye contact. “Did you hate the show?”

Not at all, I tell her. I really liked it. Then I add, in an effort to avoid bland effusiveness and because she’s still looking at me with a sceptical eyebrow raise, that perhaps I found it more intriguing than moving, and anyway it would have been hard to beat the experience I had seeing her at End Of The Road festival a few years ago. I realise too late that my words have landed with a leaden thud.

“Great,” Clark says. “It’s the third show. I mean, when I played End Of The Road, that was one of the last dates I did. Tours take a while to alchemise.” She pauses. “Also, if a rapper got up on stage and didn’t have a live band, which most of them don’t, no one would be bummed at all. Why is the assumption that I need to have a live band onstage for something to be authentic? It’s about the management of expectation, and I think it’s similar to people thinking that they have a glass of milk, and then they drink it and it’s Sprite. ‘I don’t like this.’ Actually you like Sprite too, you just weren’t expecting it.”

St. Vincent has made a career out of giving people something they weren’t quite expecting. Her music is bold and melodic  – but only if you catch it at certain angles, like a magic eye book that only makes sense if you squint the right way. With each album since her chamber pop debut Marry Me a decade ago, she’s pushed her sound further towards a place between beauty and ugliness, aggression and vulnerability, adding scuzzy synth layers, distorted guitar riffs so heavy they drag half a second behind the beat, and lyrics both profoundly moving and a little grotesque  –  images of severed fingers, for example, that anchor a tale of drunken heartbreak.

Masseduction, her fifth LP (or sixth, if you count her David Byrne collaboration Love This Giant), is a poignant, kinky masterpiece. It’s a work of staggering frankness, with anthemic pop melodies that float atop crunchy riffs and gasping synths, as Clark’s fingers wring out every peculiarly arresting sound a guitar can make. She has a pithy tagline for each of her albums. 2011’s Strange Mercy was housewife on pills; her self-titled record was near-future cult leader; this one is dominatrix at the mental institution.

She sings of loss and depression, of BDSM and pill popping, vacuous cities and self-destructive urges. Her voice is pure and resplendent, but it also creaks, stretches into a sigh or plummets to a growl. On “Hang On Me”, as she pleads with someone, “Please, oh please don’t hang up yet,” a million unsaid things pour into the cracks in her voice.

“If you want to know about my life,” she told fans in a statement when the album was announced – aware both of her historic inscrutability and of the increased thirst for personal revelations her relationship with supermodel Cara Delevingne had prompted – “listen to this record”.

Clark performing this Summer. Photo: Getty

In the past, Clark has recoiled at the suggestion that her songs are diaristic, saying that such an idea “presupposes –  in a kind of sexist way  –  this idea that women lack the imagination to write about anything other than their exact literal lives.” Still, this record is a little different to the others. “It’s very close to my heart. It’s not literal, because if it was literal it wouldn’t be art, but you know, it’s very heart on sleeve.”

Is there a particular way she hopes people interpret it? “No,” she says, exasperated. “There’s not. I’m happy to be misunderstood. It’s not even about being ‘misunderstood’, it’s just up for interpretation. Any interpretation is fine, as long as it’s not, ‘She’s a racist, sexist or homophobe’. I’d be bummed if someone thought that. I’m not the one writing the think pieces on it. That’s not my job. My job’s to make a thing, it’s not to do all the interpreting and explaining. That’s didactic, and shows a profound lack of respect for the audience’s intelligence.”

Hoping she might be open to at least a small amount of explaining, I put it to Clark that there’s a restless quality to the album. She’s quite often leaving, or being left, or wanting to leave. On “Slow Disco”, a plaintive orchestral waltz and one of the most beautiful songs she’s written, she asks, “Am I thinking what everybody’s thinking? I’m so glad I came, but I can’t wait to leave.” Did she notice that theme running through the album’s veins? “Yes.” I wait for more, but instead she pulls her phone out of her pocket and starts typing. “Keep asking away.”

I do as she says, but the air in the room is uncomfortable. I wonder if I should clarify what I said about the show, but I think the moment’s passed. I forge on instead. In a previous interview, Clark said that “Slow Disco” was about how “the life you’re living, and the life you should be living, are running parallel.” Is there a life she feels she should be living? “Yeah,” she says, phone still out. “I should be in Turks and Caicos with a fucking pina colada coming out of a coconut, just getting a sick tan.”

“I mean, I don’t even think I should be living,” she adds, before puffing air out of her lips. “Hilarious joke. No, I feel super lucky that I’m living the life I am. Everything I’ve ever done, every person I’ve ever met, every experience I’ve ever had, is because I got good enough at moving my fingers at micro-movements across a piece of wood and steel. That’s bonkers.”

That’s a fairly self-deprecating assessment of how St Vincent got to where she is. Her inimitable skill at moving her fingers at micro-movements across a piece of wood and steel  – more commonly known as playing the guitar  –  is part of it, but there’s an intrigue and charisma to her music, and the persona she presents, that goes far beyond technica​l skill. It’s an intangible talent, one that has steadily drawn her into the limelight – though it was her self-titled fourth album that really thrust her into the big leagues, topping a handful of Albums of 2014 lists, and earning her a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.

Clark with ex-girlfriend Cara Delevingne. Photo: Getty.

Then she fell in love with someone unthinkably famous, and was thrust into a more insidious kind of limelight, the kind where paparazzi followed her around, where tabloid journalists tricked her relatives into revealing painful personal information, the kind that fuelled her anxiety and depression. Though being on the road for endless stretches of time didn’t help with that. In an appearance on the New Yorker’s podcast, she said that between her self-titled album and this one, she needed to do a “radical reorganising of my life in order to fulfil my destiny as a creative person”.

“Oh my god! Who am I, Jim Jones?” she says laughing, when I quote this back to her. “Wow. I said that? It’s like a Paulo Coelho meets Jim Jones inspirational talk. I think I meant that I was just in a monastic period, I just wasn’t drinking or having sex or really doing anything that you’d consider fun.” The only pleasure she allowed herself was getting Chinese massages in New York City. I’ve never had a massage, I tell her. Perhaps I have a lifetime of tension. She looks aghast. “You probably do. You carry it with you, you know?”

Did she find it helpful, this monastic period? “Oh it was so generative. I got so much done. Completely eschewing certain things that can otherwise take up a fair amount of time left so much time to be productive. I really loved that time. Being on tour is just a different kind of energy. It’s performance all the time. Obviously I’m not putting on my best performance for you today.” She laughs again. The icy atmosphere is starting to melt, but our time’s up.

I bid Clark goodbye. She would get up, she says, but she’s too tired. I’m glad we managed to drag the encounter towards conviviality, but  –  though I’m sure she won’t spend another second dwelling on it  –  I don’t think either of us had much fun.

The next morning, my phone buzzes. Clark’s messaged me on Twitter. “Dude!” she says, “I’m sorry I was a cock.” She explains that she was exhausted, “which is not an excuse”, but that she’d felt especially defensive because she’d been getting negative tweets about the show all day, and had thought my comments were an attempt to go for the jugular. “I really misread the interaction,” she says, “and have been feeling horribly guilty ever since. I thought you were just there to tell me my show sucked and I got real defensive and yeah, it went downhill from there.”

As it turns out then, her emotions aren’t irrelevant. She feels things deeply, all the time. You can hear it in her music, in every riff, every crack in her voice, every line about loss, or leaving, or wanting to leave. Those negative tweets were sprinkled amongst a litany of praise, but  –  though she wore an insouciant armour when we met  –  she clung to them anyway. “You carry it with you, you know?” I hope she carries the good things too. I hope she gets some sleep.

Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2017/11/it-s-cool-some-people-hate-my-show-st-vincent-fan-backlash-and-chinese?amp

[aion-rsa]

What the Mank Ending Leaves Out About Orson Welles and Citizen Kane

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This article contains Mank spoilers. You can read our review here.

It’s like the climax of a Western. Two men stare across from each other in a showdown of ego and calculation. And Gary Oldman’s Herman J. Mankiewicz (or “Mank”) has just told Orson Welles (Tom Burke) he wants writing credit for the Citizen Kane screenplay. This is not going to end well.

Before this moment, Welles had been conciliatory to Mank, feigning concern for his health and offering to take sole rewriting duties on the gargantuan script. He’s even providing $10,000 from RKO Pictures as a consolation. It’s of course more bribe than bonus. Yet as Welles realizes that he might have to share credit, or worse have no credit at all for a screenplay we just watched Mankiewicz write alone for two hours, the budding director throws a temper tantrum worthy of Charles Foster Kane, and Mankiewicz uses it as inspiration for exactly that—hubris run amok.

In the end, Welles is unmasked as a bully and an opportunist: a charlatan who wants to claim credit for a masterful screenplay that is all Mank’s, at least according to Mank. Yet the movie’s “Boy Genius from New York” wasn’t smart enough to see the writing on the wall about how the newly formed Screen Writers Guild would arbitrate this, nor did he predict that when Mank finally accepted his eventual screenwriting Oscar from his front lawn he’d say, “I am very happy to accept this award in the manner in which the screenplay was written, which is to say in the absence of Orson Welles.”

Is all this true? Did Welles put his name on a screenplay he didn’t help write a word of? It’s a question that has bedeviled the legend of Citizen Kane for 50 years, and even longer if you consider how many decades before that most people just believed the “Boy Genius” created everything substantial in Kane out of whole cloth. That myth is perhaps why Pauline Kael created one of her own when she published her 50,000-word essay “Raising Kane” across two volumes in The New Yorker in 1971—an account of Citizen Kane’s creation that suggests Mankiewicz alone wrote the script.

The Influence of Pauline Kael and “Raising Kane”

Kael’s essay, which is the clear basis for Mank, has been discredited in the ensuing years as inaccurate, unfair to Welles, and at best sloppy (or at worst intentionally misleading). But it makes for a hell of a story, which five decades on still finds life in David Fincher’s new Netflix film.

“Orson Welles wasn’t around when Citizen Kane was written, early in 1940,” Kael emphatically stated midway through the first volume of “Raising Kane.” Rather, she’d eventually elaborate, he was too “deeply entangled in the radio shows and other activities and a romance with Dolores Del Rio” to be bothered to do anything at Victorville’s dude ranch but stop by to have dinner once with Mankiewicz. In his absence, Kael paints a picture of a disabled Mank dictating the masterpiece of his script, more or less fully formed, to secretary Rita Alexander—and with the good support of Welles’ one-time business partner and now increasingly estranged middleman, John Houseman.

In Kael’s telling, “Welles probably made suggestions in his early conversations with Mankiewicz, and since he received copies of the work weekly while it was in progress at Victorville, he may have given advice by phone or letter. Later, he almost certainly made suggestions for cuts that helped Mankiewicz hammer the script into tighter form, and he is known to have made a few changes on the set.”

Basic key facts that Kael had access to while researching her essay would call this account into question, including how Welles and Mankiewicz spent five weeks in consultation, hatching out the general story of the film, as well as Welles simultaneously penning his own rough draft while Mank was in Victorville. But the blind spots turned out to be even bigger than these oversights.

So why the omissions? In part, as with Fincher after her, Kael clearly wanted to shine a light on one of Hollywood’s forgotten talents, as well as his entire generation of early talkie screenwriters. Unlike the playwrights and script doctors who came after him, Mankiewicz arrived in Hollywood as part of a singular era in the New York literary world, a member of the fabled “Algonquin Club” who came to Tinseltown for easy work and fat paychecks.

As Mank famously telegraphed to his buddy Ben Hecht, “MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS.” But as Kael sharply illuminated, writers were one of the least valued cogs in the machinery of Golden Age Hollywood’s assembly line. They gladly took the money, but disdained the business as much as themselves.

“The vacation became an extended drunken party, and while they were there in the debris of the long morning after, American letters passed them by,” Kael opined. Mankiewicz, a journalist who wrote (often drunkenly) for The New York Times and The New Yorker, came to Hollywood and sold his soul—but then got little of the credit he deserved for doing so. That includes his immeasurable contributions to Citizen Kane.

Mank highlights elements from Mankiewicz’s own personal biography that became essential to crafting the 1941 masterpiece. Obviously Mankiewicz’s friendships with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance in the film) and his movie star mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) informed much—though crucially not all—of the biography of Charles Foster Kane (Welles) and Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) in Kane. Other episodes in the ’41 film were also lifted from Mank’s own life. Kael underlines a good one where Mank fell asleep drunk at his typewriter while writing a scathing theater review for The Times. It was so toxic his editor refused to publish it, similar to the experiences of Joseph Cotten’s Jedediah Leland in Kane.

These contributions had been obscured in the 30 years between Kane and Kael, with most only remembering Welles’ multi-hyphenated talent. And as the late ‘60s and early ‘70s rolled around, a new generation of film critics like Peter Bogdanovich and Andrew Sarris emerged with an almost worshipful reverence for the contribution of film directors. Sarris even coined “auteur theory,” and Kael became one of its biggest skeptics. It seems likely that “Raising Kane” was as much about tearing down “auteur theory,” and going after one of its adherents’ biggest idols, as it was meant to raise Mank up.

The problem, of course, is that for as much as Kael got Mankiewicz, she missed Welles—and the actual making of their picture—by miles.

What Mank Misses

Backlash to “Raising Kane” was fierce, with Sarris and Bogdanovich among its most vocal early critics. Indeed, both wrote pieces criticizing Kael, and Bogdanovich’s Esquire article, “The Kane Mutiny” published in 1972, proved to be the first major yank at unraveling Kael’s (and now Mank’s) version of events. Hardly an uninterested party—Bogdanovich was a protégé and friend of Welles, who likely had input on “The Kane Mutiny” from Welles himself—Bogdanovich nonetheless did something Kael failed at: legwork that could corroborate her story.

For starters Bogdanovich unearthed much of the research for “Raising Kane” was not done by Kael but UCLA film professor Howard Suber. “Raising Kane” was originally intended (and eventually published) as the introduction to a screenplay book on the movie titled The Citizen Kane Book (1971). Kael agreed to write an introduction in part so she could publish it as an excerpt elsewhere, but she also agreed to co-author the introduction with Suber, who’d been researching Kane for years. In the end, she wrote her epic alone, but with Suber’s treasure trove of material. Yet she failed to mention his name once in 50,000 words.

Bogdanovich interviewed Suber about these events and the professor came to a very different conclusion than Kael, saying, “After months of investigation… I regard the authorship of Kane as a very open question. Unfortunately, both sides would have to be consulted, and Miss Kael never spoke to Mr. Welles, which as I see it, violates all the principles of historical research.” For that comment, Kael declared she’d never return to UCLA until Suber apologized. He waited until after her death to speak publicly in detail about how he was supposed to co-write the original introduction.

Read more

Movies

Mank and Amanda Seyfried’s Quest to Save Marion Davies from Citizen Kane

By David Crow

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David Fincher’s Joker and Orson Welles Criticisms Shouldn’t Matter

By David Crow

The vision Mank offers of the screenplay’s origins existing exclusively in Victorville seems based primarily on the accounts of two people who were there: Houseman, Welles’ bitter ex-partner who spent much of the rest of his life criticizing Welles on all matters, and Rita Alexander, whom Kael described as saying, “Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of ‘Citizen Kane.’”

That might be Alexander’s account, but Bogdanovich reached out to Welles’ own secretary, Kathryn Trosper, who likewise typed out much of Welles’ version of a script written concurrently with Mank’s, as well as the subsequent drafts that Welles worked on. “Then I’d like to know what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles!” Trosper responded.

More convincingly are the accounts of major third party figures Kael referenced but never interviewed, like Charles Lederer. As another screenwriter who was good friends with Mank, and nephew to Marion Davies, Lederer is played in Fincher’s film by Joseph Cross as a man loyal to both his aunt and pseudo-mentor. He also is the go-between who Oldman’s Mankiewicz gives a copy of American (Citizen Kane’s original title) to, in order to decide if Marion would be upset. The fallout of letting the script into Hearst-friendly hands nearly derails Kane’s release. This is also how Kael described events in her essay, even though she never reached out to Lederer. Bogdanovich did.

“That is one hundred percent, whole-cloth false,” Lederer said in 1972, revealing he received the script from someone else within the industry. “I gave it back to him. He asked me if I thought Marion would be offended and I said I didn’t think so.”

Regarding authorship, Lederer said, “Manky was always complaining and sighing about Orson’s changes. And I heard from Benny [Hecht] too, that Manky was terribly upset. But you see, Manky was a great paragrapher—he wasn’t really a picture writer. I read his script of the film—the long one called American—before Orson really got to changing it and making his vision of it—and I thought it was pretty dull.” He would go on to add, “Orson vivified the material, changed it a lot, transcended it with his direction.”

As early as ’72, Bogdanovich picked apart Kael’s essay, from finding a 1941 affidavit by Richard Barr, executive assistant on the film, where he stated Welles made revisions that included dialogue, changing sequences and characterizations, and creating new scenes, to also citing Lederer’s claim that Kane never had its writing credits arbitrated by the Screen Writers Guild. This contradicts Kael’s assertion that the guild forced Welles to accept Mankiewicz’s name on the screenplay—and first above his own.

However, it has since been confirmed that Mankiewicz did lodge a protest with the Screen Writers Guild in 1940 before withdrawing it. He clearly worried about receiving credit because he had genuinely agreed to go uncredited on the script. The primary reason for this arrangement was because RKO’s contract stipulated that wunderkind Welles was to write, direct, produce, and star in his own movies. The studio didn’t want the mystique impugned by a co-writer. Whether Welles personally orchestrated this is unknown, but after Mank made noises and RKO decided (without the guild’s intervention) to give Mank credit, it was Welles’ decision to give Mankiewicz first credit. Assistant Richard Wilson recalled Welles circling Mankiewicz’s name and drawing an arrow to move it in front of his own for the end credits.

Beginning in 1978, film professor Robert L. Carringer offered the definitive rebuttal to Kael, and therefore Mank’s, story. First with “The Scripts of Citizen Kane” and then The Making of Citizen Kane, Carringer analyzed all seven drafts of the script, from the original 266-page behemoth Mankiewicz turned in from Victorville to the 156-page shooting script, with Welles being held chiefly responsible for most or all of the changes after the third draft.

Among Carringer’s discoveries, significant lines like “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a great man” are attributed to Welles, as are several of the film’s most significant sequences, such as Kane’s loveless first marriage being conveyed through a series of dissolves at the couple’s breakfast table over the decades.

Carringer concluded, “[Mankiewicz’s] principal contributions were the story frame, a cast of characters, and a good share of the dialogue… Welles added the narrative brilliance – the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity, and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table sequence. He also transformed Kane from a cardboard fictionalization of Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence.”

Reconsidering Orson Welles and ‘Auteurs’

The truth is Welles wasn’t there when Mank wrote his first draft—though even that occurred after more than a month of story meetings between the two men—but he did write many of the later drafts; and he wrote enough to deserve co-screenwriting credit.

It’s easy to understand the frustration for many about Mank being overlooked, including Mank’s own resentment. After the Citizen Kane premiere, where attendees were greeted to a program declaring Welles the author, director, producer, and star, Mankiewicz wrote to his father, “I’m particularly furious at the incredibly insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact is that there isn’t one single line in the picture that wasn’t in writing—writing from and by me—before ever a camera turned.”

Yet this resentment, which in turn eventually fueled Kael and now Fincher, is divorced from reality.

Auteur theory is flawed and certainly not perfect. While some directors can clearly leave a signature on their body of work that is distinct, filmmaking is still a collaborative process, and emphasis on the director too often cultivates neglect for many other talents. But Kael, and now Fincher after her, seem so determined to undermine the concept that they created an ideological prism of their own, which is separated from the actual truth.

In a recent interview with Premiere, Fincher said, “Sure, there is genius in Citizen Kane, who could argue? But when Welles says, ‘It only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography,’ pfff… Let’s say that this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have Gregg Toland around to prepare the next shot.”

This is a fair critique of Welles’ boast in the 1970s on The Dick Cavett Show that “technically the whole bag of movies can be learned in a day and a half.” This was braggadocious late night TV blather, then and now, which undervalues talents like Toland and Mank. And it informs Fincher’s vision of Welles as a Mephistophelian figure who slithers up to Oldman’s hospital bed to make a Faustian bargain. But it’s not the whole picture of Welles or his legacy.

After all, Welles was the first (and still one of few) directors to place cinematographer Toland on the same title card as himself in the end credits of Citizen Kane, giving the man equal due for the visual wonder of the film.

And in a more thoughtful interview Welles had with Bogdanovich in 1969, he said, “It’s impossible to say how much I owe to Gregg. He was superb… Up until then, cameramen were listed with about eight other names. Nobody those days—only the stars, director and the producer—got separate cards. Gregg deserved it, didn’t he?”

And as for Mank? In the same interview, Welles said, “I loved him. People did. He was much admired… [A lot of Hollywood writers] were pretty bitter and miserable. And nobody was more miserable, more bitter and funnier than Mank… A perfect monument of self-destruction. But you know when the bitterness wasn’t focused onto you—he was the best company in the world.”

While he additionally gave Mank credit for “rosebud” in that interview (his least favorite aspect in Kane), Welles also heaped praise on Mank writing the scene where Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) recounts seeing a girl on a ferry in 1896 and thinking about her every day since.

“That was all Mank,” Welles said, “it’s my favorite scene… If I were in hell and they gave me a day off and said what part of any movie you ever made do you want to see, I’d say the scene of Mank’s about Bernstein. All the rest could be better, but that was just right.”

Late in Fincher’s Mank, Herman insists the Susan Alexander character is not really based on his pal Marion Davies—just the idea people have about her. It’s an act of betrayal, but it doesn’t undermine how great Citizen Kane is. Similarly, Fincher’s devilish vision of Welles doesn’t undermine the quality of his superb film, even as the 21st century filmmaker is playing into Kael’s false, hatchet job of a portrait of him.

Later in life Welles regretted how people got the wrong idea about Davies from Kane, saying she and Hearst had a “right to be upset about that.” And if he were alive today, maybe he’d have a right to be upset about his portrayal in Mank.

Both inaccuracies make for good stories, and both are pure fiction.

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[deathbyvalentine]

Yet Another Prompt Collection - Nosebleed Club Edition

Your Cousin’s Singed T-Shirt

There was blood on his shirt, a tear, and ash smeared down the back. There were only no tear stains because they haven’t fell from his cheeks yet. He won’t say what happened, but his knuckles are reddened, and his cheek is blooming in shades of purple.

It’s the third time this summer.

This town is too small for him. He works all day at the diner, flipping burgers for a few dollars an hour. He’s not going to college. When I ask him what he’s saving for, he says a rainy day with a wry smile. It never rains around here. The ground is nothing but dust and longing. It doesn’t even remember rain. 

He is less fragile than he seems. People see his sloping shoulders, the beautiful hands, the eyes that are almost green, and assume he is made of paper, and will fold under pressure. They haven’t seen the way he takes a punch, the way he holds his little sister. He doesn’t even flinch when the grill spits oil at him, when the car engine burns. He is roughly hewn, and he endures if not succeeds. 

He kisses boys in secret. He kisses boys in leather jackets, and boys in flannel shirts. He kisses boys with soft pink lips, and boys who only scowl. He kisses shy boys until they blush, and bold boys until they blush too. He loves them, behind the boatshed by the green green lake. Nobody knows, but they know. They see it on him, all the kisses he’s had. They punish him for it. 

He has his bags packed and hidden underneath the stairs. His car is hidden behind the billboard outside the town limits. He is done, but not gone, not yet. He’s waiting for something, a final push, somewhere to run to, not just away from. 

Meditative state in the hotel pool 

The bright turquoise water rippled as she twitched her fingers, the only parts of her body actually touching the water. The sun beat down, relentless - it was only ten o’clock. By noon, the ground would be sizzling, and anyone brave enough to walk on the ground barefoot would regret their mistake instantly. Lucinda readjusted her sunglasses, and flicked a few droplets of water onto her dark skin.

It was midsummer, almost exactly, and there was a weight hanging in the air. Soon, the days would be shortening once more, the autumn drawing closer. There would be sorrowful about it, somehow. Something sad. 

But then, the house had been sad for a while now. The halls, always large, now seemed empty, though nothing had changed on the surface. The white walls had taken on a tomb-like quality, and the floorboards were quieter than they had ever been.

It had been three weeks since her best friend had died. 

It was odd though. She had felt nothing, nothing at all when she had been told, the gaping emptiness a condemnation as much as anything else. She didn’t cry, she didn’t even flinch, she only stared. She wondered if it all would hit her later, at some point she would wake in the night weeping for Kate, but the moment never came. Was she broken? Or was she just smart?

She had never been someone that got attached to people. Her mother had remarked she was a cold child - she never had asked for kisses, or hugs, or comfort. When she had nightmares, she comforted herself, whispering quietly in the darkened room. She’d never expressed a desire for pets, or indeed, seemed to notice animals at all. When her baby sister had been born, she was neither disturbed by the new presence nor fond of it. 

The hotel pool boy paused by the side of the pool, dragging his eyes over Lucinda. pile of towels wobbling in his arms. She didn’t glance over, but the side of her mouth twitched. She liked to be watched, to be admired. What was the point of having a form at all if people did not gaze at it? People were art, and she had tried to sculpt herself into a masterpiece.

Her parents would be frantic while now, but it was a pilgrimage that had to be made, and she would make it in her own good time. Lucinda, historically, could not be rushed on anything, and she did not intend to start now. She was visiting the site of the crash where Kate had breathed her last breath, where her blood had spilt like coke across the tarmac, where her life had ended. Lucinda was partly going out of sick curiosity (surely the ground where someone had died had to look different?), partly out of escapism, and partly to see if she would finally feel something. 

“I couldn’t answer and you couldn’t hang up the phone.”

It was late, but that odd spell of summer had left the last of the light clinging to the sky, so you could still see the ghost of your silhouette outlined in haunting blue. My phone lay on the bedside table, silent, out of battery. I could have charged it, but instead I sat on the edge of my bed and watched it, hands clasped beneath my chin. 

Elsewhere in the house I could hear my brother shutting the front door and clattering into the kitchen, undoubtedly tracking mud the entire time. My mother’s low murmurs travelled from room to room, the blare of the TV static. If I closed my eyes, I could still picture them all perfectly. I knew this domesticity by heart.

If I turned my phone on, it would be disturbed, or lost. I would either have to tell them I was leaving, or her I didn’t love her enough to value her company over simple comfort. Fundamentally, I was a coward - I liked simplicity, I liked swimming with the tide, not against it. So my phone would remain black and lifeless, all those texts ignored, all the calls missed.

Act of Vengeance 

The room was a shade of pink she had not chosen for herself. It had been this colour since she could remember, painted when she was too young to know the word for the colour that splashed the walls. Nowadays, she barely noticed it.

She curled the curled phone wire around her fingers, that position that thousands, if not millions of teenagers had adopted. Balancing on her windowsill, cigarette left unlit in her other hand. On the phone her best friend was chattering about plans for prom. She had spent hours agonising over matching the petals of the corsage to her dress, to her boyfriend’s suit. She was a girl that liked everything perfect. She obsessed over details, unable to let even the smallest imperfections pass without comment.

Cecilia was fucking her boyfriend. 

It was not about him of course. Cecilia had long since learnt that making boys the point of things was in of itself a pointless and painful endeavour. It wasn’t because of anger. It wasn’t a moment of lust or love. It was out of a sort of fascination. Abigail liked perfection and the boys she chose to associate with were no different. If they weren’t perfect to begin with, she would shape them into something beautiful. 

Cecilia took a savage pleasure in corrupting, secretly, a small part of that image. In creating a bubble of lies and filth that was invisible to the untrained eye. She didn’t want her to find out, she didn’t want to hurt her. She just liked this, cradled close to her heart.  

Bedroom forts and everything alight

Most people don’t wake up during a housefire. The smoke creeps under the doors, curling around sleepers in a deadly embrace. The fumes fill their lungs, and keep them asleep. They burn to death while still dreaming. The house is quiet as it burns. 

The flames lick at the patchwork duvets, balanced on wooden chairs and dressers. The fairylights were the source of it. Their electricity had overspilt, overheated. It was almost beautiful, the bright orange glow that now lit up the room. It was impossible to tell if there were sleeping figures in the forts constructed from duvets and beds and chairs, held up with string or pegs. It would be impossible to tell later too, amongst the mess of melted plastic and ash.

The witch’s son and the scientist’s daughter

His hair was blonde. Not like gold or dripping honey, but like a wheat field only just waking into bloom. His skin was dark. His eyes were bright.  He smiled easily and lazily. He did most things easily, every movement relaxed and unhurried. She saw him every day on her way home from school, leaning in the doorway of his cottage, chewing on a long piece of grass. He smiled when he saw her, raising a hand in greeting. She found herself, once, raising a hand too before catching herself and lowering it. He seemed to be laughing at her as she scurried on.

There were rumours about him, as there were rumours about them all in this town. His mother had died last year, leaving a teenaged boy in an empty house with too many rooms and too big a garden. But he survived, and endured, and perhaps even flourished. It was scandalous, the town whispered, how little he seemed to mourn. How his cheerful demeanour never seemed to falter. 

ABANDONED

“The concept of wolves will never get old.” The snow fell too early that year, smothering the still-bright grass and turning the air quiet and still. The lanterns that always lit the way through the woods didn’t swing - there was no wind, there was nothing but the whisper of snow touching snow. And with the snow, came the wolves.

They didn’t take chickens, or steal the weak sheep in their strong jaws. But they waited, at the edge of the village, eyes fixed on the little houses. Abbie said they were hungry. Anthony said they were curious. Whatever they were, their vigil was unceasing - there was no sun to chase them away. 

Summer found herself staring back. When collecting wood, or water, she met the eyes of the leader, the one that came the closest, showed the least fear. There was an alarming intelligence in it’s eyes, something both animal and thinking. She thought of the stories of werewolves, of men trapped in an animal’s skin. Here, there was no path to wander from, but the danger was still present. Still close. 

She reached out a hand, slowly, never moving her eyes from it’s.  It did not step forward, but nor did it flinch when her palm met it’s head, and pressed fingers into the thick, thick fur there. It was coarse, and lush, and it had closed it’s eyes slightly, as though enjoying the contact.

A shot rang out, and it fell, the other wolves falling back out of the ring of light, and fading into the darkness. Scarlet splattered the snow, as Summer’s hand clasped at air, shock making it tremble. 

“Phew.” The hunter wiped a gloved hand across his brow. “It almost had you there.”

Child from the marsh

The singing travelled across the sodden ground, seemingly without source or cause. The flickering bog lights seemed unaffected, keeping their overnight vigil with little pomp or fanfare. In some countries, these were bad omens, spirits of those who wandered and found themselves lost, and soon, found themselves dead. Here though, they were a unique comfort, the sole light when the sky was not cloudless. 

But there were spirits here. Only, they were not filled with light. They were dark things, their eyes hollow and blank. Moss crawled over their unrotted skin, tinting it green. They seemed to be a feature of the marsh as much as the reeds, or the puddles. They stood, swaying in the breeze. There were not many of them, but there were enough. A silent, watching army, always turned northwards. 

She was different. She was not a corpse possessed, rather a marsh personified. Her eyes were not black - they were lanterns lit from the inside, bright and luminous. Her skin was not tallow or sickly, rather, the green looked living and vital. Her hair hung limp, damp vines swinging with movement.  A fox followed beside the child, underfed and skittish, cringing. Oh, and she walked. She was free to roam, and wander. 

She guided travellers off the path and into the marsh proper, the wisps never interfering even as they drowned, kicking to free themselves of the clinging, watery mud. They were watchers - not protectors. She was not evil, she was not anything at all. She simply was, as much as the mountains that shadowed the small piece of land.

Objects we saved from the burning house

The photo album, obviously. Not that it contained photos of us, oh no. This was an album of the dead, grandparents, nieces, brothers and cousins. To qualify for entry, you had to be both cherished and lost. We had no other albums.

A teddy, not old, pink. It’s nose was made of a heart button. 

Three rings, each with a stone of a differing type set in it. These would be ours when our mother died, and we were fascinated by them. We would play with them sometimes, holding them to the light and watching the filtered light come through. 

The cat saved itself, sooty and resentful. 

A birdcage filled with paperback books. Most of them had been salvaged from charity shops, stained with previous owner's’ tea, or curled from a past splash of water. Most of them were beatnik classics, and we read them a little too young, scandalised and fascinated by the sex, drugs and alluring rock and roll.

The record player, and the nearest records. Our family could survive a fire, but we could not live without art, without music. That perhaps explains how my father perished, in his hands clutched a series of childhood drawings from my sisters and I. 

He had always been a fragile man, my father. Prone to fits of laboured breathing, or what mother called funny turns. I remember him best in his armchair, leaning back and watching our performative play with a little smile on his face. I like to think he was often content, but more likely, it was never worth bringing up what made his discontent. He accepted everything life threw at him with the resignation that could only come from a man raising three daughters. 

I never once heard him raise his voice. Not even to call for help. 

He didn’t burn to death is the irony. He died of smoke inhalation, the dirty fumes from our home turning to ash polluting his fragile lungs until there was no air left. 

Dead swan on the riverbank

It was getting close to summer, the sky increasingly doing away with the heavy clouds and introducing those blindingly bright blue skies that seemed too gorgeous to be real. They were movie skies, not the type of thing that seemed to fit into the Surrey suburbs at all. 

Every day Silas walked home along the riverbank. In Winter, it was full of mud and ice, treacherous. He had lost more than one book to it’s depths, the wind catching him off guard and carelessly tossing it into the water. In Summer though, it ran clear. Sometimes you could see quick, silver fish flitting to and from the reeds on either side. Further along, there were wide fields, sometimes occupied by disinterested cows, but more often, empty of everything but dandelions. 

It was quiet. He walked holding his book with one hand, the other clasping the strap of his bag so it stopped banging against his hip. Occasionally he pushed his glasses up with a calloused thumb. His eyes kept flickering over the pages to check the path for obstacles or bullies, always ready to start running. His eyes flickered up, and then he stopped.

A spread of white feathers lay prone in front of him, unmoving. It was not completely white - dark, sickly blood painted the ground and stained the feathers. It looked as if the swan’s throat had been garrotted with a piece of old washing line. Not tangled, inconsequentially, but with force and intent. There was a glimpse of bone amongst the torn flesh. 

It revolted him, the sight of death. It repelled him, the sheer wrongness of something so elegant splayed at an odd angle. It occurred to him that he rarely saw the bodies of animals, yet they surely died at a quicker rate than humans. Where did they go exactly? Did someone take care of them, or did they just crawl into sad, forgotten places to perish alone? He dropped his bag, carefully shutting his book and resting it on top.

He felt he should do something, anything. A burial was out of the question. He despised the feeling of dirt under his nails, and he had no other entrenching tools with him. Dropping it into the water didn’t seem right either - a viking burial for something that was not a warrior. Slowly, he bent the wings into something looking natural, and with only a little revulsion, moved it into the grass at the side of the path. It was still warm, it’s body not yet stiffened, the feathers soft where the blood had not matted them. As he straightened up, he realised his school trousers were now sticky and marred from where he had knelt. 

On the river, another swan swam, a few cygnets following behind. He didn’t know if it was searching for it’s mate, or hunting, or even if it had another waiting in the nest. 

The flowers have always whispered to me, for as long as I can remember. The children were often left in the garden to amuse themselves. The walls were high, there were no houses that overlooked the large area, and well, it was in a time where adults let their children roam a little farther, a little longer.

She sat close to the daffodils, clapping chubby hands together, laughing as the stems danced in the wind. Her father, sitting on the far-away patio, glanced up occasionally, checking his daughter had not strayed. Her laughter carried easily, though as most children’s can, it often could be mistaken for little screams, making him jolt before returning to his newspaper.

He couldn’t see the fairies occupying her. Nobody could. But there they were among the leaves, chattering and hiding, sometimes tweaking her nose but darting back among the foliage before they could be seen. 

[clauscrayon7-blog]

The Best Men’s Trainers Released In 2018

It’s been a big year for trainers, both literally and figuratively. Building on the chunky styles that set 2017’s Richter scales racing, in 2018 platform-esque stompers made way for nineties-inspired dad shoes.

We also saw technology come on in leaps and bounds with innovations like Nike’s React cushioning system and the rollout of Adidas’s 3D-printed Futurecraft model, making the footwear market easily one of the most exciting sectors of menswear.

Elsewhere, we were treated to see-through uppers and the emergence of trail-running shoes as a fashion item (neither of which we saw coming). But even among all the madness, this year has also given us some solid gold classics.

With so much going on, you’d think it’d be difficult to pick the best trainers of 2018. (And it was.) But that’s what we’ve done. Here are they are, and the reasons why they stood out from the crowd.

Nike Epic React

Even if the product had been terrible, Nike’s expertly executed marketing campaign at the beginning of the year would’ve been enough to make us want it. However, it wasn’t terrible. In fact, Nike’s Epic React was the most revolutionary running shoe we’ve seen in a long time, utilising a cutting-edge sole unit that’s softer, lighter and bouncier than the brand’s previous top-end cushioning material.

As a result, this year’s marathons were a blur of React soles pounding streets and pavements across the globe. The biggest drop of 2018? Quite possibly.

Adidas Yung-1

This was the year the ‘90s resurgence really took hold of menswear. And trainers were no exception. One of the most memorable #throwbacks came courtesy of Adidas in the shape of the Yung-1 – a chunky retro trainer serving as proof that the 20-year trend-cycle clock is still ticking to the second.

Rewind to 1998, and Three Stripes had just released the Falcon Dorf, a bulky tricked-out kick that would go on to become one of the most recognisable silhouettes of the decade. The Yung-1 is a reincarnation of that style, brought bang up to date for the digital age.

Nike React Element 87

On paper, the React Element 87 doesn’t sound particularly appealing. It’s got a big lumpy outsole, a V-shaped tongue and perhaps most bizarrely of all, your feet are visible through it. Yet somehow all of this comes together to create one of the most handsome shoes we’ve seen all year. And it’s not all good looks. These bad boys use the same sole technology as Nike’s flagship running shoe the Epic React, only it’s been reinforced at key pressure points.

If you like to go sockless, though, best leave this one well alone. Don’t worry, there’s also the React Element 55, which is the same shoe minus the translucent upper.

Puma Thunder Spectra

Puma’s most iconic shoe is without a doubt the unapologetically minimal Suede Classic. However, this year the brand’s been putting itself on every sneakerhead’s map for a very different reason. This was the year Puma made itself the king of tasteful maximalism. The sort that even your mate who shields his eyes and hisses anytime there’s a pair of Balenciagas in the vicinity can get on board with.

The Thunder Spectra is the shoe that started it, using sharp flashes of colour set against a moody, black leather backdrop. It proved a huge hit, with several followup colourways released since, each one every bit as handsome as the last.

Balenciaga Track

Just when you thought fashion couldn’t get any more ridiculous, someone turns to you and says, “trail running shoes are going to be the next big thing”. At first, you may not have believed them. But then, unless you spent the year blindfolded, you were met with the release of Balenciaga’s Track shoe.

This overengineered cross-country runner sprinted onto the market in September to all the hype you’d expect from the brand that single-handedly kickstarted the biggest trend of the last couple of years.

Nike Air Max 98 ‘Gundam’

For the uninitiated, Gundam is a Japanese franchise consisting of several anime series, games, toys and more. At its core, it’s about massive robots, but you don’t need to be into those or any of the above in order to appreciate one of the most low-key hyped releases of 2018, the Nike Air Max 98 ‘Gundam’.

The shoe’s colourway was inspired by the RX-78-2, the original Gundam robot first introduced in 1979. Whether you care about that or not is irrelevant, the fact remains: this is one seriously fine piece of footwear.

End x Vans ‘Vertigo’ Slip-On

If you were to drink three quarters of a bottle of gin and glance down at your feet while wearing a pair of checkerboard shoes, it would probably look a lot like this. Respected fashion retailer End joined forces with Vans to put its own stamp on two of the iconic California skate brand’s most recognisable silhouettes: the OG Slip-On and the Old Skool.

For us, the Slip-On is the one that stands out. It was the first model to bear the brand’s signature checkerboard pattern, and as well as featuring a psychedelic reimagining of it, the End version also boasts premium materials including fine leather and 6 oz canvas.

Puma RS-X Toys

German sportswear Stalwart Puma showed us all once again why it’s the best brand out there for bulky, colourful kicks that won’t break the bank nor your style credentials when it released the RS-X Toys.

This bold, colourful model was inspired by the vinyl toys of the 1980s and ‘90s and is bound to evoke some serious nostalgia in any red-blooded millennial. Of course, it’s not all about aesthetics. Believe it or not, this beast was built for running, meaning it’s feather-light and as comfortable as they come. A definite ‘Marmite’ shoe, but a masterpiece in madness and future collector’s item all the same.

Nike Tailwind

Nike’s Tailwind runner was nothing short of revolutionary when it first hit shelves in 1979. So it’s little wonder that it’s one of our favourite re-releases of the year.

This simple-looking (by today’s standards) shoe was the first piece of footwear to incorporate the Swoosh’s now-famous ‘Air’ technology, and at the time whipped runners-up into an undying frenzy. A legend was born, and to mark 40 years since, we were treated to a limited batch in the original understated colourway. There was even a pair of socks to match.

Asics x Kiko Kostadinov Gel Delva 1

Everyone knows Japanese sportswear label Asics makes some of the best running shoes on the market. How could they possibly get any better? Easy, just add one up-and-coming Bulgarian fashion designer to the creative process.

Kiko Kostadinov may not be a name you’re immediately familiar with, but it probably will be soon. The 29-year-old is currently creative director at Mackintosh (the coats, not computers) as well as helming his own eponymous label. Even with all that on his plate, he somehow still found the time to collaborate on this moody technical runner.

Converse x Undercover 70 OX

At the beginning of 2018, renegade Japanese designer Jun Takahashi’s brand Undercover whipped Pitti up into a storm by parading some particularly spicy Converse All Star high tops down the runway. Every fashion-savvy man and his equally stylish dog wanted a pair. On September 25th, they got the chance.

The shoe released in four striking colourways, each with contrast detailing and the words ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ printed on the left and right toe respectively. Speaking of order, that’s exactly what we did when we first set eyes on them.

Nike x Sean Wotherspoon Air Max 1/97

This year has been a phenomenal one for trainers by anyone’s standards, but even with such stiff competition, this corduroy belter from sportswear don Nike and famed trainer collector Sean Wotherspoon stands out.

There’s just so much to like: the beautifully contrasting layers of colour to the upper; the little wave motif on the tongue; the tactile fabrication; and, of course, the fact that this is not one but two shoes in one. For the less observant among you, its an Air Max 97’s body, sat on an Air Max 1’s sole unit. So wrong, but so right.

Adidas Spezial Lowertree

If there’s one man who knows what goes into making a great Adidas trainer, it’s designer, collector and all-round Three Stripes connoisseur Gary Aspden. His Spezial line is based around the brand’s archives, taking classic and historic models and updating them with contemporary touches. This usually results in some seriously good-looking footwear, and this year was no exception.

The Lowertree SPZL owes its silhouette to the iconic Marathon Competition model from 1985. Only where the original was beige with hits of red, this version has been reimagined in a vivid nineties colour palette to pay homage to the acid house scene of which Aspden is so fond.

Converse x Golf Le Fleur One Star

If you’re a fan of shoes that will burn your retinas if not viewed through sunglasses, then you’re probably already well acquainted with Tyler The Creator’s collaborations. The founder of hip-hop collective Odd Future is known for his Golf clothing line as well as his rapping, and in the past has had hypebeasts frothing at the mouth with his neon Vans.

This year, he turned his attention to another low-key skate classic, the Converse One Star. Redesigned with a flower motif to the side and released just in time for summer in a range of tempting vibrant colourways.

Puma x Santa Cruz Suede

It’s fair to say 2018 marked a big year for German sportswear don Puma. It was the 50th anniversary of its most iconic shoe, the Suede Classic, and what better way to celebrate than with a completely unexpected collaboration?

To mark the occasion, Puma joined forces with Californian skate brand Santa Cruz. The result was a pair of beautifully simple suede kicks, adorned with some of Santa Cruz’s famous artwork, Including the iconic screaming hand designed by artist Jim Phillips.

Nike ISPA React Runner Mid

You may not be familiar with Nike’s ISPA subdivision, but chances are you’re going to become very well acquainted over the coming years. This renegade team of designers is pushing footwear design in bold new directions, utilising technical fabrics, futuristic aesthetics and incorporating the Swoosh’s latest and greatest tech at the same time.

ISPA stands for ‘Improvise, Scavenge, Protect, and Adapt’, and this React Element-based mid-top was the first shoe to be created by the program. It featured a round-the-ankle lacing system, reflective detailing and boasts water-repellent uppers to keep the weather sealed out.

Common Projects Achilles Low ‘Rust’

Luxury minimalist sneakers may have been sidelined by the sort of shoes The Spice Girls would have worn circa 1996, but it’s only temporary. Stripped-back kicks are still out there, waiting for the chunky trainer’s reign to end. If this handsome new Achilles Low is anything to go by, they’re passing the time by playing with some new colourways.

Common Projects call this new shade ‘rust’. Whether or not that’s a deliberate metaphor for what’s been happening to its brand over the last two years is unclear. What’s certain, however, is that if the NY brand keeps lining releases like this up, chunky trainers might be toppled from their throne sooner rather than later.

Air Jordan x Levi’s Jordan 4

Okay, shoes made out of jeans are far from something we’d typically advocate, and these are far from the easiest shoes to style. However, from a design and brand perspective, 2018’s Jordan x Levi’s tie-up is easily the biggest of the year.

Nike’s Air Jordan subdivision is the biggest name in the game. If it hadn’t have been for designer Tinker Hatfield and his future-shaping basketball shoes, the modern sneakerhead as we know them may not even exist. Meanwhile, Californian brand Levi’s is the king of denim. Bring the two together, and naturally, you’ve got something rather special.

Adidas Alphabounce Instinct

If disturbing psychedelic painter H.R. Giger had designed a shoe, it would probably have looked a little something like this. Looks-wise, the Alphabounce Instinct is so odd that you can’t help but stare at it, and the more you stare at it, the more you think, ‘actually, that would look pretty sweet on my shoe rack.’

It’s not all aesthetics, either, there’s a lot going on under the hood here. Designed with athletes in mind, the Alphabounce Instinct takes cues from the movement of the human body and its adaptive design is supposed to allow the wearer to move more instinctively while running.

Reebok x Overkill Club C

Berlin’s favourite sneaker shop Overkill is no stranger to a juicy joint partnership. This year, its focus was the iconic Reebok Club C, which was treated to a makeover in premium, off-white leather with green corduroy accents and Overkill-branded satin insoles.

The inspiration behind the shoe comes from 1985 East Berlin, taking its colours from wallpaper, tablecloths and floor patterns that were prevalent in the former communist district at the time. A fine piece of footwear and one of the best versions of the Club C we’ve seen to date.

Source: https://www.fashionbeans.com/article/best-trainer-releases-2018/

[lifejustgotawkward]

365 Day Movie Challenge (2017) - #216: Dunkirk (2017) - dir. Christopher Nolan

Two weeks ago, I saw Dunkirk in a 70mm IMAX show at my favorite IMAX venue, the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 theater in Manhattan. As I have probably said numerous times in earlier reviews, that screen provides the definitive IMAX experience for viewers in New York City. I was doubly excited in this instance because I went to Dunkirk with a good friend of mine who did not grow up in New York and who had never been to this particular IMAX theater. (I am happy to report that she was indeed astonished by the immensity of the screen, even more so since we were sitting in the last row, almost exactly in the center.) I mention all of these details because they helped inform how I processed the overwhelming magnitude of Christopher Nolan’s latest film.

From the moment the film started, I was firmly ensconced in the narrative. I felt as though I were actually in the movie. Every heart-pounding tremor boomed out of the sound system and was transferred directly into my seat. It was easy to be captivated by the simple story of young British soldier Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) since his struggle is universal: to survive. The close-ups of Tommy were breathtaking in IMAX, although perhaps I was specially attuned to them because I often study and write about the impact of faces and bodies in cinema. It is for this same reason that I was also blown away by the performance given by Aneurin Barnard as another of the main soldier characters, Gibson. Barnard has marvelously expressive eyes, a real gift for him to have as an actor since Gibson moves through his scenes in silence.

Indeed, much of Dunkirk’s intensity relies on visuals and on the actors’ abilities to express themselves without dialogue, just like in silent cinema. The subtlest changes in a person’s face can shape a language of their own. You may hear from other viewers and critics that Dunkirk’s characters lack development and the story lacks the types of expected dramatic arcs that accompany traditionally fleshed-out characters, but I do not believe that filmmakers “owe” those details to an audience, nor do I need to know those aspects of a character’s life, either past or present, in order to care. I identified with Tommy as he fought his way through obstacle after obstacle; he felt fear and panic, and I know those emotions intimately. I have been fortunate never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but the fact that Christopher Nolan’s film allowed me to connect so strongly with its soldiers, sailors and heroic citizens is an extraordinary achievement.

Besides Tommy, Gibson and Alex (Harry Styles in a decent film debut), who are the soldiers we follow on the beach, the film also observes two high-up military officials, Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) and Colonel Winnant (James D’Arcy), as well as the valiant work done in the air by pilots Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) and by sea via the civilian vessel captained by Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), his Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and one of Peter’s schoolmates, George (Barry Keoghan, who will be seen as the young lead of Yorgos Lanthimos’ next film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in November). Another key member of the cast is Shivering Soldier (Cillian Murphy), the unnamed British serviceman who is found in the Channel by the Dawson boat and whose experiences at Dunkirk have left him shell-shocked. All of these performers do incredible work, but Murphy is especially affecting.

Don’t be fooled by reviewers who say that Dunkirk has no one protagonist, though. In spite of the tripartite storytelling created by Nolan (as we have seen throughout his career, he is obsessed with narratives about the manipulation of time), there is no doubt that Tommy is at the center of the action. He is the first character we pay attention to in the film, and the last person we see onscreen. Other characters carry their sections of the narrative, but Tommy is the beating heart of our viewing experience. Christopher Nolan has compared Fionn Whitehead to a young Tom Courtenay, and I absolutely agree.

It should go without saying - although I will say so anyway - that the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema (he has shot several big-deal movies in the last decade: Let the Right One In, The Fighter, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Her, Interstellar, Spectre) and the editing by Lee Smith (he has cut every Christopher Nolan film dating back to Batman Begins) are top of the line. Think pieces from the past few weeks have criticized various aspects of Dunkirk, including the lack of diversity and the fact that the characters refer to “the enemy” rather than Nazis or Germans, but one of the most crucial components of artistic license is the ability to tell a story from the perspective of one’s choosing. Firstly, Nolan’s choice of language does not negate the evilness of the Nazis, and second, I do not believe that Nolan intended to depict the entirety of the Dunkirk experience. We do not see the faces of every single person on the beach. Instead we concentrate on four soldiers, two pilots and three civilians. Their stories are their own, not anyone else’s (even though Tommy was evidently written as an Everyman figure). No film should be held to the same standards expected from a comprehensive, thousand-page textbook.

Tonally, Nolan’s film is closer to the mood of World War I stories like Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory or the Dalton Trumbo novel Johnny Got His Gun, rather than what we usually expect from modern films made about World War II. The brilliance of Dunkirk isn’t just in how it portrays the effects of psychological trauma on soldiers who are barely old enough to shave, let alone fight and die in battle; it is also in the knowledge that Tommy and his comrades must reckon with two opposing truths, the importance of the Allied cause versus the utterly cruel and harrowing realities of combat. World War II movies don’t have to show limbs flying everywhere, like in Saving Private Ryan and Hacksaw Ridge; we know that that happens in war. But Dunkirk still communicates the lows and eventual highs of this historic evacuation by showing pain, doubt, loss, but throughout it all the strength of the human spirit. I applaud the bravery of examining the grotesque nature of war seen through the eyes of young men while simultaneously acknowledging how necessary it was for World War II to be fought and won by the Allies; one does not cancel out the other. Therein lies the significance of the film’s final shot and the greatness of Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece as a whole.

[cortegiania]

Hi, love your blog! Do you like the white princess? Both the book and the tv show I mean.

Hi anon, thanks a lot! Brace yourself, because this is going to be a very long answer written both by Mary’s perspective and my own (they’re similar but we have a lot of feelings, so….):

LAURA

Book: Hated it. If I could just get past Gregory’s glaring, ludicrous bias or if I’d lived on the moon until the other day and known nothing about history I could maybe enjoy it as a work of fiction pure as simple, but even so its tiresome reiterations sold as psychological introspection and its singularly uninspired prose are so bad I just can’t get into it. I think PG probably had shot herself in the foot by describing HVII as a creepy villain in The Constant Princess, so she had no choice but stick to that characterisation in her other books or else it would hardly have looked like the same universe. I personally believe this is almost downright offensive to the historical Henry Tudor, not because it has any actual influence on any intelligent person’s idea of him but because it really cheapens him both as a sovreign and a person. Whatever PG might think of him, he was a remarkable figure she either doesn’t quite grasp or actively means to undermine. No middle ground here.

But you know, it’s always the same problem with PG: it’s okay to write fiction with your own theory, although I find most of hers hilarious, just maybe don’t claim to be a historian?? Like, that’s not your phd?? Just because you read about something it doesn’t mean you get any authority on it - I read a lot about the Borgias, it doesn’t mean I’m a Borgia historian. I’m not even close. Tbh, I also blame the UK’s cultural industry here. Just don’t interview the woman in your documentaries. Don’t give her the same space as David frigging Starkey. She’s good for Harlequin books at best, or rather was. Sorry this rant got OT quite quickly, but it’s really hard to separate the book’s quality from its historicity or lack thereof and that’s chiefly PG’s own fault.

TV Show: I do and I don’t like it. Obectively it’s laughably bad. It lacks everything that made TWQ decent, stylish entertainment: great performances, gorgeous locations, beautiful cinematography, evocative directing. But even the best intentions can’t make much out of a weak script and TWP’s is a ridiculous mess that makes me want to send Reign’s writers a sorry note for all those times I’ve laughed at them. The amount of exposition in every single dialogue is embarassing, except when it comes to mentioning that RIII was “Lizzie”’s uncle. At that point they’re no longer exposing anything, in fact they’re crossing her fingers people will forget about it. Then, when they’re not busy explaining us who the characters (minus Richard) are, they keep themselves occupied making them contradict themselves or do things that make no sense whatsoever:

In one episode Margaret offers peace in the name of the child and Elizabeth is like perhaps, lol, mic drop, Elizabeth out; the next one it’s Elizabeth who bids peace (a peace she doesn’t mean because she’s still scheming behind their backs) and Margaret shuts her up. If they didn’t hate each others’ guts I’d say they’re sparring lovers.

Both Elizabeths know Margaret killed the princes so they know they cursed Henry’s future son but they go through with the wedding and the pregnancy anyway, in fact they claim they’ll raise a healthy baby. Curse? What curse? Did they ever make one? But wait, maybe the curse isn’t a thing on TWP!

But then “Lizzie” finally gives birth and wants her mother to discuss the curse. So it is a thing on the show! Why didn’t they bring it up before? Did “Lizzie” just endure 9 months of pregnancy with a child she distined to an untimely death? She’ll probably discuss this with her mom now, right? Better late than never! But no, when she’s finally brought to her she doesn’t even bring it up for a second.

Oh, and let’s not forget that time “Lizzie”’s pregnancy was announced in a room full of people but then they had to fake the loss of her virginity on their wedding night! So smart! This will not make you guys look suspicious at all!

I could go on but I’m exhausted.

And then there are assorted stupidities such as having Margaret of York talk of “her spies” knowing Henry had a son when Henry has just held the equivalent of a press conference to have the world know about it. Some spies, Margaret!

In general, the whole thing looks like it was written and shot in a rush and with a 100$ budget. The women’s costumes are absolutely terrible and look cheap, poorly assembled with pieces that just don’t belong together nor to this era (I’d say born from an incestous relationship between Magnificent Century and Kosem). The best ones apart from the men’s are those recycled from other shows (Burgundy is full of them). Plus, Margaret Beaufort (whose character is deprived of all the humanity, vulnerability and even humour she used to have on TWQ) is wearing a synthetic Minnie Mouse hat half of the time.

But every show has its saving grace and TWP’s is Jacob Collins Levy. The guy even read bios, he can mention data even I couldn’t remember. I swear he’s possessed by Henry VII. He can be sweet, mean, dorky, kingly, authoritative, paranoid, you say it. He’s a miracle and I thank whomever picked him every day. He even looks the part, for heaven’s sake, you can totally picture him as a 20-something Henry Tudor. Poor Jodie Comer can’t do much with her Gregory-based script but the show took most liberties with Henry’s character and as a result he’s way better thanhis book counterpart. Their nice blossoming chemistry (1x01? What’s 1x01?) is single-handedly making this mess of a show worth a shot.

I guess at the end of the day it doesn’t have the ambition of TWQ? I don’t know. It’s a Reign-like show, except they sold it as accurate!!! and feminist!!!! and… it’s not quite working as either of those things. It’s silly entertainment at best.

MARY

Book: I really don’t like the book, I feel it’s not only terrible in terms of plot and historical accuracy but also badly written and kinda repetitive (the characters are always saying the same things over and over again, Philippa Gregory doesn’t know synonyms are a thing probably). I stated my feelings pretty clearly here and my opinion hasn’t changed one bit; just to give you a vague idea of how much I truly hate this book I’ll say this: I never dnf books, never, but with this I couldn’t bring myself to keep going and I gave up at ~75% (I read the ending though and it sucked). What bothers me the most is the fact that PG thinks that what she wrote is an accurate depiction of the truth (minus the witchy part of curse, or at least I hope so); on her website she wrote this:

Historical research??? Where?! There in nothing in this book you couldn’t find on wikipedia; actually, now that I think about it, wikipedia is probably more accurate and less biased towards Henry and Margaret than she is.

The characters, let’s not talk about them; Elizabeth is annoying and she keeps repeating she loved Richard, she loves Richard, she will always love Richard (no synonyms remember?) and blah blah blah: just shut up already, we got it, you can move on now. She knows nothing (about 50% percent of her lines consist in “I don’t know” or something like that) and she’s stupid, there’s no other word for that, no polite way of saying she’s unintelligent. Henry is an idiot and he RAPES Elizabeth before their wedding???!?!?! WHAT??! And he’s in love with Katherine Huntly?!? WHAT? He’s volatile, weak, completely unable to govern (spoiler alert: the real Henry was NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL) and he’s a pawn in his mother’s hands. Oh, have I mentioned Elizabeth and Henry keep falling in and out of love with each other for no reason? Plus she falls for him after he raped her, what kind of message is PG trying to send here? Because I don’t like it.

I cannot really talk about the plot because there is no plot, it’s always the same thing repeated ad infinitum: Henry fears a York boy will steal his throne, he questions Elizabeth about it, she asks her mother (who says she knows nothing but we know better) and she tells Henry she’s clueless. Then the whole thing starts again, interspersed with some random fighting and pregnancies. It’s dull as dirt.

I’ll be glad to further elaborate my thoughts if you want but I think my rant is already too long so I’ll stop now.

TV Show: I have mixed feelings about this. Let’s be honest for a second here: the show is bad and the fact that the writers and producers are women is not enough to say the approach to things is feminist. If something is bad it’s just bad, whether it was a man or a woman who made it. The writing is lazy (actors spend half of their time explaining the viewers what they’re seeing) and boring and despite there being some great actors (Michelle Fairley for instance) they often have nothing to work with; the original material wasn’t good in the first place but they did nothing to improve it.

One thing I do like are the main actors: Jacob Collins-Levy is a gem, WE’VE BEEN BLESSED. He understands Henry, he studied him and one can truly see it in his nuanced performance: he brings the character to life with subtlety, he is Henry. Give this man all the emmys please because he does all this with a poor script and I feel like he knows more about Henry than the people who wrote this show. I like Jodie Comer as well, she works well with the shitty script she’s been given. Plus Jacob and Jodie have the best chemistry and that helps a lot: just imagine what masterpiece we would have had if the writing had been decent. I guess I’m warming to Lizzie as a character (I absolutely hate her in TWQ) but her constant obsession with Teddy gets on my nerves (it seems she has dropped the issue now though, thankfully). Michelle Fairley is good but she’s no Amanda Hale unfortunately and Margaret herself is not the one we all saw and loved in TWQ. Elizabeth (Woodville) is the usual and I can’t stand her as usual.

The plot is pretty unexciting: the whole Burgundy business is awfully monotonous and Elizabeth scheming is repetitive and tedious.

I just wanted to briefly say something about the “rape” scene in the first episode. Whatever Emma Frost says about it, it was not the great showing of strenght on Elizabeth’s part they’re trying to sell: Lizzie giving her “consent” didn’t make it okay and it did not make her a feminist, it did not make her powerful, it did not put her in control. I’ve elected to ignore that shit and enjoy the romance from a historical point of view but I find kinda disturbing that the writers are set on building a romance that started with that.

As for more frivolous stuff, the costumes are horrendous and the sets look cheap, I expected more.

I hope this answers your question :)

[thehallofgame]

Review - Tomb Raider (2013)

Enjoyability Score: 9

Gameplay Score: 8.5

Tomb Raider Review Series: 9/11ish

              Tomb Raider is a series that loves a reboot. This time around it’s a hard reboot that aimed to change the essential feeling of the series and tell an origin story for Lara Croft. The game is almost perfect, with only the most minor of complaints marring the beautifully rendered blood and mud smeared masterpiece. The hard turn into a more adult-oriented, grungier aesthetic served the series well and somewhat offset the head-to-head competition the series was having with the Uncharted games. However, where it had drawbacks was in the game’s unprecedented, for the series, linearity, and the occasional awkwardness of the series’s characteristic high drama divorced from it’s original campy undertones.

              The game centers around a very young, too smart for her own good Lara Croft on her first archaeological expedition. Lara, and the whole expedition, wind up marooned on the mythical Japanese island they were hoping to find. Things rapidly get very deadly, fairly grisly, and extremely implausible. While Tomb Raider games don’t shy away from melodramatic plots about ancient magic, lost civilizations, and world ending calamities only Lara Croft can prevent, this time the game takes itself much more seriously. The story of the game is good, taking the player through what is essentially a coming of age narrative alongside a fight for survival (but against a crazy god-queen worshipping cult, nothing so mundane as starvation or other shipwreck related ailments). The writing is quite heavy handed in that it leans on many American movie tropes that lands it somewhere between an action-thriller movie and the adventure movies that originally inspired the series. Additionally, the game’s characterization sometimes frustrates by repeatedly making Lara a universally and instantly competent person at whatever she puts her hand to, and also with a great deal of story-telling gameplay dissonance. The most famous example of this is the way Lara bemoans killing in cutscenes but then mows down enemies without a flinch during normal gameplay. Another thing that occurs is the fact that Lara is suddenly much less deadly during dramatic story events than during normal gameplay. Normally I’d handwave this as gameplay contrivance, but it is irksome in a game that’s so cinematic in nature.

              Like the campy tone, much of the series’s flashier gameplay contrivances are gone. Lara’s signature dual wielding of pistols is over, replaced instead with a new signature weapon: a bow. Likewise, the over the top gymnastic feats of the earlier game have been pared down to more realistic scrambles and weighty-feeling leaps. However, this doesn’t drag the platforming down. It feels fluid and fun, with only the occasional hang-up on glitching collision mesh or when the game doesn’t properly register what the player is trying to do. The auto-save and checkpoint system is reliable enough that this is rarely an issue at all. It’s far less noticeable than the overwhelming fluidity of having Lara run up walls, leap across chasms, hurtle down zip lines, and use the climbing axe to traverse cliff faces.

              It’s a shame, then, that the game often interrupts these sequences with quick-time events that are little more than button mashing and slow-motion segments. These choices weren’t well received in the previous two games, and their unfortunate removal of player agency is even more of a head-scratcher when compared with several segments of linear platforming across collapsing structures that leave the player in control. Perhaps there were simply too many instances in the game that called for dramatic, collapsing set pieces for all of them to be timed escape runs, but that indicates a bad design decision, not a good reason to put in flawed gameplay mechanics.

              I’ve already mentioned the game’s linear nature, so I’ll get into it now. The island of Yamatai, on which the whole game takes place, is divided into a series of environments that basically follow one of two formulas: either a long winding corridor with puzzles and/or setpieces, or a large open area with narrow entrance and exit paths. The game feels like it’s funneling the player constantly forward, and it somewhat undermines the sense of exploration fostered in the earlier Tomb Raider games when a cutscene or a quick-time sequence interrupts the player’s wanderings to send them hurtling into the next level, unable to get back until they reach the level’s fast travel hub. It lends the story the sense of urgency it’s meant to convey and highlights the changes to narrative structure that came with the reboot, but it means that the game also feels a lot more like a 3rd person shooter than an adventure game.

              Luckily, the over-the-shoulder combat is solid and feels pretty good. It uses a fairly standard aim button and fire button system that is familiar and comfortable. Lara finds four projectile weapons over the course of the game, and her climbing axe is used as a melee weapons. Each of the weapons is upgradeable through a series of salvaged materials and specific parts scattered around the levels. By the end of the game each weapon will have an alternate firing method that can be used to launch grenades or grapples, and some have multiple types of ammunition with different effects. There’s a stealth system in play that’s fairly optional, though the player is strongly encouraged to use it in certain sections.

              The stealth system is largely dependent on the ‘survival instincts’ ability, which is new to this game. While standing still the player can hit a button which will render the world in grey-scale, highlighting interactable items in yellow, enemies who will cause an alarm if killed in red, and enemies who can be safely stealth killed in white. The yellow object act as a hint system, highlighting puzzle-solving objects, collectibles, and animals that can be hunted for extra experience points and salvage. The enemy coloration is supposed to help with the stealth system, and it does to a degree, though unreliably. Where enemies are mobile and moving around one another it’s easy enough to line up a shot with a silent weapon or to sneak up on them, but when enemies are stationary the mechanics meant to separate them don’t always work as intended and often triggers the alarm the player was trying to prevent. An alert causes at least one wave, often several, of enemies to appear and turn the fight into a bullet storm.

              A limited level-based progression system exists, with some choice in the order Lara obtains certain bonuses, though with the fact that all the options will be taken in the course of the game there’s little real customization available. That said, these choices do allow tailoring to playstyle in the beginning to middle in the game. Basically, there are three types of skills: experience bonuses, item-collecting bonuses, and combat bonuses.

              A big feature of the game is exploration and collectibles. Documents containing background information and boxes containing valuable relics are the flashiest rewards, with each relic having a unique look and some cultural/historical information for Lara to expound on when it’s discovered. While these kinds of goodies are always a delight, they make the game’s optional tombs all the more a disappointment. The optional tombs are really just a single platforming puzzle with a big box of salvage materials at the end. They’re more boring than the rest of the game and don’t provide new world-building information nor treasures. Which is, for lack of a better word, lame in a game literally called Tomb Raider.

              Ultimately, I’ve been griping about a lot of small things. By in large the updates the developers made to the series revitalized it, differentiated it from Uncharted, and made the game accessible to a more mainstream audience. While a lot of the things that were hallmarks of the series are gone there’s a strong argument to be made that it was past time for some of them to go. Tomb Raider tells a good story that, while over the top at times, feels like an updated version of the action-scientist tropes that inspired the series in the first place. Further, Lara’s origin story concurrent with her discovery that unexplained phenomena exist in the world sets the stage for the games that were to follow.

[group1stem1magiting-blog]

Reel Feels

Rosewell Ray V. Cabusas

August 03, 2018 | 12:27am

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“That’s all that matters. The greatest thing is to have someone who loves you and—and to love in return. People who haven’t got it—or had it—don’t believe that, but it’s the truth.”

What’s with the quote, you ask? Well, I may not be as engrossed as everybody else when it comes to chick flicks and such but hey! Everybody has their soft and weak spots. I may not be interested by the very first time I lay my eyes on a piece but soon you’ll find me sitting hunched at the edge of the room – crying and reflecting on what I have just watched or read. Oh, the sentiments in the literature and films we’ve indulged ourselves with.

Today, I will be sharing my favorite scene from a British historical drama I’ve been patronizing since season 1. Hey hey hey! Don’t leave me just yet! I ,myself, was really not into historical genre long before I came about but trust me, it gets better once you've widen your boundaries! So lemme start with my looooong erratic remarks about my favorite drama scene. *cue jazz music*

Entitled as Poldark, it is based from Winston Graham’s book with the same title. This all-new version of the vintage Masterpiece series stars Aidan Turner as Capt. Ross Poldark. Yes!! Aidan Turner! Who portrayed a character from Jackson's The Hobbit adaptation named Kili- the youngest of the thirteen dwarves who set out on Thorin Oakenshield's quest to conquer Erebor. (Let me put a brake on that before I begin to fantasize about Tolkien beings).

Going back!! The story begins In the late 18th century, Ross Poldark returns from the American War of Independence to his home in Cornwall after three years in the army. Upon his return home, he discovers his father has died, his estate in ruins and in debt, and his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth is engaged to his cousin Francis. Wow, a warm homecoming surprise for a soldier returning from war. Yet, Capt. Poldark stood firm. Ain’t nobody is bringin' my man downnn. While in quest in saving the family’s long running mine business; In town, he encounters a young woman named Demelza, dressed as a boy. After learning that her father beats her, Poldark offers her lodging and work as a kitchen maid. He then strives to help his father's tenants and the people of the village while attempting to run the copper mines he inherited, sought after by his rival, the greedy and arrogant George Warleggan.

•Ross Venor Poldark•

•Elizabeth Chynoweth Warleggan•

•Demelza Carne Poldark•

Its fourth season is currently airing this year!! With fast paced jawdropping revelations, thrilling scenes and unexpected turn of events, Poldark always keeps me at the edge of my seat.... or bed. Even though are more than 30 episodes released, there's only one scene that I’m totally diggin and will share. After seeing this drama I've came to ask myself, what is it like to live in the 18th century where romantic love letters and songs are a norm? Where love is expressed through exquisite art--to feel every stroke of letters they write; that every words they speak and sing are music to their love one's ears. What does it feel like?? Welp!! Fast-forward to Season 1 Episode 4 where Demelza is already wed to Capt. Poldark. Too soon? See here why. <--tis a link

Now, where do I start? I don’t even now where to begin to describe how utterly perfect every single millisecond of this scene is. I thought it impossible to choose a favorite scene from this episode because it’s been an unadultered Demelza/Ross relationship, however, then came this and I forgot about everything else. It was Christmas Eve when Demelza and Ross are invited in a small feast at Nampara. While chillin (cause its cold) near the fireplace, Elizabeth plays a harp for the guests. As they clap after Elizabeth's graceful performance, a guest provocatively asked Demelza to play something- with the idea that Demelza is just a scullery maid. Ross intervenes saying that Demelza rather sings. With no other choice, Demelza- who don't even play instruments, walked towards the harp then unexpectedly plucks the right string out of nervousness. Then she began to sing. There was none which could compete with Demelza singing her soul-stirring love song. It resonates across the whole room and deeply moves everyone. Demelza’s clear voice full of unsaid feelings makes an impact on the listeners (I would like to be included too thank you very much); and Elizabeth immediatelly realizes that her harp could never compare this.

[Video link here!!!]

The Wild Red Rose

“I’d pluck a fair rose for my love;

I’d pluck a red rose blowing.

Love’s in my heart a-trying so to prove.

What your heart’s knowing.

I’d pluck a finger on a thorn,

I’d pluck a finger bleeding.

Red is my heart a-wounded and forlorn

And your heart needing.”

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Everyone is listening to Demelza, but it’s clear that there is is only one man to whom the song is for. Everybody is moved by the performance because Demelza’s song touches the hearts of those who know how to feel love and even those who don’t, because its message is so strong and clear and beautiful in its frankness - it’s HER LOVE CONFESSION to her husband. It’s as close as she dares to voice her love in front of him. She bewitches him and it’s as if everyone else in the room vanished and he truly saw her for the first time. When she looks up and watches him, Ross can’t keep his eyes from her and he feels every note and word and it makes him tremble. And in that moment, as the comprehension dawns he finally realizes the meaning of her song and it takes his breath away - that HIS WIFE doesn’t need to learn to LIKE him at all because SHE ALREADY LOVES HIM! Awww, the loving and proud smile! I also love the fact that Ross actually suggests that Demelza sings because he is indirectly admitting that he loves her signing and thinks it beautiful - remember when he secretly listened to her at the beginning of the episode.

In this moment, for the first time I truly believe that Ross loves her in return. For him, Elizabeth has been a regret and a wound of the past; something that could have been and he is not yet able to let go nor to stop asking himself how it could have been. And I think the reason why it’s taking him such a long time to indentify his feelings for Demelza as love is because they are completely different from what he’s felt for Elizabeth - stronger, deeper, more profound, raw and intense. This is no longer the first naive and hopeful love but the love that lasts a lifetime and endures everything.

So there we have it!! A very huge kudos to Aidan Turner, Eleanor Tomlinson, the whole Poldark cast and crew for successfully bringing to life one of Graham’s timeless masterpiece. I still can’t deny the fact that this scene will be haunting me forever. A very short verse yet the lyrics! Wow. Beyond being frankly a confession-- it also clearly suggests that even though there’s a feeling of pain and sorrow, she would still do whatever it takes to give everything what her love desires. Demelza is quite aware that her husband is still suppressed to the first woman he loved with the society never failing to remind Demelza what her stand is. It makes her think that she could never compare to Elizabeth's, but then she has nothing more to offer than only herself to the man she loves- who ,too, is broken. Then rolled the ending credits. I admit I was left in awe for a moment thinking what could’ve possibly happened in the succeeding episodes...