#seeing it for the first time at the cinema is literally a core memory to me now

[rafasbiscuits]

Tagged by @schumi-nadal and @fisherkings thank u for tagging me guys it's always an honour, love youuu😘😘

Rules: post 10 of your favorite comfort mfovies then tag 10 people.

1. X Men movie series. Definitely, absolutely, undoubtedly, comfort movie. X Men. I remember watching the prequels with my brother as a kid when it's only the two of us at home. It's not just a comfort movie it's literally a fricking nostalgia for me. Then continued watching the whole timeline when I had my own computer.

2. STAR WARS MOVIES!!! Been a fan since I was a literal toddler and grew up with this. All sorts of nostalgia will come rushing to me and I will immediately feel hugged everytime I listen to the theme and just, see a familiar character. hey I don't know any lore cause I don't watch the cartoons but I watch enough to know what's going on🤷

3. Mean Girls. Yes, I watch Mean Girls on repeat everytime I eat lunch, it helps me eat cause I get distracted by all the drama going on, it's not nostalgic or anything cause I first watched it like two years ago but it is definitely a favourite and an absolute comfort movie.

4. Any Ghibli movies, I mean cmon, Ghibli!!! All my childhood anime movies are made from Ghibli. I love every single one of themm

5. Any Barbie movies (especially the Mariposa one, and the Princess Academy one and OMG THE MERMAID ONE!!) wait the mermaid one definitely needs its own like thing but I'm just putting it here. THE MERMAID BARBIE IS SO ICONIC I LOVE THAT MOVIE SO SO MUCH omg I have to rewatch

6. Twilight Series. Don't- actually. yes. I don't care anymore, I will not keep denying the fact that I LOVE this movie. It's part of my childhood and this movie really gave me alot of memories, I always watch the series whenever I'm sad or stressed about school..which is, all the time.

7. GOTG trilogy. Ugh, I mean I'm a Marvel fan in general (but I lean more to X Men), but Guardians Of The Galaxy will always be special to me. And the trilogy ended this year too and lemme tell you i CRIED. I remember begging my brother to lend me his USB so I can watch the first movie, and I did (took me a few weeks) and then BAM! Found comfort characters, all their songs became my comfort songs and immediately became a comfort movie, seriously the whole movie feels like home to me, god I love them.

8. Brokeback Mountain. I don't need to say anything about this, explains alot already.

9. Interstellar. Loved that movie to the CORE. watched it on the cinema and this movie made me fall in love with Nolan.

10. mmm I can't think of anything anymore but uhhh 2001: A Space Oddysey. Love it forever and always, the beginning of time and all that, loved the book it's one of my favourite books. And then the movie was just out of this world (literally) soundtrack? Top. Acting? Absolutely fantastic. Cinematography? yES. Perfection. I have an interest in the topic which is why I just feel so happy when I rewatch it..

Tagging...uhhh: @yoellglia @swaggypsyduck @tam-is-blogging @thefrootloopman @hubillusion @jcferrero @bluespring864 @raulsevyn @soronya @janesurlife (I'd love to tag all of you, yes the one who is reading this, but it says 10, I love you all very much tho😘)

[nutcasewithaknife]

....I see you from your tag on that chandelier post that you also appreciate the absolute masterpiece that is om shanti om.

That movie is literally a childhood core memory. @istgidek1234 was bullied into watching it for the first time not too long ago and I relived the high of the first watch vicariously through her. It's comic its tragic its haunting its absolute and utter crack. It is the best of desi cinema. I cry every time at Shanti's death. I'm never getting over the skjdnfnjgkfkd of Dard-E-Disco.

[rryeongchaes]

it’s been days since i first finished “for your heart only”, and while i’ve re-read it several times in between tasks at work, it’s still so hard to put together my thoughts because there is so much to love and praise about this chapter.

i’ve already screamed and cried over the beginning ryuryeong you put in the beginning, but it was especially wonderful seeing how ryujin reassured chaeryeong that everything will be alright then goes into the flashback where chaeryeong wholeheartedly encouraged and supported ryujin to follow the spark she had with yeji while also reassuring ryujin that she knows ryujin would never betray her feelings. we’ve mentioned how dlc ryujin is a green flag but we must also talk about how dlc ryeong is also a green flag!

and the chaerji date. THE CHAERJI DATE!!!

the way yeji asked chaeryeong out was so cute. she must have been planning the date for awhile and just needed that extra bit of courage to ask. i laughed at ryujin’s “finally”, probably sounding exasperated but you know she’s so happy that chaerji will get the chance to affirm their feelings.

the photobooth scene was absolute, rom-com cinema (in my mind at least). the little ways yeji is showing how much chaeryeong is on her mind and how she’s trying to be public with her feelings of affection towards chaeryeong without using words, while chaeryeong is so overwhelmed with her own feelings for yeji just by looking at her. absolutely my favorite scene.

a close second is the part with the yellowtail sashimi. it’s such a minor scene but reading how yeji was processing the fact chaeryeong wanted to order yellowtail for her was so…. UGH MY HEART. of course ryeong wants to take care of yeji too, but it’s also the fact that yeji wasn’t the only one trying to solve ryeong; ryeong was also trying to discover and learn new things about yeji too. it made me remember that bathroom scene from “dazed and senseless” when chaeryeong knew yeji need a kiss (really, anything) from her girlfriends to calm her when she didn’t even say anything.

and the confession… i loved that it was chaeryeong who confessed first. i was expecting it to be yeji since she was the one who asked her out. it also made me kind of sad at the same time since we know that yeji has been meaning to confess her feelings to ryeong, but is afraid. made me wonder if yeji was also dealing with own doubts and insecurities the way ryeong was, also afraid that her confession would be rejected (even though it’s so clear as day that you two love each other PLEASE)

thank you so much for this hefty treat of a chapter at 9k+ words. you worked hard, RCP! all the build up and teasing leading to this was sooooo worth it and more. i would love to know yeji’s pov and thoughts on the date, whether in a future entry or a short headcanon. i’m curious to know if there was something that gave yeji that final drop of courage she needed to ask chaeryeong out on a date or if it was simply for the sake of moving the plot along. i’m so happy and giddy from this chapter either way :)

(i might as well write a dlc dissertation with how much i yap about this amazing series) // 🦇

oh god wow, thank you so so so much for reading🦇🥺! you're the best!! the time it must have taken for this, just thank you, i literally sprang out of bed when I saw this in my inbox lol

i am SO happy you liked the ryuryeong. i really wanted to portray the trust and foundation they have, it's the reason we even have dlc in the first place. that was a (totally planned) parallel ;) they're both just so sweet and tender with each other, they all take care of each other in their own unique ways.

YUP chaerji date :) ryujin is so happy that her gfs are finally taking the step to be official hahah

the photobooth has been a real highlight this entry and i'm so happy everyone's finding it cute and romantic. it's gonna be a core memory for them 🥺 with them finally affirming their feelings, and pda being a very real thing that can come up, it's gonna be these small ways they show each other in public whether that's a cherry phone case (cough..yeji..cough) or affectionate looks across the room

oh i'm so glad you picked up that little detail, yeji clearly planned out so much of the date, so ryeong doing her part, paying and looking after what yeji wants to is so incredibly important, this is a date afterall, yeji needs to enjoy herself too!!

yessss ryeong's picked up a lot of yeji's tendencies, learnt how it's slightly different being yeji's partner, and well, if there's anyone that can calm yeji down it's chaeryeong.

the confession scene. 🦇 you have no idea how long i toyed with this scene, orginally it was yeji who confessed first, but as i wrote it, it made increasing sense for chaeryeong to be the one to confess first. yeji planned this whole day, put together a perfect date for chaeryeong, that act in itself is a declaration of her care and love for chaeryeong.

i think yeji's hesitance before was mostly from trying to find the 'right' time to say what she wanted, to lay her heart and soul out. i'm slightly hesitant on saying that yeji was scared that she was going to be rejected, but more so, she was afriad that she wouldn't be able to deliver on what chaeryeong deserved / what she thinks ryeong deserves

for yeji's pov of the date, hmm it could be something i work into the next yeji pov chapter as like a paragraph or something to reference. but in short, yeji couldn't be happier, she was determined to take care of ryeong and spoil her on their date, but ended up being the one spoiled instead. (i love them.)

if things go accordingly, you'll find out what gave yeji that final drop of courage in the next yeji pov too ;) if not, well, any answer you can come up with is a viable hc.

I think you'd be surprised to hear that I'm not fully happy with this entry, the core elements were all there but reading everything again a week after, I already see bits and pieces that could have been changed for a smoother read. But that being said, thank you so much for being so kind and sweet, analysing all the different details and pieceing together little fragments from previous entries, it genuinely keeps me writing this series and coming back to it.

I'd love to read that dissertation and review it ahahha, dlc is basically my dissertaion on how much i love catz line at this point

[megan-loves-surveys]

#35.

If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be? Ayumi Hamasaki or Adam Lambert, cos I've met all my fave wrestlers already.

What’s one thing you hope never changes? My hobbies.

What is one childhood memory that you remember especially well? Breaking my leg, taking a bunch of time off school and then not being able to do PE when I went back.

Who is your celebrity crush? Jon Moxley. Always.

How do you vent your anger? Hmm, depends why I'm angry.

Do you have a collection of anything? Wrestling t-shirts, action figures and Converse. I just got a shoe rack for my Converse, they look so nicely laid out now.

What are some core principles you have that you’ll never give up or change? If someone's choice or opinion doesn't affect you, then please STFU about it if you disagree. Like, how does my choice not to have children affect you?

What trait do you admire in others but don’t possess yourself? Being super confident and being able to talk to literally anyone, I don't have that in me lol.

Are you ticklish? If so, where? Sure.

What was the last movie you saw? In cinemas - Bob's Burgers Movie (I haven't been to the cinema since 2022 lol), on TV... some 80s movie that I forget the name of, my Mum was watching it. It was about this guy who turns into voyeur and sees this woman stripping off in her window lmao, but it's more than that.

What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had? Take your pick between breaking my femur after slipping over as a kid, or getting hit by a car and breaking my shoulder in 5 places, along with breaking my other arm, cracking my pelvis and a concussion.

Do you tend to hold grudges against people who have done you wrong? Depends what they did to me. I mean, do I still hold a grudge against the woman who ran me over? Definitely, I will never forgive her.

Basic question: what’s your favorite color/colors? Purple! Followed by green and blue.

Do you have a fast or slow metabolism? Uh... not sure.

Ever seen a pregnant woman smoking/drinking? Not that I can recall. That does remind me of my BFF when she was pregnant cos her boyfriend didn't even let her drink a sip of a coffee drink LOL.

Do you like hickeys? No, they're embarrassing lol.

How many people have you had feelings for since high school ended? Enough.

Has the last person you dated/fell in love with ever seen you cry? Yes.

Do you still talk with your latest ex? No.

Did you get any compliments today? I haven't talked to my boyfriend yet today, so no :P

Do you own anything bought in another country? Loads of stuff.

Who do you text the most? My boyfriend.

Do you miss your last ex? Not at all.

Have you ever known a guy who caused a lot of drama? Loads.

Is where you live on a boulevard, road, street, or avenue? Road.

What would you name twin girls? If I had to? Cheryl and Stella.

Do you want to have a bachelorette party? I don't want to get married, so no.

When was the last time you prayed with someone? Never.

What time of year do you start listening to Christmas music? Start of December lol.

If you’re female, would you feel uncomfortable having a male gynecologist? I've never been to one, so no clue.

Were you ever hospitalized as a child? Yes, more than once.

What do you get tired of having to explain? That yes, I'm actually in my 30's xD

Who is your least favorite character in the last show you watched? I'm watching WWE, so my least fave 'character' aka wrestler is probably... the entire of Judgment Day LOL.

If you weren’t in a relationship with your significant other (or last) and you met them for the first time tonight, would you hook up with them? Yes.

Is there a place that makes you sad to return to? Not really.

Has anyone ever surprised you by changing when you didn’t believe that they could? Hmm.

Do you and your significant other have “a song?” What is it? Not particularly, our music taste is completely different.

Do you think it’s bullying to tell someone they’re naïve? Well, if they're being naïve, then no lol.

Which name do you like better: Faith, Grace, or Hope? Grace.

Do any of your neighbors have dogs? Yup - the ones across from us have the cutest French bulldog, she's deaf and just so sweet <3 A couple of other people have one too, but they're further down the complex so we don't see them much.

When is the last time you went on a date? A couple of weeks ago, we went out for dinner.

Has a police officer ever committed a crime against you? No.

If you had kids, would take them to Disney World? Sure, if I could afford it :P

Does it bother you when girls make duck faces? Not really.

Has a little kid ever fallen asleep on your lap before? No.

Would you ever try anal? If you have, were you always keen to try it? I've done it loads before, I prefer it over blowjobs tbh hahaha.

If you were to get engaged, what’s your dream engagement ring? None.

Would you feel hurt if your last ex was in a relationship? I don't care what he does. He's an ex for a reason.

Who was the last person you played a video game with? I don't play them with other people, I'm a solo gamer xD

Would you tell your parents if you were gay? My parents don't know I'm bi... so no lol.

What’s one aspect of your life that did not turn out as you expected? How long it took me to find work.

Who do you think cares the most about you? Lots of people.

Does it bother/offend you when someone calls something (not someONE) gay? Yeah, that's lame, don't use it as an insult.

How old are your parents? My Dad turned 74 last week and my Mum is 73.

What is the oddest thing that’s happened to you? Depends what you consider odd, really.

Your favorite band: Do you prefer their old or new stuff? For Ayumi Hamasaki, I definitely prefer her older stuff, though I do like her new material cos I like everything she releases. But her older albums are some of the best J-pop ever made. For Little Mix, I pretty much like all their albums! In fact, their middle period with Get Weird is probably their worst, though I still love it.

When was the last time you met someone who shared your first name? Good question. I was friends with a fellow Megan at school and I run across them online sometimes.

Do you have health insurance? No. Don't really need it in NZ, we have free health care.

What does your doormat say? It's just brown.

What would you rather have: a nanny, a housekeeper, a cook, or a chauffeur? A cook or chauffeur, cos I suck at cooking and I don't drive lol.

STARTED SCHOOL: 5. HAD YOUR FIRST REAL KISS: 7. FELL IN LOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME: 34, when I met my current boyfriend. YOU GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL: 18. LOST YOUR VIRGINITY: 14. GOT MARRIED: I don't want to get married. STOPPED BELIEVING IN SANTA CLAUS: I actually don't know haha. STARTED USING THE INTERNET: I think... I was like 9 or 10? BOUGHT YOUR FIRST NEW CAR: I've never owned a car. PAID OFF THAT CAR: - WENT TO YOUR VERY FIRST CONCERT: I was... 12 cos it was Five in the year 2000. THINK YOU WILL DIE: Hopefully when I'm very very old. HAD YOUR FIRST PET: 5, I got a cat for my 5th birthday. EXPERIENCED THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE 4 THE FIRST TIME: I think I was 7 when my Granddad passed. SAW YOUR FIRST HORROR MOVIE: Not sure. WERE IN YOUR VERY FIRST CAR ACCIDENT: I was hit by a car in 2017, if that counts. GOT YOR FIRST JOB: I was in my 20's lol. BROKE A BONE 4 THE FIRST TIME: 8, when I broke my femur. MOVED OUT ON YOUR OWN: I haven't. MET YOUR BEST FRIEND: 14, cos we met in 2002. HAD YOUR 1ST CRUSH ON A CELEBRITY: 10, Ritchie from Five <3 I met him earlier this year xD HAD YOUR 1ST CRUSH ON SOMEONE FROM SCHOOL: 7. He was my first kiss lol. FIRST VOTED IN AN ELECTION: 18. REALIZED HOW HARD LIFE CAN REALLY BE: When I turned 30 and had my arm in a sling and could barely do anything for myself. What a horrible 30th birthday. MET YOUR FAVE CELEBRITY: Which one? I met Mox for the first time in 2015 when I was... 28? FIRST GOT INTO TROUBLE WITH THE LAW: Never have. GOT YOUR FIRST SPEEDING TICKET: - MET YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER: 34. LOST YOUR MOM OR DAD: I haven't yet, thank god. GOT INTO YOUR FIRST FIST FIGHT: Never.

Animals

Cats Dogs Ducks Quokkas Rats Bands/Artists

Ayumi Hamasaki Little Mix Blue Five At the moment, Madison Beer Countries you want to visit

Japan USA (been there loads of times but I always wanna go back) UK France Italy Video games

Pokémon Broken Sword Civilization The Sims Starcraft Movies

Not sure, I'm not a big movie fan Anime

Pokémon is literally the only anime I've watched lol Drinks

Water Starbucks frappes Grapefruit juice Coke Zero Sugar Chicken noodle soup School subjects

Computers/IT Legal Studies English Geography Study period Hobbies

Watching wrestling Playing video games Listening to music Chatting on Discord Writing Books

Weather Warden series That's all I need xD

[heavencollins]

Top 10 Films of 2020: Part One

2020 was a rough year for a lot of reasons, but even more rough due to the lack of an existent film industry for over half of the year.  Sure, there are small productions happening and movies being released on VOD, as well as some in theatres, but so many great films were pushed back this year—movies I was excited to possibly have on my top ten.  Minari, Promising Young Woman, Zola, The Green Knight, Saint Maud.  Okay most of those are A24 releases but A24 literally released next to none of their slate for this year and it’s one of the most disappointing things to happen in the entertainment industry in my opinion.  

Alas, I still found cinema through streaming, paying $20 for a VOD rental, and those amazing $1.80 rentals from Redbox (remember when they were only a dollar?  because I do).  And honestly?  It was probably the hardest time curating a top ten that I’ve had in a long time; with so much just available through the internet and owning every single popular streaming service, it was both impossible to watch everything I wanted but also since I watched a lot of what i wanted, I ended up loving most of it.  For a year that was so dismal in every other way possible, the films that were released ended up being a shining light more often than not.  Of course, like every other year, a lot of hot garbage came out too, but that isn’t the focus of this—the great, amazing, can’t believe these are real films.  

So let’s start from number ten.  This was my first and only $20 rental this year, starring a man who I personally admire: Pete Davidson.  

10. The King Of Staten Island, directed by Judd Apatow and written by Judd Apatow, Pete Davidson, and Dave Sirus.  

Judd Apatow is one of the first directors who I watched religiously, and hearing that he was doing a film with Pete Davidson that was essentially based on Davidson’s life meant that I knew I’d have to watch it.  Scott, played by Davidson, is a twenty-something with no direct path in life; he lives with his mother, his sister is going off to college—something he never attempted—and he has no real career.  His father died in a large building structure fire, much like Davidson’s actual father, a firefighter who passed away while responding to the twin towers during 9/11.  Scott is emotionally a wreck, plagued with depression and anxiety, a chronic weed smoker, and dreams of being a tattoo artist that he practices by tattooing his group of rag-tag friends, but none of the tattoos are very great.  

The thing about an Apatow film is they border the line between comedy and drama very well, kind of a complicated little dance.  But, King of Staten Island is very much a drama more than a comedy.  Bill Burr plays Ray, the father of a kid that Scott tattoos earlier on in the film.  Ray comes stomping up to Scott’s mother’s house, and Margie, played by Marissa Tomei, opens the door.  It’s essentially love at first sight.  She hasn’t dated since Scott’s father passed, and to make matters worse, Ray is also a firefighter.  This complicates emotions for Scott, as he loves his mother but also doesn’t know how to deal with the feeling that his mother is finally moving on and may face heartbreak again.  

Davidson puts it all on the table in this film.  It’s poignant and realistic; at the start, Scott is driving down the highway and closes his eyes, way longer than you should.  It sets the tone from the start that this man isn’t okay, but also he’s scared of dying because as soon as he opens his eyes again and sees he may be about to crash, he quickly panics and readjusts his wheel.  This struck a chord with me as most people know that Davidson has struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past.  It’s a beautiful film that memorializes both how much Davidson’s father meant to him, but also the cycles of grief and trauma that last throughout your life.  

9: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), directed by Cathy Yan and written by Christina Hodson.

Suicide Squad is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen period, fact.  Birds of Prey is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen period, fact.  I never, ever, ever thought I’d see a day where a DC movie was in my top ten, but this year anything is possible.  Birds of Prey is a display of feminism, badassery, and all around perfection.  You jump right into the story, hearing Margot Robbie’s classic Harley Quinn voice laid over an animation showing what we missed in her life so far, which means you don’t have to have any previous knowledge of the other films.  Birds of Prey is meant to stand alone from any other movie preceding this one, and that’s just part of why it’s so great.

This film knows not to take itself too seriously.  Margot Robbie is a dream as Harley Quinn, using just the right amount of playfulness to put a little edge on her, while also maintaining the manic-panic-pixie-dream-girl effect.  Perhaps the best scene is when Harley goes and purchases the perfect egg breakfast sandwich, and then she drops it, causing a dramatic slow motion effect that proves she really does love that sandwich more than anything in the world.  Or her realistic apartment, nothing truly fancy, just a little hole in the wall above a rundown Chinese restaurant.  But then she has an amazing ensemble of other women actors around her, which are what really uplift her performance. 

The funhouse fight scene at the end may be the best in superhero movie history.  I mean, I guess, is Harley Quinn really a superhero?  She’s kind of the anti-hero, which is what makes her so great.  She’s somebody who isn’t even close to perfect but she still succeeds and tries to help and uplift the other women on her team.  There’s just something special about this movie that made me smile and laugh the entire time.  It’s a reminder that it’s okay to have fun every once in a while.  

8: The Assistant, directed and written by Kitty Green.

For those who don’t know, I work as an assistant during the day for a small business here in Vermont.  The work is mundane but it’s a job that’s giving me experience for the future.  In The Assistant, Jane, played by Julia Garner, is an assistant to a “powerful entertainment mogul.”  She gets lunch, answers phones, is the first one into the office, the last one out of the office, finds herself overshadowed by her male counterparts and getting the majority of the “grunt” work, and becomes more and more aware of what’s really going on at this office throughout a day in her life.  

What’s interesting about this film is nothing is ever seen; everything Jane starts to feel is just based on intuition.  Her boss is tricky, finding ways to keep his abuse of women out of the public eye, out of the eye of any female employees.  This is obviously in response to #MeToo, Times Up, and the Harvey Weinstein news from the last few years, and it works surprisingly well as a film that just unnerves you and gets under your skin.  

The reality of assault in the film industry is that until it’s widely public and known, nobody is going to know about it.  You can report it to your company, to other women, to other men, to anybody, and nobody will take you seriously until they either experience it themselves or know somebody else who has.  The Assistant hits the ball out of the park with the ending, even if it doesn’t give a vindictive satisfaction to viewers, because it’s simply the truth of the matter.  

7: Tenet, directed and written by Christopher Nolan.

I really don’t know what to say about this one.  It’s really controversial to like it but I absolutely LOVED this movie, it’s pure fucking vibes.  A lot of people are cinema purists, which I am not, and will never claim to be, which was a huge deal with this film.  Personally, this works way better at home than it ever would in a theater.  It’s slightly long, the sound mixing makes it so it can be hard to hear dialogue over loud noises and the score, and it’s the type of movie you may have to rewind  a few times.  

My partner and I watched this in 4K Ultra HD with subtitles on, and let me tell you, it was amazing.  Everything about the acting, the diversity in the film, the fact that Nolan literally has a character say “Don’t try to understand it, just experience it”???? VIBES.  That’s all I can say about it.  Plus, Elizabeth Debicki plays an actual badass who stands against her abuser and that enough is five stars.  A tall queen standing up against her short joker—absolute feminism.  

Sure, no character gets any development, but is that seriously necessary for every film?  It’s an action flick about time and space and none of it makes sense and you can’t force it to.  Why does everything need to make sense in a time where we are literally living through a pandemic?  Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the experience of Tenet.  It’s more fun when you don’t take it seriously.  

6: The Devil All The Time, directed by Antonio Campos and written by Antonio Campos, Donald Ray Pollock, and Paulo Campos.

I never read the book this was based on, but this film made me want to.  I love a film where multiple plot lines converge into one central story and this one did it so well, all with the same theme surrounding every single character: the guilt of sin and how no matter how much you think you can save yourself, you can’t truly save yourself.  I’m not a huge fan of Tom Holland, but he shines as Arvin from beginning to end.  Pattinson brings a creepy southern preacher to life with an accent that he will never be able to match again.  Keough gives a performance you can only sympathize with as you know she’s being manipulated the entire time.  Every character in this is corrupt in their own way but some in worse ways than others.

I don’t know how much to say about this one without spoiling it, either, because the core of this film is on the characters and what leads to their untimely ends, because pretty much everybody ends up dead.  It’s grim and dark but it’s so beautiful and tells the story in a way that keeps you interested throughout the entire run time.  It surprised me but there’s never truly been a Robert Pattinson starring movie that I’ve hated, so am I really surprised?  I’m a TwiHard at heart even at age 22. 

[chiseler]

Tales of the Unexpected:  SANTA CLAUS

Most of my life I’d been haunted by an image—five seconds from a film I could not name: Santa, in someone’s living room on Christmas Eve, fires a toy cannon at a demon’s ass. That’s all, but it stuck with me for decades. The only thing I was sure about was that it came from a film my father had taken me to see when I was four or five. There was snow in the theater parking lot.

It clearly wasn’t a typical holiday film, so as the years progressed I decided it must have been Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (co-starring Jamie Farr and Pia Zadora as martians), but I was mistaken. There are no demons in that movie. I asked my dad, but he had no idea what the hell I was talking about. Then, as the universe would have it, when I was well into middle age the film was placed in my hands by someone  who had no idea I’d spent much of my life looking for it. Seeing the film in its entirety for the first time in 40 years, I finally understood why things might have turned out the way they did.

When the conversation rolls around to bad Christmas movies, there’s of course a broad spectrum from which to choose. Given that nearly every Christmas movie ever made is insufferable to some degree, it’s generally easier, I’ve found,  to break things down into categories that stretch from the simply godawful (Jingle All the Way) to the agonizingly painful (A Very Brady Christmas or that Marlo Thomas remake of It’s a Wonderful Life) to the merely baffling (An Ewoks Christmas). Of course there are some people who think they can bring the conversation to an abrupt end by pulling out Santa Claus Conquers the Martians as the last word on holiday cinema. There’s simply nothing more to say.

Oh, but that’s far too simple. There’s another level out there. Something that reaches far beyond banal categorizations like “good” and “bad” and even “weird,” deep into the almost unfathomable territory of “brain damaging” and “utterly terrifying,” and a number of adjectives that have yet to be discovered. Films that cannot and should not be called “bad” no matter how easy it would make thinking for the smug hipsters in the Mystery Science Theater crowd. These are films that come from another plane, another universe, another way of thinking, and for that they remain fascinating, and cannot be so easily dismissed.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, K. Gordon Murray was an American film producer and distributor who made a decent living for himself by picking up the rights to foreign genre pictures (mostly from Mexico), dubbing them into English, and renting them to U.S. theaters. English-speaking audiences can thank Murray for The Brainiac and Robot vs.The Aztec Mummy.

In 1956 he bought the rights to a children’s holiday picture directed by René Cardona, a man better known for horror and exploitation pictures like Survive! and Night of the Bloody Apes. Instead of widespread distribution, Murray limited the film to short (two or three day) runs around the holidays, when the film would only be shown as a children’s matinee. In retrospect I have to wonder if he limited viewings that way because he knew what kind of effect the film would have on people.

Santa Claus sounds about as innocuous as they come. Who would even pay attention to a title like that?  It’s only when you note the shrill, almost frantic tone of some of the taglines attached to the film that you begin to get some sense that there’s something else going on here—that this isn’t another Rankin/Bass production:

Bursting upon our BIG SCREEN in all the colors of the rainbow… a prize-winning blue ribbon treat for old and young alike! Here’s something for the whole family to see together!

Another tagline makes it sound even more ominous:

See All the Weird and Wonderful Characters of Make-Believe! The Fantastic Crystal Work-Room of the Happy Elves! The Fabulous Realm of the Candy-Stick Palaces!

Those families who weren’t scared away by those dire warnings were never the same again.

René Cardona

In  Cardona’s vision, Santa (José Elías Moreno)  lives in a cloud kingdom in space, positioned in a stationary orbit above the North Pole. Instead of elves, Santa has collected groups of children from all corners of the world—North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa. It’s unclear who these children belong to or if they’re in space willingly, but they open the film with a long recital of traditional songs from each nation.

Ten minutes later we cut to Hell. Although this happens in most Christmas movies, few do it so literally. There amid the flames, Satan informs a minor and bumbling demon named Pitch (José Luis Aguirre ‘Trotsky’) that he is to turn all of the children on Earth evil in order to anger “that old goat Santa Claus” and show the people of the world “who their true master is.”

We are then introduced to three storylines: a lonely rich boy whose parents neglect him, a poor girl whose single mother can barely support them both, and three young thugs. Behind each story, we hear Santa’s echoed laughter. Santa laughs through the entire film, often at scenes of misery and despair. It’s unclear why.

Finally and centrally, we see the core of Santa’s orbiting kingdom—an observatory equipped with a collection of surveillance devices that would put the NSA to shame. As the narrator (Murray himself) describes it:

This is Santa’s Magic Observatory. What wonderful instruments! The Ear Scope! The Teletalker, that knows everything! The Cosmic Telescope! The Master Eye! Nothing that happens on Earth is unknown to Santa Claus!

He’s not kidding, either. Santa can see anyone he chooses merely by thinking of them, listen to what they’re saying, even watch their dreams, and these are powers he abuses freely.

There is no reason to attempt to describe the plot any further. It’s not an issue. Visually, however, the film is a thing of deranged  wonder, reminiscent of Japanese films that would be made ten or fifteen years later. It’s a world of remarkable and sometimes frightening imagination. The telescope features a large, roving eyeball instead of a lens. Santa’s sleigh is actually a giant wind-up toy, the living reindeer replaced with carousel reindeer made of white plastic. The color palate throughout the film (if you can find a decent print) is intense. And the film’s multiple dream sequences are, well, pretty jaw-dropping.

It’s also a remarkably subversive film—which intertwined both with the visuals as well as the director’s background, may be no surprise at all. Along with the kidnapped children he’s using as slave labor, the cannon he fires at the demon’s ass, and  Santa’s often inappropriate laughter, which snakes throughout much of the soundtrack, there’s Merlin, another of Santa’s employees. Merlin runs a drug lab, and on Christmas Eve has just developed a “magic powder” that will “give people a sound sleep and fill them with wonderful thoughts and good intentions.”

Santa is perfectly willing to deliver babies to children who request little brothers or sisters, and one good little boy is set to receive “an atomic lab and a machine gun.” And then of course there’s the role of the demons here, in a world in which Santa and his toys have replaced Christianity.

It’s a film that’s often mocked by fools for its cheap sets and bad acting, without pausing to think about what’s really going on here—the kind of twisted, alien imagination at work, or the ideas that Cardona is sneaking in under their smug noses. It’s a deeply strange and disturbing work, a visionary work on a minuscule budget, and one that says more about the holidays than we may care to think about.

Maybe that’s why my dad has blocked it out of his memory, and why I spent a lifetime trying to track it down.

by Jim Knipfel

[brentwatchesmovies]

Brent’s Top 10 Movies of 2019

Scorsese is probably my favorite living filmmaker, but I’ll be honest, when I heard that Scorsese was making this movie, and *how* he was making it (heavily digital de-aged actors) I was a bit skeptical. De Niro and Pacino haven’t been turning in interesting performances in quite awhile, and Pesci came out of a decades-long retirement for the movie as well. On top of that, the first trailer released did little for me. All that to say I was an idiot to doubt the master.

Scorsese returns to the crime genre that he re-invented many times over the years, this time with the eyes of a man in his 70’s, looking back on his life and career. The movie is very long, but in my opinion, it needs the length. The viewer needs to *feel* the totality of a life, and as is his intent with The Irishman, the *consequences* of this specific life. The final hour or so of this movie feels like a culmination of Scorsese’s career in many ways. The energy and entertainment of a crime/mob epic, with the fatalism and philosophical leanings of a movie like ‘Silence’. It’s a 3.5 hour movie that I’ve already rewatched, and actively want to again, so that alone ought to speak volumes.

Harmony Korine made one of my favorite movies of the 2010’s, the neon-soaked and often misunderstood ‘Spring Breakers’, so I was already in the bag for whatever he did next. When I heard it was a freewheeling stoner comedy where Matthew Mcconaughey plays a guy named ‘Moondog’ costarring Snoop Dogg, I reserved its location on my top 10 list.

This movie doesn’t have the empty heart at its core that defines Spring Breakers, opting instead for a character study about a ‘Florida man’ poet after his life pretty much falls apart. It’s basically plotless, stumbling from one insane, borderline hallucinatory sequence to the next, but I just loved living in the world of this movie. Beach Bum almost feels like a deliriously fun VR simulation of hanging out with Matt McConaughey and his weirdo friends down in the Florida keys. This is one that probably won’t pop up on many top 10 lists but I really adore, and will surely rewatch it a dozen times in the years to come.

Let the record show, I’ve been a huge fan of Bong Joon-ho since I first saw his monster movie/family drama ‘The Host’. Some time later, he went on to make ‘Snowpiercer’, one of my favorite movies of the last decade. All that to say, I think Parasite is probably his best movie, and a true masterwork of thriller direction. It also has his usual brand of social commentary and a script filled with darkness and humor, following a South Korean tendency to juggle multiple tones throughout, sometimes all in one moment or scene.

Parasite also follows a big 2019 trend of commenting on class and social dynamics between the rich and the poor. I think that’s part of why it’s done incredibly well at the box office (especially for a Korean language film), the fact that people can relate in a huge way, regardless of which country your from. Parasite is one of the most entertaining movie viewing experiences I’ve had this year and I’d recommend everyone check it out.

If you were to ask me what the funnest movie-going experience I had in 2019 was, I’d have to pick Rian Johnson’s ‘Knives Out’. Hot off making one of the best Star Wars movies ever made (don’t @ me) Johnson decided to make a passion project in the vein of classic Agatha Christie style murder mysteries, and the results are a total blast. Filled with clever twists and turns, weaponizing the structure of murder-mysteries against the audiences expectations, it stays one step ahead of you the entire time.

Aside from the clever mystery of it all, it’s the actors performances and chemistry that really sell this thing. Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Collette are expectedly great per usual, and Daniel Craig is having the time of his life as Mississippi private-eye Benoit Blanc, but the heart of the movie is relative newcomer Ana de Armas. She brings an emotional weight and anchor to the movie that always keeps you emotionally invested amidst the terrible, money hungry backstabbing by the other heightened characters. I hope everyone sees this movie and Johnson is able to give us another Benoit Blanc adventure somewhere down the line, I’ll be there opening day.

Nobody makes an upbeat, feel-good movie like Ari Aster does! After last years light and breezy ‘Hereditary’ (which I liked a lot but didn’t totally love) he’s back with a completely riveting and emotionally draining (not to mention horrific) masterpiece. What I connected to most in Midsommar is the journey of Dani, played incredibly by Florence Pugh. The way the film portrays the relationship between her and her dog shit boyfriend played by the (usually) charming Jack Reynor keeps you invested in every twist, perfectly paced out over the movies admittedly long runtime.

I won’t get into spoiler territory, but where this movie goes in the end is what makes this a fully 5-star movie for me. After putting you through hell, like Aster loves to do with bells on, Midsommar ends in a euphoric, psychedelic orgy of music and violence that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Midsommar rules so hard and I can’t wait for whatever twisted thing Aster cooks up next.

One of my increasingly favorite brands of movies is a finely crafted, primo slice of dad-movie cinema, and James Mangold has made one with Ford v Ferrari. The story chronicles the partnership of ex-racer and designer Carroll Shelby and racer Ken Miles as they work to make a Ford that can compete in the 24 hour race of Le Mans. Bale and Damon are a blast to watch bounce off each other and the race sequences are pretty damn thrilling, combining (what I expect is) a solid amount of great VFX with practical racing to great effect.

I also didn’t expect it to have as much to say about the struggle to create something special by passionate people and not committees while also inside the very machine that churns out products on an assembly line. Just a random note, this original movie was just put out by 20th Century Fox, now owned by Disney but that’s completely unrelated and I’m not sure why I’d even bring that up??? Anyway, I love this movie and dads, moms and everybody else should check it out.

If you saw my list last year, then it must appear like I’m some diehard Mr. Rogers fan. I don’t really have many memories watching his show as a child, but what the documentary ‘Won’t You be my Neighbor’ and this film by Marielle Heller have in common is a shared fascination of his immense empathy and character. It’s only right that America’s dad Tom Hanks should play him, and I was surprised at the end that I was able to get over his stardom and accept him as Rogers. He’s not doing a direct impersonation, and I think it’s all the better for it, instead opting for matching his soft tone and laid back movements.

On a pure emotional level, this movie was a freight train. It didn’t help that the movie covers a lot of father stuff, from losing your own to becoming one yourself (2 big boxes on the Brent bingo card). Heller’s direction is clever in its weaponizing of meta/post-modern techniques, such as one incredible fourth wall break in a diner scene. It literally breaks down the barrier between Mr. Rogers, we the audience, and the films intent to make us feel something.

I cry a lot at movies, that much is well known, but it’s rare that a movie makes me weep, and this one did. Even thinking about scenes right now, days later, my eyes are welling up with tears thinking about the messages of the movie. Mr. Rogers and his lessons of empathy and emotional understanding have rarely been as vital and important as they are right now in our world.

Robert Eggers first film ‘The Witch’ from 2015 is one of my favorite movies of this decade, possibly of all time, so my hype for his black and white, period piece two-hander ‘The Lighthouse’ was through the roof. Even with sky-high expectations, it still blew me away. With dialogue reminiscent of The Witch in its specific authenticity to its era, to the two lead actors giving all-time great performances, It was one of the most entertaining film viewing experiences I had this year.

There’s something about both of Egger’s movies that I really keyed into watching this one: his fascination with shame and the liberation from it. Where Witch was from the female perspective, Lighthouse literally has two farting, drunk men in a giant phallic symbol fighting for dominance. It’s less a horror film than his first, but still utterly engrossing, demented and specific to his singular vision. I can’t wait to see 20 more movies from this guy.

This is another big movie of 2019, like The Irishman, where you can see the director looking inward, at what his films mean and represent. It initially caught me so off guard that I really didn’t know how to feel about it, but after seeing it again, it’s one of my favorites of the year, and probably Tarantino’s filmography overall. More akin to something like Boogie Nights or Dazed and Confused, letting us live with and follow a small group of characters, it mostly doesn’t feel like a Tarantino movie (until the inevitable and shocking explosion of violence in the third act, of course).

‘Hollywood’ is the most sincere and loving movie Tarantino has made, interested in giving us a send off to an era of Hollywood and artists that have been lost or forgotten (Some more tragically than others). In the end, the movie functions similarly to ‘Inglorious Basterds’ in it’s rewriting of history to give us catharsis. “If only things could have worked out this way.” Luckily in movies, removed from the restrictions of reality, they can. And once upon a time in Hollywood, they did.

Uncut Gems probably tripled my blood pressure by the time the credits rolled. A slice-of-life story about a gambler/dealer in New York’s diamond district, the movie follows Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler in easily the best performance of his career. Ratner is basically addicted to living at the edge of a cliff, being chased by violent debt collectors, juggling a home life and a relationship with an employee, and fully relying on risky sports bets to stay afloat. It makes for a consistently tense and unique viewing experience, expertly directed by the Safdie brothers.

Something that might not work for everyone but that I personally loved, is the chaotic way in which the movie is shot. What feels like loosely directed scenes, with characters talking over each other and multiple conversations happening at once, adds an authenticity and reality lacking from most other movies. It’s more adjacent to Linklater (thanks to Adam for the comparison) or Scorsese’s earlier films (also fitting, that he’s a producer on this). Following Howard Ratner as his life descends into chaotic hell was one of the best times I’ve had watching a movie this year.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

AVENGERS ENDGAME

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME

BOOKSMART

JOHN WICK CHAPTER 3

THE FAREWELL

AD ASTRA

[macgyvertape]

50 or so hours into Cyberpunk 2077

This should be roughly the correct amount of time, ive been leaving the game running as I get up to get food or do stretches. Quests are roughly in order I did them

non spoilers above cut:

 i haven't found a single hat/helmet i like, and since you can't hide them I just am not wearing any. It matters that much.

I posted the other day about bugs, every few hours I play I find new bugs. some require me to go back and reload a save others I honestly can’t tell if it’s a bug or just really poor development

there are several perks that don’t quite do what the description says, like the Anamesis perk. Based on reddit and trying it out it seems to just not do anything.

sometimes in car chase segments the passenger will say “look out” as cars spawn in my path and hit me. Can’t tell if that was deliberate or a pop in issue

Yeah I’ve just totally given up on doing pacifist things unless required by a mission. Given up on doing stealth too unless a mission objective, except for sneaking around to set up a fight.

:readmore:

the delemain car quest is fun. From the shock of the one going "beep beep motherfucker" and doing a hit and run to start it off, to the GLADOS car i see a lot of people talking about. It was fun to explore the city when i might have missed places like the landfill apparently there is follow up on T-bug's death if you go back to the quick hack shop in Kabuki. It's not much but better than nothing I made the pass with Panam of "what if the room just had one bed". I know she won't do a wlw romance, which is fine since I wouldn’t have chosen her.  I enjoy her as a character, don’t get me wrong, my V considers her as a friend, but it seems like theres always drama going on which would be tiring. I would have gone for a fling, i like her leotard-pants combo with all the straps

but also her questline was buggy as hell. Multiple cases of having to reload due to clipping into objects, including her in a driving section, or just insta-dying when collision physics with some rocks broke "your neural network can no longer function independantly of the chip" me slapping my desk: s y m b i o te!!! come on lets have some s y m b i o s i s

in the scene with hellman i really liked how Johnny moved around the room. It made him feel like he was really there. it was hard to follow the convo as I left the room, i would not have understood it without subtitles. But i guess Takemura fucking waterboarded hellman. :|

lol I hope the dialogue is different b/c i refuse to smoke for Johnny

i am level 18 and still can't beat the first opponents in the fist fighting quest. ffs

I looked up the romances options so I went to do the I fought the law quest as soon as i got it. ACAB, but like I literally just met River Ward 2 minutes ago, and I really like him. His earring and cyborg eye, his big fluffy coat. I'm definitely gonna sleep with him Ok i like how when River Ward is dealing with the tiger claws if you interject it leads to a fight. It goes better if you follow his instructions and let him deal with it. Seriously I enjoy that sometimes its good to not pick a dialogue choice.

during the red queen club part, there was no dialogue over the phone. So i reloaded a save and got myself spotted and attacked. Then River showed up to help me <3 and it was more enjoyable having him there. I honestly am not sure if him not going to the club level is bug or not.

then uuuuuugh the worst of irl police "cops are my family" from Detective Han. Again ACAB "FRATERNITY OF CITY COPS RESEMBLES A [Nomad] CLAN NOT AT ALL" ok a few minutes ago i was complaining about bugs, but the character modeling in this game is good (when they're there). You can see body posture, characters jiggle their legs when they are nervous. Like I though character A was just throwing a cigarette on the ground, but then character B flinches back; I realize Char A threw it at B as a fuck you

I'm honestly curious if "I fought the Law" quest will have any impact later on. My choices were that I thought there was more going on than Holt being the only person behind this (based on how complicated the main questline heist is, and keeping an eye on some of the in game news), and told him not to take it to internal affairs, and I loved his response of how he doesn't give a shit what we think, he's doing it anyway.

In the elevator to report in, Johnny said "this muck is deeper than you think, tell them nothing", so i just said that the case was complicated. anyway i love how much of a sarcastic asshole V is

I thought i was being nonlethal with the monk quest, but it seems i accidently killed someone. RIP, but thats kind of the problem with this game. Like when i do the non lethal cyberpychosis quests I equip my non lethal modded gun and hope for the est. I like how a go here kill things quest led to Charles the ripperdoc. He's getting all his parts from scav gang members so I felt obligated to take him out. I got a police bounty for it but w/e.

I merged the Delemain fragments with the whole. Guess he's the meta now. (Side note: some of my favorite rvb fanfic plots are Ai consiousness/memory merging with the humans, so I’m having fun with this game and look foward to introspective fanfic)

Honestly Jonny made some good points, the fragments didn't deserve to die; but also destroying the core and freeing the fragments, they couldn't really function alone.

I was able to rescue Saul fine with stealth. Using cameras and the synapse overload really made it easy.  Can't use the sniper rifle reward b/c I don't have the stats for it, and while it has a silencer the fact that it's a ricochette weapon and not a shoot through walls weapons, makes it not as good imo; and theres a legendary one that is stats free for only 100k.

Lol made a pass again at Panam, and she immediately shut me down. I then did Mitch's quest and I love every time someone tells V they area  good person.

I hacked the operation carpe noctem shard, and wow the corporations are using ai to make people have cyberpsychosis, or something like that. What a shocker /s, I've played Deus Ex HR before

lol driving through the unifinished interstate, past the fight from Panam's first quest I found a "batcave" with a very nice car, and a manifesto written by "muckman'. But here's my complaint about the loot, there is a legendary top, but it had 16 armor. My current top has 84 armor, like why would i switch?? then later i found a bunker with soviet spies in it. Wild

Doing River's second quest, love the timing of as soon as you ask, why are we breaking in, someone shows up to tell you he got kicked off the force. It's funny how Johnny comments how maybe River's into you, and V just doubts Johnny's words. Love how the first kid asks River if I'm his girlfriend. also wow like oof both the second parts of Judy and River's quest are SUPER fucked UP!! oof like i stopped doing first person mode on the braindances for those quests as soon as i could, just made me too uncomfortable seeing that in first person.

DRIVING IN THE GAME IS BAD! nowhere is it more apparent than the sinnerman quest, which took me 3 times to get the driving section done, as cars spawned out of nowhere to hit me. Then when you restart, there is a bunch of dialogue it doesn't let you fast forward through. The rest of the Sinnerman questline is interesting. My V took every option to tell the dude that he was messed up, and what he was doing was wrong. idk, I was surprised how much dialogue there was that let you buy into his whole "forgiveness thing" and how there wasn't any real dialogue to call him the fuck out, that in seeking forgiveness he continues to do harm both emotional to the mother of the man he killed, but also that he got the husband killed via cop. The later follow up quest, I told him that what he is doing is crazy, studio is just going to profit off this vid. Then I refused to join him prayer, and told him fuck no i wasn't going to hammer him to the cross, or even watch. Yes, the man is scared of dying, and the corporation is exploiting him, but he keeps creating burdens for others.  I think the discussion on this quest will be interesting to read, it's definitely my own personal experience with religion coloring my view. Anyway back to a main quest, yeah i don't trust Placide, especially in that scene where he grabs my hand, then jacks in. I ran off to do most of the sidequests here and got some criticism from him. I do love how in the cinema the western movie switches to a mission brief as the netwatch agent talks. its a fun enviromental detail.  I took the netwatch offer, i don't think he's being fully honest with me, but he didn't put a virus in my head. As I told Placide later, I didn't pick a side. I like how you can then talk with the agent, who is a fan of Western movies, b/c they show "a simpler time where all good guys carry badges" :eyeroll:, and then V recommends Unforgiven, which from the wiki summary goes against that theme.

Looks like the Voodoo boys all got killed by Netwatch, but I as revenge for them trying to set me up I'm fine with it. Honestly after speaking with ai!Alt I don’t believe their plan of trying to be on good relations with AI would work. 

doing the johnny flashback 2, and wow Johnny really is an asshole. Like I had gotten so used to him in side missions I forgot how self centered and unlikable he was.You constantly get prompts to drink or do drugs, which I ignored. But i do love the goth/punk love Rogue and others have.

lol i called it, when Hellman said that the engram would seek to override the host, put V on the engram. I really like how as the relic malfunctions, you wind up in the chair with a cigarette, which you can either smoke and say you are turning into Johnny or throw away. My dialogue "your problem is the ends justify the means", which is true!!! He and Rogue detonated a nuke downtown, does anyone know that, and like ask Rogue about it????

(Funny you can ask Rouge about Johnny silverhand, over the phone, then the game bugs out and spawns her npc where you are. She doens't say much about the nuke, but she does say no one trusts you for jobs). The line of no one trusting you for jobs is pretty funny at level 46 street cred where im at “respected” status. really loving the family atmosphere at River's 3rd quest. Also his big strong arms, and the fact he is no longer a cop. I totally let the kids win, and wow the family dinner where they GRILL YOU over the relationship and try to set the two of you up, then the water tower scene!!!!! I don't love the first person sex cutscenes but they do have personality. I'm glad afterwards you got to tell River about the biochip and that you might die. Because he's so far removed from your personal plot. So I took that option to back out of a relationship.

I do love that you wake up with "river's tanktop" that says "fuck the police" It actually has extremely good armor stats, so thats what I'll wear now.

panam 3rd quest, when shes like why did you help me, I'm like "because it's important to you". Basically the closest you can get to "when a friend asks for help you help them", which as an ex-nomad backstory I really choose the nomad options when ever i can Paralezes quest part 2! I love the piano song but I always think of it as ocean's 11 music. It's also fun to see the computer and see Judy recommended you for the first quest. The emails talk about "forgetting" to hire a staffer, on the balocony a strange antennia was scannable, the color of the roses was remembered wrong...  lol guess i was right with those giant wall screens. Its fun environmental details that spell things out before you can notice, and it ties into some other quests where people's behavior is being altered. Actually, this quest "Dream On" I love it! For a while I've been like "wheres the illuminati conspiracy! Here it IS! I chose to follow Elisabeth's wishes and not tell her husband he was being brainwashed. In best case they program him to forget again, in worst case he ends up dead. The gaslighting Elisabeth described is CHILLING, her husband describes a vacation she can't remember and she doesn't know whose memories have been messed with. On your way to the plaza you get a call from someone/something that says the know exactly WHAT you are, any you black out!!! It's such a great feeling of helplessness that you're just one person in a world so big that you can't fight every power. As Johnny said, could be a corporation, could be a rogue ai, either way Jefferson is fucked (and so are you).

[twilightvolt]

My Favorite Anime OPs and EDs from 2010-2019

No one asked for this, but i’m doin’ it anyway cuz there’s so many songs out there that i’ve never heard anyone talk about. like, y’all sleep on Yu-Gi-Oh! apparently. lmao

Going by release year, here’s all the OPs and EDs i can remember that i luv (and still do to this day). i may or may not have gotten all the years right. hell, i’m not even sure i got the OP and ED numbers right.

It’ll go by: Song Name - Artist (Name of Anime and Which OP/ED it is) an asterisk means i REALLY like it above the rest.

Hopefully this’ll help introduce you to some new jams you missed out on! ^  ^

2010

Going My Way! ~Road to Tomorrow~ - Masaaki Endoh (Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds OP5)*

Close to You - ALvino (Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds ED4)

Future Colors - Plastic Tree (Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds ED5)

Gravity 0 - Aqua Timez (Star Driver OP)*

Never Give Up! - Sonar Pocket (Digimon Xros Wars OP)*

Period - Chemistry (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood OP4)*

Rain - SID (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood OP5)* THE. FEELS.

Uragiri no Yuuyake - THEATRE BROOK (Durarara!! OP)* Y’all remember this one? Lmao

Trust Me - Yuya Matsushita (Durarara!! ED)

Ice Cream Syndrome - Sukima Switch (Pokemon Zoroark: Master of Illusions ED)*

My Soul, Your Beats! - Lia (Angel Beats OP) WAIT HOLD ON, ANGEL BEATS WAS THIS DECADE? I THOUGHT THAT WAS 2009 OR SOMETHING. DAHEQ?

ChAngE - Miwa (BLEACH OP12)

Calling - FLOW (Heroman ED)*

SHIVER - the GazettE (Black Butler II OP)

2011

Samurai Heart (Some Like it Hot!) - SPYAIR (Gintama ED17)* And on this day I realized….SPYAIR is lit.

New World - Twill (Digimon Xros Wars OP2)

Masterpiece - Mihimaru GT (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL OP)

Boku Quest - Golden Bomber (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL ED)* I luv watching the actual ending sequence. It fits my cyber aesthetic to a T.

BRAVING! - KANAN (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL OP2)

Setsubou no Freesia (Longing Freesia) - Daizystripper (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL ED2)* I’ll be completely honest, this song has been my favorite anime theme over most, if not all others, ever since. It’s kinda held a special place in my heart as it’s got memories of what transpired during 2012 that i don’t think i’ll ever forget. From the summer trip we took down south to me creating my very first OCs, Takuya and his Charmander partner Drake, on paper, i’ll luv this song with all my heart. ^  ^

Lovers - 7!! (Seven Oops) (Naruto Shippuden OP)

Counter Identity - UNISON SQUARE GARDEN (Soul Eater Repeat Show OP)*

Ai Ga Hoshii Yo - Shion Tsuji (Soul Eater Repeat Show OP2)* WANTCHU WANTCHU, I WANT CHUU~

SHINING STAR - 9nine (Star Driver OP2)*

Crossover - 9nine (Star Driver ED2)

Sky's the Limit - Shihoko Hirata (Persona 4 the Animation OP)

We’re Not Alone - coldrain (Rainbow Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin OP)

One Reason - Fade (Deadman Wonderland OP) I can bet you right now half of y’all forgot about this show. I mean i did. Lol

Mayonaka no Orchestra - Aqua Timez (Naruto Shippuden ED16)

Hacking to the Gate - Kanako Itou (Steins;Gate OP)* THIS SONG CLEARED MY SKIN AND RAISED MY GRADES.

Ranbu no Melody - SID (BLEACH OP13)* That main chorus tho. N o i c e .

LISTEN TO THE STEREO!! - GOING UNDERGROUND (Katekyo Hitman Reborn OP8)*

Core Pride - UVERworld (Blue Exorcist OP)

2012

Mask - Aqua Timez (BLEACH ED30?)

Soul Drive - Color Bottle (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL OP3)*

Wild Child - Moumoon (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL ED3)* Whenever I hear this song, I either think of school shenanigans or, if school isn't a thing in their world, a high school AU. Lmao

Unbreakable Heart - Hideaki Takatori (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL OP4)

Artist - Vistlip (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL ED4)*

Stand By Me - Stereopony (Eureka Seven AO ED)* Ok I know some people don't wanna remember AO, but hear me out here. Lmao 

Brave Blue - FLOW (Eureka Seven AO OP2)*

Key Plus Words - Shihoko Hirata & Yumi Kawamura (Persona 4 the Animation OP2)

Harukaze - SCANDAL (BLEACH OP15)*

Crossing Field - LiSA (Sword Art Online OP) I like making SAO jokes as much as the next guy, but let's be real here. Crossing Field was still a pretty good song.

STAND UP! - Twill (Digimon Xros Wars Hunters OP)* Hunters sucked, but the OP slaps.

Kyomu Densen - ALI PROJECT (Another OP) This show gave me a temporary fear of umbrellas, but this OP is good.

Complication - ROOKiEZ is PUNK’D (Durarara!! OP2)

Light My Fire - KOTOKO (Shakugan no Shana III Final OP)

Mite Mite Kochichi - Memoiro Clover Z (Pokemon Best Wishes ED3)

2013

Dualism of Mirrors - Petite Milady (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL OP5)

GO WAY GO WAY - FoZZtone (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL ED5)

Challenge the GAME - REDMAN (Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL ED6)* I swear to god, this should’ve been the final OP rather than Wonder Wings. I really don’t like that song.

Oh, and if you wanna hear more of the lead singer's voice, he's the lead singer of GIRUGAMESH. They didn't do any anime songs while they were still active afaik, but totally check it out if you like J-Rock.

Sakura Mitsutsuki & Genjyou Destruction - SPYAIR (Gintama OP13 and Gintama: The Final Chapter OP)*

After Cherry Blossoms (all quartets lead to the?) - UNISON SQUARE GARDEN (Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta OP)*

Non-Fiction Compass - UNISON SQUARE GARDEN (Yozakura Quartet: Tsuki ni Naku OP)

Sayonara Memory - 7!! (Seven Oops) (Naruto Shippuden ED)

BLOODY STREAM - Coda (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Battle tendency OP)* I mean, how could i NOT put this song on here? Lmao

Be An Arrow! - Rica Matsumoto (Pokemon Best Wishes! OP2)

Natsumeku Sakamichi (Summerly Slope) - Daisuke (Pokemon Best Wishes DA! OP)* While the Black & White series was absolutely terrible, I can thank it for spawning some nice OPs.

Egao - Ikimono-gakari (Pokemon Genesect and the Legend Awakened ED)

Take Your Way - Livetune adding Fukase (From SEKAI NO OWARI) (Devil Survivor 2 the Animation OP)* I swear I will never get tired of this song.

Be - Song Riders (Devil Survivor 2 the Animation ED)*

Watashi no Bara wo Kaminasai - ALI PROJECT (Rozen Maiden 2013 OP)

Moshimo - Daisuke (Naruto Shippuden OP)

Burn My Dread ~Spring of Birth~ & More Than One Heart - Yumi Kawamura (Persona 3 the Movie #1 Spring of Birth OP and ED)*

Eden - Aqua Timez (Magi: the Kingdom of Magic ED)*

Out of Control - Nothing’s Carved in Stone (Psycho Pass OP2)*

HERO -Kibou no Uta- - FLOW (Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods ED)

2014

Silhouette - KANA BOON (Naruto Shippuden OP16)* Everyone rise for the weeb national anthem.

BelievexBelieve - Bulletrain (Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V OP)

ENAMEL - SID (Black Butler: Book of Circus OP)

Masayume Chasing - BoA (Fairy Tail OP15)

STRIKE BACK - BACK-ON (Fairy Tail OP16)*

Burn! - Bulletrain (Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V OP2)

DAYxDAY - BLUE ENCOUNT (Gintama OP)* Before Polaris, there was this. lol

Goya no Machiawase - Hello Sleepwalkers (Noragami OP)* I swear Noragami has great taste in OPs. lmao

Fate is in Our Hands - Lotus Juice (Persona 3 the Movie #2 Midsummer Knight's Dream OP)* Y'all know Lotus Juice makes EVERYTHING badass.

One Hand, One Heartbeat - Yumi Kawamura (Persona 3 the Movie #2 Midsummer Knight's Dream ED)* I swear I literally feel like crying every time I hear this song. It's just that powerful.

Unravel - TK from Ling Tosite Sigure (Tokyo Ghoul OP) Ok, lemme explain. I used to hate this song cuz I thought TK's singing voice was whiny as hell. But after a long, LOOOOONG time, it finally started to grow on me. I think it's because of all the song covers I've listened to and, after understanding the meaning behind the lyrics, I appreciate this song a bit more nowadays. 

V (VOLT) and MEGA V (MEGA VOLT) - Yusuke (Pokemon XY OPs 1&2)*

daze - Jin ft. MARiA from GARNiDELiA (Mekakucity Actors OP)

Monochrome - Dancing Dolls (Soul Eater NOT! OP)

2015

Saigo Made ii - Aqua Timez (Gintama ED15 i think?)

Kyouran Hey Kids! - THE ORAL CIGARETTES (Noragami Aragoto OP)* IN THIS HOUSE, WE JUST WANNA HOLD YOUR HAAAAAAND~

Getta Ban Ban (Mad-Paced Getter) - Tomohisa Sako (Pokemon XY OP3)*

XY&Z - Rica Matsumoto (Pokemon XY&Z OP)*

Raise Your Flag - MAN WITH A MISSION (Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans OP)*

Hello, World! - BUMP OF CHICKEN (Kekkai Sensen OP)*

Sugar Song and Bitter Step AKA the song everyone makes fan animated parodies of it’s opening sequence - UNISON SQUARE GARDEN (Kekkai Sensen ED)

Kirifuda (Trump Card) - Cinema Staff (Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V OP4)

Speaking - MRS. GREEN APPLE (Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V ED4)* before Great Escape from Attack on Titan and Inferno from Fire Force, there was this OP and ED. both of which i feel are better songs. lmao

Tweedia - Rei Yasuda (Pokemon Hoopa and the Clash of Ages ED)*

Diver - KANA-BOON (The Last: Naruto the Movie ED)*

Butter-Fly 2015 - Kouji Wada (Digimon Adventure Tri. OP)

Sono Chi no Kioku ~End of the World~ - JO☆STARS ~TOMMY, Coda, JIN~ (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders OP2)

Lapis Lazuli - Eir Aoi (Arslan Senki ED)*

Clattanoia - OxT (Overlord OP)*

L.L.L. - MYTH & ROID (Overlord ED)

Nazo 2015 - La PomPon (Detective Conan OP41)* Hearing this brought back memories of hearing the original during my childhood back when Cased Closed was still a thing.

Just Fly Away - EDGE of LIFE (Gundam Build Fighters Try OP2)

Flyers - BRADIO (Death Parade OP) Like Another, this was one of those where i wouldn’t have touched the show itself if my anime club didn’t watch it.

X.U. - Hiroyuki Sawano (Seraph of the End OP)*

Hikari - ViViD (Magi: the Kingdom of Magic OP2)

2016

DiVE!! - Amatsuki (Digimon Universe: Applimonsters OP)*

Ai - Ami Wajima (Digimon Universe: Applimonsters ED2)

The Day - Porno Graffitti (My Hero Academia OP)

HEROES - Brian the Sun (My Hero academia ED)

RAGE OF DUST - SPYAIR (Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans OP2)*

Believe in Myself - EDGE of LIFE (Fairy Tail OP21)*

CRAZY NOISY BIZARRE TOWN - THE DU (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable OP)

Chase - batta (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable OP2)* Screw the haters. This song is a bop.

Great Days - Karen Aoki & Daisuke Hasegawa (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable OP3) As you can see, i luv all of Jojo Part 4’s OPs. lmao

Kaze no Uta - FLOW (Tales of Zestiria the X OP)* Zestiria may have been the most uninteresting experience i’ve had in the Tales series, but at least it’s OPs are straight fire.

Dream Lantern, ZenZenZense, Sparkle and Nandemonaiya - RADWIMPS (Various themes from Your Name) I'm still miffed that they didn't kiss at the end. >:v

Re:Re: - ASIAN KUNGFU GENERATION (Erased OP)

Brave Shine - Aimer (Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works OP)*

Starting Over - Mr. Children (The Boy and the Beast ED)* Mamoru Hosoda never ceases to make me smile and/or cry, huh?

GO - BUMP OF CHICKEN (GRANBLUE FANTASY the Animation OP)

KINGS - angela (K Project OP) i don’t even know how i remembered this one. I watched K at my local anime club years ago cuz one of my friends suggested it. I barely remember what it was about, though. ^  ^’

Vision - Kusou Linkai (Yu-Gi-Oh ARC-V ED5)

Light of Hope - Unknown Number (Yu-Gi-Oh ARC-V OP5)

Pendulum Beat! - SUPER DRAGON (Yu-Gi-Oh ARC-V OP6)*

2017

Peace Sign - Kenshi Yonezu (My Hero Academia OP2)* SURE IT’S POPULAR, BUT IT’S POPULAR FOR A REASON.

Datte Atashi no Hero - LiSA (My Hero Academia ED3)

Little Pi - Ange☆Reve (Digimon Universe: Applimonsters ED3)

Perfect World - Traffic Light (Digimon Universe: Applimonsters ED4)*

With the Wind - Hiroaki “TOMMY” Tominaga (Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS OP)* I’ll be honest, this one took some getting used to, but now i luv it!

Fake Town Baby - UNISON SQUARE GARDEN (Kekkai Sensen and Beyond OP)

Tonari Au - THE ORAL CIGARETTES (Sakurada Reset ED)*

Rain - SEKAI NO OWARI (Mary and the Witch's Flower ED)* I really liked the movie and I just luved the fantasy vibes given off by the instrumentals in this song.

Baton Road - KANA BOON (Boruto: Naruto Next Generations OP)* Y'all say Boruto is trash, but at least the theme songs still boppin'.

Boku wa Hashiri Tsuzukeru - Melofloat (Boruto: Naruto Next Generations ED3)

FEED THE FIRE - coldrain (King’s Game OP)* Thank you Fire Force for introducing me to this wonderful band. ;w;

2018

PAiNT it BLACK - BiSH (Black Clover OP2)* Never thought I'd ever find a band actually named bish. Lmao

Black Rover - Vickeblanka (Black Clover OP3)

Guess Who is Back - Kumi Koda (Black Clover OP4)* Now, if this ain't a bop fit for a triumphant return like "SURPRISE BISH I'M BACK." then idk what is. Lmao

Gamushara & Tenge Tenjou - Miyuna (Black Clover OP&ED5)* i’m mainly referring to Gamushara, but i luv Tenge Tenjou too.

ODD FUTURE - UVERworld (My Hero Academia OP4)*

Make my story - Lenny code fiction (My Hero Academia OP5)*

The Future is Now - Straightener (Digimon ReArise OP)* Yes, I know I'm cheating cuz it's a video game, but it's an opening sequence much like an anime, so yeah.

Breath - Porno Graffitti (Pokemon the Power of Us ED)

Katharsis - TK from Ling Tosite Sigure (Tokyo Ghoul OP3?)*

Here - JUNNA (The Ancient Magus Bride OP)

Renai Circulation - Kana Hanazawa (Bakemonogatari OP4) Imma be honest, i found this song through those Coldplay mashups and other memes. Lmao

I Wanna Be - SPYAIR (Gintama Shirogane no Tamashii Hen OP)

Hana Ichi Monme - BURNOUT SYNDROMES (Gintama Shirogane no Tamashii Hen ED)*

2019

Hana ga Saku Michi - THE CHARM PARK (Black Clover ED7)* I SWEAR NO ONE’S COVERED THIS SONG YET AND I’M SAD. I LUV THIS SONG.

Inferno - MRS. GREEN APPLE (Fire Force OP)

Veil - Keina Suda (Fire Force ED)* This ED gives me feels and i luv it. ;w;

MAYDAY - coldrain (Fire Force OP2)* This sounds like a song i’d hear at Hot Topic and i feel blessed. lmao

Nounai - Lenny code fiction (Fire Force ED2) I swear this anime doesn’t have a single song i don’t like. I’m not kidding. lmao

WILD SIDE - ALI (BEASTARS OP)* IN THIS HOUSE, WE DO NOT SKIP THIS OPENING I STG.

Le Zoo - YURiKA (BEASTARS ED)

Nemureru Honou (Sleeping Instincts) - YURiKA (BEASTARS ED2)*

Kawaki no Ameku - Minami (Domestic Na Kanojo OP)

Polaris - BLUE ENCOUNT (My Hero Academia OP6)* THIS IS THE BIGGEST BOP SINCE PEACE SIGN OML

Touch Off - UVERworld (The Promised Neverland OP)* This show was too creepy for me to continue, but I luv it for what it is. Also NAA NANANANANANAA NANANAAAA~

Sangenshoku - PELICAN FANCLUB (Dr. Stone OP2)* Sorry, but Good Morning World didn’t totally do it for me. I luv this OP way more tbh.

Suisou - Megumi Nakajima (Hoshiai no Sora OP)* The bits before the chorus are just so good.

1•2•3 - After the Rain (Pocket Monsters 2019 OP)

Dark Crow - MAN WITH A MISSION (Vinland Saga OP2)

MOTOR CITY - Kenichi Asai (No Guns Life OP)

Game Over - DATS (No Guns Life ED)

[newmoneytrash]

Death Stranding

I had to write about Death Stranding to get this not very good game out of my head and soul

(this has spoilers I guess but honestly who cares)

I was going to wait to play Death Stranding, if I ever even played it at all. I had barely seen any trailers outside of the first couple. I remember seeing them and thinking “this isn’t going to be the crazy, weird experience everyone thinks it’s going to be”. I didn’t think that I knew better than anyone else, or that the people who were excited were stupid to feel that way. I just felt like I could see what it was and knew that, having played the majority of Kojima’s work, that this probably wasn’t going to be the experience that people thought it was going to be.

And I was comfortable with my disinterest, content to know that this thing existed, that I was fine with it existing away from me. But then a week before release when the review embargo lifted and people started posting their impressions and experiences and reviews my interest was piqued in a way that no trailer or announcement had interested me before. It wasn’t the glowing and fawning reviews that drew me to the game, the people who played and loved the game. It was, weirdly, the negative ones that changed me from not having any interest in playing Death Stranding to going to the store on the Friday morning it was released and standing in the rain waiting too long for an Uber so I could get home as fast as possible to start playing.

The reason the negative reviews drew me to the game so much is not because they were negative, it’s not that I was taking some joy in getting to play something that I thought was going to be bad and now I had an opportunity to be vindicated by seeing for myself that it is bad. It was the things that they were negative about that sounded so interesting. The idea that a group of people would spend so much time and effort and money in creating a large premier video game experience where the main crux seemed to be tedium is an inherently fascinating concept.

The kind of elevator pitch descriptor that interested me the most (that was used by people both derisively and positively) was that it was a post-apocalyptic truck simulator. Travelling a dead or dying world as a UPS driver. Mad Max meets King of Queens (that’s a comparison that I made and I’m too proud of it not to use it). What if a development team who made one of the great action games on the last decade (Metal Gear Solid V might be a terribly lacking narrative experience with some frustrating mission design, but the core gameplay is extremely good) and funnelled all of that energy into something intentionally boring and monotonous?

Not only did that help reset my expectations of what this would be, it made me feel excitement for something that I had previously thought I wouldn’t be able to feel excitement or anticipation for.

I spent 40 hours with it over the course of a week. That might not sound like a lot of time in video game speak, but I don’t remember the last time I spent that much time with a game over such a short period of time. Over the first weekend I had it I played for just over 20 hours. Twenty hours. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that focused on a game in my life. But still when I reflect on my time with it, and especially when I try to recall those initial 20 hours which were far and away the most fun I had with the game, I feel nothing. It’s like static, like someone has gone back and just erased that time from my memory.

That’s maybe not entirely fair. I remember general things, just not specific gameplay moments.

I remember the gameplay loop. It’s less a truck simulator game and more of a hiking game, at least initially. And this was appealing to me. You’re slowly traversing across these barren, empty environments delivering packages to and from outposts and shelters. You’re packing a huge amount of garbage on your back and climbing up mountains and down cliffs and wading through rivers. You’re given ropes and ladders to try and ease your journey, and later you’re able to build greater structures like bridges and towers to help you more easily navigate the environment and scout your path ahead. Eventually you’re given access to motorbikes and trucks that can both help and hinder your deliveries, depending on the paths you take and forge. You even get a chance to help rebuild an actual honest to goodness highway, creating it piece by piece by providing an increasing amount of materials to each section. Maybe the greatest accomplishment I felt playing this game was spending a few hours creating large sections of the highway and then getting to just fly down it on a motorbike. It really did feel like I hate created something big, that I not only radically changed the world by creating this, but that I had bettered it.

And there’s there community aspect of the game. Having others donate materials to your structures as well as seeing structures others have built and abandoned vehicles and packages in your world is all really neat and interesting. Everything positive I have to say about this game is wrapped up in these systems, because there is a lot of the game that feels like you’re on a genuine journey. Taking a package over the peak of a snow capped mountain for the first time can feel like a legitimate achievement, it was rewarding just walking from one place to the next. Seeing a bridge helpfully placed in a frustrating location made me feel real gratitude toward that person, and receiving feedback that other people were using and liking things that I had built made me feel good, as if I was paying forward the help that I had received.

For a long time I didn’t even think there would be combat in the game but it gradually increases as you go along and, while it’s never good, it’s still serviceable and easy enough to never really get in the way. The shooting and melee combat feels off, and I might have had a better time if it wasn’t there at all, but a few boss encounters and combat vignettes were interesting and would occasionally help when the monotony of just delivering packages started to grow.

But after 20 hours of this nothing really stood out to me, there’s no one gameplay moment that will stay with me. I won’t reflect on this game and think “wow, remember that one journey I took by following the coastline?” It’s all just a long, sustained blur.

And it’s not that I don’t remember the story or the characters either. Those are all easy to recall. The story is especially easy to recall because, over 40 hours, it’s just basically telling you one thing over and over and over. It’s hard not to recall it, because there is only one thing to recall.

The thing that I was worried about before the game came out was that the story was just going to be a huge mess. Kojima’s games are always functionally good to great, that’s never really been an issue I’ve had with his work, it’s always been the stories he tries to tell and how he tries to tell them. From the first Metal Gear Solid through to The Phantom Pain there are always misgivings I’ve had with character representation, general themes, and just the delivery of that narrative. I know this isn’t a unique position to have regarding his work (sexism and his consistently awful portrayal of women is a pretty famous issue he has, even among his biggest fans), but beyond that I just never felt that anything he was doing was particularly special. They were different and almost always interesting, but a lot of people would like to tell you that Kojima was doing masterful video game storytelling that no one else was capable, that he was single-handedly raising the medium of video games to something as artistically valid and viable as cinema or art. But, to me, he was never doing that. He was making fun and compelling video games, but they were inconsistent and messy and overly verbose and self-righteous.

So my concern was that, now that he was the head of an independent studio that for all intents and purposes answered to no one, he would let that his storytelling get further away from him. In an attempt to prove his level of creativity, maybe to even prove his worth, he was going to put all of his ideas on the table and the result was going to be an indecipherable mess.  When they would release a trailer of a naked Norman Reedus on a beach holding a baby attached to him with an artificial umbilical cord, or Guillermo Del Toro standing in a sewer holding a baby in a jar while Mads Mikkelsen is covered in black tar leading a bunch of skeleton soldiers a lot of people responding with a variant of “wow Kojima is going to make something crazy, this is going to blow my mind”. But all I saw was a giant red flag.

So when I finally experienced the story of Death Stranding I was kind of taken aback. Not by how crazy or nonsensical it is, but by kind of how… boring and one note it is? There isn’t really any room for interpretation in this story. It’s all very, very literal. It tells you how and why things are happening, and if you missed the exposition the first time don’t worry! Here is another twenty minute info dump reiterating the same boring, one note narrative over and over.

The game just tricks you into thinking it’s being more creative than it is because it’s filled with endless jargon. There is timefall, void outs, BTs, BBs, Beaches, repatriates, chiral energy, and extinction entities. Ha and ka. But it’s all in service of creating a world and a narrative that ultimately says nothing, and spends dozens of hours painfully and slowly telling you nothing. It’s borderline torturous.

There is also some high school art level social commentary on social media. Likes are a huge commodity in this world, with people becoming addicted to the feeling you get when they receive one. And instead of having a smart phone or whatever you have Cuff Links, which is a literal pair of handcuffs that, when strapped to your wrist, functions as a way to communicate with people through the Codec or email. Because our phones are a prison, right guys? Pretty deep. In Kojima’s world we truly do live in a society.

But it’s not just the small stuff like that that’s so literal, every part of the game is literal. You’re Sam Porter Bridges, a porter who has a contract with the organisations Bridges, created by someone named Bridget, to create bridges with people across America (both figuratively and literally) to create a network across the continent that will bridge everyone together. Every metaphor and theme in the game is so painfully literal that the game never gives you the opportunity to interpret anything else. The only time there are moments in the game when you don’t know what is happening is when characters start talking about things that you could have no way of knowing about as if you did know about them, but even then these moments of mystery are immediately undone because they always immediately explain the thing that you missed. You will have a cryptic conversation with someone about something you have had no opportunity to deduce or discover on your own, but it never matters because it’s followed up a few minutes later with a flashback or exposition that lays everything out on the table.

Instead of Kojima creating something nonsensical and imaginative and impossible to follow, he managed to make the world’s most shallow metaphor about really nothing in particular. When he said that the game was inspired by Donald Trump and Brexit he meant that it was inspired by the division that these things caused between people and how we need to create Bridges to reconnect with people.

That’s it, that’s the game. That is its message. And it’s not interestingly presented, there’s nothing more to it than that.

One of the podcast conversations I listened to before released (that was largely critical of the game) that drew me toward playing it ended with one of the people saying “It is a game that I think everyone should experience, but not one that I could ever recommend” which is a perfect way of articulating how I feel. It’s a unique experience that does things that a game of its size has never really done before. I don’t think there’s merit in being different for differences’ sake, but this isn’t that. The gameplay is considered and deliberate and purposeful, but that doesn’t mean that it’s fun and it doesn’t negate the parts that are tedious and tiring. Just because you make something boring and annoying on purpose that doesn’t make it good.

If you had asked me six months ago if I think I would like Death Stranding I would have said no. I probably would have qualified it by saying I hope that I was wrong, that I would like it to be good, but that I was probably more likely to hate it.

I didn’t love it, and I don’t like it. I don’t even hate it, but in a weird way I wish that I could. Because then at least I would feel something toward it. Instead Death Stranding leaves me feeling something much, much worse.

It makes me feel nothing.

[ainsleys-interests]

J.G. Ballard

The Atrocity Exhibition with an Preface by William Burroughs

A Flamingo Modern Classic edition published 2001 Copyright © J G Ballard 1993

This revised, expanded, annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition first published in a large format in Great Britain by Flamingo, 1993

A revised, expanded, annotated and illustrated edition first published in the USA by Re/Search, 1990 Copyright © J G Ballard 1990

The original edition first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1970, and first published in paperback by Panther Books, 1972

Copyright © J G Ballard 1969

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Preface by William S. Burroughs

1 The Atrocity Exhibition

2 The University of Death

3 The Assassination Weapon

4 You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe

5 Notes towards a Mental Breakdown

6 The Great American Nude

7 The Summer Cannibals

8 Tolerances of the Human Face

9 You and Me and the Continuum

10 Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy

11 Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

12 Crash!

13 The Generations of America

14 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

15 The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

APPENDIX:

Princess Margaret’s Face Lift

Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty

About the Author

From the reviews of The Atrocity Exhibition: Also by J.G. Ballard

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person - John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.

Other figures, though crucially important to the decades that followed, have begun to sink below the horizon. How many of us remember Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the Kennedy assassination in Dallas? Or Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy? At the end of each chapter I have provided a few notes that identify these lesser characters and set out the general background to the book.

Readers who find themselves daunted by the unfamiliar narrative structure of The Atrocity Exhibition - far simpler than it seems at first glance - might try a different approach. Rather than start at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel, simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the underlying narrative will reveal itself. In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written.

J.G. Ballard, 2001

PREFACE BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm.) The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition . . . was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.’

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child . . . ’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune . . . Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest . . . ’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art - literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape . . . clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions.’

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes . . . James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus . . . Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.’

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean,’ subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology.’

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown. The noise from the cine-films of induced psychoses rose from the lecture theatre below Travis’s office. Keeping his back to the window behind his desk, he assembled the terminal documents he had collected with so much effort during the previous months: (1) Spectro-heliogram of the sun; (2) Front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London; (3) Transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (4) ‘Chronograms,’ by E. J. Marey; (5) Photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression, Egypt; (6) Reproduction of Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’; (7) Fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs. When he had finished Travis turned to the window. As usual, the white Pontiac had found a place in the crowded parking lot directly below him. The two occupants watched him through the tinted windshield.

Internal Landscapes. Controlling the tremor in his left hand, Travis studied the thin-shouldered man sitting opposite him. Through the transom the light from the empty corridor shone into the darkened office. His face was partly hidden by the peak of his flying cap, but Travis recognized the bruised features of the bomber pilot whose photographs, torn from the pages of Newsweek and Paris-Match, had been strewn around the bedroom of the shabby hotel in Earls Court. His eyes stared at Travis, their focus sustained only by a continuous effort. For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature. Why had he come to the hospital, seeking out Travis among the thirty physicians? Travis had tried to speak to him, but the tall man made no reply, standing by the instrument cabinet like a tattered mannequin. His immature but at the same time aged face seemed as rigid as a plaster mask. For months Travis had seen his solitary figure, shoulders hunched inside the flying jacket, in more and more newsreels, as an extra in war films, and then as a patient in an elegant ophthalmic film on nystagmus - the series of giant geometric models, like sections of abstract landscapes, had made him uneasily aware that their long-delayed confrontation would soon take place.

The Weapons Range. Travis stopped the car at the end of the lane. In the sunlight he could see the remains of the outer perimeter fence, and beyond this a rusting quonset and the iron-stained roofs of the bunkers. He crossed the ditch and walked towards the fence, within five minutes found an opening. A disused runway moved through the grass. Partly concealed by the sunlight, the camouflage patterns across the complex of towers and bunkers four hundred yards away

revealed half-familiar contours - the model of a face, a posture, a neural interval. A unique event would take place here. Without thinking, Travis murmured, ‘Elizabeth Taylor.’ Abruptly there was a blare of sound above the trees.

Dissociation: Who Laughed at Nagasaki? Travis ran across the broken concrete to the perimeter fence. The helicopter plunged towards him, engine roaring through the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and paper. Twenty yards from the fence Travis stumbled among the coils of barbed wire. The helicopter was banking sharply, the pilot crouched over the controls. As Travis ran forward the shadows of the diving machine flickered around him like cryptic ideograms. Then the craft pulled away and flew off across the bunkers. When Travis reached the car, holding the torn knee of his trousers, he saw the young woman in the white dress walking down the lane. Her disfigured face looked back at him with indulgent eyes. Travis started to call to her, but stopped himself. Exhausted, he vomited across the roof of the car.

Serial Deaths. During this period, as he sat in the rear seat of the Pontiac, Travis was preoccupied by his separation from the normal tokens of life he had accepted for so long. His wife, the patients at the hospital (resistance agents in the ‘world war’ he hoped to launch), his undecided affair with Catherine Austin - these became as fragmentary as the faces of Elizabeth Taylor and Sigmund Freud on the advertising billboards, as unreal as the war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam. As he moved deeper into his own psychosis, whose onset he had recognized during his year at the hospital, he welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him. Now and then the young woman would look at him with a faint smile on her deformed mouth. Deliberately, Travis made no response, hesitant to commit himself into her hands. Who were they, these strange twins - couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.

Casualties Union. At the young woman’s suggestion, Travis joined the C. U., and with a group of thirty housewives practised the simulation of wounds. Later they would tour with Red Cross demonstration teams. Massive cerebral damage and abdominal bleeding in automobile accidents could be imitated within half an hour, aided by the application of suitable coloured resins. Convincing radiation burns required careful preparation, and might involve some three to four hours of makeup. Death, by contrast, was a matter of lying prone. Later, in the apartment they had taken overlooking the zoo, Travis washed the wounds from his hands and face. This curious pantomime, overlaid by the summer evening stench of the animals, seemed performed solely to pacify his two companions. In the bathroom mirror he could see the tall figure of the pilot, his slim face with its lost eyes hidden below the peaked cap, and the young woman in the white dress watching him from the lounge. Her intelligent face, like that of a student, occasionally showed a nervous reflex of hostility. Already Travis found it difficult not to think of her continuously. When would she speak to him? Perhaps, like himself, she realized that his instructions would come from other levels?

Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud,

Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral: V.J.-Day, the bodies of Japanese troops in the paddy fields at night. The next day, as he walked back to Shanghai, the peasants were planting rice among the swaying legs. Memories of others than himself, together these messages moved to some kind of focus. The dead face of the bomber pilot hovered by the door, the projection of World War III’s unknown soldier. His presence exhausted Travis.

Marey’s Chronograms. Dr Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. ‘Marey’s Chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible - the walking human figure, for example, is represented as a series of dune-like lumps.’ Dr Nathan accepted a cigarette from Catherine Austin, who had sauntered forward from the incubator at the rear of the office. Ignoring her quizzical eye, he continued, ‘Your husband’s brilliant feat was to reverse the process. Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects - this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient - he treated them as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time.’ Dr Nathan lit his cigarette with care. ‘The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have totally altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital . . . ’

‘Was my husband a doctor, or a patient?’ Dr Nathan nodded sagely, glancing over his fingertips at Catherine Austin. What had Travis seen in those time-filled eyes? ‘Mrs Travis, I’m not sure the question is valid any longer. These matters involve a relativity of a very different kind. What we are concerned with now are the implications - in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’

Zoom Lens. Dr Nathan stopped. Reluctantly, his eyes turned across the room to the portrait camera mounted on its tripod by the consulting couch. How could he explain to this sensitive and elusive woman that her own body, with its endlessly familiar geometry, its landscapes of touch and feeling, was their only defence against her husband’s all-too-plain intentions? Above all, how could he invite her to pose for what she would no doubt regard as a set of obscene photographs?

The Skin Area. After their meeting, at the exhibition of war wounds at the Royal Society of Medicine’s conference hall, Travis and Catherine Austin returned to the apartment overlooking the zoo. In the lift Travis avoided her hands as she tried to embrace him. He led her into the bedroom. Mouth pursed, she watched as he showed her the set of Enneper’s models. ‘What are they?’ She touched the interlocking cubes and cones, mathematical models of pseudo-space. ‘Fusing sequences, Catherine - for a doomsday weapon.’ In the postures they assumed, in the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom, and later of the curvilinear roof of the Festival Hall, the jutting balconies of the London Hilton, and lastly of the abandoned weapons range. Here the circular target areas became identified in

Travis’s mind with the concealed breasts of the young woman with radiation burns. Searching for her, he and Catherine Austin drove around the darkening countryside, lost among the labyrinth of billboards. The faces of Sigmund Freud and Jeanne Moreau presided over their last bitter hours.

Neoplasm. Later, escaping from Catherine Austin, and from the forbidding figure of the bomber pilot, who now watched him from the roof of the lion house, Travis took refuge in a small suburban house among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. He sat in the empty sitting-room overlooking the shabby garden. From the white bungalow beyond the clapboard fence his middle-aged neighbour dying of cancer watched him through the long afternoons. Her handsome face, veiled by the laced curtains, resembled that of a skull. All day she would pace around the small bedroom. At the end of the second month, when the doctor’s visits became more frequent, she undressed by the window, exposing her emaciated body through the veiled curtains. Each day, as he watched from the cubular room, he saw different aspects of her eroded body, the black breasts reminding him of the eyes of the bomber pilot, the abdominal scars like the radiation burns of the young woman. After her death he followed the funeral cars among the reservoirs in the white Pontiac.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.‘This reluctance to accept the fact of his own consciousness,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘may reflect certain positional difficulties in the immediate context of time and space. The right-angle spiral of a stairwell may remind him of similar biases within the chemistry of the biological kingdom. This can be carried to remarkable lengths - for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Much of Travis’s thought concerns what he terms “the lost symmetry of the blastosphere” - the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes. It occurred to Travis that our own bodies may conceal the rudiments of a symmetry not only about the vertical axis but also the horizontal. One recalls Goethe’s notion that the skull is formed of modified vertebrae - similarly, the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remains of a lost sacral skull. The resemblance between histologies of lung and kidney has long been noted. Other correspondences of respiratory and urino-genital function come to mind, enshrined both in popular mythology (the supposed equivalence in size of nose and penis) and psychoanalytic symbolism (the “eyes” are a common code for the testicles). In conclusion, it seems that Travis’s extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the “Mythology of the Amniotic Return”. In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator . . . ’

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark- suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare - Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body - why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked

past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?

The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area.

How Garbo Died.‘The film is a unique document,’ Webster explained, as he led Catherine Austin into the basement cinema. ‘At first sight it seems to be a strange newsreel about the latest tableau sculptures - there are a series of plaster casts of film stars and politicians in bizarre poses - how they were made we can’t find out, they seem to have been cast from the living models, LBJ and Mrs Johnson, Burton and the Taylor actress, there’s even one of Garbo dying. We were called in when the film was found.’ He signalled to the projectionist. ‘One of the casts is of Margaret Travis - I won’t describe it, but you’ll see why we’re worried. Incidentally, a touring version of Kienholz’s “Dodge 38” was seen travelling at speed on a motorway yesterday, a wrecked white car with the plastic dummies of a World War III pilot and a girl with facial burns making love among a refuse of bubblegum war cards and oral contraceptive wallets.’

War-Zone D. On his way across the car park Dr Nathan stopped and shielded his eyes from the sun. During the past week a series of enormous signs had been built along the roads surrounding the hospital, almost walling it in from the rest of the world. A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea. A helicopter soared overhead, its pilot supervising the work of the men on the track. Its down-draught ripped away some of the paper panels. They floated across the road, an eddying smile plastered against the radiator grille of a parked car.

The Atrocity Exhibition. Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetized in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticizing her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds; ‘Europe after the Rain’; the human race - Caliban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit.

The Danger Area. Webster ran through the dim light after Margaret Travis. He caught her by the entrance to the main camera bunker, where the cheekbones of an enormous face had been painted in faded Technicolor across the rust-stained concrete. ‘For God’s sake - ’ She looked down at his strong wrist against her breast, then wrenched herself away. ‘Mrs Travis! Why do you think

we’ve taken all these photographs?’ Webster held the torn lapel of his suit, then pointed to a tableau figure in the uniform of a Chinese infantryman standing at the end of the conduit. ‘The place is crawling with the things - you’ll never find him.’ As he spoke a searchlight in the centre of the airfield lit up the target areas, outlining the rigid figures of the mannequins.

The Enormous Face. Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital - the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Yet Margaret Travis’s role was ambiguous. In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape. Dr Nathan crossed an exposed causeway to the next bunker. He leaned against the dark décolleté. When the searchlight flared between the blockhouses he put on his shoe. ‘No . . . ’ He was hobbling towards the airfield when the explosion lit up the evening air.

The Exploding Madonna. For Travis, the ascension of his wife’s body above the target area, exploding madonna of the weapons range, was a celebration of the intervals through which he perceived the surrounding continuum of time and space. Here she became one with the madonnas of the billboards and the ophthalmic films, the Venus of the magazine cuttings whose postures celebrated his own search through the suburbs of Hell.

Departure. The next morning, Travis wandered along the gunnery aisles. On the bunkers the painted figure of the screen actress mediated all time and space to him through her body. As he searched among the tyres and coils of barbed wire he saw the helicopter rising into the sky, the bomber pilot at the controls. It made a leftward turn and flew off towards the horizon. Half an hour later the young woman drove away in the white Pontiac. Travis watched them leave without regret. When they had gone the corpses of Dr Nathan, Webster, and Catherine Austin formed a small tableau by the bunkers.

A Terminal Posture. Lying on the worn concrete of the gunnery aisles, he assumed the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body.

<Annotations>

Apocalypse.

‘Eniwetok and Luna Park’ may seem a strange pairing, the H-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands with the Paris fun-fair loved by the surrealists. But the endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything) did have a carnival air, a media phenomenon which Stanley Kubrick caught perfectly at the end of Dr Strangelove. I imagine my mental patients conflating Freud and Liz Taylor in their Warhol-like efforts, unerringly homing in on the first signs of their doctor’s nervous breakdown. The Atrocity Exhibition’s original dedication should have been ‘To the Insane’. I owe them everything.

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown.

The many lists in The Atrocity Exhibition were produced by free association, which accounts for the repetition but, I hope, makes more sense of them.

‘Garden Airplane Traps.’ ‘Voracious gardens in turn devoured by a vegetation that springs from the debris of trapped airplanes.’ Max Ernst, Informal Life. The nightmare of a grounded pilot.

Why a white Pontiac? A British pop-star of the 1960s, Dickie Valentine, drove his daughter in a white Pontiac to the same school that my own children attended near the film studios at Shepperton. The car had a powerful iconic presence, emerging from all those American movies into the tranquil TV suburbs. Soon after, Valentine died in a car accident. By chance a telescoped Pontiac starred in my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

The Weapons Range.

Weapons ranges have a special magic, all that destructive technology concentrated on the production of nothing, the closest we can get to certain obsessional states of mind. Even more strange are the bunkers of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, most of which are still standing, and are far larger than one expects. Space-age cathedrals, they threaten the surrounding landscape like lines of Teutonic knights, and are examples of cryptic architecture, where form no longer reveals function. They seem to contain the codes of some mysterious mental process. At Utah Beach, the most deserted stretch of the Normandy coast, they stare out over the washed sand, older than the planet. On visits with my agent and his wife, I used to photograph them compulsively.

Serial Deaths.

‘The war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam.’ Written in 1966, this was a prophetic leap in the dark. To date no Vietnam movie has been shot on the original battlegrounds, but I’m confident it will happen, and might even get out of control. Spielberg returned to Shanghai for Empire of the Sun, an eerie sensation for me - even more so were the scenes shot near Shepperton, using extras recruited from among my neighbours, many of whom have part-time jobs at the studios. I can almost believe that I came to Shepperton thirty years ago knowing unconsciously that one day I would write a novel about my wartime experiences in Shanghai, and that it might well be filmed in these studios. Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

Casualties Union.

The so-called Casualties Union existed in London in the 1960s, probably inspired by the nuclear disarmament movement. Putting on the cosmetic wounds was a messy business, and a recruitment leaflet reassured volunteers: ‘Death is simply a matter of lying prone.’

Pirate Radio.

Tsingtao, on the north China coast near Peking, was a German naval base during World War I, and later became a popular beach resort where I spent the summers in the 1930s. As a seven-year-old I was deeply impressed by the huge blockhouses and the maze of concrete tunnels where the tourist guides pointed to the bloody handprints of (they claimed) wounded German gunners driven mad by the British naval bombardment. For some reason these were far more moving than the dead Chinese soldiers in the battlegrounds around Shanghai which I visited with my parents, though they were sad enough.

Marey’s Chronograms.

‘An individual is a four-dimensional object of greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say that he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.’ Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.

Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the Hilton during the shooting of Cleopatra, when she contracted pneumonia and was given a tracheotomy. The Hilton’s balconies remind Travis of the actress’s lost gill-slits (which we all develop embryonically as we briefly recapitulate our biological past).

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot.

‘Where and when Travis placed his hands on her body.’ The poet Paul Eluard, describing his wife Gala, who later left him to marry Dali, said: ‘Her body is the shape of my hands.’

How Garbo Died.

The sculptor George Segal has made a number of plaster casts of prominent art patrons, mostly New York bankers and their wives. Frozen in time, these middle-aged men and women have a remarkable poignancy, figures from some future Pompeii.

The Enormous Face.

Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the old-style Hollywood actresses, has retained her hold on the popular imagination in the two decades since this piece was written, a quality she shares (no thanks to myself ) with almost all the public figures in this

book - Marilyn Monroe, Reagan, Jackie Kennedy among others. A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated 60s TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed - I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self- constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike Taylor, they radiate no light.

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.

CHAPTER TWO

THE UNIVERSITY OF DEATH

The Conceptual Death. By now these seminars had become a daily inquisition into Talbot’s growing distress and uncertainty. A disturbing aspect was the conscious complicity of the class in his long anticipated breakdown. Dr Nathan paused in the doorway of the lecture theatre, debating whether to end this unique but unsavoury experiment. The students waited as Talbot stared at the photographs of himself arranged in sequence on the blackboard, his attention distracted by the elegant but severe figure of Catherine Austin watching from the empty seats beside the film projector. The simulated newsreels of auto-crashes and Vietnam atrocities (an apt commentary on her own destructive sexuality) illustrated the scenario of World War III on which the students were ostensibly engaged. However, as Dr Nathan realized, its real focus lay elsewhere. An unexpected figure now dominated the climax of the scenario. Using the identity of their own lecturer, the students had devised the first conceptual death.

Auto-erotic. As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.

Obscene Mannequin.‘Shall I lie down with you?’ Ignoring her question, Talbot studied her broad hips, with their now empty contours of touch and feeling. Already she had the texture of a rubber mannequin fitted with explicit vents, an obscene masturbatory appliance. As he stood up he saw the diaphragm in her handbag, useless cache-sexe. He listened to the helicopters. They seemed to alight on an invisible landing zone in the margins of his mind. On the garage roof stood the sculpture he had laboriously built during the past month; antennae of metal aerials holding glass faces to the sun, the slides of diseased spinal levels he had taken from the laboratory. All night he watched the sky, listening to the time-music of the quasars.

Left Orbit and Temple. Below the window a thickset young man, wearing the black military overcoat affected by the students, was loading a large display billboard into a truck outside the Neurology department, a photo reproduction of Talbot’s left orbit and temple. He stared up at the sculpture on the roof. His sallow, bearded face had pursued Talbot for the past weeks during the conception of the scenario. It was at Koester’s instigation that the class were now devising the optimum death of World War III’s first casualty, a wound profile more and more clearly revealed as Talbot’s. A marked physical hostility existed between them, a compound of sexual rivalry over Catherine Austin and homo-erotic jealousy.

A Sophisticated Entertainment. Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer. Already members of the public were leaving. Despite the scandal that would ensue he had deliberately authorized this ‘Festival of Atrocity Films,’ which Talbot had suggested as one of his last coherent acts. Behind their display frames the images of Nader and JFK, napalm and air crash victims revealed the considerable ingenuity of the film makers. Yet the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized.

The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out a Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia. More properly, the programme should be called a festival of home movies. He lit a gold-tipped cigarette, noticing that a photograph of Talbot had been cleverly montaged over a reproduction of Dali’s ‘Hypercubic Christ.’ Even the film festival had been devised as part of the scenario’s calculated psycho-drama.

A Shabby Voyeur. As she parked the car, Karen Novotny could see the silver bowls of the three radio telescopes above the trees. The tall man in the shabby flying jacket walked towards the perimeter fence, bars of sunlight crossing his face. Why had she followed him here? She had picked him up in the empty hotel cinema after the conference on space medicine, then taken him back to her apartment. All week he had been watching the telescopes with the same fixity of expression, an optical rigor like that of a disappointed voyeur. Who was he? - some fugitive from time and space, clearly moving now into his own landscape. His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred closeups of hands. She stepped from the car, the coil hanging in her womb like a steel foetus, a stillborn star. She smoothed her white linen skirt as Talbot ran back from the fence, ripping the cassette from his camera. Between them had sprung up a relationship of intense sexuality.

The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot’s face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

Spinal Levels.’Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child. In the patio at the centre of the maze a young woman in a flowered white dress sat behind a desk covered with catalogues. Her blanched skin exposed the hollow planes of her face. Like the pilot, Talbot recognized her as a student at his seminar. Her nervous smile revealed the wound that disfigured the inside of her mouth.

Towards the D.M.Z. Later, as he sat in the cabin of the helicopter, Talbot looked down at the motorway below them. The speeding cars wound through the cloverleaves. The concrete causeways formed an immense cipher, the templates of an unseen posture. The young woman in the white dress sat beside him. Her breasts and shoulders recapitulated the forgotten contours of Karen Novotny’s body, the motion-sculpture of the highways. Afraid to smile at him, she stared at his hands as if they held some invisible weapon. The flowering tissue of her mouth reminded him of the porous esplanades of Ernst’s ‘Silence,’ the pumice-like beaches of a dead sea. His committal into the authority of these two couriers had at last freed him from his memories of Koester and Catherine Austin. The erosion of that waking landscape continued. Meanwhile the quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the island galaxies.

Mimetized Disasters. The helicopter banked abruptly, pulled round in a gesture of impatience by the pilot. They plunged towards the underpass, the huge fans of the Sikorsky sliding through the

air like the wings of a crippled archangel. A multiple collision had occurred in the approach to the underpass. After the police had left they walked for an hour among the cars, staring through the steam at the bodies propped against the fractured windshields. Here he would find his alternate death, the mimetized disasters of Vietnam and the Congo recapitulated in the contours of these broken fenders and radiator assemblies. As they circled overhead the shells of the vehicles lay in the dusk like the crushed wings of an aerial armada.

No U-Turn.‘Above all, the notion of conceptual auto-disaster has preoccupied Talbot during the final stages of his breakdown,’ Dr Nathan wrote. ‘But even more disturbing is Talbot’s deliberate self-involvement in the narrative of the scenario. Far from the students making an exhibition of an overwrought instructor, transforming him into a kind of ur-Christ of the communications landscape, Talbot has in fact exploited them. This has altered the entire direction of the scenario, turning it from an exercise on the theme of “the end of the world” into a psycho-drama of increasingly tragic perspectives.’

The Persistence of Memory. An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later, walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.

Arrival at the Zone. They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over the landscape of broken overpasses and crushed underpasses. The pilot walked down the slope to a rusting grader surrounded by tyres and fuel drums. Beyond it a quonset tilted into a pool of mud. Talbot waited for the young woman to speak to him, but she stared at her hands, lips clenched against her teeth. Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity. How long had they sat there?

The Plaza. Later, when his two couriers had moved to the ridge of the embankment, Talbot began to explore the terrain. Covered by the same even light, the landscape of derelict roadways spread to the horizon. On the ridge the pilot squatted under the tail of the helicopter, the young woman behind him. Their impassive, unlit faces seemed an extension of the landscape. Talbot followed the concrete beach. Here and there sections of the banking had fallen, revealing the steel buttresses below. An orchard of miniature fruit trees grew from the sutures between the concrete slabs. Three hundred yards from the helicopter he entered a sunken plaza where two convergent highways moved below an underpass. The shells of long-abandoned automobiles lay below the arches. Talbot brought the young woman and guided her down the embankment. For several hours they waited on the concrete slope. The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind.

The Annunciation. Partly veiled by the afternoon clouds, the enormous image of a woman’s hands moved across the sky. Talbot stood up, for a moment losing his balance on the sloping concrete. Raised as if to form an arch over an invisible child, the hands passed through the air above the plaza. They hung in the sunlight like immense doves. Talbot climbed the slope, following this spectre along the embankment. He had witnessed the annunciation of a unique

event. Looking down at the plaza, he murmured without thinking, ‘Ralph Nader.’

The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

Transliterated Pudenda. Dr Nathan showed his pass to the guard at the gatehouse. As they drove towards the testing area he was aware of Catherine Austin peering through the windshield, her sexuality keening now that Talbot was within range. Nathan glanced down at her broad thighs, calculating the jut and rake of her pubis. ‘Talbot’s belief - and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario - is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its manifest function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy - mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President. In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ.’ They stopped by the test course. A group of engineers watched a crushed Lincoln dragged away through the morning air. The hairless plastic mannequin of a woman sat propped on the grass, injury sites marked on her legs and thorax.

Journeys to an Interior. Waiting in Karen Novotny’s apartment, Talbot made certain transits: (1) Spinal: ‘The Eye of Silence’ - these porous rock towers, with the luminosity of exposed organs, contained an immense planetary silence. Moving across the iodine water of these corroded lagoons, Talbot followed the solitary nymph through the causeways of rock, the palaces of his own flesh and bone. (2) Media: montage landscapes of war - webbing heaped in pits beside the Shanghai - Nanking railway; bargirls’ cabins built out of tyres and fuel drums; dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L. C. T.s off Woosung pier. (3) Contour: the unique parameters of Karen’s body - beckoning vents of mouth and vulva, the soft hypogeum of the anus. (4) Astral: segments of his posture mimetized in the processions of space. These transits contained an image of the geometry assembling itself in the musculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles between the walls of the apartment.

Stochastic Analysis. Karen Novotny paused over the wet stockings in the handbasin. As his fingers touched her armpits she stared into the sculpture garden between the apartment blocks. The sallow-faced young man in the fascist overcoat who had followed her all week was sitting on the bench beside the Paolozzi. His paranoid eyes, with their fusion of passion and duplicity, had watched her like a rapist’s across the café tables. Talbot’s bruised hands were lifting her breasts, as if weighing their heavy curvatures against some more plausible alternative. The landscape of highways obsessed him, the rear mouldings of automobiles. All day he had been building his bizarre antenna on the roof of the apartment block, staring into the sky as if trying to force a corridor to the sun. Searching in his suitcase, she found clippings of his face taken from as yet unpublished news stories in Oggi and Newsweek . In the evening, while she bathed, waiting for him to enter the bathroom as she powdered her body, he crouched over the blueprints spread between the sofas in the lounge, calculating a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park.

Crash Magazine. Catherine Austin moved through the exhibits towards the dark-skinned young man in the black coat. He leaned against one of the cars, his face covered by the rainbows reflected from a frosted windshield. Who was Koester: a student in Talbot’s class; Judas in this scenario; a rabbi serving a sinister novitiate? Why had he organized this exhibition of crashed cars? The truncated vehicles, with their ruptured radiator grilles, were arranged in lines down the showroom floor. His warped sexuality, of which she had been aware since his arrival at the first semester, had something of the same quality as these maimed vehicles. He had even produced a magazine devoted solely to car accidents: Crash! The dismembered bodies of Jayne Mansfield, Camus and Dean presided over its pages, epiphanies of violence and desire.

A Cosmetic Problem. The star of the show was JFK, victim of the first conceptual car crash. A damaged Lincoln had been given the place of honour, plastic models of the late President and his wife in the rear seat. An elaborate attempt had been made to represent cosmetically the expressed brain tissue of the President. As she touched the white acrylic smears across the trunk Koester swung himself aggressively out of the driver’s seat. While he lit her cigarette she leaned against the fender of a white Pontiac, their thighs almost touching. Koester took her arm with a nervous gesture. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . ’ The flow of small talk modulated their sexual encounter. ‘ . . . surely Christ’s crucifixion could be regarded as the first traffic accident - certainly if we accept Jarry’s happy piece of anti-clericalism . . . ’

The Sixty-Minute Zoom. As they moved from apartment to apartment along the motorway, Karen Novotny was conscious of the continuing dissociation of the events around her. Talbot followed her about the apartment, drawing chalk outlines on the floor around her chair, around the cups and utensils on the breakfast table as she drank her coffee, and lastly around herself: (1) sitting, in the posture of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, on the edge of the bidet, (2) watching from the balcony as she waited for Koester to find them again, (3) making love to Talbot on the bed. He worked silently at the chalk outlines, now and then rearranging her limbs. The noise of the helicopters had become incessant. One morning she awoke in complete silence to find that Talbot had gone.

A Question of Definition. The multiplying outlines covered the walls and floors, a frieze of priapic dances - crash victims, a crucified man, children in intercourse. The outline of a helicopter covered the cinder surface of the tennis court like the profile of an archangel. She returned after a fruitless search among the cafés to find the furniture removed from the apartment. Koester and his student gang were photographing the chalk outlines. Her own name had been written into the silhouette of herself in the bath. ‘ “Novotny, masturbating,” ’ she read out aloud. ‘Are you writing me into your scenario, Mr Koester?’ she asked with an attempt at irony. His irritated eyes compared her figure with the outline in the bath. ‘ We know where he is, Miss Novotny.’ She stared at the outline of her breasts on the black tiles of the shower stall, Talbot’s hands traced around them. Hands multiplied around the rooms, soundlessly clapping, a welcoming host.

The Unidentified Female Orifice. These leg stances preoccupied Talbot - Karen Novotny (1) stepping from the driving seat of the Pontiac, median surface of thighs exposed, (2) squatting on the bathroom floor, knees laterally displaced, fingers searching for the diaphragm lip, (3) in the a tergo posture, thighs pressing against Talbot, (4) collision: crushed right tibia against the instrument console, left patella impacted by the handbrake.

The Optimum Wound Profile.‘One must bear in mind that roll-over followed by a head-on

collision produces complex occupant movements and injuries from unknown sources,’ Dr Nathan explained to Captain Webster. He held up the montage photograph he had found in Koester’s cubicle, the figure of a man with itemized wound areas. ‘However, here we have a wholly uncharacteristic emphasis on palm, ankle, and abdominal injuries. Even allowing for the excessive crushing movements in a severe impact it is difficult to reconstruct the likely accident mode. In this case, taken from Koester’s scenario of Talbot’s death, the injuries seem to have been sustained in an optimized auto-fatality, conceived by the driver as some kind of bizarre crucifixion. He would be mounted in the crash vehicle in an obscene position as if taking part in some grotesque act of intercourse - Christ crucified on the sodomized body of his own mother.’

The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.

Talbot: False Deaths.(1) The flesh impact: Karen Novotny’s beckoning figure in the shower stall, open thighs and exposed pubis - traffic fatalities screamed in this soft collision. (2) The overpass below the apartment: the angles between the concrete buttresses contained for Talbot an immense anguish. (3) A crushed fender: in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny, the alternate death of Ralph Nader.

Unusual Poses.‘You’ll see why we’re worried, Captain.’ Dr Nathan beckoned Webster towards the photographs pinned to the walls of Talbot’s office. ‘We can regard them in all cases as “poses”. They show (1) the left orbit and zygomatic arch of President Kennedy magnified from Zapruder frame 230, (2) X-ray plates of the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, (3) a sequence of corridor angles at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, (4) Miss Karen Novotny, an intimate of Talbot’s, in a series of unusual amatory positions. In fact, it is hard to tell whether the positions are those of Miss Novotny in intercourse or as an auto-crash fatality - to a large extent the difference is now meaningless.’ Captain Webster studied the exhibits. He fingered the shaving scar on his heavy jaw, envying Talbot the franchises of this young woman’s body. ‘And together they make up a portrait of this American safety fellow - Nader?’

‘In Death, Yes.’ Nathan nodded sagely over his cigarette smoke. ‘In death, yes. That is, an alternate or “false” death. These images of angles and postures constitute not so much a private gallery as a conceptual equation, a fusing device by which Talbot hopes to bring his scenario to a climax. The danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder. As to the figure of Nader - one must remember that Talbot is here distinguishing between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. Nader’s true role is clearly very different from his apparent one, to be deciphered in terms of the postures we assume, our anxieties mimetized in the junction between wall and ceiling. In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace. In twentieth-century terms the crucifixion, for example, would be re-enacted as a

conceptual auto-disaster.’

Idiosyncrasies and Sin-crazed Idioms. As she leaned against the concrete parapet of the camera tower, Catherine Austin could feel Koester’s hands moving around her shoulder straps. His rigid face was held six inches from her own, his mouth like the pecking orifice of some unpleasant machine. The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rain-washed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus. A car moved along the perimeter of the test area. During the night the students had built an elaborate tableau on the impact site fifty feet below, a multi-vehicle auto-crash. A dozen wrecked cars lay on their sides, broken fenders on the grass verges. Plastic mannequins had been embedded in the interlocked windshields and radiator grilles, wound areas marked on their broken bodies. Koester had named them: Jackie, Ralph, Abraham. Perhaps he saw the tableau as a rape? His hand hesitated on her left breast. He was watching the Novotny girl walking along the concrete aisle. She laughed, disengaging herself from Koester. Where were her own wound areas?

Speed Trials. Talbot opened the door of the Lincoln and took up his position in agent Greer’s seat. Behind him the helicopter pilot and the young woman sat in the rear of the limousine. For the first time the young woman had begun to smile at Talbot, a soundless rictus of the mouth, deliberately exposing her wound as if showing him that her shyness had gone. Ignoring her now, Talbot looked out through the dawn light at the converging concrete aisles. Soon the climax of the scenario would come, JFK would die again, his young wife raped by this conjunction of time and space. The enigmatic figure of Nader presided over the collision, its myths born from the cross-overs of auto-crashes and genitalia. He looked up from the wheel as the flares illuminated the impact zone. When the car surged forward he realized that the two passengers had gone.

The Acceleration Couch. Half zipping his trousers, Koester lay back against the torn upholstery, one hand still resting on the plump thigh of the sleeping young woman. The debris-filled compartment had not been the most comfortable site. This zombie-like creature had strayed across the concrete runways like a fugitive from her own dreams, forever talking about Talbot as if unconsciously inviting Koester to betray him. Why was she wearing the Jackie Kennedy wig? He sat up, trying to open the rusty door. The students had christened the wreck ‘Dodge 38’, furnishing the rear seat with empty beer bottles and contraceptive wallets. Abruptly the car jolted forward, throwing him across the young woman. As she woke, pulling at her skirt, the sky whirled past the frosted windows. The clanking cable between the rails propelled them on a collision course with a speeding limousine below the camera tower.

Celebration. For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader. The dismembered bodies of Karen Novotny and himself moved across the morning landscape, recreated in a hundred crashing cars, in the perspectives of a thousand concrete embankments, in the sexual postures of a million lovers.

Interlocked Bodies. Holding the bruise under his left nipple, Dr Nathan ran after Webster towards the burning wrecks. The cars lay together at the centre of the collision corridor, the last steam and smoke lifting from their cabins. Webster stepped over the armless body of Karen Novotny hanging face-down from the rear window. The burning fuel had traced a delicate lacework of expressed tissue across her naked thighs. Webster pulled open the rear door of the Lincoln. ‘Where the hell is Talbot?’ Holding his throat with one hand, Dr Nathan stared at the wig lying among the beer bottles.

The Helicopters are Burning. Talbot followed the young woman between the burning helicopters. Their fuselages formed bonfires across the dark fields. Her strong stride, with its itemized progress across the foam-smeared concrete, carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to his own sexuality. Talbot stopped by the burning wreck of a Sikorsky. The body of Karen Novotny, with its landscapes of touch and feeling, clung like a wraith to his thighs and abdomen.

Fractured Smile. The hot sunlight lay across the suburban street. From the radio of the car sounded a fading harmonic. Karen Novotny’s fractured smile spread across the windshield. Talbot looked up at his own face mediated from the billboard beside the car park. Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.

<Annotations>

The Conceptual Death.

Experiments often test the experimenter more than the subject. One remembers the old joke about the laboratory rat who said: ‘I have that scientist trained - every time I press this lever he gives me a pellet of food.’ For me, the most interesting aspect of the work of Masters and Johnson, collected in Human Sexual Response, was its effect on themselves. How were their sex lives influenced, what changes occurred in their sexual freedoms and fantasies? In conversation they seemed almost neutered by the experiments. I suspect that the copulating volunteers were really training the good doctors to lose all interest in sex, just as computerized diagnostic machines, where patients press buttons in reply to stock questions, are inadvertently training them to develop duodenal ulcers or varicose veins.

Talbot. Another face of the central character of The Atrocity Exhibition. The core identity is Traven, a name taken consciously from B. Traven, a writer I’ve always admired for his extreme reclusiveness - so completely at odds with the logic of our own age, when even the concept of privacy is constructed from publicly circulating materials. It is now almost impossible to be ourselves except on the world’s terms.

Obscene Mannequin.

The time-music of the quasars. A huge volume of radio signals reaches this planet from space, crossing gigantic distances from the far side of the universe. It’s hard to accept that these messages are meaningless, as they presumably are, no more than the outward sign of nuclear processes within the stars. Yet the hope remains that one day we will decode them, and find, not some intergalactic fax service, but a spontaneously generated choral music, a naive electro-magnetic architecture, the primitive syntax of a philosophical system, as meaningless but as reassuring as the pattern of waves on a beach.

Reassembling the furniture of his mind, Talbot has constructed a primitive antenna, and can now hear the night sky singing of time, the voice of the unseen powers of the cosmos.

A Sophisticated Entertainment.

Has a festival of atrocity films ever been held? Every year at the Oscars ceremony, some might say. It seemed likely in the late 60s, but the new puritans of our day would greet such a suggestion with a shudder. A pity - given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology.

The Image Maze.

After a dinner party in the 1970s I almost came to blows with a prominent New York poet (in fact, I tried playfully to run him down with my car, if such an act can be playful). He had derided my observation that cruel and violent images which elicit pity one day have by the next afternoon been stylised into media emblems. Yet the tragic photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head was soon used by the London Sunday Times as a repeated logo keying its readers to Vietnam features in the paper. If I remember, the tilt of the dying man’s head was slightly exaggerated, like a stylized coke bottle or tail-fin.

Towards the D.M.Z.

Max Ernst’s paintings run through The Atrocity Exhibition, in particular ‘The Eye of Silence’ and ‘Europe After the Rain.’ Their clinker-like rocks resemble skeletons from which all organic matter has been leached, all sense of time. Looking at these landscapes, it’s impossible to imagine anything ever happening within them. The neural counterparts of these images must exist within our brains, though it’s difficult to guess what purpose they serve.

Mimetized Disasters.

Most of the machines that surround our lives - airliners, refrigerators, cars and typewriters - have streamlined their way into our affections. Now and then, as in the case of the helicopter, with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness, we can see clearly the deep hostility of the mineral world. We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of the evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.

The Persistence of Memory.

Dali’s masterpiece, and one of the most powerful of all surrealist images.

The Plaza.

Dealey Plaza in Dallas, re-imagined in Talbot’s eye as the end of the world.

The Annunciation.

Nader has only just survived into the 1990s, and it’s difficult now to imagine his name leaping to anyone’s lips, but at the time he sent a seismic tremor through the mind of the US consumer, challenging the authority of that greatest of all American icons, the automobile. Every car crash seemed a prayer to Ralph Nader.

Stochastic Analysis.

Believe it or not, some researcher did carry out a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park, translating the guesstimated flow-patterns of vehicles into a three-dimensional volume graph.

Crash Magazine.

This was written two years before my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars. Scouring the wreckers’ yards around London, I was unable to find a crashed Lincoln Continental, perhaps fortunately. As it was, the audience reaction to the telescoped Pontiac, Mini and Austin Cambridge verged on nervous hysteria, though had the cars been parked in the street outside the gallery no one would have given them a glance or devoted a moment’s thought to the injured occupants. In a calculated test of the spectators, I hired a topless girl to interview the guests on closed-circuit TV. She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless - an interesting logic was at work there. As the opening night party deteriorated into a drunken brawl she was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac, and later wrote a damning review of the show in the underground paper Friendz. The cars were exhibited without comment, but during the month-long show they were continually attacked by visitors to the gallery, who broke windows, tore off wing mirrors, splashed them with white paint. The overall reaction to the experiment convinced me to write Crash, in itself a considerable challenge to most notions of sanity.

I’m told that cars purporting to be the JFK Continental are often exhibited in the United States, and that a white Continental claiming to be the car in which Kennedy met his death was recently the centrepiece of a small museum on the causeway leading to Cocoa Beach, Florida.

The Optimum Wound Profile.

In February 1972, two weeks after completing Crash , I was involved in my only serious car accident. After a front wheel blowout my Ford Zephyr veered to the right, crossed the central reservation (I received a bill for the demolished sign, and was annoyed to see later that I had paid for a more advanced model, with flashing lights), and then rolled over and continued upside-down along the oncoming lane. Fortunately I was wearing a seat belt and no other vehicle was involved. An extreme case of nature imitating art. Curiously, before the accident and since, I have always been a careful and even slow driver, frequently egged on by impatient women-friends.

Unusual Poses.

Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the fatal head wound. I forget the significance of frame 230.

The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles - ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ - together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography. One shudders to think how the report’s authors would have dealt with any sexual elements, particularly if they had involved Jacqueline Kennedy (perhaps The Atrocity Exhibition fills that gap), or how their successors might have coped with the assassination of Vice-President Quayle and his evangelist wife in a hotel suite - say in Miami, a good city in which to be assassinated,

within sight of those lovely banyan trees in Coral Gables, ambling pelicans and the witty Arquitectonica building.

Speed Trials.

Special Agent William R. Greer of the Secret Service was the driver of the Presidential limousine. One can’t help wondering how the events in Dealey Plaza affected him. Has his sense of space and time been altered? What role in his imagination is played by the desperate widow? The facilities exist for a complete neuro-psychiatric profile, though one will never be carried out. The results would be interesting, since we were all in a sense in the driver’s seat on that day in Dallas.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ASSASSINATION WEAPON

Thoracic Drop. The spinal landscape, revealed at the level of T-12, is that of the porous rock towers of Tenerife, and of the native of the Canaries, Oscar Dominguez, who created the technique of decalcomania and so exposed the first spinal landscape. The clinker-like rock towers, suspended above the silent swamp, create an impression of profound anguish. The inhospitability of this mineral world, with its inorganic growths, is relieved only by the balloons flying in the clear sky. They are painted with names: Jackie, Lee Harvey, Malcolm. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Here, time makes no concessions.

Autogeddon. Waking: the concrete embankment of a motorway extension. Roadworks, cars drumming two hundred yards below. In the sunlight the seams between the sections are illuminated like the sutures of an exposed skull. A young woman stands ten feet away from him, watching with unsure eyes. The hyoid bone in her throat flutters as if discharging some subvocal rosary. She points to her car, parked off the verge beside a grader, and then beckons to him. Kline, Coma, Xero. He remembered the aloof, cerebral Kline and their long discussions on this terminal concrete beach. Under a different sun. This girl is not Coma. ‘My car.’ She speaks, the sounds as dissociated as the recording in a doll. ‘I can give you a lift. I saw you reach the island. It’s like trying to cross the Styx.’

Googolplex. Dr Nathan studied the walls of the empty room. The mandalas, scored in the white plaster with a nail file, radiated like suns towards the window. He peered at the objects on the tray offered to him by the nurse. ‘So, these are the treasures he has left us - an entry from Oswald’s Historic Diary, a much-thumbed reproduction of Magritte’s “Annunciation”, and the mass numbers of the first twelve radioactive nuclides. What are we supposed to do with them?’ Nurse Nagamatzu gazed at him with cool eyes. ‘Permutate them, doctor?’ Dr Nathan lit a cigarette, ignoring the explicit insolence. This elegant bitch, like all women she intruded her sexuality at the most inopportune moments. One day . . . He said, ‘Perhaps. We might find Mrs Kennedy there. Or her husband. The Warren Commission has reopened its hearing, you know. Apparently it’s not satisfied. Quite unprecedented.’ Permutate them? The theoretical number of nucleotide patterns in DNA was a mere 10 to the power of 120,000. What number was vast enough to contain all the possibilities of those three objects?

Jackie Kennedy, your eyelids deflagrate. The serene face of the President’s widow, painted on clapboard four hundred feet high, moves across the rooftops, disappearing into the haze on the outskirts of the city. There are hundreds of the signs, revealing Jackie in countless familiar postures. Next week there may be an SS officer, Beethoven, Christopher Columbus or Fidel Castro. The fragments of these signs litter the suburban streets for weeks afterwards. Bonfires of Jackie’s face burn among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. With luck he finds a job on one of the municipal disposal teams, warms his hands at a brazier of eyes. At night he sleeps beneath an unlit bonfire of breasts.

Xero. Of the three figures who were to accompany him, the strangest was Xero. For most of the time Kline and Coma would remain near him, sitting a few feet away on the embankment of the deserted motorway, following in another car when he drove to the radio-observatory, pausing behind him as he visited the atrocity exhibition. Coma was too shy, but now and then he would manage to talk to Kline, although he never remembered what they said to each other. By contrast,

Xero was a figure of galvanic energy and uncertainty. As he moved across the abandoned landscape near the overpass, the perspectives of the air seemed to invert behind him. At times, when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the hieroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem.

Questions, always questions. Karen Novotny watched him move around the apartment, dismantling the mirrors in the hall and bathroom. He stacked them on the table between the settees in the lounge. This strange man, and his obsessions with time, Jackie Kennedy, Oswald and Eniwetok. Who was he? Where had he come from? In the three days since she had found him on the motorway she had discovered only that he was a former H-bomber pilot, for some reason carrying World War III in his head. ‘What are you trying to build?’ she asked. He assembled the mirrors into a box-like structure. He glanced up at her, face hidden by the peak of his Air Force cap. ‘A trap.’ She stood beside him as he knelt on the floor. ‘For what? Time?’ He placed a hand between her knees and gripped her right thigh, handhold of reality. ‘For your womb, Karen. You’ve caught a star there.’ But he was thinking of Coma, waiting with Kline in the espresso bar, while Xero roamed the street in his white Pontiac. In Coma’s eyes runes glowed.

The Impossible Room. In the dim light he lay on the floor of the room. A perfect cube, its walls and ceiling were formed by what seemed to be a series of cinema screens. Projected on to them in close-up was the face of Nurse Nagamatzu, her mouth, three feet across, moving silently as she spoke in slow motion. Like a cloud, the giant head moved up the wall behind him, then passed across the ceiling and down the opposite corner. Later the inclined, pensive face of Dr Nathan appeared, rising from the floor until it filled three walls and the ceiling, a slow mouthing monster.

Beach Fatigue. After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with a collection of mud-stained documents and a Coke bottle.

Pontiac Starchief. Two hundred yards from the hut a wheel-less Pontiac sits in the sand. The presence of this car baffles him. Often he spends hours sitting in it, trying out the front and back seats. All sorts of rubbish is lying in the sand: a typewriter with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes these seem to mean something), a smashed neurosurgical unit (he pockets a handful of leucotomes, useful for self-defence). Then he cuts his foot on the Coke bottle, and spends several feverish days in the hut. Luckily he finds an incomplete isolation drill for trainee astronauts, half of an eighty-hour sequence.

Coma: the million-year girl. Coma’s arrival coincides with his recovery from the bout of fever. At first she spends all her time writing poems on the damaged typewriter. Later, when not writing the poems, she wanders away to an old solar energy device and loses herself in the maze of mirrors. Shortly afterwards Kline appears, and sits at a chair and table in the sand twenty yards from the hut. Xero, meanwhile, is moving among the oil derricks half a mile away, assembling immense Cinemascope signs that carry the reclining images of Oswald, Jackie Kennedy and

Malcolm X.

Pre-uterine Claims.‘The author,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘has found that the patient forms a distinctive type of object relation based on perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass. Although psychoanalysis cannot reach the primary archaic mechanism of “rapprochement” it can deal with the neurotic superstructure, guiding the patient towards the choice of stable and worthwhile objects. In the case under consideration the previous career of the patient as a military pilot should be noted, and the unconscious role of thermonuclear weapons in bringing about the total fusion and non-differentiation of all matter. What the patient is reacting against is, simply, the phenomenology of the universe, the specific and independent existence of separate objects and events, however trivial and inoffensive these may seem. A spoon, for example, offends him by the mere fact of its existence in time and space. More than this, one could say that the precise, if largely random, configuration of atoms in the universe at any given moment, one never again to be repeated, seems to him to be preposterous by virtue of its unique identity . . . ’ Dr Nathan lowered his pen and looked down into the recreation garden. Traven was standing in the sunlight, raising and lowering his arms and legs in a private calisthenic display, which he repeated several times (presumably an attempt to render time and events meaningless by replication?).

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’ Captain Webster studied the documents laid out on Dr Nathan’s demonstration table. These were: (1) a spectroheliogram of the sun; (2) tarmac and take-off checks for the B-29 Super-fortress Enola Gay; (3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein; (4) transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (5) photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression; (6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’. He turned to Dr Nathan. ‘You say these constitute an assassination weapon?’

‘Not in the sense you mean.’ Dr Nathan covered the exhibits with a sheet. By chance the cabinets took up the contours of a corpse. ‘Not in the sense you mean. This is an attempt to bring about the “false” death of the President - false in the sense of coexistent or alternate. The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.’ Dr Nathan went over to the window. Obviously he would have to begin the search single-handedly. Where to begin? No doubt Nurse Nagamatzu could be used as bait. That vamp had once worked as a taxi-dancer in the world’s largest nightclub in Osaka, appropriately named ‘The Universe’.

Unidentified Radio-source, Cassiopeia. Karen Novotny waited as he reversed the car on to the farm track. Half a mile across the meadows she could see the steel bowls of the three radio telescopes in the sunlight. So the attempt was to be made here? There seemed to be nothing to kill except the sky. All week they had been chasing about, sitting for hours through the conference on neuro-psychiatry, visiting art galleries, even flying in a rented Rapide across the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. Her eyes had ached from keeping a lookout. ‘They’re four hundred feet high,’ he told her, ‘the last thing you need is a pair of binoculars.’ What had he been looking for - the radio telescopes or the giant madonnas he muttered about as he lay asleep beside her at night? ‘Xero!’ she heard him shout. With the agility of an acrobat he vaulted over the bonnet of the car, then set off at a run across the meadow. Carrying the black Jackie Kennedy wig as carefully as she could in both hands, she hurried after him. One of the telescopes was moving, its dish turning towards them.

Madame Butterfly. Holding the wound under her left breast, Nurse Nagamatzu stepped across Webster’s body and leaned against the bogie of the telescope pylon. Eighty feet above her the

steel bowl had stopped revolving, and the echoes of the gunshots reverberated among the lattice- work. Clearing her throat with an effort, she spat out the blood. The flecks of lung tissue speckled the bright ribbon of the rail. The bullet had broken two ribs, then collapsed her left lung and lodged itself below her scapula. As her eyes faded she caught a last glimpse of a white American car setting off across the tarmac apron beyond the control house, where the shells of the old bombers lay heaped together. The runways of the former airfield radiated from her in all directions. Dr Nathan was kneeling in the path of the car, intently building a sculpture of mirrors. She tried to pull the wig off her head, and then fell sideways across the rail.

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Pausing outside the entrance to the tea terrace, Margaret Traven noticed the tall figure of Captain Webster watching her from the sculpture room. Duchamp’s glass construction, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, reminded her of the ambiguous role she might have to play. This was chess in which every move was a counter-gambit. How could she help her husband, that tormented man, pursued by furies more implacable than the Four Riders - the very facts of time and space? She gave a start as Webster took her elbow. He turned to face her, looking into her eyes. ‘You need a drink. Let’s sit down - I’ll explain again why this is so important.’

Venus Smiles. The dead face of the President’s widow looked up at him from the track. Confused by the Japanese cast of her features, with all their reminders of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he stared at the bowl of the telescope. Twenty yards away Dr Nathan was watching him in the sunlight, the sculpture beside him reflecting a dozen fragments of his head and arms. Kline and Coma were moving away along the railway track.

Einstein.‘The notion that this great Swiss mathematician is a pornographer may strike you as something of a bad joke,’ Dr Nathan remarked to Webster. ‘However, you must understand that for Traven science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography. How different from Lautreamont, who brought together the sewing machine and the umbrella on the operating table, identifying the pudenda of the carpet with the woof of the cadaver.’ Dr Nathan turned to Webster with a smile. ‘One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.’

Rune-filled Eyes. Now, in this concluding phase, the presence of his watching trinity, Coma, Kline and Xero, became ever closer. All three were more preoccupied than he remembered them. Only Coma, with her rune-filled eyes, watched him with any sympathy. It was as if they sensed that something was missing. He remembered the documents he had found near the terminal hut.

In a Technical Sense. Webster’s hand hesitated on Karen Novotny’s zip. He listened to the last bars of the Mahler symphony playing from the radiogram extension in the warm bedroom. ‘The bomber crashed on landing,’ he explained. ‘Four members of the crew were killed. He was alive when they got him out, but at one point in the operating theatre his heart and vital functions failed. In a technical sense he was dead for about two minutes. Now, all this time later, it looks as if something is missing, something that vanished during the short period of his death. Perhaps his soul, the capacity to achieve a state of grace. Nathan would call it the ability to accept the phenomenology of the universe, or the fact of your own consciousness. This is Traven’s hell. You can see he’s trying to build bridges between things - this Kennedy business, for example. He wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense.’

The Water World. Margaret Traven moved through the darkness along the causeways between the reservoirs. Half a mile away the edge of the embankment formed a raised horizon, enclosing this world of tanks, water and pumping gear with an almost claustrophobic silence. The varying levels of water in the tanks seemed to let an extra dimension into the damp air. A hundred yards away, across two parallel settling beds, she saw her husband walking rapidly along one of the white-painted catwalks. He disappeared down a stairway. What was he looking for? Was this watery world the site where he hoped to be reborn, in this fragmented womb with its dozens of amniotic levels?

An Existential Yes. They were moving away from him. After his return to the terminal hut he noticed that Kline, Coma and Xero no longer approached him. Their fading figures, a quarter of a mile from the hut, wandered to and fro, half-hidden from him by the hollows and earthworks. The Cinemascope billboards of Jackie, Oswald and Malcolm X were beginning to break up in the wind. One morning he woke to find that they had gone.

The Terminal Zone. He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

<Annotations>

Thoracic Drop.

Oscar Dominguez, a leading member of the surrealist group in Paris, invented the technique of crushing gouache between layers of paper. When separated they reveal eroded, rock-like forms that touch some deeply buried memory, perhaps at an early stage in the formation of the brain’s visual centres, before the wiring is fully in place. Here I refer to Ernst’s ‘Eye of Silence’.

Googolplex.

Oswald’s Historic Diary, which he began on October 16th, 1959, the day of his arrival in Moscow, is a remarkable document which shows this inarticulate and barely literate man struggling to make sense of the largest issues of his day. Curiously, many prominent assassins have possessed distinctive literary styles, as if they had unconsciously rehearsed and rationalized their crimes on the verbal level long before committing them. Arthur Bremer, who critically wounded George Wallace, composed his own diary with great literary flair, while Manson has a unique apocalyptic style. ‘Paycheck whore wears a dollar bill gown to the funeral of hope and love . . . ’ (The Manson File, Amok Press).

Xero.

These three figures, who are shadows projected from Traven’s unconscious, had been in my mind since the end of the 1950s (see Re/Search #8/9, pages 38-40). They materialized in The Atrocity Exhibition, but then exited and never returned. I wait patiently for them to reappear.

Beach Fatigue.

Guam in 1947. The B-29s which bombed the airfield beside Lunghua Camp, near Shanghai, where I was interned during the Second World War, had reportedly flown from Guam. Pacific islands with their silent airstrips among the palm trees, Wake Island above all, have a potent magic for me. The runways that cross these little atolls, now mostly abandoned, seem to represent extreme states of nostalgia and possibility, doorways into another continuum. It was from the island of Tinian, in the Marianas, that the atom bombs were launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war unexpectedly and almost certainly saved the lives of myself and my fellow internees in Shanghai, where the huge Japanese armies had intended to make a last stand against the expected American landings.

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’

Kennedy’s assassination presides over The Atrocity Exhibition, and in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into

the popular psyche that have not yet closed.

[benefits1986]

Meet My 7 Anaks & Counting

Kids make you adult even when you don’t want to and even when you can’t.

You got that right in real black and raging red.  I have kids. Lahat panganay pa because why not?  7 and counting to be exact.  This 37-year old balakang has been raising kids since forever.  My first kid is J. I wasn’t really happy to have him since I was so young. A few weeks after he came home, he contracted meningitis. I saw him battle the lumbar puncture at three months old. I was waiting for a really loud cry but all I saw was a soundless howl. Since we practically grew up together, I always have a tough time managing him. He called me by my first name one too many times.  My second kid is K. He is a few years younger than J. When I first saw him, I felt weird and pleasant because he is suck a tiny bundle. A few months after he came home, J and I gave him chicken pox. It was summer season. We didn’t know that we’re not allowed to come near him because chicken pox is communicable. Mother dragon told us that it’s fine. K will get by. I took this really badly and reminded myself that I ought to step up.  My third kid is R. He came home sick and I looked after him for quite some time. I remember his first day in school. He held my hand and shook his head. I told him that it’s gonna be fine. My most memorable encounter with him is when we watched a GP movie and again, he shuddered. It was his first time to be in a cinema so he needed to adjust his big eye to the darkness a little slower than the rest of the world. Later, I saw him laughing and having the time of his life. Good times, that one.  My fourth kid is a Gen Z with an old soul. She is B. She came later because we didn’t get to spend her formative years together. She has hips that don’t lie, and RBF and she masters the side-eye emoji in real life. She reminds me a lot of my naive younger self.  My fifth kid is Z. I gave this kid that nickname because her real name is too feminine. I forced her mom to say yes. Since Z belongs to Generation Alpha, I reasoned that this kid ought to have a nickname that’s flexible, just in case she’d want to change this name. The mom told me that I overthink way too much. Later, she agreed that Z’s nickname is modern and is unique. RBF all the way, I assured the mom that everything’s gonna be fine and that we’ll make it with you, little Z.  My sixth kid, and perhaps, my last is A. She is in the spectrum. I thought that after 5 kids, A will be a breeze since I’m no longer a kid. I thought that I have little patience but she challenged it beyond this universe and even across all galaxies. Though we rarely meet eye to eye, literally and figuratively, A gives me the gift of really growing up even when after all these years, I feel like I’m defying gravity. I’ve yet to see A in full bloom so I need to make sure I live long enough to catch her in every fall especially in this third world country where autism is looked down upon. One time, she had a prod levels tantrum in the grocery. People stopped and stared. With my RBF, I said: How can I help you all? The flock dispersed. A got her stage back. Tabi kayo. Kids like A have too much sensory responses and that tantrums are but kids’ stuff. Deep inside I feel so much worry because A’s life is bound my uncertainties that even I can’t control.  My pahabol kid is E. The first time I saw her sa PT, I blinked many times. LUH. True ba ito? E is super young pa so ang core memory ko pa lang sa kanya is that naiyak ako when I got her Airforce 1 Triple White plus her first of many Adidas tracksuit in pink because why not? LOL. Never akong naiyak in getting a kid any gift in my entire life kaya dammmngggurlll, iba ‘to. Iba na ‘to.  Indeed, De Ramos hips don’t lie. Kinaya ‘yung 7 and counting pa.  May almost sunod-sunod pa.  Ayoko na rin mag-count because ang hirap.  ______ HAPPY APRIL FOOLS DAY!  Relak.  1 is my brother.  3 pinsans.  2 inaanaks. 1 pamangkin sa pinsan.  But, truth be told, I’ve been a mom all my life. Funny how I came to realize this when K born in ‘92 hugged me before going back to Manila in my ina’s burial almost a week ago. In between talking about his booming business, I asked him: K, wala naman akong mega career stride, bakit mga 4 hours plus tayo lagi naguusap about your business? Let alone wala naman akong alam diyan bilang wala naman sa universe ko ang mundo ng engineering? K smiled a sly smile and said: Ate Bene, I value you kasi ‘yung strength mo, wala ka man sa mundong ‘to, nacompliment mo weakness ko. Remember, ikaw na tuturo sa akin paano defend ‘yung thesis ko, paano mag-communicate, paano dumiskarte. Mommy kita e. I was taken aback a bit and said, ‘wag kang ano diyan, K. Tigilan mo ako. Hindi pa rin ako sasamang mag-golf sa’yo kasi papain mo ako sa mga potential mong prospects. Kamot-ulo si K e. Hahahahahaha. He told me that I’d be getting a commission na pang-pick up ko. Sabi ko naman, ‘di ako impressed sa’yo. Alam mo ‘yan. Uhugin ka pa lang, may bulutong ka pa lang, alam na kita. Che.  K and I fight head to head a lot of times but what’s nice about us is that we agree to disagree. We have been close the past years and ever since then, spoiled ako dito pero pilitang spoiled. Alam niya kasi na ayoko ng basic and ayoko ng surprise. Since medyo marunong na ng galawan, naiisahan na ako. Leche. Kidding aside, K has been with me during my toughest times, too. Biglaang magyaya na sunduin ako tapos sama ako sa mga errands niya then kwentuhan lang about life in general. K is my real pill and my bardagulan pill.  One of the toughest fights we’ve had was when he reached out to me to get a K-drama inspired proposal to his now wife, A. Sobrang banas ko talaga kasi he didn’t know that I have a soft side talaga. Secret K-drama OG girl ako kasi it’s not something I share openly, then. I asked him straight up na why 2 weeks lang and bakit ako of all people? ‘Di pa kasi kami close noon. He told me that he believes na ako lang makakahelp at makaka-manage sa ka-sentihan niya. FUCK. And that wala na siyang ibang lalapitan if mag-no ako. MAGALING ‘TO. NAHASA. Hahahahaha. Agit na agit ‘yung usapan namin and bilang ganti, dahil sobrang hapit na sa timeline, nag 24-hour+ marathon kami sa Tagaytay para matapos na ‘yung gusto niyang itawid. Siya tuloy ‘yung almost sumuko. Tags is where ko natatawid a good number of my deadliest deadline sa work kaya nahanap ko ‘yung cafe na safe kahit 24 hours pa ang labada. :D  Since he wanted to have a K-drama proposal, I gave him very specific directions that he begrudgingly followed but all in buy in naman siya. Even pagluhod with feelings. Perhaps the highlight of our roll out was when he stared at me blankly when I said: NO sa WILL YOU MARRY ME. Inis na inis siya and shouted: E ano sasabihin? K, stop. ‘Wag ako. WELCOME HOME (since expat si A) then followed by WILL YOU BE MY HOME. Basic. Hindi kadire. Hindi cringe. Sapul. His jaw dropped. RBF ako. Nung nahimasmasan na siya, binawian ako, or at least, he tried to: Ate, may romantic side ka pala? ‘Di ko maiisip ‘yun. Tama na ikaw kinuha ko. Me: Shut up. K-drama drug long-term effect lang ‘yan. Tabi. Now, ayusin mo mga pinapaggawa ko. Bilis.  My basher dad verdict sa proposal na ang competition is ‘yung surprise ni K kay A na Mt. Fuji hotel + Tokyo helicopter ride: Iba ka, anak. Mahirap ka na talagang habulin sa surprise if magka-jowa ka tapos mag-propose sa’yo. Baka mag-no ka kasi basic. LOL. Bash pa more, dad. Sige pa. Pero tulo-luha-uhog naman siya kasi siya pinaghawak nami ng engagement ring ni A. Hahahahahaha. Giba. Also, challenged accepted ako na Pinas x Tags will bump off even Tokyo and Mt. Fuji with storytelling na solid at dalisay. Chariz. Seriously, wala sa location, sa prod, sa gara or garbo ‘yan ng life events, mhie. Nasa intention to make stories live on and on, and I, thank you! Though, simula pa lang, wala na akong panatapat talaga sa Jap Dreams in Full Color nung pinsan ko. Sabi ko nga, dapat doon na lang siya nag-propose para ‘di na ako kasali sa kashitan nya.  I told him that last event ko na ‘yun na gagawin kasi panget niya kabonding. Sabi naman niya, marami pang next time. ‘Di ako nag-charge ng fee sa kanya kasi sabi ko ‘yan na gift ko sa wedding niya. So much stress, so much shit. LOL.  Ngayon, andito na kami sa first birthday ng firstborn niya. And sabi ko, ‘wag niya kong bibiglain kasi may mga planned trips ako sa birthday month ni baby E. Sabi naman niya, noted. LOL.  ___

My firstborn. My bunsong kapatid. This one’s tough.  I was so used to being an only child. I didn’t dream of a baby brother or a baby sister. Weird but growing up in our compound back in Pasay, I wasn’t given time to baby talk and baby walk kasi puro adults na kausap ko. LOL. I do have playmates pero since ako lang bata sa compound, basically, spoiled ako. Hahahahahaha. Pero I didn’t know I was being spoiled because mother dragon breathes down my neck and even nudges ‘yung mga kapitbahay na niso-spoil ako. LELS.  And sooooo, when J came home, stressed out ako. Why is there a baby in the crib? Why? I went about my usual grind as a typical kid, but I noticed mother dragon has been spending very little to no time with me na. Shet. I don’t get easily shaken pero this time, shookthhh to the core ako. Oks lang naman hati attention but to look past me??? Whyyy?  Mother dragon planted me at our sofa one day and told me that since ate na ako, I need to play the part. I was 3. :D Takte siya. Syempre, I tried listening since wala nga baby talk na naganap sa childhood ko. She told me that J is sick with meningitis. I was barely able to pronounce it pero pinaulit-ulit niya sa akin. LOL. Hype siya since 1986 talga sa buhay ko, aba. She told me that they’d be spending time in the hospital and I’d be staying with my tita, my 2 lolas, and the list went on and on and on. Bored man ako, naiyak lang ako kasi bakit ako need wala sa bahay ko? LOL.  When J came back home from the hospital, I was too afraid too touch him. Baka magkamali ako. What I’ve been asked to do is to be my mom’s not so little (as a fat kid) elf. LOL. Sunud-sunuran since my dad needs to be in the office to fund my brother’s meds and check ups na hindi dapat ma-miss. And me? Tutoring me was my mom and I’s bonding. SHET. Very transactional po talaga, opo. She explained that I needed to skip nursery and kinder so that WE as in kami ay mag-tag team for my brother. Even when I didn’t want to join this battle, mom managed to get a yes from me since ako ang ate, ako ang panganay. Period. Savage na, savogue pa. Wala akong kawala.  One of the rurok ng pagka-ate ko as per my mom is when I stopped her from giving J his meds. Sabi ko raw: Ma, ‘di ‘yan gamot ni J. Tignan mo... iba color ng packaging. Parang same lang pero no. I remember my mom hugging me and tears fell down her cheeks. LUH. Ano bang ginawa ko na namang mali? HAHAHAHA. Sabi niya: Thank you. Later she told me na very good daw ako as a keen observer kasi when she returned the meds to the store, sabi is if nainom ni J ‘yung meds na ‘yun, game over na. I was almost 6 then. Mhie, details kung details po tayo. Hahahahaahahaha.  Funny how there were times when super galit ako sa kapatid ko nung galawgaw na siya and he literally gets in my way, na iniisip ko as a kid, paano if nainom nga niya ‘yung wrong meds? E ‘di sana wala na akong kaagaw. LOL. Hassle kasi, even my first school had to be adjusted sa sched niya pati doc appointments niya. UGH. I thought that school would be my escape. LOL. Hindi pala. Extension lang ng pagiging ate ko. LELS.  Since J and I have very, very similar names, we grew up being compared kasi same school kami. J is notorious, ako naman notorious pero nakikipagbardagulan kahit nabully din ako at times. Naging matapang. LOL. Tapos, if may umaayaw sa kapatid ko lalo na teachers who are getting back sa kanya, bawat isa nun, may ganting kamalditahan sa akin. Though J and I are always fighting, in the outside world, Ate always looks after J kahit na si J ang madalas na may fault. LOL. Ending, naging super spoiled. LUH.  Years past and now, after all the shit and the super shit, J and I are in a better place. This deserves another post kasi medyo mahaba na masyado ang lahat. J never fails naman to come clean sa lahat kahit super duper delayed na or ‘pag talagang fucking crunch time na at wala na siyang malalapitan para matawid ang mga ganaps niya. Syempre, ate niya ako, kaya at the end of the day and even at night, walang nagbago. Andun kami sa point na if I’d have no kids of my own, lahat ng akin, sa kanya na. LOL. Kaso onti lang meron ako, kaya mag-tiis na lang siya. Laman-tiyan din kahit paano. And that, if he is in deep trouble and any form of emergency, I will run to him. Mahirap kasi na-spoil ko talaga siya, kaya tiisan muna kami. Ako rin naman enabler niya so, magdusa rin ako, right? LOL.  Inaayos pa namin ‘yung gaslighting niya nung nag-hiatus ako sa pag-enable sa kanya, pumalit si K since they’re almost of the same age. LUH. Sabi ko naman: Good thing K is there nung hiatus namin. Kahit ‘di halata, I am always worried about you, hayup ka. LOL pero big boy ka na.  My proud ate moment sa bunso kong kapatid is when I watched him holding hands with his 11-year old panganay. Daig pa ako e. Sana all... not. HAHAHAHA. Natigilan lang ako kasi inspite being a real pain in the ass, I am seeing my brother trying to be a decent parent. WAWAWWW. And that, kahit na super stress ako sa kanya, he will make it. Galingan lang niya talaga. Piliin lang niya ‘yung mga gagawin at mga hindi niya gagawin. I saw pure love in his eye in the same manner that his kid loves him. Oh, shit. Daig nga ako. LOL. Adulting hits na talaga siya e. At uma-adult na rin kahit paano ang galawan.  ______  My third kid is R, ‘92 baby rin. Jusq, mhie. Eto naman, pinsan ko na kasama namin sa bahay ng tito ko. Because we share the same wicked humor and we bully J and R’s sister D a lot, nagkakasundo kami. Siya naman ‘yung isang tingin lang, alam na OG ko. LOL.  When he became an anesthesiologist, damn, natawa ako e. The first time I saw his towering all white ensemble in Makati Med, his first arena, sabi ko: Aba. Talaga? Ayoko magpagamot sa’yo. Baka mamatay ako agad. LOL. Even this super yabang na gagong ‘to, nakakaltukan ko. Natawa siya tapos sabi: Ate, ako nga rin, di makapaniwalang doctor na ako e. Akalain mo ‘yun? At 6 ft. 2-ish ewan ko na height tapos malaking mama na siya ngayon, tingin ko pa rin sa kanya fragile baby boy na may malaking mata. Hahaha.  This time, we are together in battling another curveball in time for Taurus szn. Kakapasok lang na big bad news which I am not ready to share pa today. The last time we had a heart to heart talk was in Tap Station. Nag-sorry pa naka-ratty pambahay siya when we met. Sabi ko, oks lang. Sanay naman akong mukha siyang basura. LOL. We had a deep dive of his recent life ganaps. Mhie, I cannot. Hahahaha. But, in truth, I admire how R is taking one of the team both sa career and sa family.  Indeed, he has grown up pero dami niya pang pabebe shit lalo when it comes to being too focused on making more even when the quality of his relationships are in shambles. Reminded him that he got that from his dad and that okay naman maging good provider but with a bigger heart and gentle spirit. EMS. I hope he passes his incoming exam para maka wantusa Tap Station on him naman daw next time. Opak. Nakakapanglibre na si gago. Hahaha. Also, he is taking Grab ‘pag sira car niya instead of getting a driver. Galing-galing. Bumbaba na ere. And nakikihalo na rin sa realities ng naka-LL as in lalayan ng lipunan ang mini nepotism baby na ‘to.  ________ Ang haba na neto pero oks lang kasi ansakit ng pilay ko. Fuck. Hindi tuloy ako makabike and maka-yes sa golf invites. LOL. Kinakalma ko na lang talaga kasi andami kong gagawin sa Holy Week Break to be honest. UGH.  ________ Then we go to B. While her design is very Gen Z, we vibe kasi ‘yung PL namin mga 80% match. Hahahaha. Apart from that, her parents asked me to look after her talaga in the light of mental health awareness and alagwa. Natawa nga ako kasi very bad example ako pero sabi nung parents niya, since I’ve been there, done that, I can guide her better. Jusq. Every time we have deep dives, I am as honest, as cutting pero laging may caveat and bwelo. Parang kinakausap ko lang younger shit self ko. LOL.  She is on her way to med school na rin and a possible sosyo sa small biz niya involving the arts as a Gen Z. HAHAHAHHA. Patulan na natin para mas mabantayan ko from a safe distance.  Since mental health mom mode ako kay B, I won’t be sharing the tidbits kasi, baka mabuking mga katarantaduhan ko nung bata pa ako. HAHAHAHAHA. Shet, taguan na naman ng feelings pala; but syempre, tinatatwid pa niya and it’s not my story to tell.  My proudest mom moment with her is when she tells me her small and big wins. And also, when she looked after ina nung ‘di na talaga kaya ng sched at aging katawang lupa ko na magbalik-balik sa far side ng Laguna and Manila. Nagulat ako kasi sabi ko, she might spiral. She told me, kaya niya and that she wanted to. Grabe, mhie! Parang kinilig uterus ko kahit hindi ko siya niluwal. Hahahahaha. She is also getting better in interacting with people! Opakkkk. Love. Love. Love. Onting hilot pa, pakak na ‘to. Bawasan lang niya kasungitan niya, tapos ‘yung RBF at side-eye emoji, na default niya, tone down niya rin. See? Parang kausap ko lang sarili ko, right?  Also, looking after B is allowing me to face my then shits kahit ayoko talaga. She gives me the chance to look back at the dark times and how I’ve inched my way to see candy colored skies. Usto mo yarn? Hahahahaha. Che. B, ilang beses ko namang sinabi sa’yo, don’t be like ate. ‘Wag mo nga daanan ang masukal na dinaan ko kasi andito lang ako para bigyan ka ng Venn Diagrams para sa RPG IRL game mo. :D Lels. You are doing a good job and will be better sooner than later. ‘Wag ka mainip. ‘Wag kang masyadong mag-madali. Everyone has their timeline. And it’s okay to be okay in the same manner that it’s ok not to be ok, ok?  Thank u, next!  ______

And nooooww, down to the last 2! Z muna tayo. Z is my single mom friend’s anak. Eto na naman po tayo sa era ng PBB Teens kagulo. I was probably the first one to know about zygote Z outside her mom’s family. ‘Di po kami mag-jowa ng nanay neto e. Saktong landian lang na ‘di talaga ubra kasi ‘di kami talo. Hahahahahaha. Maarte kami masyado pareho. Anyhow, Z is my test of faith in singlemom-hood kasi ‘yung friend ko nag-literal grow up and shape up when Z entered the picture. E mas gago pa ‘to sa akin in soooo many levels. LOL.  Z also looks a lot like her biological dad so test of true love and acceptance talaga every time I see her and carry her. And just recently, Z came out as bisexual. Mana sa akin noong 200X. Hahahaha. Soon, convert ko na ‘to maging pansexual. CHZ. The mom reached out and asked ano raw ba gagawin niya sa big boobies ni Z. Sabi ko naman, simple lang ‘yan. Don’t just tolerate. Accept her and her pronouns. So, they/them na siya now. Pak. Progressive.  They are proudly wearing binders na top-class, too. I saw Z morph to a confident queer person and though we barely talk to each other, may updates siya parati about Harry Potter that we didn’t force on them. HUHUHUHUHU. Proud almost mom moment ako diyan. LELS. And they are attuned with the old world, too.  At times, sabi nga namin nung mom niya, anak ko si Z. Their taste are much like mine. And they thought I was a content creator kasi I looked like one daw (discrimination ‘tong batang ‘to. Stereotyping me.) and that they wanted to be a content creator herself during their toddler to pre-teen years. LOL. Sabi ko naman, tigilan niya ‘yun pero if gusto niya, support ko pa rin siya. One of our besties moments ni Z is about Guava Juicebox. Hahahahaha. Tagal na neto pero ang laki ng mata niya when were bonding over Lego and their handmade Bing Bong plush toy I got her during one of her visits here in Pinas. Hirap nung pronouns, mhie. Sobrang postmodern times na talaga. I don’t want to complicate but sige, patulan natin for Z. Z, may you be as queer as you want to be. Mommy mo, masyadong old age ang mindset. Jusq. Akong bahala sa’yo sa mga trip mong safe and saktong not so safe. :D Bahala mommy mo jan maging uugod-ugod sa parenting skills. Hahahaha.  _______  And then, there is A. My beautiful mess. I am co-parenting this girl since adopted only daughter ako sa household ng best friend ko. A came unexpected ng best friend kong noon ay walang hangad kung ‘di maging bachelor with his Jap obsessions. Kagigil. But, when we got A, things turned upside down. Bonding namin now with his wife is anything A. Hindi rin lumabas sa akin si A para super clear. Ayaw natin ng fake news.  I remember when A was a baby, I noticed that she is not able to make eye contact. Kakabasa ng mga stuff about babies since ‘yung best friend ko as a father na pa-macho era pa then.  Later, we got the news na A is in the spectrum nga. My best friend said na alam naman daw niya as a geek and hyperfocus lagi sa details but he wanted an offical confirmation. Raising A even when extra parent lang ako and super duper love A’s mom kasi ang galing niya. Busilak. Bullied kami ng best friend ko pero sobrang hands down na maalaga at may malasakit.  A is a work in progress. She is teaching me to let go and appreciate realities as they come and go. Siguro, toughest stuff ko to down about her is that she knows two emotions: OK lang and frustration. Nothing in between. Sigh. Let’s see how this pans out. Off to visit her this long break. Dalaga na siya. Nyeknyek shorts na and tank tops gusto. Aynakooo. Bawal. CHZ. _______  Last na ‘to. E, my dreamy Korean baby na ayaw kong kargahin kaso since sad si K, E’s dad, wala e. I gave in. Ambango niya lagi. Baby scent plus cutie baby siya talaga, as in. Vibin’ din kami surprisingly kahit ang galing niyang magpa-eme. Antaba ng tears ‘pag may gusto tapos stariray. Hahahahahaha.  E is K’s then fiance’s surprise to T sa wedding day nila mismo. Nauna kasi wedding nila na sila lang 2 sa office ng priest nung lockdown and after a year, the church wedding took place, finally. Wala pa kaming bonding moments masyado kasi gagawin ko siyang gala, pero since a few cells pa lang siya, kilala ko na siya. Then, maarte parents, may pa-gender reveal shit pa. Then ako pa host neto sa binyag. :D Utusan na naman ang peg. Hindi na pala mom. Chz. But, E, thank you for making me witness love at its purest. That love takes time and is all about choosing to stay even when it’s easier to go away. Ems. Kwento naman sa’yo ‘to for sure ng eme mong dad, but, bilisan mo na lumaki para makapag-roadtrip and foodtrip na tayo. Bike tayo ‘pag puwede na. Galingan mo muna matuto mag-lakad. LOL.  _______ But, wait. I am a trueblue pet mom of 3. :) My Vici, My Vidi and my KD. Will talk more about them next time kasi ubos na pake for choodaze ka-chosan. And because nakakatawa as in dry laugh mga attempts ng brand to ride this April Fools Day bandwagon. Balakayojan!  Also, goal nating ma-menopause because, why not? :D Kaya just in case you’re wondering if I’m conceiving, fake news po. Sadyang malaki lang talaga hips ko. Sighhhh.  Hanggang sa muli, paalam muna! 

[treasure-mimic]

So I saw Captain Marvel last night.

It was good. It was perfectly serviceable as an action movie, as a superhero movie, and as a Marvel movie. I imagine there’s gonna be a lot of little girls and grown women who love it because Carol is a really cool character. It was good.

It has, however, gotten me to think about something specific a lot since I’ve seen it though. What’ve I been thinking about?

Nirvana.

Post will contain spoilers for the major plot twist in Captain Marvel.

I think it’s probably pretty easy to harp on Captain Marvel for leaning as hard as it does on the 90s aesthetic. A decision seemingly made out of convenience and enforced by general cultural excitement at just, naming things that existed in the 90s and don’t anymore. But, ya know, let’s give Captain Marvel a little more credit than that. Let’s try and look into Captain Marvel’s themes and see if we can’t sus out a reason behind it.

Let’s talk about Skrulls.

A common reading of all alien invasion media is the idea that the alien force preys upon what the populace fears most at the time. Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), for example, sets itself as a direct and intentional parallel to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centers, mirroring a lot of the imagery from the attacks and a lot of the language used about the enemy and events just following. In The Avengers (2012) the evil alien horde presents itself as a tactical and well-armed warforce staging a frontal invasion on a civilian populace, coincidentally in the same city as the 9/11 attacks, and when it does get paralleled to any terrestrial army, is compared to the conquering, expanding force of the Nazi army in World War 2. The US fears an invasion, the hordes at the gate ready to rush in and slaughter us while we sit comfortable and unprotected.

In contrast, however, we have The Body Snatchers, written in 1954, published in 1955, and adapted for the screen first in 1956. A supernatural thriller wherein a race of sentient plants from outer space land in the US and consume regular humans, replacing them with replicas that walk and talk like normal people, but are actually duplicates created by these pods, disguising their presence on earth while they attempt to consume every human being on the planet without any person being any the wiser, with any attempt to expose their actions being chalked up to “hysteria”. While all writers involved deny any intentional theming along these lines, one of the most common readings in all of cinema is that the story, perhaps unintentionally, parallels the fears felt by Americans of communists and Soviet spies infiltrating the country from within, deteriorating our systems to defend ourselves until its too late. It’s very easy to read Invasion of the Body Snatchers in this light as it was coming out alongside much more explicit narratives about much more explicit Soviet spies with similar insidious plots, to the point that even by 1961 their tropes and conventions were being parodied in publications like Spy vs Spy.

A year later is when the Skrulls invaded. In 1962, The Fantastic Four #2 was released, premiering an invading alien race of shapeshifters called the Skrulls who can effortlessly implant themselves among life on earth by taking on the appearance and memories of the people they copy. Following so closely to the footsteps of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and coming out so soon afterwards, it’s not the biggest stretch to apply the same reading to the Skrulls. They are, or at least were, an extension of the fear of Soviet spies in our midst, turning us on our protectors, scoring key seats in our government, and turning us over to an uncaring invading force. The Skrulls would continue this act throughout nearly every appearance they’ve had since, even after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

You know what else happened in 1991?

It’s likely unfair to point to one single instance as the “start” of a cultural era, but Nirvana’s Nevermind is as good a place to start the 90s as any. One of its tracks even plays during one of Captain Marvel’s key scenes. So let’s now talk about Nirvana. 

The sentiment that sits at the core of Nirvana’s work, as well as the core of all 90s alternative and grunge acts, is a potent combination of disaffection and frustration. After a couple decades of constantly fearing for their own lives and the lives of everyone around them, the mood of the youth of the generation burned out and gave way to a dull irritation. There wasn’t enough energy to keep the anger going sincerely, so instead the anger was kept alive through irony. A bitter hateful sarcasm, frustrated with every power structure that had been involved in leading to this point. Frustrated with corrupt government officials (”Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses”), with uncaring capitalistic systems (”God money’s not looking for the cure. God money’s not concerned about the sick among the pure.”), with societal systems that keep them down (”Oh, I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite, so don’t let me have any rights”), with themselves (”What drives you on can drive you mad, a million lies to sell yourself is all you’ve ever had”), and just a frustration with a world that doesn’t and doesn’t pretend to understand them (”Oh well, whatever, nevermind.”).

90s alternative and grunge as genres set themselves as opposites to the aesthetics of the decades preceding them. In terms of pop culture, the 80s were the decade of glamour and bombast, the 90s were the decade of grounding and moodiness. It refutes and refuses to partake in the systems that created and drove the half century of wars that preceded it.

So doesn’t it make sense then, that the Marvel movie set in and embroiling itself in the 90s grunge era is the one that humanized these representatives of Soviet agents. Gave them families and a backstory and a very human reason to fight.

So, that’s that then. Captain Marvel isn’t just using the 90s aesthetic as a shallow means to pander to nostalgic twenty-somethings, its a thematic connection to reinforce the need to consider the other side’s perspective, using the counterculture of grunge to boost the counterculture of good guy Skrulls, right?

Well, no!

Look, okay, I’ll be the first to admit that I pulled all that directly out of my ass. I can’t imagine this level of thought went into connecting the story of Captain Marvel to the pervading zeitgeist of the 90s, especially when the Nirvana and No Doubt songs are played against Blockbuster Videos and Two Way Pagers. Besides, while it might be a good idea to understand that the Soviet spies and plants are in fact people with families and lives, saying that the Soviet Union were actually misunderstood good guys is at best the innocent musings of someone who genuinely didn’t know how bad things got and at worst grounds to suspect someone is actually some kind of Russian psyop themselves, and it’s far from any kind of message that Disney of all corporations would ever want attached to them. But that doesn’t make the analysis wrong per say. As said before, the writers of Invasion of the Body Snatchers disagree with the reading of its parallel to Cold War paranoia.

But Captain Marvel just doesn’t have the right 90s attitude. She’s defiant, certainly, maybe even counterculture given her response to the sexism she’s faced her entire life, but she doesn’t abandon the system, she doesn’t even really learn to see all enemies as people, and she does the least grunge thing of all and chooses a side.

I’m not saying the movie would be better if Carol reasoned with the imperialistic hivemind robo-fascist that literally brainwashed her to use as a weapon, or if she had just left the Kree to commit genocide against what is, in this universe, an oppressed racial minority that’s already been driven to the brink of extinction by rampant imperialism, but the movie still puts the blame on a nation of citizenry as opposed to the systems that influence them. The Skrulls have family and just want to live their lives in peace. The Kree don’t and don’t. The Supreme Intelligence wasn’t lying to an entire nation of soldiers, telling them that the Skrulls are all terrorists and the aggressors in this conflict, it was literally just Carol. Carol was the only one who didn’t know. Those soldiers that Carol had spent six years training with, living with, trusting with her life, they can be killed without a thought cause they’re the bad guys. Cause they didn’t have families like the Skrulls did.

In all likelihood, Marvel Studios saw a female led movie as being enough of a risk and wanted to keep the rest of film entirely safe. It’ll cause less waves if instead of portraying two warring factions as shades of grey, they just swap out black and white’s positions halfway through.

Captain Marvel adopts the aesthetics of 90s rebellion without going that extra step to actually rebel. It comes close to the realization that war is made of people with lives being shunted to their end by careless systems looking for profit, but still organizes all the players into a good side and a bad side instead of acknowledging the fascist systems behind them seeking excess material wealth and control.

Oh well.

Whatever.

Nevermind.

[back-and-totheleft]

The Doors and JFK at 30

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, few American filmmakers were as restless as Oliver Stone. He fired off seven movies from 1986 to 1991, each one a shotgun blast of confrontational ideas and virtuosic style. “Platoon” won four Oscars. “Wall Street” summed up an era of excess.

Stone was particularly busy in 1991. He started the year with “The Doors,” a psychedelic rise-and-fall biopic about the rocker Jim Morrison, played by Val Kilmer. He ended the year with “JFK,” a kaleidoscopic portrait of the hunt for truth in the wake of a national tragedy.

Thirty years later, “JFK” and “The Doors” remain fascinating artistic artifacts, brimming with the brash confidence of a director on a hot streak. They also X-ray some of the cultural fault lines that continue to divide the United States three decades later.

“JFK,” a three-hour epic featuring a stacked ensemble cast, both reflected and anticipated a country in thrall to conspiracy theories. “The Doors” dramatized the agony and ecstasy of the counterculture, revealing why the sex-and-drugs scene was seen as equal parts alluring and revolting.

The films parallel each other in striking ways. Stone, a veteran of the Vietnam War, was then Hollywood’s boldest chronicler of the 1960s, and both of his 1991 projects represent attempts to reckon with that decade’s knotty legacies. They blurred fact and fabrication, memory and myth.

In the eyes of many observers at the time, neither film was an unqualified success. “The Doors” drew mixed reviews and flailed at the box-office. “JFK” performed well on both fronts, but some historians and commentators assailed its fast-and-loose relationship with the factual record.

But in many respects, facts were beside the point.

‘Speculations’ and ‘nightmares’

In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald had acted alone. Stone was far less convinced, and “JFK” was intended as his “counter-myth.”

Kevin Costner, nearing the apex of his star power and industry clout, stars as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who investigated the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

Garrison’s crusade takes the viewer on a dizzying tour of midcentury American paranoia. He eyes a sprawling cast of potential culprits: the CIA, the Mafia, Cuban freedom fighters, the military-industrial complex — the shadowy men behind what Stone calls our “untold history.”

“The movie was misunderstood as advancing one particular conspiracy theory, when in fact it was exploring several,” said Matt Zoller Seitz, a veteran film critic and the author of a 2016 book about Stone’s career. “It gave the conspiracy mindset a bigger and more prestigious platform, and I think without ‘JFK’ you don’t get ‘The X-Files,’ for example.”

“JFK” is the near opposite of a by-the-books historical docudrama. The film is a lurid panorama of half-truths and speculation. Stone’s approach alienated some op-ed writers and commentators, who criticized the director months before the movie even premiered.

The columnist George Will huffed that Stone was “a man of technical skill, scant education and negligible conscience.” Walter Cronkite, the CBS newscaster who broke the news of Kennedy’s killing to the nation, reportedly decried the “mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies.”

The film critic Roger Ebert offered up what might be the most salient interpretation, though, writing in a 2002 retrospective: “I have no opinion on the factual accuracy of ... ‘JFK.’ I don’t think that’s the point. This is not a film about the facts of the assassination, but about the feelings.”

“I have no doubt Cronkite was correct, from his point of view. But I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares,” Ebert wrote.

It is here where “JFK” still reverberates in the addled, deeply fractured America of 2021 — not as a literal account of events but as a collage of issues that still tug at the national fabric, justifiably or not: distrust of government, skepticism of institutions, conspiracy theories, rabbit holes.

“I look at ‘JFK’ now and I see Covid denialists who make it seem as if the virus was created by scientists out of ‘The X-Files,’ the same ones who are going to inject us with DNA from bees, or whatever,” Seitz said. “I think there was a genie that was let out of the bottle with that movie.”

“It is a deranged film when you stand back from it,” Seitz said with a laugh.

Nevertheless, many people around the world still doubt the official narrative of the Warren Commission report and hope more information comes to light.

Jay O. Sanders, a character actor who played Lou Ivon, one of the investigators on Garrison’s team, said in an interview earlier this year that, to this day, strangers still approach him on the street and ask him who he believes killed Kennedy.

“The moment we explored in the film was one of the most important moments to countless people in this country," Sanders said. "It was a loss of innocence. It was a loss of hope."

‘Doors’ to self-destruction

Stone is said to have been intoxicated by The Doors ever since he first heard their music while serving in Vietnam. “The Doors,” a hallucinatory and borderline campy biopic about the dark poet of Nixon-era rock-and-roll, was the director’s acid-kissed homage.

“The Doors” charts Morrison’s rise and vertiginous descent into alcoholism, drug abuse, live-concert antics, cruelty and general R-rated debauchery. It is a frequently unflattering character study — and one that was razzed for exaggerating the musician’s behavior.

“In a way, it feels like the movie Jim Morrison would’ve hallucinated as he was dying,” Seitz said. “There’s a lot of deliberately disorienting touches ... that make you feel like you’re on drugs.”

The film climaxes with a raucous concert in Miami. Kilmer’s Morrison antagonizes the audience, clashes with police officers and appears to expose himself onstage. He bellows what amounts to a personal manifesto and philosophical mission statement: “No limits! No laws!”

The movie is freewheeling but nonetheless adheres to the standard rock god biopic conventions, the stuff of the John C. Reilly parody flick “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.” It also functions as a sociopolitical Rorschach test.

You might be gripped by Stone’s reverential vision of Morrison (who died in 1971 at 27) as a counterculture prophet who urged his adoring fans to stop being “slaves” to the starchy American establishment.

But then again, you might see “The Doors” as a cautionary tale — wittingly or otherwise — about the excesses of the peace-and-love years, with Kilmer’s version of Morrison as a Dionysian narcissist who symbolized the destructiveness of heedless social rebellion.

Oliver Gruner, an academic at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., explored these contradictions in his 2016 monograph “Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory,” a look at how the American film industry has dramatized the decade.

“Here was a film that on the one hand celebrates an individual associated with hippie lifestyles, but on the other seems vehemently skeptical of the counterculture,” Gruner wrote.

America in 2021 is still conflicted on what to make of that frenzied decade. “The Doors” is not a film about politics, yet the chaos at its core might help us understand why the norm-smashing spirit of the ‘60s split the country and riled soon-to-be-ascendant social conservatives.

In a mixed review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin offered this crisp description of Stone’s larger-than-life subject: “Nowhere did the best and worst of the '60s collide as messily as they did in Jim Morrison.”

But in the course of 141 minutes, she wrote, Stone is not entirely “successful in offering any final assessment of either the ‘60s or his hero than in bringing both back with strange and spectacular power.” The same might be said of “JFK,” a movie of urgent questions without clear-cut answers.

But maybe that was by design.

It has been said that America never got over the ‘60s. Stone seemed to intuit as much. How can you conclude a story that never really ended?

-Daniel Arkin, ‘JFK’ and ‘The Doors’ at 30: Why Oliver Stone’s portraits of the '60s still resonate," NBC News, Oct 2 2021 [x]

[wackygoofball]

Afterthoughts after Ragnarok

So, I had the opportunity to watch both Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok as a double-feature at an IMAX cinema yesterday, which was… fangirl heaven, in a nutshell. I can only highly recommend watching the second installment before Ragnarok because it is a nice reminder of the details, basically. And of course, it sets the mood. 😊

I just wanted to quickly type up some initial thoughts on Thor: Ragnarok because I am fangirling hard right now.

THEREFORE – BEWARE OF SPOILER ALERT.

To send this ahead: I went into the movie not having any expectations. I really tried my best to stay clear of great spoilers (other than the clips and scenes that were released as part of the promo). I hoped for a retro-adventure arc from the old days, but I wasn’t holding my breath for it. Though gladly, my hope was not at all disappointed. The bright color schemes, the music, the slapstick moments which are MUCH more prominent in this movie than any of the Thor films… it was what I was hoping for – and more.

Being a proud member of Loki’s Army and a general Hiddlestoner, I obviously have my biases when it comes to what scenes I enjoyed a lot, but overall… the movie did what I wanted it to do (again, I just talk here personal wishes and interests): It made me laugh and took me on a fun ride. That is what I wanted, and this is what I got.

To dig a bit further into the matter, there are some things that I wanna mention that I particularly enjoyed or that interested me:

Obviously, the destruction of Mjölnir alongside Thor unleashing his *true* potential as the God of Thunder is a big theme of this story arc (one that may not be that absolutely original, but that still resonated with the overall theme of what the movie was getting at; to me, it fed in nicely into the narrative and resonated with the Thor movies as a whole). I am actually rather fond of the idea that we see more of the God of Thunder than the God of Hammers (thanks, Odin, for that comment 😉). With this story arc, we reach a new level and a new skillset for Thor to fetch from *and to master,* so I am pretty excited to see what they are going to do with that in Infinity War, and as to where Thor is going to take his newly unleashed powers or where there may be hardships for him.

I do wonder whether Thor will seek *some* sort of replacement. Obviosuly, Mjölnir isn’t going to return in that fashion. It was a unicum and it has been rendered superfluous when it comes to Thor’s thunder powers. However, it *is* the weapon he has been using for… hundreds of years, so it may be that Thor will use *a* hammer alongside his now unleashed true thunder powers. Perhaps a bit of nostalgia or otherwise simply something to use in close combat, which is obviously also part of his fighting style. So, I am pretty hyped to see what may be done with that in the upcoming movies of the franchise.

In that same breath, I suppose it may be worth mentioning that we also saw something with God of Mischief Loki when it comes to new or otherwise not yet made explicit skillsets. Loki touching Valkyrie to dig up the memories she repressed for so long (and drowned it in lots of booze in the most wonderful of fashions ♥), to me, actually fed into the idea of not just introducing new characters and their skillsets or in case of Thor, showing their true potential, but also showing us what already known characters still have in store. While we already knew about Loki’s ability of manipulating and accessing people’s minds, I believe this is the first time we saw him *activate repressed memories* and *witness* them. Yet again, it had me wondering whether that skillset will prove useful in one of the following movies. A random thought I had last night (and please excuse, it was VERY late when I had that thought, hehe) was about whether Loki using that method may prove to be interesting in Bucky’s case and the memories that were deleted/locked away or what not, which may or may not be something of interest in the Infinity War story arc (WHERE ARE YOU, TRAILER???). if said memories were somehow vital to the plot.

Speaking of our favorite trickster, I found his arc a joy. Not only the jokes and the return of the horns, but particularly his trickster-self being back in full swing made me really happy. The previous Thor movie built heavily on Loki’s revenge for Frigga, in general the family problems… which there were… a lot of…, and of course his ongoing wish to lay claims to the throne, out of which he felt cheated once his origin was revealed to him in the first Thor film. The vibe I always had of particularly comic!Loki (though I am not too deeply invested in the comics, I will admit, but from what I have read, that was my general impression) was really this idea of causing, as his name has it, mischief, being the trickster, collaborating with whoever in order to somehow maneuver out of situations, only to be bound to clean up the mess he made (with the Revengers 😉 ). And I found that sort of spirit resonating with Loki in this story arc much more than in previous installments. While I very much enjoyed the idea of revenge and his ongoing battling with his family due to the differences that lie between them, I feared that they would just go on with that instead of giving it a new twist, but I felt like this actually was the twist that suited not just the overall mood of the film but also Loki.

So yeah, I am pretty happy to see Loki back in the role as God of Mischief as much as I enjoy Thor now being in full God of Thunder mode. The story arc had a nice conclusive theme of the two arriving at *who they actually are,* and thereby returning to their roots, which I thought had a nice touch to it.  

Other things that have me wondering after having watched the movie: Is Sif to return? She wasn’t one of those who fell *on screen.* Because she may potentially be a bit of a wildcard in the upcoming movies, especially after… Jane and Thor are no more, it seems. But yeah, I don’t know if that was just a filming issue or whatever else. I do hope to see Lady Sif back in all of her glory. Especially since I want to see her interact with Valkyrie! They could bond so wonderfully over being awesome warrior ladies. :3  

Speaking of Valkyrie, I really love her. ♥ I love her drinking speed (lol), and for that she is *as for this movie* a secondary character, she had a developed story arc (which of course… is now not the super deep-reaching stuff that you would get at if it were a movie just about her and her origin story in a much more serious setting than the Marvel franchise lays out), Loki’s backflash was gorgeously shot and it really took you into this *epic* moment of defeat when the Valkyries fell against Hela. Another thing I quite enjoyed about how her character was written is the easiness with which she interacts with other characters, she is witty, she is cute, and while hostile towards e.g. Thor and Loki (lol) in the beginning, I found it a joy to see her interact with the Hulk. Since she is so strong, she is unafraid of interacting with him in a friendly manner outside the battlefield, which I found had a nice touch. I hope to see more of her. A lot more.

Now, Hela. Cate Blanchet has the swagger of a Goddess of Death. Holy Shit. I loved the costume, I loved the attitude, and I have no clue how she gets the daggers out of everywhere but she does it majestically, and that is all that matters, lol. While more of a cartoon villain (but that is what fitted the mood best, let’s be real) in many regards, I found some touches of how they framed her return really interesting. While Norse mythology would have something to say about her being made firstborn daughter to Odin when she is actually one of Loki’s children… it was a rather intriguing commentary on how history is made, at least in my reading. Hela has been erased by her own father once she grew too power hungry for him. She was erased from public memory as she was cast into the realm of the dead.

Not only did that shed a rather interesting light on the idea of succession – because now we don't just have one son who was chosen by the father to have the throne as opposed to the son who wanted the throne, but didn’t get entitled to it, but also a female heir who had rights to the throne until she was considered unfit in Odin’s eyes. Actually, the repetition is what intrigued me, because it fed nicely into the idea of Ragnarok on what it is at its core, the Dawn of the Gods and the moment of a self-repeating world. Because Ragnarok is happening over and over, in different forms, and to me, that was the vibe I got from that succession question, too. Loki turned out rather similar to Hela in that way (though with a difference, to which I will return later, so hold on). Hela felt/was entitled to the throne until Odin deemed her unfit due to her violence that did not match his political agenda following the conquest era. Loki felt entitled to the same honor, but was seen as unfit for his ambitions/birth by Odin.

On that same note, I really liked this idea of history being rewritten by the winners (in this case Odin). Odin glossed over Hela’s involvement along with the conquest period (if Hela can be believed) to prevent her danger from reaching further after her banishment. At the same time, he portrayed and literally painted himself in a certain way (not just on the ceiling) that may not have been as reflective of the reality of the origin story of his rule as it could have been.

Similarly, I did find it an interesting way of handling Odin’s legacy after he’s passed away in the early stages of the movie. Odin dies after the conversation with Thor and Loki in which he seemingly tried to make peace with himself and them (and likely with the idea in mind that they arrive at a truce as well, so to have a chance against Hela together). So, the first impression we got was “oh, he leaves this world at peace with himself and everyone else, he is redeemed.” And at first I was a bit like… hm, I don’t expect great narrative arcs in this movie, not the gut-wrenching, complex moral dilemma that… other movies are made for, but that seems rather cheap. However, looking at Odin’s arc in this last movie as a whole, I did find it rather interesting (because yeah, I think he made a good couple of mistakes particularly with Loki that made him prime for some sort of redemption needing to be done). Because after the redeem-momentum, we get this reversal of history narrative via Hela, which gives way and depth to questioning his rule as a whole. And it is concluded when he tells Thor in a vision that he is stronger/better than him, not the other way around. Now of course, protagonist is getting the hype it takes to win over the enemy and unleash new potential and all, but I found *that* as a nice redemptive mode that yet again tied back to the very idea of Ragnarok. Thor, symbolized by having his eye removed like his Father (*cries*), is repeating Odin’s history – but with a difference. He steps up to that legacy, but does so differently from what Odin did. And Odin recognizing that and pinpointing it as the stronger/better way is something that I found hit the point home with the redemptive mode surrounding his death.

Now, this is getting far too long already (I am rambling and I am sorry), but one last thing I wanted to speak of – as a member of Loki’s Army: Loki’s (short but entertaining) reign.

Especially since I started out watching the previous Thor movie before Ragnarok, the question that remained as a sort of cliffhanger was just what kind of rule Loki would pursue. I mean, he was one of the big gun villains in the first Avengers movie, he was the big gun enemy in the first Thor movie, and obviously caused mischief wherever possible. While we knew of Hela taking over, thereby pointing to Loki’s rule not being very long, I personally did wonder what they would have Loki’s rule look like.

He may well have turned out to be the Hela type, kill all the infidels, and be a gigantic asshole with a lot of sass. However, his reign, however short-lived… it was basically one big party. And now of course, it was for comedy for many parts, but I did find it rather interesting and actually resonating with how they set up Loki all the while.

For all his talk and attitude of being the lone wolf and only ever being interested in himself, the God of Mischief has always been seeking the approval of his family, or at the very least, their attention (positive or negative, didn’t matter, so long it was some kind of attention). Ever since learning about his origins, I think the factor that was added to the whole idea of him wanting that throne no matter the costs was that he was seeing the approval of the Asgardians.

And in a way, I find that rather organic storytelling: Loki knew he wouldn’t get the approval of his family after what happened, after what was revealed about him. I mean, he gave that speech (which Hiddleston enacted beautifully, btw) to Odin about how he is now a monster that the children are told about to make them afraid of said monsters. And I think it is rather logical that he sought the approval of the people who are now supposedly afraid o him for his Jotünn roots. Being admired, being accepted by them as king would make him less of a monster, it would get him the approval he could no longer find with his family past a certain point, it would give him the approval he thought he couldn’t get by virtue of his birth. And across the movie narrative, at least that is my impression, that wish did not die down, but actually increased over time.

And now, having seen Ragnarok, I somehow tend to stick to that reading, because Loki relished the approval of himself. But it wasn’t *just* the statue (though it was a matter of heart to him, I am sure), it was that he (as Odin) was partying – with the people. He wasn't just sitting in the throne room feeling powerful. As Thor points out, he didn’t do much of anything with the power he had as King of Asgard for as long as it lasted, but instead… seems to have been partying the whole time. And again, obviously, the comedic moment is quite at the front, but the idea that Loki would spend his reign trying to be friendly with the people, having fun, was not just so very Loki-like (see that theater… damn, I laughed so hard at the play) but also resonated with this overall arc of seeking approval. While all the while claiming not to care what others think of him, Loki seeks it again and again, whether he likes it or not. And in the end, it is and will always be his one family whose approval he is seeking most (as he himself asserted at some point) – he wants Thor’s approval, he wants that guy’s attention, even if it’s just in a negative sense.

While I am most certain that he will turn on Thor again (he did have some fun time before gathering the Eternal Flame with the Tesseract and all), I remain positive that this will simply be status quo now. Thor’s not trusting him is actually, in a way, his trust in him. Thor knows Loki will pull shit, Loki knows that Thor knows… it’s going to be fun to see how they may continue to try to outsmart the other but rather in a friendly manner.

So, to now conclude this way too long rambling: If you want to have a fun Marvel ride, Thor: Ragnarok is your friend. The music, the mood, the story, it flows well and easily. You won’t grow tired or bored, neither are you overloaded with input. The slapstick, to me, was hilarious. And while Norse mythology was very much twisted around to fit into the narrative, I personally found some traces of the idea of Ragnarok not just in the metaphor of it being the people, but also in the way the characters were portrayed and moved through their story arc. It delivers funny, and to me, interesting secondary characters. It may be read as containing some interesting commentary on history making and the question of redemption and legacy alongside the self-repeating world in succession, where legacy ends and characters arriving at where they are meant to be begins.

And finally, I think the movie does something great for both Thor and Loki (and also for Valkyrie and Hulk if in different senses) in that it returns them to their roots. They are now the true God of Thunder and the true God of Mischief again.

And that, to me, is a great way of heading into Infinity War.

It is definitely worth the watch. 😊

[pinksman]

so happy for you that you got to see cmbyn! do you have anything else to share about it?? anything or everything haha :)

thank you!!! i’m from spain and the release date has been pushed until february (which i’m sure is a crime and violates human rights in so many levels) so i don’t know what i would’ve done if i had to wait that long!!

some thoughts under the cut! beware of little spoilers!

what can i say about the movie that hasn’t been yet said? you all know about timmy’s perfect performance (he probably created a new kind of performance, the perfect-mance), and armie’s accurate approach to a character whose thoughts aren’t as explicit as elio’s in the novel (so it wasn’t an easy task, but he succeeded), and luca’s wonderful touch to all of it. the sole idea of this movie being in the making for so long (as it’s been said in interviews), and therefore the chance of somebody else directing it, terrifies me. i can’t believe we (the world) were lucky enough to get the best adaptation possible, considering luca wasn’t the first choice; he wasn’t even a choice at the very beginning, so yeah. i can assure you that, even though i obviously haven’t seen any other adaptations of this novel and hopefully i never will because if somebody ever decides to remake this i’m going to be so mad i’ll walk out of my grave if needed. as an audiovisual communication student, a spectator and a fan of the novel, the film is a 10. it’s impossible to be disappointed. IMO, if you are disappointed it will be because you wanted to be disappointed.

half an hour before the screening i was literally shaking. (i tend to overreact a lot but trust me, this time i’m serious) i was so nervous, which is crazy considering i wasn’t headed to do anything. all i was going to do was see a movie, ffs. when the movie ended, there was applauding. i looked around as i cried, and people were acting normal (the audacity?). i had cried twice during the movie (a couple scenes towards the end of it), but after it ended, i needed to cry more. and i was surrounded by people who didn’t seem affected at all. it just amazes me how the “same” experience can be an absolute different experience to each person. nobody in the room could possibly imagine the things i was feeling inside. still today, 12 days later, i haven’t cried as much as i would’ve liked.

if you love the book, you will love the movie. some scenes are different, some scenes are new. luca takes his time to introduce the characters (and the scenery, which, in luca’s filmography, becomes a character itself) - and when i say he takes his time i mean he really takes his time. the first half of the movie consists on following elio around. everyone else is there, oliver included, but. elio is the absolute core.

we have elio-from-the-novel who we know everything about. and reading/writing a book is a complete different process than watching/making a film. you can’t judge or analyze them the same way: the same elements are built differently-they have to be built differently. and yet, somehow, elio-from-the-novel is elio-from-the-film, which is the reason why i cried for the longest i’ve cried ever. and just to be clear: i cry a lot. movies make me emotional. but i wasn’t crying because call me by your name has these touching scenes that are supposed to make you emotional, and i wasn’t crying because the ending was sad, or whatever. the thing is, i couldn’t stop thinking: my elio. my elio. my elio. my elio. my elio was there, that was him, that’s his face and his manners and his feelings and his skin. my favorite type of books are the ones with stories told in first person, where the narrator is the protagonist, so it was inevitable that elio’s way of opening up to the reader, so raw, so pure, would stick with me forever.

as good as armie’s work is, and it is, and the chemistry is brutal (you are going to love the lovemaking scene!! so!! much!!!!), this is timothée’s movie. (btw we need more movies about young people. yesterday i read in variety that timmy could be the youngest actor to get an oscar nomination since 1939. what kind of nonsense is that?) if timmy only knew how much it means to me what he did, and how much i worship him (do i like you, timmy? i worship you) because he LITERALLY brought elio to life, well, i’d probably scare the shit outta him. it’s fine. i’m just glad i got to exist at the same time as him. no big deal.

and idk, here some other things:

i know it’s too late for me to advise you to not seek spoilers. you’ve probably already seen photos of the first kiss. but, luckily for you: this movie is like nothing you’ve ever seen before and it’s way better than what you can imagine without having seen it. the famous last shot? better than what you could ever imagine. the last part of the movie, which is different from the novel? better than what you’re thinking. eat as many spoilers as you want! it’ll still be better than you thought.

i don’t want to overhype it but i s2g it’s just so good

try watching something else by luca before!! it’s really worth it!! try a bigger splash, for instance

if you haven’t read the book, YOU HAVE TO. it’s not that the movie needs the book in order to be complete. if you watch the movie without having read the book, you’ll love it. if you watch it after having read the book (and loved it because let’s be real how can you read cmbyn and not love it? impossible), you’ll have the whole experience, a deluxe package that contains happiness, sweet pain, clear skin and faith in humanity

the movie is not sad. the novel is about the passing of time!! and about living in the moment but at the same time feeling the inevitable weight of the future!! and about how love always finds a way to be an essential part of everybody’s personal growth!! and elio is forming his identity!! and the movie is just the same!!

elio is so affectionate with his parents and mafalda and it’s the cutest thing ever

marzia is PRECIOUS

mr. perlman’s speech at the end is the same as in the novel so prepare your tears

IMO Judaism is more present in the movie than in the novel !!!!

there is a specific moment in which... we are left alone with oliver... i won’t say anything else but... beware of genius cinema

the camerawork will leave you breathless

the scene with the soldiers memorial is my favorite. it’s a sequence shot with them walking around the memorial and talking and meeting on the other side....... “you know what things...” goodbye

idk what else to say i don’t want to give away any more details??? if you want me to say something else just ask me and i’ll think of more stuff? and be more specific? i’d love to force myself to remember the movie since i feel it slipping away every second that passes and i ache for a rewatch.

i don’t know how i wrote such a long text i’m so, so sorry. i hope it’s kind of what you wanted haha x