#so it evokes this imagery of her drowning in their relationship

[m-gaydy]

guilty as sin

[theprologues]

SUBMISSION - Grammys performance symbolism, part two

So, with those reservations safely out of the way, and a warning to readers NOT to hurt themselves by getting their hopes up again … 

What aspects of Taylor’s Grammy’s performance made me think there might be light at the end of the tunnel for Kaylor? 

First, Taylor’s blue and gold performance dress. “Deep blue but you painted me golden” is a line from Dancing With Our Hands Tied, a song that is widely assumed to be about the night of Kissgate. It’s a song where Taylor talks about how miserable (“deep blue”) she was after the collapse of her relationship with Diana and her public reputation in 2013. She describes how her new lover, Karlie, brought her back to life and lit her up with the glow of a new, true love. She painted her golden. But then they were caught in an intimate moment at Kissgate, and Taylor panicked. Her fears and anxieties threatened to drown her, and though she and her new lover tried to dance through the catastrophe, they eventually came to realize they were doing so with their hands tied. They had no hope of swimming to the surface together and breaking free. They could only have done so if Taylor had stood firm and owned their love in the moment, instead of setting in motion the bearding contracts that would change everything. (This is what she means when she says that “if I could dance with you again”, she would “kiss” and “hold” her lover, instead of presumably backing away. If she could do the moment over, she would claim Karlie as her lover, and hold her hand for the world to see, through hell or high water.) 

Though it’s a depressing motif in DWOHT, Taylor has, interestingly, returned to this imagery of a golden tie several times in other songs, painting it in a much more positive light. Most recently, the Willow music video explores this, visually representing the “single thread of gold that tied me to you” which Taylor sings about in Invisible String. Both IS and Willow are happy songs, which describe their lovers as being tied together by fate. “Wherever you go, I’ll follow,” Taylor sings in Willow. In DWOHT, the lovers followed each other to a place of deepest blue. The bottom of the ocean, under the waves, where they couldn’t breathe. In Willow they follow each other to freedom.

That freedom is represented in the Willow music video by the open cabin door the lovers step through at the end of the video. Taylor incorporates this door into the Willow section of her Grammy’s performance, performing first in the open doorway and then stepping through it to perform with her band out in the open. 

But returning to the blue and gold dress. This is not only a very Karlie motif which keeps recurring in her art (often to postitve effect). It’s also a representation of Taylor finding happiness WITHIN the closet. It’s talking about how her partner’s love helps her to bear the depression being in the closet, and fearing exposure, causes her. The fact that Taylor chooses to wear this dress throughout her performance, with no costume changes, suggests a) she is still in the closet, and b) she is still with Karlie, and still considers her love to be such a lifeline. 

If Toe was real and Taylor was happy with him, she could have chosen to wear an all-gold dress for the occasion. If Kaylor was over and she had decided to return to the closet, she could have communicated that by wearing all blue. If Kaylor was over and so far in the past she had moved on with someone new, there was no need to evoke the motif at all. She could simply have laid claim to another color, or worn another prairie type dress to fit the aesthetic. And yet, she didn’t. Why not, if not to communicate what I said above? 

What else is worth considering, in Taylor’s medley? Well, there’s the cabin setting. Taylor and Karlie famously took a trip to Big Sur forest and stayed in a cabin together in 2014, where Karlie was the first person to hear 1989 in full. They took many photos on the trip, including one captioned with “on the way home” (a lyric from You Are In Love, which talks about hearing love in the silence) and one of the two of them looking up at a fallen tree. A VERY similar looking tree appears in the Cardigan music video, and the slanted, moss-covered roof Taylor opens the medley lying on also looks a lot like this tree. Again, curious that she would call back to this if she and Karlie have separated.

Moving on. Taylor opens the medley singing on the roof, looking straight up into the camera. When we pull back we see the stage around set to that of a starry night. Taylor is thus cast as the romantic, the star-gazer. She also calls back to another lyric Kaylors have previously tied to Karlie - “up on the roof with a schoolgirl crush”. It’s been repeatedly tied to Karlie and Taylor’s attendance at the Victoria Secret show after-party. Again, why evoke imagery so tied to the early, happy days of this relationship? 

We then move through a progression of events that sees her hiding inside with friends, before eventually stepping out into the light. That all reads like a visual interpretation of her relationship with Karlie, from her early loneliness and lovestruck dreaming, to the happiness she finds within her little hideaway, to her eventual decision to step out of it and claim her lover. The medley ends on a repetition of “that’s my man”, seemingly hinting that Taylor’s freedom is tied up in her ability to finally say those words. 

What else? Well, there are the Ivy allusions. Taylor’s cabin covered in greenery can’t help but evoke the lyrics of Ivy - “my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now I’m covered in you”. Ivy is widely interpreted as a sapphic song about two women finding love despite their commitments to men. Another line in the song “he’s in the room, your opal eyes are all I wish to see, he wants what’s only yours” is alluded to in Taylor’s choice of opal jewelry on the night. What a weird thing to draw attention to, if you’re not secretly in love with a woman while parading a beard around in public. We’re also told in the song that “he” (possibly the same man, possibly another) wants to burn the house of the Ivy lovers down. Jerk just so happened to announce the baby’s birth on this night, in what felt like an attempt to undermine Taylor’s joy. Hmm. Curious. 

You know what else is curious? Taylor’s choice of outfit for the Grammys red carpet. Not only is the floral dress very reminiscent of a floral ensemble Karlie wore to cover a June (pride month) issue of Spanish Vogue. (Cover subtitled, “flowers of change”.) It’s also by the designer Oscar de la Renta. Taylor and Karlie famously attended one of his shows together early on in their relationship. They sat in the front row looking very cozy, while Taylor refused to answer questions about why she was there and reportedly giggled “my publicist will be mad at me”. Hmm.

Taylor has also worn Oscar de la Renta on numerous occasions while out with Karlie, including most famously at the Met Gala. That iconic pale pink gown that she was buried in the Look What You Made Me Do music video? That was an Oscar de la Renta. There are many interpretations of the scene in the video, but it’s worth noting that Taylor is buried alive in it (which could be interpreted as a metaphor for being closeted) and that in a video all about her various revenge fantasies, she depicts herself crawling back up out of this grave. She views coming back to life and walking away from the flaming wreckage of her past with Big Machine as the ultimate revenge. At the end of the video she clips her own wings while all the past iterations of her argue amongst themselves. This would seem to suggest that she can defeat her enemies but she can’t defeat herself, because she can’t outrun her past, and until then she will always be doomed to self-sabotage. Nevertheless, this Taylor (lurking in the background bedecked in peaced-out palm tree print) is in a much better position than the Taylor who opened the video as a zombie corpse. She’s on the surface and has some hope of freedome, at last. This is a theme we see carried through in the following video, where Taylor goes one-on-one against herself and eventually breaks free.

Long story short? Taylor wearing such a floral, literally blooming dress from THIS designer, of all people, suggests she may finally be about to rise again. The aborted coming out apparently planned for the Lover era (and thus seeded during the Rep era) may finally be a go? 

Again, I’m very reluctant to get people’s hopes up here. But it’s hard to look at this dress and not think of that June (Pride month) floral magazine cover. Or of the Spade riddle, “Why worry? She blooms in June.” Or of the fact that Taylor’s stunts are often loudest before the end. She acknowledged Calvin and hugged him at an awards show before he was booted out of the narrative and Tom H appeared to replace him. (Something like ten days or so after the “split”, if I remember right?) And the inconsistencies of the Toe timeline speak for themselves. There was speculation - unpopular though it was - among Kaylors in the Rep era that guessed Taylor wouldn’t come out until 2021 / 2022. It seemed a world away at the time but who knows? Maybe this was always the plan. Maybe this is all “part of the fucking story”, even the parts that seem ugly or counterproductive. A lot can change in a couple of months in Hollywood, and with Taylor in particular. By June, it’s possible we COULD be looking at a vastly different landscape. Maybe this was one last hurrah for the Toes. Many of them are just harmless fans taking Taylor at her word, after all. 

Only time will tell, and I don’t blame Kaylors for checking out. This isn’t healthy, especially for those of us who are gay ourselves, and can’t help but feel a personal connection to Taylor’s journey out of the closet. We know what a big deal it would be. But for those who still want to hope … It’s just possible Taylor has a plan, and this is the dark night before the dawn. 

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Pro: I added the photos and the bolded parts. Love symbolism. This was truly a spectacular performance. Awesome submission anon!!

[45paperplates]

About Olivia Rodrigo

It is a sign of a deep lack of self-esteem in our American monoculture that when Olivia Rodrigo so recently became the biggest pop musician of the moment most writers tasked to interpret said phenomenon were by default so cynical about the music they live to represent to the world that they seemed totally unaware of the most obvious explanation, one so obvious that it's almost childishly democratic: that she is simply the most naturally compelling new artist working in pop today.

Instead, they have cited elements of the music that are actually quite detrimental to its quality. Most pop-punk was weak, whiny, and obnoxiously self-involved when it was popular, and the fact that one of Olivia’s songs (“good 4 u”) sounds an awful lot like the good stuff (“Misery Business”) is indeed a sign of creative bankruptcy. That the album often sounds so much like Lorde, Taylor Swift, or Billie Eilish is only evidence of the pop machine’s greed-driven need for familiarity and the moments where these influences are truly overwhelming are the album’s least original and most incongruous. The truly teenage moments, despite their popularity with millennials and real teenagers alike, are out of touch and uninspired. I am a thirty-two year old man who also cannot parallel park, but I will never be able to relate to this kind of quirkiness in song if the singer is a rich teenager who claims in interviews that she pays for valet parking in order to avoid it.

Her relationship with Taylor Swift, whose influence is indeed all over every song on the album, seems destined to be tense, and Olivia performs best when her own creativity manages to escape it. “favorite crime” is essentially a Taylor Swift album track, imitative of Swift’s least incisive creative tendencies. “And I watched as you fled the scene / Doe-eyed as you buried me / One heart broke, four hands bloody,” writes Olivia, in the kind of mildly clever figurative imagery that makes the listener’s brain work to uncover a meaning that was already obvious, the kind of line Taylor writes in her weakest moments. The song’s apparent antecedent, “Victim,” performed live on Instagram in June of 2020, doesn’t sound like Taylor at all:

Let me be the victim of your perfect crime Bathe in my blood so I’m not the bad guy Yeah, I messed up so that you’ll mess up too I really want the blame to be on you So drive the knife in deep Make the victim bleed  

“Make the victim bleed.” It’s both unpretentiously direct and painfully deep. The imagery is vibrant and even specific enough to evoke centuries of high Catholic masochism without being at all complicated. Olivia’s best lyrics are indeed never detailed for their own sake, but calmly symbolic, referential of cultural archetypes, serving in the makeup of some more abstracted, weightier conceptual design.

Guilt, particularly of the religious kind, would seem to be her true creative center, a counterintuitive thought, given that so many of her songs officially released are so especially accusatory, to an empowering extent. But she always admits her doubt: “'Cause let’s be honest, we kinda do sound the same / Another actress / I hate to think that I was just your type” she says of her ex’s new girlfriend. Indeed every song on the album that is explicitly about heartbreak goes out of its way to acquit the criminal in one way or another, either implicitly or directly, describing situations that are as emotionally painful as they are understandable from both sides.

She knows, in other words, that her anger at the boy is both valid and unjustified, that her sadness is real but not at all unique. Her pain transcends by its lack of an honest target, and this is what makes her music relatable to all ages. Without quite saying it, through a contradictory combination of dedicated vulnerability and self-awareness she asks the universe--or God even--rather than the boy, why did this happen? Why does this happen and is it my fault? "Did I do something wrong?"

More than anywhere else, you can hear it in her voice. Though lots of different things can get in the way, this transcendent guilt sits in her voice as a sustained emotional power, shifting between a dull pain somewhere deep in her chest and a lump in her throat, lending sincere force and tragic significance to subject matter that most have interpreted as specifically teenaged and delightfully naive. Bruce Springsteen famously said that the first time he heard “Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan’s voice “sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult.” This is the kind of compliment disallowed to teenage girls by the use of the “you’re mature for your age” trope by predatory old men, which is a shame, because if anyone deserves to be called mature it's a teenager who takes guilt seriously before they’ve really had a chance to even do anything wrong.

Maybe she has had her marvelously unanimous success because this pained emotional high is heavily tempered on SOUR, particularly in its singles, two of which drown it out in the bridge (“drivers license”, “deja vu”), and the third of which filters it through talk-singing and distorted yelling (“good 4 u”). Maybe this is why she switched out “Victim,” a song where she sings of her “guilty Catholic heart,” and pleads “make the victim me,” for “favorite crime.” It does seem almost too heavy for American pop, and maybe a little dab of it is all the industry’s recipe requires because America doesn’t know how to process a mature teenage girl in a healthy way. But it is the passion at the source of her talent and, although her album is not at all perfect, shines through like the burning sun at every opportunity.

[cozy-the-overlord]

Okay, so yesterday when I woke up the first thing I saw was this post from @lokistan, which as you can see from my reblog made me immediately think of “gold rush” by Taylor Swift. It made me realize that out of all the folklore/evermore songs I’ve annotated and analyzed, I had yet to do “gold rush.” So I decided to remedy that immediately (I actually started writing this yesterday, but then my computer glitched and I lost all my work and I was too mad to start over again right away). And yes, I am aware that I just spent the last two hours of my life on something that probably no one will read, but I don’t care-- I love doing stuff like this so much. Here’s my interpretation of “gold rush”!

“gold rush” is the third track off of Taylor Swift’s ninth studio album evermore. It immediately stands out from the rest of the album sonically due to its ethereal production and Taylor’s lilting, dreamlike vocals. This is fitting as Taylor described this song as taking place “inside a single daydream where you get lost in thought for a minute and then snap out of it" (x). The daydream in question revolves around a person the narrator comes across and is so enchanted by that she begins to picture a life with them, while still being very aware that such a life can never really exist.

Gleaming, twinkling

Eyes like sinking

Ships on waters

So inviting, I almost jump in

The opening to the song also serves as the opening to the daydream with an immediate departure from reality—the narrator sees this person as a magical thing, thinking of sparkling, shining imagery in regard to them. The “gleaming, twinkling” serves a double purpose: gleaming inspires thoughts of shining metal such as gold, which makes sense as this is the person around whom a gold rush is about to begin, while twinkling evokes images of stars and stardom (twinkle twinkle little star anyone?), which serves to show that this person is both incredibly popular and totally out of reach.

In the second two lines, Taylor plays with enjambment, a poetic device in which the sentence continues even after the line break, which can be utilized to give the sentence a double meaning. “Eyes like sinking” sounds like a version of the common love song trope of being so fascinated with the beauty of your lover’s eyes that you could drown in them (Taylor herself has used this trope many times before, including in reputation’s “Gorgeous”: “ocean blue eyes, looking in mine, I feel like I might sink and drown and die”). This continues to show that this person is incredibly captivating and that the narrator especially is entranced by them.

However, the song continues so that the full sentence reads “eyes like sinking ships on waters,” which completely changes the image. A sinking ship is something that’s irrevocably doomed, something that you need to escape from in order to save your life. By using enjambment in this way, Taylor gives us an image of this person while simultaneously giving insight into the narrator’s internal struggle: this person is captivating, fascinating, enchanting and the narrator is undeniably drawn to them, but she also realizes that trying be with this person would not only never work, but would probably hurt her more in the long run. In other words, she’d go down with their ship. Even so, she still finds this churning water inviting, so much so that she almost jumps in—almost, because she does know better.

But I don’t like a gold rush, gold rush

I don’t like anticipating my face in a red flush

I don’t like that anyone would die to feel your touch

Everybody wants you

Everybody wonders what it would be like to love you

In the chorus, we have the lilting vocals and ethereal strings of the opening replaced with a conversational tone and a firm backbeat. While the opening was the daydream, the chorus is something closer to reality as the narrator giving her reasons for not wanting to get involved with this person.

The main reason is that she doesn’t like a gold rush, which she repeats several times throughout. A gold rush occurs when gold is discovered somewhere, resulting in a horde of people rushing to the site hoping to stake a claim and get rich. However, there’s never enough gold to go around, and with the perilous journey to the gold mines and the amount that the miners have to give up to get there (in the California Gold Rush of 1849, people on the east coast of the United States were leaving behind their entire lives to either travel across the country by wagon or to sail around the tip of South America in order to get to California for a chance at some gold), people actually tend to end up losing far more than they gain.

To the narrator, this person is the recently discovered gold. They’re gleaming and rare, and now everyone is in a mad scramble to get a piece of them. She realizes that she is not the only one who is desperate to be with this person, and that chances are she’d be one of the miners who loses everything should she try to go after them. She wouldn’t be in control—she’d only be “anticipating my face in a red flush,” anticipating embarrassment, getting flustered over a person she could never have.

Walk past, quick brush

I don’t like slow motion double vision in a rose blush

I don’t like that falling feels like flying ‘til the bone crush

Everybody wants you

But I don’t like a gold rush

The second part of the chorus imagines the overwhelming nature of any relationship she would have with this person. She emphasizes how just a quick brush with this person is enough to mess with her abilities to comprehend reality: being with this person would cause “slow motion double vision” and make her think that “falling feels like flying” until she hits the ground and the bones crush (a visceral image). She ends the chorus with an adamant “I don’t like a gold rush.” However, her daydream is far from over.

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful?

With your hair falling into place like dominoes

I see me padding cross your wooden floors

With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from the door

The lilting vocals are back as the narrator once again allows herself to ignore the elephant in the room and just focus on how entrancing this individual is. She goes as far to imagine a life with this person, where there’s a sense of intimacy and familiarity (also, apparently there’s some debate about whether the “Eagles t-shirt” references the band The Eagles or the Philadelphia football team? It doesn’t really matter, as the point of the line is to show that she’s imagining a place with this person where she feels at home and safe with them, but for the record I assumed it was the football team because Taylor’s from Pennsylvania).

At dinner parties

I’ll call you out on your contrarian shit

And the coastal town

We wandered round had never seen

A love as pure as it

And then it fades into the gray of my day-old tea

Cause it could never be

She continues to imagine a life with this person, focusing (as Taylor does best) on the simple moments. “Contrarian” describes a person who goes against popular opinion often just for the sake of going against popular opinion, and the narrator imagines a level of closeness with this person where she could call them out on it. She also conjures up grander memories—visiting a coastal town where their love is the purest thing within it. However, she seems to wake up from this daydream before returning to the reality-steeped chorus when she allows it to “fade into the gray of my day-old tea”—a image that certainly contrasts with the gleaming, twinkling gold of the person she’s dreaming about. I especially love that she specifies that the tea is not just gray, but day-old—it shows how her life is mundane and emotionless. The tea’s gone cold and she hasn’t drank it yet, because she’s wistfully dreaming about something else.

Because the chorus is exactly the same as the first, we’re going to skip to the next verse.

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful?

With your hair falling into place like dominoes

My mind turns your life into folklore

I can’t dare to dream about you anymore

Again, she’s allowing herself to fall into this daydream, but there’s a heightened sort of awareness this time. Instead of imagining an intimate, peaceful relationship, the narrator admits that it’s all in her head—she’s turning his life into folklore. Folklore, besides being the name of evermore’s sister album, also refers to “the traditional beliefs, legends, and customs, current among the common people” (“folklore, n. 1.” OED online), stories that are often passed down orally through generations and change slightly with each retelling. She’s realizing that her dreams about this person are nothing more than stories that she’s changing in order to live vicariously through them. Here, she admits that it’s useless to continue doing so: “I can’t dare to dream about you anymore.”

At dinner parties

I won’t call you out on your contrarian shit

And the coastal town

We never found, will never see

A love as pure as it

And it fades into the gray of my day-old tea

Cause it will never be

Here we have the same daydream as before, only modified to fit reality. She’s not going to call this person out on anything, because they don’t have that level of familiarity. They’ll never find this magical coastal town, and both they and it will never see this pure love because it doesn’t exist. This time, when the daydream fades into the gray of her day-old tea, it’s not with the wistful “it could never be,” but with a firm “it will never be.”

Gleaming, twinkling

Eyes like sinking

Ships on waters

So inviting, I almost jump in

We end where we begin, with the reminder that she could jump into this beautiful disaster, that she almost does, but she stops herself because she realizes it will never work out the way she wants to—she’ll only end up hurting herself. She spares herself from the gold rush.

[thecloserkin]

fic rec: Vignettes by CosmicZombie

fandom: The Borgias (Showtime 2011)

pairing: Cesare Borgia/Lucrezia Borgia

word count: 17k

is it explicit: yes

bottom line: Cesare heals Lucrezia from the emotional trauma of her marriage; this fic healed me from the ennui of being alive

It’s an S1 AU where Lucrezia returns to Rome from Pesaro to await her divorce, but Rome does not feel like home anymore and Lucrezia does not feel like herself. Pesaro isn’t just a place, you see—it’s the physical manifestation of Lucrezia’s loss of identity. That bastard Giovanni Sforza made her feel worthless, made her feel like less than nothing, and you don’t recover from that kind of abuse overnight. This fic pulls off an astounding sleight of hand where it repeatedly juxtaposes Pesaro against Rome, alien-place against home-place, and then it turns out Rome isn’t home—Cesare is home. That revelation hit me like a ton of bricks.

“Am I different, Cesare?” “You are Lucrezia.” “I—I sometimes feel as though I cannot remember who I used to be.”

She’s home but not home; she’s with Cesare but she wants to be with him more (she wants his dick inside her lol).

This fic takes its time with the slow buildup of UST, and I adore how tactile Lucrezia and Cesare are. We have tears being wiped away, nose bumps, brushing of lips against knuckles, warm breath on skin, dancing in the moonlight, cuddling, even bedsharing! Another thing I’m in awe of is the imagery: I could hear the burbling of the water fountain and I was getting sleepy just from the descriptions of sunlight. She even has a dream where she sees Cesare in her own reflection in a mirror, and it was such a disturbing image that it stayed with me. In truth it’s a dreamlike atmosphere that’s evoked here—Vanozza, Juan, Gioffre etc are onscreen for 0.2 seconds even though they’re all living at the villa together—it’s pretty tightly centered on Lucrezia and Cesare. What’s going on in the outside world?? Is France about to invade & occupy the Vatican? Is Milan in cahoots with them? Are there rumblings of discontent from Naples? Has Savonarola set Florence on fire yet? Who tf knows—not Cesare or Lucrezia, they’re in their own little bubble!!!

When other characters are mentioned, however, the context is revealing:

Juan had mocked them when they were children for being like a two-headed Cerberus

Djem had told her of Indian tigers once, how when the monsoon came after months of drought they sometimes drank so much in compensation that they drowned their own hearts in water.

That second quote!!! That’s Lucrezia being reunited with Cesare and immediately trying not to gorge herself on him. She missed him so much while she was away in Pesaro!

So Lucrezia has insomnia. Of course, before she left Rome, she used to sleep like a baby:

“Come,” Cesare said gently, pulling their clasped hands to his chest and kissing her knuckles. “Let me read you to sleep as I used to…What should you like to hear, sis?” “Anything so long as it is in your voice,” Lucrezia murmured, eyelids heavy.

This passage, I think, best encapsulates the rupture that has occurred in Lucrezia:

She wondered now that she was back how she had been able to bear being away from him for so long, but then she felt that she had not only been away from him while at Pesaro, but also away from herself. Now that she had returned she ached for both of them so deeply she felt as though it would consume her.

What a turn of phrase! She had not only been away from Cesare but away from herself. Because Cesare is her own self q.e.d. bye

“Sometimes I feel as though I no longer exist,” Lucrezia whispered, leaning her forehead against his … It is only when I am with you that I feel like myself again, Cesare.” “I would cut out his heart for what he has done to you, sis.” “What good is his heart? It will not make me feel myself again …Only yours can do that, brother, as it has always done.”

ONLY CESARE MAKES HER FEEL REAL AAAAAAA!!!

Here is where the UST really starts to build, and Lucrezia feels the little tremors of physical attraction under her abiding affection for Cesare:

she felt as though she were simultaneously glimpsing the assurance of the one thing which would never change, and flickers of things she had always known before but never truly been confronted with.

shoulders pressed together the way they had sat together so often over the years; on one or other of their beds, or the walls of the Vatican, or on this very spot – yet it somehow felt infinitely different to any of those times. He had always been her solace, in everything. Never before had he somehow been part of what troubled her.

This is a conversation wherein Lucrezia doubts she is worthy enough to experience all-consuming soul-engulfing romantic love the way it’s valorized in stories and songs:

“But you have been with women, Cesare …You know what it is to love someone, to be loved. I have not known that. I may never know it.” “You will know it someday, my love. I promise you.“ “But I do not know it now. Tell me what it is like. Tell me that it exists…Please, Cesare.” “I do not know if I have ever loved a woman I have been with in the way you describe, sister.” “Is such love impossible?” “In every sense of the word, my love.”

This conversation is EVERYTHING. I cut out out the body language but it’s like, Cesare is finishing every single sentence with “my love”??? What more proof does she want that he loves and adores and desires her above all other women?? “Impossible loves” indeed!!!

She had craved his attention and his very presence whenever he was missing from her – but she felt now that she still craved him even when she was with him. The power of it overwhelmed her and empowered her all at once, and was more consuming than her love of god had ever been.

THEIR LOVE FOR EACH OTHER IS MORE POWERFUL THAN THEIR LOVE FOR GOD this is it this is the essence of Cesare/Lucrezia

For most of her childhood, she had lived in fear she would never find anyone else in the world whom she loved as much as her brother. Sitting amidst the wildflowers with her hair unravelling and her heart racing as they looked at each other, she knew it had been a long time since she had feared that.

Did somebody say platonic/fraternal affection shading imperceptibly into romantic attachment??? My jaaaaaam

“How many people do you think are blessed with such intimacy of the soul, Cesare?” “None that I know.”

Soulmates!!!

This is the prologue to them consummating their relationship—they rode out into the woods and the scene is as picturesque as can be:

“I do not like the way men look at me … I feel like fearful Daphne under their gaze, and just as helpless to escape them. They do not see me, they only see the pope’s daughter, a Borgia.” “I do not see only that.” “No, I know you do not. But you are different, Cesare … I cannot imagine what it would be to fear you.” “Many do not have to imagine.” “I do not fear you …But I fear this, Cesare…I fear what I feel for you when we are together.”

There’s no going back after this—they’re taking an irrevocable step in their relationship but they’re also ruining each other for any future partners, who could not possibly ever measure up.

She could feel how hard he was against her thigh, feel the urgency in the tremor of his hands where they touched her hair, feel the fevered thump of his heart where his chest was pressed against her own. For the first time, she felt as though she was given a glimpse of the recklessness which drove him when he was wielding a sword or charging headlong into the chaos of a battlefield.

Making love is actually not dissimilar to making war: the adrenaline rush?? The anticipation? The endorphins??

Oh wait no jk they don’t consummate till they get back to the villa later that night. This is my favorite passage from this fic, it’s Lucrezia running into him on the terrace after supper and really seeing him. She’s the only one who’s ever seen all of him:

Here in the shadows with just the two of them the impatient ambition and calculating intelligence that constricted him as much as his Cardinal’s red was lost, and he was just himself. The brother Lucrezia had known since she was placed into his arms less than an hour after she first came into the world, who had existed before ambition or anger in his devotion, curiosity and passion. It was the Cesare she and she alone knew, and it made emotion bloom in her chest to think she was the only person who had ever known him as this.

And then they go back to her room and bang, which is how Lucrezia finds herself again. Protip everyone: skip the Eat Pray Love and instead embark on a journey of self-discovery by banging your brother!

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Back and to the future: childhood trauma and adult guilt

There is a double layer of meaning in the title of the season 15 premiere. One is pretty obvious and I’d call it the meta layer, fitting for the “beginning of the end”, an episode that heavily calls back to the early seasons of the show to introduce the new season. The episode, in fact, textually contains elements from the past of the characters, having the characters face ghosts they dealt with many years ago; actually contains brief flashbacks such as the moments with the woman in white and the iconic closing of the trunk--but also subtextually contains several callbacks to previous seasons, spanning from the visual of the child standing above water, reminiscent of 1x03, to Belphegor’s role paralleling Ruby’s in 3x01, and so on.

The layer of callbacks to the past of the show is pretty obvious and expected from the last season of the show (and considering Adam’s return and other returns teased by the cast and crew, we haven’t seen it all yet...), but I’d say there is another layer, which is about the past of the characters--childhood.

The “past” elements in the episode weren’t shown at random. @drsilverfish as usual hits the nail on the head in this post about what Constance Welsh and John Wayne Gacy represent in relation to Dean and Sam, but there’s also a few elements that I’d add. (I have also written a post about the significance of the severed heart that @drsilverfish​ mentions in the post).

The woman in white, Constance, committed suicide after killing her children (all by drowning), while the child standing above water and a ghost coming up to grab someone (and drown them) is reminiscent of the child ghost in Dead In The Water. Drowning is a theme in the show that has been emphasized last season in relation past/childhood trauma (x, x) by connecting Dean’s experience with Michael’s possession to drowning, rain/Noah imagery, and the ocean (x, x, also x).

What else have we got? John Wayne Gacy, a clown, Sam’s childhood phobia -- but also a serial killer, Sam’s special interest. (Additionally, the mother and child are a parallel to Dean and Sam as kids - last paragraph here.) The clown ghost, though, is also reminiscent of the rakshasa in 2x02, the “homicidal phantom clown” whose MO was being invited by children in their house and then kill the people in it. (And I think this also - in addition to the meanings pointed out by @drsilverfish​, I mean - explains why the clown was a ghost from a fairly recent episode instead of an “older” one: the clown in 2x02 wasn’t a ghost but a different monster, and 15x01 specifically needed ghosts, but wanted to evoke 2x02 and the specific vibe of a monster connected to children. John Wayne Gacy was also connected to children, in the sense that he abused and killed young boys, but that’s not something the text of the show insists on.)

(I wonder if the lady with the hatchet was supposed to make us think of the Hatchet Man, the character from the horror movies, so tied with past trauma and Dean’s childhood and John, or Sam’s broken hatchet after Jack’s death.)

Then there’s Bloody Mary, who, while not inherently linked to childhood, is summoned by a young girl, and then kills the girl’s older sister’s friend, who accidentally killed a young boy. The point of her story, though, is guilt, which is also the theme of 1x01 and 1x03: the woman in white couldn’t “go home” because of the guilt of killing her children, and the victims of the child in 1x03 carried the guilt of causing the child’s death as kids.

In fact, I think the “water ghost” became Bloody Mary partly to avoid the implication that the drowned kid from 1x03 would have gone to hell, but of course she fits well into the theme, and there’s always a layer carried by her sharing a name with Mary Winchester, which possibly originated as a coincidence since Bloody Mary is an actual legend the show drew inspiration from for their episode, but at this point using a character called Mary is hardly done accidentally. 15x01 basically has a mother who drowned her children and herself - in fact the first ever Mary mirror since it was literally the pilot -, and another woman called Mary who tries to pull a mother and a child into a basin of water... again, parenthood, childhood, drowning, trauma, guilt, we have it all.

So: childhood (especially dead children) and guilt. Obviously, the most prominent dead child in the episode is Jack, whose “ghost” literally walks around with them and torments them; but also Dean and Sam, whose childhood is evoked at the end of the episode, the children whose childhood was murdered together with Mary. Which leads to the other elements of the episode -- mothers. Constance, the first mother we meet in the show after Mary; the mother with her child that Sam and Cas save; and the mother who is never mentioned but whose ghosts hangs on Dean and Cas’ relationship since they realized that Jack had killed her.

Back and to the future, the title of the episode tells us. We need to “return” to the childhood, to the past, to the trauma whose ghost is haunting us, in order to go forward. The episode subtextually laid the cards on the table, the rest of the season will play them...

[mediaeval-muse]

Book Review

Not Quite A Husband. By Sherry Thomas. New York: Bantam, 2009.

Rating: 1.5/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Marsdens #2

Summary: Their marriage lasted only slightly longer than the honeymoon—to no one’s surprise, not even Bryony Asquith’s. A man as talented, handsome, and sought after by society as Leo Marsden couldn't possibly want to spend his entire life with a woman who rebelled against propriety by becoming a doctor. Why, then, three years after their annulment and half a world away, does he track her down at her clinic in the remotest corner of India? Leo has no reason to think Bryony could ever forgive him for the way he treated her, but he won’t rest until he’s delivered an urgent message from her sister—and fulfilled his duty by escorting her safely back to England. But as they risk their lives for each other on the journey home, will the biggest danger be the treacherous war around them—or their rekindling passion?

***Full review under the cut.***

Content/Trigger Warnings: dubious consent, infidelity, blood, animal death

Overview: I originally picked this book up because it was on Bustle’s list of feminist romances. I had some success with this list before - I adored The Suffragette Scandal and had a lot of respect for The Raven Prince, so the story of a female doctor defying societal expectations sounded up my alley. Unfortunately, that was the only thing I liked about this book. In general, Not Quite A Husband is not written with a strong sense of direction, and I don’t think it qualifies as “feminist” due to the lack of clear consent during some of the intimate scenes. I didn’t give this book zero or one star because I did like Bryony as a doctor, and her personality was different than a lot of romance heroines I’ve read, but on the whole, I found this book very difficult to enjoy.

Writing: Thomas’ prose is rather plain. While I don’t think romances need to have high brow, poetic, literary prose, I do think they still need to evoke the setting and emotion in order to immerse the reader in the story. While Thomas did have some phrases that did so, much of the book felt like a list of facts or telling rather than showing. The prose didn’t linger on emotional of physical sensations, so the emotional moments didn’t feel weighty and the intimate moments felt robotic. While we get flashbacks so we can see where characters are coming from, we are mostly told rather than shown how characters are feeling in the current moment. For example: “Shame. Self-loathing. Frustration They churned in him, enough to drown him outright” (p. 146). While the hydraulic imagery is nice, I don’t exactly *feel* the hero’s anguish in this passage. Nothing of his inner monologue or POV builds on the feeling of being overwhelmed or unsettled, especially since the scene promptly moves on to dialogue and some exposition.

The scenes themselves also felt awkwardly structured. Thomas had the tendency to end a scene and move on to the next section without giving the reader a sense of purpose or closure. For example, there is one scene where the characters take a break from traveling; our heroine thinks about the region and how she doesn’t want to leave the hero. She becomes overheated, so she fans herself, and our hero speaks to her about the weather. The scene ends with him thinking how beautiful she is. To me, these scenes felt awkward because they didn’t revolve around a milestone in the relationship or reveal much about the characters. The characters don’t discuss the heroine’s feelings about parting, nor does she contemplate how her desire to remain with him are complicated, and we already know the hero is attracted to the heroine at this point, so nothing new is revealed. It just felt like a scene that went nowhere and was just inserted to fill space.

Along similar lines, I think the flashbacks cut in at awkward times. Flashbacks are set apart from the main narrative of this book by italics, and frequently, these italics would interrupt the flow of a scene. I like flashbacks when they are done with a sense of purpose, informing the present action in ways that make the story richer. To me, it felt like flashbacks were inserted randomly in this book.

Plot: This book primarily follows our heroine, Bryony, as she and her ex-husband, Leo, travel back to England from India. Bryony’s sister has asked Leo to track Bryony down because their father is ill, and Leo agrees. The summary on the back of the book suggests that India is a war torn, or that the geography itself is threatening. While we do get some of that, I don’t think the travel narrative was all that exciting. The characters travel, it’s hot, they stop and instruct their guides/staff to make food, and they make puppy eyes at each other while thinking about their pasts. There wasn’t really a feeling of suspense because scenes didn’t build on one another - they just sort of happened, and there were few (if any) external forces that kept Bryony and Leo apart. As a result, I found the travel plot rather dull.

I also don’t think the travel narrative made for a good frame regarding the characters’ backstories. This book makes clear that it’s awkward for Bryony and Leo to travel together because they used to be married, but some event caused them to obtain an annulment and separate. On top of that, Bryony and Leo used to be childhood friends, and both have exciting lives as a doctor and a mathematics professor. None of this backstory seemed to be enriched by the travel narrative - characters weren’t prompted to speak or contemplate their pasts based on events happening in the present, so it felt like things were brought up randomly and for no other purpose than there was nothing else to do. For example, Leo brings out a chess board at one point and the two play a game, but it doesn’t prompt much discussion other than “I didn’t know you played” and “usually men won’t play with a woman who is better than they are.” I wanted to know more - is Bryony a calculating person? Is this a commentary on her life as a doctor/how men underestimate her? I didn’t get the sense that it was, and so many scenes felt empty because the travel narrative and the backstories didn’t line up. Granted, it could have been done differently; characters could have found the journey so boring that they have little else to do but ruminate on their thoughts, but because the writing didn’t evoke the feeling of boredom, I didn’t get the impression that this was the case.

About 2/3 through the book, our protagonists get caught up in one of the uprisings of 1897 in the Swat Valley. Things get a little more interesting from here, but in my opinion, the groundwork wasn’t laid very well to make the uprisings seem like a threat from the get go. I would have liked to have seen Bryony thinking more about how she wants to help people in such a conflict-torn area, or maybe more talk from the Indian characters about how the conflict has affected them. At the very least, I think the conflict could have been built up as the characters travelled, perhaps by them talking more about what they’ve heard about the area as well as the politics involved. Granted, the premise itself is complicated, as we’re following two British characters as they travel through India (there’s some colonial stuff there to untangle), but though I didn’t get the sense that India was being especially exoticized, I also didn’t get the sense that the setting was very important, either. Bryony and Leo could have been in any other location and I don’t think the basic narrative would have changed.

Characters: Bryony, our heroine, is a competent female physician with an aloof personality that is interpreted as cold. For the most part, I liked that Bryony didn’t fit the mold of romance heroines with more whimsical or warm personalities. It made for a different kind of reading experience. However, I don’t think enough was done to show Bryony as a complex character. Her coldness is connected to her childhood trauma and failed marriage, which could have been handled well if we were able to get inside Bryony’s head more. Because of the telling (as opposed to showing), it was hard to determine exactly how the past impacted Bryony in the present. I also would have liked to see Bryony in her job as a physician more, showing off her competence and connecting with patients to show that she’s not truly cold, she just shows emotion differently.

Leo, our hero, is somewhat bland. He’s apparently a mathematics genius, but he barely ever talks or thinks about math. He is shown to be good at running a household and handling logistics, as he plans the whole trip out of India and took care of staff and scheduling while married to Bryony. I wish he had more of an interest or background in using those skills (perhaps by running a business), and that these skills complemented Bryony’s more so that their relationship felt more complimentary. Instead, it seems to get brought up at random, so Leo’s defining characteristic seems to be that he’s attractive.

Bryony and Leo don’t get much interaction with secondary characters for a good chunk of the book. Bryony’s sister and father are like ghostly specters, heard but not seen until 2/3 through the story. The same is true of Leo’s family in that they are apparently very important to Leo, but we are told rather than shown that. By far the strangest choice regarding characters was the fact that during the entire trip out of India, Bryony and Leo are accompanied by a number of guides and staff, but I can’t recall a single line of direct speech from any of them. Given that barely anything happens on this trip, I thought it could have been an interesting opportunity for Indian characters to talk about their lives, or, at the very least, start building a sense of dread or suspense about the ongoing conflicts in the area. Having silent companions felt awkward because, well, we’re in India, but there are few interactions with Indian characters. They’re just there to be hired hands. 

Other: I was not a fan of the romance in this book for one reason: neither character seemed to think it was important to get consent before engaging in sexual activities. I’m not saying that all intimate scenes need an explicit “can we have sex?” “Yes” exchange; what I mean is that I want it to be clear that when characters engage in such activity, it’s because they both want to do so. In Bryony and Leo’s case, there were many scenes where consent was unclear. The first time they have sex, Leo is delirious with fever and he just grabs her and penetrates her without thinking. Bryony goes along with it, but I was still very uncomfortable. Bryony likewise goes to Leo’s tent and starts having sex with him while he is asleep. Later, some flashbacks tell us that Leo used to have sex with Bryony despite her showing clear signs of not wanting to do so, and it got to the point where he would start having sex with her while she was asleep, so Bryony would lock her door at night. I hated this so much. I think the point was to show that Leo was trying to make Bryony less cold towards him, but it honestly felt like rape.

In addition to the dubious consent, I couldn’t quite get on board with the characters’ reasons for wanting to be with each other. It seemed that Leo was in love with Bryony in part because he idolized her when they were children, and in part because he wanted to bring her out of her shell. It would have been ok if Bryony’s flaws were actually flaws, and if he had used methods other than what I described above. Bryony, by contrast, just seemed to like Leo because he is attractive. The book states multiple times that she didn’t notice Leo that much as a child, and she only married him because she hoped his popularity would lend her credibility as a female doctor. They ultimately decide to love one another once they have a near-death experience, so all the real growth happens in the last 1/3 of the book.

It gets worse once it’s revealed that Bryony’s coldness stems from the fact that she caught Leo cheating during their engagement. Leo insists it was only one time, and I think that was done sincerely. I honestly wouldn’t have minded a plot where a hero has to gain his love interest’s trust back after such a thing. Where this went wrong for me is that Leo seemed to blame Bryony for the affair by saying she should have stopped him or called off the wedding, and instead of proving to her that he is sorry, he simply focuses on how much pain he is in. Granted, Leo does say that he did wrong and there was no excuse, but I didn’t see him as a kind, considerate enough lover to believe that he had learned or that he was putting Bryony’s well being ahead of his own desires.

Overall, I was disappointed in this book. Not only was the prose and structure rather  lackluster, but the dubious consent was enough to put me off, and I’m still not sure if the author meant to portray Indians rebelling against the British as bad or just a thrilling adventure.

[cristalconnors]

BEST ALBUMS OF 2019: TOP TEN

SPECIAL CITATIONS:

HOMECOMING: THE LIVE ALBUM, Beyoncé

The live album feels like a lost art form. Of late, many feel thrown together without much thought- an offering to the most ardent of fans about as meaningful as a gift card you’d give your coworker. Homecoming is the antithesis of that: a flawless documentation of Beyoncé’s benchmark live performance at the 2018 edition of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that is a staggering recontextualisation of her entire life’s work, dazzlingly criss-crossing her discography, offering rollicking, thoughtful new arrangements of classics and deep-cuts alike, filtered through the lens of HBCU marching band, playing like a half time show that goes on and on and on, offering the final, definitive evidence that Beyoncé is the greatest showman in modern history by leaps and bounds. 

LEAK 04-13 (BAIT ONES), Jai Paul

Discovering Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) sometime in the summer of 2013 was like being let in on a secret. I felt like the member of an exclusive club of people in-the-know, the possessor of a forbidden document that could only be discussed in hushed tones and accessed illegally. The circumstances of its arrival were uncertain. Had he leaked it purposefully? Were all of the songs really his? It didn’t even have a proper name (it would be christened Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) many years later). The enthralling mystery of it was eclipsed only by the music itself. It sounded like you shouldn’t have been listening to it, a top secret transmission intercepted and compromised in the process. Its stunningly lush, busy textures were threadbare, pieces of the songs suddenly falling away only to reappear, as if you were streaming it and your internet connection was struggling to keep up. But that only contributed to the mystical grandeur of this earth shattering R&B that felt so purposeful, so impeccably sequenced (not by Jai), so bizarre and at times even funny, so much so that it was difficult to imagine how it could possibly be unfinished- it was perfect.

I don’t think I’d ever really understood how thoroughly devastating the leak was to Jai Paul himself until I read the lengthy note that accompanied his abrupt return on June 1st of this year, when he not only graced us with two stunning new tracks but properly released this album for the first time, a remarkable gesture of goodwill to his fans who gleefully partook in the stolen material, many without much regard to how it’d become available to them. Reading the letter, I felt guilty. The extent to which the leak derailed his career, demolished his trust in the institutions the industry is built on, compelled him to cast himself away from music entirely- his lifeline- and, in his own words, “withdraw from life in general” was genuinely heartbreaking. But the official release of the album that caused so much strife is the culmination of a years long journey of recovery, reconciliation, and growth. It’s a hard-earned reclamation of ownership that signals that Jai Paul, one of the most vital, distinct voices to emerge from the decade, is ready to get back on the horse. Look out.

THE TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2019:

10. CALIGULA, Lingua Ignota

Caligula is maybe the most stunning document of feminine rage I’ve ever heard- an improbable synthesis of metal and opera imbued with biblical imagery and defined by language that’s as flowery as it is vicious (“may your own shame hang you / may dishonor drown you / may there be no kindness / no kindness / no kindness”). Kristin Hayter’s classically trained voice bends almost to the point of snapping, sometimes bringing her tongue to her soft palate to make a sound somewhere between a hum and a gurgle before launching into blood curdling shrieks as the music around her morphs as well, twinkling piano and organ giving way to billowing, thunderous guitar. It’s music that belongs in a symphony hall, if only they’d allow moshing.

09. SINNER, Moodymann

The songs on Sinner, Kenny Dixon, Jr.’s twelfth album as Moodymann, unspool on their own terms, continually mutating as they go on, shifting gears just when you think you’ve got a handle on them. His house isn’t very dense, but there’s always a remarkable amount of intrigue in his deceptively simple sound, evoking early 70′s R&B until strange idiosyncrasies pop out organically from the fabric of the song, pulling focus, reframing it as you’re listening to it. It’s strange, compelling stuff that beckons you to dive beneath its surface, promising you’ll find something new each time.

08. NO HOME RECORD, Kim Gordon

My favorite Sonic Youth songs were always the ones Kim Gordon did lead vocals on. Her hulking monotone was strangely captivating, even when it wasn’t clear what she was even talking about (which was most of the time.) No Home Record is a sublime capitalization and expansion of her power as a vocalist and writer, embracing those same abstract sensibilities that have defined her work for nearly 40 years but pushing them boldly into the future, crafting entrancing, often menacing sonic dreamscapes that are littered with oblique, powerfully resonant hints at the fruits of her near decade of self-discovery after divorcing Thurston Moore. It’s a debut decades in the making that shockingly reveals new, untapped powers from an indelible titan of rock we thought we’d had pegged.

07. HOUSE OF SUGAR, (Sandy) Alex G

Alex Giannascoli’s folk rock warps itself, intentionally obscuring textures and images in a convoluted effort to clarify the feeling behind them. It shouldn’t work but always does, and on House of Sugar, his eighth full-length effort in just nine years, he finds thrilling new power in simplicity and repetition, exemplified by the woozy abstract tapestry of songs like “Walk Away,” “Taking,” or “Near,” wringing a simple phrase, or even just a word, for everything it’s worth, repeating them over and over and over again to craft crystal clear images of longing and pain. But the more traditional songs are just as gripping, striking his strange balance between downtown and backwoods, crafting folk that emanates from deep in the soul and soars out into outer space. 

06. BANDANA, Freddie Gibbs & Madlib

Freddie Gibbs and Madlib reunite on the most virtuosic rap album of the year, taking their unlikely marriage of gangster rap and delicately constructed, meditative beats that sound almost like memories to astonishing new heights. Gibbs grapples with personal demons- the lowest lows of his career, his ongoing relationship with drug abuse- but also flexes, showcasing his effortless flow as he flawlessly keeps pace with Madlib’s twisty production, navigating signature changes and tricky rhythms with ease, perfectly in concert with Madlib’s searching, soulful looping beats that envelop you, contorting right when you’ve settled into them. The collaboration keeps you on your toes, demanding your full attention as they whisk you through their kaleidoscopic vision of masterful, immersive rap.

05. ALL MIRRORS, Angel Olsen

The breakup album has never sounded so lush. Plenty can wax poetic about ridding themselves of toxic partners and of newfound freedom, but Angel Olsen tries to get to the heart of what it all meant, how she’d allowed herself to get lost in the relationship, forgetting herself. She makes the process sound luxurious, utilizing a 12-piece orchestra to inject a bolt of energy and welcome drama into her abstracted songwriting, embracing the darkness and working through it to find herself anew on the other side.

04. WHEN I GET HOME, Solange

When I Get Home sounds like you should be listening to it in a museum- and knowing Solange you’ll probably be able to at some point. Its heady sophistication is constantly announcing itself to you, but that’s not to say that it’s impenetrable. It’s her most personal effort, a surreal tour through the Houston of her memory and the Houston of her imagination, exploring the sounds she was reared on, but refracting them, embracing repetition to create a dreamlike, prismatic journey through her influences that, as Solange puts it, can’t be a singular expression of herself “there’s too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers, so many...”

03. NORMAN FUCKING ROCKWELL!, Lana Del Rey

Norman Fucking Rockwell! is Lana Del Rey’s victory lap, an amalgamation of everything she’s always done well packed into a sprawling 68 minute apocalyptic opus, invoking Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and most memorably, Sublime while utilizing her trademark playful, disaffected word play to craft a soaring requiem for the world as we know it. “L.A.’s in flames” and who cares when there’s a good time to be had? It’s a stunning “fuck you” to an industry and populace that dismissed her viciously when she arrived on the scene, forging her masterpiece on her own terms.

02. U.F.O.F., Big Thief

U.F.O.F. evokes the sensation of reaching out and attempting to make a connection- a connection with another realm, with the dead, with alien life, with a distant lover. The music is open and searching, and to hear the band talk about the process of writing and recording it, this spirit of experimentation was present in the studio. They’d tinker with instruments none of them knew how to play, hoping whatever they could coax out of it might speak to the ethereal textures and opaque poetry of the music they were working on. The result is a ghostly folk masterclass that launches Big Thief into the stratosphere as they work seamlessly in tandem to craft music that touches God.

01. TITANIC RISING, Weyes Blood

Struggling to cope with a world on the precipice of collapse, Natalie Mering looks backward, invoking the baroque pop of the 1970′s to search for solace in the stars or the arms of another, like Karen Carpenter scrolling through Tinder or Co-Star. But trying to stave herself away in the past only finds herself submerged in her childhood bedroom. So she bolts forward, utilizing familiar frameworks to craft stunningly lush, contemporary and urgent pop that grapples with crises both personal and apocalyptic with an optimism that feels not naive but like a vital lifeline, like a hand reaching out in the darkness to pull you to safety. It may be a futile gesture, but at the end of a decade that’s abruptly descended into a hellscape, it’s a call to keep the faith and forge on.

[lunapaper]

Album Review: ‘The Archer’ - Alexandra Savior

Alexandra Savior has finally gained her independence.

After seemingly being moulded in Alex Turner’s image on her retro cool debut Belladonna Of Sadness (which he helped co-write), the Portland singer/songwriter was at risk of being typecast as the forever-elusive ‘Mystery Girl’

And then things fell apart.

Savior was dropped by her both manager and record label, Columbia Records. She moved back home and begun attending community college, all but giving up on music. A long-term relationship also came to a volatile end. Yet it’s this series of events that helped lay the groundwork for her long-awaited second album, The Archer, proving quite cathartic. As she recently told Billboard:

‘I think I went through a period of time where I was very innocent and I was being taken advantage of by a lot of manipulative forces in my life […] I was very young and naive when I first left home and came into the music industry. I think I was prey for a lot of those sort of characters to come in and control what I was doing. I never felt I was being seen for who I was; I was being seen for what they could push me into and what was most sellable.’

Though Savior retains her detached cool, The Archer evokes a heady sense of drama amidst a hazy, psychedelic sprawl; a heavier, much grittier effort compared to the achingly hip feel of her debut.

‘Crying All The Time’ s 60s B-movie chic floating atop a sea of psychedelic guitar and mournful echoes, with Savior resigned to a horrible fate (‘My death, it haunts him like a ship/Without a sail/I know I'll be gone soon/But just for him, I will prevail’). On the sparse piano ballad ‘Soft Currents, she concedes: ‘My fate is at the hands of my mistakes/And that's alright,’ emerging from the darkness after seven years of bad luck, though still drowning in a sea of tears. ‘Saving Grace’ is a desert rock enigma that also recalls Savior’s debut as she finds herself easy prey for the so-called ‘beast.’

On ‘Howl,’ she’s at the mercy of a ‘Handsome dictator,’ describing the ‘Cold sweats off dripping down my bed/Transatlantic barrier/Trust falling right into my death’ almost like a lovesick teenager, though the darkness that bubbles beneath its kitschy horror movie aesthetic is all too hard to ignore. Mind games also ensue on the twinkling surf pop of ‘Can’t Help Myself,’ Savior dreaming of ‘Sweet lips like pink lemonade’ even as the light dims. Like other tracks on the record, it wouldn’t look too out of place on Norman Fucking Rockwell!

‘But You,’ meanwhile, proves an eerie lullaby. In true noir style, Savior paints a devastating portrait of love, recalling ‘The wilted edge of a lonesome mattress/I lay my head there until the feeling passes/It's sinking in just as time relapses,’ numb to the lush sonic peaks and valleys that surround her. Strings swirl in and out of focus while rumbling horns spell doom, in perfect sync with Savior’s state of mind as she beckons: ‘Speak soft, speak sly now, honey/It feels a little empty in the night now, honey/Drift back, drift right down on me.’ It’s easy to see why it’s the singer’s favourite song on the record.

The title track is also where her haunting lyricism shines. Inspired by ‘a lot of experiences with predatory men in my life,’ love is a bleak and dangerous prospect as the singer eagerly waits to be devoured, the imagery stark yet tragically beautiful as Savior is knowingly led to her doom.

On Belladonna Of Sadness, Alexandra Savior didn’t know where her alter ego began and she stopped. Her debut single ‘Mirage’ proved a cruel irony as she inevitably found herself made to sing ‘whatever the fuck they want.’ The Archer, however, is a powerful emancipation while remaining true to her roots.

While Turner’s influence loomed far too heavy on her debut, Savior proves a hurricane force on The Archer, working alongside producer Sam Cohen to craft a quasi-cinematic score that steadily flows across harsh, unforgiving terrain. The shift from the ‘character-based’ lyricism of Belladonna Of Sadness to more personal storytelling also provides some much-needed depth.

Short, sweet but utterly dreamy, Savior delivers the emotional blow we’ve been waiting for…

- Bianca B.

[francesbeau]

Othello - Quote Analysis - William Shakespeare

Started: 30th of April 2021 Finished: 30th of April 2021 

Act One Scene One: 

- Iago talking about Cassio: “great arithmetician/mere prattle without prance” Targets Cassio’s lack of experience 

- Iago talking about Cassio: “A Florentine never damned in a fair wife” Mentions outsider status to disconnect him from the dynamism of Venetian life. Depicts Cassio as a bachelor to create more realism, goes against Cinthios original play.

- Iago: “We cannot all be masters, nor all masters truly be followed” A corruption of the master/servant relationship. Draws upon the tricky servant trope (servus callidus) King James had just been appointed to so this was very topical. 

- Iago: “I am not what I am”, teasingly obscure and creates the question of who really is Iago? Also makes an allusion to 12th night where Viola says “I am not what I am” This showcases how vows about dissemblance can have benign intention. 

- Iago to Brabantio: “look at your house, your daughter and your bags!” asyndetic listing highlights women as secondary importance. 

- “An old black ram is tuping your white ewe” explicate reference to miscegenation. women as an extension of property. Subdued pun to make Brabantio the victim of violation. This sexually suggestive language is because black rams are associated with lust and sexual potency and its horns imply its the reincarnation of the devil. 

- “You’ll have your nephews neigh to you, coursers for cousins, and jennets for germans” Paronomasia is where words nearly sound alike, similar to eye rhyme. Cluster of racial attacks. 

- Brabantio: “thou art a villain” - Iago: “you are a senator”. Dissonance of identity, highlights corrupt higher structures. 

- Roderigo: “tying her beauty, duty and wit in an extravagant and wheeling stranger” 

- Iago: “However, this may gall him with some check” - Subdued equestrian metaphor of a horse being pulled back by reins. 

Act One Scene Two: 

- Iago: “By Janus” Appropriate God to evoke as it is the twofaced God.

- Othello: “Keep up your bright swords” Where Christ, betrayed by Judas, is arrested he order Peter to “put up thy sword into thy sheath” 

Act One Scene Three: 

- Duke: “Valliant Othello” first person to use his name and its the most important man in all of Venice. 

- Othello: “Rude I am in speech, and little blessed in the soft phrase of peace” Actually highly articulated. Spezzatura -  ‘certain nonchalance, so as to conceal and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort’

- Othello: “I won his daughter” - Links to patriarchal norms, Romeo and Juliet there is challenge for Paris to win and “woo” Juliet. 

- Othello: “The anthropophagi and men...” The allusion to the race of the cannibals in the Odyssey called Laestryganes who tried to eat Odysseus. 

- Othello: “she wished heaven had made her such a man” Kind of fickle and would love any man with same fantastical tales. 

- Desdemona: “divided duty” / “I saw Othello’s visage in my mind” Blackness of face is merely a deceptive outward show and his true countenance lies in the mind. 

Othello: “Nor to comply with the heat of young affects” - He is confining his sexual passion due to his stereotypes and has a lack of matched enthusiasm. Separates himself from sexual desire. Could be guilty repression. Freud: Sexual instincts are allied to emotional condition of fear” 

- Duke: “your son-in-law is far more fair than black”

- Iago: “our bodies are gardens to the which our wills are gardeners” - whole soliloquy goes on to examine to argument that if we didn’t have rational minds to counterbalance our emotions our desires would take over. 

- Iago: “these Moors are changeable in their ways” / “Moor is of free and open nature”

- Iago: “when she is sated with his body she will find the errors of her choices” Sexual reference

- Iago: “womb of time.”

- Iago: “twixt my sheet/ done my office” anxiety within marriage links to 2.3 when he calls Othello the “lusty moor” who leapt into his “seat”

- Iago: “Cassio’s a proper man” Acknowledges adversaries advantages. 

Act Two Scene One

- “What from the cape can you discern at sea?” Begins in storm which is symbolic of passions of Cyprus. Starts with the limitations of light and foreshadows metaphorical blindness. 

- “Our great captains, captain” 

- Othello: “oh my souls joy if after every tempest come such calms” / “If i were to die twere now the to e the most happy, for I fear my soul hath her content to absolute” Last time Othello is truly happy 

- Desdemona: “Our loves and comforts should increase even as our days grow”

Act Two Scene Three 

- Othello: “Are we turned Turks?/For Christian shame” Evokes intermittent conflict between European powers and the Ottoman Empire

- Othello to Cassio: “what's the matter, that you unlace your reputation thus.” 

- Iago: “I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear” Link to Hamlet where the King was poisoned by it being poured into his ear

Act Three Scene Three 

- Iago: “Ha, I like not that.” / “Nothing My Lord, or if, I know not what”. Plants seeds of suspicion with mysterious interjection 

- Othello: “Excellent wretch, perdition catch my soul. But i do love thee, and when i love thee not chaos comes again” Oxymoran - doesn't have a grip on emotions. breakdown of cosmos and order as chaos is the undoing of the gods. 

- Iago: “Honest My Lord?” Othello: “Honest? Ay, Honest.” Anadiplosis is the repetition of the last line of previous conversation

- Iago: “My lord you know I Love thee” - John 21;15 “Lord thou knowest I love thee” 

- “Beware my Lord of Jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds upon”

- Othello: “Haply for I am black and have not these soft parts of conversation” - Endemic to Venetian culture are attitudes that Othello cant inculcate. In the shape of Iago the venomous rage of society that are rocked by the elopement play out. 

- “She s gone, I am abused and my relief must be to loathe her” 

- “I had rather be a toad and live upon the vapor of a dungeon than to keep a corner in the thing i love” - This metaphor places emphasis on the embarrassment of cuckoldry. The animalistic imagery is interesting as toads are insignificant and gross which highlight how he feels. Women is the aggressor.

- “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not”

- Iago about a fake dream from Cassio, “I heard him say, ‘Sweet Desdemona let us be wary and hide our love”

- Iago to Othello: “I am your own forever” language of service, however Iago hints at mephisteplion bargain by which Iago has ensnared his soul. 

Act Three Scene Four 

- “There is magic in the web of it”, assumes bizarre shape of perverted trail

Act Four Scene One

- Iago: “to kiss in private” aggressively plants seeds of images of animated sexual congress 

- Othello about himself: “A horned man’s a monster and a beast” Sign of cuckoldry 

- Othello: “My heart has turned to stone” / ‘He Beats his chest’ / “sweeter creature” (like Cassio’s dream) 

- “I’ll chop her into messes” Truculent 

“Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile” - complex conceit, crocodiles generated spontaneously and a proverbial hypocrisy. Plutarch suggests that crocodiles wept when devouring their victims. Crocodile pretends to be in distress to lure victims in. 

Act Four Scene Two

- Othello about Emilia - “a lock and key of villainous secrets”

- Desdemona: “I understand a fury in your words, bot not the words.” 

- Emilia: “she forsook so many noble matches” - links ti act one scene two: she shunned the wealthy curled darlings of our nation

Act Four Scene Three

- The whole song of willow, link to Hamlet as Ophelia fell from a willow tree and drowned after finding out her husband did not love her. 

- Emilia: “if wives do fall” - Post-lapsyrian, eve’s fall from grace. 

- “The ills we do, their ills instruct us so” inverts traditional male leadership role. 

Act Five Scene One 

- ‘Iago wounds Cassio in the leg from behind and exit’ - constant scene controlment. Displays talent for improvisation. 

Act Five Scene Two

- Othello: ‘Think on thy sins’ Desdemona: ‘They are the loves I bear to you’ could be a reference to race but more so an allusion to the sin of living a human more than god. 

- Othello: “A murder which I thought a sacrifice” Zenith of insanity.

- “The sun and the moon and that affrighted globe” Christs crucifixion similar events. Globe theater in terror. 

- “It is the very error of the moon” - Power of the moon can induce madness

- “Base Indian who threw away a pearl” - Matthew 8 Merchant who looses everything trying to obtain a pearl. 

- “Malignant and a turband turk” - symbolically annihilating both Iago and himself. Whole speech is about the salvation of a soul peppered with semantics of Orientalism.

- Lodovico: “this heavy heart with heavy heart relate” Rhyming is emblematic of balance that civilized Venetians are saturated with

[shipcestuous]

"Welcome the Stranger" theory (Submission)

I think Alice is ½ alien.  Her and Misty both use on Ethan with what looks like alien mind control powers, + it explains why she’s the unfavorite child.  She’s very manipulative towards him (mostly with sex–that seductive vocal tone she uses on him right from the start), but she’s more sympathetic than Misty bc she’s less in control, I think she uses her powers on him subconsciously but is nearly as confused as he is.  Also she’s very emotional and needy for Ethan’s love (her human side), and she’s more honest about wanting to take him away through the portal to a “better place” (which she doesn’t seem to have been to herself–for all we know it’s a horrible alien experimentation lab) and not lying that it’s “Geneva”.  Maybe their mom was an alien and went back home through another portal (that hole in the ground in the ocean painting), or maybe an alien “subbed in” for their mom during part of their childhood (the brunette in the photo).  The only question is, why do the aliens want to separate them? Do extra-terrestrials have incest taboos?

Yesss, thank you for talking to me about Welcome The Stranger.

I’m not a fan of the it’s all mental illness/hallucinations theories which just aren’t that interesting as a resolution to me, so I’m so glad you’re thinking outside of the box. Whatever was really going on, there’s really no doubt that the imagery is meant to evoke aliens. 

You’ve actually given voice to some theories that were sort of bouncing around in my brain in a very beginning-stages kind of way. Because I had been very curious about their mother’s relationships with the “stranger”, and there was the photo you mentioned that Alice looked at where her mother was replaced with Misty/the stranger the first time she looked at it, and we don’t know anything about their dad. It could be possible that their mother somehow had a child with one of these beings. Or that their mother was one of them. Is it relevant somehow that Ethan was the favored child and that Alice was a “mistake”? 

On one hand, I really like the idea that Alice gets into Ethan’s head because he’s in love with her and because she’s his sister and his family. But there’s definitely a lot to be said for the idea that she might possibly be able to control his thoughts in a way that’s similar to what Misty does, and that might be because she’s half of whatever Misty/the stranger is. There’s the earlier conversation when Ethan says that Alice is doing things, making him crazy, making him think things like when they were kids. So it’s like she had been able to do it her whole life, maybe without really knowing that she could do it. 

And what about Alice having sex with her stepdad? Maybe she mind-controlled him too. 

Oh my flippin’ gosh, THAT’S WHAT’S IN THE OCEAN PICTURE? I noticed a formation of rocks but I never realized there was a hole in the center! I’m like banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what the significance of the painting is and now I know. THANK YOU. The plot thickens. That’s why Ethan is so troubled by the picture and by the hole when it appears, because the picture’s got another weird hole in it, and that’s where their mother disappeared. She did disappear at the ocean, just not drowning in the water, but through that hole. (Possibly, that is. According to this theory we’re teasing out.) 

Honestly, this makes so much sense. I’m really excited by what you’ve said, Anon. Thank you so much for sharing your theory with me!

But you’re right - why send Misty to get between them?

[takenews-blog1]

The Best Movies of 2017

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/the-best-movies-of-2017/

The Best Movies of 2017

In contrast to tv, most movie studios nonetheless function by a byzantine system that favours releases within the so-called “Oscar season” – between November and December – in a bid to stay recent within the reminiscence of voters. For Hollywood viewers internationally, that normally means most of those movies don’t make it our shores earlier than February the subsequent yr at the very least, generally even later after they’ve picked up all potential awards.

For the needs of this assortment, we’re sticking to the movies that our critics have had an opportunity to see a technique or one other, be it in wide-release, movie festivals, or at house. These which are but to turn into out there in India in any vogue – Girl Fowl, and Phantom Thread to call a number of – shall be thought-about as a part of our Oscar protection in 2018.

Listed below are the perfect motion pictures we’ve seen in 2017, in alphabetical order:

Blade Runner 2049 Arrival director Denis Villeneuve’s revisit to the dystopian futuristic world of Los Angeles, the place disobedient bioengineered androids – outlawed for years in a blame-game – are hunted by future cops (together with Ryan Gosling’s Officer Okay) who could or is probably not human themselves. It’s the type of mind-boggling, contemplative story that doesn’t go away you for hours after you exit the darkish corridor.

It’s additionally meant to be seen on the most important canvas you could find round you, for the enthralling visuals of Roger Deakins envelop you, drowning you in melancholy and isolation, whereas the movie bides its time with an eerie tone. Blade Runner 2049 ruminates those self same philosophical questions as its cult-favourite unique, exploring what it means to be human: reminiscence, company, and free-will – with an added contact of household, authority, and love.

Dunkirk Christopher Nolan’s first struggle movie is a haunting, visceral and chilling depiction of the Could 1940 evacuation of greater than 300,000 Allied troops from the seashores of Dunkirk, France, as they had been being pinned from all sides – land, air, and sea – by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, their faces unseen for everything of the movie. The ability of Dunkirk is in the way in which it showcases the pandemonium and gallantry of the spectacle, with stirring imagery than courageous discuss.

Because of IMAX cameras and Hans Zimmer’s rating, it gave a brand new dimension to experiencing fight on the massive display screen (with out the nuisance of 3D glasses, thoughts you). No surprise Nolan referred to as it “digital actuality with out the headset”. Too unhealthy the Darkish Knight trilogy director glossed over the presence of Indian troopers at Dunkirk, one thing that may have given the real looking movie additional authenticity.

Watch: Blu-ray, Google Play, iTunes

Get Out With Get Out, comic Jordan Peele delivered a state-of-the-art skewering of the injustices perpetrated and neglected by sham white liberalists, turning the movie into one of many greatest cultural phenomenon of 2017, a yr that feels completely well timed for its arrival given the prominence of far-right teams and its acceptance by these hungry for energy.

From the lens of a younger African-American boyfriend reluctantly agreeing to satisfy the mother and father of his white girlfriend, Get Out delivered an creative horror story aimed on the minimisation and suppression of the black group, and offered labels (“the sunken place”) that may drive dialog. It is made much more fascinating when you think about that Get Out is Peele’s directorial debut.

Logan Hugh Jackman’s final automobile because the X-Males mutant Wolverine – Logan – can also be his finest, which is probably the most becoming farewell the actor deserves for his lengthy portrayal of the world-weary superhero, having turn into an icon for the style. Set in a future the place he’s amongst a number of mutants left, and powered by the studio’s licence to craft an R-rated movie (‘A’ in India), director James Mangold delivered a grim, unforgiving take with penchant for graphic violence and frequent profanity.

With the addition of 11-year-old Dafne Eager as a younger mutant, and the presence of a nonagenarian Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Logan supplies two opposing dynamics for its eponymous character, touching upon emotionally-resonant themes of household, belief, ache, decay, and duty. Mangold’s sturdy work in understanding the roots of his characters, and letting the movie breathe make it the perfect superhero story since Nolan’s The Darkish Knight in 2008.

Watch: Blu-ray, Google Play, iTunes

The Large Sick Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani’s debut function – which he co-wrote along with his spouse, and starred in as himself – is a bittersweet, heartfelt movie in regards to the unconventional love story that introduced them collectively, going from a one-night stand to deep devotion from one get together whereas the opposite disappeared right into a medically-induced coma after a thriller sickness, regardless of the hiatus nature of their transient relationship.

Because of stable performances from Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan (who performs his future-wife Emily), deft route from Michael Showalter, and a script that eschews easily-achievable melodrama for realism and rounded characters, The Large Sick was one in every of this yr’s most touching and funniest tales, improved by its cross-cultural themes that touched upon the significance of household, and preventing for love.

Watch: Amazon Prime Video

The Florida Venture The clear, apparent winner of director Sean Baker’s newest work is Brooklynn Prince, the now 7-year-old who infuses each little bit of her vitality into Moonee, a baby rising up amidst the brightly-painted rundown motels within the state of Florida, naked miles away from the empire of Disney. Her exuberance and comedic timing are on the coronary heart of The Florida Venture’s finest moments, which chronicles life for the late-capitalism unlucky throughout a summer time.

Willem Dafoe delivers one in every of his finest performances because the weary lodge supervisor having to cope with Moonee, her pals, and her mischievous mom, as Baker makes use of the colorful backdrop to juxtapose the greyness of their lives, culminating in a closing shot that evokes his final iPhone-shot movie Tangerine – and compassion, empathy, and tears.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes The closing chapter to the story of Caesar (Andy Serkis) not solely proved that Serkis is a grasp of motion-capture efficiency artwork, however cemented the prequel Planet of the Apes trilogy’s deserved standing as the finest trilogy of the continued decade. In contrast to many big-budgeted summer time blockbusters of its ilk, it confirmed how an instalment can deepen the allegories, motifs, and themes of its predecessors, whereas constructing an epic arc for its central protagonist.

The director Matt Reeves was impressed by the story of Moses – he additionally riffed on The Nice Escape and Apocalypse Now in elements – in penning the story for Battle, noting whereas manufacturing: “That is going to be the story that’s going to cement [Caesar’s] standing as a seminal determine in ape historical past, and type of results in an nearly biblical standing.” The movie’s larger success lies within the highly effective values it sends out, one all of us may gain advantage from in divisive instances similar to these.

Watch: Blu-ray, Google Play, iTunes

[gta-5-cheats]

The Best Movies of 2017

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/the-best-movies-of-2017/

The Best Movies of 2017

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Unlike television, most film studios still operate by a byzantine system that favours releases in the so-called “Oscar season” – between November and December – in a bid to remain fresh in the memory of voters. For Hollywood viewers internationally, that usually means most of these films don’t make it our shores before February the next year at least, sometimes even later after they’ve picked up all possible awards.

For the purposes of this collection, we’re sticking to the films that our critics have had a chance to see one way or another, be it in wide-release, film festivals, or at home. Those that are yet to become available in India in any fashion – Lady Bird, and Phantom Thread to name a few – will be considered as part of our Oscar coverage in 2018.

Here are the best movies we’ve seen in 2017, in alphabetical order:

Blade Runner 2049 Arrival director Denis Villeneuve’s revisit to the dystopian futuristic world of Los Angeles, where disobedient bioengineered androids – outlawed for years in a blame-game – are hunted by future cops (including Ryan Gosling’s Officer K) who may or may not be human themselves. It is the kind of mind-boggling, contemplative tale that doesn’t leave you for hours after you exit the dark hall.

It’s also meant to be seen on the biggest canvas you can find around you, for the enthralling visuals of Roger Deakins envelop you, drowning you in melancholy and isolation, while the film bides its time with an eerie tone. Blade Runner 2049 ruminates those same philosophical questions as its cult-favourite original, exploring what it means to be human: memory, agency, and free-will – with an added touch of family, authority, and love.

Dunkirk Christopher Nolan’s first war film is a haunting, visceral and chilling depiction of the May 1940 evacuation of more than 300,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, France, as they were being pinned from all sides – land, air, and sea – by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, their faces unseen for the entirety of the film. The power of Dunkirk is in the way it showcases the pandemonium and gallantry of the spectacle, with stirring imagery than brave talk.

Thanks to IMAX cameras and Hans Zimmer’s score, it gave a new dimension to experiencing combat on the big screen (without the nuisance of 3D glasses, mind you). No wonder Nolan called it “virtual reality without the headset”. Too bad the Dark Knight trilogy director glossed over the presence of Indian soldiers at Dunkirk, something that would have given the realistic film further authenticity.

Watch: Blu-ray, Google Play, iTunes

Get Out With Get Out, comedian Jordan Peele delivered a state-of-the-art skewering of the injustices perpetrated and overlooked by sham white liberalists, turning the film into one of the biggest cultural phenomenon of 2017, a year that feels perfectly timely for its arrival given the prominence of far-right groups and its acceptance by those hungry for power.

From the lens of a young African-American boyfriend reluctantly agreeing to meet the parents of his white girlfriend, Get Out delivered an inventive horror story aimed at the minimisation and suppression of the black community, and provided labels (“the sunken place”) that would drive conversation. It’s made even more fascinating when you consider that Get Out is Peele’s directorial debut.

Logan Hugh Jackman’s last vehicle as the X-Men mutant Wolverine – Logan – is also his best, which is the most fitting farewell the actor deserves for his long portrayal of the world-weary superhero, having become an icon for the genre. Set in a future where he’s among a few mutants left, and powered by the studio’s licence to craft an R-rated film (‘A’ in India), director James Mangold delivered a grim, unforgiving take with penchant for graphic violence and frequent profanity.

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With the addition of 11-year-old Dafne Keen as a young mutant, and the presence of a nonagenarian Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Logan provides two opposing dynamics for its eponymous character, touching upon emotionally-resonant themes of family, trust, pain, decay, and responsibility. Mangold’s sturdy work in understanding the roots of his characters, and letting the film breathe make it the best superhero story since Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2008.

Watch: Blu-ray, Google Play, iTunes

The Big Sick Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani’s debut feature – which he co-wrote with his wife, and starred in as himself – is a bittersweet, heartfelt film about the unconventional love story that brought them together, going from a one-night stand to deep devotion from one party while the other disappeared into a medically-induced coma after a mystery illness, despite the hiatus nature of their brief relationship.

Thanks to solid performances from Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan (who plays his future-wife Emily), deft direction from Michael Showalter, and a script that eschews easily-achievable melodrama for realism and rounded characters, The Big Sick was one of this year’s most touching and funniest stories, improved by its cross-cultural themes that touched upon the importance of family, and fighting for love.

Watch: Amazon Prime Video

The Florida Project The clear, obvious winner of director Sean Baker’s latest work is Brooklynn Prince, the now 7-year-old who infuses every bit of her energy into Moonee, a child growing up amidst the brightly-painted rundown motels in the state of Florida, bare miles away from the empire of Disney. Her exuberance and comedic timing are at the heart of The Florida Project’s best moments, which chronicles life for the late-capitalism unfortunate during a summer.

Willem Dafoe delivers one of his best performances as the weary hotel manager having to deal with Moonee, her friends, and her mischievous mother, as Baker uses the colourful backdrop to juxtapose the greyness of their lives, culminating in a closing shot that evokes his last iPhone-shot film Tangerine – and compassion, empathy, and tears.

War for the Planet of the Apes The closing chapter to the story of Caesar (Andy Serkis) not only proved that Serkis is a master of motion-capture performance art, but cemented the prequel Planet of the Apes trilogy’s deserved status as the best trilogy of the ongoing decade. Unlike many big-budgeted summer blockbusters of its ilk, it showed how an instalment can deepen the allegories, motifs, and themes of its predecessors, while building an epic arc for its central protagonist.

The director Matt Reeves was inspired by the story of Moses – he also riffed on The Great Escape and Apocalypse Now in parts – in penning the tale for War, noting while production: “This is going to be the story that is going to cement [Caesar’s] status as a seminal figure in ape history, and sort of leads to an almost biblical status.” The film’s bigger success lies in the powerful values it sends out, one we all could benefit from in divisive times such as these.

Watch: Blu-ray, Google Play, iTunes

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[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Mapping Migrant Journeys onto Boats of String

Chiharu Shiota, Where are we going? installation view (photo © Gabriel de la Chapelle, all photos courtesy Le Bon Marché)

PARIS — With titanic vision and ludicrous amounts of string, Chiharu Shiota, the Berlin-based Japanese installation artist, appears to connect drowning and drawing in her magisterial installation at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche.

Ten lushly netted windows on Rue de Sèvres first caught my eye, suggesting that something might be worth untangling inside. A spiderweb-like, all-over treatment of the windows ensnarls torn pages from a world atlas, in one display, and the black contour lines of a long boat, in others. The title of the exhibition — Where are we going? — drew me further in, evoking the sentiment that many grappled with following the Women’s March on Washington, namely that collective question: “Where Do We Go From Here?”

Chiharu Shiota, Where are we going? window installation (photo © Say Who — Romain Mayoussier)

Having recently been terribly disappointed by the Ai Weiwei show in this space, I had struck it from my art radar, so I was unprepared to encounter Shiota’s mesmerizing work. She is known for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads, with which she links everyday objects (such as keys, windows, dresses, shoes, boats, and suitcases) within an abstract, linear network. The optical effect resembles the way the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles expresses webbed resistance to political oppression, as with his black massive web “La Bruja 1” (“The Witch 1,” 1979–81), which I saw in curator Victoria Noorthoorn’s 2011 Lyon Biennale. Like Meireles, Shiota mobilizes large ecologies of meaning through her ephemeral webs that cannot easily be captured by flat photography. These are three-dimensional drawings that must be moved around and seen from many angles, as with the thread sculptures of Fred Sandback and the distributed paintings of Felice Varini. Here, it is essential to ride the escalator up and down to see the work from various perspectives.

Surprisingly, the most immersive piece in Where are we going? is the least effective. Inside the department store, on the ground floor, Shiota has created “Memory of the Ocean” (2016), a large, cotton candy-looking white wave visitors can walk through. In spite of its maritime title, it evokes nothing of the kind. It teeters on the uneasy threshold between prettiness and banality and has little of the poetic invention of the two major sculptures hanging in the store’s atrium, both lyrical and epic, of grouped boat shapes that lavishly float overhead. These works leaven precise craft with speculative excursion.

Chiharu Shiota, Where are we going? installation view (photo © Gabriel de la Chapelle)

Looking at the boat form from below — from the drowned person’s position — I could make out the rudimentary forms of a cluster of metal hulls, seemingly drawn with a black pencil (just one smaller one is red), floating above in suspension under the store’s central glass ceilings, like some windswept Aeolian harp. But these strung boat-harps offer no dream of utopian emancipation for migrants because they hold no water, even as they themselves are constructed as open boundaries and so might suggest the possible transmigration of bodies across border. Where are we going? To the frontier between life and death, between the vulnerable individual and the world of risk. In this respect, these de-skinned boats bring to the fore a concern with the fine grain of migration and bodily experience, where hybridity and the crossing of permeable boundaries loom large.

Shiota’s floating ethical catastrophe invites a two-sided reflection: one dark and pathological that involves the escalation of violence, as in a catastrophic sea storm; the other a luminous promotion of communal survival through postcolonial reconciliation and intelligent adaptation to environmental crises. Joined, these two sides reveal Shiota as the creator of a Janus-faced demiurgic construction that is powerfully relevant to our contemporary world of global violence and mass displacement. Her lofty visual narrative is articulated through the interweaving of mythological motifs and traces of manual labor.

Chiharu Shiota, Where are we going? installation view (photo © Gabriel de la Chapelle)

In an interview accompanying the show, Shiota states that her use of boat imagery stems from childhood ferry rides she took to go from Osaka to Kochi, where she felt as “in a new world (…) the world of vacation and sea.” She says that her sculptures here represent “hope in the future.” For me this work is a bit more socially vivid, nuanced, and indispensable. It suggests what art after Trump might be, and what it must be: a reflection on the mutually enriching relationship between contemplation and action; the political and the secular spiritual.

Of course the boat is a concise symbolic element in many important myths. In Japanese myth, there is the Ama no Iwafune (“heavenly rock boat”) from the Iwafune Shrine in Osaka, where Shiota was born in 1972. In ancient Egypt, the boat was the vessel that enabled the sun to journey across the sky, as well as to take dead souls to the netherworld. Indeed, in many esoteric traditions, the floating boat is a symbol of knowledge beyond death. Perched above me, this boat image-complex (where the supporting black strings suggest black rain) offered no hopes of migrants crossing to a better existence. There is no means of remaking the world anew for them, but only a shedding of home and belongings — of form itself. Hanging in limbo, this cluster of bottomless boats left me suspended, wondering about the depths of the new dangers presented by Trump and how many people’s lives will be ensnared in their net.

Where are we going? says to me: Hang in there, being is a matter of fortune or misfortune that goes in and out like the ocean’s tide. Shiota’s exhibition is both precise and elusive, specific and elliptical, and as such is uncannily well suited to remind us of the in-between state of migration and its reliance on hope. It reflects the vulnerabilities and uncertainties shared by millions of migrants risking everything to make their world anew. In Where are we going? we can glimpse, from within the belly of a luxury marketplace, the migrant’s leap into the watery void — either into something better, or into the abyss of limbo or death. Either way, wherever we are going, we will be haunted by these dangerous feelings.

Chiharu Shiota, “Memory of the Ocean” (2016) (photo © Gabriel de la Chapelle)

Chiharu Shiota, Where are we going? window installation (photo © Say Who — Romain Mayoussier)

Chiharu Shiota: Where are we going? continues at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche (24 Rue de Sèvres, 7th arrondissement, Paris, France) through February 18.

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