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laylaglobalproject · 10 months ago

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Week 1 - Project Launch

Monday 25th February -

Today was the launch of the global project. We were given the new brief which was:

"This module focuses on real-world challenge-based learning, through a globally located live brief, set by an external client, user, community, audience or institution. Building on skills developed in the previous modules throughout Level 5, the scope is now bigger again, with a global perspective, and an emphasis on understanding different cultures, knowledge and working practices. You will collaboratively question and explore a live brief, while iteratively moving through the Thought, Materials and Digital Labs as needed as your project grows and develops. Throughout the module, you will regularly bring your work together to share, display, discuss, and critique.

The inclusion of a reflective essay asking you to discuss a position for yourself globally, in relation to your work and interests, will act as a transition into level 6, in preparation for your final year of self-directed study and the future direction you wish to take. "

Later in the presentation there was a more direct version of the brief which provided some more clarity as to what was actively being asked:

"The Brief - A Portal Between Two Universities

Communicating across the Continent

This collaborative creative project aims to create a body of work and a possible real time event. This project takes inspiration from PORTAL, by Benedict’s Gylys, which acts as a reminder that:

‘We are all inseparably connected’ "

I gathered, we were to create some form of 'portal' connecting us and the students in Kiev, while being conscious of the socio-geographical challenges and solutions, audience and community, and the environment. We were given the example 'PORTAL' which was a good example of the kind of outcome that we could produce. Anything that connects us to the students in Kiev. This example showed a physically built portal in the streets of Lithuania, and Poland and it shows a live view image of the street at the time, only the Lithuanian street is streamed on the Polish portal and vice versa.

We were then spoken through the learning objectives and how we will be assessed:

Learning Objective 1: 25% Individually assessed

research and development evidenced in a process log

relating to the needs of the client, audience, community and planet.

Learning Objective 2: 25% Individually assessed

research and development evidenced in a process log

regarding socio-geographical challenges/solutions for sustainable development.

Learning Objective 3: 25% Group assessed

Research and development and final output evidenced in process log

Learning Objective 4: Individually assessed

Individual 2000 word essay

develop a position for ourselves globally in relation to the inquiry

We went on to discuss the reading texts that we will venture into throughout the project. After this we were told that it was Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design, that we were going to be collaborating with. We started to consider themes that we could focus on to later develop our projects. The ones that we were given were:

communication/language

population

weather

maps/geography

time zone

studios

creative work

food

These were just a few ideas that we were told about and discussed. We can work with different themes if we chose but these were a few that we ventured into early on to begin to spark our ideas. We looked into examples of each that had already been done. Like carrier pigeons as a form of communication and morse code as a language/communication example. My favourite example that we looked at, however, was the "Tomorrow is another day, weather experience" by Mathieu Lehanneur. It was an installation made for a Palliative care unit. It offered patients an opportunity to see tomorrow's sky as it streamed live weather updates for the next day and displayed them through this window like feature for the patients. I liked most the meaning behind this installation. I think it was especially heartwarming and I like the idea of designing with such a nice sentiment. I think that this project is a perfect example of where the audience, community and the socio-geographic issues/questions have been dealt with in such a professional and compassionate way. He claims to have used the weather as it is such a frequent conversation between people, and rather than steer away from the fact that the patients aren't in control or aware of their time, he gives them this awareness of the future. Patients in such an environment you wouldn't expect to have but he allows this conversation and this knowledge.

‘I also liked being a step ahead of death itself: perhaps I will not be there tomorrow, but I know what tomorrow will look like!‘

This sentiment resonated with me particularly as I think it was such a positive effect of the installation. He deals with the environment in such an admirable and positive way. It is this kind of designing that I think shows a higher level of professionalism. There is such an understanding and awareness of his audience, setting and community and it is evident in the outcome and the effect that it has.

We discussed the next steps for the project which were to join the Figma page. This is a communal workspace that we shared with the students in Kiev, so that we could all upload our work to a space that was accessible for all. It was a very very similar programme to Miro and so was easy to get the hand of and begin uploading to. After joining the Figma we began research for the rest of the morning until we had a teams call with students and tutors in Kiev. We were to select a theme and start researching and configuring research to influence and aid our design ideas. This was so that we could all come up with individual pitches for the following Monday morning. We were to pitch to the class our idea so that we could find similarities in ideas and then begin to split off into groups and develop these ideas further, alongside the students in Kyiv.

In the evening of the session we had our first Teams call with the Students in Kyiv. This call was mostly just an introductory meeting to each other and to see the other students. We spoke about the project and heard a little from a teacher in Kyiv who seemed very excited to begin the project. We informed them of our course and then individually the students from Kyiv introduced themselves which was really nice to hear. I was really impressed with their English and they even said it was a good opportunity for them to practice which was nice! After the introductions we spoke about the next steps of the project, which were of course to come up with individual pitches which will then navigate us into groups based on the similarities between the ideas. We mentioned that the communal Figma page will be used throughout the project so that we can all see each other's ideas and comment throughout the entire process.

We created spaces on the Figma to introduce us, with images of ourselves and a small bio to tell them a little about each of us. The Ukrainian students did the same and it was nice to see this social page form, for me it helped to realise that we were really in contact and collaborating with this students, despite them being in another country. It also helped as anything then posted by a student was labelled and we could physically see the person that was uploading the content.

Wednesday 28th February -

Today I felt was the time to really consider what I wanted to achieve via my 'portal'. I tried to break down various similarities and differences between the students in Kyiv and ourselves. The biggest ones I came up with ranged from,

similar educative backgrounds

different cultures

different architecture/environments

similar interests

universities/courses.

I began my research into Kyiv and its culture. I was considering the differences and the similarities between Kyiv and Birmingham as I thought this may be an easy was to compare the two and see any significant themes. One area I did begin to look into was the architecture. This was slightly difficult as I wanted to ensure the architecture I looked at in Kyiv had little to no soviet relations. It was imperative that even in my research I stayed sensitive of the current affairs. I discovered the 'monumental' statue, 'Mother Kyiv'. This statue was built to commemorate the victory of World War Two. Its vast scale was made to resemble a sense of power as it stands at a large 102 meters (including the podium on which it stands). The parliament of Ukraine began a decommunisation of Ukraine in April 2015 and ultimately outlawed Soviet and communist symbols, street names, and monuments. World War Two monuments were, however, protected from this law until February 2018 where the debate began to replace the Soviet State emblem on the statue with the Ukrainian Trident Coat of Arms. According to 'DIAM' on the 13th of July 2023 the work to remove the Soviet emblem began. I was particularly drawn to this monument not just because it is located in Kyiv but because of this history and what it now represents. It seems something that the people of Ukraine can be proud of as it has been, in a way, reclaimed.

Birmingham is also known for a lot of its architecture. From the traditional, listed buildings to the much more modern buildings like the library and the bullring. This was an interesting area as it allowed me to really consider the buildings that I am surrounded by and often overlook. Even to look at our building, first opened as an art school in September 1885. It is the oldest School of Art in the UK. This was an interesting comparison point and allowed for a lot of useful research. It is interesting to learn about the different features of each city and how they are influenced. From the reclaiming of once soviet statues to the gothic revival architecture of Birmingham, the cultural differences shine through.

After a fair amount of reading and research in the morning I tried to focus on possible physical outcomes. I considered different ways of interacting, and just made a note of anything that inspired me after hearing the brief. I created a mindmap of these ideas as it was a rough draft on possible ideas that I can later branch off of and develop.

These ideas consisted of:

handprints

drawing

creating a VR world

emojis

mirror images

interactive projections

lighting changes

These were all just very initial thoughts that I made a note of. My design process begins with rough ideas and then development to create more thought out and evolved ideas. This is what I spent the rest of the afternoon doing. I started to flesh out some of these thoughts. Some of the more developed ideas were:

A window between Kyiv and Birmingham - we can each design and project visuals through the window and stream them in each others studio, maybe uploading them through a shared website.

An interactive game between the two groups, potentially a murder mystery.

A live streamed chat via our own website.

Create a monument combining aspects of both Ukrainian and British culture, specific to Birmingham and Kyiv. We can then project it or use AR to display it in each other's studios.

A communal server of some sort that we can all access and enter together.

I began to create a mind-map of these ideas to visualise and see them alongside each other. This usually helps see any possible crossovers of ideas that could be combined into one or developed together. I also thought this may be a useful visual to display in my pitch presentation to see if there's anything that may inspire/coincide with others.

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ayuuria · 4 years ago

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Yashahime Translation: Livedoor News Interview

Please do not repost this translation without my consent! This includes screenshots of any type and amount. If you wish to share this translation, simply link to this post.

For more information regarding the use of my translations, click here.

The New Story That Continues the World of Inuyasha, Anime “Hanyō no Yashahime” Director x Producer Interview

With the Resolve to Reopen the Concluded “Inuyasha” World in Their Hearts. The Behind-the-Scenes Production of “Hanyō no Yashahime”

For 12 years from 1996-2008, “Inuyasha” (original creator: Takahashi Rumiko) which was serialized in “Weekly Shōnen Sunday” (Shogakukan) was a feudal fairy tale that depicted the heart of the battle between demons, humans, and half-demons for the Shikon Jewel.

Anime “Inuyasha” broadcasted from 2000-2004 followed “Inuyasha the Final Act” from 2009-2010, after the original work was concluded. It is a timeless masterpiece that is now loved around the world.

Continuing that world of “Inuyasha” is the new original anime, “Hanyō no Yashahime”, which began broadcast in October of 2020. Many Inuyasha fans were surprised at the shocking set up that the daughters of Sesshōmaru, a popular character in “Inuyasha”, would be the protagonists.

With everything from the production, background music, and cast performance having an Inuyasha flavor mixed in, being moved from seeing the new characters and the “Inuyasha” characters coming together on the TV screen, to the absolutely unclear mysterious developments, the hearts of fans around world have been grabbed once again.

Since broadcast began, despite having completed one cour (translator’s note: Cour = 3 months or 13 weeks/episodes), the full picture of the story still cannot be seen. We carried out an interview conversation with director Satō Teruo and producer Naka Toshikazu regarding the things of interest about the work up until now and ahead.

We Prepared a Device That Would Allow Inuyasha Fans to Enjoy (the show)

— One cour has passed since broadcast began. Are the responses reaching you?

Naka: The response is incredible. Especially on social media.

Satō: You’re right. I’m also on Twitter, so I get reactions from all over the world. I truly get a sense that it’s work that’s receiving a lot of attention.

When I look at comments on the official (Twitter) account, most of them are from overseas. Not only do I once again realize that “Inuyasha” boasts a worldwide popularity, I do my best while feeling the pressure of “Hanyō no Yashahime” being a work that inherits that world.

— Apparently the one who suggested the project was Suwa Michihiko of ytv Nextry, who was the producer for anime “Inuyasha” and “Detective Conan”. How did you two feel when you first heard about the project?

Naka: “We’re going to do a story that’s been neatly concluded once before again!? How!?” is what I felt at the beginning.

From the moment I first heard about it, I was still floating around what kind of story it would be. “I might make it a story about Sesshōmaru’s daughter.” was as far as I had gotten. I thought “If I’m not mistaken, if we make it like that, then there might be something to do”.

Satō: There were talks of “wanting to do it” for 2-3 years and Rumiko-sensei, Suwa-san, and the “Inuyasha” staff had mulled over the idea.

It’s just that not only was the story of “Inuyasha” itself was very neatly concluded, after “Since Then” (the special edition (chapter) depicting the after story) we had Rumiko-sensei tell us “There’s nothing left to do in “Inuyasha””.

There was a rather heavy responsibility in touching that and as an Inuyasha fan myself, it made me really think about “In order to create a new story out of a work that was neatly concluded, what sort of form does it need to take?”

I think Inuyasha fans would watch, so I felt that I wanted to release something that everyone would agree to as much as possible without breaking their (idea of) “Inuyasha”.

— In terms of the target audience for “Hanyō no Yashahime”, do you consider Inuyasha fans the main target? Or do you focus on the new audience that does not know “Inuyasha”?

Naka: For us, we want people to like the new characters so in that sense, we keep in mind the new people.

It’s just that a lot of time has passed since “Inuyasha” was broadcasted and I think among the people who watched “Inuyasha” back in the day are people who have become parents. I think watching it as two generations, parent and child (Mom and Dad who liked “Inuyasha” and the children who are touching it as a new work), is the most ideal.

Satō: The voice actresses who voice the three princesses (Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha), are from a generation that watched “Inuyasha” right when they were kids. They chit-chat while recording every week (laughs).

It would be great if the new target group could go back and watch “Inuyasha” because of “Hanyō no Yashahime” and think “There are demons that appeared in “Hanyō no Yashahime” too”. On the reverse side, I would like those who watched “Inuyasha” to enjoy “Hanyō no Yashahime” from the point of view of “It’s the demon from that time”.

For that reason, we inlayed different devices and components into the story.

Naka: We periodically put in devises that would make people who like Rumiko-sensei’s other works smile a little bit. Like the hoodlums who appeared in episode 2 or the monkey gag in episode 9.

— In other words, while still keeping in mind those who don’t know “Inuyasha”, you are of course creating a work that Inuyasha fans can enjoy as well.

Satō: Making sure we don’t destroy the image of “Inuyasha” characters is at the forefront of our minds, especially when we bring them out into the “Hanyō no Yashahime” world. This is so that people watching don’t think “That’s not the kind of character they were”.

Of course, when we bring them out, we always have Rumiko-sensei review the scenario. She’ll tell us “It should be fine if it’s like this” and apply that to the scenario which is how we’ve been doing it.

Naka: We’re careful so that when “Inuyasha” characters take the mound, they don’t eat into the spotlight of the new characters while also not losing their “status”.

— Among the fans, the way the broadcasting order of “Hanyō no Yashahime” to “Great Detective Conan” is similar to “Inuyasha” to “Conan” became a popular topic of conversation. Was that formation something Yomiuri TV-san was particular about?

Satō: The order is the same as when it was broadcasted during the golden hour of 19:00-20:00 (7-8pm on the 12-hour clock). We’re grateful that they’re nostalgic about it.

Naka: I don’t know if they were particular about it or not, but it was decided from the start that it would be broadcasted during that timeframe (before “Conan”). It’s possible that it just turned out that way, but from the production side, it felt “just like before” in the end.

Satō: It’s like (Yamaguchi) Kappei-san (role of Inuyasha and also Edogawa Conan/Phantom Theif Kid in “Great Detective Conan”) has 2 consecutive appearances (laughs).

Naka: Not only is the connection between the timeframe the same, but also when we heard that SixTONES would be doing the opening for the October cour, we thought the flow looked the same as “Inuyasha” since it would be a group from Jonny & Associates that would be singing (Editor’s note: In the past, V6 and Tackey & Tsubasa were in charge of the theme song for “Inuyasha”).

In the end, we’re also curious as to how the structure is the same as during “Inuyasha”.

A Character Cannot Come to Life Without Working Out the Fundamental Aspects

— Next, we will ask how story the of “Hanyō no Yashahime” was created. We just heard from Naka-san that “When I first heard about it “I might make it a story about Sesshōmaru’s daughter.” was how far I had gotten”, but were there any different ideas regarding the direction after that?

[Characters bios written following the question but I’m skipping it]

Naka: We proceeded with that intention as is.

It’s just that even if it’s a daughter, we couldn’t quite settle whether the daughter would be twins or an only child. We couldn’t decide until right on the line of “If we don’t decide what sort personality the character will have at this stage, we may have to relook things including the broadcast timing” (laughs).

Satō: We pretty much decided after directly talking to Rumiko-sensei.

— What did Rumiko-sensei tell you?

Naka: Regarding the character persona, she pointed out things such as “With only the setting, you don’t know why they speak that way” and “Why they dress like this doesn’t feel right to me”.

Especially with Towa, it took a long time for Rumiko-sensei to understand and agree to the part where “She dresses like a boy because she’s this kind of persona”. That’s where we struggled the most.

Satō: For Rumiko-sensei, apparently, she understood Setsuna and Moroha straight down like “So this is the kind of child she is”.

However, only with Towa did she say, “If you don’t clearly boil down and solidify how she will grow and what sort of foundation she’ll have, the story development will become blurred wouldn’t it”.

With that point, it was a lot of work deciding Towa’s character.

Naka: Not just the settings, but we had Sumisawa Katsuyuki-san (in charge of series composition for “Inuyasha” and now this work as well) vigorously write the scripts for episodes 1 and 2 and show Rumiko-sensei “With this story flow, Towa will respond like this” and “We’ll use this language”.

With that, we put things in order in a “But, we probably don’t need this kind of language after all, right?” kind of way.

— It was explained in the story that Towa dresses like a boy because “It’s easier to fight in”, but is that one of the settings that was solidified like that?

Naka: Yes. The result of coming up with different reasons and many ideas was that we ended up settling on a conversely simple reason.

Satō: Rumiko-sensei casually said “Isn’t “it’s easier to fight in” good enough?” (laughs). We were turning up a lot of different rationalizations. (translator’s note: Not confident on this sentence) For example, “As a girl, there was something she didn’t like”.

But it also became “I don’t think that’s true” …… It made us realize it was fine to have something simple and straightforward.

— So Rumiko-sensei was involved with the character persona starting from the foundation.

Satō: I learned a lot from speaking with Rumiko-sensei as I was creating the characters. Rumiko-sensei’s way of thinking is very logical and upfront. For example, “Because (she’s) this kind of child, (she) behaves like this” or “(She) Won’t say something like this”.

That’s why, people who view the work will see their foundation. In my head, I knew “If you don’t work out the fundamental aspects, the character won’t come to life” but I came to realize that once again.

In the anime, there were many people who put out ideas starting with Sumisawa-san, but I thought it must be a lot of work for Rumiko-sensei to create a manga while consulting with the editors.

We’re Mindful of the Composition that “Towa Sets the Story in Motion”

— With the characters solidified, did you receive any orders from Sumisawa-san as you planned the story?

Naka: With “Hanyō no Yashahime”, it started with Sumisawa-san first writing the scenario that would become the first manuscript.

In that regard, we discussed with him things such as “Keeping in mind of the development ahead, please pay attention to this part” or “Please put this device in”.

More precisely, there was a lot of discussion about Moroha’s position at the beginning. There was the fact that Moroha was the easiest character to move, but we wanted him to keep in mind as much as possible that she (Moroha) should show her concern for Towa and Setsuna in a way that ensures they’re at the forefront.

Satō: To the writer, Moroha is like a “Mini Inuyasha”. Hence there was a tendency to naturally center the story around her.

However, Sesshōmaru’s daughters, Towa and Setsuna, are the protagonists this time so we wanted (the writer) to keep that in mind.

Because Moroha is easy to understand with her character and Setsuna is a female version of Sesshōmaru, when their vectors become conspicuous, Towa appears overshadowed no matter what. “The protagonist getting overshadowed by those around them troupe.” is something that happens in original works.

That’s why we’re conscious of the composition of bringing Towa into the center and using her to move the story whenever possible. That’s the part we especially placed importance on when putting together the story.

— Next, please tell us the appeals of the three protagonists. Starting from Towa please.

Naka: Regarding Towa, she inherited Sesshōmaru’s silver hair, has a boyish outfit, and has an outward appearance that would make girls think she’s attractive.

However, her values are surprisingly modern, and she has a naiveness about her which Setsuna calls out within the story. I don’t think there have been many characters who have been balanced like this thus far.

Although, at the current phase, there’s a point that what the goal behind her actions is might still be a little weak.

Satō: Just as Naka-san said, Towa has a half-hearted kindness and naiveté; how that will change as she travels with Setsuna and Moroha. Please look forward to that growth as you watch the story.

I think there are people who get impatient seeing Towa’s current indecisiveness (laughs).

What will that kind of protagonist experience and how will her feelings change from that. It will make me happy if people think “Towa’s changed; she’s matured” at the end.

Naka: I think having lots of room for growth is what gives her that protagonist feel. Conversely, Setsuna is a relatively standard character. However, on the one hand, she does have a kind side.

Satō: She does show a little affection after all (laughs)

Earlier I said “a female version of Sesshōmaru” so I think her nonchalant kindness is the same as his. The vector of her character direction is easy to understand which is her appeal.

— It seems Setsuna coldly pushes Towa away, but also shows concern for her. Despite saying, “The curse of the Dream Butterfly doesn’t need to be broken”, she goes along with Towa’s search for the Dream Butterfly.

Satō: Just as the line “I can’t readily accept that” in episode 3 said, Setsuna cannot accept Towa as her sister.

However, I believe she understands Towa’s virtues as an individual. We would like everyone to pay attention to how Setsuna draws the line of “I can understand Towa’s good qualities, but I can’t acknowledge her as an older sister” and the point at which that line is crossed.

Will the day ever come where Setsuna will address Towa as “Towa nee-chan” ……

— It feels as though the distance between them is getting shorter, like when she almost went along with Towa’s high-five in episode 11.

Satō: Little by little. Within that, we would like for you to please look forward to how their feelings intersect when the time comes.

Naka: In that episode, it looks as though she gets along with Towa, but when Towa tried to lay her head on her lap, she didn’t allow it. I was watching with great interest like “So that’s where she draws the line” (laughs).

— Next, Moroha.

Naka: Moroha is pretty much just what you see (laughs)

Satō: She’s a hybrid of Inuyasha and Kagome. If her theatrical elocution is like Inuyasha’s, then her actions are understandable like Kagome’s.

In that sense, I think she’s a character that viewers can easily connect with. There’s also the fact that currently, all the gag lines are relatively being placed on Moroha (laughs).

Naka: In earlier episodes, her level of participation was high but lately she’s been in charge of punch lines (laughs). For example, when they didn’t take her to the battle in episode 10 or when she got caught up in Setsuna’s attack in episode 11.

Earlier, we discussed how “We were careful not center too much around Moroha” but it put us at a disadvantage as a result and I feel a little bad (laughs). However, Moroha will be taking charge in episode 16 next week (1/23/21) so please look forward to that.

Satō: Not only will Moroha play a very active role, but it is also an important episode that depicts the environment that she grew up in. Why she has to collect bounties and what kind of relationship she has with Jyūbee will be touched upon. If you watch that, I think you’ll come to understand her actions up until now like “So that’s why she was doing things like that”.

From a composition standpoint, episode 15 revealed Towa and Setsuna’s past, episode 16 will reveal Moroha’s backbone, and furthermore, the story of Setsuna’s childhood will come hereafter. If you watch that far, the full story of this will work will become clear for the most part.

The first cour was a period of planting seeds, but now going forward, the composition is set up so that the fruit of the tree will ripen and fall, so please continue to look forward to it.

The Casting of Miroku Was Entrusted to the Sound Director for “Inuyasha”

— Next, please tell us about the casting. On what points did you decide the cast group?

Satō: It was fundamentally decided through auditions. If we don’t progress the script to some extent, sound director Nagura Yasushi-san can’t determine the direction of the roles, so when the script amount had accumulated, we gathered up people who could picture the characters and carried out the auditions from there.

It was right about the time when the COVID crisis was escalating, so we worried if we could really start broadcasting in October.

Naka: The balance between the three was the deciding factor. After we narrowed it down from a number candidates, we took a “If this person did this character, then the balance would probably become like this” kind of view and decided from there.

Satō: There’s going to be a lot of dialogue between the three of them not matter what, so in order to avoid having similar voice tones and similar ways of speaking, we created the characters based on that assumption.

Towa’s thought process and actions are modern and Moroha acts on her emotions. Conversely, Setsuna is always calm and collected like Sesshōmaru and makes decisions after observing the entirety of the situation. Then she’ll look for the best solution and take action.

Because each of the characters has that kind of nature, we ordered Nagura-san to look for a balance that enables you to easily tell the three of them apart when they’re conversing.

– Did you not look at it from a standpoint that the voices should or should not sound similar to those of the parent generation like Sesshōmaru, Inuyasha, or Kagome?

Naka: That is a point that we were not at all concerned about. We proceeded with a viewpoint that the person should match the outward appearance, the actions within the story, and the nature of the character.

When balancing the three of them, balancing the twins seemed difficult, so from there we decided on Moroha first as her position takes a step back. We decided on Towa and Setsuna at the end after looking at the balance between them and considering Moroha for a second time.

— What were the key points in selecting the cast outside the three girls?

Naka: We left it up to Nagura-san. There were times when he asked for our review and opinions.

For example, there was an idea for Riku (CV: Fukuyama Jun) to have a more feminine voice. But when we spoke to director Satō, he said “A masculine image”, so we went with that direction.

— The Miroku that Yasumura Makoto-san, who replaced the late Tsujitani Kōji-san, played was a hot topic but did Nagura-san decide on that casting as well?

Satō: Regarding Yasumura-san, we asked Tsuruoka Yota, who was the sound director for “Inuyasha”, to decide. We thought that fit more under the category of “Inuyasha” rather than “Hanyō no Yashahime”.

Of course, I’m sure the viewers knew (the voice) was going to change, but we received a lot of feedback saying “It’s Miroku-sama!” and “It doesn’t feel out of place at all!” when episode 1 was broadcasted.

I was in Tsujitani-san’s care many times as a sound director prior to him playing Miroku. I was still a newbie producer back then but even when I met him after that at the “Inuyasha” set, he spoke to me like “Hello~”

I was producing while my heart was pounding hard. During testing, when I was panicking because I couldn’t match up the lip-syncing, he reached out to me like “We’ll do the syncing so it’s fine”. The figure of him reaching out to me so nicely is strong in my memory.

It was such a shame that he died so young. However, this time Yasumura-san, who was also his junior at the same agency, is working hard as his successor, and I think he was casted well.

Naka: Director Satō, you said “The air around Yasumura-san is completely different now compared to when I worked with him in other works”.

Satō: In episode 1, it seems he was really nervous having to record with the cast of “Inuyasha” who are high level seniors.

He was relaxed to some extent in episode 13 which was Miroku’s episode. He said to me “I’m sorry about before when I was extremely nervous” (laughs).

Creating Scenes in A Way That’s Distinct from the Popular (Methods)

— In order to make viewers feel that this is a work that inherits the world of “Inuyasha”, do you do any devising on the production side?

Satō: I would say scene creation. We don’t really get onboard with the popular trends. We split the cuts and show things the way they did in “Inuyasha” in order to smoothly give it that “Inuyasha” feel. I think it’s distinct from what’s popular nowadays.

This might be weird way of saying it, but it’s like we’re using an old-fashioned way of creating. By purposely doing things in a “Works from about 10 years ago felt like this” sort of way, it brings out that “Inuyasha” feel.

For other parts, Sumisawa-san directs the theatrical elocution and we have the same sound team from “Inuyasha” working, so no particular explanation is needed. In that aspect, they’re making it a lot easier for me (laughs).

For me, “Inuyasha” was the first work I did as a freelance producer. Not only was it a work that taught me the fundamentals of producing, but I also learned (how to make) storyboards from “Inuyasha”. In that sense, it’s a very memorable work.

— At the beginning, you said you “Put in devices that connect to “Inuyasha””, but between episode 9-12, demons that appeared in “Inuyasha” were continuously making appearances and it became a topic of discussion.

Naka: That section was the “devoured by Mōryōmaru” series. We had to speed through things in “Inuyasha the Final Act”, so I brought out those demons thinking “If we could just use the demons that we couldn’t properly show back then, even just a little”.

Satō: After fall for Meiōjū, we only had the scene of Mōryōmaru taking the armored shell (laughs)

Naka: We explain that “The demon that appeared this time is actually in “Inuyasha”” on the official Twitter account. It would be wonderful if there are people who take an interest in “Inuyasha” after watching “Hanyō no Yashahime”.

Satō: I think there’s also a wonderful world laid out in that work, so we would certainly love for you to watch “Inuyasha” while enjoying “Hanyō no Yashahime”.

Picking Out Noteworthy Episodes and Explaining Them!

— From here, we will have you look back on episodes that have already aired. We have picked out a number of impressionable episodes, so please tell us some secret (behind the) production stories, memorable recordings, and scenes that left a lasting impression on you.

Episode 1: Inuyasha Since Then

Satō: It was like a “class reunion” (laughs). Although, we couldn’t have everyone record together due to the COVID crisis.

We had everyone take turns recording but they were all was greeting each other like “Oh my god~!” as they passed by one another. Likewise, it was a teamwork that went without saying.

Jaken (played by Chō-san) was adlibbing a lot and that situation made me really think “This is “Inuyasha””.

The first episode was mainly “Inuyasha” basically, but at the very beginning and end, we had the story connect to episode 7 of “Hanyō no Yashahime”. In that sense, the episode was pretty much full “Inuyasha”.

Naka: While we had director Satō do the storyboard and production, I saw the storyboard and felt “Ah, it’s “Inuyasha”. It will be okay”. Like feeling relieved (laughs)

Satō: When 10 years goes by, the producers from back then aren’t around anymore. The people I worked with are now at the director level. Explaining something like the rules of “Inuyasha” from square one to the new people is a hassle, so I was like “I’ll do this myself” (laughs).

The surprising thing is, we had the same group of people from 20 year ago with chief animation director Hishinuma Yoshihito (in charge of character design in “Inuyasha”. In this work, he oversees animation character design) and the animators from back then. It felt as though “Ah, nothing’s changed”.

I remember working while saying “Back then, I never thought we would do something like this 20 years later”.

Episode 2: The Three Princesses

Satō: You could say this episode was episode 1 for “Hanyō no Yashahime”.

Due to the COVID crisis, we couldn’t have the three princesses record together and it made me realize how important it was for everyone to record together. Even though it’s a conversation, when you have one person record first and the other person responding while listening (the recording), it changes the mood and rhythm.

Nagura-san tried to match up schedules so that the three princesses could record together as much as possible, but in the end, we couldn’t record with everyone. In a sense, episode 2 was very memorable to me in that it left the impression of “So we’re going to have to record like this from now on”.

I think all the works that started airing in the fall were in the same situation, not just “Hanyō no Yashahime”. Since we were recording in chunks, it became necessary to pay even more attention than before to ensure that we didn’t forget to record anything.

I’m grateful to everyone involved that we somehow managed to air every week, despite these difficult times.

Naka: The first demon that appears in episode 2, is a point where we kept “Inuyasha” in mind as we pulled Mistress Three Eyes from Mistress Centipede.

I think it was an episode where we appealed that “We’re aware of the “Rumik World”” by putting in the hoodlums mentioned earlier and Towa’s gag face.

Even though the original “Inuyasha” leaned a little more to the serious side, I think Rumiko-sensei’s taste of allowing a little bit of leeway while not shaking off just that (aspect) is there.

This time as well, including the broadcast time, there were views from inside stating that they didn’t want to make (the episode) too serious. However, director Satō had already added that kind of relaxedness even before that was directly said. He splendidly created that balance that wasn’t too serious.

Episode 7: The Apple Meeting

Satō: Riku, who appears in episode 7, is a character we aimed to have revitalize the story by plopping in a new character just when the story was about to get stuck in a rut. Rumiko-sensei also uses this technique; for example, Kōga and Mugen no Byakuya in “Inuyasha”.

I spoke with Sumisawa-san at the beginning, expressing my desire to introduce a new character to revitalize the story before viewers could start thinking “We’re going to just keep watching this journey?” as they watch the three princesses progress on their journey. He’s a keyman who stirs up the story.

Plus, the three Yashahimes are girls, so there was also the idea of having a romantic component like with Inuyasha, Kagome, and Kikyō. Although he ended up having the feel of a pick-up artist as a result of trying to add that component in (laughs).

Naka: Episode 7 is an episode that connects to episode 1. We intended to put in the device of connecting episode 1 to another episode when we organized it, but after watching episode 7 I thought “It connected pretty well”.

I think it was nicely organized as it turned into a spoiler episode where you found out why Towa was there and what Setsuna and Moroha were doing while Yotsume was telling the old tale.

Satō: Going forward, Riku will gradually involve himself with Towa, and we wanted to show why that is over a number of episodes.

I think you’ll understand to some extent in episode 15, but he’s a character that you don’t know which side he swings to (friend or foe?), so he’s a character to look forward to in that sense.

Episode 13: The Delicious Feudal Monk

Satō: It was a parent child episode with Miroku and Hisui (CV: Urao Takehiro) that we added with the desire to develop Hisui. He is the son of Miroku and Sango (CV: Kuwashima Houko) and I think everyone was wondering what Miroku was currently doing, so we thought it would be nice to introduce what Miroku was up to here and depict the parent-child relationship.

Naka: It’s an episode where Hisui finally plays an active role. It was a feeling of sorry to have completely kept you waiting in the first cour. I am glad we were able to give him an active role to some extent. Moroha ended up going somewhere else though (laughs)

Finally, Setsuna stole the show at the end when her true power was released. I think it brings out Miroku and other “Inuyasha” characters in a good manner while still having highlights for “Hanyō no Yashahime”.

Episode 14: The Mastermind Who Burned the Forest

Satō: This is the episode where the truth behind the fire that attacked young Towa and Setsuna is revealed. It’s a real binding episode you could say, and I think it’s a story that could be put in a modern setting.

Also, from this story, the distance between Towa and Setsuna that we talked about earlier will somewhat destroy a line, I think. There’s Towa who shows her anger towards Homura, the one who tore them (the twins) apart, and Setsuna who has some thoughts from seeing that.

If you can feel that, I think how you view episode 15 will change.

Naka: I thought Towa’s comparison to a smartphone at the beginning was a little off as she doesn’t understand the concept of jealousy (laughs).

Also, something that I thought was strange after rewatching episode 14 was how the gardener and the cook were fine with working in such a dangerous place (laughs). I thought it was amazing even though they’re just regular humans.

Demons and humans unexpectedly coexist in this world. In a sense, you could say it’s very open-minded for a demon. Demons were depicted in all sorts of places in “Inuyasha” too, so it was an episode that made me realize once again that it’s this kind of world.

Episode 15: Lunar Eclipse, The Sorrowful Parting of Fate

Satō: Why did Towa and Setsuna have to grow up separated (from their parents) when they were young? This is the episode that answers that and depicts the continuation of the brief flashback in episode 8.

Why Sesshōmaru and Kirinmaru confronted Inuyasha and Kagome becomes clear. With this, I think you can start to understand Sesshōmaru’s actions.

Naka: This episode was a little different. To begin with, we thought that patrons would be happy to see Inuyasha and the others at the end of the first cour, so we organized it so that the past would be discussed at this timing.

It’s just that it felt completely independent from the main story and Riku just suddenly narrates it, so I’m sure viewers were surprised. Riku was in there as like the navigator.

The three Yashahimes don’t particularly know this, and this episode was purely for the viewers. It would be great if everyone looks forward to what’s to come while keeping this in mind.

— Thank you very much. Lastly, please give a message to our readers who are looking forward to what’s coming up ahead.

Naka: Cour 1 has just ended and we have entered cour 2, so from here on you will learn the things that you wanted to know. Please see for yourself how Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha will grow as you look forward to the mysteries being unraveled.

Satō: After episode 15, “what each character must do” will continuously become clear, and it will become a story that pursues that. On top of that, it would make me really happy if you could enjoy watching what will happen to the three (girls).

#yashahime #hanyou no yashahime #yashahime: princess half demon #translation

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oscopelabs · 4 years ago

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Christopher Nolan: The Man Who Wasn’t There by Daniel Carlson

So, we’ll start with the fact that all movies are make-believe. It’s a bunch of actors on a set, wearing costumes and standing with props picked out by hordes of people you’ll never see, under the guidance of a director, saying things that have been written down for them while doing their best to say these things so that it sounds like they’re just now thinking of them. We all know this—saying it feels incredibly stupid, like pointing out that water is wet—but it’s still worth noting. There is, for example, no such person as Luke Skywalker. Never has been, never will be. He was invented by a baby boomer from Modesto. He is not real.

And we know this, and that’s part of the fun. We know that Luke Skywalker isn’t real but is being portrayed by an actor (another boomer from the Bay Area, come to think of it), and that none of the things we’re seeing are real. But we give ourselves over to the collective fiction for the greater experience of becoming involved in a story. This is one of the most amazing things that we do as humans. We know—deep down, in our bones, without-a-doubt know—that the thing we’re watching is fiction, but we enter a state of suspended reality where we imagine the story to be real, and we allow ourselves to be moved by it. We’ve been doing this since we developed language. The people telling these stories know this and bring the same level of commitment and imagination and assurance that we do as viewers, too. The storyteller knows that the story isn’t real, but for lack of a better way to get a handle on it, it feels real. So, to continue with the example, we’re excited when Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star because he helped the good guys win. For us viewers, in this state of mutually reinforced agreement, that “happened.” It’s not real, but it’s “real”—that is, it’s real within the established boundaries of the invented world that we’ve all agreed to sit and look at for a couple of hours. Every viewer knows this, and every filmmaker acts on it, too. Except:

Christopher Nolan does not do this.

There’s no one single owner or maker of any movie, and anyone who tells you different has their hand in your pocket. But there’s an argument to be made that when somebody both writes and directs the movie, it’s a bit easier to locate a sense of personhood in the final product. (This is all really rough math, too, and should not be used in court.) Christopher Nolan has directed 11 films to date, and while his style can be found in all of them, his self is more present in the ones where he had a hand in the shaping of the story—and crucially, not just that, but in the construction of the fictional world. Take away the superhero trilogy, the remake of a Norwegian thriller, the adaptation of a novel, and the historical drama, and Nolan’s directed five films that can reasonably be attributed to his own creative universe: Following (1998), Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2020). These movies all involve themes that Nolan seems to enjoy working with no matter the source material, including identity, memory, and how easily reality can be called into question when two people refuse to concede that they had very different experiences of the same event. Basically, he makes movies about how perception shapes existence. How he does this, though, is unlike pretty much everybody else.

Take Inception. After a decade spent going from hotshot new talent to household name (thanks to directing the two highest-grossing Batman movies ever made, as well as the first superhero movie to earn an Oscar for acting), he had the credit line to make something big and flashy that was also weird and personal. So we got an action movie that, when first announced in the Hollywood trades, was described as being set within “the architecture of the mind.” Although this at first seemed to be a phrase that only a publicist could love, it turned out to be the best way to describe the film. This is a film, after all, about a group of elite agents who use special technology to enter someone’s subconscious dream-state and then manipulate that person’s memories and emotions. The second half of the film sees team leader Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the rest of the squad actually descend through multiple nested subconsciouses to achieve their goal, even as they’re chased every step of the way by representations of Mal (Marion Cotillard), Dom’s late wife, who committed suicide after spending too much time in another’s subconscious and lost the ability to discern whether she was really alive or still in the dream-world.

I say “representations” because that’s what they are: Mal is long dead, but Dom still feels enormous guilt over his complicity in her actions, and that guilt shows up looking like Mal, whose villainous actions (the representation’s actions, that is) are just more signs of Dom not being able to come to grips with his own past. It’s his own brain making these things up and attacking itself, and it chases his entire crew down three successive layers of dream worlds. You get caught up in the movie’s world as a viewer, and you go along because Nolan is pretty good at making exciting movies that feel like theme-park rides. You accept that Dom and everybody else refer to Mal as Mal and not, say, Dom. Dom even addresses her (“her”) when her projection shows up, speaking to her as if she’s a separate being with her own will and desires and not a puppet that he’s pretending not to know he’s controlling. It’s only later that you realize that the movie is in some ways just a big-budget rendition of what it would look like to really, really want to avoid therapy.

Which is what makes Nolan different from other filmmakers:

None of this is actually happening.

Again, yes, it’s happening in the sense that we see things on screen—explosions, chases, a fight scene in a rotating hallway that’s still some of the best practical-effects work in modern action movies—but within the universe of the film, none of what’s going on is taking place in the real world. It’s all unfolding in the subconsciouses of Dom’s teammates. In the movie’s real world, they’re all asleep on a luxury jet. They’re “doing” things that have an outcome on the plot, but Nolan sets more than half the movie inside dreams. It’s a movie about reality where we spend less time in reality than in fantasy. Half the movie is pretend.

For Nolan, filmmaking is about using a dazzling array of techniques to create a visual spectacle that distracts the viewer from the fact that the real and true story is happening somewhere else: in the fringes we can’t quite see, in the things we forget to remember, or even in the realm of pure speculation.

Memento arrived like (and with) a gunshot. It seemed to come out of nowhere and leave people struggling to describe it, and they usually wound up saying something like “it goes backward, but also forward at the same time, except some parts are actually really backward, like in reverse, so it’s maybe a circle?” Written by Christopher Nolan from an idea originally shared with him by his brother, Jonathan (who eventually turned it into a very different short story titled “Memento Mori”), the film follows a man named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who has anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories, so every few minutes he sort of just resets and has to figure out where he is, what he’s doing there, and so on. He’s on the hunt for the man who attacked him and his wife, leaving his wife dead and Leonard in his present condition, which you can imagine does not make the gathering and synthesis of clues easy.

What’s more, Nolan puts the viewer in Leonard’s shoes by breaking the film’s linear timeline into two halves—call them A and B—and then alternating between them, with the added disorientation coming from the fact that one of those timeline halves plays out backward, with each successive scene showing what happened before the one you previously saw. So, if you numbered all the scenes in each timeline in chronological order, they’d look something like this when arranged in the final film: Scene A1, Scene B22, Scene A2, Scene B21, Scene A3, Scene B20, etc. You get why it messed with people’s heads.

As a result, we spend most of the movie pretty confused, just like Leonard, whose suppositions about what might or might not take place next begin to substitute for our own understanding of the film. It’s not until the end that we find out the shoe already dropped, and that Leonard killed the original attacker some time ago and has since been led on a series of goose chases by his cop friend, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who’s planting fake clues to get Leonard to take out other criminals. In other words, we realize that the story we thought was happening was pretend, and the real story was happening all around us, in the margins, memories, and imaginations of the characters. The most honest moment in the movie is the scene where Leonard hires a sex worker to wait several minutes in the bathroom while he gets in bed, then make a noise with the door to wake him, at which point his amnesia has kicked in again and he briefly thinks that the noise is being made by his wife. He’s wrong, of course, but this is the only time in the movie that we actually know he’s wrong. It’s the only time we truly know what’s real and what isn’t.

Yet you can’t talk about Memento without talking about Following, Nolan’s first feature. Although the film’s production was so extremely low-budget you’d think they were lying—the cast and crew all had day jobs and could only film on the weekends, so the thing took a year to make—Nolan’s willingness to dwell completely in a make-believe world that the viewer never knows about is already evident. It’s about a bored young writer who starts following strangers through the city for kicks, only for one of those strangers to catch him in the act and confront him. The stranger introduces himself as Cobb—I kindly submit here that it is not a coincidence that this is also Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s name in Inception, but you already knew that—and reveals himself to be a burglar, spooked by the tail but willing to take on an apprentice. Cobb trains the writer to be a burglar, only for the situation to ultimately wind up implicating the writer himself in a complex blackmail plot. You see, the writer didn’t latch onto Cobb in a crowd; Cobb lured him in. The whole movie has been Cobb’s story all along, with the writer as a patsy who doesn’t understand the truth until the final frame. None of what we saw mattered, and everything that actually happened happened off-screen just before or just after we came in on a given scene. It’s like realizing the movie you’re watching turned out to be just deleted scenes from something else. You can’t say Nolan didn’t show his hand from the start.

That same general concept—that the movie we’re watching is actually the knock-on effect of a movie we’ll only glimpse, or maybe never even see—underpins Nolan’s latest movies, Interstellar and Tenet, too. Interstellar has some concepts that are iffy even for Nolan (it makes total sense for someone to do something for another out of love, but somewhat less sense that that love somehow reshapes the physical universe), but it’s still a big, bold approach to exploring how time and perception shape our actions. As the film follows its core group of astronauts while they search for potentially habitable new worlds, they encounter strange visions and experiences that turn out to be their handiwork from the future reflected back at them. Sure, it raises the paradoxical question of whether they had a first mission before this that failed, so now their future selves are intervening to make the second one (which feels like the first one to the astronauts the whole time) successful, and all sorts of other stuff that your sophomore-year roommate would like to talk with you about in great detail. But so much of what we see isn’t the stuff that happens, or that winds up being important. There’s the great scene where the astronauts land on a planet near a black hole, which is wreaking havoc on how time passes on the planet. A minor disaster delays their departure for the main ship still in orbit, but when the landing team returns, they find that more than 20 years have “passed” since they left, with the one remaining team member on the ship having spent more than two decades waiting for them to return. It’s a moment of genuine horror, and it underscores the fact that what we thought was the one true reality was just the perspective of a handful of characters we happened to follow for a few minutes. There were whole things happening that changed the plot and story and direction of everything that would follow, and we never saw them; we didn’t even know we’d missed them.

Tenet is, of course, the latest and most recursive exploration yet of Nolan’s obsession with showing us a story that turns out to be mostly fake. It is almost perversely hard to even begin to explain the film (Google “Tenet timeline infographic” and have fun). One way to think about it is to imagine if the two timeline halves from Memento somehow existed at the same time, with people moving both forward and backward through time while inhabiting the same location. Basically, some scientists figured out how to “invert” the basic entropy of objects, so that they exist backward: you hold out your hand and the ball on the ground leaps up into it, because you’ve dropped it in the future, so now you can pick it up, etc. … Look, it doesn’t get easier to understand.

The upshot is, though, that we spend the film following the Protagonist (that’s his name), a CIA agent played by John David Washington, as he’s tasked with tracking down the source of the inverted stuff to figure out what’s unfolding in the future and why it’s suddenly started to make itself known in the present. He gets marginally closer to understanding the truth by the end of the film, but because this is a Nolan film that is maybe more expressly about the nature of reality than anything he’s ever done, his journey doesn’t so much take him forward as it does in a large circle. Because, and stop me if you’ve heard this, the true story of Tenet is taking place outside the Protagonist’s actions and knowledge, alongside him but invisible, often steered by people who themselves are moving “backward” through time and thus have already met the Protagonist in the future and are old friends with him by the time he meets them in his youth. Even more brain-liquefying, some of these people have been working under the orders of the Protagonist himself—the future version, that is—because his past self has already achieved the victories that allowed him to send the future people backward through time to meet his younger self so they’d achieve the victories that allow him to etc., etc., etc.

With Tenet, Nolan didn’t just make a movie that challenged perception, like Memento, or that dwelt in fiction, like Inception. He made a movie that can only be understood (to whatever degree true understanding is possible) by rewatching the movie itself, over and over, as the multiple timelines and harrowingly complex bits of cause and effect come into some kind of focus. The whole movie itself isn’t happening, in a sense, but is just the ramifications of something else, the echoes of a shout whose origin we’re straining to pinpoint. It both is and isn’t.

Christopher Nolan is a talented director of action-driven suspense thrillers. He’s canny at controlling the audience’s emotions, and he knows how to put on a dazzling show. Plus he’s fantastic at picking when to deploy non-computer-generated effects for maximum impact. But you could say that about a lot of other directors, too. What sets Nolan apart from the rest, and what makes him a director to keep watching and returning to, is the teasing way his movies wind up being just deceptive enough to fool you into thinking that you know what’s going on, then just harsh enough to disabuse you of that notion. Looking at what seems to drive him, I don’t think Tenet is his best movie-movie, but it’s his most-Nolan movie. It’s almost a culmination of his continuing efforts to tell stories where what you see and what actually happens are two different things. It’s not that he makes puzzles to solve. There is no solving these movies. Rather, it’s that he sculpts these delicate artifacts that only let you see two dimensions at a time, never all three, no matter how you twist your head. Craning back and forth, you can almost see the whole thing, but not quite. Some part of it will always have to exist in your memory. And that’s where Christopher Nolan likes to be.

#chrisopher nolan #tenet #memento #following #following movie #christopher nolan film #inception #inception film #memento film #tenet film #interstellar #interstellar film #oscilloscope laboratories #musings #film writing #beastie boys

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lacktastrophe · 4 years ago

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Daisy MegaPost Pt1

Update: 3/7/2021

This one’s been in the shop for a couple of years now. I think I started this way back in 2019 but I just became just far too busy to work on huge posts again. I had anticipated to have all of Daisy written up during the break that BCB had, but I became in need of a break myself too. Part two was written up, but I never went further.

I had come back to this recently and made some changes. I wasn’t too happy with the way I used to write and I’ve been editing this over and over, until I noticed it wasn’t keeping them. I’ve published it now since there wasn’t any point just keeping it in drafts and it’s more or less done, just not in this state I’m perfectly happy with, but it seems to be keeping my changes now it’s in this state. I anticipate I’ll still be making some edits. Before I continue on with Part 2. As for part 3 and onwards, I can’t give a time frame.

With the webtoons version way ahead of the chapters here, I’ll probably make progressive updates and start using those over the old Volume 1 art, I’d anticipate the webtoons version is a retelling of the story and thus there might be some retcons, like how Kizuna was replaced with Stacy. I’d anticipate some changes might make different meanings for the future.

I still enjoy examining the story and characters. I still plan to do some introspections to the other characters I haven’t come to, but it’ll be far fewer and in-between than years ago. I have other projects and those need priority.

But I’m happy that people still enjoy reading these.

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We’re onto the main characters now, things are going to need to change with the way mega-posts are going to be published from this point forward. My previous mega-posts are usually just one long post, hence the name. Though they’re starting to become uncontrollable, and Tumblr is clamping down, or at least not really working with excessive word counts.

Uh oh. . .

Well, the old mega-posts can still be accessed but you’ll need a direct link, they won’t show up on the mainroll and I’d be surprised if they still show up these days, and I’d have to guess this has something to do with the anti-spam detection on Tumblr.

If you were interested in the previous mega-posts, they can be accessed on their own page from my blog’s front page. I just wouldn’t try reading some of the earlier ones on an app, it’ll struggle.

The other problem was with the word count, even without the characters being the prime focus, they’re starting to get long. Abbey’s alone was a 16000 behemoth. This surprised me, as despite him being a secondary character there was an awful lot to discover and talk about. Augustus, despite being a character who appeared much more in-between chapters but much fewer than Abbey, was nearly 21000 words. If there was that much to talk about with the secondary characters, the same method of just dumping as much as I can into one post is clearly not going to work when we start approaching the main characters. I had to split both of them up for my own convenience.

The main change is to make these smaller so they’re friendlier on the app and the website; maybe aim for 2000-5000 words without focusing too heavily on trying to get through on as many chapters as possible and see how far we go.

The plan from this point forward is to do a large collection of write ups but then deploy them progressively. That’ll also give anyone who’s keen a chance to give feedback or who wants to talk further about something.

Sound good?

Me too! So without further ado, let’s get a move on and have a look at Daisy.

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So, our first protagonist, where do we start with Daisy?

How you’re first introduced to Daisy really depends on whether you read the book or followed the comic through the site. The book’s opening chapter, ‘Like a Bittersweet Candy Bowl’ introduces you to Daisy as a massive bookworm who does well in school. She’s pretty smart!

Book in hand, we’d pretty much believe that right off the bat. She appears like the most studious in this group of friends. And we’d be right! She even puts the ever-perfect Mike to shame. She’s nothing less than a perfect student.

‘Perfect’ could be an understatement, Daisy is a literal freak of nature when it comes to her academics; as when Daisy and the kids transition to Roseville high, we find her already in classes well advanced than her peers.

Daisy is just that incredible!

Through the website, ‘Simple Pleasures’ aims to introduce the kids in much the same way, but there is far less in the way of monologuing and we’re introduced as the characters interact. In much the same way as the introduction chapter in volume 1, we learn that Daisy is quite the bookworm and school-obsessed student, even during weekends. But that’s not the only thing dominating her thoughts, as when Lucy goes out on her walk, the first person she runs into is Daisy who is looking for someone else in particular!

You guessed it!

Oh GOD, does Daisy like boys! Can you guess who she’s got her eye on?

Of course it’s Mike. Are you surprised she’s got a deep crush on the boy who seems very perfect himself? Everywhere that Mike goes, you can be sure that there’s a shadow in the shape of Daisy not too far behind. . .

Wherever he goes. . .

Daisy doesn’t shy from showing her interest in him when the convenience calls for it. Ah, young love.

Eventually, Daisy would find love, though it wouldn’t be with Mike. It would however be the second longest running relationship in the comic if you consider Mike and Sandy, with an admirer of hers.

Still, suffice to say, even after every attempt gets shot down in the most spectacular way, Daisy bounces back -- Like a daisy. Her shining ray of positivity follows her everywhere. It’s all in the name, after all. Daisy still manages to rise up with her sunny disposition.

But not every time.

As the story progresses, little by little, we start seeing that there’s more to Daisy. We start to see that not everything is bright and happy like her name-sake despite appearances. Things would be far from perfect, and underneath that smiling face is a character suffering with low self-esteem in that very same area; her appearance; believing their Ragamuffin/Selkirk-Rex heritage is letting them down and putting them in misery. This tends to be particularly true on rainy days, when all the hours she spends of a morning brushing down her fur become undone when the droplets causes it to fluff up and the curls start showing. Daisy attributes these traits to the reason she isn’t quite as easily noticed by the boys as the other girls, setting up for a number of stories involving her in Volume1, and opening her to be taken advantage of in the pursuit of attention and affection.

Not all the characters gain admirers or attention and for most of these characters, this is fine. But Daisy is not one of those and this above all things has an enormous impact on her. She wants to be noticed and receive affection, particularly from Mike, and others to a degree.

It’s when faced with multiple rejections from her dream boyfriend we also progressively discover a side of her shown to be more envious if not resentful of a few others who have it so easy, particularly with one such character inside her friend circle.

As you can imagine, these weaknesses will eventually put Daisy in danger as she tries her best to come up with ways to cope and make changes in order to improve her life, especially if the means are at the cost of logical reasoning like taking advice from the seediest boy in the school to attain her goals. She isn’t infallible; Intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean smarts. Even with someone who does as well in school as Daisy does, there’s always room to grow.

But until that happens, Daisy often finds herself in trouble when her personal feelings, ambitions and dreams do the talking for them on pursuit of happiness, for herself and others.

And oh boy, doesn’t Daisy make more than her own fair share of mistakes.

Let’s move onto the story, it starts with Simple pleasures, the first chapter.

This chapter serves to introduce us to the main group of characters central to the story and so features the aloof and prickly Lucy, the playboy Paulo, the ever-perfect Mike and the bookworm Daisy. It starts with Lucy on a morning walk and progressively running into each of them. With Daisy specifically, it starts with Daisy coming across her first and greeting her by shouting ‘Hey’ behind her.

Except...Lucy ignores her, and we don’t know why -- Is Lucy doing this intentionally? She’s in a world of her own at the moment with her singing. Are they friends? Is she just so aloof she doesn’t realise she’s there?

Well, Daisy isn’t going to let herself be ignored so easily and she really needs Lucy for something. So she goes to get her attention by impulsively grabbing onto Lucy’s tail. This would turn out to be a very critical mistake that one of the other protagonists just can’t stop helping himself from doing, and because of that we notice that Lucy isn’t as aloof as she seems, and reciprocates by twisting around and kicking her in the face.

Only to find that the person she was expecting was actually Daisy, much to her surprise. There’s a reason she never noticed her.

The first chapter has a number of objectives, it serves to set up the tone of the comic by showing the dynamic between the main group of friends, but also displays their characteristics. We already learn a couple of things from Daisy and Lucy’s interaction here. We learn that Lucy has a short fuse when it comes to unwanted contact. She appears aloof, but the main reason for Lucy not acknowledging Daisy initially is through the understanding that she’s partially deaf, unable to hear out of her left ear in similar in characteristic with her breed, the Khao Manee. Many of the other characters will make this mistake too and often at times Lucy doesn’t make it obvious she can’t hear what’s going on around them and needs to ask about what transpired much later. Lucy’s aloofness will be questioned in time as we start seeing more of her.

Daisy had forgotten about Lucy’s disability because something else was more important. And naturally, we learn that Daisy has, no less; a bit of a crush on the forefront of her mind. And we learn here that crush is on Mike, one of their friends at school, and her reasoning for bothering Lucy is that she’s only looking for him. What we come to learn later is it’s a little known fact that wherever Lucy is, Mike is often not too far away. In fact Lucy is never off on her own by herself.

Sadly for Daisy, Lucy doesn’t know where he is, so Daisy runs off in the opposite direction. That’s about as much of Daisy as we see until the next chapter.

Before we move on, let’s talk more about their interaction. As brief as it was, the interaction gives off more in the subtext into the status of the relationships between these characters and the others. I anticipate as new readers many of the details of this interaction just fly over heads, accepting these two are friends and this is just how they are. But being as late into the comic as we are, I feel we’re already seeing some of the signs of what’s to come in the story through this short interaction. Not everything is as it seems.

Most of this payload of information is laid in the question that Daisy poses after Lucy asks her what she’s after. When Lucy states she hasn’t seen Mike, Daisy asks ‘Oh no, did you upset him?’

Immediately we’re given some insight into the triangle that exists between these characters and their relationship between one another, and insight into the state of these relationships.

Starting with Mike and Lucy’s relationship as the question is directed about the two of them, we learn that the friendship isn’t without it’s issues, and we’d be quick to pass this off initially as something that happens from time to time. Fight’s happen, it’s a fact of life, and it happens more so when you’re a kid and figuring things out, yourself and life. Reading through the story, we would find the two inseparable in the later chapters and we never look at Daisy’s question again. But reading through BCB again from as late in the comic as we are, we have to wonder why this question specifically.

What we learn much later in the comic as we progress through is that Mike and Lucy’s relationship is much more complicated than what it appears to be. Much later, we see that the two do argue from time to time, until we get to the point where the plaster and apologies aren’t mending the cracks. The friendship isn’t quite as clean cut as it was made out to be and we start seeing some back stories into the characters. What appears to be a competitive rivalry through volume 1 between two friends is really something more sinister. By the time we reach Volume 4, we learn these two are really anything but friends.

For the moment, Daisy’s casual interaction gives off a sense of normality in their environment and understanding the answer to the question would actually help plan out her next move if we were to consider that maybe there was some intent behind the question. But we’ll get to the nature of it soon.

Without knowing too much about the kids as early in the story. I’d feel we’d put our trust in the kids to tell the story for us, and Daisy does come off as being quite perceptive and trustworthy immediately being the positive bookkeeper she is, she would be the expert for us until such a time as we become the experts.

One thing we’d discover much later on our own is that the Mike and Lucy are inseparable. In one way or another, they will find each other and act like close friends again. And Daisy knows this too without specifically pointing it out. Already suggesting that they’ve fought, it would only be a matter of time before they made up again, whether that takes minutes or hours. No matter how big the town is again, so long as they’ve got each other in their thoughts, they’ll stumble upon each other in no time, almost like a six sense.

It could be said that this is for the sake of convenience in the story in getting them to interact faster in the comic and resolve disputes, and that would be right. But BCB takes this and turns it into a running gag between just these two characters. There are more than a few jokes that exist in Volume 1 to make this seem like these two are made for each other in the way that they will eventually run into each other no matter how big the town is. One such joke is seen in Volume 1 through Mike’s inability to surprise Lucy on her Birthday. It’s so powerful, even Lucy’s auditory disability doesn’t stop her from catching him just before he can do it, even if the hiding spot isn’t obvious.

We’ve only seen this fail once, and that was in ‘Its all in the mind’ when Mike does sneak up on her, but Lucy has very much moved on from Mike at this point, so we’d have to wonder if this is something to do with them both being in Sync, we might not know.

The question Daisy asks doesn’t just pertain to Mike and Lucy’s relationship however, it also begs the question to Lucy and Daisy’s relationship at the same time. In fact, if it wasn’t for Daisy’s sunny disposition and Lucy’s stone-faced responses, the entire interaction would appear quite rude; Daisy’s question isn’t whether or not she’s seen him, only if she’s upset him, shedding some poor light on Lucy’s personality.

It’s important to remember that while these two are friends at our current point in the comic, they did not start out as friends, especially when you consider Confrontation, as we’re coming up to. Daisy, while she was amicable around Lucy and quite hospitable to her in the friend group, has to contend with her as being this roadblock to getting to Mike. Lucy seemed more aloof around her, but there’s more than enough to suggest that Lucy had other mutual feelings.

Understanding now that there is a rivalry between the two (or a one-sided rivalry, take your pick), we can understand why that particular question had been asked. Its tent though is to give more reason to Daisy’s next move: If Lucy did divulge she had fought with him; then it would only be a matter of time before Mike showed up, as Mike would feel the need to apologise and through their innate ability, would find each other, it would just be a matter of time. If she hadn’t; then Mike could be just about anywhere.

It turns out to be the later. And too infatuated with Mike (or not interested in hanging out with Lucy, take your pick), Daisy does not simply stay with her to wait and runs off in the opposite direction, hoping to find him first.

It’s when Daisy is no longer in the focus, we can see that Lucy isn’t exactly as stonewalled as she initially appeared to be, blushing from the interaction.

As possible that Lucy is only reacting because of her stupid head-over-heels attitude for that other idiot, as Lucy is yet to realise her feelings for Mike, we could wonder if it might not also be because Daisy has rudely pointed at the elephant in the room in Lucy and Mike’s relationship. Who’s to say?

(2021 edit -- The webtoon has this piece of dialogue changed. This time Daisy asks ‘Awww, are you both fighting still?’, which makes this even more pronounced that things aren’t all quite sunshine already. )

Finally, Daisy and Mike. Now that Lucy’s interaction with Daisy is done, Daisy is running around town looking for Mike, for whatever reason it just can’t wait until school.

Ah love. I’m sure it won’t be a problem in the future, right?

Mike is a real nice guy; lending Daisy his math workbook to Daisy.

We really need to look a bit deeper into this. We know much later in the story we that Daisy is well in advance of her peers in her studies. When she starts Roseville high, we find her in no more than two ahead of the others in her grade, with the juniors, and Tess.

And in the first few chapters of volume 1, we learn that Daisy often tutors Mike, so there’s no way Daisy even needs that book.

Unless...

O---Oh. It wasn’t for Math after all.

We’d come to learn that boy troubles are generally the source for all of Daisy’s grief. We’ll find that Daisy’s crazed obsession over Mike is used to justify a lot of the actions she’ll take in the future and we don’t know how bad this is until the much later volumes. Volume one step over this lightly as just a girl wanting her crush’ affection. But it becomes more pronounced in the much later volumes, especially when Abbey makes a point out of it when Daisy is less inhibited to keep her real feelings secret after getting drunk off Alcohol at Rachel’s party in a very late chapter.

Getting back to the current chapter, Lucy will notice that Mike eventually did find Mike, but she’s not with him. So maybe that was all she really wanted.

We’d be saps for thinking that.

But without anything concrete, we can only presume that was it. So thanks for returning Mike’s book, Daisy.

Daisy appears again in Merry Snow Day, the following chapter. This is a very short chapter where the kids are going to school after Lucy (begrudgingly) accepts schools not out, and walks with Mike to school. Daisy appears not long after and the first order of the day is to talk about homework, including offering to tutor him. She’d do anything if it meant helping her fellow students.

It’s at this part we’re introduced to the subtle idea of the rivalry for Mike’s affection between Daisy and Lucy. It’s subtle since it’s very one-sided and Lucy and Daisy don’t directly interact with one another or show that they’re fighting. Their interactions for most of the early chapters happen through Mike like you can see above when Lucy adds herself into the conversation. We’d have reason despite Lucy’s aloofness that such a rivalry does exist subconsciously and there are some reasons to believe this we’ll touch on. But for the moment, we can be sure that Lucy doesn’t consider Daisy a threat for one main reason: Mike will come back, so there’s no problem.

Daisy wouldn’t make a point of the rivalry either but Daisy would take advantage of the convenience of Lucy being out of the picture to seek attention from Mike, as she does when Lucy continues to school, and Daisy directly copies what happened just seconds ago when Lucy was about to fall on the ice, and Mike catches her.

Nice.

This chapter also introduces Yashy, Lucy’s pet Lizard and her surrogate daughter into the story line. The earlier chapters of Bittersweet Candy Bowl are ripe with slap-stick humour, and Yashy is the general source of this with her outspokenness and wise-ass personality. She’s there to rile up the others and break all the ice with her innocent demeanour. This will be the case up until the kids go to Highschool when the comedy starts being turned down in place of focusing on the rifts coming between the kids.

Unlike the other pets, Yashy is integral to the plot involving Lucy and Mike’s relationship, as she’s partly the reason for the friendship going on as long as it has. Having known Yashy for as long as Lucy, Mike takes on the role of the surrogate dad in Yashy’s life and this ends up having Yashy taking on the belief that Mike and Lucy are an established couple. But this isn’t true, and it plagues Mike as this is anything further than the truth. But with Yashy’s innocence, he can’t find the means to break this to her.

Yashy’s insistence of Mike and Lucy’s eventual destiny of being husband and wife comes at Daisy’s expense, as despite Lucy not necessarily seeing reason to stop Daisy’s attempts at trying for seek Mike’s affection, it’s Yashy who perceives her as a real threat and will shout obscenities at her when she doesn’t get her way, with a particular choice of word in mind. Though it doesn’t stop Daisy. But we can’t help but wonder much later if those words Yashy chooses to throw don’t have some kind of an effect on her much later.

That completes this chapter. Daisy doesn’t have much of an impact in Unfit for Education, appearing more to just be a participant in Sue’s obsessive thoughts game. But she gets a larger role to play in the following chapter; Burden of Parenthood.

This chapter has the kids going through sex ed. and being given the responsibility of raising a robotic baby, which they will be graded on based on their performance. This chapter starts off quite unexpectedly, as when the teacher begins pairing off the students, Yashy’s expectations that Michael and Lucy will be paired together, doesn’t actually happen for a change.

This time, Daisy is paired up with Mike, and Lucy is paired up with Paulo.

As you could guess, Yashy isn’t thrilled in the least bit. But neither is Lucy particularly when she spots Paulo pleased at the results himself.

Again I still don’t think Yashy’s abuse is really doing much for Daisy, I can’t help but wonder what that will do for her self-esteem?

Oh, I bet she’ll be fine, she’s like a Daisy, remember?

It’s during lunch we find Daisy is positively happy with the result when she confronts Mike with their baby. Although there’s just one problem. The baby is a glaring defect, a very...interesting feature about it that has Mike freaking out.

And he’s not playing ball because of it. Even Lucy is having a hard time with the baby’s smile.

But Daisy, Daisy couldn’t care; it’s Mike’s child.

The Daisy x Mike compatibility really doesn’t take off as Mike wants absolutely nothing to do with the newly-named Alegria, which Daisy is quick to point out after keenly watching a maternally-skilled Lucy teach a very clumsy Paulo how to properly hold a child, something she learned when raising Yashy. Daisy is by all means entranced by the romantic exchange.

But where’s hers?

Trying to get Mike jealous by thrusting her baby in Paulo’s arms, and Paulo taking to the baby. Mike sees his chance and gets Lucy to ditch the two and work as a team again.

There is a momentary issue when the teacher discovers the pairs do not have their correctly assigned baby, and through a quick suggestion they were giving a realistic portrayal of divorce and custody, get extra marks on their assignments.

You’d think Daisy would be quite depressed with her chance to work with Mike not going the way she planned and the opportunity going out the window. But to receive additional credit on their work, she’s actually more than ecstatic at the results!

It’s fine, there’ll be more chances. There’s still 4 more years of school!

And in the meantime, Daisy x Paulo was born. One would have to wonder if it would bear fruits.

...Nah.

Daisy has a role to play in the next chapter; Prom Preparation. She’s tasked with organising the 8th grade prom.

The first order of the day is to survey the music selection for the evening, starting with genres. Daisy gets ideas from a number of the students, almost forgetting she hadn’t asked Mike yet.

Apparently Mike doesn’t have a favourite genre of music that comes to mind. Not being a fan of new music, Daisy fills the gap and suggests he’s into much older stuff which she tries to bond over, infuriating Yashy.

When Daisy asks Lucy for her favourite music genre. Lucy wonders why she should bother since she’s not planning on going. . .

Leaving Mikie easy pickings for the evening. Daisy sees her chance for a bit of romance that evening, and Yashy is not at all pleased about this.

It’s worth talking about Yashy at this point, as even though we’re technically focusing on Daisy, there’s something we might be able to gain from both Yashy and Lucy that might give more insight into Daisy and Lucy’s relationship. You might notice, (2021 -- Especially in the Webtoons version), during each outburst by Yashy we can see Lucy blushing as her child unleashes hell upon Daisy, and we’d have to wonder why that is, because Lucy doesn’t seem to be initially the kind of person to care too much about anything going on around them, right?

But what if Yashy was this mouthpiece of Lucy’s impulsive thoughts that she doesn’t act on, and that’s why Lucy appears to blush from embarrassment? Yashy’s impulses are not something she’s able to control, only her own through her own inhibitions. Later in the story we start seeing hints that Lucy’s stonewall-straight faced demeanour is very much a facade and she’s actually quite sensitive, but when she’s fighting her emotions inside and she doesn’t have the answer, a blank expression is all you get so she can’t be hurt in one way or another.

But having been raised by Lucy, we could assume that Yashy is very much Lucy’s child and we can expect that having been raised by Lucy, much like every other kid out there, sometimes kids pick up traits from their parents.

(2021 -- The problem of Yashy’s language was also bought up in the more recent chapter, Dinner time, when Lucy’s mum points this out as Lucy and Jordan are fighting. While the person who was called out for this was Jordan. Can’t help but think that despite Jordan pointing out something embarrassing about why Mike might not be over more, Lucy is instead more blushing over the problem with Yashy, as Yashy is still embarrassed at being called out over it too. It’s hard to imagine the problem is just Jordan as Lucy has quite opinionated language as well, and lastly, because Yashy spends more of her time with her. There’s just an awful lot of body language going on in that scene and it’s hard to tell.)

Yashy is quite innocent in the story as she is one of the fewer characters who meets with rejection and doesn’t undergo the same hardships that Lucy underwent in her youth, so where this language and outspokenness has come from, you’d have to wonder if it’s just a quirk, or something deeper at this stage. Like as if Yashy is actually Lucy without the inhibitions.

Daisy doesn’t back down from Yashy when the golden opportunity arises even despite the name-calling. It’s when Mike believes both girls are fighting over him for Lucy to set the record straight -- she isn’t; Yashy and Daisy were and makes a point out of it. This causes Mike to walk off embarrassed since Lucy doesn’t reciprocate the same feelings. It’s only a little later towards the end when Daisy is turned down along with several other girls who learn of Mike’s availability. That ends that chapter. No romance for Daisy.

The next chapter is Helping hands, this chapter stars Daisy and Paulo who appear to have become closer friends since their pairing together in Burden of Parenthood. The chapter begins with Daisy and Paulo walking through the street, with Daisy talking about how Katie had a sleep-over the previous weekend but wasn’t invited, she was sure she must have misplaced it.

Though why missing out on Katie’s sleepover is the highlight of Daisy’s weekend is anyone’s best guess, right?

Daisy screams out suddenly as she points out an injured bird on the road, appearing heartbroken at the events. Paulo points out an arriving car that is about to put it out of its misery causing Daisy to become further distraught by this. At the very last minute, Paulo saves the bird, almost putting his own life in danger.

Expecting her to be elated, Daisy is not at all pleased in Paulo’s recklessness and scolds him, before being otherwise thankful he did it to save the bird.

But the next question is, now what?

With a hospital being too far away, Daisy suggests instead to take it to Lucy’s house as a last resort. Bringing up Paulo’s crush however, garners a reaction from Paulo that, well. . . Daisy’s not to pleased at seeing.

Oh, we’re going to see more of that.

Daisy thinks about whether or not Lucy would end up adopting the bird as she has quite a number of pets herself. Daisy would herself although her mother wouldn’t allow it.

Suggesting Paulo could with how well Paulo did at looking after Alegria, Paulo finds the talk far too embarrassing for his ever-masculine personality. Daisy tries to persuade him that girls are into boys who can be shown to have a caring attitude. Sadly, Paulo thinks he’s already at this level.

Oh, how Paulo x Daisy is teased so.

The weather starts to take a turn for the worst and threatens to rain down much to Daisy’s horror, as we learn something interesting about how her fur reacts to the rain. Paulo tries not not to give this away but Daisy then realises and starts showing how self conscious she is about her fur, a fact we learn more of in an intermission, where Daisy spends quite a number of hours brushing it down. When Daisy asks whether he’s grossed out by her curls, he avoids the question by telling them they have to hurry, or the bird won’t make it!

Unfortunately for Daisy, Paulo isn’t the last person when they arrive at Lucy’s house. Leaving the bird in her care, Daisy immediately runs into the bathroom only to run into Mike, it’s an absolute nightmare scenario.

Feeling devastated, Paulo comes in with some saving words and tells her if Mike was really worth her time, he’d wouldn’t care no matter how she looked. Which does wonders for her esteem.

Lucy arrives down shortly thereafter and lets the two know the bird will make it, having only been attacked by another creature and not so much struck by a car. Lucy will nurse it until its better, much to the joy of Daisy and Paulo.

At that point, the conversation switches as that matter is taken care of. Noticing that Mike is at Lucy’s house studying with her. Daisy tries to invite herself to stay over and help out too.

It turns out, simply asking means you’re outstaying your hospitality.

Yeah, they’re not really tight friends are they?

On the Monday, Daisy and Paulo ask Lucy about the bird, first mistaking what Lucy says meaning that the bird passed away, it healed over the weekend and left the following day.

But not before giving them a gift.

After all, they’d need it for their baby. The bird seems to think they’d make a good couple. Ah, PauloxDaisy again. If only they both felt that way about each other.

Daisy appears in show and tell, in this chapter we are introduced to the specific breeds the characters are.

Naturally, Yashy is not at all pleased about Daisy when she arrives.

When it comes to Daisy’s turn, we find she’s Selkirk Rex cross Ragamuffin.

Which would explain a lot of Daisy’s features, Selkirk and Ragamuffins are both very people-oriented and akin to Teddy Bears. Both breeds can get along with nearly everybody.

And, well that’s true for Daisy.

Daisy appears in Pep Rally, a chapter focusing on the sports carnival. Daisy appears as one of the school’s cheerleaders next to Amaya, Stacy, and her rival, Katie, who is not at all happy that she’s not the captain. Daisy is not about to give up being the center of attention.

This chapter has more to do with Mike’s super sensitive hearing than anything else. Even so, Daisy is more than capable of being able to amp up the crowd, especially when Mike lands a win.

Daisy appears in the next chapter ‘Off to the Movies’, when Mike invites Lucy to the movies, only for Paulo, David and Daisy to show up at the same time and suggest they all go see a movie together (Lucy reluctantly agreeing). When it comes to selecting their preferences for movies, Daisy goes for the mushiest movie that’s available. Paulo and David wanting horror, Mike wanting comedy and Lucy. . .well, she wants to see a love story. It seems like they all can’t decide, but Lucy chooses the jack of all trades movie as a compromise; the ‘epic suspensful, romance thriller with lots of jokes’.

Win-win, right?

Daisy’s in heaven when the seating arrangements are chosen, right next to her crush, she couldn’t be more optimistic.

A number of things happen during the movie, but nothing got by Daisy when the movie ends as she notices Paulo on the brink of tears following its conclusion. Daisy offers to forget that she ever saw it, on the condition he explains his phobia to barking, something else that happened earlier when Paulo tried to steal David’s popcorn.

Predictably, Paulo is far too masculine to talk about his feelings.

Eventually Paulo balks to the peer pressure (from Daisy) and explains what happened. When the others make fun of Paulo over it, Daisy leaps to his defense and tells them off. There’s a lovely moment between the two as Daisy reassures Paulo that she appreciates his forwardness and openness to the things that bothers him. And Paulo decides to talk about everything.

The PauloxDaisy content just keeps coming.

But it’ll never work. I--I swear it won’t.

By the very end, the kids all say their farewells to each other and go their separate ways.

Daisy appears in the next chapter ‘Puppy Love’. Mike finds a love letter in his locker from a secret admirer (It’s Stacy). Mike chastises Lucy who finds the whole thing hilarious and reads the poem aloud. Mike wants to find the person responsible. Suddenly, and out from nowhere, Daisy appears suggesting they do some detective work, all in the name of romance. But Mike reveals he just simply wants to reject them.

With much similarity to Prom Night, this chapter is more to point out with how much of the school has an interest in dating Mike. It’s not just Daisy, but also Sue, Amaya, Katie, those three random girls. The only exception is dear old Lucy.

The next chapter is Confrontation. This chapter opens with Mike and Lucy doing what they do best when something unfortunate happens; they argue, with Lucy blaming Mike for having them miss their stop. Daisy begs Paulo to get them to stop, and they do, albiet, for a short few seconds before they start arguing again.

With no sign of it ending, Daisy and Paulo day-dream of a better alternate reality where they both get their desires. Mike and Lucy are just awful for each other. Things would work out better if it was just Mike and Daisy, and Paulo and Lucy, Just think of the romance. What could go wrong?

The kids get off at the next station which unfortunately for them turns out to be a bad idea as they end up in the roughest neighbourhood a few towns over from Roseville. With Lucy suggesting they find a phone to call their parents, they go out in search of an open store. With Mike and Lucy still at each other’s throats, Daisy tries to take advantage of the situtation by suggesting that Mike could in fact stay over at her place seeing as how late it was, especially if his house is a bit too far. hoping that Lucy having been quite bitter to him will cause him to think about coming around to her advances. But Mike rejects her advance. When Daisy becomes fed up enough to suggest he’d go to Lucy’s house despite their fighting, he agrees it likely would happen, frustrating her even more.

She loses her temper, exploding about Mike and Lucy’s friendship being just horrible and suggests any investment would never be returns. Prompting a reaction from Mike for a short moment, until Mike twists that around and tells her to stop chasing the same stupid feelings, walking ahead and leaving Daisy to sulk to herself.

She’s joined shortly after when Paulo’s escapade in trying to woo Lucy goes as well as anyone would expect. Daisy, frustrated in how Mike always seems to show some compromise with Lucy, argues with him over his bad taste in women too.

Daisy’s thorns are on full display here as she starts to openly show her resentment towards Lucy who has it all so easy with both Paulo and Mike due to her looks. Daisy’s frustrated that despite her best efforts to be more appealing in every other way; Lucy has the looks, and that’s all that matters.

With Daisy being too frustrated from being inhibited from displaying this side of her, it’s clear neither she nor Lucy are good friends at all. Daisy has shown such a low opinion of her because of her attitude, knowing full well that often times Mike gets beaten up by her. Lucy’s aloofness could be confused with disinterest and both of them suggest that Lucy wouldn’t really care if either of them suddenly caught alight.

But Mike overhears this thanks to his superhearing and tells them there’s more to her than what they know. But neither of them take the comment seriously.

Lucy also overhears, and is a little distraught at how the others think of her.

The kids find a bar and Sue manages to call ther mother to come pick them up. Problems arise when Mike takes on a dare to eat as many liqueur chocolates from a stranger, and is quite positively drunk out of his mind. Lucy comments on this having watched on and Daisy chastises her for letting him do it.

She might have wished she had done something about it, as Mike is all over her, uninhibited from telling her how he feels about her looks.

And that does nothing for Daisy who sucks at all the attention Lucy’s getting. The world’s just unfair.

Though, Mike notices Daisy’s state, and goes over to give her attention too. What would be a dream for Daisy is sadly shortlived, as Mike’s attention switches to ice-cream truck music, and suddenly takes off towards it.

The kids are find themselves backed into an alley, as the stranger who Mike took the bet from comes to get his money back.

The ordeal is quite terrifying to Daisy. Paulo tries to defend her. But he gets a little too in over his head, not realising these two were the people who created his phobia of barking .

When Paulo is kicked aside, Daisy goes to him and asks if he knows the two. But Paulo doesn’t recognise them.

Not considering herself a fighter, Daisy is only able to come to her friends’ comfort as each one is assaulted one by one. Paulo first, then Sue when she cops an arm to the nose.

She can only watch when Mike tries to defend them, actually having some martial arts experience, but being too drunk to be effective.

And finally Lucy, as capable as she was finds herself unable to fend off Alejandro. Daisy calls out, but Lucy tells her to be quiet, or to hide as Lucy bears the brunt of the assault.

Mike regains consciousness at the very last moment and saves her before both team up in a last stand against Alejandro. Alejandro realises he’s bitten off more than he can chew and runs away. Daisy watches on as Lucy breaks down having realised how close they all were to having someone lose their life.

Sue’s mother arrives and all the kids are on their way back to Roseville. Paulo can’t help but notice that Daisy is really in the dumps over the night. Lucy did something completely unexpected in coming to their aid at the last minute — the ever uncaring Lucy put herself on the line so no one else would get hurt. And she feels awful knowing she was wrong — about Lucy and what she said about her to Mike.

Paulo tries to reassure her that Mike probably doesn’t remember what she said, and that turns out to be true as Mike is willing to accept her apology the next day.

Things are back to normal it seems, luckily for Daisy.

Or are they?

I figure we’ll stop here and resume next week. Look at that! We covered 12 chapters of 127! There’s a lot more of Daisy to come!

#bittersweet candy bowl #bcb #megathread #daisy

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architectuul · 4 years ago

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Mapping the Margins

Christina Serifi is an architect, researcher and urbanist. She is a co-founder of TiriLab, an initiative which explores multi cultural heritage related to techniques, technologies and culture specifics from communities in northern Greece. Christina is associate researcher in Terreform, where she has coordinated various publications regrading indigenous knowledge, alternative educational models and self sufficiency.

Photo © Norman Posselt

Her work investigates forms, collective memories, typologies and local practices, focusing on urban fragments, in-between spaces, as well as osculation of architectural and social space, Christina has been awarded with the Fulbright fellowship and Urban Design Award ’14 from CCNY, she is also a Future Architecture Platform Fellow and Digital Research Fellow of Architectuul.

Mapping the Margins is a series of maps and documentations, identifying, for the first time, all the women associations, local agriculture cooperatives as well as abandoned buildings in Thesprotia province, in order to create an active platform where many cooperatives can find a space to grow. Through these rural commons, we aim to merge formal, non-formal and informal learning models and create encounters with artists, local institutions and inhabitants from and for the region.

Berlin, New York, Athens, where is your basis?

CS: The truth is that I develop my professional practice through constant collaborations with local initiatives, professionals and different institutions. I am a Digital nomad I would say. If you ask about my physical basis is in Berlin, where I spend three or four months. The rest of the year I travel a lot, try to be as close as possible with communities that I work with.

Christina, please talk about your work in Terreform with Michael Sorkin. He has been a very important mentor and friend who has influenced your work a lot?

CS: Yes, this is true and I am happy that you are taking me some years back. This is a very sensitive matter for me because as you know we lost Michael a year ago because of COVID and since then all Terreform members are mourning for this loss.

I joined Terreform team after my Masters studies in New York, when we started to work in Yachay in the North of Ecuador, which was a new Technopole that the government was planning to build from scratch in one of the most fertile lands in the country. We started to investigate during my Masters this topic and Michael suggested me to join Terreform team, which was for me an amazing experience. Not only we manage to focus deeper on Technopoles, but we also travelled to Ecuador, we developed a lot of alternative plans, we talked with the local municipality how to support the local communities and protect this territory. We developed alternative plans, on how many new educational functions can be re-located in the existing near town called Ibarra. We also investigated a lot the integration between formal and informal knowledge. I don’t like to use words scientific or non-scientific, because I believe that this distinction has to do more with power and less with the production of knowledge. We were trying to highlight the local knowledge. This was one of the most interesting project that I was working while I was in Terreform.

Terreform Why Yachay. | Photo © Christina Serifi

We worked in Gowntown, where we interrogated the expansion of the Columbia University in Upper West Manhattan. I also worked in this amazing project that Michael initiated ten years ago called New York City Steady State where we investigated how New York can be self sustainable and self -sufficient in its own boundaries. For me the most important lesson that I’ve learned in Terreform was regarding the work ethics and this amazing environment that we built together. Michael was a very generous and open person. He managed to bring together people from different places around the world and involved them on projects that were really interesting. He was very generous in this sense, offering his knowledge, his guidance, giving the space to every person who wanted to investigate, publishing books from independent authors or people that they couldn’t find publishers. In this sense he was a true mentor and a real light. Although, I left New York four years ago I really miss his light.

Another part of your professional life is TiriLab?

CS: TiriLab is something I was dreaming many years and have imagined since I left Greece and moved to New York. I had this dream of how to return to my hometown, in Morfi, a smaller village where I was born, be closer to nature, work with the community there and different women initiatives. In TiriLab, we work mostly with women through our recent projects. These projects challenge traditional gender norms in rural areas, rediscovering narratives of women from different ethnic groups. Everything started, when I invited 35 amazing friends from all over Europe to come and spend some days in the village. They stayed with local families and we managed to create food encounters, where we were cooking together and meeting different women initiatives from the area. We called it Summer of Nothing. The idea was not to propose solutions as professionals but to go to rural area, stay, listen and understand the life that unfolds in such areas. This was the beginning of TiriLab.

Mapping the margins in Thesprotia by Tirilab. | Picture © Christina Serifi

A lot of local initiatives were organised by women, these small informal or formal groups managed to keep these villages alive during the economic crisis and they are also responsible of the cultural life of these villages. We wanted to empower these women initiatives, give them visibility and foster their multi-layered identity. A big step was last year when Tirilab got selected to be part of Future Architecture Platform encounter in Ljubljana, where I met different other groups and exchanged experiences. After that TiriLab expanded.

Mapping the margins in Thesprotia by Tirilab. | Picture © Christina Serifi

Oikeiology, Satellite Kitchens, Epirotopia - could you explain me these projects briefly?

CS: They are ongoing projects that started last year after I returned from Ljubljana. Oikeiology started as a pedagogical experiment, we wanted to bring to the forefront all the livelihood relationships between communities and natural bodies. It came to our minds in May, when the Greek government passed a law of abolishing the protection of NATURA 2000 areas in the whole country. Specifically in Thesprotia, in the region where we work in Tirilab, more that 45% of the natural areas are protected. The new law will leave these areas without any legal legislation for protection. We wanted to bring to the attention of local municipalities and also neighbourhood communities how to keep these ecosystems alive, how to involve the idea of eco-pedagogy into the schools and learning programs because the relationship of the communities with the natural environment there is really strong. Their food culture, their economic activities are related to the natural landscape. These pastoral communities use the natural resources in a regenerative way and they strongly support their protection. This dialogue is very important. In a bigger scale, with Oikeiology we wanted to examine the connection between urban and rural environments through shared experiences, knowledge, skills, ideas and resources of solidarity.

Satellite Kitchens, Paraskevi Demetriou | Photo © Angel Ballesteros, Muzungu

Satellite Kitchens, Dora Tzani | Photo © Angel Ballesteros, Muzungu coop

With the support of 5th Istanbul Design Biennial we created the project Satellite Kitchens. Through this project we had an amazing chance to collaborate with Muzungu, a group of video producers and journalists based in Madrid and Athens. We spent a month of documentation and researching on exterior kitchens. In this area a lot of women have built their kitchens, where whole communities were created around them. These communities were more pastoral and nomadic. After the 1960s they become more stable and you can see that many houses were developed around the exterior kitchens. We started documenting, drawing and understanding how these kitchens were evolved as spaces and also as places of storytelling, sharing different experiences and stories of women that have inhabited them so long. We saw a kitchen not only as a laboratory but also as an assembly space, as a common space and also as a space of resistance. They are more that 40 communities in the area and we managed to document 15 of them. For me, personally, it was an amazing opportunity to understand and come closer to a lot of these women that I knew since my childhood.

TiriLab’s Summer of Nothing. | Photo © Emanuel Dominguez, Zuloark

Epirotopia started when Zuloark, invited us to create the first parliament talking about the rights of the people in the area. We managed to bring together people from the municipality, local initiatives, inhabitants of different villages and young groups that create interesting projects. We invited them in a first digital encounter last December to envision together different socio-political imaginaries for the area. It was challenging moderate this huge parliamentary session but very rewarding! We are planing to create a physical meeting in August and discuss some of the local issues in depth. We also plan to make it regularly every year. The idea is that each inhabitant could reply to each of the 3 questions: what to protect, what to eliminate and what to bring new in the area.

What about the Future Architecture Platform and the Digital Research Fellow as a part of Architectuul’s joint venue?

I am super grateful having in my professional and personal life both platforms. Through Future Architecture Platform I meet Architectuul, where we started developing an amazing professional and personal relationship. It was a unique opportunity that through FAP we managed not only to bring TiriLab into life but also to create further exciting collaborations.

Christina presenting TiriLab at the Future Architecture CEx2020 Matchmaking Conference, 12. februar 2020, MAO | Photo: Iztok Dimc

I was also very happy to be nominated together with 45 degrees as a Digital Research Fellow and work with Architectuul. We continue with mapping all the best practices that we started in Greece and bring it in another scale, to start highlighting a network around Europe. I was imagining Architectuul as an active knowledge platform where practitioners, activists, researchers, local initiatives and practices can interconnect and create synergies.

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Your theoretical work and research is very much integrated into the core of different communities, you use new digital methodologies and technologies to enable forgotten communities?

CS: This is a hard question! My work is balancing between theory and practice. When I work close to local initiatives I am trying to understand their ways of living and producing and how to deliver this message to reach wider institutions and more specifically educational institutions. When I was working in Terreform, we started using multiple digital mapping techniques, integrating GIS in our research, collecting not only quantitative but most importantly qualitative data. Since then, I had this obsession on creating active digital maps that can operate as an open encyclopaedia or platform of practices, methodologies, local techniques and knowledges. I am really grateful of having the opportunity to be part of a new research project between TU Braunschweig and Central Saint Martins “Architecture after Architecture: Spatial Practice in the Face of the Climate Emergency” where I can explore these mapping methodologies together with an inspiring group of educators and researchers.

But you are still not finished, I heard about some UAU?

CS: UAU! is an amazing collaboration that we started recently and stands for Urban Activation Unit. It’s a joint venture between collectives, professionals, practitioners and educators. The three of us whom initiated UAU! don’t see it as a project that belongs to us. We see it as a bigger platform that can embrace alternative pedagogical experiments and qualities of third landscapes as ecosystems.

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With UAU! we want to challenge the established way of transferring knowledge and we see it as a moving open pedagogic parliament. It starts its route within the Balkans because the three of us come from the Balkans. Our idea is to bring together people from urban and rural geographies, local residents with students, each time on a different program addressing issues that have to do with water recuperation, food production and local educational practices.

Its launch will be at the summer school Informal City: Temporal-Autonomous Utopias in Koper, Slovenia from 1-10 September. During this event we will co-build the Table on the Future, where participants will share food, exchange ideas and open new cultural dialogues regarding lively practices. This table will become an infrastructure where the production and distribution of food will be celebrated to address how can we establish ecological conscious communities. More news will follow from UAU! so stay Tuned!

#intervew #future architecture platform

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abstractanalogue · 4 years ago

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Capratone, The Asteroids & The Metronoids (for Beginners)

Tracks & Traces #13: I’ve been planning to write about the music of Capratone, The Asteroids and The Metronoids for sometime and have finally gotten around to it (somehow its been almost 3 years since the last T&T). The link between these bands is Andrew Lyster (now living in Brussels) and as I will explain, he kindly answered some of my questions for this hybrid Tracks & Traces. Since originally publishing this piece Richie Kelly of Capratone has also similarly added valuable information I would never have been able to share otherwise. Usually I just depend on my memory, the records, press cuttings and any surviving notes I took from the times but as I got deeper into the story there were too many question marks about line-ups (pre-Capratone), the issue of a possible ‘lost’ Capratone album and don’t even get me started about The Metronoids! At time of writing most of this music is hard if not impossible to find streaming online and I couldn’t even locate any band photos or videos either. Which is all the more reason to write a piece to mark their existence and hopefully spark a revival of interest. When I was putting the finishing touches to the article I did discover there is now at least some music from The Asteroids on YouTube. Not long after I originally shared this piece, Joss Moorkens of Capratone sent me two band photos, the first line-up (L-R: Fiachra, Joss, Andrew) and as a four piece with Richie Kelly (below).

I first saw Andrew Lyster play (vocals/guitar) when I caught The World of Pugh in a venue I only went to once, Dillinger’s. Like many things from those days it’s long gone but it was a bar with a small stage (up some stairs?) somewhere off Dublin’s Capel St. (18/3/94). As I totally forgot who was in the rest of the band I’ll let Andrew take up the story.

“The World of Pugh was the first group where I wrote songs. I think it started around 1993. Originally it was Keith Swan on drums and a fellow called Brian McEleney on bass. Then in 1994 I brought some songs in and Brian took off to be replaced by Niall Brown (who was also the singer and guitar player for The Moustaches). Niall played bass for World of Pugh in the form where we had songs and did gigs.”

I’m sure someone like Joss Moorkens (then drumming with Tucker Suite) had told me about TWOP and the name had struck me (there was a very cool hand drawn flyer for the gig). They played bottom of the bill with Tucker Suite, Budge and Schroeder’s Cat, all part of a very exciting little scene at the time. Less than two weeks later I happened to see TWOP again on a bill with The Moustaches at a house party on Middle Abbey Street. The Moustaches, who sadly never released anything, were also part of this same scene (in my mind anyway). As I recall, this latter show was on the second or third floor of a semi derelict space in which a friend of both bands was living as a caretaker. Andrew has now told me that he and Keith Swan actually lived there and it was where TWOP rehearsed. I remember sitting on an old mattress and really enjoying the atmosphere (a cymbal was tied to a rafter). I do remember that TWOP had a real sense of humour on stage with some crowd involvement going on. They never had any releases but might well have recorded something (I’ve also heard tell of an unreleased album by The Moustaches!). This would be the last time I saw them play, perhaps it was even their last show? It would be another year before I would see Andrew onstage again.

While researching this piece I did find an Irish band family tree which shows that Andrew, Joss, Fiachra Lennon and Brian Gough were in a band called Mudshark (1991-92), which was not actually their first band. Again, Andrew gave me some more information which I thought was worth sharing and clarifying about these early days.

“Brian Gough (later in Mexican Pets) had been in an even earlier band than Mudshark with me called The Foots. This band only played one gig in a pub in Dun Laoghaire in 1991. Our friends had to listen to the music from the street because they were too young to get in. After The Foots broke up I think Brian went on to another group called Harvey, and then Tucker Suite with Greg Barrett (later in Joan of Arse) on bass initially. Greg then did Schnorbitz with Joss, and had a cool band called Giraffe Running.”

Andrew’s next band would be Capratone (vocals/guitar) along with Joss on Drums and Fiachra on bass. Regarding song-writing Andrew told me, “For the most part I would write the songs and we would try to make them better by all writing our own parts through rehearsals. One or two were group written from stuff that happened in rehearsal.” I first saw them in another venue off Capel St. supporting Schroeder’s Cat at Behan’s Bar (previously The Fox & Pheasant) (3/4/95) and again just ten days later at The Plough with (surprise surprise) The Moustaches and Schroeder’s Cat. I would get to see this line-up play quite often on local bills until Sept ‘97 (more on this later). I recall they also played a short tour around Ireland with US band The Make-Up (April ‘97).

In early ‘96 they tried to record an album with producer Marc Carolan. Andrew told me it was to be called, “Le Plus Roll, because we felt our music was more Roll than Rock. I can’t pin down the exact date of the recording, but my guess is that it was in 1996. We had 2 days in a studio somewhere in Rathgar. It was a 24 track ADAT studio. I think it had a Soundcraft desk. The highlight equipment-wise was an incredible Ampeg bass stack that belonged to some professional band. Its sound was so authoritative and great that by the end of the long first day’s recording, when I had crawled into bed, I was woken up a couple of times by LOUD auditory hallucinations of Fiachra’s P Bass blasting through that thing. Marc, and the three of us all worked really hard for the two days, we did manage to record and mix all the songs we came in with, but I think the short time-frame worked against us capturing the right aesthetic. The means of production were expensive to rent and we couldn’t afford to record even in a project studio like that for more than a day or two.”

Luckily, one of the songs, ‘Homeward’, ended up on the Irish band compilation album, Zip Up Your Boots For The Showbands (1996). I always loved this intricate and explosive song and a whole album like this would have been quite something. The only place online you can hear it now is on a radio show I made for Dublin Digital Radio about bands that played in Dublin’s Attic venue. I must point out the musicianship of Capratone, it may not have been so obvious in the more noisy Tucker Suite but Joss was such an amazing and distinct drummer and both Fiachra and he so easily locked together. They created a lot of space for Andrew’s vocals and guitar for these catchy and very inventive songs to really flow.

At some point in late 1996 Richie Kelly joined (on right in pic) on guitar and they played as a four piece. At some other point Andrew left but as the band continued things must have been going really well musically. According to my notes the last two times I saw Capratone play was at the start of September ‘97, supporting The Sewing Room and Luggage at Dublin’s Mean Fiddler and then a headline show in The Funnel venue at the end of the same month. This doesn’t mean they stopped playing of course but for whatever reasons I didn’t see them again. Things don’t stay static, I did get really into electronic dance music and clubbing the following year but continued to see guitar bands as well but gigs would clash, allegiances, circumstances and tastes change, choices have to be made.

At some point this second line-up hooked up with Dublin label Folkrum Records (run by Dan Watson) and they recorded a mini album, The Art of Go, which was released in early 2000 (CD only) and produced by Simon Kenny aka Si Schroeder. At that stage Joss and Fiachra were still in the line-up with Richie and Eric Sexton (on guitar). I wasn’t sure if any of Andrew’s songs survived after his time with the band (on the Capratone page of the old Folkrum website he only gets thanked for the name) so I needed to ask him about it, “I didn’t write anything on the LP called The Art of Go. There was a strange overlapping series of line-ups in Capratone but when I left I think Richie Kelly (who was a recently arrived guitar player joining the original 3 piece) took on the song-writing job. As far as I know those Art Of Go tunes were all of his making. Richie went on to make a few attempts at recording subsequent line-ups of Capratone.” According to Joss’ short biog of the band on Last.fm, by the end of Capratone the line-up had changed completely from the original one.

Since I published this piece Richie Kelly has been in touch and has kindly provided more detail about joining the band and how his role and the line-up evolved. “I saw Capratone in 1996 and was blown away. Even before the show ended, I wanted to join but that seemed unlikely. It turned out that Andrew’s song-writing was taking a new direction and he had decided to add a second guitarist. We were connected through an extended friend group and apparently word had gotten to him that I was as enamoured with The Beach Boys as he was. We bumped into each other and started talking music and I must have auditioned and joined the band shortly thereafter. At some point I brought a song to the band and we added it to our set (with my vocals). I started contributing more so when Andrew decided to stop playing, we just continued. We added Eric Sexton, a friend and former bandmate. The Art of Go was recorded by Simon Kenny with basic tracking done over a weekend at a large room in Joss’ father’s business. Simon and I continued vocals and overdubs at his flat in Donnybrook.”

Surprisingly none of this music has made it onto YouTube or anywhere else online that I could find. It can be bought on Discogs, which is how I got my hands on it about two years ago. In my opinion it works really well as an EP, with a few really engaging tracks but with some filler too. The best for me would be ‘Clozer’ which sounds like a lost classic and musically is a more full bodied version of the band heard on ‘Homeward’. ‘Free Jazz’ is pleasingly upbeat and cruises along on Beach Boy vibes. They do sound quite American (Pavement and bands of that ilk) at times (as did Capratone mark 1) but this was very much the sound and influence of the times, everything still comes down to the quality of the song-writing. The band broke up a good while later, sometime in 2003 without anymore releases. At some stage Richie Kelly moved to Brooklyn, New York and started a similar sounding band there but with more brass, Sport of Kings. He even re-recorded ‘Free Jazz’ and made a video for it. The influence of Brian Wilson is clear on this song in particular, they cleverly re-use The Beach Boy’s ‘Cool, cool water” line in the song (also present in the original version). Apart from some positive reviews of their only EP, Logic House (2011), there is little sign of the band online either but at least you can check out their excellent video for ‘Free Jazz’ (see below). I did find just one image of Capratone at this time on the Folkrum website, which I have enlarged below. Richie is the golf club carrying member.

In my original piece I wasn’t sure what happened to Capratone next so Richie can take up the story, “The Art of Go attracted the interest of Shifty Disco, who released all of the Elephant 6 stuff in the UK. We set about making a full length for them which we were calling Aviation High. Simon Kenny was initially set to record but was so busy with other projects, I asked Andrew to do it and he agreed. Drum and bass tracking took place in a studio in Dublin. Andrew and I indulged our love of tinkering at his family home while recording my parts and mixing. The result is a pretty high fidelity Capratone record. Shifty Disco preferred the super compressed Capratone of the previous record and passed. We trudged along with some line-up changes after that. The most stable line-up though was myself, Cian Synnot on drums, Fiachra McCarthy on guitar and Michael Stevens (of Groom and many other excellent bands) on bass. As Joss said, no original members were left by the end of Capratone. I believe we kept the name simply because we couldn’t come up with a new one, apparently I have a problem naming things. When I ended up opening music studios and practice spaces in Brooklyn after moving there, I asked Joss if I could use the name of his label Scientific Laboratories because I loved it so much and couldn't think of an alternative.”

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I think it’s well worth including here what happened with Richie’s next band Sport of Kings. “My love of fidelity only increased as the years continued except my focus switched from The Beach Boys to Steely Dan. I because obsessed with doing an indie rock version of their music and Sport of Kings took that direction. The initial line-up was drums, bass guitars and Fender Rhodes and then we added a horn section and a drummer from NYU’s Jazz Program who were incredible and took things to a whole different level.”

“After our Logic House EP, we made a full record (15 songs to be called Queer Theorem) with Michael Leonhart of Steely Dan as producer and occasional synth/horns/vocals contributor. This was essentially a dream come true for me. Initial tracking was done by me at a studio in Brooklyn and painstaking overdubbing, vocals and mixing was done by myself and Michael at his mixing room in the city. Ironically, we recorded yet another version of ‘Free Jazz’ with Michael. I’m not sure why I keep rerecording it but it might have something to do with Andrew and I finding out Brian Wilson used to record ‘Proud Mary’ every time he went into a new studio to check the sonics. I think I now have 4 completed versions!”

“I put an enormous amount of effort into Queer Theorem but it took so long that by the time it was ready, many band members were so in demand by big artists that they had little time to give. Keeping a 7-piece band of amazing musicians afloat proved too difficult and I disbanded the group rather than trying to recruit new musicians. I had also taken that level of fidelity to its conclusion and I returned to looser music after moving to Portland, OR.”

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The next ‘band’ Andrew founded was solo project The Asteroids. I don’t think he ever presented it live but there was just one release, an exquisite three track 10″/CD, Moonlight Music For Beginners, which was released on Joss Moorkens’ Scientific Laboratories label in 2000 (the same year as The Art of Go). You can listen to what has to be my favourite song, ‘Nine Lives’ at link below (the other two songs can helpfully be found on the same channel and I’ve linked them here). According to the sleeve notes it took two years to record, with I assume Andrew playing all the instruments and doing the programming etc. I was sure to pick this up on vinyl at the time and have cherished it since. The amazing paintings on front and back were by the artist Niamh McGrath.

‘Nine Lives’ is so laid back, rich in instrumentation but for me it’s all about Andrew’s vocals (Alan Kelly of The Last Post also provides additional backing vocals). The lyrics prove to be the real earworm for me, “Who is the man, who has done this to you?” with an unexpected lyrical twist at the end. The song has somehow burrowed its way into my consciousness and over the past 20 years has been liable to play in my head at any time. ‘Return Of The Moonlightman’ is more sparse and based again around the vocal arrangement, a second deeper voice (John Parkinson) enters the fray about halfway and it goes to another level with a lovely gradual close. ‘The Great Escape’ is dominated by a really warm organ sound that pulls you along. This one in particular reminds me of Brian Wilson, one of Andrew’s touchstone influences. It’s one of those releases which has dated really well in my opinion and is pretty much unknown I think (I don’t know how many were pressed or sold). There was so much promised with this release and frankly it’s something of a shame it was not followed up at the time. If Andrew had been signed or whatever then things might have happened differently but like all of the bands I’ve written about in this series, we’re lucky to have what we have and the music will last forever. You can still find it for sale on Discogs and it can be played and purchased on iTunes and Tidal. There was one other song from this period, ‘Lunar Doo Wop’, released on a compilation CD included free with the first Foggy Notions magazine. I vaguely remember it but can no longer find my copy (the title tells us all we need to know!).

Sometime in 2005 or later I bumped into Andrew and he gave me a CD from his latest group The Metronoids. It was a two track disc in a plastic wallet (no cover artwork or personnel details) called Petroleum. Today this doesn’t even exist on Discogs never mind anywhere else! Until I asked Andrew about it I wasn’t sure if this had simply been a promo but he told me there was artwork etc. The reason I probably never saw it for sale is that I left Dublin in 2005. For a bit more information I had to dig into the data on the CD itself and found that the track names are simply ‘Petroleum 1 & 2′ and for what it’s worth the genre on iTunes comes up as Blues (not sure how this gets assigned). It’s a pleasant listen (the more spirited second track is my favourite) but it surprised me very much to find it was all drums/percussion and obviously nothing like what he’d done before. This would be the only release under the name, which I imagine is pretty rare to come across.

I obviously had to get Andrew to explain The Metronoids to me, “This was a project I really enjoyed. Done in 2004/5 with Joss and Marc Hayes (drummer from The Moustaches, Boxes). It was always a real pleasure to be in a room with those two guys. I think we did a handful of rehearsals and one recording session. The idea was drum improv within premeditated structures. All three of us played drums. I think I got the notion to do a project that required a different kind of listening from my love of the CD called Guitar Solo by Annette Krebs.”

I wasn’t aware of this at the time but Andrew, Joss and Fiachra briefly reunited as The Lamps in 2005 but as far as I know while there were some live gigs there were no releases. Since then Andrew has told me he is currently working on two new music projects, “One with Fiachra Lennon is called Fig/Astro, it started in 2018, we should be finished an LP this year. He wrote a bunch of instrumental tracks and sent them to me. At his request I turned the instrumentals into songs, and the productions are evolving from there with both of us working on it via WeTransfer. He is a real natural musician so the songs have a very solid foundation. It was refreshing to write songs this way from track to song, rather than from song to track as I had always done previously. My own LP has been in the pipeline since 2009 when I wrote a load of songs and set out to record them in-the-box. Some of the songs went through over 20 productions. Working on a finite group of productions over a long period, under the microscope of Digital Audio Workstation has really allowed me to discover how to do my own thing. The work on this solo album takes a lot of focus.”

After Capratone Joss would go on to play with Joan of Arse and The Dudley Corporation and guest on many other releases, most of these can be found on his impressive Discogs entry. When I was doing my research for this piece I was excited to find an old Souncloud page for The Asteroids I never knew existed, it has two unreleased tracks which date from about 2014 but Andrew said the music since then has been become more abstract. Fiachra meanwhile has a bulging Soundcloud page full of his own demos that is very worth exploring too. Both of them are also on Twitter, The Asteroids and Fiachra. It will have been a long time coming but I’m looking forward to the next new releases from both these artists.

Sometimes the best things take time.

Stephen Rennicks

#capratone #the asteroids #the metronoids #andrew lyster #fiachra lennon #joss moorkens #richie kelly #folkrum records #the art of go #moonlight music for beginners #sport of kings #the world of pugh #dublin #music #1990s #2000s

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theparanormalperiodical · 5 years ago

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The True Story Behind The Blair Witch Project (1999), And The 13 Real Urban Legends About Witches That Will Make You Lie Down And Cry

It’s been mocked, and it’s been made a cultural icon.

It kick-started a horror trend, and it kicked itself down to the dregs of the film industry.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) is a point of contention among horror fans - you know, a bit like bringing up trans-rights at dinner with your UKIP Aunt sitting two seats down. But, just like trans-rights, we have to talk about it.

(Fuck you, Jane.)

The Blair Witch Project - and her 2 sequels - was the first film to turn on the camcorder and document the search for something supernatural.

This was the OG clickbait, this was the beginning of horror films claiming to document true events (ahem Paranormal Activity ahem), and this was the end of horror films being taken seriously.

But it was also these three things that grabbed everyone’s attention.

The original film was based on the claim that in 1994, 3 students went missing whilst exploring the supposedly haunted woods of Burkittsville Maryland. 5 years later, the footage they captured was found and put on the big screen.

Were these real events being documented?

Did these kids actually go missing?

And was the Blair Witch real?

Spoiler alert: no, nope, and not at all.

But even if this specific case wasn’t true, the film itself is unnervingly accurate. Like, literally last night I was researching all the different urban legends relating to witches in the US and I was convinced I had awoken the spirit of the Bell Witch.

So, considering the solidarity I have with the followers of this blog, I’ve decided to traumatise you, too.

This article is going to provide the summary to the three forgotten ‘n’ fucked-up films that make up the series, tell you why the Blair Witch is an uncomfortably accurate portrayal of witches historically, and finish up with a stroll through the 13 urban legends that are just like the one featured in the film.

Pull on your hiking boots, and hand me the map.

Let’s get spooky.

Here’s A Quick Summary Of The Blair Witch Film Series

Ahh, the 90s.

Will Smith was gettin’ jiggy with it, and Trump wasn’t President. Times were so much easier back then!

Well, not for budding film students Heather, Mike and Josh, who packed up their filming equipment in a car and headed to Burkittsville, Maryland to make a documentary about the urban legend of the Blair Witch. (The Blair Witch Project (1999))

They start off by interviewing locals, and capture a few key details that set up the rest of the film and its sequels. It is claimed that Rustin Parr was a bloke who lived in the woods and kidnapped several children in the 1940s.

Why? Because the Blair Witch told him to do so. Two fishermen confirm the legends of the woods being haunted, and mention some lass called Robin Weaver.

Kidnapped in 1888, she returned 3 days later, claiming the witch was “an old woman whose feet never touched the ground."

Having heard the tales and waited out the warnings, they begin their journey and head to their first stop, Coffin Rock. Supposedly, 5 men were murdered in a ritualistic fashion here in the 19th century, and their bodies disappeared without a trace.

The next day, they continue their travels, and their ordeal begins. They arrive at an old cemetery which is made up of cairns (piles of rocks which turn out to have ritualistic meaning) and camp nearby. Noises are heard round the tent all night, like twigs snapping, but they reduce this to woodland creatures.

The following day, they realise they are lost and cannot find the car. The activity escalates, but is found to be unexplainable.

They then begin to fight between each other, and encounter a section of humanoid stick figures hanging from the trees. Their evening entertainment of weird noises around the tent resumes, but this time the laughter of children is added to the remix. Something then attacks their tent, sending them fleeing from their campsite.

Some people will just never like dubstep.

They return to their tent, and discover that their possessions have been rifled through, and slime covers Josh’s stuff. The fighting ensues, and Josh straight-up fucks-off.

His screams are then heard one night, and Heather and Mike deduce it to be the witch’s fabrication to draw them out of their tent and into her grasp.

Her trap is confirmed when Heather finds a bundle of sticks the next morning containing a ritualistic goody-bag containing what appears to be left of Josh.

That same night, she records her infamous apology video in a style not dissimilar to most YouTubers who have been caught being racist/homophobic/[insert any terrible thing].

Once again, Josh’s screams are heard and they follow them to a house bearing demonic symbols and the bloody handprints of children. Not the aesthetic I myself would go for, but it worked for the Blair Witch...

Mike and Heather stumble into the basement, and we witness our favourite vloggers being killed in the manner described earlier in the film:

One child would face the corner of the basement while the other was being slaughtered. The last shot of the film is of Mike standing in the corner of the basement, suggesting that Heather is the first to die at the hands of the witch.

The second film (Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)) follows up on these events a year after the footage was found. A gaggle of fans of the original film troop to Burkittsville to explore the legend and the circumstances of the kidnapping of Heather, Mike and Josh.

This film is messy and complicated, and it’s for that reason that I don’t want to waste 8,000 words on a film that is actually ignored by the film series. So, I’m going to give you a tl;dr, instead:

Basics, this film documents the group of fans and tourists being turned against each other by the witch. They go to the house where shit reportedly went down, and set up surveillance cameras to document potential activity.

It’s the first film, but with hell of a lot more activity. And it culminates with the symbolic hanging of someone who appears to be inciting the demonic rituals scattered across the film as they are reportedly possessed by the Blair Witch.

Unfortunately, we don’t learn anything new in this film - we simply see the greater extent of her powers.

Tired, yet?

(Bored, perhaps?)

Our journey is almost over, and it ends with Blair Witch (2016).

This film ignores the events of the second film, and follows a group of documentary makers as they explore the legend of the Blair Witch - but this time it's not about capturing paranormal activity. They go to investigate a peculiar video on YouTube that proves that Heather - the woman from the OG cult classic - might just be alive.

The brother of Heather leads this group, and focuses this documentary on the desire for closure.

Despite skipping out the Book of Shadows, it basically sticks to that exact premise. Surveillance cameras are set up, and showcases the witch’s methods of turning the crew on each other, but on an even greater level. We even see the witch, alongside a couple other creatures in tow...

It finally gives us behind the scenes insight into the paranormal activity, and ends with everyone dying!

Sigh.

The Blair Witch Is Based Off Of Urban Legends - And Is Uncomfortably Similar To The Stories

Despite its many flaws, The Blair Witch Project does one thing right: we never see the witch.

But it’s the way that her control of the woods and those within it is portrayed that points to the terrifyingly accurate nature of the witch when compared to other urban legends.

The film’s fictional legend gives up minimal information regarding the Blair Witch:

We know she was responsible for residents - especially children - going missing throughout the 18th and 20th century, and we know that the locals of Burkittsville claimed that the Blair Witch was the ghost of Elly Kedward, a woman who reportedly practiced witchcraft and was sentenced to death in 1785.

This salem-witch-what-died-but-didnt-really-die-no-one-really-knows is a common basis of the urban legends that will be explored later in this post, but it's the other attributes of the witch that draw her even closer to the claims made around these cases.

The focus of this is that the Blair Witch represents the crone, one of the core concepts of paganism and many other ancient religions. Of the few glimpses we see of a creature that could be the witch and the descriptions of her made by the locals of Burkittsville, we piece together the image of an elderly, monstrous being.

Take this clip from the final film in the saga:

This unnatural-looking humanoid bears a resemblance to the claims of witches in folklore, such as breasts sagging below waistlines, or bones jutting out of their flesh. Add on top of this the animalistic claims from the original movie - like that one woman claiming she saw her arm which was coated with dark hair - and we arrive at a rather monstrous being.

But this animalistic account does not merely echo her ugliness; it forges the link between the witch and her powers over the woods she resides in.

As the maiden becomes the mother, and the mother becomes the crone, her connection with nature grows. It reaches the extent from which her connection with nature is greater than that of her male counterparts, threatening almighty patriarchy and cursing her as the evil witch she is!!1!

Furthermore, it's not difficult to see the links between the woods she controls, and the imagery of life and fertility. Add a smattering of rumours about kidnapped children, and the house of Rustin Parr becomes a womb.

(Less PMS, more blood.)

More so, by harnessing the powers of nature, she blurs the boundaries between the genders. Heck, she even goes as far as to blur the boundaries between reality and the reality she creates for her victims!

She tricks them into falling out with each other, she confuses them by creating this unnavigable wood, and she ensnares them into her invisible trap.

Or, translated into simple terms, the Blair Witch fulfills the concept of the Monstrous-Feminine, a theory conjured up by Barbara Creed. On one hand it suggests women are either portrayed as the victim within horror films, and on the other it suggests that when the woman becomes monstrous, she takes on extreme attributes regarding the female reproductive body.

Guess which one the Blair Witch is.

But this theory didn’t start with Babs sitting in a room and getting her feminist on - Creed deconstructs notions that can be traced back to the era of the Salem witch trials. Each and every urban legend starts here, when it was #on-trend to burn your local witch.

The Blair Witch is the puppet master in these films.

And she is not the only one that is pulling the strings.

The Real Urban Legends About Witches That You Need To Know About

“So, the Blair Witch is some chick who hasn’t shaved in 3 months and has a metaphorical vagina?”

Ok, fair enough.

The Blair Witch isn’t directly based on a specific urban legend, so yes, delete the sage from your Amazon basket and buy those limited edition poptarts, instead.

…

Oh, you thought this post was over?

My little ghoul - this is The Paranormal Periodical. You didn’t think I’d let you leave without informing you of that witch roaming around your local area, would you?

‘Course not. Here are the 13 real urban legends of witches that’ll scare the shizz outta you.

#1 - Naale Baa

We trade in deep woodland in Maryland for Karntaka, India for this local legend. And within minutes of arriving, you’ll spot the word ‘naale baa’ on the walls - a decoration not dissimilar to that seen in Rustin Parr’s crib.

It is claimed that by writing these words on their walls they can deter the witch that wanders from house to house in search of her husband.

Glammed up in full bridal wear, Nale Ba (as she is also known) supposedly attempts to entice the man of the house, and then curse the family with bad luck.

In the 1990s, this urban legend faced a particular resurgence, and even evolved to claim that she would imitate the voices of victim’s family members to encourage them to open the door. But when the door is opened, you die!

How? No idea.

Am I still scared? Hell yeah.

But I’m not the only one concerned about this witch - claims that multiple men in Thailand just disappeared from their beds in the middle of the night were pinned onto this urban legend.

#2 - The Bell Witch

This is probably the most famous legend regarding a witch puppeteering an innocent family’s life.

The story starts in 1817. A family begin to witness signs of paranormal activity on their farm that targets the man of the house and his daughter, Betsy. A variety of large animals are seen across their farm and follow the family and their slaves. Strange noises then begin to fill the house, like invisible chains being dragged on the floor, or dogs fighting. Betsy repeatedly claims that she can see a little girl playing on the swings.

But this friendly ghost then begins to attack the child, slapping her and scarring her with pins.

The man of the house then begins to demand answers about these spooky shenanigans, and straight up asks the spirit what the shit is going on.

The spirit gives ‘em a lowdown of her backstory - a bit like those clips from the X Factor where they use Katy Perry’s Firework over the top of this 16 year old girl’s turmoil regarding GCSE maths - and claims that she is "Old Kate Batts' witch".

‘Couple of convos later and they deduce that the farm rests on a Native American burial ground, and the spirit has been disturbed.

Yet despite the specificity of this legend, the haunting sticks to familial lines we see with Naale Baa and the Blair Witch:

The witch claims she will leave - but she will return in 7 years. She kept her promise, and haunted Betsy when she achieved her womanly purpose of shitting out a baby and having a family of her own.

#3 - The Perron Family Farmhouse

This case was the inspiration behind the original Conjuring movie, founding one of the most iconic horror film series to date - and it’s clear to see why.

I’ve already done a fully-fledged post on this classic tale, but here’s a tl;dr for people hoping not to delve too deep into the haunting…

The Perron family made the mistake of moving onto the land once owned and now haunted by Bathsheba Sherman, a witch from the 19th century.

With increasingly violent activity beginning to haunt the family - which culminated in the possession of the mother of the house - this has earned its place as one of the scariest tales of terror to feature on this blog.

#4 - Mary Evelyn Ford

She was burned at the stake for her witchcraft.

She was buried in a steel lined grave, and her casket was covered with concrete to keep her trapped in.

Oh, and she was 5 years old.

It is claimed that Mary will wander ‘round the cemetery or stand trapped within the protective fencing around her graveside, making faces at mourners and enticing them towards her final resting place. From there she will suck you into the depths where her body now lies, and use your vitality for strength!

#5 - The Three Legged Lady of Mississippi

The American road trip.

A classic coming-of-adventure filled with freedom, spotify playlists you accidentally stream via your data, and running over people that are already dead.

No? Just me?

The story goes that there’s one road in Mississippi which is haunted by The Three Legged Lady. If you honk your horn three times, she will knock on the roof of the car, and race your car to the end of the road, hitting it with her body throughout the short journey.

Why?

Her origins, like most urban legends, have been subject to a lot of dispute, but there are 2 claims which follow this tale:

One side to the story claims she was the innocent victim of a sacrifice by a satanic cult, whilst the other side claims she doesn’t actually have three legs.

She’s holding her daughter’s leg, which was severed off when she was run over by a car. It is said that she is still looking for the rest of her daughter.

#6 - The Skinwalkers of Arizona

Our road trip doesn’t stop there, however - this time we are heading for the Navajo region of Arizona.

Supposedly, when you’re sailing down the highway, something will tap on your window, and you’ll catch a glance of a skinwalker. These humanoid, mutated beings were shapeshifters that were the witch doctors representing the evil within Navajo society.

This urban legend even featured in a court case when a woman was found brutally murdered!

Heck, there is actually a specific region of Arizona - Skinwalker Ranch - from which you are sure to these mystical beings.

#7 - Goody Cole, The Witch of Hampton

This urban legend sticks to the minimalist aesthetic, but nevertheless has earned its reputation in Hampton.

The story goes that a woman accused of being a witch was found dead in her house, and thus, to ensure this bitch stays dead, they bury her with a stake and horseshoe. She says six feet under, but her powers prevail; she curses those that happen to go past her grave.

Her curses stick to those sailing on the river by her burial site, including that one time she reportedly brewed a storm for an innocent girl enjoying a summer’s day on a sailboat who just so happened to be mocking her past.

Not a good day for yachting with father, then?

#8 - The Curse of Jonathon Buck’s Tomb

Okay, this one’s fucking creepy.

And I love it.

Jonathon Buck was one of the main lads in charge of the Salem witch trials, and condemned many a woman to death by burning. Unfortunately, his attempts to rid one woman of her alleged powers failed, and she scarred his tombstone with a burn mark in the shape of a leg.

No, seriously.

Whenever the tomb is moved, the mark reappears.

#9 - Mary Nohl’s Witch House

This origins of this tale can be traced to much more recent events, but carries the essence of an urban legend that rumoured witches cannot escape from.

Mary Nohl was a sculptor famed for her wacky art and weird displays that decorated her house and gardens. The local residents petitioned for it to be demolished, but it was placed on the National Register, instead.

It is here that the rumours began to swell:

The legend claims that her husband and son drowned in a nearby lake, so, she created these sculptures to watch out for them and await their return to their home. But it was discovered that she never had any children, voiding the rumours conjured up by teenagers after late night visits to this spectacular house.

#10 - The Pendle Witches

I’ve already covered this gaggle of witches and the legends they’ve left on Pendle Hill, but here’s a quick recap for those that haven’t already checked out that post:

The Pendle witches were a group of peasants who practiced dark and mysterious magic. From neighbours getting ill, to strange effigies being found containing hair and teeth, there was more than enough evidence to send them to trial.

It was on this hill that they were sentenced to death, and it was on this hill that they were hung for their crimes. But their witchy behaviour didn’t stop with their deaths.

Peculiar happenings still haunt Pendle hill…

#11 - The Surrey Witch

Our next urban legend is also resident to the UK, and even takes its form in the same era.

In the 17th century, a white witch lived in a cave in Surrey, and was known for lending things to her neighbours. All you had to do was stand on the boulder outside her cave and ask!

But one day, some bloke tried his luck, and asked for her cauldron. She was chill with it, but said he must return it by a deadline. He missed the due date, and lost 5% off his final mark he fled to escape her potential wrath.

He fled to Frensham church, from which the cauldron has been utilised for centuries. I wonder if the witch is still out there looking for it?

#12 - Tituba, The Voodoo Queen

Okay, so this witch might not have an urban legend tied to her memory, but her past mirrors the Blair Witch’s own story so it’s freakalicious, regardless...

Tituba was actually the first woman accused of practicing witchcraft in 1692. She even confessed to her crimes, and threw two other witches under the bus!

(So much for solidarity, guys.)

But her story follows a unique twist, as she was believed to have come to the colony she later resided in to encourage local children to take up Voodoo. Her focus on children and thus her maternal portrayal is a simplified reflection of the Blair Witches own metaphorical genitalia.

#13 - The Witch House, aka The Jonathon Corwin House

Our final urban legend belongs to one of the most historical buildings in Salem:

No, really, it’s the only structure in Salem still standing that had a hand in the witch trials. Not only has it witnessed dark and twisted histories of innocent people, it’s still home to some of them.

Jonathon Corwin - the former owner of the house - was a judge in the trials, and thus carried the memories of the trials with him back to his home, but with reports of torture in the basement and even his own burial down there after his murder, I think we can safely that many myths and legends will circle this house.

Add in a visit from the Ghost Adventures crew, and we can stamp on the Zak Bagan’s seal of approval.

No wonder it’s considered the most haunted house in Salem!

Now It’s Time To Hear What You Think:

Which urban legend is the winner of tonight’s fuck-off-i-cant-handle-the-spooks-man award?

And will you ever watch The Blair Witch Project again?

😍Up for more spooky stuff? Follow this blog and hear a new real ghost story everyday!😍

(Also this is me now.)

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slashertalks · 5 years ago

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I think the most enjoyable thing to me about film review is how fluid it is. Not only is the medium, by nature, ever-changing, but with personal experience comes a shift in opinion that can change perspectives so much it requires a completely new piece. Though this work is not coming out of so drastic a change, it is coming out of a desire to rectify something put forward in my previous SAW review. Similarly, it is a statement of something core to my beliefs with all my reviews: that “bad” films are not always truly bad. Often, they’re quite enjoyable.

Now, I should put forward my frame of reference for this, in the form of two facts. The first: my current hyperfixation is SAW. The second: the only two SAW films I’ve seen are the original, and SAW 3D. Do with this information what you will, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that what I’m writing comes from a place of intense personal passion, and simultaneously intense disinterest. See, when I say SAW, I mean specifically Doctor Lawrence Gordon and Adam Faulkner-Stanheight. To a lesser extent, I am also fixated on the production, but that’s relatively common for me. The technical, visual aspects of a film are often just as important to my enjoyment of it as anything else— I’m more inclined to enjoy a film with physical effects and mechanics, both of which SAW has plenty.

This piece is serving as both an expansion on my original short blurb on SAW, and an acknowledgement that SAW 3D is not, as I put it, the horror equivalent of “a daytime soap opera.” It is, quite simply, a fun movie.

Do I have any background in any of the characters beyond Dr. Gordon himself? Not in the slightest— I’m coming into this movie with no expectations for how Hoffman or Jill Tuck should behave. This is, perhaps, a flaw of my own attention span. I tend to jump about through franchises: for years, I’d only seen the first and third Friday the 13th movies. I still haven’t seen the second or sixth Nightmare on Elm Street. My viewing history is filled with maybe somedays, films I’m certain I’d enjoy, most often part of franchises I know I like, but I just don’t have the motivation to sit down and watch them. Saw 2-6 and Jigsaw are part of this category.

What does that make SAW 3D, then? Lacking background in characters beyond Lawrence, whose appearance is unfortunately limited, what do I get from what was supposed to be the close of the franchise?

Not much, quite honestly.

SAW 3D is not a film rich in much. Beyond a trap made of an entire building which feels a little too poetic for Hoffman to have made (judging, again, by my admittedly-limited knowledge of the character), and an enjoyably gruesome trap made for a group of neo-nazis (I SQUIRMED watching this one!!!! SQUIRMED!!!! I can’t remember the last time I had to look away from a movie!!!!!! Even on a second viewing, I had to close my eyes at this part! Can you tell how exciting that is?), SAW 3D feels rather slapped together. I’ve heard as well that the director had no desire to actually direct the film, which makes things difficult.

What does a film do when saddled with an unwilling director? Its best, of course, and SAW 3D is still a valiant enough effort. Is it a masterpiece? Not by any stretch of the word, but it’s fun. This here is why horror is one of my favorite genres! SAW is a masterpiece of modern horror, a reflection of the magic of A Texas Chain Saw Massacre! A rarity! A gem! I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about this film. SAW even surpasses Texas Chain Saw in one area: the actors, director, and staff had fun making this movie! I will always sing praise for Texas Chain Saw; it is the film I consider the penultimate horror movie, unsurpassable in its legacy. It captured a sort of magic in how gut-wrenchingly horrific it is with such minimal blood: it’s all psychological.

As previously said, I feel that SAW captures that same magic. The film has minimal gore, a byproduct of its limited budget, but is remembered as much more brutal than it actually is— it became the springboard for a franchise absolutely drenched in disgusting moments. SAW 3D’s neo-nazi trap is chief among them, for me (that back glue? good GOD man....). Yet, where the cast of Texas Chain Saw have many painful, sweaty, exhausting moments to remember (the actor who played Nubbins was a veteran and has stated that his time working on Texas Chain Saw was worse than his time as a soldier), the cast of the original SAW had a blast, proven by an audio commentary filled with James Wan, Leigh Whannell, and Cary Elwes all poking fun at each other (and a ridiculously goofy Marlon Brando impersonation from Mr. Elwes — I genuinely can’t recommend the commentary enough).

Even separated completely from my personal passion for the film, it’s an amazing feat for me to sit here and say to you all that a film has, in one instance, surpassed for me my pinnacle of horror. How often does that happen?

Yet, I still haven’t completed my thoughts on SAW 3D. Circling back, I have to laugh. I’ve unintentionally mirrored my own Texas Chain Saw viewing pattern with my SAW viewings: for quite a long time, I’d only seen Texas Chain Saw and TCM: The Next Generation. If you’ve been here long enough, you’ve seen me mention TNG time and time again. To recap, for those of you who may be seeing my writing for the first time: it’s a genuinely HORRIBLE film. It is, however, a favorite of mine— enough so that I own it on DVD, now. TNG is a purposefully bad film, created with the intent of antagonizing the viewer and calling to attention our pattern of complacent viewership. In my original piece on TNG, I state that “my problem with modern horror is that it’s loud, the violence is gratuitous and charmless ... because supposedly that’s what a Modern Viewer [sic] wants. TCM4 takes these things, grinds your nose into them, and says ‘fuck you, you want this? here'” (source). Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation defies the conventions of modern horror in a deeply obnoxious, yet thought-provoking way. SAW 3D... does not.

SAW 3D’s greatest problem is, perhaps, that it’s exactly what audiences demand. Though I must admit the 3D is tasteful, and I’m grateful for that, the fact remains that the movie lacks innovation. While it doesn’t necessarily need to innovate as the close of a franchise, I ultimately think it’s ridiculous to have tried to close the franchise at all. As much as I hate the trend of reboots and remakes in the modern market, particularly modern horror, I must acknowledge that studios will milk a popular franchise for all that it’s worth, and sometimes more (I’m looking at you, SyFy Pumpkinhead sequels).

SAW 3D is the victim of an unfortunate situation. An over-saturation of SAW films in the market meant waning popularity, coupled with a fanbase still dedicated enough to want a finale, and a director lacking interest in the project (we all get tired of things, no matter how passionate we may be in the beginning— I hardly blame anyone for being tired of the franchise after the way they churned those films out). This isn’t to imply any of the films are bad, especially since I haven’t seen them! There is, however, an undeniable pattern to horror films which has persisted since the 70s and 80s: horror franchises tank after 3-5 films. Some are lucky, some less so, but the range of 3-5 films seems to be the golden one for horror. For a movie franchise, seven films is comfortably beyond that, and SAW 3D is misleadingly the seventh film.

For as much as I’ll happily sit down and watch it, SAW 3D puts nothing forward and asks nothing in return. A franchise that started with such a dramatic bang went out with a fizzle (or would have, if not for Jigsaw and the upcoming Spiral). It’s enjoyable to see the reverse bear trap used. It’s enjoyable to see Lawrence again, and to watch Hoffman lay on the ground and get poked (quoth the reviewer: get his ass, Larry). It’s... fun, but it’s cheap fun. It’s fast food horror. I’m happy to have it once in a while, but the late 2000s to 2010s were oversaturated with similar films. I want more from a movie meant to close out something as dramatically influential as SAW, something so enrapturing! Something which I can confidently say exceeds Texas Chain Saw Massacre in one important area! Damn it, the SAW franchise deserved better than this!

Maybe it’ll get it, with the Spiral reboot coming out. Maybe it won’t, who knows? I’m interested to see how Spiral plays out, and I have surprisingly high hopes. Between that and the Candyman remake, there are a lot of “re-” horror films I’m genuinely looking forward to. I haven’t felt this way about a horror re-anything since Evil Dead in 2013, and I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. We’ll see what the future holds — hopefully something that’ll be handled better than the original franchise was, though I don’t think Hollywood will ever learn to distinguish a dead horse from a live one. They’ll just keep beating and beating every horse in the stable. Perhaps I’m really a pessimist about all this, but again: personal experience. I’ll keep my cautious optimism up, and keep an eye out. I’m planning on watching Dying Breed and Cooties soon (two films with Leigh Whannell in them), so expect at least a short blurb on those two, and who knows? Maybe you’ll see something big about Spiral in the future. After all, if even a fizzle like SAW 3D can make me squirm even now, I think there’s a lot of hope to be had.

#saw 3d #saw the final chapter #saw

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tohellandbackanthology · 5 years ago

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Sign-ups now open!

art courtesy of @naruhearts

WHO WE ARE + WHAT WE WANT TO DO

Eight nerds. One television show. One city.

It was Dean and Cas who brought us together and now we’re bringing you an anthology as an ode to the Supernatural family we’ve built. This anthology, inspired by zines from fandom history, will feature fan creations made specifically for this project. Our group is passionate about transparency and diversity, and we are thrilled to announce an anthology project where every step of the anthology process will be made available to the public and where every creator, regardless of experience, followers or kudos counts, will be welcome and treated equally in the selection process!

Much like the way we first came together through fandom bangs and fests, destiel artists and authors will come together to collaborate on 33 stand-alone stories, each with an accompanying piece of artwork. Pieces will be previously unpublished and produced in correspondence with our anthology’s theme, To Hell + Back, recalling Castiel’s unforgettable words to Dean as he first entered the show:

I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition.

But wait! We’re not stopping there! Since we want to celebrate fandom and fan labour of all types, we decided that a physical book would just not be enough. We’re also offering a digital exclusive as an extra tier, and no, it’s not just the PDF copy of the print anthology! The digital exclusive will include new podfics, poetry, drabbles, and art that will not be available in the print book! Not to mention Supernatural-inspired fan-made merchandise, too!

All of these will be available in a bundle package and we aim to make every part of the anthology as affordable and accessible as possible.

THE PARTICIPANT SELECTION PROCESS + SCHEDULE

September 1, 2019: Sign-ups open. Everyone, regardless of experience, is encouraged to apply! All who do so receive a welcome e-mail within 72 hours and a link to submit a sample of their craft. All samples are anonymous so that selection of participants for the anthology is unbiased.

September 28, 2019: Sign-ups close. Those who have not submitted a sample work to us receive a 48-hour window to do so in order to complete the sign-up process.

September 30, 2019: Sample work submissions close. Anyone who hasn’t submitted a sample is assumed to have no further interest in the project.

Oct. 10 to Nov. 10, 2019: Round 1 of blind reads/viewing. One mod who does not participate in the reading/viewing process makes certain that all writing samples are anonymous and passes them on to round 1 reviewers. Round 1 reviewers come from outside of fandom. They read samples and note them for basic spelling and punctuation, coherence of plot, structure, and impact on audiences. They view art, noting creativity, aesthetics, style and quality.

Nov. 11 to Nov. 25, 2019: Round 2 of blind reads/viewing. The remaining seven moderators read/view the works that passed the first round of blind reads/views. They check for characterization and world-building as well as round 1 criteria, using their fandom experience to make the final selection of participants that will appear in the anthology.

December 1, 2019: Selection of anthology participants is announced.

The full schedule, leading up to the projected Oct. 2020 shipping date, can be found here.

See our Wiki for for the nitty-gritty details HERE! You are expected to read it in full before signing up.

Want to support this project? Please consider giving this post a reblog so that others can get in on the fun, too!

ARE YOU INTERESTED? Find below the cut: more information about anthology specifics, sample submission requirements + our policies.

GENERAL FAQ

1. Can I write/draw/create anything?

All content must adhere to our theme of “To Hell and Back.” You may interpret this as you wish, but keep in mind that if you apply for the print anthology, you will be working as a team with your writer/artist to decide how you will portray this in your work. The concept of the story and art will be a collaborative effort! For people interested in the digital exclusive anthology, you will likely be working individually, but you can have a co-creator if you wish. However, the mod team will not be pairing you up. You are responsible for finding a partner yourself and you must sign up separately.

2. How many people are you accepting for the anthology?

The short answer is A LOT! The print anthology will contain 33 previously unpublished stories and 33 full pages of art, including the moderator team who will be adding 7 stories + 1 art piece of their own.The digital exclusive will similarly contain many diverse types of creators: 10 drabble writers, 10 poets, 20 artists, and as many podficcers as we can get! Overall, this project will likely involve 106+ creators. We’re flexible and our policy is the more, the merrier!

3. Can I apply for both the print anthology and the digital exclusive?

No. Both parts of this project make up the whole that is called the To Hell + Back Anthology. As such, we want to include as many unique creators as we can and applicants should carefully consider which format their creations fit in best. Of course, in the future, if we do find a shortage for either part of the anthology, we may relax this rule. Creators wishing to make merch for the bundle packages will be able to volunteer at a later date.

4. What’s the difference between the print anthology and the digital exclusive?

Both parts of this project make up the whole that is called the To Hell + Back Anthology.

The print anthology will contain 33 short stories (1200-6000 words) and 33 full pages of accompanying art (1 page A4, minimum 300 DPI CMYK).

The digital exclusive will contain podfics (10-60 min. long), drabbles (maximum 1200 words), poetry (maximum 1200 words), and art (72 dpi and RGB).

No creator will be featured in both. You are allowed to apply to either the print or the digital. No works will be duplicated or copied to either version. Each part (print and digital) are equally important and all content creators will be held to the same standard to ensure consistent quality for both parts of the To Hell + Back Anthology.

Note: These requirements only apply to works that will be published in the anthology. Requirements for the length and quality of samples for the reviewers are different. Please refer to #8 for details.

5. Can I co-create?

Co-creators are allowed for the digital exclusive only. Print creators will be paired up through a draw (artist + writer team), and therefore, will already have a partner.

If you wish to co-write (digital) or co-art (digital), you may do so with one partner, with the understanding that if your partner must drop due to unforeseeable circumstances, you will be expected to finish the piece solo. Discuss who will be credited in the digital exclusive should this situation arise. You must sign up separately.

If you are a podficcer who does not write, you must sign up with a writer-partner. Please sign up separately. If you are a podficcer who does write but would prefer not to for the digital exclusive, you must sign up with a writer-partner. Sign up separately.

6. What is the content rating of the anthology?

The anthology (both print and digital) allows NSFW content. Of course, it does not allow for the depiction of sex between minors, bestiality or any other content that may break laws. All NSFW content must also be tagged. If we deem that your NSFW material is unacceptable for the anthology, you will be required to edit your work until it meets our standards or risk exclusion from the anthology.

The anthology covers (print and digital) will be SFW.

7. What is the content rating for sample submissions during sign-ups?

All sample submissions during sign-ups must be SFW so that our round 1 reviewers feel comfortable reading your work. If you have any concerns about this, contact the mods.

8. Okay, I’ve signed up. I’ve received the email with the link to submit my sample work for the reviewers. What are the requirements for submitting samples?

While the submission form will have your name, all samples pieces themselves must be submitted free of any identification. If you’re submitting a previously published piece of writing, please copy the story into a blank Google doc. and send it to us without your name on it. Therefore, there should be no links to AO3 or other sites. Artists, please remove watermarks or any other identifying info. on your art sample and then upload it as an attachment directly to part 2 of the application form! We promise that we won’t re-post them anywhere else!

If you are co-writing, each partner should submit a sample separately.

All samples, for both writers and artists, will be sent to us via a Google doc. If you have any trouble or are unsure how to do this, contact the mods.

***ALL SAMPLES MUST BE SFW***

Writers (print): 1000 - 2000 words of fic that showcase Dean and Cas’ profound bond. Can be an excerpt (with brief story summary), previously published or new. Story summaries that accompany excerpts are for context purposes—we'd like to be able to situate your sample in context! Can be a completed fic, previously published or new. No identifying information. Safe For Work.

Artists (print and digital): submit one fully completed piece of art (preferably in the style that you will be working with for the anthology). No watermarks or any other kind of directly identifying information is to be on this piece. Safe For Work!

Poets (digital): submit one piece of poetry of 200-800 words.

Drabble writers (digital): submit one drabble of 600-800 words.

Podficcers (digital): We do not have sample submissions for podfics, owing to how many few podficcers are within the fandom. Therefore, people who wish to podfic without experience are able to apply. However, we reserve the right to deny publication of the podfic. in the digital exclusive if the quality is not up to par and fixing said quality would delay shipping. Furthermore, podficcers must write their own fic. If you’re a podficcer who does not write fic, please sign-up with a writer whose work you would like to read. This writer's text will not be featured within either the physical anthology or the digital exclusive, as we would like podfics to remain audio-only content. However, we will feature them (and their AO3/social media) in our contributor list and credit both creators in our final pages! Regardless of these details, do not be deterred from applying! The mods will work especially hard with podficcers to smooth things out because we are super excited to see you featured in our digital exclusive!

9. Cool! I’m going to sign up. I’m going to submit a sample for the reviewers. If I’m accepted, what will be the requirements for my anthology piece?

Rating: All ratings are welcome, provided that the material does not break laws. Content must be tagged. You will be contacted by the mods if you have unsuitable material and advised on how to proceed.

Content: All content must be brand-new. It should not have been published anywhere else. It must adhere with our “to hell and back” theme.

Writers (print): one story of 1200-6000 words.

Artists (print): 1 page A4, minimum 300 DPI CMYK.

Poets (digital): as many poems as you wish, all of which combined reach a maximum of 1200 words. There is no minimum.

Drabble writers (digital): as many drabbles as you wish, all of which combined reach minimum 100 words, maximum 1200 words.

Artists (digital): 2 pages, 72 dpi and RGB.

Podficcers (digital): they should be between 10-60 min. long.

10. Can I post my work for the anthology online?

Yes, 4 months after the anthologies officially ship (projected shipping date is October 2020; therefore, you can expect to post your creations February 1, 2021. Before then, you are not allowed to post anthology content.

11. Can I post teasers about my work for the anthology to build up excitement?

No. We, the mod team, would like all promotions to come from us, and we have scheduled sneak-peeks and audience engagement to keep the momentum going. You are prohibited from discussing details of your work to the general public before the anthology ships.

12. Is there a Discord for creators?

Yes! It will open on December 1, 2019 when all participants are finalized.

Rules + Expectations (including for the mods!)

Before signing up and submitting your samples for the reviewers, you are expected to read the Wiki in full. It contains all important information and requirements necessary for your participation in the anthology. This Tumblr post is only a general overview; it does not include all information.

As always, all participants throughout every stage of the process are expected to be respectful and courteous of others. We want to send off this ode to the Supernatural fandom with love, not anger! If any issues every arise, the mods will be more than happy to help. We’re here for you!

Our Dedication to Transparency + Diversity:

Throughout the creation of this anthology, we are dedicated to transparency. You will always know what is being done with your money, and we will not spend a cent until we are certain that you will be satisfied with what you receive. On all our social media platforms, we will continually update with photos, videos, and other information about what is going on behind-the-scenes. Should any complication arise in the shipment schedule or any other aspect of the anthology, you will be the first to know.

Projected shipment is October 2020. Information on the fundraiser will become available in the coming months.

In this fandom, we have seen so many creators produce amazing work. We are passionate about treating everyone with equality, regardless of your experience. Whether you have 1 follower or 40,000, 1 kudos or 2498, 70 published pieces or none, we want you for our project and we’re excited to work with you. Please consider signing-up! We’re ecstatic to have you!

Read our mission statement HERE.

Still have questions or need clarification? Comments? Concerns? General excitement? You are most welcome to submit an ask, send us an email, tweet, or yell at us on Insta and we will respond as soon as possible!

#destiel #deancas #spnfamily #spn #destielfanficnet #ARE YOU EXCITED??#WE ARE EXCITED!!#please sign up!!#and don't forget to reblog this post so that others can get in on the fun too!

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ayuuria · 4 years ago

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Yashahime Translation: Animage Magazine September 2020 Issue

Please do not repost this translation without my consent! This includes screenshots of any type and amount. If you wish to share this translation, simply link to this post.

For more information regarding the use of my translations, click here.

This is an old article that was published back in August of 2020, before Yashahime began airing so please keep that in mind as you read this. I never translated this article until now so this is not a reprint or anything like that.

The Half-Demon Girls 2020 autumn SPOTLIGHT!

The feudal and modern era, the fantasy adventure that traverses the two time periods has started once again in the Reiwa period. The curtains will finally rise this fall on the feudal fairytale full of mystery and romanticism spun by three half-demon girls.

“Inuyasha” (original work by Takahashi Rumiko, published in Shōnen Sunday Comics) is an action adventure that was unfolded by a half-demon living in the feudal era named Inuyasha and a modern girl who time traveled to the feudal era named Higurashi Kagome. The anime ran from 2000 – 2004 and the depicts complex, jumbled human drama between humans and demons and the struggle for the Shikon Jewel. “Inuyasha The Final Act” was broadcasted from 2009 – 2010 which concluded the series and brought the curtains to a close.

Continuing that world and depicting a new adventure is “Hanyō no Yashahime”. Living in two different eras while still being twins are Towa and Setsuna, Sesshōmaru’s (Inuyasha’s elder brother) daughters. Then there’s Inuyasha and Kagome’s daughter, Moroha. These three girls who have both human and demon blood are the protagonists of this work. Why did these girls end up moving together? Who is Towa and Setsuna’s mother? Why are the three of them living separately from their parents?... Currently, the full story is wrapped in mystery.

This month, we went directly to Sumisawa Katsuyuki-san who was the series composition writer and script writer for “Inuyasha” and “Inuyasha The Final Act” and now for this current work as well. For the anime staff too, the feelings for the Inuyasha series seems to have strongly taken root even now.

Higurashi Towa Sesshōmaru’s daughter and Setsuna’s elder twin sister. She slipped through time when she was little and was raised as Sōta’s (Kagome’s younger brother) daughter. She tends to get into fights easily.

Setsuna Sesshōmaru’s daughter and Towa’s younger twin sister. However, she does not remember Towa whom she was separated from when they were little. She is a member of the demon slayers headed by Kohaku.

Moroha Inuyasha and Kagome’s daughter who has lived on her own since early childhood. She spends her days slaying demon bounties and takes the alias of “The monster killing Moroha”.

Sesshōmaru’s Two Daughters

Cool and beautiful, the proud and cool-headed Sesshōmaru was a prominently popular character in “Inuyasha”. His daughters, Towa and Setsuna, also have traces of him about them. “Setsuna and Towa strongly inherited Sesshōmaru’s “Yin” and “Yang” respectively. For that purpose, when thinking about their image, Rumiko-sensei also stated, “Please forget about the mother’s existence for now” (Sumisawa)

Behind the Character Creation

The character designs for Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha were done by Takahashi Rumiko-sensei. “At the beginning, Rumiko-sensei told us “I can’t draw a character if I don’t understand them”. The designs depicted here are the result of finally getting the OK after presenting many setting plans from our end.” (Sumisawa)

The Characters of “Inuyasha” Too

Sōta, who is the parent who raises Towa, is a familiar existence to “Inuyasha” fans. In addition, Kohaku, who is the head of the demon slayer group that Setsuna is a part of, is the little brother of Sango who is Inuyasha’s comrade. He was also an important character who held the key to the struggle for the Shikon Jewel. Will other characters from “Inuyasha” make an appearance besides them?

The Feudal Fairytale Going Between Two Eras Series Composition: Sumisawa Katsuyuki

— First, please tell us the details of how this work came about.

Sumisawa: Over 3 years ago, the producer for anime “Inuyasha”, Suwa Michihiko, said to me “I want you to write a continuation for “Inuyasha””. I thought “Goodness, what is this person saying” (laughs). Afterall, “Inuyasha” was concluded. Takahashi Rumiko-sensei is a perfect original creator so there wasn’t a single unanswered thing. I don’t think there are many mangas that conclude so beautifully and properly that it’s deeply moving. On top of that, I wrote the script for the anime called “Inuyasha The Final Act” and brought it to an end myself, so depicting something beyond that is impossible.

— What sort of story direction did Suwa-san come up with?

Sumisawa: When I also asked back “Inuyasha and Kagome don’t have any problems, the Bone Eater’s Well (which connects the modern and feudal era) can no longer be traversed, Naraku was defeated and the Shikon Jewel is gone. What sort of story would we make?” and he responded, “Coming up with (a story) is your job isn’t it” (laughs).

— That is a very unreasonable request (laughs).

Sumisawa: Yes. That’s why I put it on the backburner for over 2 years after that. It’s just that when I was invited to and attended an anime event in Washington D.C, there was a person there cosplaying the Great Dog Demon (Inuyasha and Sesshōmaru’s father). That person said to me “Please hurry and make a sequel to “Inuyasha”!”. It seems that even now, they felt that “Inuyasha” was still a passionate real time work. With that, what I came up with after rethinking “Maybe I can write something with this” was “the story of Sesshōmaru’s daughter”.

— Why Sesshōmaru’s child instead of Inuyasha and Kagome’s child?

Sumisawa: When the work features the child of the protagonist as the main character, the parents steal show when they make an appearance. Even Rumiko-sensei analyzed that “Even if you make it a story about Inuyasha’s son confronting some incident, you can’t surpass the method in which the problem was resolved in the work “Inuyasha”, so it’s impossible”. In that case, I suggested to Rumiko-sensei “If it’s Sesshōmaru’s daughter, it would be a different development”.

— What was Takahashi-san’s reaction when she heard that idea?

Sumisawa: At first, she was unsure like “Hmm” for a long time. It’s only natural. Among the characters that Rumiko-sensei created, Sesshōmaru was a character that she had a strong emotional attachment to. However, she told me “But if it’s Sumisawa-san, it might be doable” and I said, “Please allow me to do this!”. I was grateful that Rumiko-sensei trusted me. I strongly felt that I had to live up to that trust. Actually, I thought of an idea where the setting would be the “modern era” and Sesshōmaru’s daughters would fight demons with Sesshōmaru being mostly uninvolved. However, that didn’t work at all. Now, I’m embarrassed at myself for coming up with that plan.

— That sounds entertaining in it of itself.

Sumisawa: No. First, the atmosphere wouldn’t be serious. Also, if you don’t have the component of going between the feudal and modern eras, it wouldn’t be the “Inuyasha” world. If you only have one (era), it wouldn’t be “a feudal fairytale”.

— Then, how was the title “Hanyō no Yashahime” decided?

Sumisawa: We didn’t really struggle to come up with this title. Rumiko-sensei invented the word "half-demon” (half human and half demon), so “HANYO” is understood overseas. Thus, we purposely put this globally understood word “half-demon” into the title. “Yashahime” is used in other (works) as well, so our aim was to put something in front. The “feudal fairytale” in the logo “Is like what “mobile suit” is to “Gundam”” as Sunrise’s Ogata Naohiro-san put it.

— So it becomes a new feudal fairytale with the half-demon girls as the main characters.

Sumisawa: The thing is, I said earlier that “Inuyasha” was a manga that didn’t leave a single thing unanswered, but actually, there’s a little bit of content that wasn’t shown in the anime. For example, when Rumiko-sensei did a one-time revival of “Inuyasha” for the Great East Japan Earthquake revitalization support project, “Heroes Come Back”. This was published in volume 30 of the “Inuyasha” Wide Edition comics. That and to show “Inuyasha The Final Act” within the episode limit, we ended up not touching some of the episodes (within the manga). So I thought I had to write those in.

— Currently, the two biggest questions fans have been focused on are “Why are Inuyasha, Kagome, and Sesshōmaru not raising their children?” and “Who is Sesshōmaru’s wife?”

Sumisawa:

Yes. I can’t answer that here, but under Takahashi Rumiko-sensei’s supervision, there’s no way we would leave out those very important topics. Of course, these are properly shown in the main story so look forward to seeing it. Please be at ease.

#yashahime #hanyou no yashahime #yashahime: princess half demon #translation

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wellesleyunderground · 4 years ago

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Wellesley Underground Interview with Founders (Sara Hess ‘08 and Shavanna Calder ‘08) of Feminist Fashion & Beauty Magazine, MUJER!

Need a break from the politics? Dive into the making of Issue No.2 of MUJER! Magazine. Interview by Camylle Fleming ‘14.

1. Wellesley Underground (WU): Tell us about the origin of MUJER! Magazine and bring us up to speed on the November launch.

Sara Hess ‘08, Editor in Chief: MUJER! has been a long time coming for us. Ever since Shavanna and I were swapping clothes from each other’s closets when we were roommates at Wellesley, we’ve had an interest in fashion and over the years we’d often played around with the idea of doing a fashion related project together. MUJER! came about in late 2017 when I had reached a point of being really frustrated with fashion magazines (all of the ads and the Photoshop, the lack of any real content and focus on hyper consumption). I also was disappointed to see that several of the fashion bloggers I’d followed over the years and enjoyed for their authenticity were following the same route as they transitioned from blogs to Instagram and started posting highly stylized Photoshopped pics that were all sponsored and very phony. Finally, I had recently turned 30 and it then occurred to me that I was older than nearly all the models I saw in the major fashion publications, which is insane when you think about it. I told Shavanna what I was thinking of doing-- a feminist fashion and beauty mag, all models 25+, no Photoshop on their faces or bodies, more racial and ethnic diversity, a focus on more sustainable production and consumption and no ads. Shavanna is an amazing stylist and has a great eye for design so I was super excited when she agreed to be creative director. I was living between Mexico City and New York at the time. I had developed some contacts in the fashion industry in Mexico and really admired the fashion scene there, which is one of the reasons we went with the name MUJER! It took us about 6-7 months to produce the content for the first print edition which was published in September 2018.

2.WU: How did fashion and beauty become sites of contestation and rebellion for you two?

Sara: I grew up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania and was constantly getting in trouble for breaking the dress code at my public school. It’s ironic because I was definitely a major nerd-- not your typical rebel. In junior high, I was really upset to find out I had not been accepted to the National Junior Honor Society. I asked one of my teachers why and he told me that it was because the shorts that I wore to school were often too short. Honestly, it was not my intention to be risque. I was just awkwardly going through puberty and had legs that were too long for my body and it was impossible to find shorts that were long enough and didn’t look dorky. After that, I went through a punk rocker phase, where again clothing is a form of rebellion. I was totally into the early Gwen Stefani punk looks. I would get picked on a lot by classmates but then a few months later everyone would be wearing what I had been wearing before, which would be my cue to change styles because I never wanted to look like everyone else. For me, it became a way to stand out and to push back against conservative influences.

Shavanna Calder ‘08, Creative Director: I can’t say that I’ve thought of fashion for most of my life as a site of rebellion. I just wore what I liked and (especially as a kid) what was on trend.

I had hip surgery 5 years ago and have struggled to be able to wear heels after that. In some ways that forced me to rethink how to dress for formal situations (without heels). Though I am working towards wearing heels again through physical therapy (my profession requires it), I’ve found a certain level of pride in showing other women that we can still look dressed up/professional etc. without wearing heels. Also embracing flatforms has been fun!

I think beauty, more so, has always been a site of contestation and rebellion for me as a Black woman. Growing up and having hair that was different than most of my friends. Makeup and hair supplies that we had to drive an extra distance for. Reading different magazines than my friends because teen vogue (at that time), seventeen etc never catered to me (thank God for Essence). Now, being natural, my hair oftentimes is a point of rebellion/contestation as I educate and ask for the things that I need as a Black artist instead of accepting the burden of sitting in silence.

Founders Shavanna + Sara (above)

3. WU: On social media, you’ve discussed the initiative of “showing women as they actually exist in the world”. Can you describe some of the images you two grew up with and how they are in conversation with MUJER!

Shavanna: In some ways growing up when I did, I feel like I did get to see images of women (more often) without photoshop and a ton of contouring etc because that just wasn’t on trend. It’s one thing I miss about the early 2000’s. That being said, the rest of the content oftentimes centered around ways to get men, look flirty etc etc. For us I think “showing women as they actually exist in the world” goes beyond imaging to the content of the magazine (the stories and issues that are discussed) as well as the lack of harmful ads encouraging women to alter their bodies by buying certain products etc. We are able to highlight a diverse group of female identifying folx and the complexity of us instead of the monolith that I often see portrayed.

4. WU: What are the ways in which your Mexico City base contributes to the core principles of MUJER!

Sara: Mexico City is just my heart and soul. I don’t know how else to describe it. It makes me turn to mush as though I’m talking about someone I’m in love with. The creative and design scene here is out of this world funky and unique and I really feel that I can wear anything going out here at night. People are elegant and cool and put a great deal of thought into how they present themselves. The fashion scene is authentic and fun and nowhere near as pretentious as it is in other parts of the world. We try to reflect this creativity and sincerity in MUJER! as well.

Shavanna: Additionally I’ll say that people have really embraced us there. There is an openness, flexibility and sense of collaboration that has made it super easy to throw any ideas we have out there and run with it (more than I’ve seen in other parts of the world).

5. WU: For those of us who are new to publication production, can you walk us through the steps of creating content, finding models, artwork, all without the filler of advertisements?

Sara: We are also new to magazine production, ha! We started by basically bringing together people we knew from the fashion world here in Mexico City. I have a dear friend, Jenny. She’s a stylist from Sweden and was working on the sets of reality shows here so she kind of kicked me into gear to do the first beauty shoot. She had a lot of experience doing shoots so she helped me get a great photographer and scout a location and models. We’ve really been blessed with meeting all of the right people at the right moment. We found a wonderful lead graphic designer, Celina Arrazola who happened to know the neighborhood where all the printers are and was an expert in hand binding books. Advertisements were never an option so we self-finance the production, which was and is intense.

Shavanna: Yes, as Sara mentioned we’re incredibly new to this and are (honestly) still figuring a lot out as we go. However, generally we come up with ideas/stories together that excite us, that we haven’t seen in other fashion magazines. We then reach out to female identifying folx to help us realize these ideas (because we want to support female entrepreneurs as well). The hardest part will be figuring out how to make it sustainable (and take the more of the financial burden off of Sara) and we’re in the process of sorting that out the best way we can!

5a. WU: Okay, same question. Add COVID, go:

Sara: Now, because of COVID, our plans to do another print edition were derailed so we decided to do a digital edition-- everyone featured sent in their own photos and instead of printing we created a PDF version of the magazine, with Celina’s excellent graphic design of course.

It essentially made printing the way we did with the first edition impossible. That was a very manual process that involved visiting the printer in person multiple times and Celina handbound the magazine, with me struggling to be useful to her by folding the pages. This time we went all digital.

Shavanna: In addition we had to become creative since we could no longer conduct shoots or interviews in person. Everything was done via email (except for Sultana’s shoot which happened pre-COVID). All other photos were submitted by the women in the issue. Whilst I missed many aspects of being in person, in some ways the challenge allowed us to lean in to our mission of showing women as we truly are. It also allowed for us to have a remote intern via Wellesley which was awesome!

6. WU: How do you want to grapple with the plurality of feminism(s) in the pages of the magazine?

Shavanna: By being truly intentional about seeking out diverse voices. By celebrating those voices and by taking our readers feedback to heart. Outside of the folx who are interviewed or featured in our magazine we attempt to employ women in the creation of the physical product as well (design, photography etc). The end result is something that has been touched by women from various parts of the world and from different walks of life.

7. WU: Can you share the story of how the magazine gained its title? How do you respond to any pushback and claims of appropriation from Latinx individuals for your usage of the word “Mujer”?

Sara: For starters, we were founded in Mexico City and at least half of our readers are native Spanish speakers. The publication, like many of its readers, is also bilingual. For the interviews and articles that are originally done in Spanish, we leave them in Spanish, only translating key quotes into English and vice versa for pieces that are originally in English. The title is also a global call to women that goes beyond the English-language paradigm.

8.WU: The fashion and beauty industry can carry both an air of superficiality and apoliticism. Tell us what people get wrong about the experience of working within it.

Sara: I think this is hard for us to get into because we are not really working in the fashion and beauty industry-- we are working parallel to it and trying to pick the piece we enjoy while also creating something new and different for women that makes them feel empowered, not inadequate.

Shavanna: Yes neither Sara nor I really work within the industry (nor have we prior to the magazine). I’ve worked as a stylist from time to time, but that’s about it. For the most part we’ve been consumers who were unhappy with what we were consuming and figured we could do something about it.

9. WU: In an effort to not over-glorify the value of success and “making it”, let’s talk about failure. Can you share with our readers what went wrong in the process of producing MUJER!?

Sara: Before our Chilanga shoot, Shavanna and I got horrible food poisoning. Like, nearly had to go to the hospital.

Shavanna: Yes we were living on pepto bismol and had just started eating plain bread and pasta the day of our shoot, but we powered through! Honestly this magazine has felt like a contribution to society that we were meant to be a part of, so despite obstacles that have come up, we know that we can’t be sidetracked.

10. WU: How do you react to the “self-care” trend and it’s correlation to the consumption of beauty products? Relatedly, how do you two take care of yourselves?

Sara: I’m an introvert who fakes being an extrovert, but I definitely know I need alone time so I try to make space for that. As of late, I try to use more natural/ organic beauty products and just less of everything period. Also sleep. Sleep is so important. Finally, I’ve decided I will deal with drama in my professional life because I feel like that’s where I’m making a contribution that’s important but I try to minimize drama in my personal life as much as possible.

Shavanna: I try to take care of myself by reminding myself that rest is ok and necessary (so hard). Practicing my faith/meditation. Asking for what I need. Going to therapy (physical and mental health). Exercising. Connecting with loved ones (friends and family). Being kind to myself.

11. WU: As a follower of your Insta page, I find myself lingering on your original posts, staring into the faces of the individuals you capture. It makes me realize how my brain has been trained to see the same faces featured in public spaces, so much so that they’ve become invisible. Can you share the favorite photos that you’ve captured and why they stand out to you?

Shavanna: My favorite photos are of Wellesley alumna Solonje Burnett. I’ve always admired Solonje’s fearlessness and creativity and I think we truly captured her essence in these. Though she is beautiful, the interview is about so much more and highlights her as the complex, multifaceted woman that she is (instead of just her beauty routine or what her house looks like).

12. WU: What does the day in the life of an Editor-in-Chief look like? How about a Creative Director?

Shavanna: We’re very collaborative. I don’t think we really have hard and fast rules as to who does what necessarily as much as it’s a partnership. One of us will propose an idea (in between juggling the rest of our lives) and we’ll discuss pros and cons and greenlight what works best and aligns with our values. We also just hold each other accountable. Right now there isn’t a typical day in the life as well just because we both have other jobs (though it would be amazing for Mujer! to continue to take off in a way that allowed us to devote more time to it).

13. WU: Both of you currently have worked with higher education institutions (Harvard + NYU). Can you tell us a bit about your “day jobs” and the types of opportunities they have afforded you in relation to the Magazine?

Sara: While I was working at HBS, I co-authored a case study on Monocle magazine which has helped to inform some of our thinking around the business model for MUJER!

Shavanna: I worked for almost 7 years at NYU, first at Stern and then within the Faculty of Arts & Science. In terms of opportunities? I’d say actually, for me, anyway the two aren’t related. My time at NYU influenced my acting career more so than Mujer! by giving me some flexibility and certainly financial stability.

14. WU: Lastly - a question you ask your features in the upcoming digital issue: how have you been gentle with yourself during this time?

Sara: Uff, I have been eating a lot of ice cream and taking breaks when I need to. I turned off the New York Times news alerts on my phone. I still read the news everyday but this has helped a lot.

Shavanna: Uff indeed. Hm sometimes I remind myself that the fact that I’m functioning is enough. This quote from Audre Lorde has been getting me through: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Working out and going for walks, journaling, therapy, being in touch with my spirituality, limiting myself on social media (or at least certain groups or accounts), listening to my body in terms of what it wants (whether that be food or change of environment). Talking to friends when I have the energy always brightens my day and constantly reminding myself to take things one moment/day at a time. This is all incredibly hard and I’m grateful to those who have been gentle with me when I struggle to be gentle with myself.

Check out the MUJER! Covid-19 digital issue here: https://www.mujerrev.com/mujer-sale Given the increase in domestic violence and gender based violence around the world during the pandemic, a portion of the proceeds from the issue will go to two organizations helping womxn that are survivors of domestic abuse and human trafficking: Women of Color Network - Blue Lips Campaign and El Pozo de Vida.

MUJER! Homepage: https://www.mujerrev.com/ MUJER! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mujerrev/

#wellesleyunderground #wellesley college #mujermagazine #fashion #beauty

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feralismyheart · 5 years ago

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Rest In Peace, Mel Baggs <3

I didn’t know Mel Baggs well, just through tumblr posts, and then hir contributing to the first issue of my Autistic compilation zine (started on tumblr in #actuallyautistic), No Missing Pieces Zine. Partly since I love hir poem, and partly because sie wrote a great, fairly extensive contributor bio to go along with it, I thought I would share the poem sie contributed in hopes y’all will love it as much as I do.

Rest in peace, Mel. You are so very missed. Thank you so much for everything. <3 <3 <3

If you reblog this, please leave this post in tact out of respect for Mel and to credit the zine sie was a part of.

(Note - I’ve added periods to break up hir contribution a bit on here & break it away from the rest of the post for accessibility & to have it stand out more. Otherwise, no edits.)

Contributor Bio: Mel Baggs is 34 years old. Sie was born in the redwoods of California, grew up in San Jose, lived in the redwoods again as an adult, and moved to Vermont in 2005, where sie currently lives. Hir biggest hobby is crocheting, and sie always has several projects going on at once. Sie has been involved with the autistic community since sie was almost 18 years old, and has seen a lot of history and changes even over that short period of time. Sie has also been involved in other aspects of the disability rights movement: The psychiatric survivor/consumer/ex-patient movement, the mainstream (mostly physical) disability rights movement, and the developmental disability self-advocacy movement. Sie is not one of those people who is always finding a movement or community and feeling as if sie has come home for the first time. But if sie had to pick one of these movements, sie would pick the developmental disability self-advocacy movement. Sie has been in the developmental disability service system hir entire adult life, due to severe problems with daily living skills. This may make hir more emotionally connected to the experiences of people in general with developmental disabilities, rather than autism in particular. Sie has a number of disabilities and chronic health issues that make hir more aware of autism as it fits into a broader concept of the landscape of disability, rather than being a unique condition that is different from disability somehow. Sie also loves cats, and lives with an elderly and amazing cat named Fey. Hir experiences as an autistic person, particularly hir perceptual differences from the norm, are highly meaningful to hir and sie would not change them even if it meant sie would be more ‘independent’.

Sie has a poetry blog at: http://ameliabaggs.wordpress.com/ Sie also has a blog at: http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/ Hir tumblr is: http://withasmoothroundstone.tumblr.com/

In 2000, a group of autism parents decided to hold a rally in Washington D.C. to “raise awareness” for an autism cure. They did not consult with autistic adults anytime during the process. They did collect as many pictures of autistic children as they could, to show how many of us existed. And worst of all, they called the rally “Hear Their Silence,” the message being that only parents could talk about autism, autistic people were silent and only fit to be present as silent faces on posters. The following poem is my response to the title of their rally:

You Can’t Hear My Silence

They told the world to hear our silence Hear the silence of the mute autistic people Who will never have a voice of any kind Presumed, by them, to be all of us Or all of us who matter And they, of course, would speak for us All of us At all

I wish they could hear silence I wish they could listen to silence until they heard it

Silence is The gap between your words Silence is The void between you and me Silence is The place where everything begins Silence is The place where the universe hides Silence is Everything there is, and nothing Silence is Where I’d rather be Silence is Where you’ll find all of me that matters

But you’ll never hear my silence Because you don’t know how to listen To things you can’t hear

#mel baggs #rest in peace #actuallyautistic #actually autistic #actuallydd

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harvestgatenetwork-blog · 5 years ago

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The Harvest Gate Podcast - Episode 1

Below is a written transcript of Episode 1 of The Harvest Gate Podcast.

Now available on harvestgate.org/podcast , Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app or service.

New episodes every Sunday at 6AM.

Episode 1: What is Harvest Gate?

*Intro Music*

Greg: Hey this is Greg

Zack: And Zack

Greg: Welcome to the very first Harvest Gate Podcast. We are delighted to be talking to you about this project. And we’re excited to welcome you to our very first podcast, we’re going to be talking about Harvest Gate, tracking our growth and development, keeping you up to date on events and news that’s going on. But for this very first episode, we want to take some time to introduce ourselves, Harvest Gate and everything about this project. So Zack why don’t you start, tell us a little about yourself.

Zack: Yea, my name is Zack Morgan. I am a pastor here in Newark, Ohio. I’ve lived in this area for pretty much my entire life. I spent 6 years away in the air force and I came back to the church that I grew up in as a pastor which was an interesting dynamic. I’ve had some great leaders that have guided me along the way and have helped shape a lot of my thinking, a lot of my behaviors. It has led to this really cool…what I believe is the vision of Harvest Gate that I’m excited to talk about with you Greg.

Greg: I’m excited too! We’ll dig deeper into exactly what Harvest Gate is and where that idea came from. But first, do you want to tell everyone a bit about how we met and our relationship, how we got here?

Zack: Yea. That is a fun story. About a year and a half ago I was playing on a church softball team and Greg and his wife Emily came to the game and that was an interesting dynamic about how you came in the first place.

Greg: Yea, I mean, it is a funny story as well. We didn't really know you guys, we didn't have any connection to your church, even though its less than a mile from our house. We had a mutual friend that Emily knows from a group of ladies that she meets with, that her husband played some game that I played and said, "Hey, we should get together and hang out!". They invited us to play softball and I think at some point we discovered a mutual affection for tennis, which sort of led into, how can we get some exercise outside of softball, let's meet up on Fridays for tennis.

Zack: And what Greg didn't tell me is that he's a really good tennis player and I kind of just played for just for fun. So Greg and I started playing tennis, and that was really fun, but then the weather got cold so we started getting coffee and so we started getting coffee. We've been getting coffee for about a year.

Greg: Yea, over a year.

Zack: One of the fun dynamics between our relationship, I'm a pastor obviously, but Greg is not a follower of the Christian way. He believes what I would call the Christian ethic but does not identify as a Christian himself. Greg, would you talk about that a little bit?

Greg: You know, I think everyone has their, sort of journey or path that they've been on. I grew up going to church and while I think I didn't totally buy-in to everything about it, I really picked up on Christian values and how you treat other people. Treating people with kindness and loving people even if you have differences with them. It's been certainly a topic of conversation and discussion in my marriage where my wife is a very strong believer and I'm less so, but we agree on wanting to pass on those values to our son, in a way that is impactful and meaningful for him in his life. The thing that meant a lot to me about our relationship, and getting coffee, and talking and all the conversations that we had is that I never felt this pressure, that I was any less than anyone else because I didn't believe in it. We could have honest conversations about what we thought about or how we felt about things and there wasn't any judgement or pressure like, "We'd be better friends if you were a believer" or something like that.

Zack: And I just love you authenticity, you don't pretend to be something you aren't. In honesty, apart from Tennis and Coffee, there's not a whole lot that we share in common, but we've developed a really good friendship, I would consider you one of my best friends.

Greg: Yea, absolutely.

Zack: Can you tell me a little bit about why, as a non-believer, why you would want to join a church plant? I love it. I'm also really intrigued by it.

Greg: When you outline it that way it doesn't make a ton of sense. I think it's a combination of several things. My wife's passion for the project is really exciting and that gets me really excited about it. But also, I look at not just the church side of it but all the positive impact you're trying to have in and around central Ohio and the long term vision of how that can grow. It appeals to me because there are too many things in our world these days that are negative, that divide people when we would really come together to do good things, regardless of what we believe or how we feel about certain things. Why not try and make a positive impact.

Zack: You and I have had this conversation before. I believe that this is what the Kingdom is all about. Whether you are a believer or not a believer, coming together to bring about God's redemptive work to the world. You can do that whether you are a believer in Jesus and his ways or not. Greg, does this seem like a good time to talk about what's going on with Harvest Gate, how we got to this point?

Greg: Yea, let's dig in a little deeper on what Harvest Gate is, what exactly it is that we're talking about our involvement in then we can maybe we can get into our related experience and what we're bringing to the project.

Zack: I'll try to be brief about this but my story with church planting goes back to 2009. In 2009, my wife and I, Liz, were in a church in Florida while I was in the military and our church was wanting to start small groups and at the time I had just fallen in love with everything church. I wanted everything to do with the church. I heard they were doing small groups and I said, "OH! Can I lead one?" They said sure, and I said, what is a small group? So they kind of laid it out. I said, "Is there a curriculum or anything like that, that I need to go by?" No. Being the naive, young man I was, I thought, well I only have the bible to go off of so that's a good start.

So I remember in Acts, chapter 2, there is a part where it says, "And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the breaking of bread, to fellowship and to receiving of the lord's supper." And in verse 47 it says, "and the lord added daily, to their numbers, those who are being saved."

So I was like, alright, well I guess we'll just go with this. Our small group started out with 8 people and like every church in America in the 2000's our slogan was, "Love God, Love People and Server your world."

I went through that passage and I said, "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, that would be 'Love God'."

And to fellowship, that's 'Love People' and broke it down that way. Our group started out with 8 people and within about 3 months we were averaging 35 people or so.

Greg: Wow!

Zack: That group became church for people. We did communion, we did worship, we did teaching, we ate a lot, we laughed a lot, we cried a lot and it just became beautiful. It was at that point where I felt, looking back in hindsight, I had no idea what church planting was, I was like, "Oh we should just start a church!"

Greg: Yea

Zack: And by god's grace we didn't because I was an idiot back then...I'm still an idiot, but less so.

Greg: And humble.

Zack: Yes. I lacked humility back then and it was a piece of pride for me. So that's where my heart for church planting began and then we'll fast forward. In 2014, I got out of the military, I became a pastor at the church where I'm currently serving here in Newark.

In 2016, at the behest of my lead pastor, who is a multiplication guru, he encouraged me to do a church planters assessment and so, Liz and I went through a 2 or 3 day thing.

Greg: Liz, your wife, of course.

Zack: Yes, Liz is my wife. So its a 3 day journey where, basically, you're being...interrogated is not the right word...interviewed about your life and your life experience for probably 8 hours a day. Ultimately what they said, they give you 3 options, they say, "Yes, you possess the qualities to be a lead church planter right now."

"Yes, you do possess these things but you need some significant training or coaching."

or "No".

Liz and I received a no, sorry, we received a yes! We were ecstatic! That was in 2016. We left there thinking, "Yea, this is awesome, still feeling called to church planting but we don't feel released from where it is we're currently serving."

So in 2017, I went to a church planters conference in Florida, called Exponential, which I feel now is a great time to plug Exponential. If you are interested in church planting or multiplication or discipleship, Exponential is a fantastic conference that I highly recommend, it is the largest gathering of church planters and multipliers around the world. Something like 5000 people come out to that.

It was there at Exponential that I met a fellow church planter, who was actually doing it, I felt like an imposter because I hadn't actually planted a church. But I met him, his name is Cory Dorian, he is out in Washington or Oregon area. He got permission from his district to buy a house in a neighborhood. Basically, they just did a house church and their ministry, their vision, was to do everything in their neighborhood for the neighborhood.

They met in their house but they did all their shopping, all their haircutting, everything happened in their neighborhood.

So i asked Cory, "This is fantastic! But what are you doing, how are you finding that you can support yourself apart from being paid by the district."

Greg: Financially.

Zack: Financially, right. And he said, "Uhh, I haven't figured that out yet."

I loved that vision but it felt like all the wind was let out of the sails because it's like, well, I'm not going to be able to find a district or a place...I'm not going to be able to find a sugar daddy essentially...

Greg: And that's important for you because you have a wife, you have 3 kids...

Zack: Yea!

Greg: You've got to support that whole household as well.

Zack: And if I had a really rich Uncle or something like that who, what was that movie, Baxter's Millions? Brewster's Millions? Richard Prior? It was a great movie, anyways!.

But that was not the case for me. I started dreaming, "How could we do this?" And I was reminded, I feel like God reminded me of this, that I had a dream to open a coffeehouse before I was called into ministry, but once I was called into ministry I thought, "Well, that dream is just going to have to die."

And so I let that go and hopped into ministry.

But here in 2017 at Exponential I feel like God gave me a dream to marry both the marketplace and the church together. God gave me this vision, I called home, I called Liz, and I said, "Liz. God gave me this vision, here's the vision."

And she said, "Well its great that he gave you that vision, but he did not give that to me."

Greg: Uh oh.

Zack: Liz continued, "If he wants us to do this, he's going to have to talk to me about that."

Again, all the wind out of my sails.

Greg: Yea.

Zack: At that point, I put church planting in my back pocket and I thought, "Well, maybe one day down the road, 10 or 20, 30 years from now, God will let us plant a church."

Greg: Yea.

Zack: So in 2018, Liz and I began the process of becoming missionaries, to go to Vienna, Austria. It was a great process, it was about a 9 month process where we went through that application process. Through that we were getting lots of affirmations from the people who would have essentially benefited from it, the people who would be sending us. But what we were missing were affirmations from people who were close to us, like our family and our spiritual mentors, who were surrounding us.

For the last 4 years, I've been working on my Master's of Divinity with a specialization in church planting and multiplication through Wesley Seminary. One of the classes I had to take for my specialization was a class called "Launch"

By this point in the story, we're in 2019, January of 2019.

Greg: About a year ago.

Zack: About a year ago. Almost to the day. One of the first assignments was, give an autobiography of your experience or your involvement with church planting and multiplication. I essentially was typing out everything that I just shared, "Oh I felt called to plant a church 10 years ago...here it is...10 years later...haven't planted...woe is me."

As I am writing that paper, I get a text message from my pastor, Chris Dyer, and he says, "Zack, do you still feel called to plant a church?"

And I was like, "........Yes."

And he said, "Because I have been talking with Ed Love, who is the director of multiplication for the Wesleyan church, and he thinks that I just need to push you out of the nest and let you fly."

Greg: Mmhmm...works for birds.

Zack: Works for birds! I remember I screen-shotted it and sent it to Liz and remember, we're still going through the process of trying to become missionaries at this point. I sent it to Liz and I said, "So things might be changing."

And little did we know, that moment set us on a course to birth what we are now talking about, Harvest Gate. So that's what kind of led us to this moment. That class was an amazing class, it helped us put essentially to paper, everything that had been in my head and had been ethereal, had now become a reality.

Greg: It's been a long journey, there's been a lot of things that have sort of led you to that point. Now that we're here, define Harvest Gate. What is Harvest Gate? You talked about the coffeehouse, the house churches, package those together for us, for the listener and explain what that is.

Zack: Yea, so it's interesting. I grew up in what I would call a traditional kind of church. And I'm not talking about the music necessarily. It's a place where you go on a given day of the week and that's what we called church. But as I've studied the scriptures and as I've studied church history and things like that, what I have found is that the movement of God's people often happens in homes.

What we say at Harvest Gate, what would be our mission statement essentially is, "Connecting faith to families, communities and marketplaces."

I heard some statistics a few years ago, and these numbers aren't exactly correct but they are close enough. Again, I believe I was at Exponential. And I heard a pastor say this, he said, "83% of pastors, in the last 12 months, do not have any friends who are non-church goers." And that broke my heart.

Another thing he said is, "Something like 63% of pastors, in the last 12 months, have not personally led someone to Jesus."

I remember thinking, "We have to do something that is different!" If we're trying to tell our people that they need to be loving their neighbor and caring for their neighbor and loving those who are different than them and loving those who have different ideologies, how are we going to teach them these things if we ourselves aren't doing these things.

Greg: Yea!

Zack: Which again is another reason why I love our relationship because we don't agree on everything.

Greg: It really is a relationship that, in my head, wouldn't make sense. Because I have often felt uncomfortable at church. I've had a handful of interactions where somebody comes up to you and says, "Oh, are you saved?!" and it sort of feels aggressive and an invasion of...Well, I can choose to believe what I want to believe. I don't necessarily want to share that with everyone, though I obviously am now...

It is an interesting dynamic about how we got here and how it just works. And there is no...I don't ever feel that uncomfortable pressure or bias towards believes versus non-believes or something like that. I can just be whoever I am. Thanks for that!

Zack: And that doesn't mean that we don't talk about spiritual matters.

Greg: Yea!

Zack: I've told you before, if I didn't want you to believe what I believe, then what I believe is not actually worth it. Or I'm just a jerk for not wanting you to believe that.

Actually, Greg, the reason that we are doing our church is exactly for people like you, who have been hurt by the church, burned by the church, who don't want to associate. I'm not saying you don't necessarily want to associate with church.

Greg: Sure.

Zack: People who just feel disenfranchised. There have been some studies, some more anecdotal, some more legitimate, that have said, "If the church as it stands now, as it is traditionally configured, were to operate at a 100%, we would only reach about 40% of the population."

When I say traditional church, I'm talking about brick and mortar church, where you go to a certain place on a certain day of the week and if you're really spiritual, one other time throughout the week. Maybe you're part of a small group or something like that.

So we have roughly 95% of churches in America, who are going after 40% (of the population), while maybe 5% are going after the other 60% of people. Harvest Gate, I believe, is a church that wants to go after the 60%. Those people who will never step foot into a traditional type of church.

We want to engage people in what we would call the third place of life. I remember reading a book called, "The Story of Christianity" by Husto Gonzalez, who is a really famous church historian. There is a passage in there that really just struck me. He said this, he said, "In truth, most missionary work was not carried out by the apostles but rather by the countless and nameless Christians, who for different reasons, persecution, business or missionary calling, traveled from place to place taking the news of the gospel with them."

As I was thinking about that and pondering that, I couldn't help but to think, Paul became a tent maker, he used his tent making to build relationships with people and used that to share the gospel.

His partners in ministry, Pricilla and Aquila, were tent makers. You have Lydia, who was the first one, the first person baptized in Europe and there is a church that met in her home. She was a seller of fine, purple linen. The writer of the book Luke and Acts, Luke, was a physician. Each of these people used their vocation in order to pastor people, essentially. And that is where the idea of Harvest Gate came from.

What we want to do is open a coffeehouse where we can engage people in the third place of life. There was a book written called "The Great Good Place" and it identifies 3 different places of life. You have the first place which is home, the second place which is work and the third place which is, kind of defined by neutral ground, it is a place where everyone feels welcome, it is a level place. Conversation is the main activity. It is easily accessible and there is accommodation for everybody. It has regulars. You think of Cheers.

Greg: Right, right.

Zack: Low profile, the mood is playful. You refer to it as a home away from home. I have a local coffeehouse that I attend, that I frequent pretty regularly.

Greg: Well and we go there together, and whenever we're there, there are maybe a dozen people or so, over the hour or hour and a half that we're talking, that know you, have seen you at church, have you seen you around town.

They certainly remember you by name, some are just "Hello!" and some are "Oh how's the family, how's the kids" and they certainly really do know you.

Zack: And it's not just me, it's the case for you to.

Greg: That's true. I have, maybe by accident, come to meet and know lots of people through my relationships with people at both your church and another church here in town. All of a sudden...I should clarify, I'm not originally from Newark, I moved here from Columbus. My wife Emily is from Newark. And there were a lot of times, maybe even a lot of years, soon after I moved out here where I felt very isolated, didn't know anybody.

I've spent almost the last 8 years working from home and working from home is great but you don't meet anyone working from home, just your dogs and your family. How I feel now emotionally and mentally is so much better. Having these relationships with people, where I live and having met you and us being able to get together regularly to talk and share what's going on in our lives has made a huge difference.

Zack: I think that community aspect is really important.

Greg: Yea.

Zack: This is not the case entirely, across the Christian realm but a lot of times in the church, community or relationships are kind of sterile. We might have a few close-knit relationships but there's not a general sense of community.

Greg: Right.

Zack: We might say that we have a community of people, but we really only see each other once a week.

Greg: Yea..

Zack: Maybe twice a week. And so what I love about our relationship, maybe not daily, but pretty close to that.

Greg: You are a master of the gif by the way.

Zack: Thank you! It is a skill that I...

*laughter*

Zack: We communicate pretty frequently. I would say that our...I could be mistaken...This is honest moments here with Zack and Greg. I feel like our relationship when it first started was kind of awkward.

Greg: Maybe. I think we were both figuring it out. It's a believe and a non-believer at probably extreme ends of that spectrum. I'm not an active non-believer, I'm not dissuading people, I'm comfortable where I am.

Zack: Yea.

Greg: And I think we were both trying to figure out, are we going to offend each other? Are we going to be uncomfortable with these types of conversations? We figured out pretty quickly, no, we're fine having honest discussions about it. We can come and go from that topic without it feeling forced or uncomfortable, like oh, we have to talk about that big cross-shaped elephant in the room.

Zack: Exactly, yea and it kind of sounds like an intro to a bad joke. A pastor and an agnostic walk into a coffeehouse.

We're hoping that through the coffeehouse we're able to engage with people in a relationship. I have a family member who was asked about this, and they said, "So is this like a Christian coffeehouse that's like, here's your coffee now if you want prayer step over to this line and we'll have someone sent over to pray for you."

No, that would just be weird and uncomfortable.

Greg: I can verify that. That I would also feel weird and uncomfortable about that.

Zack: I would feel weird and uncomfortable about that and I'm a pastor.

Greg: Well there ya go.

Zack: This is a for-profit coffeehouse that I'll be the owner of.

Greg: Yea.

Zack: The idea is that we want to engage the world in a really good, quality service, quality product. Here's the thing, I believe that our worship and our work are intimately tied together.

Greg: Yea. Everybody on the Harvest Gate team is reading a book about this.

Zack: Yea.

Greg: About how your work and how what you do should be fulfilling and tied to what you love to do.

Zack: The Hebrew word for the word "work" in the old testament, Genesis 2, says that, "God put Adam in the garden to work the field and take care of it." That word, work, is the Hebrew word "aved" and it literally is used throughout the old testament to mean, service or service to god. That word is often used synonymously with the word worship.

I believe that one of the best ways that I can share the gospel with people, is through doing really really good work.

Greg: Yea.

Zack: And treating people really well and there is a saying, I don't know if you're aware of this saying Greg but St Francis of Asisi said, "Preach often and when necessary use words."

I think it is a great sentiment but I think what has happened in the church is we just go, "Well I don't need to say anything because I'm doing it with my life."

I think that words are important and that we need to have those conversations which is why, I think, you and I have these conversations.

Greg: Yea.

Zack: But...so we want to use the coffeehouse to engage people into relationships so we can invite them into discipleship and then into our house church. Which is what we're going to be, it's not going to be a building, it's going to be wherever people live and work.

It doesn't matter if you live in an 8,000 foot mansion, which if you do, please invite me over, I want to see that.

Greg: Right, yea! Absolutely!

Zack: Or if you live in a studio apartment, it doesn't matter. You can have church right there. Engaging in those things that the early church engaged in. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the breaking of bread, to communion and to fellowship. You can do those things all from your home.

So we want to engage people in the first, the second and the third place of life.

Greg: So I think the coffeehouse ties back into the example you gave earlier, and I apologize I forget who you were specifically referring to but, when they were talking about starting this house church and they felt called to do that, it was great and they felt very passionately about that but how do you support your family. The coffeehouse is really going to do that, its going to support your family to enable you to do the stuff in that community.

We should clarify, we're in Newark, Ohio right now, Harvest Gate is going to be in Columbus, you're not opening a coffeehouse and going to sometimes be there, you're going to move there, to live within short distance of the coffeehouse, or at least that's the plan.

Zack: Yes and thank you for bringing that up. Our big dream is that we want to have a transforming presence in every zip code in Columbus. In Columbus, there are 49 zip codes.

Greg: That's a lot of zip codes.

Zack: That's a lot of zip codes. So that means we want to have either a business, and it doesn't have to be a coffeehouse. A business and/or a house church in every zip code in Columbus. You're absolutely correct, Greg, that will be my vocation, that will be the way that I sustain our life and our family.

Here's one of the things I love about what we're doing, through the coffeehouse, 10% of all of our profits are going to go towards starting other businesses or other churches, or other faith communities. Greg, let’s say that, in this hypothetical situation you become a believer and you've always wanted to start Greg's yoga studio.

Greg: *laughs* I can think of a couple other businesses I might start first, but lets go with Yoga, I can aspire to something...

Zack: We would then launch you out, through the pool of money essentially that is coming in through Harvest Gate Coffeehouse to help start Greg's Yoga Studio. We want to be a place that is a blessing to other individuals, yes, but also to the community as well.

Which informs our name. The name Harvest Gate comes from 3 things, Jesus says, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few, so ask the lord of the harvest for more workers."

We want to be a part of the harvest. In Columbus, as of 2010, there are 693,127 people who have no religious affiliation at all. We want to see that number changed.

We want to be a part of the harvest, that is where we get Harvest from. Gate kind of seems a little strange and I'm going to address the elephant in the room. It seems like when you put Gate at the end of something, like Watergate, it seems to not go well.

Greg: Harvest Gate is not a harvest related scandal.

Zack: No. It is not. It is rooted in biblical ideologies. Jesus says that, "I am the gate. None come to the father except through me." We want to be very very very very Jesus centered. I had this revelation a couple of years ago, where I felt God spoke to me and he said, "Zack, you've become so institutionalized that you've been trying to win people to church and not to Jesus."

That began me on a journey that I really just want to be so Jesus-centered that its...

Greg: Thinking about taking up carpentry as well?

Zack: My dad's a carpenter so that works!

Greg: There ya go!

Zack: That's where we kind of get the idea of Harvest Gate, but it goes a little further than that. In the new testament, Paul used the word "ecclesia" to talk about the church, it is the greek word, "ecclesia". In America, what we generally tend to do is we define that word pretty narrowly and we say, it is a gathering of people or the gathering of the saints. To be sure, it is that, it is a gathering of people but Paul actually took that word from the secular community, so every village, town or city would have a group of elders who would meet at the city gate.

That group of elders, their responsibility was to bring wisdom and council and clarity and value to the cities, towns or villages in which they lived. If there is an engagement, they would affirm the engagement. If there was a dispute between land owners, they would make a judgement based off of the information that came in. Different things like that.

So that gathering of people at the city gate was called an ecclesia. And so Paul, I believe knew this, when he used the word ecclesia to describe the church.

I believe that Paul wanted the church to know that we exist for our communities, we exist for the cities, towns or villages that we live in. As a business, we want to bring value to our community, we want to hire people, we want to create jobs, we want to give back to our community. We want to be a gathering space for people! Whether you are a Christian or not or whatever the case is. So that's kind of what we're wanting to do with our business.

Greg: I think its a really...one of the things that drew me to the project is that it is such a...seems like an unconventional idea, that it can be a business that can do good. So often these days, capitalism in America is fueled by this uncontrollable greed for more, for more, for more. And companies seem to only want to do good things if it makes them appealing to customers, if it makes them lead to more sales. It sort of takes business away from any type of morality and starts to only think about what good can we do to positively influence our bottom line.

I don't like that sort of greed, really turns me off of businesses.

It is hard to describe exactly how I feel about it in a professional way. Nevertheless, I think I really like that Harvest Gate is taking a business and saying, "Okay, this is not just about making as much money as possible and that the only people that are going to be positively impacted by that are the tiny handful of people at the top or those that have invested the most money, or something like that."

We're not going around looking for investors to share in what we're doing in some way, we're looking for, and this is probably a good time to talk about it, that we're going to be looking for people to donate to help support this project and we're going to be talking about, fairly transparently, on this podcast about our progress with that. How we're doing and how we're reaching our goals, setting our goals and how all of that is going to enable this project to happen.

Zack: And I think it is important that we say that, we view this as a missionary endeavor.

That a lot of times missionaries will go to a foreign country and they will start a business in order to engage people in the community. We're wanting to do the exact same thing here in Columbus.

The business and the house church are in a symbiotic relationship with one another.

Greg: Yea

Zack: I tell people this, If we have just a business and no house church, we are just a business. We don't want to be just a business.

If we have just a house church and no business, I'm going to be living in a box and I won't be taking care of my family and I don't want them to resent me.

And we also won't have a way to engage people into the house church because we won't have a way of knowing people.

Greg: You can't have a house church without a house.

Zack: Exactly! We've kind of wrestled with this, which comes first, the chicken or the egg. In this situation, it is the business. For us to move to Columbus, the housing market there is about $100,000 more than where we currently live.

Greg: No doubt about that.

Zack: I truly believe that this is of God because I don't know if...I might be able to plant a church and do okay with it just because I'm familiar with it but I've never started a business though and I don't really know much about business. Fortunately, we have a team of people who have been surrounding us, like your wife, Emily.

Greg: Your wife, Liz.

Zack: Yea. And some others on the team, who have great skill and great knowledge and we also have outside counselors, I don't know if counselor is the right word, outside sources who are speaking into our lives and speaking into the business itself.

Greg: Yea, and I think it is worth mentioning now that we are going to be taking some time over the coming weeks. We're hoping to do this podcast weekly, and meet some of the people on this team and how they are going to be contributing and I think that goes to also we'll be talking more about your history and background, experience.

We'll be talking a little bit about myself, my wife, your wife and other team members and how everybody is connected to this, how serendipitous it is about how we all got connected with this. It is a really, sort of, weirdly shaped grapevine that has connected everybody to bring them here.

Zack: Yea and to speak to that point, a lot of times when we plant churches or we start businesses or things like that, what we tend to do is say, "I have these positions that need filled so I'm going to find people that fit these roles."

I feel like we have done this a little differently. God has laid people on my heart and I have sought them out and we found their unique gifts and skills and have plugged them into the places where they will thrive the most. And I believe that is what we are called to do in the church, is to release people so that they can live an abundant life in who God has made them to be.

Greg: I think that is a really fine point to end on for our first podcast for Harvest Gate.

Zack: Yea.

Greg: It has been great sharing this project and this idea with everybody and we hope that everyone is excited to keep tabs on what we're doing and the development of it. We'll be getting into more detail on our goals and our timeline and lots and lots more in upcoming episodes. For now, people can check us out and track what's going on at harvestgate.org

Zack: That's correct.

Greg: And we're currently on what social media?

Zack: We are on Facebook and Instagram for the time being.

Greg: And definitely more to come in the future.

Zack: Yea.

Greg: Alright, thanks very much for listening.

Zack: Had fun!

Greg: Follow us on social media @HarvestGateNetwork

Zack: There are several ways you can engage with us and support Harvest Gate at harvestgate.org

Greg: You can subscribe to the Harvest Gate podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. If you are as excited as we are about this project, please consider sharing it with the people in your life.

Zack: Thanks for listening to the Harvest Gate podcast. Connecting faith to families, communities and marketplaces.

#Columbus #HarvestGate #ConnectingFaith #Episode1

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thinkveganworld · 5 years ago

Text

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it ...Iran-Contra

Here’s Part One of a four-part series on Iran-Contra I wrote a few years ago. It was published at a number of online sites including Online Journal (now Intrepid Report), the Daily Kos, and several others. Though Iran-Contra happened years ago, the history of this episode should be understood. As the old saying goes, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

George H. W. Bush's many lies - Part One

By Carla Binion (”thinkveganworldtumblrcom”)

January 14, 2000 | George W. Bush is the Republican party's confident front-runner and a "pet" of certain mainstream TV journalists. Chris Matthews of CNBC's "Hardball" said recently that Bush's father had a clean presidency, and commentator Cokie Roberts said on ABC's "Sunday Morning" that Bush comes from a nice family.

Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and other members of the Reagan Administration participated in a cover-up of Iran-Contra during the 1980s, and the cover-up continues to this day. In their glowing praise of the Bush family, Matthews and Roberts did not mention George Herbert Walker Bush's many lies to the American people regarding Iran-Contra.

During Iran-contra, Republicans undermined the Constitution in ways Democrats have never done. Many people say Democrats and Republicans are both owned by large corporations. They say there is little difference between the parties, and that neither represents the people. That is true to an extent, but, on the whole, it is only Republicans who have aggressively threatened the Constitution.

Americans often either wince or yawn at the mention of Iran-Contra, a scandal lost to memory for most of us. However, the story is important now because the son of one of the Iran-Contra participants is running for president. The elder Bush lied to the public when he claimed he was "out of the loop" on Iran-Contra.

People might find Iran-Contra interesting if it were more accurately named. An apt name for Iran-Contra would be the"Republicans-Undermine-the-Constitution" scandal. If the public fully understood that George W. Bush's father participated in a forceful assault on the Constitution, George-the-Younger would not likely be the GOP front-runner today.

One reason Iran-Contra is lost to the American memory is that television news commentators did not do a good job explaining it to the public. The problem is not that mainstream media censored the story. They did not. Print journalists ran detailed accounts, and the Iran-Contra hearings were televised. The problem is, many Americans get all their news from television. Many people believe a news story is important only if TV journalists discuss it on news talk shows day after day.

Television journalists did not repeatedly dissect Reagan's and Bush's behavior and explain the constitutional implications of Iran-Contra. Journalists did manage to set aside enough air time to saturate the public with detailed explanations of the Clinton scandal. If TV commentators had spent an equal amount of time sifting through and explaining Iran-Contra, most Americans would now fully understand why the scandal mattered and how it threatened our constitutional system. If journalists understood Iran-Contra, they would not say George W. Bush's father had a "clean presidency."

This week I replayed 1987 and 1990 broadcasts of "PBS Frontline" with Bill Moyers on the subject of Iran-Contra. I also re-read substantial portions of the "Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair" published by the New York Times (Times Books, 1988.) The Moyers broadcast and the Congressional Report are the sources for all the information which follows, except where I specify other sources.

Moyers says that Congress's report on the Iran-Contra affair shows "the common ingredients of the White House policies were secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law." Moyers is right. The Congressional Report does show the Reagan White House deceived the American people and expressed contempt for the Constitution and the law.

The Congressional Report says: "The President did know of the Iran arms sales, and he made a deliberate decision not to notify Congress. ... As a consequence of the President's decision not to notify Congress, the operation continued for over a year through failure after failure, and when Congress finally did learn, it was not through notification by the Administration, but from a story published in a Beirut weekly."

President Ronald Reagan repeatedly told the American people he would not negotiate with terrorists. That was a lie. A November 3, 1986 report in a Lebanese magazine broke the story that Reagan was bargaining with the Ayatollah Khomeni for release of American hostages. Moyers shows footage of Reagan looking straight into TV cameras denying it. Reagan lied to the public again during a news conference the following week, claiming there were no U. S. sales of arms to Iran.

Reagan also lied to the American people about the nature of the Contras and the purpose of their operations. Reagan and CIA director William Casey created the Contras. Reagan portrayed them as democratic "freedom fighters," but the Contras' ultimate goal was the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government, a government legally recognized by the United States.

The Contras were not interested in promoting democracy, as Reagan claimed. A March 1986 report by the human rights monitoring group America's Watch said: "The testimony we obtained frequently showed gratuitous brutality: the Contras not only murdered their victims; they also tortured and mutilated them. In some cases they also killed members of the families of their targets." (William D. Hartung, AND WEAPONS FOR ALL.)

Around 70 percent of the American people disapproved of Reagan's Central American policy, but he zealously (and secretly) pursued it anyway. When CIA agents under Reagan's CIA director Casey mined Nicaraguan harbors and blew up fuel tanks, Congress cut off Contra funds. Reagan then secretly and illegally turned to foreign governments for money to keep the Contras going. He lied about that to the American people, too.

The Reagan White House enlisted a group called the "Enterprise" to help get around the law. General Richard Secord defined the Enterprise during the Iran-Contra hearings. He said, "The Enterprise is the group of companies that Mr. Hakim formed to manage the Contra and the Iranian project. ... I exercise overall control." Secord admitted to the Congressional Committee that he sold arms to the Contras for a profit.

The Enterprise included, in Moyer's words, "a shadowy network of arms dealers, fraudulent companies, and secret bank accounts." Senator Daniel K. Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee, described the Enterprise as a "shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fund-raising mechanism and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself."

Enterprise leader Richard Secord purchased 1,000 missiles from the CIA for $3.7 million. He sold them to an Iranian middle man for $10 million. The Enterprise made millions of dollars of profits from sales to Iran, and most of the money did not reach the Contras. Around $8 million remained in a private Swiss bank account at the time of the Moyers broadcasts.

During the Iran-Contra hearings, Senator Paul Sarbanes asked Secord, "If the purpose of the Enterprise was to help the Contras, why did you charge [Contra leader] Calero a mark-up that included a profit?" Secord answered, "We were in business to make a living, Senator. We had to make a living. I didn't see anything wrong with it at the time."

Bill Moyers says, "While profits were being made, lives were being lost. ... In Nicaragua the Contras use weapons from the Enterprise against civilians. It is a terrorist war they are fighting. Old men, women, children are caught in the middle." Lt. Col. Oliver North learned the Contra leaders were not noble "freedom fighters." North's liaison with the Contras, Robert Owen, told North in a memo that the people surrounding Contra leader Adolfo Calero "are not first-rate people. They are liars, greed and power motivated. This war has become a business to many of them."

Moyers interviewed a disillusioned former Contra officer. The officer said of Contra leaders, "They bought shoddy goods and sold them at hiked up prices. They bought low-grade grains...and put them up for sale or billed them to themselves at the highest prices. They did the same with ammunitions. They did the same with rifles."

"All this," says Moyers, "the contempt for Congress, the defiance of law, the huge mark-ups and profits, the secret bank accounts, the shady characters, the shakedown of foreign governments, the complicity in death and destruction -- they did all this in the dark, because it would never stand the light of day. Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of. No watchman to check the door. No accountant to check the books. No judge to check the law. The secret government has no Constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up."

The Reagan Administration repeatedly lied to the American people throughout the Iran-Contra scandal. In fact, Reagan, Bush, and the other Iran-Contra participants managed to get away with their wrongdoing precisely because they lied, stalled, stonewalled, and participated in a cover-up -- not because they were innocent, as many of their supporters still believe.

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Note: I’ll post the other parts of this series later.

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