#that I am the weirdo who wrote Soul Powered

[ammg-old2]

When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagam and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advanced reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.

[doctor-looneys-remedy]

I think we need to talk about Harry Potter.

Not the TERF queen who wrote it. I think she is suffering from the whole "I'm important! Why aren't people listening to me!!?" thing.

Let me make myself clear, lest my words be misunderstood: I don't get the whole bathroom debate. I have walked out of many a bathroom stall on the tipsy side to find a straight, cishet guy at the sink, shrugging and saying that the men's was broken. Everyone was super chill and no one cared. Happens more often than you think. A hundred year-old building with plumbing that hasn't been updated since Kennedy was in office is going to have a problem or two, and my town has its share of these establishments.

I'm here to talk about the work itself. And it isn't really in defense of the work either. It's more about what I carried into the books when I read them, which was in my 20's. Not in my teen years.

I don't think Harry Potter is Shakespeare.

I have seen some interesting takes on why Harry Potter is bad from a writing perspective. A lot of it seems to boil down to some of the same points. I'm not going to go through all of them. I'm only going to talk about one, because it bridges into a bigger issue I have with fantasy writing.

There is this complaint that in HP, the system of magic isn't explained enough and doesn't have any rules that it operates by.

I need to be honest about this. Maybe I'm coming out of a bit of a closet by saying this, and maybe its a fucking odd thing: When I used to read books by fantasy authors as a kid or a teenager, anytime some "teacher" started some finger waggy "now these are the rules" or "if you do magic x it will cost x amount of soul points" or something that sounded remotely similar in some way, I just rolled my eyes and wanted to put the book down. Kind of a "Oh. here's this shit again" reaction.

I WANTED magic that could do damn near anything. I wanted someone to write about that kind of magic. Magic that could allow you to turn a continent upside down and materialize a pizza out of nothingness the next day.

Maybe the question is.. why do people think the "correct" way to write about a concept like actual fucking magic (!!?) is to cage it into a set of do's and don't's and making it cost something soul-changey to begin with? And why should that be the only way to do it? Am I the Only Weirdo who finds that whole thing just irritating at the end of the day?

Can we stop with the Dollar General and Walmart magic and instead, let our brains bathe in the luxury of full-on, 100% anything-goes magic?

I mean, I've been the Only Weirdo plenty of times, so no big surprise if I am the only person who thinks like this.

Edit:

I already know there are some who would argue in some kind of shade-filled, know-it-all way, "**I** just think it makes it more interesting if... "

(I know, you hear them say it in the exact same tone I do, don't you? You heard them in your head pronouncing every syllable of "interesting" in that certain way didn't you?)

O.k., fine. You can find whatever you want interesting. I don't give a shit. Let me counter that by saying that sometimes things are interesting because they are. They exist in the fiction world you are writing, and that is the point of interest. How is it that a human with nearly god-like powers isn't interesting, but a human who can turn himself into a turnip every second Thursday if he sacrifices an ounce of soul or a piece of a toe is?

[kammartinez]

When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagram and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advance reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.

[kamreadsandrecs]

When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagram and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advance reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.



[leogichidaa]

Oral Surgery: The Dementor's Kiss

This has been bothering me since I first read PoA, and the later exploration in the series of ghosts, the afterlife, and Horcruxes has only further befuddled me on the subject: what in creation happens to a soul after a dementor sucks it out of a person?

Logistically, the dementor's kiss is bizarre to me on a number of levels. To start with, the body survives after the soul is removed. I guess having soulless shells of humans walking the Earth adds a creepiness factor, but it's also an odd detail. Why leave the body alive? Through what mechanism are dementors able to dislodge a soul from its body without harming or killing the body? I used to think that perhaps by sucking out the soul of a person, they turn that person into a dementor, but that doesn't seem to be indicated in canon. In PoA Remus says:

If it can, the dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself...soul-less and evil. You'll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.

"Something like itself" suggests that he does not mean that you turn into an actual dementor. He also says "soul-less and evil" which has some interesting implications. It's possible that he means the state of a soulless person is inherently evil, not in the sense that it commits evil deeds, but more in the sense that it is a horrible thing that should not exist. But it's also possible that he is saying that a person, when left with nothing but their worst memories and thoughts, is naturally inclined toward committing atrocities and, in the absence of positive thoughts, is rendered incapable of positive deeds. A valid conclusion to draw and one of the myriad of reasons Azkaban is a terrible idea: taking a bunch of criminals and exposing them to beings that will make them soulless and evil is certainly not going to improve matters.

Remus also later claims there is "no chance at all of recovery" from the Kiss, but I think he's just lacking in creativity. I don't remember where I saw this, but someone somewhere floated the idea of taking the soul fragment out of a Horcrux and putting it into the body of someone who had been Kissed, which isn't recovery per se, but it sure is something.

You can exist without a soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working.

Sure, Remus, I guess you can, but genuinely why would you keep someone alive like that unless you're planning to do some fucked up magic and put a new soul fragment or a ghost in there? It's like leaving a remote control with no batteries on a table forever. What good is that doing anyone? For what possible purpose would anyone keep these shells of people alive? To keep them as the world's most unsettling pets? Fuck's sake, put them to rest, please.

That's just the empty body though. What about the soul? And what exactly is a soul in the WWoHP? (Conveniently, @artemisia-black and @ashesandhackles published this meta today, which offers further exploration on the topic) We can infer what a soul is based on how Remus describes the body without a soul:

But you'll have no sense of self, no memory, no...anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You'll just--exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone...forever lost.

"No anything" is about as vague as you could possibly be, thank you Remus, but we at least know that all your memories and sense of self are contained in the soul. Seems like maybe your memories should be stored in the brain where they belong, but Remus says they're in the soul and who am I to argue? And Diary Riddle is a great illustration of how all-encompassing even half a soul is. Diary Riddle has memories, thoughts, ambitions, plans, etc. It seems that the body and brain are the machine, capable of functioning independently to an extent, but the soul is the substance of a person.

The fact that dementors feed on souls, in addition to happiness and joy, also implies something about the very nature of a soul. Something that is also implied by Remus' comment of "soul-less and evil". Souls, intact souls, are implied to be full of purity and goodness. You fracture your soul when you commit horrific deeds. All people seem to be born with an inherently good soul that they may mar and damage later with their wicked ways.

So a dementor makes out with you and you lose your soul, the whole of what makes you you. It is apparently "forever lost" but what does that actually mean? Let's say it is truly gone, lost, permanently deleted. You, as a substantial person, cease to exist. In a universe where an afterlife is a certainty proved by ghosts and reinforced by the Veil, it makes sense that ceasing to exist is "much worse" than death to someone like Remus (or Harry, or, indeed, most characters in the series). "You don't get to go to wizard heaven" does seem to be the fate-worse-than-death implied throughout the series.

Are the dementors sucking these souls into a black hole though? Why and how are they being wholly and completely destroyed? Souls can and are separated from the body (ghosts) or fragmented (Horcruxes) in the series without being utterly destroyed or losing their substance. And soul fragments are very difficult to destroy, that's a major plot point of DH. Do dementors have like...basilisk venom in their stomachs or something? How are they digesting a human soul?

I'm obviously way overthinking this. But I am also unable to stop overthinking this. What if dementors don't actually suck out souls for sustenance at all? What if they do it for protection? What if they're making themselves like living Horcruxes? We know that there is an established way to repel a dementor, but how do you kill the fuckers? We don't have any info on that. Maybe they are neigh on impossible to destroy once they've taken in enough souls because the souls function like armor. Maybe the souls are intact, more or less, in there, and they're just trapped for eternity inside the dementors. Which is presumably bad, but dementors are ingesting a bunch of happiness and joy, so maybe it's not even a fate worse than death, maybe it's a party in there. Who can say?

[theunderdogwrites]

In Defense of Marilyn Manson

Just kidding.

This is another one of those ‘if you live under a rock, you might not know what is going on’ pieces. But because this story appears to be unfolding daily, I’d think you’ve heard a murmur here or there even if you haven’t really paid too much attention to it because for many, I think this may fall into the “that guy has been a messed-up weirdo for years so I’m not surprised” category.

Please note that in NO WAY I am making fun of this situation, but I learned a long time ago that I require a certain amount of humor to be able to digest much of what this world presents to me.

As always, let me give you the Coles Notes version with the hopes you will go and do your own reading as well.

On February 1 actress Evan Rachel Wood posted this on her Instagram:

"The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson. He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander or blackmail. I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent."

Quick history lesson – They started dating in 2007 when she was 18 and he was 34 and were engaged for a brief time in 2010.

This was Manson’s response to what she wrote:

"Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality. My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how - and why - others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth."

Since the original statement on February 1 a number of women have come forward with stories of their own ranging from physical and emotional abuse to human trafficking. And everyday something new is revealed. Evan Rachel Woods is feverishly posting on her Insta-Story and is slowly burying Manson in an ocean of consequences. She isn’t “fired up” or “a woman scorned”, she is a victim rising above the shame she has felt and the fear of what others will say about her to tell her story and encourage others to do the same. She is the voice that started the ball rolling. The ball that is about to crush Marilyn Manson.

Whenever I write stuff that is currently being heavily featured in the media, I always dive into articles so I can get as much information as possible. But more importantly, I plunge my sensitive little soul into the murky depths known as “the comments section”. I do this because unlike those polished, finished pieces the comments section will give you a better idea of what your fellow human beings think and feel about the topic at hand. And it is never polished or even polite. And often not for the faint at heart. In case you didn’t already know – people can be quite terrible.

The comments section is the modern-day gladiator pit. Only most (not all) of the participants are not ripped, athletic warriors but rather drooling basement dwellers with one hand down their pants (not gender specific by the way) and the other hand maltreating the letters on their keyboard.

Side note: Look, I am not the grammar police as I often just push past all the warnings from the Gestapo editing program in Microsoft Word. BUT I know the value of proper spelling, well placed punctuation and valid attempts to appear smarter than a domesticated turkey by making sure sentences are well-thought out and complete. Raising your argument doesn’t mean USING ALL CAPS AND ABUSING THESE THINGS -> !!!

I just deleted three paragraphs going over the recent “reckoning” that has taken place in the past few years with regards to sexual and physical abuse accusations against (mostly) men in positions of some kind of power. I eliminated all that writing because I started to tumble off topic. I’m not writing about all the dicks now getting their comeuppance, but rather the reactions to it being Marilyn Manson’s turn in the chamber.

Victim shaming is sadly a real thing.

The easiest way I can explain this to you – if a person gets pickpocketed and then blamed because they should’ve known better than to carry their wallet in their back pocket.

Evan Rachel Woods and others have come out to accuse Manson of some pretty appalling acts of abuse and what I’ve found to be the biggest reaction is, “How did they not know he was a bad guy? His music is so graphic and they thought it was all an act? Why did they stay so long?”. As innocent as those questions might seem, and I say that because our brains don’t always serve us or others well, it is a form of discrediting those women. Let’s be honest here… it’s hard to look at Marilyn Manson and his art form and not say, “What the fuck, this guy has bad idea written all over him!”. I feel that is a perfectly reasonable response, but that is where it should end. I think it is fair to pause and attempt to understand the choices of others, but it’s heartless to minimize their experience by placing blame on them for a situation we couldn’t possibly understand if it has never happened to us.

And like I’ve quoted before: People only understand from their level of perception. But that doesn’t stop them from laying on the judgement and damaging already fragile individuals with their inability to show compassion for a fellow human being. Reading through comment sections isn’t just maddening, it’s disappointing and sad but also a real look into how awful many people feel about themselves… to the point where they seem to derive some pleasure or satisfaction from condemning a rape victim for wearing a short skirt and getting drunk.

So… we have to touch on this to be balanced: innocent until proven guilty. Only these days it’s an automatic trial by media with the public acting as judge, jury and executioner. This is where “cancel culture” steps in and within days can destroy an entire career / life. I am not a fan of cancel culture. It does not give people a chance to learn from their mistakes or make amends as it immediately harms their very existence. Often times even before any proof has surfaced. I don’t think I need to tell you how dangerous this is… the fact that just an accusation could ruin your life.

Let me make this clear: if someone comes forward and claims they’ve been sexually assaulted/abused, they need to be taken seriously and not dismissed based upon the circumstances, their gender identity, the color of their skin, their economic position or profession or the person they’re accusing. In turn, the individual being accused should be given time to address the claims before the public begins demolishing their life.

A reoccurring comment in almost all these cases where someone comes forward and alleges abuse YEARS after it happened, is – “Why did they wait so long to come forward?”.

Is this a fair question? Sure. And I feel it is asked because our brain needs to find a way to understand the information we are being given. Because while we’d all like to think that if in the same situation we’d be unfuckable with and anyone who dared to bring damage to our doorstep would immediately suffer the consequences, we actually cannot predict our reaction. There are too many unknown variables to be able to confidently say we’d instantly speak up and seek retribution.

The fear of not being believed. The fear of being blamed. The fear of rejection. The fear of retaliation from the person being accused. The fear of being forever defined by your experience. The fear.

It does not matter the why, what matters is the chance they’ve taken by speaking up at all. Those who come forward should be embraced, not ridiculed. Not abandoned. Not criticized.

“Don’t ask why victims wait so long to speak up. Ask what systems were in place to keep them quiet”. Anonymous

I own a few Marilyn Manson CD’s. And I’ve even attended one of his concerts. Would I say I am a fan? Probably a number of years ago I was but truthfully, I’ve not paid attention to any of his music in recent years because I feel it devolved while my taste evolved. That’s not a slam against him or anyone who fancies his work, it’s more a statement on how I’ve matured and now seek out music that feels authentic to me.

The one concert I attended was opened by Courtney Love. I know, what a duo to pay money to see. Near the end of Manson’s set he made a disparaging remark about Love and trashed her music. At the time he was wearing some pretty hefty platform shoes so it made it all the more hilarious when from out of nowhere she charged like a rhino and tackled him to the stage; throwing punches at his head all the way down. When he finally was able to get up, he announced the show was over. There would be no encore and then him and his bandmates trashed the stage in a temper tantrum worthy of a toddler Napoleon. Still makes me laugh to this day.

Shoutout to Evan Rachel Wood and her most recent movie ‘Kajillionaire’. Watched it on demand about a month ago and it’s a brilliant comedy that will also pull at your heart. I highly recommend you give it a chance.

Check out the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiMPCevu8Wk

[recurring-polynya]

Fanfic Weekly Roundup 9/14/2020:

Okay, it’s been, like, 2 months since I did one of these, and I apologize for that, but also, August was like... really dry at the old fanfic well? And I’ve been working my ass off for the last three week (at... what, exactly, Polynya? It is hard to say) Anyway, here’s some fanfics that I liked. Hopefully, it won’t take another 2 months before we have another.

I think I missed this one when it first came out (otherwise, it would have made the last roundup... I write these by going back through my AO3 history), but The Bet, by @lethanwolf was really cute! It was by an author who doesn’t usually go for RenRuki, but wrote it for a friend, and I really respect stretching like that, and they did a great job!

I was here first by tasteoftheforbidden is a Byakuya/Soi Fon story and I cannot imagine why I clicked on it in the first place, but it was really cute??? Like, at first they are really grumpy, and then they are like, “ah, I respect what a grump you are” and then they eat snacks. It worked. I was delighted by it, perhaps you will be as well.

Here We Meet Again by @marlasinger93-blog is just getting started, but the first chapter is really, really cute! It’s a Rukia and Renji awkwardly reconnecting after the Soul Society Arc, which I will openly admit I have an endless appetite for. I helped translate it, and I hope there will be more eventually!

I feel like I mentioned Captivate, by before @kissedbynightshade, but I couldn’t find it, so I will mention it now! It’s a little bit high concept-- it’s a modern AU where Izuru has the power to jump back in time-- usually a few minutes-- to prevent tragedy from occurring. However, after Rangiku is killed, he jumps all the way back to his teenhood, where he has the possibility to prevent deaths of Renji, Momo, and Shuuhei. It’s not actually very hard to follow, and it is an amazing mood piece. Just really chewy, poetic, melancholy Izuru (who is trans in this story; it is just sort of slid in there very naturally and it works), with a heavy dose of mystery. It is, as they say, my jam.

Is it time for the @kazeshini-s section of the roundup? We have two this time!:

Personal Questions features Orihime digging into those burning questions about how shinigami function that we all want the answer to.

Cut a Deal (We’re All Gonna Die Anyway) is Advance Team Arc fic about Orihime going to Soul Society to train with Rukia and I admit I requested it and I don’t care it was SO GOOD. Features both Orihime & Renji bonding AND Orihime & Rukia bonding, what more could you ask for???

These two are not on AO3, but do not sleep on this one where Chad Makes Renji a Burrito or this Karakura Kids Cuddle Puddle.

time in a bottle by atlntyda is a fairly short, Orihime introspection piece, but I really liked it!

Somebody to Someone by @jkrobertson Excuse me, did someone say lieutenant friendship fic? This is my love language.

Squad 4's Pregnancy Guide for the Unwed Shinigami  by manonlechat is a very silly fic where Gin is a gremlin and Matsumoto is like “well, this might as well happen.” I got a good laugh out of it.

In Between Days by @spyder-m Renji birthday fic! Renji birthday fic! Renji reflects on 40 years worth of birthdays, with and without Rukia.

the one to someone by @shamelessllamapeanutthing After the Soul Society Arc, Rukia chews over who she wants to be and who she wants to be with. Ugh, I loved this one. Great character work on Rukia, and very good and sexy banter with Renji. I am extremely bad at writing sexual tension, and I am jealous of the chemistry here. (I am very good at two-halves-of-one-idiot, and I am thankful for that, but every once in a while, it would be nice...sigh)

Icy Summits by Chaotic Dreamer was a very cute story about Renji and Rukia going on a mission as lieutenants together, shortly after they start dating. What I liked about this, is that the tension of the story is based on them both trying to do what they think is best, and they talk it out in a really healthy way, and that shit clears my pores and whitens my teeth.

Anchor and Vulnerable by squeaker_deaker. Renruki family drabbles. Real, actual-100-words drabbles. I could never. How.

We all know how I feel about ByaRen fic-- I don’t care for the pairing very extremely specific reasons, but I like both characters so much that I will occasionally read one if I think the characterization is gonna be real good (shippers be doin’ characterization, I said it). Anyway, I saw the tags “scenery porn” and “samurai do samurai things” on Heart Tangled by Grizmelder (there is a grizmelder on Tumblr who I think might be the same person, but I am afraid to tag them in case they aren’t although I just followed them because as I was scrolling thru their blog, I found both Brendan Frasier content and the LOTR Volvo meme, so obvs they are cool and I really hope they don’t click on my blog and say “who is this anime weirdo?”). Anyway, look, if you are a Period Drama Slut like me, you gotta read this. Friends, I shipped it.  It’s an AU, of course, and it somehow manages to circumvent all my canon ByaRen hangups and I don’t know who I am any more. It’s just... costumes and hair and archery and poetry and longing and sexiness. The latest chapter was epistolary. Oh, right, there is actual porn in it also, you have been warned. (also period-accurate homophobia and suicide refs, it’s a pretty serious and heart-wrenching story)

I know I am always on here, shilling The Thin Red Line. The last few chapters were absolute fire, and it was absolutely the high point of my week when a new one went up. The author, who is A_Fine_Piece on AO3 and Crimson Bttrfly on ff.net, recently announced she is discontinuing it after she got some harsh comments, and also deleted her Tumblr. I am absolutely devastated by this. She wasn’t someone I knew super-well, but we responded to each other’s comments and I really liked her. This was actually the second time this week I heard about someone getting negative fanfic comments, and all I’ll say about that is, if you’re reading a fanfic and you hate everything about it, why don’t you give yourself the gift of closing the tab and not saying anything at all? I can’t even imagine what someone could criticize about this fic, it is so well-crafted and beautifully written. I am so, so mad about this. Please leave a kind comment for an author you love this week, if you can. Writing fanfic is pretty thankless compared to the amount of effort that goes into it, we gotta protect and cherish our authors (and artists, too, for that matter!). My poor, weak heart cannot take any more of my faves quitting.

[aurora-daily]

A Beautiful Soul

Interview by Katharina Weiß for myp-magazine (August 19th, 2019).

Norwegian music artist Aurora jumped out of a natural fairytale into our urban world to spread her message of connectedness and love—in a unique and utterly beautiful way.

When Norwegian music artist Aurora Aksnes published her debut album, “All My Demons Greeting Me As Friends,” in 2016, the success was kind of overwhelming. From one day to another, her music has caught the eye of outsiders, light beings, nonbinary people and even mainstream audiences. The result: endless tours and TV appearances.

More noteworthy, however, are the encounters with her fans, who entrust everything to Aurora, bring her gifts wherever she is—from mobile phones to dead insects. In no time, she has been gathering “warriors and weirdos” around her and became a projection screen for so much.

With her third album, “A Different Kind Of Human – Step 2,” Aurora wants to empower every listener for the world we’re living in. Compared to her second record, “Infections Of A Different Kind – Step 1,” the sound became louder, more demanding, and more upright. While the melodies seem more carefree and pleasing, Aurora’s lyrics couldn’t be more pointed: She precisely describes us, our soul life and the way we treat ourselves.

Consuming that album is no less than looking in a mirror while being fully embraced. And meeting Aurora personally is an unusual experience: Her voice is as soft as a mountain spring and her sentences are as light as a natural drug trip. Let’s immerse in the thoughts of this beautiful soul!

"Humans are so diverse, but the world has forgotten that we have to embrace more than one kind.”

Katharina: In the past, you stated that your songs are “more a story of the world’s experiences”—rather than your own. What feelings are attached to that quote?

Aurora: It’s a very emotional world. But it’s not really made for humans like us, for quiet people and weird people. Humans are so diverse, but the world has forgotten that we have to embrace more than one kind. My musical world wants to be a safe place for people where everything is allowed, where you can just exist and be accepted.

“I feel that my followers and I are very equal and full of light.”

Katharina: You have a very strong community of passionate listeners who bring up a lot of personal stories in their comments and posts regarding you. How have you created this followership of “weirdos and warriors?”

Aurora: I did not create anything. It just happened. They did it themselves. I don’t know how we became so many. But now we are this big army of love. I think I try to speak to all of them at the same time and I meet many of them in person. And at my shows, I actually feel them emotionally through their energy. I try to signal them that I want every single one of them to be here with me for experiencing this exact moment, as perfect as it is. I think they know that I appreciate them. It’s magical: We have a very loving relationship. They understand when I am tired, and they respect it. I feel that my followers and I are very equal and full of light.

“It is easier to love yourself when you realize how important you are—and that you have a lot to do in this world.”

Katharina: We always read about people telling us to love ourselves, now it‘s you—but how can we deal with it when we’re failing that task?

Aurora: Failing is good. To embrace that is a very good approach for falling in love with the people around you as well: We are all kind of failures in the process of learning to love ourselves the way we really are. And this unites us. If you just imagine being old and lying on your deathbed, having spent your whole life trying to love yourself—that’s a bit sad, isn’t it? A human life is quite long these days and we have a lot of time to learn about. What can we change and what can we not change? But the most important thing is to learn acceptance. If you are not the way you hoped to be, you are the way you are anyway—don’t waste your valuable energy, spend it on beautiful things! It is easier to love yourself when you realize how important you are—and that you have a lot to do in this world.

"I am very excited for humankind to make itself proud again."

Katharina: You draw major inspiration from nature, so it is no wonder that you also speak up against environmental cruelty. Would you consider yourself an environmental activist?

Aurora: Absolutely. It is the responsibility of all of us to fix what the people before us have damaged—because they did not know what we know now. We have claimed that we are the most intelligent species on the planet. So it’s about time that we act that way. I am very excited for humankind to make itself proud again.

"If you have love in you, you need to share it.”

Katharina: You sound very passionate now. What else makes you so passionate?

Aurora: I am a very thirsty person. Among the many things that make me passionate, making music is the biggest one. When I am in this process, it feels like making love with something divine. Another important topic: respect. To treat all living things equal. No matter of gender or species. And of course: love. If you have love in you, you need to share it. And you should be allowed and proud to do so. We wasted so many years on establishing that only same-sex love is ok. But this worldview will lose in the end.

“When I was little, I was very inwards. I noticed people’s pain and when they tried to hide stories and vulnerability.”

Katharina: How can we imagine your upbringing? Was your environment always so politically aware?

Aurora: When I was little, I was very inwards. I noticed people’s pain and when they tried to hide stories and vulnerability. And I was always interested in the most intimate and personal emotions, especially my own. But I started looking outwards just after I finished my first album, “All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend.” That was when I realized how big the world is. And that there is so much to support. There are issues beyond self-care that we have to fight for. And we have to hold on to our victories. Because some time a man or woman will gain power again and use it to make love and self-empowerment illegal again.

“Growing up in the forest makes you a philosopher."

Katharina: Very true. But back to the first part of the question: How did your childhood look like?

Aurora: I grew up in a very small town. I lived in a fjord. When you translate it, it is called “the fjord of light.” Sounds like a fairytale place, I know. I grew up there with my two sisters and my mum and dad. And we had many cats, they were all grey. We moved there when I was three and for me, it was a true gift. For my older sisters, it must have been a really difficult experience to change all their surroundings, but for me, it was just beautiful. Your eyes can linger and travel over the sea and the mountains when you look out of the window. And behind the house, there was a big forest. I used to play there every day until a big bell next to the house was rang by my parents to tell me that diner was ready. Growing up in the forest makes you a philosopher.

Katharina: Let’s take the time for a philosophical game then. All my next questions are about “last times” in your life. First question: When was the last time you got surprised?

Aurora: I did get surprised when we landed in Oslo recently. It was about packing your suitcase. I opened it and realized: I just packed things that looked good, colorwise. But when I unpacked it, I recognized that I have nothing useful with me. So I had to buy some new panties.

“One night I wrote a song in my dreams.”

Katharina: When was the last time you remembered a dream very well?

Aurora: This morning. I used to have a dream journal and I remember my dreams very well. One night I wrote a song in my dreams. It was the title track from my album “Infections Of A Different Kind – Step 1.” I woke up in the middle of the night and went down to my piano. I pushed the record button on my phone and played the melody. And then I went to bed again.

Katharina: When was the last time you experienced pleasure?

Aurora: This morning. When I masturbated in the hotel room.

Katharina: When was the last time you had to say goodbye to someone—or something?

Aurora: I am often traveling with my sisters. One of them is in town with me right now, but we had to say goodbye to the other one two days ago. It is always sad, even though we are only separated for a little while.

“My supporters are really attracted to me because they resonate with what I say.”

Katharina: When was the last time a listener of your music—I don’t like the word fan—really touched you?

Aurora: I feel this way too, fan sounds so cocky. I have a big issue with it. It is not a fair word to these amazing people. Maybe we can use supporter instead? My supporters are really attracted to me because they resonate with what I say. We are similar people in some ways. Many of them are extremely artistic. Sometimes when I meet a person, they are too excited to talk to me. They can’t say anything. We all know that struggle. But they give me their letters and their words are so poetic and creative. And often I am taken aback when reading it, just thinking: What a beautiful soul!

[lynxgriffin]

Straight Outta Monster Narnia

HEY HEY I WASN’T EXPECTING TO DO THIS EVER AGAIN BUT WE’RE BACK

I’M GONNA PLAY ME SOME DELTA RUNE HERE

THOUGHTS AS I GO! ARE UNDER THE CUT!

Here we GOOOOOOO~!

Survey Program! Nice! Ominous!

I am here yes!

Truly excellent dude

OH MAKING A VESSEL NOW what are we Xehanort

NEATO I can pick Chara or Frisk heads or others…

Let’s do someone new. This kinda longish hair head.

STRIPES FOR DAYS! Longish sleeves, methinks

The legs are almost all the same LMAO

This is so friggin creepy I l OVE IT

Favorite food is PAIN nah it’s soft

BLOOD TYPE D. D for DOGGO

You have been gifted with kindness, not-XionFrisk

Pain AND seizure. Kinda wonder what happens if you say no tho…

But I don’t want to start over so let’s go with yes

OH FRIGGIN BUUUUURNED BY THE GAME, HAHAHA

Hi Toriel, you’re looking nice!

That’s a lot of friggin trophies over there

Also Kris, you need some eyes

RELIGIOUS SKA

So we have overachieving perfect child and sad boring child, okay

Awww Gerson wrote a book! How neat

It’s only you…..FOR NOW!!!!

It just isn’t home without white fur stuck in the drain, is it

CHAIRIEL’S RETURN!!!!

Also there’s some weird graphical flicker going on when I move and I wonder if it’s not because I’m playing full screen here

“Spray For The Boys, Flamin’ Hot Pizza Flavor” Damn Toby I missed your incredible sense of humor

DOES TORIEL USE PET SHAMPOO please say yes

ASRIEL’S AT COLLEGE AND UNDYNE’S A POLICE MONSTER, PERFECT

PROFESSOR ALPHYS IMMA GET AN A+ IN ANIME CLASS

DAMN who do I pick as my partner

Like…I really want Temmie…but also Snowdrake…

Random snake is also very good…

Ahhh I see this is gonna be pre-determined

HAHAHAHA FUCKIN BURNED AGAIN BY THIS HORRIBLE BLUE DUCK

Thank you cool snake I love your origin story

Oh this reindeer girl is very cute

MOTHA. FOKKIN. SUSIE

I instantly love her, goodbye

Oh Alphys you’re so not good at putting anyone in trouble

I JUST REALIZED TEMMIE HAS HER EGG ON THE DESK

Susie are you eating chalk

Oh sheet I like Susie less now

GAH DAMN THIS ESCALATED QUICKLY

Susie, Kris doesn’t even HAVE a face

Haha totally cut off my answer there

Hmm. I sense…a theme here.

Wow this really is putting on the restrictive aspects here

Now that’s a spooky face

Oh it ain’t gonna be that simple, mean girls

Well, this sure seems like an underground! Also…Kris is green now, okay

Hi there creepy waving things!

To reiterate: this is soooo creepy AND I LOVE IT

Puzzles! We got puzzles again! CREEPY PUZZLES

Whelp, we found Susie, just kinda hiding out in a…dead dust bunny thingie

LOL so much for a party member following you around

Well this is a new and interesting take on the bullet hell mechanics

Such interesting and different architecture

THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESSSSS

Yes let’s take a sudden HARD SHIFT into Final Fantasy

THE QUEST OF THE DELTA KNIGHTS that was an MST3K ep you know

About like…Leonardo da Vinci actually. Except he was a whiny bitch

LMAO Susie just “nah destroying the world sounds neat”

JOKESTER SANS GLIDES IN A FLAMING TRICYCLE SURE WHY NOT

VERY DIFFERENT COMBAT SYSTEM

“Dunno how I got an ax but like, that’s cool”

CAN’T WAIT FOR THE REMIXES OF THIS BATTLE MUSIC OKAY

Dunno if there’s a pacifist version of this game but I stick to tradition so I’m gonna try it

RALSEI. I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE

THE POWER OF FLUFFY BOYS SHINES WITHIN YOU it sure as hell does, game

The heckin heck Ralsei is so cute

Yup yup we gonna try pacifist this first time!

“If you’re reading this…I guess you’re dead.” Fair enough.

Gaster noises when trying to use the cell phone, hmmmm…

It’s an inverse papou fruit!

Susie just up and attacks this cake, all right

Battle is cool but it’s gonna take some getting used to, think I accidentally used both of my items

YOUR SENSE OF DIRECTION WON’T SAVE YOU NOW

“It’s like a dinner made out of three glasses of milk” Ralsei you’re SO CUTE

Now to see if TP stays leveled between battles…

“I thought you were running away.” / “Yeah, I finished.”

Fugdamn I want —pictures of Spiderman— remixes of this music ON MY DESK TODAY

FRIGHTENING FANFARE

Damn that puzzle still is tricky

Gah damn that was hilarious but also terrifying

We have the power of FLUFFY BOYS and MEAN GIRLS we are UNSTOPPABLE

Ohhh so that’s what the heart outline does!

Now that is a coooool cat and I like him already

Awww I don’t have enough money for the spooky sword

Susie just roastin’ everybody left and right

THEY GOT BARRY

These mechanics continue to be interesting and a bit more complex

“Damn, didn’t get to impale myself” I’m sure you’ll get your chance Susie

It’s really interesting how we’re basically group-battling to PREVENT the tank from beating the crap out of everyone

Oh now that light trick is weird

They keep throwing the usual chess and playing card guys at us and somehow I’m Suspicious

Is that a bucket. ARE Y’ALL HOMESTUCKING AT ME AGAIN

LMAO did Susie call us the Fuckboys or something

Oh, the Shit Squad, I guess!

THE POWER OF THE SHIT SQUAD SHINES WITHIN YOU HECK YESSSS

“I, Mr. Society, am far too intelligent to ever bow down to such a tyrant!” Hmmm.

Oh, it’s Sir Lion Plateface again

L E G S

THE BOSS JUST DRINKS A GALLON OF MILK THAT’S FINE

Well Ralsei got kinda junked there but WE DEFEATED SIR LION PLATEFACE

Cakes…are also my enemy…

Yeeeeah kinda saw that one coming

Susie I get the feeling you’re not going to enjoy being a bad guy either

Dang son I have no clue what’s going on anymore WE JUST HAD SOME SALSA IN A TREE STUMP

This jack’s got my number

That sure is a three-eyed three-headed cat thingamajig

Awww I like Clover

“All proceeds go to kicking your ass” CAN I USE THIS LINE IN REAL LIFE PLEASE

Hot damn we just squeaky hammered our broken cake into ULTIMATE CAKE

Why does a sweet little boy have a mustache indeed.

Create a machine to thrash your own ass, nice

It’s my beautiful death laser duck! Tops in GUN’S

Man Susie and Lancer are just having the time of their lives here

Finally, respect for pinecone-eaters!

Awww Susie, are you actually starting to worry about someone who respects your eating of chalk and pinecones

Oh thank goodness, got through that maze thing

Yes, finally, it’s our DUCK TANK LASER

Why does it say Tuna on it

“Your design sucked so we blew it up” This is like that one Berlin tour guide I had

GANGED UP ON THEM WITH KINDNESS, HA

Whelp, back to telling enemies that Susie will kick them in the shins I guess!

YES LANCER JOIN THE SHIT SQUAD

OMFG THAT FAAAAACE WHAT IS THAT FACE

Hey we’ve got a full Final Fantasy team now! Neat

STOOL FORME

I like how Lancer just sliiiiiides around outside the party instead of walking with

Hmmm well that friendship feeling didn’t last long

You done got locked in the dungeon

Yup sure did eat that jail moss two minutes in

HUH, we’re controlling Susie now

In which choices do not matter…

SUSIE’S FOKKIN PISSED

And we can’t control her actions…but why controlling the human soul?

A pair of eyes got arrested?! What IS the world coming to?!!

Oh dear, we found a bunch of kings in baby jail

Why are these filthy cages so happy-looking

Awwww Susie joined the party for realizes!

So, this about final boss point for this business?

Why are you guys just sitting on a pile of loot

And just who is this sassy lost child?

BAAHAHAHAAA

HECK YEAH WE GET TO FLIRT AGAIN

I am now BED INSPECTOR yes

Hello again fancy blue boy

“Can…can we see it” / “No.”

This sure is a jammin party with CLUB MUSIC OH HO HO HO

Awww he put his bicycle to bed

‘Welcome to my shop, you ungrateful worms” HELL YEAH

I do not wisheth to hear your MP3s! I would rather listen to the sweet song of Death!

Prepare for a battle with…WHATEVER THIS IS!!!!

JUST FUGGIN CHUCK RALSEI AT SIR LION PLATEFACE, I LIKE IT

Six dollars, for all of that?! Geez

WHELP this looks like final boss time…

Hiiiii there Lancer

Oh dang is gettin serious now

Oh woooow that’s…someone’s fetish right there

HOKAY that was tricky but! Having the defense abilities certainly helped with pacifism through that…

Despite ending this peacefully, I don’t think this scene is gonna end on a happy note…

W H E L P

DAYUM that face from Susie!!

Awwww poor Ralsei

We only have BAD-byes WUAH WUAH WUAAAH

DAWWW lil’ Asriel-lookin dude with glasses (and YES I see that anagram there)

LMAO Susie’s face

EPIC ROCK MUSIIIIIC

Also I’ve really been enjoying the color effects

Awww look at this epic adventure you two had in the closet

So basically we went to Monster Narnia, neat

Awww Susie likes Monster Narnia

Oh no we worried Toriel! THE WORST

LIBRARBY

YOU STUDY THOSE HOT DEMON COMICS FOR COLLEGE, TEMMIE

Hiiii Toby you busy makin’ something!

ALPHYS NO, YOU BETRAY MEW MEW KISSY CUTIE

OFFICE UNDYNE, DOn’T ARREST ME

I like reindeer girl’s rowdy hospitalized dad

PARTY ANIMAL TORIEL CONFIRMED

I like how there’s just a poster on the wall in this room that reads PAIN

The police tape simply reads NGGAAAAAHHHHH!

Good grief there’s SO MUCH STUFF TO EXPLORE HERE BUT I HAVE TO KEEP GOING

Snowdrakes don’t have arms, oh no!!!

“Does it hurt to be made of blood??” ….Yes. Yes it does.

HIIIIIIIII SANS

Woah woah woah WOAH WOAH SANS

Everyone is here! Even Ice Wolf!

Yes I’ll take a Double Ice Pizza you weirdos

OH MY GOOOOOOOOOD IT’S BURGERPANTS

10 OUT OF 10 GAME NOW

HIS FACES!!!! “C H I C K S”

That was brilliant, Burgerpants, thank you for existing

Catty!!! Hey where’s Bratty!

Noooo you gotta be besties with Bratty!

Brother Doug…?

Oh no, Mettaton, come out and talk to us!

ASGORE, HELLO

OMG Asgore hugs

Soul flowers….???

Awwww got some flowers for Toriel

THE GAY GUARDS IN THEIR GAY FLANNEL, YAY

It’s so late but I can’t stop until I’ve talked to LITERALLY EVERYONE

Thaaaat’s politics! …Rarely.

Comes to church for the fruit juice, sounds about right

DOG GRAVE, NO

Let’s go into the woods…what could go wrong…

Why can’t I get into the creepy shed…

Well, I think I got everything, so let’s go home now…

ASRIEL MAINS YOSHI IN SMASH CONFIRMED

Awwww Toriel is not big on Asgore’s bouquet!

OKAY decided to go to sleep here.

…Well that didn’t work out great

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

UUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

WHAT??????????

WHAT????????????

WHAT?????????

HAHA I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THE FUK HAPPENED IN ALL OF THIS BUT UH. WHEN’S CHAPTER TWO??

THAT SURE WAS A HELL OF A THING

No really Toby please WHAAAAAAATTT

OKAY I HOPE I DIDN’T MISS ANYTHING IMPORTANT BYYYYEEEE

[kangofu-cb]

director's cut thingy! would love to hear some stuff from call it what you want to or the security failure series

I answered a Call It What You Want To question here, so I think I’ll tell you a little about Security Issues!

The Security Issues verse has kind of a weird beginning.  I wrote the beginning of the first fic as a cool museum-heist sort of universe for @villainny because she is a beautiful and wonderful human being who was having a bad day

Then, someone *cough @claraxbarton cough* and I had a conversation about how... forceful? James’ personality was in the fic and then I don’t actually know how it turned into this power dynamic, but I really really like it.  Clint crying is Word of God now (thanks Matt Fraction) so I was just a little ahead of the curve on that one. 

I wrote the second fic because... shit why did I write that one? Oh! @thatsmysecretduh (who is a wonderful menace) did a lovely podfic for me and I wanted to write her something nice.  And filthy.  

The third one is DIRECTLY @thatsmysecretduh‘s fault.  She sent me an utterly FILTHY gif of a spanking, then listened to me talk out how to make that work in ‘verse for like three hours.  

I love these fics for so many reasons - I’m exploring a new dynamic for these characters, building this really intricate and interesting relationship between the two of them, and writing some crazy-hot (or at least, I think so) smut between two people who have a deep, emotional connection.  Also, I am learning a lot about kink and side-note I really need to drop a thank you to @amberlyinviolet here for helping me with all things kink.  She’s a terrific person who puts up with my dumb vanilla ass all the time, and answers the most ridiculous questions.

The reality here is that we all have things that are smoking hot in our brains, things that we maybe wouldn’t ever do in real life, for whatever reasons - trust issues, trauma, the lack of circus acrobat flexibility, whatever - and putting that stuff down on paper in fic form and tossing it into the wind is a way to vicariously live a fantasy.  

Writing porn and posting it for strangers on the internet is a little bit like baring your soul - it’s saying hey look at my weird kinks, aren’t they hot? And hoping that the answer is, if not yes, then at least it’s not gross you fucking weirdo.  

And honestly, who doesn’t want someone to pet their hair and tell them what a good job they’re doing?

Director’s Cut

[teacherintransition]

One Weekend, Vincent Van Gogh and Matthew McConaughey… Opposite Sides of The Same Coin

*photo courtesy of NPR.org

“Alright, alright, alright…” McConaughey

I’ve written in several articles regarding retirement, change of life, transitioning etc. etc. and I’ve gone to pains to point out that everyone’s path will look different. Short of being a billionaire where the sky’s the limit; pursuing your individual path … well, it ain’t easy. This weekend I was offered two radically different points of view of attaining self fulfillment… and of being unable to do so.

Kim and I had a fantastic weekend that included a Scottish Highlands Festival, visiting the grandson and hijo primero, spending the night with hijo segundo at his new home and a surprise gift from my wife with tickets to the Van Gogh Immersion Experience. We drove the “hell” out of our Chrysler sedan going from Sherman, Tx to Prosper to Madisonville to Houston and to Conroe. No question my wife knew that the driving would be a small price to pay for me to spend such deeply powerful, personal moments with Vincent. Yes, I call him Vincent… how else would soulmates address each other but with familiarity? Vincent is my soulmate … which is a term that I believe isn’t restricted to romance and relationships… depending on which life your living at that moment. Yes, you heard me right, I am indeed one of those weirdos. Some Buddhist, some Christian, some indigenous, some Celtic…New Age, transcendentalist, blah, blah, blah. Universalists would be the best term but I HATE labels. I believe this immortal existence is made up of many lives, in many times, on many planes of existence all designed to enlighten our consciousness with each living. Soulmates are people of the same spirit, loves, struggles and states of mind who are linked. Sometimes it could be husband and wife; sometimes circumstances keep you from meeting; sometimes you’re separated by time; sometimes it’s a best friend or sibling; but in the framework of an eternal quest to get things right… temporary separation from your soulmate is just a blip in our existence. Vincent is my soulmate or it’s Kurt Cobain or Frida Kahlo… or hell, maybe they are all the same people. Admit it, by now you think I’m making this crap up as I go…just setting up the blocks the best way I can as the saying goes, “wisdom is where you find it.”

Though I’ve digressed in major fashion, the Van Gogh exhibit was priceless in my reckoning and I so closely identify with the quest that Vincent cruelly endured. I am always looking for “truth” … I read Sartre, Buddha, Jesus, Plato, Thoreau, Celtic Druids, Stoics, Epicureans, any bit of enlightenment to shed light on my current path. Wisdom is indeed where you find it. While on our excursion, we listened to Matthew McConaughey’s book on life and living titled, Green Lights. McConaughey always plays characters who seem to see the world differently or have a special insight but never see life as a definitive path. From Wooderson to Brigance to Woodruff to Hanna to Coop, McConaughey’s characters are cool dudes who have it together, but are placed in circumstances that are far from together. They stick to a code but are very matter of fact casual about it. I enjoy his films, I’ve heard him speak, he appears in every way to have an open mind and like many of his characters, he’s seeking fulfillment and or validation. It was a good book, relatively speaking (VERY RELATIVELY) his growing up wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows; he faced many crossroads, don’t we all; he didn’t compromise…much on the seeking of his passion and this was a message not lost on me during this transition. His book had something to teach me after all, “wisdom is where you find it.”

Listening to McConaughey on the way to see Van Gogh? Well, alright, alright, alright. Surely these two “cool dudes” shared similar insights. Both were and artists, both seek clarity of purpose, both wished to experience the vibrancy of living….hey guys… me too! Their paths both reflect in moments when they feel most alive. When were the times I felt most alive? When did my nerve endings feel on fire and my senses were acutely aware of everything going on around me? “Good times, bad times…you know I’ve had my share,” and either could be a moment of intellectual, emotional, passionate clarity. Suffering the most heartbreaking betrayal of my life, I felt alive, but I don’t recommend it. Standing alone on a cliff side I had climbed in the Texas Hill Country and gazing outward, I felt alive. When my precious granddaughter Peyton looked at me with all the innocent wonder of a small child and said, “I wuv you Pop Pop,” I felt alive. Walking the streets of Arles, France where Van Gogh walked, I felt alive. Experiencing the complete immersion into the art and mind and heart of Vincent this weekend broke me down to sobbing because it was so overwhelming, I felt alive. When I separate myself voluntarily or not from commonality… that’s when I feel alive. The road less traveled…the break from playing life by the numbers…the challenges faced…the undiscovered country in your soul is where you will find yourself. Like Vincent once told his brother Theo, “humanity is a paved road … it’s comfortable to walk on but no flowers grow there.”

Ideally, self fulfillment should be reached at some level, but remember my “weirdo” belief system; sometimes, not in this life. I’m fifty five and served humanity well as a teacher for thirty years. I wasted time not really creating art as I should’ve been; playing guitar as I should’ve been; writing as I should’ve been; I ran theatre camps and directed Destination Imagination performances for twelve years, but have yet to find my balls and get on stage. ( I did an improv comedic performance on the stage of the Apollo in Harlem in front of ninety people…I felt very alive, but it doesn’t count) At the very least I should have found my voice…know what I want to say to the world. Vincent did, but he never realized it. McConaughey did and is cool with it. Vincent never experienced clarity of mind; McConaughey has and shares it confidently in a book. There are a thousand ideas floating, sometimes screaming, in my head about what does my art express; what does my writing say? I have a catalog of song ideas that have never been heard on my guitar. There are countless vistas of this world that I want desperately to see, that I haven’t seen yet. This is the challenge of my life change, my transition… the similarity between Vincent and McConaughey, the goal of every life to strive to find your voice. As Shakespeare once wrote, “that life, the powerful play goes on and that I might contribute a verse.” I don’t know my voice or my verse… I don’t know what to say. I don’t know anyone who thinks like I do…some…they leave ….others run away, but as it should be expected; this is a solitary quest. We creative humans are prone to this struggle and failing to find one’s voice can be a struggle of life spanning proportions. None of us get out of this alive, but the artist often burns out spectacularly without self realization: Van Gogh, Hemingway, Cobain, Bourdain, Cornell, Beehan.

Two deep souls I came across this weekend contributed their voice. One worked and struggled and suffered for his voice and it was only ever heard after this life ended. Another, was far better equipped to deal with and avoid the spiritual struggle that ensnares less fortunate in their quest. One took their life, one became a star… both asked why? I, on a much less grand stage, know that this life is destined to end and

I have gifts, tools that I don’t know how to use. I’ve said this, today…but it’s not enough. I like sitting in a swing, drinking a cold beer, lazily dozing off under the warm sun; I will not let that be all there is. This is the part of all our transitions that should look the same. I want to be challenged, I want to say and express something unique, I want to feel alive if only for moment…even a star glows when burning out.

[hollymbryan]

Blog Tour + #Review: PAHUA AND THE SOUL STEALER by Lori M. Lee! (w/ #giveaway)

Welcome to Book-Keeping! I’m thrilled today to be part of the Rockstar Book Tours blog tour for Pahua and the Soul Stealer by Lori M. Lee! This is Lori’s middle grade debut, and I had so much fun reading it! This book releases tomorrow, and I just want to put it in everyone’s hands. I’ve got all the details for you below, my review, and a great giveaway, so make sure you read all the way through!

About the Book

title: Pahua and the Soul Stealer author: Lori M. Lee publisher: Rick Riordan Presents release date: 7 September 2021

Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents Lori M. Lee's middle grade debut about a lonely Hmong girl who discovers she's a powerful shaman warrior in this fantasy inspired by Southeast Asian mythology. Pahua Moua has a bit of a reputation for being a weirdo. A lonely eleven-year-old Hmong girl with the unique ability to see spirits, she spends her summer days babysitting her little brother and playing with her best friend, a cat spirit no one else can see. One day Pahua accidentally untethers an angry spirit from the haunted bridge in her neighborhood--whoops. When her brother suddenly falls sick and can't be awoken, Pahua fears that the bridge spirit has stolen his soul. She returns to the scene of the crime with her aunt's old shaman tools, hoping to confront the spirit and demand her brother's return. Instead, she summons a demon. Thankfully, a warrior shaman with a bit of an attitude problem shows up at the last minute and saves her butt. With the help of this guide, Pahua will have to find her way through the spirit worlds and rescue her brother's soul before it's too late. Little does she know she'll have her own discoveries to make along the way. . . . With its unforgettable characters, unique nature-based magic system, breathtaking twists and reveals, and climactic boss battle, this story based on Hmong oral tradition offers everything a fantasy lover could want.

Add to Goodreads: Pahua and the Soul Stealer Purchase the Book: Amazon | Kindle | Audible | B&N | iBooks | Kobo | TBD | Bookshop.org

About the Author

Lori M. Lee is the author of speculative novels and short stories. Her books include PAHUA AND THE SOUL STEALER (Disney/Rick Riordan Presents), FOREST OF SOULS and the sequel BROKEN WEB (Page Street), and more. She’s also a contributor to the anthologies A THOUSAND BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS and COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES. She considers herself a unicorn fan, enjoys marathoning TV shows, and loves to write about magic, manipulation, and family. (Photo credit PrettyGeeky Photography)

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My 5-Star Review

I learned about the Hmong people when I took a summer class on Immigration Law during law school, when our professor assigned a book titled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. I am not a big nonfiction reader, so I went into the book feeling very meh about reading it, but it turned out to be so good that I ended up loving it. So when I saw that the main character of Lori M. Lee’s middle grade debut, Pahua, was Hmong, I was even more interested in reading it than I already had been. I absolutely loved learning more about the mythology and culture of the Hmong, and I am really hoping that this is the beginning of a series and we get to go on more exploits with Pahua and delve even deeper into these traditional stories. Rick Riordan wrote the introduction to the book, and he suggests reading the author’s note and glossary at the end of the book before starting the story, and I definitely agree. I spent quite a bit of time with the glossary before starting, trying to sound out the Hmong words and phrases, and then continued to flip back to it when needed throughout the story. I enjoy learning even bits and pieces of other languages, and I love that so much of the Hmong language was included in the story. I think it makes for such a rich reading experience!

Pahua is a great main character, and I immediately fell for her. Her personality really shines through and she is so dynamic, and I love her dry sense of humor! One thing she said at the very beginning made me laugh out loud: “Some would say I’m too old for imaginary games. But some people also like olives, so folks can be just plain wrong” (p. 8). A bit later she has another zinger as she’s trying to psych herself up: “I was a master hunter going after her greatest prey. I would be an elf assassin with perfect, deadly aim (an elf like from Lord of the Rings, NOT Elf on the Shelf, which was creep city--so glad that wasn’t a Hmong thing)” (p. 178). At the same time, Pahua’s ability to see - and talk to - spirits that no one else can see has kids at school thinking she’s weird; on top of that, she’s the only Asian kid in her class. As she says, “...being the only Asian kid in my grade already makes me an outcast. Even though I’m surrounded by a world filled with spirits, sometimes I can feel pretty lonely” (p. 9). I think there are going to be a lot of kids who identify with what Pahua feels and who will see themselves in her (even if they can’t see spirits!). I love that the Rick Riordan Presents imprint focuses on exactly these types of stories, so that MG readers either can be introduced to other cultures and mythologies or can (finally) see themselves on the page as the hero of a story.

I feel like I’m rambling because I enjoyed the story so much, so I’ll stop there. Suffice it to say, this is definitely a great read and one I want to shout to the skies about and get into the hands of readers, especially young ones. I encourage everyone to pick up this story of courage and bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, of dedication to family and culture, and of great adventure. 

Rating: 5 stars!

**Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for purposes of this blog tour. This review is voluntary on my part and reflects my honest rating and review of the book.

About the Giveaway

Three (3) lucky winners will each receive a finished copy of Pahua and the Soul Stealer by Lori M. Lee! This one is US only and ends 4 October 2021. Enter via the Rafflecopter below, and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

About the Tour

Here’s the full tour schedule so you can follow along with all the great content.

Week One:

9/1/2021 - Kait Plus Books - Excerpt 9/2/2021 - YA Books Central - Excerpt 9/3/2021 - Nerdophiles - Review 9/4/2021 - Bibliosini - Review

Week Two:

9/5/2021 - Rajiv's Reviews - Review 9/6/2021 - Book-Keeping - Review      **you are here! 9/7/2021 - The Bookwyrm's Den - Review 9/8/2021 - booksaremagictoo - Review 9/9/2021 - Sometimes Leelynn Reads - Review 9/10/2021 - Log Cabin Library - Review 9/11/2021 - Books a Plenty Book Reviews - Review

Week Three:

9/12/2021 - Lifestyle of Me - Review 9/13/2021 - Emelie's Books - Review 9/14/2021 - #BRVL Book Review Virginia Lee Blog - Review 9/15/2021 - Locks, Hooks and Books - Review 9/16/2021 - More Books Please blog - Review 9/17/2021 - Discover Elysian - Review 9/18/2021 - Don't Judge, Read - Review

Week Four:

9/19/2021 - @pagesofyellow - Review 9/20/2021 - TLC Book Nook - Review 9/21/2021 - Fyrekatz Blog - Review 9/22/2021 - The Momma Spot - Review 9/23/2021 - Lexijava - Excerpt 9/24/2021 - hauntedbybooks - Review 9/25/2021 - BookHounds YA - Excerpt

Week Five:

9/26/2021 - A Court of Coffee and Books - Review 9/27/2021 - YA Book Nerd - Excerpt 9/28/2021 - PopTheButterfly Reads - Review 9/29/2021 - @fictitious.fox - Review 9/30/2021 - Two Points of Interest - Review

[katvondworld]

So proud to have been interviewed for the #GlennGould Foundation! I'm such a huge fan!

GGF: In some of your interviews, you’ve described yourself as an outsider. And that’s partly expressed through tattoos – the tattoos you have on you, and also the ones you create. But I think that’s something that people see about Gould as well, that he charted his own course. He didn’t crave a traditional style of sociability and social interaction. What everyone said was the successful path for a classical career, spending his life giving concerts and only making records on the side, he basically turned on its ear and you know, he gave his last public concert in L.A.KvD: Yeah, yeah.GGF: At the Wilshire Ebel Theatre. KvD: That’s amazing.GGF: So I think that’s something that you and he share in a way.KvD: Wow, that’s a great compliment. And I think, it’s natural to feel like an outsider. I mean a lot of people say, “oh, it’s the artist’s way.” But I don’t. I felt like an outsider before I knew what a tattoo was, that’s my own life experience. You can also practice and master anything but I think what makes you different from anyone is your experiences and where you come from, and how that shapes the way you apply it. And that’s also what makes music and art so beautiful and different. I guess my heart responds to the struggle. I can see that in Glenn’s music as well as other artists that I absolutely love, including Beethoven.GGF: Obviously something else that you and Glenn share is your love of animals which you talked about at the start, and it seems that that special communication or even communion that people have with the animals in their lives, that was very powerful for him and I take it that it’s really super-important in your life, too.KvD: Oh it’s a huge part of my life. Most of the time, I don’t want to say that I relate to animals better, but I definitely admire animals a lot more (laughs). You know, I just look at my cats. I’m just in awe of their spirit and their amazing ability to just be. My little cat, Piaf, who I named after Edith Piaf, he was the runt of the litter His mother abandoned him and he wasn’t even supposed to survive. He’s this sweet little baby . . . he looks like a bird to me. I look at him and go, wow, I have a fucked up relationship with my Mom and I’ve had to have therapy over it, and really work on issues, then I think, Piaf was abandoned and somehow has no Mom issues! He’s so enlightened that he doesn’t even need forgiveness; he just is. And I want to be like that. I can’t imagine I’d ever get there, but I admire that for sure.And I think, too, that the more connected we are to our environment, whether it’s animals, plants or whatever, the dirt, that clear connection of how we are nothing without them, it’s so important and it’s something that we’ve lost and becomes more blurry as time goes on. With technology, there’s great things that come from it but also, there’s such huge distractions. And it’s the same with music: there are great technologies that afford us the opportunity to learn and produce music in different and easier ways, but at the same time, I see fewer kids playing instruments. Even on my Instagram, you know, I always try to post videos of me playing the piano, whether it’s a Cure song or a Beethoven song. And it’s to show people, look, I’m just some chick that came from Mexico and didn’t even go to high school but if I can do this, you can do it, so let’s break it down. I want to live in a world where there’s tons of Glenn Goulds, you know? (laughs) That’s what I want.GGF: So did he. He said technology would allow more people to become artists. This was an interview I think he gave in 1967. He said, today we have stereo sets in our homes, we can can turn up the bass and treble but that’s nowhere near the power we’ll have in the future. Then we’ll be able to not have guys like me (Glenn) telling people how to listen to Beethoven; they’ll be able to get what he called a “box of takes” from someone else’s recording sessions and create the version that they hear in their own heads, with technology that everyone can afford. And of course, we have that now. But we also have a lot of what I call “background noise” and distractions, and that makes it harder in some ways . . .KvD: It’s so much harder to focus.GGF: With the overstimulation, to find those moments of stillness and inward tranquility – what Gould called the solitude that’s the precondition for spiritual enlightenment, which he found in the North. And I sense that you find that in the environment that you’ve created very meticulously and beautifully in your home.KvD: Yeah!GGF: You call it Kat’s Closet, and you’re surrounded by beautiful handmade things that you’ve assembled.KvD: Yeah. I’m super particular about conscious living. That’s my ultimate goal, and it hits all aspects of life. Some people from outside look in and say, “oh, she’s neurotic about certain things.” I am strict about what goes in my mind on a conscious level and an unconscious level. You know, I don’t have a television in my house. I do like to watch movies so I can watch them on my laptop. But I try to avoid screens as much as possible. You described it perfectly, it’s a lot of background noise. But I think that also, your surroundings, wherever you spend a lot of time, it’s important to treat every corner of it with intention. Nothing in my house is there by accident. I think when you start taking care of everything that you do, whether it’s how you eat, what you listen to, even.I’m relaunching some fragrance that I had launched years ago but is back in demand, and I remember that process was so amazing. We had to do all these blind tests where they put all these fragrances in bottles with no labels and I had to tell by nose what fragrances I liked and what I don’t like. And they take all these notes and then they can tell you what kinds of fragrance you actually do like. When I got the results back, you know what?- the perfumes I thought I loved, I actually do love them. Whereas, you know, you look at [names a famous perfume], which is one of that company’s top-selling perfumes, fails the blind test 100% across the board. Nobody likes it when it’s not in the package. But once it’s in the package, they love it. See, when I heard that story, I thought, wow! – I don’t want to be that person that thinks they like something and then realizes that they don’t. Or maybe, sadly enough, never really realize what they truly like and what’s important to them. Like, do you really love the music that you listen to, or is it just that you’ve been hypnotized by what’s forced down your ears? To me that’s really crucial. So I’m a stickler about that, and in the house, I look at every room and say, what’s the intention of that room? I’m not as fancy as people might think, you know, when you look at my house and it’s like, “wow! It’s so beautiful.” And I’m like, “I made that.” I usually try to make stuff. You know, like all the stuff that folks think is fancy, I assembled that. You know like pianos, I collect old, weirdo obscure instruments. I never really had a fancy, nice piano until nine years ago or so when my buddy was low on cash. He had a beautiful baby grand and so I bought it off of him for like a grand. That’s the first time I owned and played a beautiful piano. But it ain’t no Steinway. (laughs)GGF: Give yourself time – you’ll have a Steinway or a Bosendorfer yet, if you want one.KvD: I’ve been lucky enough to play those at studios and stuff, but my point is that there’s so many pianos on Craigslist and small pianos, too, that fit in your room that when people say, “oh, I wish I could play,” – dude, get a piano! Couple hundred bucks, man! I know a guy that tunes it for a hundred bucks, and then you’re set!GGF: I know, plus it’s the best piece of furniture you could ever haveKvD: Beautiful!GGF: If you have a picture or a piece of sculpture, stick it on a piano!KvD: Yeah, sure (laughs).GGF: But it strikes me that you have a real feel for things that are hand-made, that people have put their soul into, and that’s a kind of connection between you and William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.KvD: Yeah, I’m a huge fan of hand-made things. There’s a certain quality that just cannot be replaced with the digital era. Photography is a perfect example of that. These digital cameras are amazing, that can capture something with such clarity, but . . . there’s a certain sentiment, I guess, a feel, a quality, that just can’t and won’t compare with film. That’s because there’s a human imprint on it. Etsy’s one of my favourite places to shop, to discover new Indie designers, because this is the voice of the people. When you look at huge corporations it’s not the voice of the people, it’s the voices of a marketing team interpreting what the people want – or think they want. There’s a certain magic that you lose. I do clearly see that difference and to me, when you hold something in your hand and think of another human being’s part to do with it, it’s an amazing thing. It’s a gem, it’s a treasure.GGF: There’s a connection between you and the maker that somehow transcends stuff made out of plastic and stamped out of a plastic extrusion machine.KvD: Yeah, most definitely. And I think, too, even on a subconscious level, people understand it as well, when they see something that’s hand made by an artisan. I always love when you don’t have a big corporation or a corporate approach, the freedom of creativity is still intact. That’s what I love about all these little independent designers is that, oh man! – this is so much more fulfilled than playing it safe. I wrote an album that I never released. When I sat down with my friends to write it, we just closed the doors and just turned everything off, and just played. We didn’t time it, oh, it’s gotta be under three minutes to get radio, and hey, we gotta add a hook . . . we said, let’s just create for the sake of creating, and it’s something that I can be proud of. That’s how it should be. That’s how Beethoven did it, and that’s how a lot of modern-day musicians that I love do it as well. I think there’s something liberating in that.GGF: Absolutely . . . plus there’s a connection. You know, when you touch a hand-made object I feel like my hand is touching the artist’s hand. It’s not perfect in the sense that it came out of a mold – it’s perfect in the sense that it came out of someone’s heart.KvD: Sure. My biggest gripe with humanity, I guess, is that we live in a world where a majority of people are just constantly taking. You take and take and take from the planet, from each other. And the more time that passes, the less it seems that people are actually producing and giving anything back. That’s why I think art is one of humanity’s most redeeming qualities, it’s the least we can do. When there’s more people like that, to me, that’s the hero quality. It’s not about ego, I resent these people who say, “I wanna be a legend, I wanna leave a mark.” You know, when you’re dead, you’re fuckin’ dead, it doesn’t matter what you did. And if climate change goes any further – which it will – and our entire environment collapses, none of this will have mattered. But during the time that you were here, what did you bring to the table? Or did you just take? I resent this very selfish way of living, it’s just not something that I admire. In fact, that’s something I love about animals, they do it by default – what they take, they put back. (laughs)GGF: You’re right. And I think you can describe it as selfish, but maybe it’s more of an illusion. A lot of Eastern religions see things in this way. We’re aware that we’re going to die, we can’t really deal with that, so we create the illusion of an eternity perspective, you know?KvD: Yeah. It’s the one thing we’ve never experienced yet.GGF: Well, all it’ll take is a great comet strike and that’ll settle that issue once and for all!KvD: Yeah, sure.GGF: We definitely live in a time that’s given us a lot of tools to make it – it’s always been possible – but let’s say that the barriers to entry have come down in a big way –KvD: For Sure.GGF: . . . and the ability to connect instantly with a larger community, obviously is something that never existed. That’s something that Glenn obviously thought and wrote a lot about when he gave up playing in public, but . . .KvD: Right.GGF: . . . but the sort of pressure to conform to what generally is regarded as a successful life . . .KvD: Sure.GGF: You know . . . you go through your schooling, you get your university degree, you get out into a profession,KvD: . . . and you get married and have kids and a house with a white picket fence, but you know, when we realize that that is super-illusionary, it’s quite liberating. I remember telling my Dad “Hey, Dad, I may not be the richest person,” when I was first tattooing, “but you know, I work at a tattoo shop, and that might not be considered quote-unquote a “real job,” but I whistle on the way to work every day when I walk over there.” You know, I’m not working my ass off for something I don’t believe in. And I think that’s just so crucial. And also that, to me, is so realistic.GGF: You remind of that line from Porgy and Bess: “Folks with plenty of plenty / Got a lock on their door / ‘Fraid somebody’s gonna rob ‘em while they’re out a-makin’ more / What for?”KvD: Yeah, that’s true. But you know, I think that is a social dynamic and it happens across the board. It’s not just with wealthy people, I think it happens in every social circle. We tend to be mesmerized by a false sense of what’s important – we tend to get dazzled by these goals . . . like Fool’s Gold, you know? And we treat people differently that way. To me, I find it refreshing when you feel the sincerity in somebody and you have a real conversation versus that feeling of, “what does that person want from me?” I know I’ve been really fortunate to be surrounded by good people. Even as I was becoming more quote-unquote “successful” and bigger and all that stuff, I just always hung out with my friends. I don’t have that many friends, but the ones I do are just solid and amazing – and my family, and I refuse to have yes-men around me. What’s the point of living like that?GGF: When was the first time you encountered Glenn Gould. What are your memories – do you remember which record it was?KvD: It’s a funny story because the person who introduced me to Glenn Gould was not somebody you’d think would introduce me to him. At the time I was writing music with Paul B. Cutler. He was the guitarist for a punk-goth band from the eighties called 45 Graves, and one of my favourite people of all time. We really, truly connected on music – not modern music: we loved Gregorian chanting and classical and medieval, you know? We loved the old stuff – not vintage! He knew how much I loved Beethoven, and my favourite Beethoven piece is the Sonata Pathétique. So he said, “have you heard Glenn Gould’s version of it?” and I’m like, “Who’s Glenn Gould?” “You don’t know who Glenn Gould is?” And I remember saying, “I have no idea!” And he was like, “You would love him!” and he introduced Glenn’s personality by describing him. Paul’s such a wizard with words, that I automatically knew I would love this person whoever he was, and so we went on a crazy Youtube binge, watching Glenn’s performances and things like that.Then I just began obsessively collecting as many records as I could possibly get. One of my favourite things about Glenn, was that every recording was so different. Different variations of the same song but played like – I felt like this was just like, the true spirit of that music. And for me it was so amazing to see somebody that was cool – you know, he was so cool! It’s shocking it’s like a sexy comedian, something you just don’t ever see, you know what I mean?And the more and more I learned about him as a person, the more it made me love and appreciate his approach to music. I say, man, I have been playing the same pieces from my childhood, you know, these masterpieces by the old Greats, and it never gets old. And isn’t that a trip that you spend your entire life trying to master an instrument, you can end up performing in front of a lot of people and get all kinds of crazy awards, and applause, and you can build a career playing somebody else’s music, whereas if you cover a Beatle’s song, you’re just in a cover band. And I think that’s the tremendous power of that type of music. And I feel that ‘til this day nobody has topped it. Of course, there’s still great music – I mean, the Beatles are great in their own right, too, but I feel nothing’s ever been as ground-breaking as the Beethovens of this world and I don’t foresee anything topping them either, and Glenn really celebrated that. So that was my introduction to Glenn. And it’s also kinda funny that the guy who introduced me is probably the gothiest punk rock guy that ever walked the planet, you know? (laughs)Kat von D talks about Music, Life, Art, and Glenn Gould

Celebrated tattoo artist and TV personality Kat von D is one of the true originals of contemporary popular culture. She has not only built a huge fan base including a vast following on social media, but launched a highly successful cosmetics line, Kat von D Beauty. While many associate her with punk and goth culture, her artistic interests are all-encompassing, starting with her childhood love of classical music, and particularly Beethoven. She is a dedicated vegan, a lover of Old Master painting, and as we discovered, a passionate admirer of Glenn Gould. We caught up with Kat and spoke with her from her home in Los Angeles in a wide-ranging conversation about her life and ideas about music, art and keeping it real in an increasingly consumer-driven world.

GGF: This is Brian Levine at The Glenn Gould Foundation and I’m very happy to be talking today with Kat von D, tattoo artist, fashion icon, makeup entrepreneur, musician, vegan, social media star, and very accomplished artist in her own right, and also a pianist and admirer of Glenn Gould and Beethoven. That’s a lot to fit in – you must be on the move all the time.

KvD (chuckling): Yeah, and on top of that, I’m a crazy cat lady, so . . .

GGF: How many cats do you have?

KvD: I just have two, but I love them a lot.

GGF: Glenn Gould would have been very happy to hear about that because as you probably know, he was a pretty passionate animal lover himself.

KvD: That’s awesome!

GGF: I think when he was five or six years old, he took his first stab at composing and he created a little kiddie opera in which all the people were extinct, and it was only the cats and dogs that were running things.

KvD: Oh, my god – I gotta get my hands on that! (laughs)

GGF: I understand you still play the piano?

KvD: Yeah, I started playing when I was five years old. My grandmother is a classically trained pianist, and she taught the three of us, my brother, sister and I. I was the only one that really stuck with it, and my first obsession was with classical music, particularly Beethoven. My grandmother herself was a huge fan, and so, I remember every week when we’d go over for piano lessons, she had this book, it was – I don’t know how to describe it – it was kind of a, like a scrapbook of articles and drawings and paintings. She was a painter herself, also, a really good one, and I actually should say she still is because she still paints and plays piano. I used to pore over this book and read everything. Of course it was in Spanish – my family’s from Argentina – there were clippings from the 1930’s and ‘40’s. You could see advertisements from back in the day. And basically my grandmother knew every myth, legend and story about Beethoven as well as all the other greats.

Beethoven’s story obviously was something that just cut to my core; not just the music, I mean, the music alone was enough, but just to hear that sort of physical struggle and to be able to compose and produce such an intense amount of ground-breaking music even with his physical ailments; that’s just something that just proves that human ability.

And when I later on discovered Glenn Gould I felt that same connection. Some of my favourite Beethoven recordings are from Glenn, all of which I collect on vinyl.

GGF: Let’s talk about your early experience learning the piano. What were some of the pieces you remember playing?

KvD: Yeah, well I remember falling in love with piano playing for the first time. I remember when it happened and it wasn’t in the beginning, I had very disciplinary folks. You know, we practiced two hours a day every day, by the clock, and I suffered through it, looking out the window, watching kids have normal lives, playing and whatnot. For us, you know everybody in my family played at least two instruments, so it was something that was nurtured and I look back at that and I’m ever so grateful. I think the best gift I’ve ever been given was those first few years of making me learn. But the first time that I ever did finally fall in love with playing the piano was when I figured out how to play Beethoven’s Sonata in G. It’s not one of his more popular, Romantic pieces, you know, it’s twelve pages of a lot of scales and frilliness. But I think it was more to me, I mean, I didn’t play video games, but I assume it’s kind of the same feeling where you’ve been hacking away at a level for a long time and then you finally win. And then you go onto the next level. That’s the high that I felt and it’s still the high that I chase anytime I’m learning anything whether it’s in my drawing or tattooing or painting or piano playing. I think I was about seven years old, and I just fell madly in love with it. And then without a timer I would practice on my own. And I just wanted to become better and better and better.

My family was quite religious growing up, so aside from classical music it was mainly religious music that was played in the household. Of course the religious stuff didn’t really sink in too much with me, but classical music always did.

Of late, I’ve been trying to build my memory repertoire, because unfortunately, because I was trained to read, I tend to use that as a crutch. Even when I’m writing my own songs I still get it transcribed and read it, and I’ve been trying to break away from that crutch and just try and build up my memory repertoire.

We really don’t have any more excuses. I think even in my generation – and I still consider myself young – you brought up this idea that being an artist is an unrealistic goal. When I first got into tattooing, same thing. I didn’t go to high school, I dropped out after junior high, ‘cause I started tattooing when I was fourteen, and I remember my parents being shocked, saying, “you have to get your high school diploma” and I remember, “but I’m living the dream! I’m doing what I want.” At times, I was even supporting my family to a certain degree with the money I was making, which was a lot for a sixteen-year-old, by the time I opened my first shop.

So I think that we do live in a world where it doesn’t matter anymore, with the success of the internet and everything else, we really have no excuses to not pursue the things we want to do. And if it means taking a pay cut, why not, you know? We don’t have to work 9 to 5 in a cubicle if we don’t want to, and if we do, that’s cool, too. I feel that part of being human is the amazing ability of making choices. And I feel that, as much as I do share with the world, through social media or Youtube or whatever, or even when I was on television, it was never about the gain of social status, or how many followers you have on Instagram. To me, it was always if I could sneak the medicine into the dessert somehow, and inspire people to actually create with their hands and with their minds and not settle for less, that would be fulfilling enough for me. I feel I’ve done that, in ways, and with music in particular, I’ve always been a fan of spotlighting, bands or musicians that a lot of people aren’t aware of, because I think that’s important because there’s a lot of stuff that’s shoved down our throat on a regular basis, whether it’s through radio, TV, all that stuff. But there’s so many great, amazing talented people that deserve that attention. And that changed my life tremendously, and I want to share that with people and inspire people to think outside the box.

I think that’s one of the reasons I love Glenn’s approach to life, as well, because he was very much about that. We do live in a really great, exciting time: I never in a million years thought I would have a makeup line, let alone be sitting here, talking with you, you know? Having this great opportunity to do this, it’s like, every day is a dream, because my family just came from, basically, a Third World country, where I was born. We came from nothing but I don’t feel I got lucky, I think some things were luck, but a lot of it was just dedication and making the time and also, well I did get luck with parents, who really nurtured music and art.

I think one of the things that bothers me the most is people who say, “oh, I wish I could draw, I can’t draw.” Well, sure you can, you can also play like Glenn Gould, but you’ve got to practice as much as he did! That’s pretty liberating, when you think, like wow! One-plus-one-equals two: all I have to do is input this many hours and time and I could actually play this, or I could actually do this. When I was practicing for this small performance, I got a piano teacher, and she told me a wild story about some wealthy man who had never played any instrument, bit he was totally moved by a classical piece that he heard at a concert and he got on a mission to learn this one song and he trained with her for months just to learn this one song, and when he learned it, he was good, and that was it. But that’s a great example of the fact that we can do anything we want. Just turn off that damn TV! (laughs)

GGF: We definitely live in a time that’s given us a lot of tools to make it – it’s always been possible – but let’s say that the barriers to entry have come down in a big way –

KvD: For Sure.

GGF: . . . and the ability to connect instantly with a larger community, obviously is something that never existed. That’s something that Glenn obviously thought and wrote a lot about when he gave up playing in public, but . . .

KvD: Right.

GGF: . . . but the sort of pressure to conform to what generally is regarded as a successful life . . .

KvD: Sure.

GGF: You know . . . you go through your schooling, you get your university degree, you get out into a profession,

KvD: . . . and you get married and have kids and a house with a white picket fence, but you know, when we realize that that is super-illusionary, it’s quite liberating. I remember telling my Dad “Hey, Dad, I may not be the richest person,” when I was first tattooing, “but you know, I work at a tattoo shop, and that might not be considered quote-unquote a “real job,” but I whistle on the way to work every day when I walk over there.” You know, I’m not working my ass off for something I don’t believe in. And I think that’s just so crucial. And also that, to me, is so realistic.

GGF: You remind of that line from Porgy and Bess: “Folks with plenty of plenty / Got a lock on their door / ‘Fraid somebody’s gonna rob ‘em while they’re out a-makin’ more / What for?”

KvD: Yeah, that’s true. But you know, I think that is a social dynamic and it happens across the board. It’s not just with wealthy people, I think it happens in every social circle. We tend to be mesmerized by a false sense of what’s important – we tend to get dazzled by these goals . . . like Fool’s Gold, you know? And we treat people differently that way. To me, I find it refreshing when you feel the sincerity in somebody and you have a real conversation versus that feeling of, “what does that person want from me?” I know I’ve been really fortunate to be surrounded by good people. Even as I was becoming more quote-unquote “successful” and bigger and all that stuff, I just always hung out with my friends. I don’t have that many friends, but the ones I do are just solid and amazing – and my family, and I refuse to have yes-men around me. What’s the point of living like that?

GGF: When was the first time you encountered Glenn Gould. What are your memories – do you remember which record it was?

KvD: It’s a funny story because the person who introduced me to Glenn Gould was not somebody you’d think would introduce me to him. At the time I was writing music with Paul B. Cutler. He was the guitarist for a punk-goth band from the eighties called 45 Graves, and one of my favourite people of all time. We really, truly connected on music – not modern music: we loved Gregorian chanting and classical and medieval, you know? We loved the old stuff – not vintage! He knew how much I loved Beethoven, and my favourite Beethoven piece is the Sonata Pathétique. So he said, “have you heard Glenn Gould’s version of it?” and I’m like, “Who’s Glenn Gould?” “You don’t know who Glenn Gould is?” And I remember saying, “I have no idea!” And he was like, “You would love him!” and he introduced Glenn’s personality by describing him. Paul’s such a wizard with words, that I automatically knew I would love this person whoever he was, and so we went on a crazy Youtube binge, watching Glenn’s performances and things like that.

Then I just began obsessively collecting as many records as I could possibly get. One of my favourite things about Glenn, was that every recording was so different. Different variations of the same song but played like – I felt like this was just like, the true spirit of that music. And for me it was so amazing to see somebody that was cool – you know, he was so cool! It’s shocking it’s like a sexy comedian, something you just don’t ever see, you know what I mean?

And the more and more I learned about him as a person, the more it made me love and appreciate his approach to music. I say, man, I have been playing the same pieces from my childhood, you know, these masterpieces by the old Greats, and it never gets old. And isn’t that a trip that you spend your entire life trying to master an instrument, you can end up performing in front of a lot of people and get all kinds of crazy awards, and applause, and you can build a career playing somebody else’s music, whereas if you cover a Beatle’s song, you’re just in a cover band. And I think that’s the tremendous power of that type of music. And I feel that ‘til this day nobody has topped it. Of course, there’s still great music – I mean, the Beatles are great in their own right, too, but I feel nothing’s ever been as ground-breaking as the Beethovens of this world and I don’t foresee anything topping them either, and Glenn really celebrated that. So that was my introduction to Glenn. And it’s also kinda funny that the guy who introduced me is probably the gothiest punk rock guy that ever walked the planet, you know? (laughs)

GGF: In some of your interviews, you’ve described yourself as an outsider. And that’s partly expressed through tattoos – the tattoos you have on you, and also the ones you create. But I think that’s something that people see about Gould as well, that he charted his own course. He didn’t crave a traditional style of sociability and social interaction. What everyone said was the successful path for a classical career, spending his life giving concerts and only making records on the side, he basically turned on its ear and you know, he gave his last public concert in L.A.

KvD: Yeah, yeah.

GGF: At the Wilshire Ebel Theatre. KvD: That’s amazing.

GGF: So I think that’s something that you and he share in a way.

KvD: Wow, that’s a great compliment. And I think, it’s natural to feel like an outsider. I mean a lot of people say, “oh, it’s the artist’s way.” But I don’t. I felt like an outsider before I knew what a tattoo was, that’s my own life experience. You can also practice and master anything but I think what makes you different from anyone is your experiences and where you come from, and how that shapes the way you apply it. And that’s also what makes music and art so beautiful and different. I guess my heart responds to the struggle. I can see that in Glenn’s music as well as other artists that I absolutely love, including Beethoven.

GGF: Obviously something else that you and Glenn share is your love of animals which you talked about at the start, and it seems that that special communication or even communion that people have with the animals in their lives, that was very powerful for him and I take it that it’s really super-important in your life, too.

KvD: Oh it’s a huge part of my life. Most of the time, I don’t want to say that I relate to animals better, but I definitely admire animals a lot more (laughs). You know, I just look at my cats. I’m just in awe of their spirit and their amazing ability to just be. My little cat, Piaf, who I named after Edith Piaf, he was the runt of the litter His mother abandoned him and he wasn’t even supposed to survive. He’s this sweet little baby . . . he looks like a bird to me. I look at him and go, wow, I have a fucked up relationship with my Mom and I’ve had to have therapy over it, and really work on issues, then I think, Piaf was abandoned and somehow has no Mom issues! He’s so enlightened that he doesn’t even need forgiveness; he just is. And I want to be like that. I can’t imagine I’d ever get there, but I admire that for sure.

And I think, too, that the more connected we are to our environment, whether it’s animals, plants or whatever, the dirt, that clear connection of how we are nothing without them, it’s so important and it’s something that we’ve lost and becomes more blurry as time goes on. With technology, there’s great things that come from it but also, there’s such huge distractions. And it’s the same with music: there are great technologies that afford us the opportunity to learn and produce music in different and easier ways, but at the same time, I see fewer kids playing instruments. Even on my Instagram, you know, I always try to post videos of me playing the piano, whether it’s a Cure song or a Beethoven song. And it’s to show people, look, I’m just some chick that came from Mexico and didn’t even go to high school but if I can do this, you can do it, so let’s break it down. I want to live in a world where there’s tons of Glenn Goulds, you know? (laughs) That’s what I want.

GGF: So did he. He said technology would allow more people to become artists. This was an interview I think he gave in 1967. He said, today we have stereo sets in our homes, we can can turn up the bass and treble but that’s nowhere near the power we’ll have in the future. Then we’ll be able to not have guys like me (Glenn) telling people how to listen to Beethoven; they’ll be able to get what he called a “box of takes” from someone else’s recording sessions and create the version that they hear in their own heads, with technology that everyone can afford. And of course, we have that now. But we also have a lot of what I call “background noise” and distractions, and that makes it harder in some ways . . .

KvD: It’s so much harder to focus.

GGF: With the overstimulation, to find those moments of stillness and inward tranquility – what Gould called the solitude that’s the precondition for spiritual enlightenment, which he found in the North. And I sense that you find that in the environment that you’ve created very meticulously and beautifully in your home.

KvD: Yeah!

GGF: You call it Kat’s Closet, and you’re surrounded by beautiful handmade things that you’ve assembled.

KvD: Yeah. I’m super particular about conscious living. That’s my ultimate goal, and it hits all aspects of life. Some people from outside look in and say, “oh, she’s neurotic about certain things.” I am strict about what goes in my mind on a conscious level and an unconscious level. You know, I don’t have a television in my house. I do like to watch movies so I can watch them on my laptop. But I try to avoid screens as much as possible. You described it perfectly, it’s a lot of background noise. But I think that also, your surroundings, wherever you spend a lot of time, it’s important to treat every corner of it with intention. Nothing in my house is there by accident. I think when you start taking care of everything that you do, whether it’s how you eat, what you listen to, even.

I’m relaunching some fragrance that I had launched years ago but is back in demand, and I remember that process was so amazing. We had to do all these blind tests where they put all these fragrances in bottles with no labels and I had to tell by nose what fragrances I liked and what I don’t like. And they take all these notes and then they can tell you what kinds of fragrance you actually do like. When I got the results back, you know what?- the perfumes I thought I loved, I actually do love them. Whereas, you know, you look at [names a famous perfume], which is one of that company’s top-selling perfumes, fails the blind test 100% across the board. Nobody likes it when it’s not in the package. But once it’s in the package, they love it. See, when I heard that story, I thought, wow! – I don’t want to be that person that thinks they like something and then realizes that they don’t. Or maybe, sadly enough, never really realize what they truly like and what’s important to them. Like, do you really love the music that you listen to, or is it just that you’ve been hypnotized by what’s forced down your ears? To me that’s really crucial. So I’m a stickler about that, and in the house, I look at every room and say, what’s the intention of that room? I’m not as fancy as people might think, you know, when you look at my house and it’s like, “wow! It’s so beautiful.” And I’m like, “I made that.” I usually try to make stuff. You know, like all the stuff that folks think is fancy, I assembled that. You know like pianos, I collect old, weirdo obscure instruments. I never really had a fancy, nice piano until nine years ago or so when my buddy was low on cash. He had a beautiful baby grand and so I bought it off of him for like a grand. That’s the first time I owned and played a beautiful piano. But it ain’t no Steinway. (laughs)

GGF: Give yourself time – you’ll have a Steinway or a Bosendorfer yet, if you want one.

KvD: I’ve been lucky enough to play those at studios and stuff, but my point is that there’s so many pianos on Craigslist and small pianos, too, that fit in your room that when people say, “oh, I wish I could play,” – dude, get a piano! Couple hundred bucks, man! I know a guy that tunes it for a hundred bucks, and then you’re set!

GGF: I know, plus it’s the best piece of furniture you could ever have

KvD: Beautiful!

GGF: If you have a picture or a piece of sculpture, stick it on a piano!

KvD: Yeah, sure (laughs).

GGF: But it strikes me that you have a real feel for things that are hand-made, that people have put their soul into, and that’s a kind of connection between you and William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.

KvD: Yeah, I’m a huge fan of hand-made things. There’s a certain quality that just cannot be replaced with the digital era. Photography is a perfect example of that. These digital cameras are amazing, that can capture something with such clarity, but . . . there’s a certain sentiment, I guess, a feel, a quality, that just can’t and won’t compare with film. That’s because there’s a human imprint on it. Etsy’s one of my favourite places to shop, to discover new Indie designers, because this is the voice of the people. When you look at huge corporations it’s not the voice of the people, it’s the voices of a marketing team interpreting what the people want – or think they want. There’s a certain magic that you lose. I do clearly see that difference and to me, when you hold something in your hand and think of another human being’s part to do with it, it’s an amazing thing. It’s a gem, it’s a treasure.

GGF: There’s a connection between you and the maker that somehow transcends stuff made out of plastic and stamped out of a plastic extrusion machine.

KvD: Yeah, most definitely. And I think, too, even on a subconscious level, people understand it as well, when they see something that’s hand made by an artisan. I always love when you don’t have a big corporation or a corporate approach, the freedom of creativity is still intact. That’s what I love about all these little independent designers is that, oh man! – this is so much more fulfilled than playing it safe. I wrote an album that I never released. When I sat down with my friends to write it, we just closed the doors and just turned everything off, and just played. We didn’t time it, oh, it’s gotta be under three minutes to get radio, and hey, we gotta add a hook . . . we said, let’s just create for the sake of creating, and it’s something that I can be proud of. That’s how it should be. That’s how Beethoven did it, and that’s how a lot of modern-day musicians that I love do it as well. I think there’s something liberating in that.

GGF: Absolutely . . . plus there’s a connection. You know, when you touch a hand-made object I feel like my hand is touching the artist’s hand. It’s not perfect in the sense that it came out of a mold – it’s perfect in the sense that it came out of someone’s heart.

KvD: Sure. My biggest gripe with humanity, I guess, is that we live in a world where a majority of people are just constantly taking. You take and take and take from the planet, from each other. And the more time that passes, the less it seems that people are actually producing and giving anything back. That’s why I think art is one of humanity’s most redeeming qualities, it’s the least we can do. When there’s more people like that, to me, that’s the hero quality. It’s not about ego, I resent these people who say, “I wanna be a legend, I wanna leave a mark.” You know, when you’re dead, you’re fuckin’ dead, it doesn’t matter what you did. And if climate change goes any further – which it will – and our entire environment collapses, none of this will have mattered. But during the time that you were here, what did you bring to the table? Or did you just take? I resent this very selfish way of living, it’s just not something that I admire. In fact, that’s something I love about animals, they do it by default – what they take, they put back. (laughs)

GGF: You’re right. And I think you can describe it as selfish, but maybe it’s more of an illusion. A lot of Eastern religions see things in this way. We’re aware that we’re going to die, we can’t really deal with that, so we create the illusion of an eternity perspective, you know?

KvD: Yeah. It’s the one thing we’ve never experienced yet.

GGF: Well, all it’ll take is a great comet strike and that’ll settle that issue once and for all!

KvD: Yeah, sure.

GGF: We were just talking about the artist and eternity. A lot of the received wisdom, if you like, is that artists create a legacy, you know, vita brevis, ars longa – life is short, art is long or eternal. But your canvas is the human body. As much as the people who receive your tattoos may cherish them, they won’t survive them, except maybe in photographs.

KvD: Yeah.

GGF: Have you thought about that?

KvD: Of course! I remember the first time learning of a client dying. Tattooing isn’t the only medium I work with, so I understand the difference, obviously. There’s ups and downs to it. First of all, I could never take credit for any tattoo I’ve ever done, because it’s always going to be a collaboration . . . always. Never what I want to do - it’s actually what the client wants. And then using your skills and abilities, the goal is to surpass their vision, and create beautiful things that they’ll enjoy. I see it more as an exchange. Once I’m done, it’s gone . . . it’s not even mine anymore. I don’t even see my name on it. If you were to look at it on a trademark level, the person has more ownership over it than I do. So I think it’s kind of cool that there’s no attachment to it. Whereas a painting that has been protected for centuries can live for as long as possible on the walls of a museum and we can admire it forever, or for as long as we’re alive. It’s kind of like my album in a sense: I can write something and give it all I’ve got and be super-proud of it and then I can share it and it can live on, or I can just keep it to myself and it becomes almost more sacred.

I’m not knocking either approach because you can always toy with the idea of releasing it and it’s a different fulfilling feeling when you share, but at the end, like I said, when you die, you die. Like Caravaggio, I was always so tickled by stories of him having such a crazy temper and he didn’t leave a massive amount of work compared to Rembrandt and Michelangelo – he would get a bad critique and burn a painting, you know? And I just thought, how cool is that? He doesn’t give a fuck, you know what I mean? Because then the act of creating is even more at its truest form, like what you think of creating. Not to say that that’s what everyone should do, ‘cause that would be so sad if paintings got burned, but I feel that when people are driven by this idea of legacy, it’s really kind of distracting to the ultimate purpose of art, in a way. But that’s just my personal opinion. I think what’s more interesting and more important, like with Glenn for example, like his legacy – it isn’t even his music? The ability to inspire others, in that capacity is just so much more powerful, I think. Beethoven, exact same thing.

Music saved my life in so many ways, it’s been my best friend, moreso than drawing. I couldn’t live without playing music – if I had to choose. There have been dark times when music has just got me through, and I’m not the only one. Music has no equal . . .it helps you off that ledge. To me, that’s just so much more ground-breaking than any type of award or legacy or whatever you want to call it, you know.

GGF: Yes, because it’s a purely inner state.. You know, Gould in one interview was asked why he never played Scarlatti, since he played so much Bach, who was also a baroque composer, and he said, there’s more “spiritual nourishment” in any one of the preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier than there is in all 500 of Scarlatti’s sonatas.

KvD: I love that.

GGF: That phrase, “spiritual nourishment” – that’s what it’s all about.

KvD: – Yeah, Yeah!

GGF: I think there’s a lot to that. One of the things that strikes me – you call yourself “outsider” – I like the 19th century term “free spirit” in the sense that your view of the world isn’t shaped by the collective “wisdom” around you. So, in that collective wisdom, punk, metal, the world of tattooing, and alternative cultures of various kinds – and classical music: these things do not together go. But in your life they really go together harmoniously and in a seamless way.

KvD: But I think they actually do go together. You wouldn’t have Slayer without Bach. When you break down heavy metal, play heavy metal, the musical structure is, these guitar licks are the exact same scales played in the exact same tempo . . . it is classical music, whether or not heavy metal has the lifespan of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart or whatever. And you look at tattooing, regardless of all the stigmas that surround that culture or subculture, you wouldn’t have tattooing without the early engravings of the 1500’s, because that’s where it comes from. I mean, that’s where the machine came from. A tattoo machine was first patented at the turn of the 20th century and it was an engraving machine. And you look at . . . as the tattoo medium actually evolved we’re at a place where the tools themselves haven’t changed. It’s barbaric – they have the same structure as an old antique doorbell that was later patented byThomas Edison. Nothing’s really changed– maybe the pigments and formulations have. But not the technique. And now we’re able to do straight-up master reproductions on skin. I think these arts need each other. So whether or not people make that connection and actually fall in love with these different genres, it’s all really the same thing. I just got lucky being raised with parents that found importance in introducing the roots of all of it to us at an early age. I wonder what, nowadays, parents teach their kids. Again, my family’s from Argentina, we were born in Mexico and we didn’t have the luxury of money. We did have the basics, which are really the fundamentals of what makes me who I am today. I wouldn’t be able to write music the way I write now without all those years of playing classical music. And I also wouldn’t be able to draw at my level without having the inspiration of the Old Masters. And I don’t think that that’s ever going to change. You look at all the real painters today, their influences probably fall in line with the same greats.

GGF: There’s a lot of wisdom in that. So many of these things get “diverted” – by, social associations and pressures. Music is really interesting because the kind of music you listen to, for a lot of people, not only conjures up the music itself, which is just the notes themselves and how they’re performed, but also a whole set of peer group associations, social associations, value associations . . . KvD: Sure. GGF: You know you think of jazz and it’s so cool, in a skeezy dive with a lot of substances getting traded back and forth around the bar and a lot of smoke . . .

KvD: Sure.

GGF: You think about Goth, and certain kinds of people are into it

KvD: Yeah,

GGF: And you think you know what they’re like because they listen to that music. . . . . . and then you think about classical music, and for a lot of people the image is Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera: some dowager in a tiara with a big string of pearls, unbelievably stuffy, and un-cool and obsessed with all sorts of social conventions. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the music. The music is just the notes that Beethoven wrote and how they’re played . . .

KvD: Sure. Well . . . do you know who Ali Helnwein is?

GGF: No, tell me.

KvD: Oh, my gosh. Well, Ali Helnwein is my favourite modern day composer he’s my age, but he’s a composer and plays all instruments and actually he comes from a family of artists and I got introduced to him after being a fan of his father who’s quite the Renaissance man, painter, photographer,– his names is Gottfried Helnwein. When you Google him your mind will be blown. When I first met Ali I was so taken aback because I had heard his music and to me he was like if Tom Waits and Bach had a baby, you know? (laughs!) I highly recommend you look him up . . . I keep telling Ali, you’ve got to start releasing more music. He’ll press vinyl for me ‘cause he knows how much I love his stuff. He’s managed to make classical music cool again. He has a cult following and the people that listen to him . . . they’re just like me. I don’t know if it’s in the melancholy melodies or just the choice of instruments, or just the compositions themselves, but he just has a cool way of composing and I absolutely love it. He’s one of those people who, I’m always, like, “I’m so grateful that you live! That you exist, that you consecrate this.” Anyway I’m just a huge fan of his.

GGF: You appear on a bunch to TV talk shows, nominally you’re in the world of celebrity culture which everyone naturally assumes is a vacuous world for vacuous people,

KvD: Right.

GGF: but it’s pretty obvious that you’re not that – that you’re a person really confronting the quest for meaning and beauty every day in your life and in your work.

KvD: Thank you.

GGF: Which is one reason why I believe Glenn probably would have really liked you. And by the way, just a tip of the hat to that beautiful drawing of Glenn that you did.

KvD: Oh thank you!

GGF: I’d seen the picture you had taken of your self on the Foundation’s Glenn Gould “park bench sculpture” . . .

KvD: Yeah! There’s actually a funny story about that because with my makeup line it takes me everywhere all over the world and . . some people would call me a workaholic. I’m always very disciplined: “OK, we fly in, we have a completely packed day, there’s no down time at the end of it – we either get the flight back or spend one night and fly back early in the morning.” But the last time I was in Toronto, it was the first time ever that I had asked my team, “hey, I know I never asked before, but is it OK if we make one personal stop?” And they were just so curious, like, “where does she want to go?” And I said, “It’s not what you think. . . you guys won’t understand, it’s fine.” And so we go there and this was like the first time I ever was like, “hey, will you take a picture of me with this, real quick?” Yeah, it was on my To-Do list, you know? So that was kind of a funny moment, my team was just laughing about it. But it made sense, because I had named an eyeliner “Gould”. It was this gold eyeliner and they didn’t know, like that all my shade names are music-related stuff, like the inspirations behind the shade names. Then it made sense to them, and I made them watch a clip from that, “on the road” documentary where he’s playing with his dog, and I said, “you guys have to watch this, it isn’t even human!” So I’m trying to explain to them why this guy is . . .this hero! And they were all blown away. So that was just a special little moment . . .I know it probably looked cheesy, but to me it was a big deal.

GGF: Not cheesy at all. You know a lot of people come from all over the world to get their picture taken, sitting beside Glenn Gould on that bench.

KvD: Oh, for sure!

GGF: And I don’t know if you know this, but when you were there on that park bench, which really isn’t a park bench, ‘cause it’s bronze, but you were about a hundred feet away from the piano that Gould was playing in that scene with his dog.

KvD: Really!!!! Ah, that’s so awesome!

GGF: Next time you come to Toronto, we’ll take you to Glenn Gould studio . . .

KvD: I wanted to go in so badly, but they just made that little pit stop for me. And then, funny enough, it was as a conference for Sephora and there’s a brand – it’s a Canadian brand called Bite Beauty – they make lipstick that’s from edible ingredients – a really, really great company. And I was talking to them . . .you know, anytime I ever meet anybody from Toronto, the first thing I say is, “oh, wow, you’re so cool, you live in Gould-town.”And if they don’t know who it is, they’re like, “uh-who?” But this lady, who was one of the heads of Bite Beauty, she said, “Wait! You know who Glenn Gould is?” And I said, “Yeahhhhh, of course! I named an eyeliner after him!” And she tells me she’s somehow related to him. And I said, “you just became the coolest person everrrr!” I got so excited.

GGF: I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a beautiful - it was just last year, graphic novel about Glenn Gould.

KvD: Or really?

GGF: Spectacular, yes. And it was artist from France named Sandrine Revel, and it’s called “Glenn Gould: Une vie à contretemps.” And it’s now been published in a Korean edition, an Italian edition and the English just came out.

KvD: Oh, gosh, you have to keep me posted on that.

GGF: Your drawing (of Gould) which is extremely beautiful,

Kvd: Aw, thanks!

GGF: It reminds me to ask you, are you a completely self-taught visual artist?

KvD: Yeah, I mean, I definitely didn’t have training – I didn’t go to art school. And when I did go to school, like junior high, I failed my art classes, mainly because I had a hard time . . . I really don’t like people telling me what to think. Especially with art. I think the schools tend to want to teach you all the history and certain genres of art that I could care less about . . . I’ve always been a huge fan of realism. Again, a huge fan of Rembrandt, and I don’t really give a fuck about cubism and whatever. I mean it’s alright if people like that stuff, I just didn’t care to waste my time on it. So I got, maybe a C-minus on all the art projects, but I think I would be lying if I said I was self-taught because I learn from people – everybody I work with. You know, lately I’ve been really struggling to learn how to paint, doing workshops with painters I admire – their style and design and aesthetics. So, in my own way – in my own ghetto way – I was self-taught, but not without absorbing the influence of the artists I have around me, and I’m fortunate to have a lot. And I’m my friends’ biggest fan, so of course, I would probably soak some of that up. I don’t think I’m sure that, if taken under a microscopic look, my drawing’s probably not at a level, you know, I don’t draw flawlessly, but I just draw the way I feel. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but I like it that way.

GGF: Well, that’s your own special style. It shouldn’t be anything other than what it is. What are your preferred media?

KvD: I absolutely love graphite . . . that’s something I’ve always, it just feels intuitive to me. But I’m not anti-charcoal or anything like that. I’ll draw with a mechanical pencil I find on the floor. You know, give me a pencil and paper and I’ll figure it out. (laughs)

GGF: And that gets you to Rembrandt and chiaroscuro and the illusion of depth in a flat medium. But you work in a three-dimensional medium, because if you’re tattooing somebody’s arm . . .

KvD: Yeah, it’s not a flat piece of paper.

GGF: Does that prove to be a bit of a drafting challenge for you?

KvD: Yeah, sure. It’s always the case, and especially when you’re looking at a portrait, I’m always looking for the flattest surface on a body to avoid distortion. But there are little tricks you can use to compensate for that, and whatnot.

GGF: Perspective must be a bit of a special challenge in the sense that if, let’s say, someone flexes their bicep and it changes shape, your vanishing point goes out of kilter.

KvD: Yeah, (laughs), it’s probably a wise move not to place an eyeball at the centre of someone’s triceps – you know, that’s gonna cause distortion. But I think when you’re in a neutral position, as long as it looks nice and even, you’re good. Sure – where there’s a will there’s a way. (giggles)

GGF: I’ve been meaning to ask you. You’ve got a beautiful Beethoven portrait on your right thigh. Would you ever consider having a Glenn on you?

KvD: Yeah! I’ve actually considered it. Like Glenn was just, ah, shockingly beautiful. (laughs) Yeah, I would definitely love to explore that. More than anything, I love pictures of hands, and he obviously had so many great photographs of his hands. And I did toy with the idea of getting a portrait of his hands, or something like that.

GGF: You know, classical music has its challenges, especially the forms that are more expensive to maintain, like the symphony orchestras. Have you ever thought of conducting an orchestra, or would you ever be interested in curating and programming an orchestral concert?

KvD: I would never flatter myself in conducting, just because I wouldn’t be that presumptuous, but I mentioned my friend Ali Helnwein, and hearing a piece come to life, and performing it live, and I remember when he was working on a violin concerto that I was able to commission, and that made me happy – to be able to fund something and not just to get classical music fans but the youth – young people who might not necessarily know anything about music, to come down and be a witness to that. I feel like I could be a good patron in that sense.

GGF: You can be a great advocate . . .

KvD: I would love that. Next time I come out to Toronto, I’ll ring you up and you can show me around.

GGF: You are absolutely guaranteed a guided tour

KvD: Awesome, man, thank you so much.

GGF: You’ve been so generous with your time . . .

KvD: No, you have.

GGF: Absolutely. OK, I don’t want to make you late, but I had so many other questions I wanted to ask you.

KvD: I could talk to you forever!

GGF: If you’re game for a Chapter 2, happy to do that anytime.

KvD: Awesome!

[grwangtang]

frenetic--

just looked up the difference between the definitions of frenetic and frantic. dailywritingtips.com tells me that “frantic implies severe agitation in a distraught state, whereas frenetic suggests excessively energetic or fast-paced activity.”  i am feeling frenetic, not frantic. 

or rather, i think there’s an incredibly fine line between the two, and maybe i just haven’t allowed myself to untangle the emotions bubbling beneath the surface that would tip me towards frantic. 

 i had surgery last week. it was the last in a series of unexpected and unfortunate medical procedures that hit me in a whirlwind, starting in april. i had two ER visits, two surgeries back then. this was the culminating, final operation of the whole ordeal. but this time was...worse? more painful. last time i had an abscess, meaning a huge blister that needed to be (sorry this is TMI and gross) popped and drained. this time, my abscess developed into a fistula--meaning i had to have something actually removed from my body, not just something “popped.” so this time was more painful. slower to heal. and more aggravating a week out from the procedure. i still walk with a weird limp. i took oxycodone for a week--it messed me up, both mentally and physically. i feel groggy or “detached” more often than i did before. i also have struggled with sleeping. over the last two or three days, i think i’ve totaled 12-14 hours of sleep.  which, if you know me at all, is a travesty. i friggin’ love sleeping. 

the plus side was that i got to spend time with my best friend Jane and my parents. they both came and took care of me. made sure i ate right. helped me when i couldn’t pick things up, or carried heavy things around for me. stuff like that. i also got to talk to them for prolonged periods of time. i’ve realized that i don’t get a lot of one on one time with both parents. as one of three kids, that is a rare and special privilege. i had four days (oxycodone filled days, but still) with both of my parents. they are...such incredible, wise, visionary, brilliant, caring people. i think in my whole life, if i had to pick my biggest blessings, it would be my family.  and my Jane. i have spent the last few days under Jane’s care and companionship. her friendship is so special to me. i untangle parts of me that i wasn’t even aware were tangled when Jane is around. it’s like she sees all of my darkness and shadows and loves me anyway. not only does she love me, but she pushes me towards the light. the parts of me that are full of shadow, of malice, of darkness, become lighter when i am with jane. it’s friendship, but it’s friendship with a purpose and a goal--to encourage me further in my faith, to build the Church up together, to get to know our God better together. and i just...am so grateful. i am so grateful tonight, in this random coffeeshop, writing as she sits a little bit away (i like to spread out. we’re in the same coffeeshop but not even sitting together. just both here, quietly writing and working, together but separate. i love that we are comfortable enough with each other to do this). anyway. surgery has sucked, but it’s also been...good. a lot of reflection and thinking and untangling and darkness becoming light. 

however, life does not wait. despite me being on bedrest, life was not on bedrest. ---so work has been hectic and crazy. basically right before i left, two of my policies passed--my policy memos were published, they were signed by the superintendent, they were approved and sent on upwards the chain of command, emails and announcements were sent out, etc.  i really, truly believe that the policies i wrote were the right ones. i really, truly think they were right by children.  but they’re getting a LOT of pushback. because people don’t like change, because this is new and radically different and actually super aggressive and a big policy, because some teachers aren’t good people or doing the best job they could be and this policy puts them on the spot (SOME. not all. in fact, very few. i maintain to this day that teaching is the hardest thing i have ever done and teachers are some of the most diligent, noble, pure hearted humans in the world. but some suck. and those some cause a big, big fuss.). so i’m going to head back into a hurricane of a work environment, as we scramble to deal with the fall out.  ---so housing stuff has been on fast forward. i officially told my roommate i’m not living there again next year. i officially decided not to renew the lease. i officially now have no idea what i’m doing next year. no decisions have been cemented on that front. just that i’m not living there anymore.  separately, one of my roommates--my favorite one, the best girl ever, super cool and chill and independent and powerful and inspiring--is moving out at the end of this week.  and i am reeling with emotions from that one. because i love her. she is so cool and so incredible. and i will miss her. and i know that we are not close enough to visit each other, even though we both like each other and are friends. and i know that this is a goodbye--and i friggin’ suck at goodbyes.  that’s hard, too.  ----so church stuff is insane. so many decisions so many conversations mountain top is in three weeks and i want boston people to go and i also want my students in cleveland to go and i am scrambling scrambling scrambling to throw this together last minute.  in terms of....certainty, no new developments. just trying to take it one step at a time here.  ----so friend stuff is insane.  one of my best friends gets married this weekend in chicago. i am so excited to see her and everyone together. i love her and think she is one of the strongest, most compassionate, most real and down to earth people ever. i am so happy for her. but i also am so nervous because there are logistical things that still scare me, there are still moments where i’m not sure what i’m doing (i’m reading at the wedding), there are schedule details that scare me.  and another one of my best friends is moving next week from boston to san francisco.  i knew she was leaving. but i assumed this would happen in like, august. i thought i had all summer with her. and now i don’t. this is akanksha, my akanksha, who i love so dearly and who means so much to me. intuitive, inquisitive, creative akanksha--gentle weirdo akanksha, beautiful heart, sensitive soul akanksha. she is leaving me in one week.  the whole thing was so unexpected. and now i am reeling again. just....in so much turmoil and spinning so fast that i don’t have time to think about each bit of it yet, because put all together, i think everything would tip my scale into frantic mode. right now i am still operating at frenetic. and i don’t know if i can afford to give into the emotions, the distraught part of me that i know i’m suppressing, that i know lies under the surface.  this was so long i’m sorry everyone. i just....life is happening so fast and i cannot keep up and i do not know what to do next to calm it down. 

[rawinternets]

Star Wars Episode 2: A rediscovery

OK... at this point, I’ve reviewed in series: 

Rogue One Ep4: A New Hope Ep5: Empire Strikes Back Ep1: Phantom Menace

And boy, I am not excited for Episode 2. Still, I’m ready to give it a chance. 

What happens when I do this is, I watch a movie that improves upon the effort in Episode 1. You can sense here that George Lucas took a lot of the criticisms to heart, maybe even ceded some control to others whom he trusts. Jar Jar is significantly toned down, the spectacle is there but the mystery and darkness is turned up a bit. 

Still, we have a mostly flat movie. Only one “9″ scene and really it’s just the visuals, which have always been Star Wars’s strength. And, we are introduced to George Lucas’s Awkward Teenager Fantasy of a Space Romance (tm) featuring a horribly directed Hayden Christensen and a bewilderingly amenable Natalie Portman. Like, at no time at all in this movie does it make sense that Padme should be falling for this petulant, whiny, and kind of creepy kid... unless we simply assume that she kind of sucks, too. 

Despite John Williams again trying to save the day (and this romance) with a score that soars to beauteous heights with Across the Stars, the film definitely fails here. The infamous “sand” line, etc etc etc all to come. 

Lastly, we get an incredibly hokey and just inexcusably bad Gladiator style setpiece. 1′s and 2′s abound. The end result is a film that kind of flops on the main plot points and otherwise just plods the prequel plots forward, setting up an ep3 that might well have been made into three movies since it’s the only prequel that is interesting or ties to the originals in any satisfactory way. 

On to the scores. 

Average score: 5.48 Standard deviation: 2.07

Scroll. 7. This whole scroll made me say, “I guess...” Like, fine, I guess Count Dooku is a necessary new Sith character. I guess the Republic needs to create an army to help the Jedi... None of it makes me that excited. Appropriate omen for the rest of the movie. 

Approaching Coruscant. 6. Very pretty ship. Very pretty cloudy day on Coruscant. Terrorist attack! Holy shit! Hollywood dramatic death of the decoy getting killed, bad directing/acting by Amidala. I wrote, “woof.” talk about botching an interesting idea. 

Palpatine and Jedi. 7. More expository scenes here. “Dooku was behind it.” Sure, whatever. Keep republic together, sure, whatever. Yoda is fine. Samuel L is bad (must be the directing...). Palpatine scheming is just sort of Meh. 

Obiwan and Anakin. 8. Not too bad, to be honest. Ewan does well, he’s turning up his “Alec Guinness” knobs quite well. 

Jarjar / Padme, re-meet Anakin. 7. Damn, Amidala friendzones Anakin immediately. Anakin less good in this scene vs. with Obiwan. But the tension here actually makes sense.  I wrote, “I’m OK with it.” Jarjar, man. Boo. 

Worm assassination attempt, city chase. 6. This was supposed to be a big sexy setpiece and I was not loving it. Pretty imagery - very bladerunner - but Anakin’s “not another lecture” and subsequent arrogance during the chase scene means I really can’t understand how the Jedi didn’t see this coming. He’s a total prick. On top of that, one basejump from a speeder down 500 feet to another moving speeder *might* have been excusable, but two? And Obiwan catching a lightsaber out of nowhere? Plus, we get bad alien cutscenes. They go to a bar and there’s robot football on in the background, and that’s just a SMH / facepalm type stupid easter egg. Wasn’t into the cigarettes / “death sticks” line that much either. Anakin as a detective is a “meh.” Just... lots of falling flat going on here. 

Jedi Council and Palpatine. 8. Obiwan tracks down the bountyhunter-assassin and Anakin gets to guard the Senator. So, I actually think this is starting to set up Anakin’s turn pretty well. Palpatine is subtly sowing confusion, discord in Anakin’s mind. The council shows serious flaws in trying to spy on Palpatine via Anakin. Palpatine can appeal to Anakin’s ego. Again, the Jedi really were pretty stupid, which I guess we just have to believe (and call-forward to Episode 8, Luke’s POV). 

Jarjar becomes senator. 3. Copy-pasting my notes: “bad. why is anakin monologuing? padme is just sitting there. anakin temper tantruming for no reason. anakin a little rapey.”

Refugees. 3. I skipped over this scene accidentally and that would have been appropriate. Anakin and Padme stilted banter is bad. “At least we have R2! ha, ha, ha!” Good music (as always, JW). 

Diner. 5. Obiwan goes to see an “old friend.” They give a big alien a mustache and have him talk like a Chicago line cook. Gimme a big “meh!” Gotta go to the outer rim to meet some cloners. hurray. 

Library. 7. Jedi archivist arrogance. The mystery deepens - no system is there where the cloners are supposed to be! zomg. But this is all fine, and almost decent with deepening the mystery. 

Padme and Anakin refugee dinner. 7. Kind of as painful as watching someone’s first date at a bar while waiting for a friend. “Attachment is forbidden but we’re encouraged to love unconditionally” and a bunch of other hoke. Anakin is persistent. Still, not a bad scene. 

Jedi training w/ Yoda. 7. A little hokey how Yoda asks the padawan kids to guess at why there’s no system in the archives. A bad yoda chin scratch. A little hokey, but good. 

Back on Naboo. 4. Good music. Dialogue between Anakin and Padme continues to be pretty rough. “Keep our faith in the republic.” More politics. Lake country. Anakin and Padme tension is dumb. 

Camino. 7. Bad name, cool scene. Good mystery unfolding... why is Obi-Wan expected? What are all these soldiers doing here, who ordered them, what’s going on? Kind of clunky revealing dialogue and the CGI is a bit out of hand but also decently cool. I wrote: “I’m OK with the secret army storyline.” 

Lake country on Naboo. 2-6.  Padme is smoking hot. Beautiful scenes here, but then we get this gem: "I don't like sand. it's coarse, rough, irritating... gets everywhere. Here, everything's soft and smooth." Anakin is such a douche. Padme lets him kiss her, but why? Not sure i'm buying this shit. Love song (Across the Stars) is amazing. Beautiful waterfall. But then they dissect their first kiss. mehhhhh. Let's talk politics at a picnic? No. "Make people agree." Anakin is authoritarian and sort of evil. How could she fall in love with this dude? Then he surfs a cow. No. Now they’re rolling around in the grass. No. No thanks.

Django and Boba on Camino. 8. One of the better and subtler scenes maybe in the whole series for acting. Obi-wan and Django do a great job of dancing around each other verbally while sizing each other up. 

Anakin-Padme Dinner / Wooing. 3. God, I wish I didn’t have so much to say about this tripe, but I do. I guess i'm fine with wooing Padme with Jedi tricks... But I still don't really buy the love story. And now we get lines like: "I'm in agony. the closer I get the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you." Suuuuuper creepy. “Haunted by the kiss you should have never given me.” “You are in my very soul tormenting me.” Honestly! This is like The Room. "THEN YOU DO FEEL SOMETHING!!!" Just a bad scene overall. Now Anakin is getting nightmares. "Your presence is soothing." Meh. Natalie Portman - did I mention she’s smoking hot? Anakin's mother is suffering in his nightmares, so he’s leaving to help her. Padme will go with him!? what the fuck. Bad lines too. Also callback to Luke leaving to help Han and Leia... I don’t know. Bad.

“Collect call.” 7. I believe this is the scene where Obi-Wan calls back to the council and Yoda or Samuel L. says their powers are diminished for not being able to see the creation of this clone army. Decent plotline, OK. 

Django Fett vs. Obi-wan fight. 6. Decent. Too much ledge-hanging and Jedi are too super-duper-heroey. Tracking Django is fine but looked hokey. 

Tatooine. 4. A fancy ship lands at Mos Eisley... man, they’re really going back to this well a lot. We see the stupid slave owner bug guy again and long story short, Anakin’s mom has been taken by the Tuskan Raiders. Time to kill some things. 

Obi-wan tracks Django. 6. Asteroid field again. Depth charges again. Supposed to be a good action setpiece but I’m distracted because there’s not supposed to be any cool noises in space. Fine with Obi-wan faking his death to avoid Django. Very pretty scenery and Obi-wan sneaks around some. Whatever. 

Anakin on the mother hunt. 1-7. Clever shadow of Anakin-as-Darth on the side of the building. Back to good music from Ep1. Finds his mom, and we’re back to bad dialogue. “Ani? Ani? Ani? Ani?” ... should feel something here, and don’t. The actor chemistry is just so bad, and I blame George. Still, Anakin going HAM is a good slip to the dark side. Hebrings his mom back dead, and proceeds to monologue shittily to Padme. "Life seems so much simpler when you're fixing things. I'm good at fixing things.” Awful. “Why'd she have to die? Why couldn't i save her? I know I could have?” what the FUCK. Terrrrrrrrrible. "I killed them. I killed them all." "I'm a jedi, I know I'm better than this." OK, finally at the very end as he breaks down, some sort of decent turn in this scene.

Count Dooku. 4. Jesus, how long is this movie? We get a random weirdo trying to create a new treaty with the trade federation to oppose the Republic. TWIST! This is what the rebellion does, but they’re somehow good! Sigh. 

Yoda and Windu. 4. “Pain, suffering. Young Skywalker is in pain.” Whatever. 

Funeral, message. 4. Here’s what I wrote and I remember none of this: “Clete is fine. Not really buying the whole anakin thing with mom. anakin stay where you are and protect the senator! padme is a mess too.”

Senator scheming. 5. So blatant. Sometimes this plotline is really well done and sometimes is sucks. Could have given this a 3-5. 

Dooku and Obi-wan. 7. OK, we have an exposition-y scene where Dooku tries to recruit Obi-wan to his side. This scene saved by two very good actors giving a good performance. 

Jar Jar in Senate. 2. The worst thing the franchise ever did gets to deliver the vote that gives Chancellor supreme powers. Jar Jar is a f***in’ tw*t. And Chancellor creates the Grand Army of the Republic. 

Padme and Anakin on planet. 1.  Oh, right. Anakin was going to go find Obi-wan or some shit. Padme saving the day with her senate powers! mehhhhhh. C3PO and R2 engage in dumb banter, but not as bad as jarjar. We’re now on some kind of shop floor ... that’s a No. Padme is now running through stampers. No. Bad. Dumb. No. Anakin also dumb. No. bad. My reviewing devolves into 2-year-old level angry language. We see machines making machines. C3PO hangs off a ledge. R2 flies around... come on. Wow, this is so bad. Padme falls into a fucking steel boiler. NO. NO NO NO. Anakin’s lightsaber is cut in half and we get a terrible "Obi-wan's gonna kill me." BOOOOO. And now droids and the fucking bountyhunter show up. God, that was worthless. 

Padme and Anakin pre-Gladiator. 2.  Anakin gets to deliver this gem: “I’ve been dying each day since you came back into my life. I love you.” I don't feel this makes any sense. Except I guess it’s clear now, as i said at the beginning of the review, that Padme kinda sucks. “I truly deeply love you.” Why?

Gladiator Death Battle. 1. HOW LONG IS THIS MOVIE? Also: GOD, THIS IS HORRIBLE. The only good part is Obi-wan with some sarcasm, otherwise we have unnecessary zerg monsters and midriff-revealing claw slashes and general dumb gladiatorial action. The “bad feeling” line was terrible, worst of the series. And where did Padme get her fucking keys? 

Jedi save the day. 3. The Jedi look very hokey and stupid, to be honest, and they don’t look like very good fighters at the end of the day. Scores 3 for light sabers but otherwise it’s a 1 or 2 scene. What’s the end game here? Get surrounded and killed? Django vs. Mace Windu who cares. We get terrible Anakin and Padme cheesing, terrible C3PO humor, bad Jedi vs. Droids action, just all around shit. 

Clones save the day. 5.  Yoda arrives with clones to save the day. At least the plotline is somewhat nuanced - who is fighting who, who is good and who is not. This ambiguity is good. But nobody wanted to kill Dooku until he was already escaped? Sort of mediocre action. Soundtrack just sounds like the matrix. Why is yoda so into the fighting? He’s trying to protect the Republic, which he knows is eroded. The jedi sure fucked up.

Death Star Plans? 5. So having seen Rogue One, this doesn’t make any sense at all (continuity errors!) ... but the DS was actually a design from the Trade Federation, apparently? Not into this. George Lucas sucks and Dooku sucks. 

Dooku Chase. 7. God, I can’t wait for this to be over (the movie and the review). Padme falls out of the transport - OK. Obi-wan and Anakin argue and it’s good. Finally some good acting out of this guy. 

Dooku fight. 7-9. Notwithstanding that Dooku seems like a very unnecessary character, this climax is decent. Anakin’s an idiot apparently, and force lightning is apparently a big sith weapon. OK light saber fighting until double-lightsaber fighting, at which point it’s hard to follow the action. George is too busy focusing in on faces. And Yoda shows up. Huzzah. Fun to watch him with the light saber, maybe a bit too much spining around and Yoda ParkourTM, but why is he shouting? Aren’t Jedi supposed to stay calm? What happened to the Quigon meditation approach? Dooku esacpes. bleh. 

Dooku Sidious meeting. 8. It’s all going to plan, yes, yes. Who the fk is Lord Tyranus? Very good music. War has begun, cool. All to Sidious’s plan, no surprise. 

Yoda and Windu. 7.  "Victory you say? Not victory. The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun the clone war has." Meh. 

Clone Deploy. 9. The visuals of Star Destroyers lifting off and a huge army deploying is pretty cool. This is the highlight of this movie, which is sad. 

Secret Marriage on Naboo. 7. Very pretty shot, no dialogue is good, anakin has a fake arm, bad kissing. definitely not an “8″. 

Credits. 6. The tone of the ending music (traditional theme) is too upbeat. Should have taken a page (pre-emptively) from Rogue One’s book and used a quiet, somber theme. Gets there after a minute or so. Bleh. So glad this is over. 

VERDICT

Not memorable, not unique, and basically a handful of scenes could have done the job here instead of what felt like 5 hours of filler. Happy to forget this movie ever happened. It grades out on the histogram as mostly 7′s and an even distribution around 4 or 5, but really, the 7′s were often due to boredom or “meh” type scores. Very flat movie in experience, with only downside and very little upside. 

REVIEW LINKS:

Introduction: Star Wars, a rediscovery.

Rogue One: 6.92 / 10.00 (stdev 2.06).

Episode 4: A New Hope. 8.00 / 10.00 (stdev 1.34).

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back. 8.00 / 10.00 (stdev 1.29).

Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. 5.00 / 10.00 (stdev 2.08). But probably worse than that, actually.

Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. 5.48 / 10.00 (stdev 2.07).

Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. 7.00 / 10.00 (stdev 1.77).

Episode 6: Return of the Jedi. 7.90 / 10.00 (stdev 1.91).

Episode 7: The Force Awakens. 6.57 / 10.00 (stdev 2.01).

Episode 8: The Last Jedi. 6.31 / 10.00 (stdev 1.89).

Verdict: Star Wars, A rediscovery.

[siouxempirepodcast]

Art in the Darkest of Times

I didn’t expect this to be a dark time. As I approached the end of my 5th decade of life, there was a certain assurance of good ahead. I had overcome many struggles and had worked hard to better myself, to enrich myself of experience and to share the wisdom of that experience with others. My personal evolution seemed to mirror the progressive and positive change I saw in the world, as well. The most formative part of my personal experience and self-identity started with music. Punk Rock was the big galvanizing force of my young life, the influence that would determine the kind of adult I would be. I bristled under authority (and still do) and recognized the efforts of people who acted independently. In the early and mid-1980’s most of pop culture seemed to reflect the “norms” of our society. White, middle-class, picket-fence, Reaganomics, the Christian Coalition, “Greed is Good,” Billboard’s Top 40. None of that resonated with me in the slightest. Give me a barely-lit hole in the wall club in Hamtramck, Michigan with dollar Rolling Rocks, LOUD music and a crowd full of people all dancing together. The punk clubs were a melting pot – predominantly white, but not exclusively so. Ostensibly heteronormative, at least on the surface, but in the dark who knows (or cares) what went on? Punk had a decidedly F-you attitude that resonated for this chick and those I associated with. Weird? Good. Different? Well, okay. This was the counter-culture, after all. We didn’t care if you had a Mohawk, black or white skin, piercings, money if you lived in a nice house out in Rochester or you slept in your car down in the seedy Cass Corridor. We weren’t necessarily all equals (gender norms were still in swing, for instance) but it was close. Sure, there were also dark moments during those punk years. There were those who took excess and experimentation too far, and never came back. There were those who burned out, faded away and now live in some unknown small town in Arizona or Ohio or the Far East. But you got through those dark times with your friends, and whatever talent you could cobble together. For many of my friends, it was music. Sharing whatever raw space on a late weeknight to practice and whatever bar or tavern or club would let you play live on the weekend. I wasn’t a musician (although I did briefly sing in an all-girl punk band when I was sixteen). Nor was I an artist, but I had many friends who drew and sketched and sculpted. No, I was a writer. I wrote and edited a local fanzine, all about the local scene, and I dreamed of being a successful author someday. I had lots of ideas, but it’s hard to get focused when you’re hitting the clubs, hitting the Rolling Rock and trying to be “cool.” It took a long time in life to get serious about my writing practice. But I got there – I’m working on my fourth book now. I’ve long identified with the artists, the weirdo’s, the “others” in our society. I’d rather have a smaller house and a bigger travel budget. I have forsaken corporate work in favor of PBJ sandwiches and a sense that my destiny is MINE. The compromises I’ve made are still acceptable to me and would be even if I hadn’t finally broken through those roadblocks to writing. And I recognize that artists are often the saving grace during times of trouble. Until this past November, I had reached the place I was freaking happy. I mean, HAPPY! Not just content or satisfied or resigned, but truly happy. Life wasn’t perfect, and the world wasn’t perfect, but I said to friends last year that it felt like I was in “the home stretch.” Now, it feels like I’m sitting at the bottom of a massive hill and I can’t even see what’s ahead, let alone how hard it’s gonna be to get there. This made me think about the other times in history when chaos came along and tore up the plans that our ancestors made in their personal journeys. What becomes of society when you can’t make sense of what’s happening? You make art, that’s the simple answer. You paint or your photograph, you dance or your design. You write your way through that nonsense like your life is at stake because of my friend – it is. If you look back at the bleakest and most chaotic times in history, you’ll see that what remains, what is remembered is the beauty that somehow managed to slip through the cracks. You’ll find the desperate souls that fought to write their little stories, songs, plays and performances and then fought to share them and preserve them. If we examine some of the darkest moments in history, you’ll find that what rose out of the ashes of those times were the powerful creative efforts of those who survived. Often, they were those who had to hide in the shadows because they faced imprisonment, banishment or death. When you talk darkness, it’s natural to default to the Holocaust. The years of Nazi oppression, the concentration camps, the brutalities, and atrocities seem to be present with us these many decades later. Not just because of film reels, but by what was left behind. We know and understand the Holocaust interpretively through art. We understand the Nazi uprising as it responded to the earlier Weimar Republic years – the Gay Thirties of Berlin, the era of Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” and of Marlene Dietrich, flaunting and tormenting through “The Blue Angel.” We understand the brutality when compared to the Bauhaus art movement, through Dadaism, through Bertolt Brecht’s agitprop. We understand the seduction of Fascism as viewed through the lens of the works of Paul Klee and the operas of Kurt Weill (“Threepenny Opera”) and Alban Berg (“Lulu/Pandora”). We certainly understand the Holocaust through the prism of the art that was created during the War years – Picasso’s “Guernica” alone speaks volumes about man’s inhumanity to man. But we also understand the Holocaust through what came in the immediate aftermath. After that, the world began to process what it learned about mankind’s ugliest extremes and our ability to survive those extremes. In fact, composer Bertolt Brecht wrote, “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” World War2 was followed by a period of unprecedented cultural impact by Jews. Writers like Philip Roth and Elie Wiesel, artists like Marc Chagall, entertainers like the Marx Brothers and Bob Dylan. It wasn’t just that Jews were valued, in our society, after having nearly been obliterated. More importantly, it is that they had something incredibly valuable to share, having survived that experience. When you survive the unthinkable, you are poised to become one of the great thinkers. The Holocaust was a striving for perfection. The Great Leap Forward in China was more about uniformity. Historian Frank Dikotter explained that “coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundations of the Great Leap Forward” and that it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings in human history.” It is believed that somewhere between 18 and 55 million people died, including during the years of the terrible Famine that plagued China (1958-1962). During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Communist Party did permit criticism of the government (including the infamous “Gang of Four”). A tsunami of Chinese literature emerged during this time, including painful accounts of life under Chairman Mao. These included short stories that appeared in official government publications. The Maoist system, like the Nazi’s before, believed in a policy of agrarian reliance. The images, in both totalitarian systems, publicly presented include robust farmers and plump housewives, darling children and industrious teens –all working toward the greater good of self-reliance and integrity of resources. But the Great Leap Forward pushed agricultural reliance to the extreme, resulting in the failure of crops across the countryside. After the famine had ended there was a period in which the Chinese leadership embraced a cultural wave known as “Scar Literature” in which the people of China were able to write honestly about their experiences. Scar literature was cathartic and depicted truly horrific accounts of life during the Cultural Revolution – of persecution and violence, including the state-sanctioned executions of their loved ones. Examples of “scar literature” include “Red Azalea” by Anchee Min, “Mao’s Last Dancer” by Li Cunxin and “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China” by Jung Chang. In “Wild Swans,” author Chang relates “Father said slowly, “I ask myself whether I am afraid of death. I don’t think I am. My life as it is now is worse. And it looks as if there is not going to be any ending. Sometimes I feel weak: I stand by Tranquility River and think, just one leap and I can get it over with. Then I tell myself I must not. If I die without being cleared, there will be no end of trouble for all of you… I have been thinking a lot lately. I had a hard childhood, and society was full of injustice. It was for a fair society that I joined the Communists. I’ve tried my best through the years. But what good has it done for the people? As for myself, why is it that in the end, I have come to be the ruin of my family? People who believe in retribution say that to end badly, you must have something on your conscience. I have been thinking hard about the things I’ve done in my life. I have given orders to execute some people…” Today’s current literature trend of purging the soul owes a great debt to those Chinese writers, many of whom wrote their true stories under the most horrendous of experiences, often hiding their works until they could be free, or defect, and share them with the world. This included stories of forced labor, brutal rapes, and cannibalism. But perhaps no time in history had as great and as long-lasting a cultural impact as that of the years of the Great Plague. The “Black Death” raged from 1346 to 1353 and claimed the lives of as many as 200 million humans. Our cultural understanding of Death itself, from the image of the Grim Reaper, of Heaven and Hell and Purgatory, stem from those years. Dante’s works bear the marks of the plague all over them. The artistic descriptions of fair maidens languishing away and the bird-beaked plague doctors, aromatic herbs warding off the bug. In fact, our very understanding of the nature of insects in the lives and health of humans came from the Black Death. Whatever would Kafka and Burroughs have written about without first the concept of the insect as the enemy? With every tragic and terrible moment in history, you’ll find a creative burst that enlightens and entertains. World War I brought us Jazz. The Crusades gave us Islamic art. The Depression gave us the works of Dorothea Lange. The Slave Trade gave us Gospel, and later, Rock and Roll. I didn’t expect this to be a dark time in my life. As a writer I understand that my responsibility is to document, to chronicle, to “bear witness” as Victor Klemperer (the German Holocaust-era journalist) wrote. But as a creative soul, a left-brained, punk rock weirdo, I have to find an outlet for my despair and not just an inlet. There’s a tiny part of me that is fascinated by what may emerge, in our future. Like other darker moments in our history, I know that it is because of the determination of our artists, that the future can be brighter.

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