#note: simon hamilton worked as a translator

[estonian-is-horrible]

Yes, but these are dialects and television is gradually wiping them out. Yes, too, many of Saagpakk's types can be grouped together and probably reduced by more than half, but... English is a relatively simple language, and I'm pretty sure we have more than 38 noun and verb types.

This herding the cats and bats of Estonian nouns and verbs into a nice uniform whole where once there never was looks more like a political or educational agenda than a reality in the field.

Estonian is what can also be described as an "esoteric language", a language which has essentially never needed to be learned by large number of adults (foreigners) and therefore never needed simplification, unlike English, Swahili and Mandarin. Its very essence, its richness, is its complexity. That's what makes it Estonian. You have to learn it as a child. It is rightfully known as a difficult language to learn, partly because Indo-Europeans are the "knowers" and partly because it's been left to its own devices for so long, uncontrolled and allowed to grow like ivy, as opposed to the cultivated gardens of, dare I say, "civilized languages". It truly is a people's language. And is there anything more alive than that? Just look at the damage the Académie Française has done to French...

But it is, as I said, a beautiful language too, with a fascinating cloud of variation that some of the more sanitized languages have pruned or weeded out, and an intricacy of inter-dialectal loan adding layers of nuance to its rich hoard of synonyms so vital to oral tradition.

Who knows, one day I might even learn it...

(A Very Brief Introduction to the Estonian Language, snippet 6)

- A Rambling Dictionary of Tallinn Street Names, page ix, © 2014 Simon Hamilton

(previous excerpts)

[citizenscreen]

Marjorie Main is one of my favorite character actors. It’s an impossibility to see her in a film and not find I am smiling broadly. With one of the most recognizable voices in movies, Main managed an abrupt, but lovable persona in many of her films. It is a joy to watch her and to honor her with this entry for the What a Character! Blogathon 2019.

Born Mary Tomlinson in Acton, Indiana the daughter of Reverend Samuel J. Tomlinson and the former Mary McGaughey, Marjorie Main changed her stage name to avoid embarrassing her minister father who disapproved of entertainment careers. She chose the name she did because “it is easy to remember.” Main was born with a thirst for entertaining even while growing up on a farm, quenching her thirst through stock companies from an early age. Her studies of the dramatic arts led her from Hamilton School of Dramatic Expression in Lexington, Kentucky onto Chicago and New York. In the meantime Ms. Main toured the vaudeville circuit meeting lecturer Dr. Stanley LeFevre Krebs whom she married in 1921. By that point, Marjorie Main was a Broadway veteran.

Marjorie’s physical look, her mannerisms, dry wit, and that voice! all made a package that was not easy to forget. Main had an impact on audiences immediately. Her stage work included a long stint opposite W. C. Fields in a skit titled “The Family Ford” that brought them all the way to New York’s Palace Theatre, the top vaudeville house in the country. Main’s Broadway shows ranged from “Cheating Cheaters” in 1916 in which she played opposite John Barrymore to playing Lucy the Reno Innkeeper in “The Women,” the role that led her to Hollywood and one she reprised in George Cukor’s 1939 big screen gem. Marjorie Main had taken a break from performing for a few years as her husband’s lecture demands grew, but she returned to the stage after his death in 1935 with a popular turn as Mrs. Martin in “Dead End,” again a role she reprised memorably on film, this time directed by William Wyler in 1937. That happens to be one of my favorite of her performances, by the way. It’s a small, but affecting turn as the mother of killer Humphrey Bogart.

Main and Bogart in the film version of DEAD END

Ms. Main made her screen debut in William Wyler’s A House Divided (1931) as a town gossip, an uncredited role in crowd scenes she’d repeat in several movies in the early 1930s. She was in her forties, unheard of in the youth-centric movie industry, but the roles Main would excel at called for a special brand of loud maturity. Anyway, it was when Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to “Dead End” and insisted that Marjorie reprise her stage role that her film career seemed destined for attention. That’s exactly what happened. The movie and her performance were instant hits.

Dead End (1937) proved an important movie in Marjorie Main’s career and for Hollywood in general as it introduced the Dead End Kids who, in one way or another, were subjects of about ninety movies in over two decades either as the Dead End Kids, the Eastside Kids, or the Bowery Boys. Marjorie Main made several Dead End Kids movies playing the impoverished mother of these kids from the slums. She was perfect in the part garnering great reviews along the way. Ms. Main never had children of her own so it was somewhat ironic that in the majority of her roles she played mothers to which she said, “That’s acting!”

The same year Marjorie made Dead End, she played another Mrs. Martin, this time as Barbara Stanwyck’s mother in King Vidor’s three-hanky classic, Stella Dallas. This film too was praised as was Main’s performance with the Hollywood Reporter referring to her as “an artist and her contribution to the picture is out of all proportion to the length of her part.” That was probably true for the entirety of Main’s career including her appearance as a nosy boarding house owner in W. S. Van Dyke’s Another Thin Man (1939), the third of six Thin Man movies starring Myrna Loy and William Powell. You may have heard of them.

Seven films were released in 1940 featuring Marjorie Main. That should give you a clue as to how much her gruff manner and loud, distinctive voice were sought in Hollywood. This included the beginning of a new screen partnership with Wallace Beery. Main replaced the great Marie Dressler as Beery’s female partner and was successful at it even though it was not an easy task to work with him, “Oh my, I should get two checks, one for the acting and the other for working with Wally Beery.” No matter though because the difficulties did not translate to the screen. The public loved Marjorie. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) noticed the audience’s admiration for Marjorie and had signed her to a seven-year contract on October 8, 1940. It was at MGM that Marjorie Main started on a comedic path to cinema history and she was happy to be given the chance.

Main and Beery in Norman Z. McLeod’s JACKASS MAIL (1942), the third of seven films they made together between 1940 and 1949.

It was the movies Marjorie Main appeared in during the MGM years in the 1940s (give or take a year) that made her a warm part of many a childhood, including mine. These include such memorable lavish films as Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait made at 20th Century Fox and such MGM gems as Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis, George Sidney’s The Harvey Girls (1946), and Cy Walters’ Summer Stock (1950). All are favorites and one recognizes the worth of Marjorie Main to the industry by noting the major Hollywood films she was appearing in at the time. Her brand of humor, her stout build and indelible voice were by this time cemented in audiences’ consciousness. An actor who had started her movie career playing upper class dramatic roles could now be counted on for comic relief as matronly maids or ornery, but funny hillbilly types. The latter portrayal was to be Main’s primary legacy at Universal International, rather than at her home studio, which loaned her out with regularity. It’s interesting to note that MGM had planned a series of films starring Marjorie featuring the character of Tish, which she portrayed in the enjoyable 1942 film of the same name co-starring ZaSu Pitts. That movie made a nice profit for MGM so it’s strange the studio decided not to capitalize on a series. By the way, Tish directed by S. Sylvan Simon is replete with legendary character actors.

Aline MacMahon and ZaSu Pitts restrain Marjorie Main in a scene from the film Tish

Marjorie Main made two movies released in 1947, much less than other character actors popular at the time, but the year proved an important one in her career nonetheless. Released in March of that year was Chester Erskine’s The Egg and I, which garnered Main the only Academy Award nomination of her career, Best Actress in a Supporting Role for a portrayal she would forever be associated with. Charles T. Barton’s The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap was released in October of 1947. Although Wistful Widow is not as memorable an outing as The Egg and I, it pitted Main against the legendary comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, which all but guaranteed the second hit of the year for the veteran character actor with a devoted following.

The plot of The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap was based on an old Montana law, which stated that a man who killed another man was responsible for the care and support of his victim’s family. Well, our story begins when traveling salesmen Chester Wooley (Costello) and Duke Egan (Abbott) stop in the town of Wagon Gap, Montana on their way to California. It takes no time for Chester to be accused of killing Fred Hawkins, a notorious criminal married to the equally infamous Mrs. Hawkins (Main). A trial and a conviction quickly follow and Chester is stuck with the Widow Hawkins and her brood of seven. The widow is immediately hell bent on making Chester Wooley her new husband and works him to the bone until he agrees to marry her. Meanwhile, as is the case in all Abbott and Costello movies, Bud Abbott’s character coasts along taking naps and eating well.

The Widow Hawkins-Chester Wooley situation turns out to be a blessing in disguise for Chester who eventually becomes Sheriff of Wagon Gap simply because every other man in town is afraid to be stuck taking care of the Widow. Let me tell you, the Widow is a doozy in Marjorie Main style. She is flirty, desperate for a husband, a raucous mother and an unapologetic farm lord. Widow Hawkins is such a character, in fact, that she alone keeps the peace at Wagon Gap, which was a notoriously lawless place prior to her falling into widowhood. Although there are many movie instances wherein Marjorie Main plays characters similar to Widow Hawkins, the resemblance is particularly noticeable in William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956) wherein she plays the riotous Widow Hudspeth with similar bravado, but with better results. The latter is a better film and resulted in a Golden Globe nomination for Ms. Main as Best Supporting Actress.

With Abbott and Costello as the Widow Hawkins

With Gary Cooper as the Widow Hudspeth

In the end of The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap, Chester and Duke find a way to leave Wagon Gap and continue their journey to California. Mrs. Hawkins gets a new marriage proposal after she is offered lots of money for her farm. It is utterly entertaining to see Abbott and Costello and Marjorie Main together and Universal International was thrilled. Universal had set the mold with legendary monsters in the early 1930s and they had saved the studio’s hide. Later, it was Show Boat (1936) directed by James Whale that had all but kept the studio’s doors open. Now Universal depended almost entirely on comedy, specifically the talents of Abbott and Costello throughout the 1940s and Marjorie Main by way of her most famous hillbilly, Phoebe “Ma” Kettle, a character introduced in Chester Erskine’s 1947 romantic comedy, The Egg and I based on the book of the same name by Betty MacDonald.

Erskine’s The Egg and I tells the story of a young married couple, Bob and Betty MacDonald, who give up city life in order to become chicken farmers. The main characters are played charmingly by Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert. The movie is a pleasant one that shows the couple’s escapades, particularly Betty’s, as she tries to put up with the tribulations of an old farm house because it’s her husband’s dream. The disrepair abounds and the chicks, who need constant care, lend themselves to amusing anecdotes. The result was that 1947 audiences liked the film enough to propel it to one of the year’s big moneymakers. In fact, The Egg and I was Universal International’s biggest moneymaker of the decade. That was due in large part to the raw rural charms of Bob and Betty’s neighbors, Ma and Pa Kettle. While The Egg and I received mixed critical reviews, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as the Kettles were a hit across the board. Of them the New York Times film critic wrote, “… tops as character players, accounting, by their feeling and understanding of their roles, for high points in the film every time they’re on the screen.” That type of sentiment coupled with the box office success of The Egg and I prompted Universal International to produce nine more films starring Marjorie Main as Ma Kettle in all nine and Percy Kilbride as Pa Kettle in seven of the outings. Kilbride retired after the seventh film in the series and was replaced by Parker Fennelly in the last. The eighth film, Charles Lamont’s The Kettles in the Ozarks, does not feature Pa Kettle.

Let honesty reign. I spent considerable effort watching all nine Ma and Pa Kettle movies in succession and could feel brain cells dropping out onto my shoulders. Before irreparable damage was done I gave up. The jokes grow old and the situations more absurd as the series advances. A highlight for me in the first three films is Richard Long who plays the Kettle’s eldest, Tom. Still, one cannot deny the appeal of the two main characters who propelled the series into one of the most popular in Hollywood history. Audiences simply could not get enough of the hillbilly couple with fifteen children – they picked up two from The Egg and I. Ma is a harsh, domineering, loud woman of considerable opinion and Pa, a slight, slow-moving, slow-thinking man with lazy as a middle name. For all their faults, however, you can’t help but love the Kettles.

Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main as Ma and Pa Kettle

Ma and Pa Kettle had many adventures in film. They went to town, came back to the farm, went to the fair, went on vacation, were just at home, went to Waikiki, were featured in the Ozarks, and finally went to Old MacDonald’s farm. All between 1949 and 1957. Considering they had no formal education (example of Kettle math) and could live comfortably on almost nothing, they were quite adept at living adventurous lives. The entire thing began in Ma and Pa Kettle also known as The Further Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle, the 1949 sequel to The Egg and I directed by Charles Lamont. Here, Pa writes a slogan for the King Henry Tobacco Company and wins a house of the future. And just in time too because their farmhouse has been condemned as a garbage dump. Many hilarious moments later thanks to the modern gadgets none of the Kettles have ever seen, the lives of the Kettle clan are irrevocably changed and, for several reasons, so are ours. We have never met the likes of them before.

Critics were not thrilled with the low budget Ma and Pa Kettle movies, but who could argue with box office returns, which were over $3 million for the first movie in the series and every one after that hit Variety’s Top Grossers of the Year charts. Overall the Ma and Pa series made over $35 million and is credited with saving Universal International. Who did not reap the financial benefits of the Ma and Pa Kettle films? The actors. Marjorie Main considered breaking her contract at various points knowing full well both Universal and MGM were profiting nicely from her portrayals without extending additional perks to the actors.

The Kettle clan in the 1949 movie. One of my life-long crushes, Richard Long, is on the left.

As you’ve seen, Marjorie Main made most of her most famous movies on loan out to Universal. Well, her most famous if you are a casual film fan, but not necessarily her best. For my money her best films were at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer which could afford more expensive productions, which translated into richer films. Marjorie’s contract with MGM ended in 1954 and she finished at that studio playing against type, as Lady Jane Dunstock in Mervyn LeRoy’s Rose Marie (1954). I should mention that the film released before Rose Marie was Vincente Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer (1954), which I love. In this one Marjorie stays true to popular expectation as a meddling neighbor of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz at a trailer park.

It is fitting that Marjorie Main’s last film appearance came in a Ma and Pa movie, Virgil W. Vogel’s The Kettle’s on Old MacDonald’s Farm in 1957. Ma Kettle gave Marjorie security and comfort while she was able to pursue varied roles elsewhere for many years. Later in life she praised the character for the joy she brought people. Ms. Main’s final acting jobs were in 1958 with appearances on two episodes of Wagon Train. Following that she retired to make an occasional appearance at a premiere or to answer interview questions. Marjorie Main appeared in 85 films over a 26-year movie career.

When one goes back through Marjorie Main’s career you realize she was adept at much more than that character you love to laugh with. However, she invokes an immediate smile like she did my mother who saw her in a movie on TCM recently, “Hey, it’s that old lady!” she said with a smile as big as the sun. That’s not a bad deal at all for a woman who intended to do just that, “I love making people laugh more than anything,” Marjorie Main said. She has been doing that now for about eight decades. I get that Ms. Main could not have known how much she meant to people, but she got an inkling in 1974 at the world premiere of That’s Entertainment celebrating MGM’s 50th anniversary. As the “more stars in the heavens” were being introduced, one of the largest ovations went to Marjorie Main. That was a year before her death of cancer at the age of 85 in April 1975.

What a character, she was. Loud and domineering, but always lovable.

◊

This is my entry to this year’s What a Character! Blogathon, an event I am hosting with Kellee of Outspoken & Freckled and Paula of Paula’s Cinema Club. Be sure to read the entries honoring character actors or all eras. The Day 1 entries are here, the Day 2 entries here, and Day 3 here.

Marjorie Main, a Domineering Lovable Character Marjorie Main is one of my favorite character actors. It's an impossibility to see her in a film and not find I am smiling broadly.

[caveartfair]

What Andy Warhol Really Ate

Image courtesy of Burger King.

Andy Warhol was known to eat hamburgers, but they weren’t exactly his go-to meal. In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), the Pop art pioneer wrote that he was not too keen on protein.

“I’ll buy a huge piece of meat, cook it up for dinner, and then right before it’s done I’ll break down and have what I wanted for dinner in the first place—bread and jam,” the artist wrote. “I’m only kidding myself when I go through the motions of cooking protein: all I ever really want is sugar.…People expect you to eat protein and you do so they won’t talk.”

But after watching the latest Burger King commercial, which premiered during Super Bowl LIII and declared in its slogan to “#EatLikeAndy,” you wouldn’t guess that the artist had tepid feelings toward meat. It features a clip from 1982 by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth in which Warhol slowly unwraps a Burger King delicacy, then sinks his teeth into it. As many outlets reported following the ad spot, Warhol actually preferred McDonald’s—but for its design, not the food. According to Warhol’s diaries and accounts from his friends and employees, he was not a die-hard burger fan. Instead, for much of his life, Warhol was known to eat very little, indulge in decadent desserts, and in his final years, avoid meat per doctor’s orders.

Campbell's Soup I: Vegetable II.48, 1968. Andy Warhol Hamilton-Selway Fine Art

Campbell's Soup I (Pepper Pot), 1968. Andy Warhol Collectors Contemporary

Warhol typically started his day (which often began in the early afternoon) with a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or, later, peppermint tea and a toasted English muffin with marmalade. Unsurprisingly, he also frequently consumed Campbell’s soup, the subject of some of his best-known paintings. In the 2015 BBC Four documentary A Day in the Life of Andy Warhol, BBC correspondent Stephen Smith explained that Warhol’s love for the soup went beyond the aesthetics of the can; he saw it as “the food of life,” Smith said, “a square meal you could depend on.” And Warhol did, regularly.

He enjoyed fruits, too, like bananas (also unsurprising) and cherries. He once recalled eating so many cherries that he had to hide the bowl of pits from his sight. “That’s the hard part of overdosing on cherries—you have all the pits to tell you exactly how many you ate. Not more or less. Exactly,” he wrote. “One-seed fruits really bother me for that reason. That’s why I’d always rather eat raisins than prunes. Prune pits are even more imposing than cherry pits.”

Warhol also had an insatiable sweet tooth. “When I was a child I never had a fantasy about having a maid, what I had a fantasy about having was candy,” he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “As I matured that fantasy translated itself into ‘make money to have candy,’ because as you get older, of course, you get more realistic.”

RARE NEAR MINT, "Andy Warhol", Velvet Underground & Nico, UN-PEELED Banana Sticker Cover, Album LP, RARE NEAR MINT CONDITION, 1967. Andy Warhol VINCE fine arts/ephemera

NEAR MINT- "Velvet Underground & Nico", 1967, "PEELED" Torso/Black Banner Sticker, USA Mono Copy, MUSEUM QUALITY, RARE, 1967. Andy Warhol and Lou Reed VINCE fine arts/ephemera

In the book, Warhol also described his recipe for “cake”: “You take some chocolate…and you take two pieces of bread…and you put the candy in the middle and you make a sandwich of it. And that would be cake.” In the 1960s, he frequented the Upper East Side restaurant Serendipity for its speciality, a glass of frozen hot chocolate, which he indulged in at lunchtime.

Other days, however, Warhol skipped lunch entirely. Famously image-obsessed and known for having a daily speed habit, he would take the amphetamine Obetrol (which was branded as a diet pill) and regularly worried about his weight fluctuations in his diaries. In order to stay thin while eating out at restaurants constantly, he developed a strategy for maintaining his figure, which he called “the Andy Warhol New York City diet.”

“When I order in a restaurant, I order everything that I don’t want, so I have a lot to play around with while everyone else eats,” he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “Then, no matter how chic the restaurant is, I insist that the waiter wrap the entire plate up like a to-go order, and after we leave the restaurant I find a little corner outside in the street to leave the plate in, because there are so many people in New York who live in the streets.…So I lose weight and stay trim, and I think that maybe one of those people will find a Grenouille dinner on the window ledge.”

Torte a La Dobosch (from Wild Raspberries) (see Feldman & Schellmann IV.130.A), 1959. Andy Warhol Forum Auctions

Ice Cream Cone, 1959. Andy Warhol Susan Sheehan Gallery

While working, Warhol often ordered in from the health food store Brownies on East 16th Street near Union Square, when the Factory was there in the late 1960s and ’70s. (He wrote in his diaries in 1980 that he once sent singer Carly Simon to the store to pick up “health sandwiches.”) When Warhol moved the Factory to East 33rd Street in 1984, he wrote: “I’ll miss ordering out from Brownies, all the carrot juices and stuff. What’re we going to do for food in this new neighborhood? I’ve only seen greasy coffee shops.”

Beginning in the late 1960s, Warhol’s health declined due to the serious gunshot wound he suffered from Valerie Solanas in 1968, but also because of an unhealthy gallbladder—an affliction he inherited from his father. He was told he needed the organ removed in the ’70s, but due to his fear of death and hospitals, particularly following the shooting, he pushed it off until 1987. By the mid-1970s, Warhol was taking pills for his gallbladder before each meal, and he was also given diet advice from his doctors.

Dietician Amy Shapiro notes that people experiencing gallbladder issues are advised to avoid foods high in fat, and should instead seek out “low-fat, easily digestible foods such as simple carbohydrates,” as the gallbladder produces the bile the body needs for digestion. That Warhol was content to eat jam sandwiches for dinner makes sense, she said, because such foods will “more likely than not prevent a flare up.” Fat cuts of meat, she added, could cause the gallbladder to become inflamed.

Life Savers, 1985. Andy Warhol Collectors Contemporary

But Warhol often ignored his doctor’s advice. In April 1980, he wrote: “I’m eating the nuts and chocolate and all the things that I’m not supposed to eat because of my gallbladder, because I think the gallbladder pills are helping so that I can eat them. But I’m getting fat so I’ll have to stop.” And years later, in September 1984, he recalled eating chicken for lunch with his friend Benjamin Liu outside of the Whitney. “And a woman came by and saw me eating chicken and said ‘That’s a no-no,’ and she was right,” he wrote. “I’m not supposed to eat meat. But I’m trying to be more normal.”

Warhol reached a breaking point one evening in February 1987, after dinner with friends at the Japanese restaurant Nippon. He felt sharp pain and went home; he guessed it was “a gallbladder attack” and threw away his junk food. Two weeks later, he was admitted at New York Hospital to have his gallbladder removed, and died shortly after. The surgeon found that his gallbladder was full of gangrene, his body had never fully recovered from being shot, he was dehydrated, and had eaten very little in the month prior, as Dr. John A. Ryan told the New York Times in 2017.

So while these anecdotes only offer a few glimpses into Warhol’s diet, it’s safe to say that the slogan “#EatLikeAndy” certainly comes with more baggage than Burger King’s ads let on. And though it probably wouldn’t be wise to emulate these eating habits, they serve to remind us that the endlessly influential and legendary artist was only human.

from Artsy News

[dailyusuk]

:0 can i ask what the plot of your wingverse is??

holy mother of fuck okay so it’s a revamped version of an old ass wingtalia au that m6 friend and i went fucking beserk with because we could make our own rules  wnd its fucking NUTS but now im coming back to it to maybe make it better and more sensicle. it focuses on multiple aph characters but so far ive worked with one group, specifically veneziano (feliciano marco vicario) , germany (ludwig beringer), belgium (clarisse jacobs), and england (arthur lee o’neill)

for starters, the au is a fantasy au that originally was built on wingtalia. theres 3 categories of humanoid species. avians (ex. winged people, not limited to feathers or gliding species), marines (water dwellers like sirens and mermaids), and ethereal (unable to fly or breathe under water naturally; ex humans, many witches, werewolves, etc.) transforming humanoids (such as shapeshifters and vampires) are categorized differently. if you remember that one post about the fucking uhhhh fantasy creature discourse jokes that’s pretty much a large sum of the species and arguments some have. the story is also based vaguely around the 1100s to victorian england, takinf many aspects from eras between those two times. 

arthur’s family name (o’neill) used to be kirkland until they became infamous for pyrokinetic family members and went into hiding, changed the surname, and resurfaced after a whole generation passed. arthur carries the family trait. the family also runs an engineering business where they just make technology n shit. it’s dangerous. really dangerous. many died.

so anyway, clarisse and arthur were out into an arranged marriage, both being 17, in which they had one son named simon. 4 years later, arthur qualified for the family business and he was basically forced to do it, working long hours and straining the already weak relationship. arthur struggles to balance his work and his family, which stresses him out heavily.

eventually clarisse meets an 18 year woodworker named ludwig. she was shopping for a gift for simon’s 4th birthday while her older brother tim babysat. they hit it off well, and she found what she was looking for, coming home to see arthur had come home early for simon. the day after he resumed his normal work schedule and clarisse talked to ludwig more. after a while and a lot of spaced out communication, arthur anc clarisse agreed to divorce for both their benefits. clarisse kept simon, but arthur still kept custody of him. clarisse married ludwig a week later and gave birth to her first daughter alese 10 months later. ludwig adopts a 3 headed dog to keep the kids entertained.

arthur still works his long ass job which is why simon stays with his mother more, as arthur bought a separate (but local) home of his own. 

then a war between two neighboring countries broke out, and a “rogue” marine named feliciano ended up taking shelter in the beringer home. he’s escaped the battlefield as the winner took the survivors as prisoners. feliciano’s father was killed in the battle. i made a SIMV about it, and you can find it here https://youtu.be/YlBCdgyfxEQ (note: lorenzo vicario (romano) - hamilton; flora del mar (nyo italy) - eliza; jovian vicario (ancient rome) - laurens; feliciano shows up but has no set character he represents). if there are questions about the video, i will answer them

now, the country that the beringer family and arthur reside in is made uo mostly of close minded avians, showing harsh xenophobia against other species. so feliciano being there is kinda dangerous for him, and the beringer household as theyre sheltering him without the government even being aware of his existence.

so arthur finds out, and started to leave work early and taking simon home out of fear something will happen to him (fire

as you can tell, feliciano is understandably upset at arthur’s vagueness and defensiveness about the subject but once he sees what his touch does to arthur (doing what water does to lava; solidifying it. hes got rocks on his face now. uncomfortable) he somewhat understands why he’s been acting that way. simon is luckily not affected by marines like his father, as he did not inherit his pyrokinesis.

arthur refuses to go near feliciano afterwards, wearing bandages to cover half his face up and playing it off as a work accident because like i said, its very dangerous. eventually he quits because of how much it stresses him out, and begins to just fix things in junkyards to keep himself busy. thats when a merchant comes up to him (a merchant from the heavens, name roughly translated to alfred) and arthur sees him and almost immediately becomes infatuated with him, but tries his hardest ro keep it at bay as there is stigma against homosexual (and bisexual) people. the merchant is friendly and caring and senses arthur is struggling financially as well as emotionally. over time alfred and arthur become close friends, arthur falling from hidden idolization to genuine love. 

alfred selflessly works to give arthur (and simon when he’s living there) a stable life and becomes arthur’s emotional crutch and is patient with him the same way arthur is with him when alfred doesnt understand how things work down in this specific country. at one point he asks to see what is under the bandage, revealing the “scar” represented by rough stone. alfred’s touch manages to fix it, removing weight from arthur’s shoulders. 

thats really all i have right now and its actually a fuckton when i write it down holy shif

[criticalsuperbeast-blog]

Creation Stories

A reflection on Creation: The First Three Chapters by Sylvia Nickerson. An exhibition at Casino Artspace, Hamilton, ON, January 2017 and a limited-edition zine, published by Nickerson, Hamilton, ON, 2017.

By Amanda Jernigan

Cover image from the comic zine Creation. Image credit: Sylvia Nickerson, 2017

I have just unpacked, from a box unopened since I moved to Hamilton in 2010, exhuming them amid a rain of packing peanuts, some small sculptures by Sylvia Nickerson. They have travelled with me since I was an undergraduate. Each sculpture comprises a piece or several pieces of sanded but unfinished softwood, to which a wax figure is affixed — sometimes several figures — with a simple configuration of copper wire. The figures are small, less than two inches high, and abstract — androgynous, their features undefined. Their attitudes vary. In one sculpture, a figure and its pendent double stand poised at the intersection of two crossing wires, funambulists at a point of decision. In another, six wax figures are poised at regular intervals along a wire arc, in a Muybridge-like representation of a leap. There’s another from the series — this one not in my collection — in which two figures face each other to either side of a wall, like the prisoners in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.

There was a long period when a small sculpture garden of Nickerson’s wax people adorned a mantle or bookshelf in my husband and my various successive abodes. The sculptures — small meditations on situation and relationship — came to constitute a kind of vocabulary, for me, a language of positional and orientational metaphor. They helped me to think about where I was in life, and who was there with me. Then we packed the figures away for one more move, and this time — because of space or time or work or children — they did not get unpacked. Until now.

I have been thinking about Nickerson’s wax people because a few months ago I went to see her exhibition Creation, at Casino Artspace: a 3-D installation of material from and related to her graphic-novel-in-process of the same title. The story of the graphic novel is intensely personal: the speaker moves to Hamilton, makes art, marries, becomes pregnant, gives birth, and haunts the grimy precincts of her downtown neighbourhood in the somnambulant but sometimes visionary trance of new motherhood. Wiped clean by sleep deprivation, existentially disoriented, she becomes a kind of tabula rasa for the often difficult stories she sees unfolding around her: poverty, violence, the displacements of gentrification. I used to know things, she says. Things I learned from books. Things I read in school. / Now what I know are our bodies, and these streets.

Sample page from chapter three of Creation. Image credit: Sylvia Nickerson, 2017

This is a narrative that I know to be autobiographical, if transmuted here by art. Yet most of the figures in the graphic novel, including the figure of the speaker, are grey-filled, animate outlines: archetypal figures, like the little wax sculptures. They are images of negative capability: emptied-out, but also open for the reader’s or viewer’s inhabitation.

When we were students together at Mount Allison University in the late nineties and early two thousands, I knew Nickerson primarily as a sculptor — though she worked in other media as well — one of the bright lights of the fine arts department. Her sculptures were weird biomorphic assemblages: she used pink dental moulding material to make casts of body parts, and her apartment was strewn at any given time with plaster or bronze torsos, noses, ears, all waiting to be gathered up by art. The visceral nature of her sculptures, their piercing intimacy, was counterpointed by a classical sense of composition and proportion. She studied mathematics alongside fine art, and her works would often put the inorganic forms of that discipline into conversation with the bodily or vegetal forms she had cast or sculpted. When she moved to Ontario, in 2005, Nickerson traded fine art for the history of science, in her academic life; in her studio life she traded sculpture for painting and drawing, eventually performing a quiet takeover of North American illustration venues from her Hamilton studio.

I honour the democratic impulse that led Nickerson away from the more rarefied genre of fine art to the more popular genre of illustration: she once told me that she’s never been comfortable making art for a coterie. Yet I have to say I have missed Nickerson the sculptor. When I walked into Casino Artspace, then, I experienced a joyful flash of recognition. The first piece in the show was a sculpture, a life-sized, life-like wax hand. It was as if the wax people of our mantlepiece sculpture-garden had grown up and gotten personal. Held in this wax hand was a drawing of an infant. The old medium cradled the new, here, just as mother cradled child. At the same time, mother cradled artist, and artist mother. A multiply resonant icon, it made me catch my breath.

Entering the gallery space, I was greeted by works on paper — the original ink-wash drawings for the first three chapters of Nickerson’s graphic novel, neatly alligator-clipped and hanging in staggered rows, on the walls. But the images were constantly escaping their two dimensions: spilling out into sculptural installations in the middle of the room and along one window sill, and onto the ceiling. In the window-sill installation, by Nickerson’s son, Colin Neary, the images escaped their artist, too: here, the infant whose birth is at the centre of Nickerson’s creation story became, before my very eyes, a child, a boy, an artist, his colourful, painted monster-figures overtaking his mother’s monochrome city. It was a literal relinquishing of control on Nickerson’s part, and as such a brilliant enactment of her exhibition’s themes: the loss of control that comes with new parenthood; the new, raw entry into the fray of life and mortality that one makes when one participates in creation in this way.

Cloud figures from installation of Creation: The First Three Chapters, at Casino Artspace. Image Credit: Cathy Coward, The Hamilton Spectator

Nickerson gave me a copy of the limited edition zine she produced to accompany the exhibition. It is to some extent a prototype, a promissory note that suggests something of what this work might be in an eventual, elaborated, printed form. I don’t want to judge it as a finished work, then, but I do want to reflect briefly on some of what is lost and found in the translation between the page and the gallery.

The printed version, which one must experience page by page rather than in the immersive simultaneity of an installation, introduces an element of elapsing time that adds to one’s experience of the story. It has a book’s intimacy and privacy. I go back and forth on the question of how much this serves the story. Certainly, it suits the private mind-space of the work, which takes us very much inside the speaker’s head; yet this is also a work about public spaces, and experiencing it in the public space of the gallery reminded me of that. The zine is artfully designed, making canny use of enlargement, reduction, repetition, and juxtaposition of the drawings, in order to tell its story. But reading it now I miss the deep blacks of the originals on display in Nickerson’s installation; I miss her son’s exuberant intervention (which is also her intervention, as she invited him into the space); and I miss that arresting, physical sense of the words and images escaping their bounds.

I am not a frequent reader of graphic novels: it’s a genre that is for the most part unknown to me. Perhaps Nickerson’s powerful installation work will ultimately be a bridge that can bring a viewer like me into the genre — and into other, future, printed versions of Creation. (The installation “ends”, if we can say that of an installation, with the words “to be continued.”) On the other hand, perhaps Nickerson has moved through the genre of the graphic novel into something new (and this not necessarily to the exclusion of the graphic novel) — a hybrid form that fuses artist and illustrator, printed page and three-dimensional space. I think of the crucible from which I once watched Nickerson pour molten bronze, when we were students. It reappears in the opening pages of Creation, with all of downtown Hamilton pouring into it or possibly out of it: a metaphor for destruction, metamorphosis, and rebirth.

There’s one further thing that I want to say about Creation. For all that motherhood is an archetypally creative experience, and although it’s written about and illustrated to exhaustion in parenting books and blogs, and on all our scattered Mistagram and Chitter feeds, the space of new motherhood, in its averbal intensity, is still a great mystery. I feel a shock of astonishment and welling gratitude, then, when I see art like Nickerson’s that has somehow emerged, an authentic expression, from that space. 

Like Sylvia Nickerson, Amanda Jernigan grew up in Ontario, went to school in New Brunswick, then moved to Hamilton, made art, married, and had children. She is a poet, essayist, and editor.

[esprit-de-corps-magazine]

DELIVERING THE GOODS, IN ALL CONDITIONS

(Volume 24-2)

By David Pugliese

The Royal Canadian Air Force and the Department of National Defence have created new working groups to prepare for the arrival of the Airbus C295W fixed-wing search and rescue planes (FWSAR).

Procurement Minister Judy Foote and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced December 8 that the government had selected the Airbus C295W aircraft for its new FWSAR aircraft. The RCAF will receive 16 C295Ws. The contract will also include in-service support, provided through a joint venture between Airbus Defence and Space and PAL Aerospace.

DND spokesman Evan Koronewski told Esprit de Corps that the working groups include those to look at operational requirements and infrastructure. Based on their recommendations, a plan will be produced and implemented to ensure the RCAF is prepared for the delivery of the C295 fleet, he added.

“The first aircraft will be delivered in 2019 in Comox, B.C., three years after contract award and is expected to meet its initial operational capability by 2021,” Koronewski explained.

The existing CC-115 Buffalo and CC-130H Hercules will continue operating until the new fixed-wing platform has reached its full operational capability, at the four main operating bases of Comox, Winnipeg (Manitoba), Trenton (Ontario), and Greenwood (Nova Scotia), he added.

Nicolas Boucher, a spokesman for Public Services and Procurement Canada, told Esprit de Corps that the final aircraft of the 16-strong fleet is expected to be delivered in 2022.

He said training of aircrew will have started by the arrival of the first plane in 2019.

The 2022 arrival of the final aircraft will also mark the beginning of the long-term maintenance and support services for the aircraft, Boucher said.

The contract between Airbus and Canada covers the following:

delivery of 16 C295W aircraft;

infrastructure and set-up activities, such as training and engineering services;

construction of a new simulator-equipped training centre in Comox, British Columbia;

maintenance and support services.

 Also included are tools and test equipment, spare parts and access to the necessary technical data for military personnel, the government noted.

The contract for the initial period of 11 years is valued at $2.4-billion and includes delivery, set-up of support systems (training centre, initial spare parts, tools, support and test equipment, electronic information environment, etc.) and the first five years of maintenance and support of the aircraft, according to Public Services and Procurement Canada.

It also includes the opportunity for Airbus to earn contract extensions for the operation and maintenance of the aircraft in increments of one to three years, for up to a possible additional 15 years. This could potentially extend the maintenance and support services until 2043, for a total value of $4.7-billion, according to the Public Services and Procurement Canada.

The Canadian government said it expects Airbus Defence and Space will continue to develop strategic relationships with Canada’s aerospace and defence firms and will undertake business activities in Canada equal to the contract value. Such business activities include manufacturing major systems on the FWSAR aircraft, such as engines, radars and sensors, as well as researching and developing new product lines in Canada. This will open up opportunities for these firms to enter new markets in partnership with PAL Aerospace, the federal government pointed out.

The C295W features substantial Canadian content. Simon Jacques, head of Airbus Defence and Space in Canada, said about 20 per cent of the aircraft is already made up of Canadian-made systems. Every C295 is powered by two Pratt & Whitney Canada PW127G turboprop engines driving a pair of Hamilton Standard 586-F six-bladed propellers.

In addition, pilots and technicians will be trained at a new facility developed by CAE in Comox, B.C. The electro-optical systems for the aircraft will be provided by L-3 WESCAM of Burlington, Ontario. AirPro, a joint venture between Airbus Defence and Space and PAL Aerospace of St John’s, Newfoundland, will provide in-service support for the life of the program.

The federal government noted additional industry partners that will contribute to maintain the FWSAR capability include Heroux-Devtek to repair landing gear; Hope Aero to repair propellers; Sonovision for technical publications; CLS Lexi-Tech for translation of publications; and Precision Aero to repair component parts on the aircraft.  

[entergamingxp]

my life with Jason Brookes • Eurogamer.net

In the autumn of 1995, I interviewed for a writing position on Edge magazine. I had no experience in publishing; I’d spent a year since leaving university writing manuals and design documents for the developer Big Red Software, but I was desperate to be a journalist. Although I hadn’t read Edge that much, everyone I worked with treated it like a holy text. It felt like a long shot. Then Jason Brookes turned up late for my interview, was friendly but distracted throughout, and at the end set me a writing task before disappearing completely. I assumed I had failed. Over a month later however, he called me and offered me a job. This was my first inkling that Jason had his own way of working.

Three days ago I got a call from Simon Cox who joined Edge just after me and later became deputy editor. Jason had been ill for three years – he died in the early hours of Monday morning. Between long difficult pauses, Simon and I swapped a few stories about our time on the magazine. I put the phone down and cried, and thought about Jason. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Jason Brookes began his journalism career at the cult Super Nintendo magazine SuperPlay, under the tutorage of launch editor, Matt Bielby. He’d originally applied for a job on the Sega magazine, Mega, but editor Neil West soon realised Brookes was a complete Nintendo fanboy and pushed him Bielby’s way. “From the start, we were influenced by Japanese magazines – not just games mags, but women’s mags, car mags and anything else we could get our hands on – as well as Japanese comics and anime,” says Bielby. “What struck me about Jason was just how much he knew about and loved Japanese culture – and gaming in particular, and Nintendo especially amongst that. He knew more about all of it than the rest of us put together.

Photo credit: Hilary Nichols.

“Getting reliable info on Japanese games was a painful, time-consuming business in the pre-internet days, involving late-night phone calls to the other side of the world, local language students doing vaguely comprehensible translations for us from Japanese magazine articles, and all sorts of palaver. Jason was intrinsic to this.”

As there were so few SNES games officially released in the UK each month, the SuperPlay team was forced to scour the obscure grey import market – and this was Jason’s forte. “Even if the average SuperPlay reader was never going to buy Super Wagan Island or Zan II, the fact that it existed and we could tell people about it added to the unique feel of the magazine,” says Beilby. “Jason would find all sorts of obscure stuff that I, for one, couldn’t get my head around at all. It became his territory in a way, and his enthusiasm made us all consider the most oddball releases in a new light.”

In 1993, Future Publishing’s magazine launch specialist Steve Jarrett was looking for writing staff to help with an ambitious project. It was a new type of games magazine, eschewing the pally, hobbyist tone of most publications of the era in favour of a serious, refined, journalistic style, inspired by visual effects mag, Cinefex. That project was Edge. “He made a huge impact on the magazine,” says Jarrett. “He filled in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge – he brought with him his love of Japanese culture, games and game art – and at the time, that was where all the innovation was coming from. He opened Edge up. He was fortunate, too, because I wasn’t so keen on travel at the time so he did all the trips to the US and Japan!”

His first issue as editor was Edge 11, which featured a series of exclusive articles on the forthcoming PlayStation console, which at the time was still known by its codename, PS-X. Jason and Matt had been invited by Sony’s third-party development manager Phil Harrison to view the legendary T-Rex graphics demo being touted to developers, and Jason later secured interviews with staff within Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, as well as at Namco, Konami and Capcom for the big reveal feature. Over the course of ten packed pages, the magazine communicated the importance and potential impact of this vital newcomer to the games industry. As a knowledgeable fan of dance music, Jason also perfectly understood Sony’s determination to align PlayStation with the ascendant 1990s club culture, running several articles on the machine’s groundbreaking marketing and its relationship with hip brands such as Ministry of Sound and Designers Republic. He saw that both the audience and industry were maturing, and that popular culture would have to cede ground to video games. He just got it.

The Edge office in the mid-1990s was a cross between a university halls of residence, a night club and a game development studio – an atmosphere utterly presided over by Jason. He was an unapologetic perfectionist, determined that every page of the magazine exemplified the Edge vision of style and substance. He would spend hours choosing exactly the right photograph or screenshot for even the most minor preview, and my abiding memory of him is hunched over a lightbox, examining 35mm slides from some Japanese arcade trade show or obscure Shibuya-based development studio.

Everything would always come together at the last possible minute. The magazine flatplan – the page layout guide that showed writing and art staff what each issue would contain – was almost always virtually empty until the week before deadline. Then suddenly, Jason would announce that he’d secured an interview with Howard Lincoln or Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux or Bill Gates, or an exclusive look at some amazing new AM2 arcade game, then we’d be off. He’d trust us too. I remember the day Susie Hamilton from Derby-based developer Core Design (then best known for aging Mega Drive title Thunderhawk) brought their latest project into the office for us to see – something called Tomb Raider. Jason wasn’t interested so me and production editor Nick Harper had a play during our lunch hour. I think within five seconds we were over at Jason’s desk, saying “Um, we think you’d better come and have a look at this.” Straightaway he gave it two pages. Deadlines would often involve two or three all-night sessions, the whole team writing and laying out pages as Orbital blasted from the stereo. It was hard work, but it was fun. We’d smuggle beer in, and Edge’s art editor Terry Stokes, an inveterate prankster, would set up elaborate traps for us around the office.

What did I learn during this fraught, tense, hilarious nights? I learned everything about writing quickly, about getting the best from poorly translated interviews, about how every sentence needs to carry a fact or idea that takes the story forward. Jason hated waffle, he hated mediocre, colourless writing. He wanted us to communicate the joy of a Treasure shooter, the technological magic inherent in a lit, textured polygon, the underlying philosophy of an executive soundbite. He thought deeply about games and how they functioned. His favourite was R-Type and to hear him break it down was to hear a Nobel prize-winning scientist explaining DNA strands. As Jason’s brother Matthew recalls, “He loved the passionate attention to detail, the creativity, the huge sprites, the multi-layered parallax, the colours, and even the superlative collision detection. I’m not sure how long he must have spent playing and eventually completing that game.”

Jason didn’t teach us how to make a magazine, he just expected us to know. When I turned up to the Edge office on my first day of work, he told me to take screenshots of Sega Rally. I didn’t know what the hell that meant, I had no idea of the process. I just had to go over to the Sega Saturn, plug the leads in, figure out how to use the Apple Mac connected to our CRT gaming monitor and get on with it. Sometimes, he’d disappear to Japan or LA for a week and you wouldn’t know when he was coming back, you’d have to piece together his intentions from vague emails and editorial meeting notes. That’s just the way it worked, we all knew it. You figured stuff out. And then he’d return and flip through the latest issue of the mag and say “you did a really good job on this article” and my god, you’d glow with pride all day.

His perfectionism at Edge lasted until his very last act at the magazine – his final Editor’s Intro. “I just remember how long it took him to craft it,” says production editor at the time, Jane Bentley. “That sign off was the most agonising 300 words I’ve ever seen someone write and rewrite. I think I came out in hives having to stay up all night for final sub checks before the mag could get biked off to the printers. But Edge was a magic world back then. A real gang of super fans.”

After this, he moved to San Francisco writing for US magazines Xbox Nation and GMR as well Japanese publications LOGiN and Famitsu. More recently, he got back into pure design, helping indie studio 17-Bit Studios create its website.

A few months before he died, we all attended Simon Cox’s wedding in the Cotswolds. I sat next to Jason for most of the reception, and we reminisced about the olden days. At some point quite late on, after a few glasses of champagne, I said to him, “when you gave me the job on Edge, you changed my life. Everything I have done in writing after that is really down to you.” He just smiled at me in that charming and slightly airy way of his. I hope I have lived up to whatever it was you saw in me on that warm autumn afternoon long ago.

This is what I have learned from Jason Brookes: be good at what you do. Take care. Make every sentence you write, every image you capture, every idea you foster mean something. And if you are given the chance to thank someone for helping you, take that chance. In fact, do it now. Email them, text them, put down your phone or close your laptop and go find them. Tell them what they did. Because life can be cruel, and important people are sometimes taken away too soon. Jason, you were brilliant, difficult, talented, chaotic, spiritual and loving. You always ended your editor’s intros with a single phrase – the future is almost here. That’s how you lived – with one foot in next week, or next year, or the next decade even, waiting with a smile on your face for the rest of us to catch up.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/my-life-with-jason-brookes-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=my-life-with-jason-brookes-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

  David Groulx

was raised in Northern Ontario. He is proud of his Aboriginal roots – Ojibwe Indian and French Canadian. After receiving his BA from Lakehead University, where he won the Munro Poetry Prize, David studied creative writing at the En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C., where he won the Simon J Lucas Jr. Memorial Award for poetry. He has also studied at the University of Victoria Creative Writing Program. David has had eleven poetry books published – Night in the Exude(Tyro Publications: Sault Ste Marie, 1997); The Long Dance (Kegedonce Press, Neyaashiinigmiing, 2000);  Under God’s Pale Bones (Kegedonce Press, Neyaashiinigmiing, 2010); A Difficult Beauty (Wolsak & Wynn: Hamilton, ON 2011); Rising With A Distant Dawn (BookLand Press: Toronto, ON 2011); Imagine Mercy (BookLand Press: Toronto, ON 2013); These Threads Become A Thinner Light (Theytus Books, Penticton, BC 2014); and In The Silhouette Of Your Silences (N.O.N Publishing, Vancouver, BC 2014). Wabigoon River Poems (Kegedonce Press, Neyaashiinigmiing, 2015), The Windigo Chronicles (Bookland Press, 2016), From Turtle Island To Gaza (AU press, 2019)

David won the 3rd annual Poetry NOW Battle of the Bards in 2011, and was a featured reader at the IFOA in Toronto & Barrie (2011), as well as Ottawa Writer’s Festival (2012). David has appeared on The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and was the Writer-In-Residence for Open Book Toronto for November 2012.David’s poetry has been translated into Spanish & German. Rising With A Distant Dawn was translated into French; under the title, Le lever à l’aube lointaine, 2013.Red River Review nominated David’s poems for Pushcart Prizes in 2012, and David’s poetry has appeared in over a 160 publications in 16 countries. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.

The Interview

When and why did you start writing poetry?

Expression is the first word that comes to kind, I believe that it is as important as air, food or water. Life is nothing until it evinced by the word.

Who introduced you to poetry?

There didn’t seem to be much poetry around when I was a kid. We had lots of books because my parents believed reading was important. I suppose the poetry I heard was in the way people spoke. My mother has an aboriginal accent, my father a heavy French accent. And then there were lots of immigrants, Portuguese, Italians, Polish and all these people spoke English differently. Like all kids brought up in a colony I was introduced to the English Romantics and a few Canadian poets. There was nothing to speak to me as a Half-breed living in Canada so I decided to create my own.

How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

I really don’t know how aware I was of the presence of older poets. I only knew that there were voices that went unheard in a dominant society. It said that this was poetry and this isn’t. I could not fit in, I could not be a part of no matter how hard I tried. I turned to poets from Africa, the middle east. Anywhere in the third world.

What is your daily writing routine?

I don’t have a ‘daily’ writing routine, because I work a regular job. During the week I try to write some notes down to use later. I do all of my writing on the weekends. Which is getting up before dawn, a pot of coffee, a pack of smokes, a computer and a small pot-bellied dog snoring somewhere behind me. I guess writing is something I’m always doing; either taking notes, writing, thinking about writing or reading.

What motivates you to write?

It is who I am, it is what I am. Without it my life would be meaningless to me. at some desolate times in my life, I believe it has even kept me alive.

What is your work ethic?

I go to a mindless job every day to keep the wolves from the door, I write because some day that knocking at the door may be opportunity. I see it like this, if you are not writing, you are not a writer. I sometimes think that if I am ever satisfied with my writing I’ll quit, which means I’ll be doing this until the day I die, whish I hope is a long time from now. I think death is a good motivation for almost anything.

How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

I remember reading America & other poems by Jeff Bien and Tiffany Midge’s Outlaws, Renegades and Saints : Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed and thinking to myself I want to write like this. For most of the poetry I’ve heard or read I remember thing I don’t want to sound like that. It has always been a exploration of my own voice. I did one year at the University of Victoria’ creative writing program and I quit because what I heard was mostly upper white middle class stuff; writing about their trips overseas. It was uninteresting and boring. I think life will influence my poetry more than other people’s poems about it.

Whom of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

I’ve been reading Aim Cesare lately. He speaks of the colonizer and the colonized, this type of relationship is what governs our society, especially y here in Canada. It is something about his expression of that relationship.

Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

I can’t sing a note.

What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

If someone asked me how do you become a writer, I would tell them. ‘ You first must have a deep love of disappointment’ and then you write.

Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

A long time ago I spent some time in jail. When I was young I’ve always had an involvement with law enforcement, seems I couldn’t keep my hands to myself. It’s called In the Days I was Known to My Brother as Papillon. Most of the manuscript has been sitting around the house for a couple of years now and now I’ve decided to finish it, its something I’m doing for myself, if it gets published or not, I haven’t decided yet.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: David Groulx Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[truthinhistorycharlestonsc-blog]

It is important to note that the Historic Charleston Walking Tour KING COTTON, SLAVERY & THE PLANTER ARISTOCRACY is like so much of our American History both a celebration and a tragedy. Our uncensored approach tells all, either the good or the bad. We don’t just shine a spotlight on the negative we do actively celebrate the Planter Aristocracy’s enormous and undeniable positives too. Especially when it comes to the creation, formation and evolution of not just our city but of our nation.

On this rainy Charleston Saturday morning we start with a bright colorful painting courtesy of Diane Britton Dunham encapsulating Charleston’s Lowcountry Gullah-Geechee Community. The head shots that follow are of Gullah men and women that have positively effected our city and our world in ways that the greatest fiction writer would have difficulty imagining. The stories of Congressman Robert Smalls, the Reverend Daniel J. Jenkins, Mrs. Septima Poinsett Clark, Mr. Philip Simmons and Queen Quet are and always will be Charleston’s greatest stories.

The story of Mr. Denmark Vesey and the 34 men who lost their lives at the hands of Mayor Hamilton Jr. and our City will always be Charleston’s most tragic and controversial. Many of you know of this time but how many have read the transcript An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes This ultra censored account may have you thinking differently…….

Before we get to the stories of these Gullah men and women in individual posts let us ask the question; Who is Gullah? I will use the excerpt from my walking tour told at Wragg Mall.

A DISSERVICE It is at this point in our walk that I have to apologize to you all because up until this point I have done you and even more importantly a people and a culture an incredible disservice by only describing these men, women and children as enslaved, Black, African or African American so let me correct that right here and right now.

These men, women and children were human beings with names, brains and heartbeats. They are not some footnote to Charleston’s or our nation’s history, they are the vital and the indispensable component of it. We do not exist as the most powerful entity in the world without their collective contributions, PERIOD!

They were forced to come from Slave Forts and Castles like this, often times chained neck to neck.

THEY BUILT EVERYTHING Everything you see around you in this city if it was built prior to the Civil War or reconstructed after the Civil War, which the majority of has been, was done by African Americans, first slave then free. Their hands are responsible for all of it and their minds much of it, they built this place whether they wanted to or not. But…….Who are they?

GULLAH Gullah was and Gullah is they! The Gullah are our local people and as you go closer to the South Carolina/Georgia border they often refer to themselves as Geechee. They were not, but still are an incredibly proud and distinctive culture who are the direct descendants of Africans whose origins lie mostly in Western Africa from today’s Senegambia region down to Angola.

This African collective had many distinct differences within themselves, including their nationality, what region they were from, what tribe they were members of, what customs they had, how they worshiped, what they ate and what languages they spoke. But…….the one “thing” they all had in common was they were all taken against their will and forced to come here to serve and die for the Planters. For me to describe them as merely survivors is not adequate and for me to only describe them as slave is an insult because they are so very much more than that.

THEY WERE THE PLANTERS MEANS I always purposefully start out our walk that way but never as a sign of disrespect but to brutally reinforce to you, that to the Planters they were, first and foremost their property and only a means to their end, which was the accumulation of wealth.

The Gullah-Geechee were the Planters tool. It did not matter to the Planters that their tool had a heart beat, and a soul and a brain. It did not matter to the Planters that their tool could experience fear, and pain, and sorrow. It did not matter to the Planters that their tool could laugh, and cry, and love and have babies of their own.

WHAT MATTERED TO THE PLANTERS What mattered to the Planter Aristocracy was, what that tool could do for them and any and every other “paternalistic” notion that is spewed today is an ignorant lie, only spewed to lessen and deflect the travesty of humanity that was inflicted on these African men, women and children by those people that still have lineage to this institution and there still exists many here on this peninsula that do.

This point can not be emphasized enough and I make no apologies for my tone when I state it.

WHERE IS GULLAH TODAY? I realize for many of you this might be the first time hearing the term Gullah or Geechee so let me put it in a modern day perspective. The Gullah are a proud people who still inhabit Charleston and her surrounding sea islands from Oak Island, North Carolina all the way to Northern Florida.

Their culture and language is alive today in this region and you can easily meet many Gullah people on our streets and countrysides sewing their history and artistry right in front of your very eyes with Palmetto and Sweet Grass. GULLAH ARTISTRY This artistry has been handed down from generation to generation and can easily be traced back to its West African roots. The pride and detail that go into this craft is not one that is often seen in today’s modern landscape. I can honestly say and ignorantly say that when I first saw how expensive their goods were, I would pass them by and I did this for years when I first moved to Charleston in 1991 and then I began to learn about this art and this people.

THEN I LEARNED I learned how they now have to actually hunt for this once abundant Palmetto and Sweet Grass because seaside development and the continued privatization of land has almost wiped out this essential raw material. I learned that the hunt is becoming harder and harder with more miles traveled to find less.

I learned how long it takes for them to harvest what they need and how it can only be done at certain times of the year and how they then have to go through the process of curing the Sweet Grass in the sun once they have finally got it back home.

I learned how long it takes to make even the smallest coaster let alone those beautiful and intricately woven multicolored baskets and rice fanners.

THE I LEARNED SOME MORE I learned how this was something that was also done in West Africa. I saw how this art tied these people from two continents together by watching a South Carolina Public Television produced documentary on a local Charleston Gullah group making a return to their homeland and how they were immediately connected to one another through this art, their similarity in dialect and their physical characteristics.

I then realized the price they were asking was nothing when you compare it to the price they have paid. There exists no memento any of you can bring back home with you from Charleston that has more soul and meaning and represents this time in our history better than this Gullah art.

GULLAH ON THE LARGEST STAGES The proud Gullah people and those that have descend from them have had their collective presence felt throughout our country far beyond Charleston and on many of our largest stages. You could have also met Gullah in the White House, the former First Lady, Michelle Obama’s paternal great grandfather and great great grandmother, South Carolina, Gullah slave.

You can still meet Gullah in our United States Supreme Court. The Honorable Clarence Thomas raised in Savannah and the first language he ever spoke was Gullah.

You could have been entertained by Gullah many times and never realized it either dancing your behind off or laughing it off, both the God Father of Soul James Brown and comedian Chris Rock born in South Carolina and are direct descendants of Gullah slaves.

GULLAH ATHLETICS In the boxing ring you would have been knocked out by Gullah’s Smokin Joe Frazier who still lives just a short drive away in Beaufort, South Carolina. On the gridiron in the National Football League you would have been run over by Gullah. Who do you consider is the greatest running back of all time? For me and many others it is the legendary Jim Brown. St. Simon’s Island, Georgia native and original inductee in to The Gullah/Geechie Hall of Fame and on the basketball court you would have been dunked on by Gullah, Wilmington, North Carolina native Michael Jordan can too trace his roots back to Oak Island, Gullah.

Heck we have all sung the campfire song Kumbaya which translates into “Come By Here” and whose origins lie right here in South Carolina Lowcountry Gullah.

INTERVIEWS The influence of the Gullah/Geechie people and those that have descended from them still continues all over our country today. The first hand accounts of the lives so many former Gullah slaves led can thankfully be accessed by any of us as a result of F.D.R.’s New Deal and his Works Progress Administration. Thousands of interviews were conducted with those former enslaved and they are archived at our Library of Congress in Washington D.C..

Their personal accounts range from unimaginable degradation and brutality to times of extreme joy, times that they loved and laughed and times when they sang and danced. One constant throughout their accounts was their unwavering faith in both God and the supernatural. The Gullah people are Charleston and Charleston is the Gullah people. We need never lose sight of that.

THE INCREDIBLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF CHARLESTON’S LOWCOUNTRY ENSLAVED GULLAH-GEECHEE AND THE SO VERY MANY THAT HAVE DESCENDED FROM THEM…….. It is important to note that the Historic Charleston Walking Tour KING COTTON, SLAVERY & THE PLANTER ARISTOCRACY…

[allbestnet]

Guest Book Recommendations From The Tim Ferriss Podcast

Robert Cialdini : Influence

Denis Johnson : Jesus' Son: Stories

Khaled Hosseini : The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns

Nassim Nicholas Taleb : Antifragile; The Black Swan; Fooled by Randomness

John Medina : Brain Rules

Malcolm Gladwell : Outliers

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner : Freakonomics

Andrew S. Grove : High Output Management; Only the Paranoid Survive

Peter Thiel with Blake Masters : Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Neal Gabler : Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

David Michaelis : Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

Randall E. Stross : The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

Steve Martin : Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Ben Horowitz : The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson : Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts

Richard P. Feynman : Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Dan Harris : 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works - A True Story

William J. Bennett : The Book of Virtues

Jon Huntsman : Winners Never Cheat

Marty Gallagher : COAN: The Man, The Myth, The Method: The Life, Times & Training of the Greatest Powerlifter of All-Time

H. Jackson Brown Jr. : Life's Little Instruction Book

Frederick Exley : A Fan's Notes

Elle Luna : The Crossroads of Should and Must

William C. Dement : The Promise of Sleep

Mark Z. Danielewski : House of Leaves

Oliver Sacks : Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

Sam Harris : Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Daniel J. Levitin : This Is Your Brain on Music

Milan Kundera : The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Paulo Coelho : The Alchemist

William Deresiewicz : Excellent Sheep

Ayn Rand : Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand : The Fountainhead

Joseph Campbell : The Power of Myth; The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Friedrich Nietzsche : The Genealogy of Morals

Josh Waitzkin : The Art of Learning

Tim Ferriss : The 4-Hour Body; The 4-Hour Workweek

Ben Goldacre : Bad Science, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

Thomas Ricks : Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005

Lawrence Wright : The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Plato : Symposium

Eiji Yoshikawa and Charles Terry : Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

Carol K. Anthony : A Guide to the I Ching

Jon Krakauer : Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town

William J. Mann : How to Be a Movie Star

Gary Shteyngart : Super Sad True Love Story

Alice Miller : The Drama of the Gifted Child

Robert W. Firestone : The Fantasy Bond

Jean Liedloff : The Continuum Concept

Tony Robbins : Personal Power

Travis Christofferson : Tripping Over the Truth

Francis Collins : The Language of God

C.S. Lewis : The Screwtape Letters

Thomas Seyfried : Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer

Ellen Davis, MS and Keith Runyan, MD : Ketogenic Diabetes Diet: Type 2 Diabetes

Ellen Davis, MS : Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet

Milan Kundera : The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Michel de Montaigne : The Complete Essays

Marcel Proust : In Search of Lost Time

Elbert Hubbard : A Message to Garcia

Ayn Rand : Atlas Shrugged

James Clavell : Sho_gun

Kenneth H. Blanchard : The One Minute Manager

John McPhee); for kids: The Empty Pot (Demi : For adults: Levels of the Game

Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer : National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America

Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin : Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story; Tihkal: The Continuation

Christopher Vogler and Michele Montez : The Writer's Journey

Charles Grodin : It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here

Tim Ferriss : The 4-Hour Body

J.R.R. Tolkien : The Hobbit

Anthony Bourdain : Kitchen Confidential

James Allen : Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

Gabriel Garci_a Ma_rquez : One Hundred Years of Solitude

Ta-Nehisi Coates : Between the World and Me

James C. Humes : Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln: 21 Powerful Secrets of History's Greatest Speakers

Harry Crews : A Feast of Snakes; Car

Steve Krug : Don't Make Me Think

Douglas W. Hubbard : How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

Jordan Ellenberg : How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Roger Fisher and William Ury : Getting to Yes

Isaac Asimov : Foundation

Peter F. Hamilton : The Reality Dysfunction (The Night's Dawn Trilogy)

Galen Rowell : Mountain Light

Timothy D. Wilson : Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

Leon A. Harris : Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores

John le Carre : Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Little Drummer's Girl; The Russia House; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Michael Lewis : The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Atul Gawande : The Checklist Manifesto

Lee Child : all of Lee Child's books

Various : The Bible

Christopher McDougall : Natural Born Heroes

J.R.R. Tolkien : Lord of the Rings

Laurence Gonzales : Deep Survival

Richard Bach and Russell Munson : Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Frank Herbert : Dune

Fred Kofman : Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values

Yuval Noah Harari : Sapiens

Marcus Aurelius : Meditations

Steven Pressfield : The War of Art

Budd Schulberg : What Makes Sammy Run?

Ron Chernow : Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Sarah Bakewell : How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Rich Cohen : The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King; Tough Jews

Matthew Josephson : Edison: A Biography

Brooks Simpson : Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity

Ray Bradbury : Fahrenheit 451

Peter Matthiessen : At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Yuval Noah Harari : Sapiens

Robert Cialdini : Influence

Ted Koppel : Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath

Budd Schulberg : What Makes Sammy Run?

Julia Cameron : The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal

Steven Pressfield : The War of Art

Anton Myrer : Once an Eagle

David Brooks : The Road to Character

Mark Rothko : Any picture book of

Paul Arden : It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be

John Keegan : The Second World War

Malcolm X and Alex Haley : The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Kahlil Gibran : The Prophet

Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching

Antoine de Saint-Exupe_ry : Wind, Sand and Stars

Stephen Batchelor : Buddhism Without Beliefs

James Clavell : Sho_gun

Jonathan Spence : The Search for Modern China; The Death of Woman Wang

essay by Tennessee Williams : ÒThe Catastrophe of SuccessÓ

Nassim Nicholas Taleb : The Black Swan

Jessica Livingston : Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

David Kushner : Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

Dani Shapiro : Still Writing

Seneca : On the Shortness of Life

Plato : The Republic

Oliver Sacks : On the Move: A Life

Henry David Thoreau : The Journal of

Margaret Mead and James Baldwin : A Rap on Race

Simone Weil : On Science, Necessity and the Love of God: Essays

Daniel Gilbert : Stumbling on Happiness

Edward Abbey : Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

Robin Wall Kimmerer : Gathering Moss

Dodie Smith : I Capture the Castle

Ayn Rand : Atlas Shrugged

Paulo Coelho : The Alchemist

Ernest Hemingway : The Complete Short Stories

James Allen : As a Man Thinketh

Viktor E. Frankl : Man's Search for Meaning

William Strauss : The Fourth Turning; Generations

Nicole Daedone : Slow Sex

Carol Dweck : Mindset

Simon Sinek : Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Thich Nhat Hanh : The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

James Surowiecki : The Wisdom of Crowds

Lao Tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell : Tao Te Ching

Jon Kabat-Zinn : Wherever You Go, There You Are

Boris Johnson : The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

Milton Friedman : Free to Choose

Kevin Starr : California

Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson : Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion

Elliot Aronson : The Social Animal

Jay Abraham : Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got

Brian Wansink : Mindless Eating

Robert Collier : The Robert Collier Letter Book

Keith Ferrazzi : Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

Mark H. McCormack : What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School

Lee Iacocca : Iacocca: An Autobiography

Atul Gawande : The Checklist Manifesto

Erik Davis : TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

Steven Kotler : The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

Tim Ferriss : The 4-Hour Workweek

Kazuo Uyeda : Cocktail Techniques

Ryan Holiday : The Obstacle Is the Way

Robert Heinlein : the works of Robert Heinlein

Walpola Rahula : What the Buddha Taught

Bhikkhu Bodhi : In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon

Rene Girard : Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Peter Thiel : Zero to One

Ben Horowitz : The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Jack Kerouac : On the Road; The Dharma Bums

Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching

Robert Pirsig : Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Gregory David Roberts : Shantaram

Ernest Hemingway : For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea; The Green Hills of Africa

Larry W. Phillips : Ernest Hemingway on Writing

Carol Dweck : Mindset

B. Alan Wallace and Brian Hodel : Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation

Alice Miller : The Drama of the Gifted Child

Sebastian Junger : Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Angela Duckworth : Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool : Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Colonel David H. Hackworth : About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior

Cormac McCarthy : Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

[playsfordaaays-blog]

Wellington Theatre 2016

First post, 22nd January NZ time, hi!

Adam Goodall’s excellent article on the Pantograph Punch, "I Am More Important Than Shakespeare": Ten Moments in Wellington Theatre 2016 opens by analysing the general state of Wellington theatre in 2016. Given that I don’t know anything about the state of Wellington theatre in 2015 or 2014 or in any previous year, I can’t do anything similar here. In 2015, I started to be interested in theatre and went to a few plays, much fewer than this year, drawn by an interest in the theatre department at my then-new school Wellington High and by going to the plays put on by the Wellington Young Actors, a company which my friend Gabe Parkin is a member of. However, I didn’t really have anything approaching an understanding of what was even happening – I didn’t so much as know who The Bacchanals were until about December, and I managed to miss A Christmas Karel Capek. 2016 has been my first year in theatre, as it were, it’s been my first year where I’ve been attending plays regularly and keeping up with developments and criticism. As such, all I can say with my lack of context is that the year in theatre has been good, and that a lot of people have made good plays during it. This list is about those plays.

First item: my top ten plays of the year, in the order I want to give them attention

Hudson and Halls Live!

Everyone loved this play. It got fantastic reviews, apparently did very well at the box office (though I’m unaware of any available figures, I’m just going off how many people I heard talking about it and the large audience I saw it with) and swept the Wellington Theatre Awards. I’m slightly resentful of that last one – it wasn’t even from Wellington! – but I can see where the judges are coming from. Hudson and Halls was a very funny and completely engaging play. The most interesting part of the play for me was the core conceit that this was a live filming of an episode and that we were the studio audience, which allowed for the audience to be very naturally involved in the action because we were present in the diegesis.

The Trojan Women

I put this here primarily for the text. Greek tragedies aren’t put on terribly often, and this one was very rewarding to see. The new translation by Simon Perris was very good, and because of it you can now cite “f*** you and die” as a quotation from Euripides. The production itself was strong, with good performances that handled the meter well. Particular note should be given to Katie Alexander, playing Kassandra with captivating intensity, and to the Mad Max (mostly Fury Road)-based design. (I’d credit the designers, but the program contained the credits in a separate piece of paper and I’ve lost that piece of paper! I’m getting names from Theatreview, and I can get from there that Ashleigh Dixon and Rudimiller Mafi are the costume designers, but there may have been other people doing other aspects of the design and I’ll credit them if I find the credits.) I think that the entrance of Athena, borne aloft by a team of ten Greek men dressed like Fury Road’s War Boys, was probably the coolest thing I’ll see in a theatre for a long time.

Smells Like Xmas          

I started writing this post just a couple of days before I published it, but I was considering starting much earlier (yay procrastination!) Several weeks ago, I was considering making a start, but I thought I should wait until that Saturday, the 17th, when I would see my last two shows of the year: The Better Best Album Party That Anyone Has Ever Been Two and Smells Like Xmas. I considered it unlikely that any candidate for this list would arrive so late, but I was wrong. Binge Culture’s Christmas show was a great success of experimentalism. Its series of skits were often abstract and sometimes difficult to follow, but they were always absolutely hilarious. I’m of the understanding that Binge Culture has quite a good reputation; judging by this, it’s well deserved.

Hamlet

Quite a lot of people heard about this production, most of them were misinformed as to its nature. It was at the Pop-Up Globe for a single day, which is what most people know about it. It was actually touring the North Island, with the Pop-Up being a brief but notable stop. I don’t have that much to say about it, other than that it was a very solid production and that the all-female casting worked very well.

Titus Andronicus

2016 was a very good year for Aotearoa Tituses. This play, once one of the least popular, had three productions this year: one in Auckland at the Pop-Up Globe, one in Hamilton, and this one, in Wellington. It was the only one of these productions I saw (of course), and it was very good. Put on by a brand-new company going by the name of the Lost Shakespeare Company, which states that it is dedicated to putting on more obscure Shakespeare plays, it was a solid minimalist production. One thing that was very notable about it was that it had no fake blood or gore effects; a startling choice for this splatterfest of a play, but one which worked very well, allowing it to play more like a straight tragedy and clearly presenting the themes and characters in the lessened presence of shock.

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Another Auckland import! Sam Brooks had two plays running in early December: Making Friends Collective’s production of Wine Lips, which I missed, and this, his own production of the semi-autobiographical play which seems to be his signature. Another one where I don’t have much to say about it, just that it’s a complex, well-written and well-acted piece of work, and that Brook’s Bruce Mason Award is well deserved.

Well

I really wish I had a script of this. Well was a piece of verbatim theatre by new feminist theatre company Women Aren’t Wolves, dealing with mental illness from the perspective of people who have it. As a document it was vital, providing a space for people with mental illness to define their conditions in their own terms. The descriptions stated that they wanted to explore “what it means to be well”, and this production met that goal admirably.

Rukahu

James Nokise is completely amazing. I don’t think that there’s anyone disputing this. This play was simultaneously one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year and a searing piece of cultural comment and criticism. Some of this was lost on me, as I don’t really know enough about the sort of theatre he’s parodying to understand how his character, Senior Pacific Artist Jon Bon Fasi, applies to how real-life Māori and Pasifika theatre is handled by CreativeNZ and the general theatrical establishment (if that is his target, I think it is), but what I could understand was incredibly insightful. Nokise could write a book, but that wouldn’t get the audiences he wants, and it wouldn’t be as funny. This is what political theatre is for, and I’m not sure it even is political theatre.

When We Dead Awaken

This show was massively underappreciated. I’ve heard very little talk about it – there are quite a few reviews of it floating around, sure, but only because it toured the North Island and was reviewed in the newspapers where it went. It certainly had flaws, with the acting sometimes lacking variance in intonation, but this production of Henrik Ibsen’s symbolistic final play was extraordinarily powerful. Stripped down to just under an hour (an Ibsen play!), it was particularly notable for its blocking, its design (though the colour pallet was composed exclusively of my favourite colours so I am biased), its music, and the vocal work of the actors. I saw the first performance in the Fringe Festival and the last one at BATS in October, and both times the ending made me gasp from the catharsis.

Galathea: Into the Bush                                                

Ania Upstill had a strong year, first directing Love’s Labours Lost for Summer Shakespeare (which was OK), then Hamlet, then this. This play was an update of John Lyly’s Elizabethan play Galathea (or Gallathea or Galatea) about two girls being disguised as boys and sent into the forest by their fathers to escape being sacrificed to Neptune and falling in love while in the captivity of Diana’s Hunt, all surrounded by the machinations of various gods. Typical Elizabethan story. Opening a week and a bit after Trump’s election, this play wasn’t just funny (and it was very, very funny), it was happy, it was celebratory, and it represented a great variety of and was primarily aimed at LGBT people. All this made it very appropriate for the time, in a different way to most things of which that can be said. Representation will be increasingly important under Trump, both to humanise the people he’ll dehumanise and to create a space for said people. The humour, the acting, the theatrical skill, and the politics of this play are all things I hope I see more of in the plays of 2017.

Second Item: Shows I missed but really wish I’d seen

Shot Bro: Confessions of a Depressed Bullet

The Vultures

Mana Wahine (I need to make a note of the Kia Mau Festival next year!)

No Post On Sunday

The Fence (directed by the older siblings of one of the WHS Shakespeare directors this year!)

Wine Lips

A Trial and/or It’s a Trial!

Rose Matafeo: Finally Dead

Perhaps, Perhaps… Quizás

Not In Our Neighbourhood (though there’ll probably be another chance to see it)

Third Item: Now For Something Completely Foreign

It wasn’t a New Zealand play at all, but I saw a cinema screening of the RSC Hamlet with Paapa Essiedu and it was completely incredible. Keep an eye on Essiedu, he’s probably got a strong career ahead of him based on his performance. Keep an eye on anyone involved in this, really. This is possibly the best play I’ve ever seen in my limited experience.

Fourth Item: Ten favourite plays with enthusiasm translator (like the Obama anger translator but for enthusiasm)

Hudson and Halls Live!

Really funny! Good theatrical technique!

The Trojan Women 

Yay tragedy!

Smells Like Xmas        

Experimental! Hilarious!

Hamlet

Yay Shakespeare!

Titus Andronicus

Yay Shakespeare!

Riding in Cars With (Mostly Straight) Boys

Yay well-written character-based drama but also with jokes!

Well

I know things I didn’t before!

Rukahu

Best editorial is a comedy show!

When We Dead Awaken

Really impressive presentation of interesting overlooked text!

Galathea: Into the Bush                                               

Spreaded non-holiday-related cheer! (I realise spreaded isn’t a word)

Fifth Item: Shows I’m Looking Forward To In 2017

The Undertow

January. Four history plays about Wellington, viewable two at a time or in one ten-hour session with intervals.

Stoge Chollonge 2006

February. Fringe Festival. Comedy show about Stage Challenge and 2000s period piece.

Possible Bacchanals show

Only exists if David Lawrence manages to get out of the Pop-Up Globe or much less likely, if they go on with less of his involvement. Lawrence has said that he does really want to do something with The Bacchanals for the election year

Nearly Inevitable PSA Show

Almost certainly coming to the Comedy Festival. With an election year AND President Trump for meat.

Anything Ania Upstill makes next year

Anything James Nokise makes next year

Good luck for next year! I don’t think there’ll be much good for the world, but theatre’s going well, however much that even matters!