#surprise it is an accidental end of hiatus silly project instead

[tunedtostatic]

[Image Description: The crew of the Iris 2 made with picrew. Detailed image descriptions under the cut. End Description.]

If using picrews is cringe now I don’t wanna be right. Loving this particular picrew by grgikau, thanks everyone who’s been putting it on my dash!

(Edit: Tumblr is still hiding posts with links, apparently. It’s at picrew dot me, /image_maker/426722.)

Outfit meta also under the cut, because if you’re not gonna overthink character picrews what’s the point:

[Detailed Image Description:

Line 1: Image 1: Violet is slightly chubby and has dark loosely wavy hair either nape-of-neck length or pulled back with only tendrils showing. She has a septum piercing and is wearing a white t-shirt and grey hoodie. She looks slightly alarmed. Background: Bi pride flag.

Image 2: Arkady has a third of her head buzzed at the top; the rest of her long flyaway hair is pulled up in a high ponytail. She has an angular face, several cartilage piercings and one eyebrow piercing. She’s wearing brown eyeshadow, a black top, and a brown leather jacket. She is smirking. Background: Offwhite with rectangular ace pride flag frame.

Line 2: Image 3: Brian has close-cropped flyaway brown hair and a beard. He’s wearing classic rectangular glasses, a yellow button-down shirt and a red hoodie. He’s grinning. Background: Offwhite with circular trans pride flag frame.

Image 4: Krejjh is depicted as a light-skinned human (but with pointy ears). Their purple hair is styled into a faux hawk on top of their head, with sideburns, and is long in the back, swooshing through the background. They’re wearing dark green eyeshadow and a red varsity jacket over a sweater with an angular turquoise and yellow pattern. They’re grinning and raising one eyebrow. Background: Orange with black stars.

Line 3: Image 5: Sana is wearing a pink hijab, a beige sweater with a green and white pattern around the collar, and navy overalls. She is wearing large-frame glasses and smiling with a hint of a smirk. Background: Grey with white stars.

Image 6: Park is wearing a white t-shirt with a red neckline, buzzed hair, and a green ballcap. His forehead is lined and he has stubble on his angular jaw. His eyes are closed and he has a small smile. Background: Yellow with offwhite rectangular frame.

Line 4: Image 7: McCabe is wearing a black jacket over a button-down shirt that is offwhite with narrow dark stripes. They have curly red hair in a ponytail, a narrow face, and freckles. They are scowling. Background: Black with circular nonbinary pride flag frame.

Image 8: Blue stars on a lavender background.

End Detailed Image Description.]

~

When it comes to fashion I headcanon Violet as a practical person who likes being comfy. Her picrew gently haunts me because once I hit on this t-shirt/hoodie combination her vibe became EXACTLY that of the lab grad TAs I had when I was in college. 10/10 would go to her office hours, she would help me decipher weird abstruse lab report instructions with no judgement

Listen, in my heart of hearts I don’t really headcanon Arkady wearing piercings on a daily basis; she’s just too paranoid and unnecessary-risk adverse to do something that would cause danger with combat, machinery, and so on. But do they give her picrew Edgy Arkady Energy? Yes. I enjoyed the flyaway hair options in this picrew maker and am generally delighted at how Arkady came out looking like a cat you’ve just extracted from somewhere she’s not supposed to be.

Brian! Also grad school fashion, but make it tacky colors. But boring tacky colors, not interesting tacky colors. Sorry Brian, I do not picture you as as having an intriguing fashion sense. I wore the same t-shirt all weekend so I’m allowed to both project this onto you and judge you for it.

Krejjh! No purple skin option, so I pinch hit with purple hair. Not all nonbinary people have an androgynous gender presentation but I definitely think Krejjh does, so I tried to find a hairstyle that worked for this. Their jacket and Brian’s hoodie are both red because they’re spouzzes and are outfit-coordinating, obviously.

I think marina-does-things’s painting of Sana in a coral pink work smock changed me as a person because I can’t imagine anything other than pink as her signature color. I am also standing on the shoulders of giants for the sweater and overalls combination; everyone who draws Sana in coveralls/a work smock/a boiler suit but also a sweater please know that at any given moment in time I am shaking you virtually by the hand.

Park! I didn’t want to erase his disability, and I’m not sure what the art ethics are of drawing on picrews, so I picked one of the options with his eyes closed. He is in a t-shirt and ballcap because he is a deeply boring person and I think he enjoys being able to wear boring clothes that are not business casual instead of boring clothes that are business casual. And not having to be clean-shaven.

I was originally going to give the disgruntled mouth option to Sana, but I’m glad I gave it to RJ. They are a ball of pure ire and, unlike Park, you won’t be able to pry their business casual away from them with a crowbar.

[10oclockdot]

Intermission

(a free response to my favorite tumblr piece in ages: Aphelis's Seven Samurai Interrupted, an exploration of the ontology of the intermission)

2001. "I'm not so sure what he'd think about it," says the astronaut. And then, a vertiginous surprise, like something holding us up just fell away: White noise, The 2.35:1 frame irised down to a peephole, Telephoto, POV, panning: through HAL's eyes as he reads their lips. The moment of consciousness. But then, a more vertiginous surprise: A deeper, more silent void than even outer space: A black screen, outside the narrative. Fade in:

The mind races--- wait, no, wait-- NO! A film floating glacially, reel after reel, suddenly bursting with intrigue only to be shut off, suspended, abandoned, adrift, uncertain... But in the audience, a hundred virtual guess-movies still play.

Early 1990's. When I was a kid, my mom sometimes rented The Great Race or It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for me and my sister. Two very silly films that came on two VHS's each. I remember there being overtures, exit music, intermissions. I remember pressing fast-forward. In the VHS era, we made our own intermissions.

(The Great Race and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World were long films. Now I wonder whether my mom chose them to give herself a long intermission from me.)

1996. The first tape of The Right Stuff ended with Glenn saying, "I plan on being the first man to ride the rocket." The second tape began with a montage of test rocket failures. Convenient, since that's the only part I really wanted to watch. Had there been an intermission there, cut for the tape? Wikipedia tells me The Right Stuff had an intermission. I check my blu-ray, but I can't find one. Where had it been? Where has it gone? Was this the erasure of an absence or of a presence?

Wiki tells me that Fantasia had an intermission, too. I don't remember it. I do remember, however, that my parents always fast-forwarded through the dinosaur part and the Bacchus part the rare once or twice we watched it. Drinking was bad, those were false gods, evolution was a lie. Like I said, we made our own intermissions.

2004. In college, I watched Persona for the first time on possibly the worst VHS tape ever made. A 16mm transfer that might as well have been made by pointing a camcorder at the screen, with white on white subtitles. Partway in, the action abruptly stopped and a card appeared on screen reading, “Please wait a moment while we change reels.” I remember it taking about a minute.

2007. In grad school, I TA'd for an introductory film history class. The Birth of a Nation was, of course, pure suffering for all the students in that 150-person room. (Seriously, everybody. If you must teach Griffith in Intro to Film, figure out the learning goal. Continuity editing? The Lonedale Operator. Poetry? The Country Doctor and maybe The Musketeers of Pig Alley. Film as fine art? Intolerance. Lillian Gish's acting? Broken Blossoms. If you want to talk about the racism, show scenes, but don't waste the 3 hours.)

Anyway. I've heard laughs during Keaton and shrieks during Un Chien Andalou and even a hushed gasp at the end of Citizen Kane. But I've never heard as pained or as abject a moan as the one that issued from every mouth in that room when the title card told them:

2009. A road trip to the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, to see Jennifer Reeves's When It Was Blue play on film, from two projectors hitting the same screen. A hallucinatory Brakhagian ocular explosion for over an hour, except for a few minutes in the middle when both projectors were turned off. Black screen, dark theater. Big, lush music played. An intermission? No one left their seats. A pause to change reels? But the experience continued as the music played, and I kept my eyes trained ahead. What was it, then? It was my favorite part.

2012. A last-minute road trip up to Ann Arbor, Michigan to see one of the rehearsal performances of Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach. It's an over-five-hour affair: 4 acts plus 5 "knee plays" designed as bookends and links between the acts. But the Knee Plays are not intermissions. Instead, the audience is invited to create their own intermission wherever they need it. I never left my seat. Neither did any of the other music nerds I went with.

2015. Chicago, for the 70mm Hateful Eight roadshow. The theater was packed with drunk, agitated people. The overture didn't shut them up. The intermission didn't calm them down. I was willing to believe that the film was building to something; but the second half proved me wrong. Over three hours of meaningless cruelty, pointless bloviation, gratuitous bloodshed. Like the film stock itself, was the intermission simply a compensatory gesture? The act of a filmmaker trying to make a bad project seem important? My friends and I talked about it for hours. We couldn't save it.

(Then again, maybe The Hateful Eight just came out a year too early. After the 2016 election, a meditation on hate and division, especially a grotesque, unredeeming one, feels timely.)

My parents voted for Trump. They'd always been Evangelical Christians (Cruz was their candidate) and they raised me as one. I don't know whether I resent their vote more for its idiocy, its bigotry, or for its absolute nullification of their values. I left the church for good around 2010. My mom still believes I'll come back.

My dad and I built model rockets together when I was a kid, but we gave it up when I went to college. We said goodbye to the hobby and figured it was all over. But it turns out it was just a break; a couple years ago we got back into it. I think that return gives my mom hope that one day I'll "find my way back" to the church. The Evangelical allegiance to Trump convinces me again that there's nothing to come back to.

2000. dc Talk, the biggest Christian band of the 90s, announced their indefinite hiatus with a greatest hits album called "Intermission." As the years went by, the intermission stretching ever longer, I sometimes pondered whether that name was a put-on. The Eagles in reverse: They didn't take a vacation, they broke up. Now I learn that dc Talk is getting back together in 2017 to play a single Caribbean cruise. Looks like there was nothing to come back to.

2007. I watched the 1965 film The Bedford Incident, which ends with the accidental launch of a nuclear missile, then white noise.

I was so furious at this ending that for years I fantasized about teaching a screenwriting class in which I would assign the students to replace "The End" with "Intermission" and write treatments for the "second half" of the movie. Where intermissions do not exist, it becomes necessary to invent them.

Because what is an intermission? It's a signpost on a journey. You're halfway there. It's a reminder of artifice: that the story was designed. Fear not, the artist is in control, and the artist will lead you back out. It's terror (because we do not yet know) but also hope (because someone does).

     Mittere: to let go.      Inter: between.      Intermission: to let go of something, but only for a time;      that is, "between" holding it and picking it back up again.

The intermission is eschatological. It proclaims, this is NOT the end. This is just a break. For two millennia, Christianity has been in intermission, awaiting the Second Coming. The second act. The intermission proclaims that an absence is really a presence. That a designer left a gap here for a purpose. That it's not just meaningless silence. "I am going there to prepare a place for you."

Where intermissions do not exist, it becomes necessary to invent them.