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sundayswiththeilluminati · 5 years

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The Prospector

“Some things should stay buried.”

Type: Grenade Launcher

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Excavation - Hold to fire grenades. Release to detonate all live grenades simultaneously. Grenades stick to surfaces and set targets on fire. Defeating targets creates Arc explosions.

Masterworked Trait: Deeper Pockets - Increases the magazine size by +1 and expands ammo reserves.

Ornaments: Comstock Lode, Belvedere, Caution: Heavy Machinery

Origin & Description: Prospector's a bit of a sleeper heavy (as opposed to the heavy Sleeper). Grenade launchers are in a pretty good spot right now and Prospector's crept up to one of the top DPS rankings. Its "hold to fire" perk makes it easy to launch its entire eight-round mag in a few seconds. In theory its perk also causes impacted surfaces to catch fire, but in practice nobody notices or cares because after you unload Prospector's magazine it's a good bet there's no surface left. In case whatever it is is still hanging on, though, letting go of the trigger causes all the stuck grenades to explode simultaneously. Prospector's ornaments are mostly just cute looks. "Comstock Lode" gives it a silver color palette in reference to the Comstock silver strike. "Belvedere" is another old-timey Western look while "Caution: Heavy Machinery" changes it to a modern hazard-orange plastic.

Speaking of things that should stay buried... Today, October 1st, Destiny 2 kicks off Year 3 with its major fall DLC Shadowkeep, aka Moon's Haunted. What's the plot? Well...the Moon's haunted. Seriously.

Shortly after the formation of the Vanguard the Guardians turned their attention to a growing solar system threat: the Hive infestation of Earth's Moon. Guardians and explorers had known for a long time that the Hive had colonized the subsurface tunnels and abandoned settlements there, though as it turns out they had no idea how extensive that colonization was. That Hive faction was led by Crota, Eater of Hope, son of Oryx the Taken King. Crota was preparing our Moon as a beachhead for a final expedition to seize the crippled Traveler; it's not clear whether he was simply growing his forces for the invasion or if he planned to transform the Moon into one of the Hive's...war-moons, there's not really another name for those. A war-Moon, if you would.

Crota was in our system on his own because he's been in Hive prince time-out ever since he accidentally cut a dimensional rift from Oryx's throne world into the Vex spacetime labyrinth and got said throne world so badly dogpiled by the Vex that one of the literal Worm Gods had to literally yell "ORYX, SET YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER." Oryx came home, kicked out the Vex, and threw Crota into the Vex gate network with the instructions, "Come home glorious, or die forgotten!" Since the three Hive Gods have had a particular vendetta against the Traveler for nearly as long as they've been Hive at all (the Traveler was part of the event that catalyzed their transformation) finally delivering it to his father would very much put Crota back in Oryx's good graces.

So the newly-organized Vanguard decided to gather its forces and lead the campaign to reclaim the Moon from the Hive. Unfortunately the Hive aren't common on Earth and the Guardians had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Long story short: it was a slaughter. Guardians had never before faced another paracausal foe and were totally unprepared for the Hive's powers of Darkness. Crota himself strode out onto the surface of Mare Imbrium with a thousand Knights at his back, pushing forth his throne-world of green fire to swallow the sky, and slew Guardians by the hundreds with a sword that drank Light. Many famous Lightbearers such as the Titan Wei-Ning fell that day; only a handful escaped the Moon to tell the gory tale. After Crota's massacre the Vanguard dropped any operations on the Moon and forbade Guardians to travel there at all, effectively abandoning it to the Hive.

Years later a fireteam led by Eriana-3, Wei-Ning's partner (and just to be clear: yes, they are lesbians, there are literally more gay couples in Destiny lore than straight ones) became the first to dare break that edict. Vell Tarlowe fell to Oryx's foster-son Alak-Hul, the Darkblade. The Heart of Crota peeled Omar Agah's Light from him to feed unborn Hive. Sai Mota nearly climbed her way back out of the Hellmouth using the bones of slain Acolytes, but Omnigul, the Will of Crota, caught her before she could escape. Eriana-3 herself fell in the tunnels below, burning hundreds of Hive to ash before they swarmed her, sending her Ghost away with one last spark of Light and an apology to the place where Wei-Ning fell. Toland the Shattered sought out Ir Yut the Deathsinger; she, well, shattered him. Only one member returned alive: Eris Morn, who had her Ghost eaten by the Hive and survived for years in the darkness of their tunnels by tearing the eyes from an Acolyte and putting them in her own skull.

Centuries later we finally took down Crota in the eponymous raid "Crota's End," avenging the Great Disaster and freeing the Moon, or at least evening things up. We also got the attention of Oryx by killing his son, leading to him coming to our solar system and the entire Taken King DLC and Kingsfall raid, but that's another story.

So how's the Moon doing now? One Destiny 2 lore page notes Hive populations have been decreasing due to the efforts of "a small contingent of veteran Guardians who have made their homes on Luna," a cute reference to the small but dedicated community still playing Destiny 1. But it turns out we've got bigger problems. Eris Morn has been out of town for a while after helping in the events of The Taken King and now she's back with upsetting news: Moon's haunted. Again, seriously. While searching for an old Golden Age facility Eris stumbled across a new dark power growing inside the Moon, one that taunted her with the shades of her fallen fireteam. Nightmares - illusions of enemies long-defeated - now stalk the surface accompanied by the voices and shadows of Guardians slain in the Great Disaster. In other words, literal ghosts are literally haunting the literal Moon.

In other words: we have work to do.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

#Destiny 2 #The Prospector #Moon's Haunted #Moon's fuckin Haunted!#eyes up Guardian #Destiny Compendium Exoticarum #this is the wager of existence #Destiny

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womenintranslation · 5 years

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From WWB:

Editor’s Note:

We're celebrating the Nobel Prize in Literature of longtime WWB contributor Olga Tokarczuk, who first appeared in our pages in 2005 with an excerpt from her wrenching tale of wartime survival, Final Stories, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She then returned in 2008 with this short story, "The Knight," translated by Jennifer Croft. Tokarczuk's explorations of relationships under pressure, whether political or internal, combine a keen sense of character with a sure hand at narrative to capture the essence of humanity. As a couple's alienation plays out over a chessboard, Tokarczuk's deft portrayal of feints and attacks maps a marriage at stalemate. We hope you enjoy "The Knight," available only on WWB.

—Susan Harris, Editorial Director

A WWB Exclusive:

The Knight

Fiction by Olga Tokarczuk

Translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft

At first she tried struggling with the locks, but they were obviously not in sync, because when she managed to turn the key in one of them, the other stayed locked—and vice versa. The wind came in gusts off the sea, winding her wool scarf around her face. Finally he set down both bags in the driveway and snatched the keys out of her hand. He managed to get the door open immediately.

The cottage they had always rented was right on the sea, among holiday cabins that all looked alike, that were bustling and noisy in the summers, open to let the air through, surrounded by parasols and plastic chairs, and little tables with radios and newspapers—now they were all boarded up, tight as a drum, sunk deep into a winter coma. This one was a little more opulent, though—it had a fireplace and a large deck that looked out over the beach. The deck was covered with sand, so as soon as they got inside she took up a broom and began to sweep it away.

"Why are you doing that?" he said. "It's not like we're going to be sitting out on the deck at this time of year."

He unloaded the food from one of the bags and put it in the refrigerator. Then he turned on the TV. She protested.

"No, please, no television."

She wanted to say something else, too, but she restrained herself.

There was a dog with them, a fox terrier—lively, restless, and unruly. As he was making a fire in the hearth, the dog dragged several pieces of wood out of the basket, tossed them into the air and caught them as they fell.

He yelled at her.

"She's cold. She's just doing it to warm up," she said.

"Yeah, sure, and I get to clean it up."

"She's just a dog."

"She gets on my nerves, 'just a dog' or not, I mean she never quits. She's hyperactive. Maybe we ought to slip a little something into her food. Bromine, Luminal, something along those lines?"

"She didn't used to get on your nerves."

"Well, she does now."

She carried her bag upstairs, to the small, icy bedroom. She sat down on the bed, which was covered with a blanket. Renata, "that dog," bounded after her and leaped up on to the blanket. She looked into the dog's gleaming brown eyes. She felt a lump come to her throat, and a sudden pain, all over her body—a momentary, piercing pain.

Something was happening with time, she thought, something not good. It was coming unglued, peeling apart. Two great tectonic plates of time were falling away from each other with a bleak rumble, casting a chasm between "then" and "now" for the next several million years. "Now" was silent, with jagged edges—deep sleep at night, and remnants of anger on waking, as if a war were being waged in that sleep. "Then" seemed constant and rhythmic from this vantage point, the light sound of a ping-pong ball striking a smooth table, a cloth of moments in which each thread was part of a larger pattern.

She realized that the easiest way to begin a conversation was with "Remember when . . . " because there was something mechanical in this, like the movement of a hand soothing a baby, like turning on a radio station that plays only soothing music—all those sounds of songbirds, waterfalls, whales. "Remember when" took them back to one place, together. It was always an emotional moment, like when you ask someone to dance, and they answer with a gleam in their eye. Yes, let's dance. It was clear they were telling each other long-established versions of the past, a very familiar narrative, already recalled many times before, absolutely safe. The past is established. It can't be changed. The past is a mantra learned by heart, the foundations of memory that are tiled over with funny little stories of recollection. Like the one about how he used to shell nuts for her and set them out on leaves in the garden. Or when they both bought the same pair of white jeans—that was a long time ago, now they would be two or three sizes too small. Or her red hair, that layered cut that was fashionable then. Or when he used to have to run after his train when he was parting from her. The farther back you went the more stories there were—evidently with time they'd lost the ability to mythologize the little things in life, sentencing reality to the commonplace and the trivial.

Once the fire was burning, they started making dinner, like a well-synchronized duet, she dicing the garlic, he washing lettuce and making dressing. She set the table, he opened a bottle of wine—it was like a dance, a perfect dance in which your partner's movements are so familiar that you cease to notice them, and then your partner disappears, and you're left to dance with yourself.

Then Renata slept by the hearth, the orange glow of the fire drifting over her frizzy coat. The expanse of the evening ahead suddenly seemed unbearable, heavy as a filling meal just before bed. His gaze wandered involuntarily to the TV, and she had a sudden urge to take a long bath, but since this was a special night, their first, they still had untapped reserves of good well. But he was careless.

"Shall I open another bottle?" he asked, but he realized immediately that more wine could ruin the order of things that had gradually been falling into place, that after drinking more wine there would be the familiar sense of discouragement, the feeling of being weighed down, the oppressive atmosphere, the senselessness of human speech, the desire to escape. The need for a conversation that would stop making sense after a few sentences, since they would have to then define all the words they had used over again. As if even their languages diverged.

"I think I'm OK for now," she answered in an artificially cheery tone.

So he took out the chessboard. He felt relieved to find it, among some old books standing on a shelf by the TV. Chess, too, belonged to their collection of "Remember when"s.

They always played in silence, in cold blood, unhurriedly, making the games last several days. He took black—he always took black—and she lit a cigarette. He felt a needle-sharp pang of anger: he hated it when she smoked indoors. He said nothing. There was nothing wrong.

Opening; the first game out of habit, automatic, both of them knowing what every next move would be. It occurred to her that she knew how he thought, and this shocked her. She felt faintly nauseous—the wine had been very dry, bitter. She let him win, and he knew she had let him win. He yawned.

"Let's play again," she said, arranging the pawns. "But this time we have to really try, really focus. Remember the time we played for a week?"

"That first Christmas, at your parents'. We couldn't leave because of all that snow that'd fallen, everything was just covered in it."

She remembered the smell of the cold room where her mother kept all the things she baked every holiday, covered in dishtowels.

They made two moves, and the game stopped. It was his move, so she went out onto the deck to smoke. Through the glass he could see her petite shoulders, draped in a wool scarf. He hadn't made his move by the time she came back.

"Shall we give it a rest for today?" she asked.

He nodded.

"Are you ready for bed?"

He felt again all the artificiality of this question, as if it really mattered to her that she didn't sound indifferent.

"I'm just going to check the forecast, and then I'll make the bed."

He turned on the TV, and things became more ordinary, somehow. The tension between them diminished when each of them went about their own lives. He opened another can of beer. He flipped through the channels, and he was gone.

She went to wash up.

The electric heater warmed up the little bathroom quickly. She set a few toiletries on the shelf below the mirror. She leaned toward the shaving mirror and examined the faint red veins on her cheeks. Then she made a thorough inspection of the skin on her neck and chest. Looking herself in the eye, she removed her makeup with a cotton pad. Only once she had undressed did she remember that there was no bathtub here, the bathtub was back in town, here there was just that unpleasant shower separated from the rest of the bathroom by a plastic shell-print curtain. She felt like crying, and she was furious with herself when she realized she was clearly overreacting, that you simply do not cry for lack of a bathtub.

When she crept into the bedroom, she saw that the bed had not been made, and that the linens were lying on the chair, neatly folded, cold and slick. There was a hum from the TV downstairs. Her rage gathering strength like an avalanche, she began to make the bed, struggling with the corners of the sheets, her physical exertion matching her anger—it was like they were singing a round. It seemed to her that this anger was a general one, an aimless fury, but then, out of the blue and to her great surprise, all at once it became a blade—like in a cartoon—pointed downstairs toward the sofa where there was a man sitting with a can of beer, and like a swarm of enraged bees it plummeted down the wooden steps and into the living room. She stood at the doorway and saw the man's head—he was sitting in profile—and for a moment she thought that materialized malice would pierce him through at the temple, at full speed, and the man would just stop moving and then slump slackly against the back of his chair. Dead.

"Hey, could you give me a hand?" she shouted from upstairs.

"Coming," he said and stood reluctantly, still gazing at the TV screen.

By the time he made it upstairs, she'd already calmed down. She took a deep breath.

"Aren't you going to wash up?" she asked calmly.

"I took a bath before we left," he said.

She lay on her back between the unpleasant, cold sheets, which felt damp. He went to turn out the lights. She heard him shut the door to the deck and put a trash bag in the bin. Then he got undressed and lay down on his side of the bed. They stayed like that for a while, next to each other, but then she drew closer to him and laid her head on his chest. He ran his hand along her bare arm with paternal tenderness, but by the next time he touched her, that tenderness had completely vanished—it was just touching, nothing more. He rolled over onto his stomach, and she put her hand on his back as if to restrain him. They'd been falling asleep that way for years. Whimpering, Renata settled at their feet.

He got up first, to let the dog out. A gust of icy wind tore into the small living room. He watched the dog run off toward the sea, chase away two seagulls, relieve herself, and return. Gusts of wind were surging in from the sea. He put the water on for coffee and waited for it to boil. He cast a glance at the open chessboard and checked to see if there were still any live embers in the hearth, but the fire had gone out completely. He poured the coffee, added milk and sugar—for her. He went back upstairs with the mugs and slipped back in between the warm sheets. He sat up as he drank, leaning against the headboard.

"I had a dream about a plane full of napoleon cakes," she said, her voice hoarse from sleep. "There was already snow on the ground, but it was sort of pink."

He didn't know how to respond. He rarely had dreams, and when he did, it was never anything he could describe. He could never find the right words.

After breakfast he took out his camera and wiped off both lenses—they were supposed to be going for a walk.

They put on all the warm things they had with them—fleeces, boots, scarves, and gloves. They headed down along the beach, toward the dunes, to the point where the wooden cottages disappeared, and there began the kingdom of grasses quivering in the wind. He crouched down and took a picture of a heap of driftwood tossed up by the sea—it looked like the bones of an animal. Then he looked through the lens, turning around and around. She left him behind and walked right along the edge of the sea, her footprints leaving slight indentations in the sand that were instantly destroyed by the water. Renata kept bringing her sticks and nudging her legs with them, but whenever she reached for one, Renata would growl and refuse to give it up.

"How am I supposed to throw it for you if you won't let go, you stupid dog?" she said.

Renata gave up the stick she'd plundered—it soared high and came right back to its spot between her teeth.

The woman realized she was under observation, that the round eye of the lens was trained on her. Briefly she saw herself as the man saw her—a small, dark figure against a background of shades of white and gray, an angular shape with clear contours. He'd caught her red-handed. Had she done something wrong? He was hiding his face behind the camera and aiming at her—like he was holding a gun. She should have been used to it by now—he had always taken pictures of her, but again she felt that same infuriation that had taken hold of her the day before, over the bed. She turned away. He caught up with her, and they walked on in silence. The wind absolved them of this silence, breached their lips and forced them to squint. The longer they were silent the less there was to say, and the more relief there was in that silence. His thoughts wandered off to the left somewhere, toward the sea, flew above the hulls of the fishing boats, and alighted on islands, in foreign countries, wherever. Hers went home again, into drawers and inside handbags, cast a glance at the calendar, and figured up bills. It wasn't a painful silence. It was nice to have someone to be silent with. With a kind of elation she thought, "This sort of silence is an art," and she repeated this sentence to herself several times. She liked it.

"Look," he said to her, pointing out a dark cloud that was racing along the land so low that the tips of the pine trees nearly snared it. He suddenly felt the urge to take this picture, this cloud and woman, both sullen, both swollen with a thunder that would never sound, lightning bolts that would never strike.

"Stay there," he shouted, stepping back to the waterline and looking through the lens from too close.

All he could see was the woman's face, distorted by the wind, a wrinkle down her forehead, lips livid from the cold. The wind fixed her hair to her face; she made maladroit stabs at brushing it aside, at doing something with her face, but it was all in vain. The shutter clicked. She turned away displeased.

"Wait a minute," he said. "Everything looks great now." He stepped a little farther back, until the water was squishing in his boots.

She was infuriated with herself for trying to pose, for caring whether or not it turned out well. With a camera held to his face he gained a kind of unjust advantage over her, and it seemed to her that he was sizing her up, evaluating her, reducing and objectifying. She'd never really liked him taking pictures of her—she was defenseless against that glass eye he donned like a mask; she sometimes got the impression he could see right through her, that he was promising her something along the lines of eternity, that he was immortalizing her, but that for all that he was sapping her strength. She surrendered more and more to him. She was always astonished by those women who worked as models, by all those young girls who would pout as he photographed them, throw back their heads, fully aware that they were putting something up for sale, not that they were someone, but that they had something to sell, like eager little saleswomen. Just merchandise. No wonder he slept with them. Did he know how much power he had thanks to that camera? His face was full of life then, but only then. She saw him again in her mind's eye, with a beer, in front of the TV—and then his face was a blank, as if there were simply nothing there.

"Don't take pictures of me," she said, dourly. Without a word he redirected the camera at Renata and ran after her for a while; the dog kept slipping out of the frame, zigzagging, trying to throw him off the scent.

He felt wounded. Sometimes she could utter the most neutral words, and it would feel like she had just punched him in the face. How did she do it? He felt like a little boy around her, like a child. He never knew when she was going to hurt him. He has mastered only one effective counterattack: hiding his king behind the other pawns, and when it came to her, that incalculable woman, he would simply ignore her, sidestep her, actively not notice her, not respond, not look, disregard, evade, keep her at a distance like in a photograph, and in so doing keep her in check—an angular figure against a background of shades of gray. There would follow, then, an incomprehensible turnaround on her side—she would fall into his arms, shrink and become a lonely, helpless little girl with graying hair, she would weaken, subside, surrender. She would grovel, just like Renata.

He ran after the dog. Renata had found a good-sized stick, clenched it in her teeth, and was now begging. He seized one end of the stick and lifted up the dog, who was hanging onto it. Renata knew this game. This was the lockjaw game. The resistance game. He began to spin around and around with the dog hanging from the stick, flying at waist-level. Then he heard a shout and saw her running toward him. He slowed down, and Renata landed safely in the sand. The woman ran up to him, her face distorted by rage.

"What do you think you're doing? Are you insane? You're going to hurt her! Do you just have no idea? Why are you so stupid, stupid?" she shouted. "Have you just completely lost it, you fucking asshole?"

He was thunderstruck. He thought she was going to hit him. Renata—stick still in her mouth—was swaying slightly.

"Fuck off, you crazy bitch," he said quietly and started walking home.

He felt like crying. A sort of outraged sob was welling up in his insides like something you had to cough up. He'd go home, he thought, pack up and take off. Or not pack up, just leave everything there. He'd take the car and take off. Go back to town. That was it, it was over. She could manage just find without him. She was still young, let her find somebody else, let her do whatever she wanted. He thought how he had tried his best, and this he found moving. He had tried his best.

When she got home, he was sitting in front of the TV drinking beer. She took off her coat and put the water on.

"Tea?" she asked.

"No," he muttered.

"I'm sorry," she said and suddenly felt very weak as if she were walking in the sand, as if she were getting bogged down, feet sinking. Never, never did he apologize to her first. She lit a cigarette.

"Could you not smoke in here?" he said.

She went out onto the deck. The kettle whistled; she didn't hear it. He got up and turned off the stove. There was a program on TV about farming. Renata kept dragging the tinder out of the basket, tossing it up and catching it in the air.

"What do you think, how's it going to end?" she asked and sat down in the armchair next to his.

"What's going to end?"

"All this, us."

He shrugged. He looked up at her, but he couldn't bear the sight of her insistent, searching eyes.

"I'll get a fire started," he said.

He crumpled some newspaper and set it in a pile, and then he laid down some twigs. She handed him the matches. He could sense that she wanted to tell him something, but he didn't make a sound. He wanted her to say something, but at the same time he was afraid that her words would slip out of control again. He knew how to penalize her, and he did—he went upstairs and lay down on the unmade bed, trying to read some old magazine. He was relieved to find an article on computers, but he didn't understand very much of it. Then he noticed an ad for a vacation in Turkey, which reminded him of their last trip together, to Greece—everything blurred, overexposed, like pictures that hadn't turned out. Her tanned, almost naked body. Making love in the hotel room—their last time. The shock of his own embarrassment. He realized he couldn't remember her any other way, and that this vacation several months ago was his earliest memory of her. That in the repeated "Remember when"s the people he saw were complete strangers. He fell asleep in astonishment.

When he woke up, she was gone. The dog was gone, too, so he thought she must have taken her to the dunes. Still, he checked to see if the car was still there. It was. He turned on the TV and half listened to the news. It was getting dark out. He made himself some scrambled eggs and ate them straight from the pan in front of the TV. Then he opened a beer and listened to the messages on his cell phone. Nothing interesting. He saw her come in, face flushed from the wind. Renata rushed at him in greeting, as if it had been years since they'd seen each other. The woman looked at the empty pan.

"You've already eaten?" she asked with some dismay. "You ate?"

He realized he ought to have waited for her.

"Just a snack," he said. "We could go to the Chinese place in town."

"I'm not hungry," she said and hung up her jacket.

Then why are you asking, he thought furiously. He knew why. So that she would have a reason to get upset. "Temper tantrum next. Don't eat anything if you don't want to. I don't give a shit," he told her in his head. He took pleasure in this kind of imagined conversation. He changed the channel, but the next one was fuzzy, so he tried to find something else, but there were only two. There was no escape.

She came back from the bathroom after a little while, hair combed, makeup probably retouched. He could smell fresh cigarette smoke on her—she had obviously been smoking in the bathroom like a schoolgirl.

"Shall we finish the game?" she asked.

He agreed. Seeing the perfect symmetry of the chessboard was soothing. The joy of the existence of rules. The sweet possibility of thinking over every move. The predictability of surprises. The feeling of control like a gentle, cerebral caress. He was adding wood to the fire when she said, "Hey, the white knight's gone."

They leaned under the table, pushed back the chairs, and searched the cracks between the cushions. He peered into the basket of wood.

"Renata. She must have run off with it," she said. "Look in her bed."

She shook out the dog's blanket—several pieces of kindling and the plastic stopper from the sink fell out, but there was no chess piece.

"Maybe she took it out into the hall?" he asked hopefully.

They started a systematic search. He went through the trash; she went out onto the deck. They pushed back the table.

"Was it still there when you went out?"

She couldn't remember.

"What did you do with the knight, you stupid dog?" she said, leaning over her.

"She probably chewed it up," he said.

He poured two glasses of beer. They sat down at the useless chessboard. Then he came up with the idea of using a small piece of wood as a playing piece—he broke off a piece and laid it on the vacant black square. She hesitated.

"I'm not playing with kindling," she said.

"Then I'll take white."

"But we'll have to start all over gain. Won't we?"

"No," he said. "I don't want to play anymore."

She thought it would be best if they got up right now, got their things together, and went home, but she didn't have the courage to say so. It also occurred to her that he was the one who had taken the chesspiece. Or that he had somehow knocked it off. She didn't say anything—she just slumped back into the couch cushions.

She knew he would go away now, abandon her—be absorbed by the TV or go upstairs and sleep again, or start to fiddle with his camera (thank God it was too dark now to take pictures) or start to read, or call people, or send them all text messages—and she knew that this was inevitable. She wanted to cuddle up to his blue-checked shirt, but she didn't have the strength to get off the couch. His hands were busy putting the chesspieces back into the box. Fine dark hairs.

He glanced at her.

"Why are you crying?" he said. "Over chess, over that knight?"

He sat down next to her and put one arm around her. The other arm hesitated for a moment, staying in the end where it was, on the armrest of the sofa.

"It's better to be left than to leave someone," she said suddenly. "Being left gives you strength."

"I'd say the opposite," he said.

"You don't understand."

"I never understand anything."

He got up and went into the kitchen. He asked about wine—shouldn't they have a little drop? She said yes.

She had everything she'd say now already in her head. Sentence by sentence, and the justification for every sentence. And notes on every sentence. He would have to respond somehow. It would be impossible to sink back into silence. When he came back he handed her a glass and sat down on the sofa. He must have known what she was thinking. That they would talk, and it would end, as usual, in a fight. Then Renata, that providential dog, began to whine at the door. He got up to let her out.

"Go on, you stupid dog," he said. "What did you do with the knight?"

Renata leaped out into the darkness with a yelp. A sharp gust of wind blew a thin trail of sand through the open door. He heard the voice of the television behind his back and felt relieved. So she'd turned on the TV.

"It's too bad we don't have the guide. There might be a movie," he said.

She refilled their glasses, although they weren't empty yet. She was suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion.

She stretched her legs out just like him and propped her feet on the low coffee table. There they sat, side by side, sipping wine until the movie ended, an amusing old mystery about an older lady who killed off her enemies with arsenic. She was reeling a little as she went up the stairs.

"I'll be there in a second," he said, but she knew he wouldn't be. He would sit there, as he often did, until morning. Plunged into the ghostly light of the screen, absent, glued to those flashing pictures like a cat—he always turned off the sound. She knew what would happen, and it was good to know. Soothing. Perfect, fully rounded certainty. A smooth glass ball in her palm. She sank heavily into sleep.

He lay down on top of her as if on grass, with his whole body, his whole weight. There was her familiar smell, her special softness. She sighed. His body responded by habit, with desire. She embraced him, as if she were holding on to him. She said something, but he couldn't understand her. He slid a hand across her hips.

"I can't breathe," she whispered.

He hesitated. He stopped. He realized that underneath him was not a woman, not a wife, not a woman's body, but a person, that he wasn't lying on top of a woman, but on top of another human being, another someone, specific, individual, inviolable. Someone with clearly defined boundaries but who beyond these was fragile and prone to ruin, delicate as watercress, like the thinnest wafer. Her sex had vanished—it had ceased to be important to him that she was a woman and his wife—she was like a brother, a comrade in suffering, a companion in pain, a neighbor facing the same looming, unidentified threat. A stranger who was at the same time extremely close to him. Someone who is nearby, who stands there and looks across the fence, someone you wave to on your way home.

This discovery was so unexpected that he felt ashamed. The sense of desire that had welled up within him now ebbed away. He rolled off her and lay down beside her. He drew her towards him, by the arm, and pulled the blanket over her. She was crying. She said something about the knight, about the knight having been lost. It occurred to him that she'd had too much to drink.

Her head was hurting. She got up quietly and went downstairs to let Renata out. He was curled up asleep, cocooned in the blanket, far from her, at the very edge of the bed. She took a handful of vitamins and aspirin. She felt worn out, wrung out. First she spent a long time brushing her teeth; her hair was mussed up from the night before and sticking out all over the place. Eyes swollen. Had she been crying? Yes. Overreacting. She gave the skin on her stomach a hard pinch. This pain was a relief, it opened the floodgates of a mollifying self-hatred. As a child she'd heard that you could catch cancer from pinching. Some adult had told her that, she didn't remember who, when boys were pinching girls' breasts.

When she came down, he was sitting on the sofa, in just a shirt and no pants, reading the paper. He'd made her coffee.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said back.

"What are we going to do today?"

"Is there anything we have to do?"

"We'll have to get our stuff together this afternoon."

He turned the page.

"How do you feel?"

"Fine," he said.

After a pause he added, "You?"

She didn't feel like talking anymore. She started to leaf through a magazine. Suddenly the clouds parted, and a whole sea of blinding light flooded the room. She took a cigarette and went out onto the deck, although the very idea of smoking made her feel sick. She forced herself. She saw Renata at a distance. The crazy dog was throwing herself into the water, trying to bite the waves. Stupid animal, she thought. She was shivering with cold.

He went upstairs to put on his pants. He would have been very happy to start packing now. He had so many urgent things to do. He felt reinvigorated. As he passed the bed he saw her pajamas with the teddy bear on the front and for an instant, an instant finer than the layer of November ice on a puddle, he found the same tenderness in himself that he had felt sleeping with her nightshirt while she'd been away. This tenderness, like the desire he'd felt that night, was a habit. He shook his head. After all, she had cheated on him. Anger, a wave of anger he knew well by now, arrested his movements. He became an animal ready for battle, tense, attentive. He put on his pants and tightened his belt. It wasn't even about her anymore—let her do whatever she wants—it was about him: never, ever again would he let himself get hurt like that. He remembered that agony, but thanks to it he felt stronger now somehow, as if he had gone to war and come home safely. On his way down he saw her from the stairs huddled on the sofa, no makeup, eyes swollen. A strange thought occurred to him. I wanted her to die, he thought, and that's why she's gotten so ugly.

"I'm going to go take a couple of pictures," he said.

She said she'd go with him. He waited on the deck for her to get dressed. They went in the direction opposite that they'd gone the day before.

"Look," she shouted to him over the wind and pointed to something he'd already seen: a white band of sky over a navy-blue sea and whitecaps that looked like they'd been painted there by a Chinese artist. Then a flash of sunshine like lightning.

"There must have been a storm last night," she said.

There was a lot of trash on the beach: strips of algae, tree branches, sticks, interspersed now and then with unexpectedly colorful plastic things. She walked behind him and thought that from behind he looked the same as he had looked back then, but she knew it was just an illusion. Nothing could be restored. What's happened once can never happen again. Never. Lightning never strikes twice. She was suddenly struck by the significance of that cliché. There was nothing to be done about it. For a moment she wanted to bound after him and tug on his jacket, turn him around to face her, and then it would turn out that—what? What would it turn out? She slowed down, while he walked quickly up ahead, he and the dog and the camera getting farther and farther away, so she didn't try to catch up with him now, she just sat down on the sand. With some effort, turning her back to the wind, she managed to light a cigarette, and then she sat there in despair, thinking systematically of everything that would never happen again: their hands touching, that spark, sometimes accidental and sometimes greedy, eagerly awaited; the excitement of his scent, and of nestling into that scent; the knowing glances, each reading the other's mind; the same thoughts at the same moment; the calm, confident closeness; hand in hand, as if this were their natural and only position; delight in the shape of an ear; the nightly vine-like clinging to each other's body, treating it as a kind of case for one's own. A long morning. Drinking beetroot soup from the same bowl. The surge of desire on a walk in the park… The suitcase you take into the world with you contains things you can only use once, like those magic charms in fairy tales, like fireworks. Once they go off, once they go out, there's nothing you can scrape back up out of the ashes. That's it.

She thought she would tell him all this when he got back, but as they were walking home she realized that it was banal, that she would be ashamed to share something like this. He would just smile, because it would be as if she had sung him the words of some popular song. Nothing more. Yes, all her despair was simply banal—evidently despair was another thing you could only experience once. All subsequent despair would just be a Xerox copy. And maybe there is some mysterious line in life that you cross unknowingly, unintentionally, and from then on everything is just a lousy replay of what's come before it, which once had come into being fresh and new, but which can now only occur as pastiche, a second-rate paraphrase. Maybe that dividing line from which life only flows downhill was actually right here, today, on this beach, and from here on out, from this day forward, there would be blurred copies of them taking part in their lives, fuzzy reproductions, ordinary forgeries, poor-quality fakes.

They went home in silence, and the wind absolved them of it just as it had done the day before. He walked ahead with Renata and she behind, her face flushed from the wind.

Renata tried to go inside with something in her mouth. He blocked her path with his foot.

"What do you have, you rotten dog? What'd you find? A smelly old bone? A dead fish?"

He forced her mouth open and took out a piece of pale, polished wood. It took him a minute to realize what it was.

"Look what she's found!" he cried out in surprise.

She walked up, took the saliva-wet figurine from his hand and wiped it off on the mat. It was a chess horse, a white knight, but not the one from their set. This one was smaller, nobler, stouter, probably hand-carved. Its little open mouth was turned up, and a crack ran along the whole length of it.

"I don't believe it!" he said. "Renata, where did you get this?"

"It's from the sea," she said. "That washed up from the sea."

"I can't believe it," he repeated and glanced at her quickly, timidly, to avoid keeping his eyes on her. "How could a little horse like that have ended up in the water? And white, just like the one we lost? What are the odds?"

They both went up to the kitchen sink. She washed it off carefully and then dried it was a tea towel.

They set it on the table and examined it as if it were a rare insect. Renata too—she seemed pleased with herself. Then he put it on the empty square where the little unwanted piece of wood was still lying. The knight looked out of place amongst the other pieces, like a mutant.

"Shall we play?" he asked.

"Now? We have to go now," she replied, but she took off her jacket and sat down uncertainly.

"Whose move was it?"

She didn't know. They sat for a moment longer over the open chessboard, and then he said, without looking at her, "I was just kidding."

Read more by Olga Tokarczuk in WWB

From Final Stories by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Read the excerpt. A First Read from Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Read the excerpt.

#WWB #wordswithoutborders #Olga Tokarczuk #jennifer croft #nobel prize #womenintranslation #polish literature

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mistymins · 6 years

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A Call For The Past

○ yoongi x reader | 2.4k

○ some angst | winter soldier!au | marvel!au |

⇀ summary: it hasn’t been easy since you discovered your friend ‘Suga’ was an undercover assassin. And trying to reconnect with him may be just as hard as being traveling fugitives.

⇀ part of a scenario/drabble series, Lacuna - inspired by Marvel & the character Bucky Barnes

Gunshots. The distinct intimidation from the sound of every single one unloading from the barrel rattled the core your bones only this time, the discordance thundered beside your ear. The strange thing about it was that there were no visible bullets, not even one, to accompany the alarming sounds you were hearing. You sank to your toes, nearly burying your face to your knees as you cupped your ear in a failed attempt to foil the sound’s intent on instilling fear in you.

But the abyss-like void ignores all pleas, engulfing you into the darkness until you were falling and falling…faint echoes of something troublesome beginning to gnaw at you and you didn’t know whether they were manifestations of this nonsensical place or the real thing. But the clarity settled and those “faint echoes” became all the more familiar, and a piercing kind of hurt dug at your chest.

As you descended, you feel your gut menacingly tell you that you weren’t too far behind from the end of the fall. You teetered over the edge of danger but there was only silent acceptance and a slight taint of fear in the mixture. But before the bone crushing impact could hit you, light and soon coming into focus, cheap furniture in a mundane room with walls as vibrant as lifeless vegetation.

You woke up abruptly almost like a reel from shock. A sheen of sweat gliding down your forehead as you prompted yourself upright. Right…this was your reality. The color of the room lacked saturation probably due to the grey weather seeping from the curtains, the time indeterminable, but that seemed insignificant now that you notice him standing near the doorway—his black baseball cap covering his forehead, a bag of contents in his right hand.

You knew he had stepped out because he usually wears the same cap whenever he did and he almost rarely returns without bringing back something.

But just looking made you remember your circumstances, so you slither back into the curtains,turning your back against his stoic gaze. “Take me home” a hint of tiredness in your voice, “Take me home, I miss my dog…I miss my apartment.”

There was small moment when you hear nothing from him before feeling the paper bag settle near your feet. “Eat up.” He says.

You hoist yourself up to rummage through it—of course, he had already left you to yourself—it was food that was nothing special: two pieces of plastic wrapped sandwiches from the gas station and a water bottle. Though it was a far cry from the norm, you kind of got used to it in the past couple of weeks.

Before you could dig in, a proper thanks was in order, after all, he’s had no qualms about getting grub for you whenever necessary (you couldn’t leave the motel anyway, but it was the thought that counts).

You eyed the overturned bag, the other sandwich beckoning to be paid attention to. Did he not eat again? You pout slightly, he tends to provide for you at the expense of his health, you get it; he’s the knight in shining armor but this protection shouldn’t be at ‘expense’ of anything. You’re not the only human being on the run here.

You snag the other sandwich, staggering your way off the mattress to go and meet him. Of course, he’s already in his favorite spot: on a chair adjacent the window, inscrutably peering at the happenings outside with laser-eye focus, hands twisting and turning a knife, a glock appearing pristine as it perched by its lonesome in the middle of the coffee table before him.

“I don’t think they’re chasing us right now.” You murmur.

He tilts his head just enough to tell you that he definitely heard your voice and that he’s acknowledged it, but nothing more. It was starting to get annoying how brooding and reserved he is, acting like a stranger…he doesn’t even talk to you much anymore.

“Suga.” You say and his attention seems to catch the bait.

You held out the sandwich for him and he stares at it blankly at first, then navigates to you—his eyes devoid of anything, resembling the arctic cold. He could probably freeze a person with intimidation just by that poker face, but not you.

You raise your eyebrows and nod as if it was your own wordless way of commanding him to take the damn sandwich and just eat it.

He sighs—which you’ve come to know as his way of saying, fine, I’ll do it—and you grin from ear to ear, satisfied so much to have him listen to you that you pull the chair on the opposite end, intending to have a bite together like it was your guy’s typical, lazy, Sunday morning back at the apartment. Like how it usually was.

The moment your hand touches the head of the wooden chair (maybe he was already eyeing you before then), he blurts, “Your fingerprints.”

It takes a second or two but you immediately caught on, ripping your fingers back much like the reaction of a person repelled back by stinging pain from a hot stove.

“Sorry.” You muster, mouth drawing a line, knowing he was going to have to wipe off the prints later. “So…”, you start again, watching him unwrap his food as you quickly follow the same action. “Anything suspicious going on out there?”

“We’re in the clear right now so there’s nothing we need to worry about.” He says, stopping midway just to check back on you.

He must’ve noticed you gawking at him, it’s not like it was your intention to do it on purpose. Trying to reconnect with somebody who, to be honest to yourself, you thought you knew pretty well only to find out he wasn’t just hiding one or two measly little secrets was eye-opening.

You’d known him as ‘Suga’, your next door neighbor, close friend, confidant, all that good stuff…he was nearly a complete 180 but…The guy you knew, he couldn’t be completely gone, could he?

“Suga” you quickly notice your mistake, “I mean, Yoongi. When you were my neighbor, when we hung out and all that, how much of that was actually you? It can’t be all a lie, right?”

There’s that feeling where it seems like everything and everyone just stops moving, and the air ceases to blow a draft through the wispy curtains of the window, and even the tick-tock of the clock dissolves into a soundless nothingness—all because you were listening for something you either wanted or didn’t want to hear.

You couldn’t help but bring this up or think about it whenever you looked upon his face because he, Suga, was your friend.

His eyes twitch just enough for you to catch wind of it, “I’m given an alias wherever I go, my background, my interests…all fabricated”, his voice is surly; he doesn’t seem to want to eat anymore, “Suga was just a persona and a mask that I was supposed to play for Hydra. I’m sorry.”

His confession was a sharpened knife that you had pricked yourself upon now that he lay the words right in front of the table. And as much you swallowed the pill of harsh “truth”, it managed to bubble up in your voice; the anger and the hurt.

“Then who are you? And I don’t want to hear another alias or another fake identity, I mean, who are you, really?” you notice your voice slightly grow but it was too late to take it back.

“I…” he manages to say, letting his brown hair fall on his eyes, “don’t know. I don’t remember.”

His eyebrows knit together and for a while, you thought that that was it, it was going be another season until you hear about his past, however…

“It’s just—” he’s fighting to press on, “I have bits and pieces jumbled in my head. I remember these memories but” it’s as if whatever words he’s unable to convey is translated into hand gestures. “I don’t know what’s real, what was implanted. What I’m supposed to believe.”

There’s a look on his face that unintentionally confesses the anguish he’s holding back.

Never before, since this whole ‘run-away’ thing had blown out of proportion, had you felt some semblance of empathy towards him. He’s told you only on a ‘need to know’ basis. About Hydra, about ‘his work’, but the only fact ingrained in you was that he took Suga away—it felt like, in some sense, he had killed him; the Suga who was all along a fake identity.

The bitterness cultivated like a growing seed but now it seemed to filter away as you realize that here sat a man, used like an asset, paying the price for being their mercenary dog.

“Listen to me. there’s something that you did, or didn’t do I guess, that already makes you different” You say, leaning closer, “Your mission report was to kill me...You had nearly a hundred chances to do what you had to do. You got close to me, earned my trust; you could’ve ended my life before I even knew it. But you didn’t” It still hurt to admit what he’d been planning all this time but you’ve had some time to let it simmer.

“Don’t you see? This means that something that was the real you made a decision.” You assure.

After weeks, it looks like your words finally punctured the iron clad armor he hid behind as you saw a small smile that, to anyone else might’ve been insignificant—just a faint and effortless—but to you was like blue skies peering through the storm. You’ve seen him smile before, but it just seemed…different.

The truth is, you missed Suga but the person who portrayed him was still here, with that same face that reacted to whatever you were saying. Maybe Suga was fake and Yoongi was the real person…or maybe it didn’t matter as long as he was here.

“Housekeeping!”

There was a muffled voice behind the door that instinctively got you both turning heads, your throat tightened as if even the slightest sound of your hushed breath could be detected; anxiety beginning to run its course. Yoongi, however, was fearless, he didn’t tremble at the thought of another assailant possibly barging in, at least he didn’t appear to be as you watched him soundlessly tip toe towards the door when you could only sit and swallow the dryness in your throat.

It probably is just the housekeeper but being on the run has taught you to be extra careful of the ones you’d least expect to try anything.

He prompts you stay where you are—which you knew to do anyways as he’s the expert in these kinds of things—twirling the knife in his right hand as he predatorily checks the door.

All you could think is ok, what can we do in this situation? If the person outside is, in your worst possible scenario, another wolf of Hydra, opening the door and letting your face be shown is equivalent to inviting death; your voices too would probably be in the files…of course, before all this, you were Yoongi’s target, and he’s likely fed them intel or they’ve already done their little ‘research’. Either way, they definitely know who you are.

There’s a knock on the door when neither of you spoke a word.

This was when a plan simultaneously hashes in your head; one you admit you’re embarrassed to have thought of in the first place, but more so, that you actually think it would be a viable solution—especially since your source for this “ingenious” plan was from a movie.

Seriously…seriously?! One half of you say. And the other half is curiously gung-ho for it. Let’s just say, HYDRA recognizing your voice wasn’t going to be a concern.

Okay…

The more you thought about it the more cumbersome it appears so you literally just dive in head-first before your other half could talk you out of it. A series of lewd sounds begin to leave your lips; the kind that occurs in the ‘after dark’ hours. Was this more embarrassing in action? Yes, yes it was.

And what could possibly be the cherry on top of this mortifying experience was the fact that Yoongi had no choice but to observe while you work at it; etched on his face was an ajar mouth and widened eyes that detailed a ‘is this really happening?’ speechlessness.

An overwhelming amount of heat settled on your cheeks and continues to climb there when he raises a cheeky brow at your changes in pitch. He’s never seen or heard you like this before.

But despite the crippling embarrassment, it evidently works as the housekeeper utters something along the lines of ‘I’ll come back some other time’ and Yoongi peeks out the viewfinder, knowing that he is just waiting until they are no longer in the picture or at least far enough. What was for sure not even a minute felt significantly longer; made more intense that neither of you lost eye contact even if your mind is burdening you to look elsewhere.

You clear your throat as your leg fidgets and as he made his return to the table. “Shut up.” you say before he could sit down and say anything smart. “It worked, okay?”

He shrugged and although his expression tried to be subdued, there was no hiding that he undeniably got a kick from all of this. “Just one thing.” Is he pausing for dramatic effect now? “Remember that mask I have?” he asks and you snap your gaze from your sandwich to him.

Crap. In hindsight, this now made your little idea from a few minutes ago seem like an embarrassing drunken story from a frat party.

This “mask”, technically called a Photostatic Veil, was an ingenuity that was made up of programmable tech, constructed by nano-sized cells from end to end. In other words, it could completely reshape itself and mimic the facial structures of another person and it was 100% fail proof in hiding your true identity. It was one of the technological devices gifted to him along with the job.

The sudden realization only now makes you avoid looking at him as you pick up your food, “Just eat the damn sandwich…” you mutter.

You would be mistaken if you thought you heard him snicker but you swore you did as the sound of rustling plastic eventually drowns it out.

#yoongi x reader #yoongi scenarios #yoongi imagine #yoongi fic #bts scenarios #bts imagine

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ramialkarmi · 7 years

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Christopher Nolan explains the biggest challenges in making his latest movie 'Dunkirk' into an 'intimate epic'

From instant classics like “Memento” and “Inception,” to his flawless “The Dark Knight” trilogy, director Christopher Nolan has spent his career telling unique stories while pushing the medium. And for his latest movie, “Dunkirk” (opening July 21), he’s pushed it further than most ever have.

Recounting the evacuation of close to 400,000 British soldiers from Dunkirk, France during World War II, Nolan tells the story in three parts: soldiers on the Dunkirk beach trying to survive as German planes drop bombs on them, British Spitfire aircraft trying to shoot down the German bombers, and civilian boats taking a day trip to assist in the evacuation.

In typical Nolan fashion, he goes beyond the norms to depict the events. Filmed with little dialogue and a non-linear story, powered by the ticking clock score of composer Hans Zimmer, it’s the incredible images filmed on an IMAX camera that move the story.

Business Insider spoke to Nolan about the challenges of making “Dunkirk,” using as little CGI as possible to pull off the action, casting Harry Styles in one of the main roles, and why he can’t get enough of the comedy “MacGruber.”

Jason Guerrasio: One of the big things I took away from the movie was how intimate the setting and characters were compared to the subject matter and the IMAX format. I hope that reaction doesn't disappoint you.

Christopher Nolan: No. I refer to it as an intimate epic. That was very much my ambition for this film. To immerse the audience in aggressively human scale storytelling, visually. And by contrasting multiple points of view but each told in a disciplined way. Try and build up a larger picture of the extraordinary events at Dunkirk.

Guerrasio: So was that one of the biggest challenges of pulling off this project? Condensing the events at Dunkirk into intimate storytelling.

Nolan: Well, the tension between subjective storytelling and sort of the bigger picture is always a challenge in any film, particularly when you're taking on, which I never have done before, historical reality. So I really wanted to be on that beach with those guys. I wanted the audience to feel like they are there. But I also need them and want them to understand what an incredible story this is. I never wanted to cut out generals in rooms pushing things around on maps, so I settled on a land, sea, and air approach. I settled on subjective storytelling shifting between very different points of view. You're there on the beach with the soldiers, you're on a civilian boat coming across to help, or you're in the cockpit of the Spitfire dogfighting with the enemy up above.

Guerrasio: That's what's crazy, though the story is told on a huge IMAX screen, the shots from inside the cockpit of the Spitfire feel claustrophobic.

Nolan: What I love about IMAX is with its extraordinary resolution and color reproduction it's a very rich image with incredible detail. It lends itself wonderfully to huge shots with much in the frame. Thousands of extras and all the rest. But it also lends itself to the intimate, the small, the detail, incredibly well. The high aspect ratio on those screens, you're getting the roof of the set, the water creeping in from the bottom, you can get a very tactile sense of the situation we're trying to present.

Guerrasio: You've done more with an IMAX camera on this movie than anyone has yet, is there something you will never try to attempt again with this equipment in a future movie?

Nolan: I think, to be perfectly honest, everything we managed to do with the IMAX camera has encouraged us to try more and more.

Guerrasio: So there wasn't one thing you were like, "Nope, never again."

Nolan: No. I think in truth the only real limitation for me of those cameras is we haven't found a way to make them sufficiently soundproof to record dialogue. For other filmmakers this wouldn't be a problem, but I personally really like to use the dialogue that's recorded live on set. I don't like to ADR [additional dialogue replacement] things. I think you lose something in the performance. So that means that any time there's a really intimate dialogue scene, I need to use another format. In this case, for "Dunkirk," we used 5 perf-65mm. So our kind of smaller format was the format “Lawrence of Arabia” was shot on.

Guerrasio: What is your approach to editing? It's important for every filmmaker but your stories are often told in a unique way where editing really must be a high priority. Do you edit while shooting?

Nolan: My approach to the edit is I have a great editor in Lee Smith who I have worked with for years, he edits as we go along. He assembles the film. I tend not to look at any of that. I don't cut while I'm shooting. I'm too busy shooting. I watch dailies every day the old fashioned way, which I'm surprised so few filmmakers do anymore. It used to be a requirement of the job. But we project our dailies on film everyday and we sit there and talk about what we've done and sort of steer the ship. Lee goes ahead and edits but I tend not to look at those cuts unless there's a problem. If he sees a problem and thinks we've missed something at that point I'll go in and look at stuff. But generally what I do is I wait until filming has finished and then we get into the edit suite and start again from scratch. We view all the data and we start building it up from the beginning.

Guerrasio: Was there any specific sequence in this movie that was a challenge in the edit?

Nolan: The aerial sequences were particularly challenging because the reality of aerial sequences is they are tremendous eye candy. You watch the dailies you just want to use everything. But you have to be constantly aware in the edit that story drives everything for an audience. And if there isn't a new story point being made you have to be disciplined, so in the aerial sequences we were throwing away some of the most incredible aerial footage that I've ever seen and not putting it in the film because that's what you have to do. You have to trust that with what you are putting in there you are going to convey that sense of visceral excitement and wonderment that you felt in the dailies. That's always a challenge and it takes a long time to hone the whole thing down from a longer cut to a shorter cut.

Guerrasio: I couldn't tell what was visual effects and what was practical in this movie, particularly the sinking destroyers and dogfights. How much visual effects were used?

Nolan: I’m very proud with the visual effects being as seamless as they are. I worked very closely with my visual effects supervisor, who was there shooting with me on set. He basically was doing himself out of a job because he was able to help me achieve things in-camera that would have actually been visual effects and then didn't need to be. So, there's really nothing in the film that isn't in some way based in some kind of practical reality that we put in front of the camera. We didn't want anything to go fully CG and I'm very proud to be able to say that of my films this is the first time when we've been able to make a film that I actually can't remember which of the shots are visual effects and which aren't in some of the sequences. We've never been able to get to that point before.

Guerrasio: So the Spitfire doing the water landing, that was a replica plane?

Nolan: Yeah, we built a full size replica Spitfire and landed it on the water for real. And we actually strapped an IMAX camera to it for the crash and the thing sank much more quickly than we anticipated, because you never know, no one has done this before. And in the hours it took to retrieve the IMAX camera its housing, which was a big plastic barrel, actually had a hole in it and the entire thing filled with water. So the camera was completely submerged. But we called the lab and they clued us into an old fashioned technique that used to be used on film shoots. You keep the film wet, you unload the camera, and you keep it damp the whole time. We shipped it back to Los Angeles from the set in France, and they processed it before drying it out and the shot came out absolutely perfect and it's in the film.

Guerrasio: Wow.

Nolan: Try doing that with a digital camera! [Laughs]

Guerrasio: The scores in your movies are always so memorable, how did the second hand on a clock ticking theme come to you, and how did that evolve with your composer Hans Zimmer?

Nolan: The screenplay had been written according to musical principals. There's an audio illusion, if you will, in music called a "Shepard tone" and with my composer David Julyan on "The Prestige" we explored that and based a lot of the score around that. And it's an illusion where there's a continuing ascension of tone. It's a corkscrew effect. It’s always going up and up and up but it never goes outside of its range. And I wrote the script according to that principle. I interwove the three timelines in such a way that there's a continual feeling of intensity. Increasing intensity. So I wanted to build the music on similar mathematical principals. Very early on I sent Hans a recording that I made of a watch that I own with a particularly insistent ticking and we started to build the track out of that sound and then working from that sound we built the music as we built the picture cut. So there's a fusion of music and sound effects and picture that we've never been able to achieve before.

Guerrasio: You certainly gained your auteur status some time ago, but you also manned a huge Hollywood franchise, I want your perspective on today's blockbuster making. Has the director's voice been lost in today's blockbuster? It seems producers like Kathleen Kennedy at Lucasfilm and Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios are making all the creative moves.

Nolan: I think the Hollywood machine as an industrial process, there's always been a tension between art and commerce in Hollywood filmmaking, so the machine itself is often looking for ways to depersonalize the process so that it is more predictable as an economic model. But in truth, thankfully for directors it never works. [Laughs] Not long term. The director is, I think, the closest thing to the all-around filmmaker on set. You need a point of focus, a creative point of focus, through which the rest of the team's input can be focused on and I think the director is the best person suited to do that. At the end of the day, I think directors have always been absolutely driving the creative process.

Guerrasio: But the argument can be made that currently the producers on particular tentpole projects are the creative point of focus and they then hire a crew, including a director, who will follow that vision. I'm sure you had to listen to your share of notes from Warner Bros. while making your Batman movies, could you make a franchise movie in today's conditions?

Nolan: I think those conditions are being overstated. Like, everyone talking about "Star Wars" as an example are willfully ignoring what J.J. Abrams did in the process. Which isn't appropriate, J.J. is a very powerful creator. Not to mention, George Lucas, by the way. [Laughs] I mean, there is a bigger reality here in terms of where these things actually come from.

Guerrasio: Obviously, there's always the originator. Which, thankfully, is an individual and not something done by committee.

Nolan: Well, and I don't think anybody thought that Jon Favreau was doing a sensible thing by casting Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, but what an incredible decision he made. There's an entire industry based on that now.

Guerrasio: Very true. And we can pivot that a little to you casting Harry Styles. Many were scratching their heads about that casting and I think many will see you’ve really discovered a talent. Do you pat yourself on the back with this one or was it casting director magic?

Nolan: Oh, I'm very much patting myself on the back. [Laughs] Well, I'm the guy who is always taking it on the chin if I make the wrong decision. The truth is ever since I cast Heath Ledger as The Joker and raised all kinds of eyebrows, I've recognized that this is my responsibility and I really have to spot the potential in somebody who hasn't done a particular thing before. Because whether you're taking about Harry Styles or Mark Rylance you don't really want to cast them in a position where they are doing something they've already done. You want to give the audience something different. So you're looking at their talent and how that can be used. The truth is, Harry auditioned for our casting director, he sent the tape along. The casting director rightly pointed out how good it was. We threw him into the mix with many, many other young men and he earned his seat at the table over a series of very hard-fought auditions.

Guerrasio: He's very good in the movie.

Nolan: I’m very excited for people to see what he has done in the film. I think it's truthful and it's a very tough role he's playing, too.

Guerrasio: Do you get to watch a lot of new releases? Do you try to keep up on everything?

Nolan: I do when I'm not working. It depends on what phase I'm working. Obviously, this year I've been very buried in my own process. But in between films I absolutely try to catch up on everything.

Guerrasio: When's the last time you've laughed uncontrollably while watching a movie.

Nolan: Oooo. [Pause]

Guerrasio: There has to be one.

Nolan: Oh, there are many, but I'm trying to think if there's a recent. You know, I've been outed in the past as a "MacGruber" fan and I have to say there are a couple of moments in that film that had been howling uncontrollably.

Guerrasio: Give me one in particular, I have to know.

Nolan: [Laughs] I'm not going to go any further!

SEE ALSO: The inside story of how "Spider-Man" star Tom Holland went undercover in a NYC high school to prepare to be Peter Parker

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outside-meat-fountains · 6 years

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Plastic knight plushie!!!! He was difficult to make but I like how he turned out!!!

#off fangame #unload (off fangame)#plastic knight (unload)#my art #his tail was a fucking pain in the ass to make

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ramialkarmi · 7 years

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Christopher Nolan explains the biggest challenges in making his latest movie 'Dunkirk' into an 'intimate epic'

In typical Nolan fashion, he goes beyond the norms to depict the events. Filmed with little dialogue and a non-liner story, powered by the ticking clock score of composer Hans Zimmer, it’s the incredible images filmed on an IMAX camera that move the story.