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twosentencereviews · 10 months ago

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Joker 2 will (probably) also be bad

I've gone on record saying Joker (2019) was a badly-conceived film, with ideas that are, at best, inconsistent and muddled.

And now they're making another one. With Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. Maybe it will be better this time?

...no, probably not. Let me break it down.

So, the entire design philosophy of Joker (2019) from writer/director Todd Phillips was, quote, "we're gonna sneak in a real movie in the guise of a comic book movie". That is, Phillips wanted to make Taxi Driver...but he's only a talented enough filmmaker to make The Hangover at best, and The Hangover Part III at worst, and so Warner Bros only trusted him with an IP that was guaranteed to succeed regardless of quality.

This sucks on two levels. If we judge Joker as a "real film"...it fails utterly, because it's using the visual language of the 1970s to whine about 21st century woes, and even then doesn't have anything to say. The "failed standup act goes viral" plot beat doesn't fit with the media landscape of the 1970s, while the clown rioters echo the "eat the rich, defund the police" sentiment that was brewing in 2019 and would explode with George Floyd's murder in 2020. These things are included because Phillips is the kind of jerk who complains about "woke culture" on Twitter. The only reason Phillips sets the film in the 1970s...is because he's cheating off Scorsese's homework.

But if we judge Joker as a comic book movie, it also sucks, because it completely fails to live up to what makes The Joker so fascinating. See, The Joker is a Batman villain; a standout antagonist against the rogues gallery. You cannot understand The Joker except as a literary foil, as a dark reflection of the Dark Knight. Batman is a solemn, incorruptible force for justice. The Joker is a manic, incorruptible force of destruction. While many of Batman's villains are sympathetic (e.g. Mr Freeze), and others are garden-variety thugs with powers (e.g. Clayface), The Joker is pure. He cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with, he has no agenda beyond causing mayhem, and he has no better nature to appeal to. That charisma, that certainty of purpose, is what makes the Joker such a fun villain. Phillips throws all of that in the garbage--Arthur Fleck is weak-willed, cowardly, and just needs a friend.

And now, in Folie a deux...he's getting one, in the form of Gaga's Harley Quinn.

Now, Harley Quinn is different from the Joker. Harley was introduced in Batman: the Animated Series, voiced by Arleen Sorkin, as a counterpart to Mark Hamill's Joker. Her origin story is that she was Dr. Harlene Quinzel, a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum, who tried to fix The Joker...only to be pulled in by his madness, taking a new name, costume, and falling head-over-heels for "Mista J", her "puddin'".

This is interesting because while The Joker only really makes sense as a Batman antagonist, Harley only really makes sense in the context of the Joker. Harley's story is one of domestic abuse; she is The Joker's greatest victim, and yet his staunchest ally. She sometimes realizes this and tries to get away, but can't escape his manipulative gravity. This obsessive love, however, is not returned; The Joker's soulmate is Batman, the yin to his yang, his equal and opposite. Nowhere is this more clear than in the iconic Mad Love, where Harley almost kills Batman as a gift to her puddin', only for The Joker to furiously lash out in a "no one kills Batman but me" kind of way.

So while the Joker is fun because he's so unsympathetic, Harley is fun because she is sympathetic. The Joker is fully evil, but Harley is only evil because of her exposure to The Joker; without him in the picture, she's just a manic antihero.

And that's exactly what's happened to her character over time; fan and authorial desire to see Harley achieve independence and escape the cycle of abuse led directly to her more modern portrayals, such as Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad (2016), Birds of Prey, and The Suicide Squad (2021). But even then, she was introduced in Suicide Squad against Jared Leto's Joker, and the start of Birds of Prey is her mourning her breakup with him. Her animated series starts the same way, seeking autonomy and an independent self-identity.

Folie a deux...isn't going to be doing that. It can't. It doesn't work with Arthur Fleck. The whole point of Joker (2019) is that Arthur Fleck is a loser, he's a failed nobody, he is the dregs of society that everyone ignores. His sexual frustration and loneliness form the basis of a major (and idiotic) plot beat with Zazie Beetz. He is a million miles from the "charismaniac" of Hamill or Ledger--there is zero possibility that he could "infect" a brilliant psychiatrist.

To his credit, Phillips realizes this, and is taking a different angle. From the trailer, it looks like Gaga's Harley is going to be a fellow Arkham resident, and she's going to be the one who initiates flirtation with Arthur, in a sort of "love letter to a serial killer" kind of admiration. The trailer leans heavily on the refrain of "what the world needs now is love, sweet love", and overall seems to be framing itself as an honest-to-god romance. Instead of the Joker/Harley relationship being abuser/victim, it looks instead to be toxic enabling, where Harley encourages Arthur to embrace his worst, most destructive instincts.

And...that's probably going to be framed as a good thing. See, if Folie a deux is going to be a romance, then plot constraints demand that there needs to be an obstacle dividing the lovers and preventing their happy union. What obstacle could exist between Arthur and Harley? Why, the entire legal system, of course--we see in the teaser multiple shots of them going up courthouse steps. It's likely that the pair fall in love in Arkham, escape ("let's get out of here", Harley says), are recaptured, and then have to defend themselves in court. This might have a "happy ending" where they win and leave together, affirming that enabling a violent criminal is a good thing. Or it might have a "sad ending" where the court outcome separates them, affirming Arthur's nihilism and anger at a system he perceives as unjust only when it inconveniences him. Either way, Harley is going to be framed as good for Arthur, making him better while making him worse.

Could this be done well? Maybe. It's certainly possible. Canon is already so broken that it's no longer a limitation. A talented director might realize the moral complexity in the relationship between two violent, mentally unstable murderers. One could frame the entire thing as a tragedy, where "boy gets girl back again" is shown to be disastrous (as in The Graduate). Or, it could even be something of an inversion of the more canonical Joker/Harley romance; instead of Harley realizing that she's better off without Mista J, it might be Arthur realizing he is better off without Harley.

But it almost certainly won't be any of that. Because Phillips thinks that Arthur Fleck is relatable. He thinks he's a martyr, a victim of targeted injustice, a doomed hero refusing to bow to societal norms. But he isn't. Arthur Fleck is an entitled white boy who simultaneously sees his suffering as a systemic failing, while also refusing to see how the system harms others, and refusing to see how his own choices make things worse for everyone. Arthur Fleck is an embodiment of denied privilege, where cishet white men expect to be lavished with unearned success, and are butthurt when they don't get it.

And above all, the thing that media has always told men is that a manic pixie dream girl is going to find you and fall madly in love with you despite your obvious failings. That is the heterosexual male romantic fantasy; love without effort, acceptance without labor, companionship without obligation. Todd Phillips might play this straight. Or he might set this up for Arthur, only to deny it as an act of authorial cruelty. But the first film demonstrates that he lacks the self-awareness necessary to actually deconstruct it, to criticize the expectation itself.

So no. I don't think Folie a deux will be better than its prequel. Because for Todd Phillips to make a better movie, he'd have to be a better person. And he's not.

#joker #joker folie a deux #folie a deux #prediction #harley quinn #romance

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sapphicmsmarvel · 4 years ago

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EP: Siren Queen

masterlist

Premise: Y/N L/N is a part of the world's biggest girl group. A stalker starts harassing her and her band mates so their label calls in the BAU.

The case was weird for the BAU. It was a stalker case for a famous girl, Y/N L/N, she was part of the worlds most successful girl group. Garcia was all too excited to be involved in the case. Of course, she hated that you were being stalked but she was a huge fan.

“You better tell me everything!” She squealed, “If she’s nice, if she’s as hot as she is on camera, if the other girls are nice, if they are ‘just like us’ please!”

“If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were the stalker, Garcia.” JJ joked.

“If someone hurts that ray of sunshine I will stalk them!” She shouted through the video call and then hung up.

JJ flipped through the file, “we have five days to catch this guy before they go on tour. And the girls are refusing to cancel.” “Even if their lives are at stake?”

“They said that they will not cancel because it’s the opening to their world tour and they won’t risk disappointing fans because they know people are flying in from all over the country.” Prentiss explained.

“Shouldn’t the label put the girls first?” Morgan asked.

“Usually labels tend not to care about artists.” Reid said, “the amount of label abuse that’s been coming to light is horrific you guys should read up on it.”

He looked up as everyone looked at him confused, he explained, “Simon Cowell for example, there are claims against him because of abuse towards clients. Overworking them, homophobic comments, racist comments, sexist comments you name it.”

“What groups?” JJ asked.

“Little Mix and One Direction are the two most prominent ones.” Reid said flicking through the file.

“How do you know all this?” “Garcia.” He answered. “Then I did my own research because I was fascinated by the music industry. It never hurts to learn even if I don’t know anything about it.”

The team left it at that, and continued digging through the evidence of your stalker.

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The team was currently sitting in one of the rehearsal rooms. There were couches, a snack bar, a coffee stand, everything except the girls they were meeting.

Their publicist Ramona looked at them all apologetically, “I’m so sorry, the girls seem to be in traffic. They’re with trusted drivers and security guards.”

“Have they been background checked?” Hotch asked.

Ramona nodded, “we all were when we were taken on, we were when this stalker showed up as well. The dancers, the crew, everybody those girls come into contact with are background checked.”

“Even interviewers?” Reid asked. Ramona nodded, “without their knowledge, just like you advised. If this got leaked…” Ramona shook her head, “we all know what happens to victims of stalkers, it isn’t foreign in this business.”

At that moment the girls all came in, Emily recognized them from the files. Apparently, even your bandmates got checked. Zoey came in first, snuggled in her hoodie, her jeans were rumpled and her heels were clacking. Her smile falling off her face the second she walked into the room. Her blonde hair was tousled as if she was running her hands through it a lot. Her green eyes were tired.

Leaning on her was Brooke, who was also looking exhausted. Ramona told them that they had been up since 4 am doing press, it was now 4pm. They had a two hour rehearsal next, then dinner, then vocal rehearsal, then they could go to their hotel. Apparently it was an easy day for them. Brooke's black hair was in it’s natural curls, she wore heels as well as a dress.

The two were holding hands.

Then came in Liz, she was wearing a black long sleeve shirt, shorts and a beanie as well as heeled boots. She didn’t look as tired, she looked fiercely protective as she was holding your hand.

You looked anxious, you were also in a hoodie, jeans and heeled boots, all black. Your eyes were darting around the room as you took in everyone around you. Your eyes startled when they landed on Emily, Emily wasn’t sure why.

Ramona introduced all of them to the girls then said “Sit down girls.”

Three of them did, you had other ideas and went and got coffee. “Y/N, that’s your fourth cup.”

You held up a finger, “I don’t want to hear it, Ramona. I have a stalker out there and I have to act like everythings normal, if Marcus has a problem with it, he can suck my dick.”

Morgan looked at Emily with wide eyes. Emily shrugged. Then looked at Reid, “who’s Marcus?” She asked him.

“Their choreographer.” “Why does it matter what he says?”

“Because he cares about us and is a fitness nut.” You answered, “you’re not very good at whispering.” You deadpanned, sipping your coffee.

“Y/N!” Ramona scolded.

You rolled your eyes, and Zoey spoke up, “give her a break Ramona. She never gives you issues, let her live.”

“It’s okay,” Emily spoke up, “I understand what it’s like to be afraid of looking over your shoulder.”

You nodded, avoiding eye contact. You felt guilty for snapping, that much she could tell.

“Okay, let’s get started.” Hotch said, “do you have any particular fans you’d like to tell us about, people have stood out?”

“We have a lot of...dedicated fans.” Zoey said, to put it gently. “Some good, some bad, some that are really intense.”

You scoffed from where you were standing, “that's putting it lightly.” You grabbed a mini chocolate chip cookie..

“Do girl groups have groupies?” Morgan asked.

“Of course we do,” Liz said, her tan cheeks gaining a rosy color. You sat in between her and Zoey, Brooke was next to Zoey. You had three other cookies in your hand and handed them to the others.

“We recognize the line between fans and stalkers as well as people who don't agree with who we are. But there’s been nothing like this.” Brooke shuddered.

“Don’t agree with who you are?” JJ asked.

You held up a hand, “queer.”

Brooke raised her hand, “black.”

Liz raised hers, “philipino and black. So mixed race.”

Then Zoey raised hers as well, “I’m ‘too skinny’ so everyone thinks I have an eating disorder.”

You piped up, “I’ve also been fat shamed by the worlds biggest media outlets, it’s nothing new to find hate online.”

Emily grimaced and she knew her team was doing the exact same thing.

“Do you have any ideas as to who it could be?” Rossi asked.

“There’s one,” Zoey said, “but Y/N insists it can’t be him.”

“You need to tell us.” Emily said, everyone looked at you.

You sighed, “he went to jail when we were teens for sexual misconduct. I was the first person he assaulted and harassed consistently. But I didn’t press charges.” “Why not?” Morgan asked.

“Because I was a fourteen year old girl who didn’t recognize that it was sexual assault.” You snapped, then sighed, “I’m sorry Agent Morgan. It’s touchy.” Zoey took your hand, Liz took your other one, Brooke reached over and put her hand on top of Zoeys. “To be honest, I don’t know where I would be without these three.” You admitted. Emily admired it, the sisterhood between you four.

“How long have you guys been friends?” JJ asked.

“We met in high school, then formed the band.” Brooke answered.

“Do you know if he’s out?”

You sighed, “he is. But he lacks the brain cells to pull this stuff off.”

“It’s not that hard to mail letters.” JJ said.

“Yeah but, he shouldn’t know the exact times we show up at venues, interviews, he isn’t smart enough to think of how to obtain that information. As kids he was not smart, at all.” You said, letting go of your friends’ hands and you started rubbing your hands on your jeans.

Emily noticed how all of them kept their hands on you, as a way of comfort.

“Unless he was following the bus,” Zoey said.

“He’s too lazy.” You said, “never had energy for thorough shit.”

“What’s his name? We’re gonna send it to our technical analyst.” Morgan said.

You nodded and spoke the name you’ve feared for far too long. “Peter Brady, he was born in my home state

“Okay,” Hotch started, “I want all of you to be shadowing the girls, they are not to be left alone, we don’t know how organized this guy is and what he knows.” He looked at Rossi, “we’ll contact Garcia and run through possible people. Do you have anywhere to set up?”

Ramona began directing them to rooms, then told all of you to get changed and do rehearsals for the tour.

JJ and Reid sat in during the rehearsals, meanwhile Emily and Morgan helped Hotch and Rossi with going through all the names that Garcia flagged as potentially dangerous.

Two hours later, Emily was eating dinner, she was planning to eat alone, but then she found you. You were sitting on the floor backstage, by a bunch of wires and such eating your pizza. You were alone.

“Hey,” Emily said.

“Hi, did Ramona send you because I’m alone?” You asked, smiling slightly.

“No,” Emily said sitting next to you, “I can recognize when someone needs someone to talk to. Where are your friends?”

“They’re talking to their partners, I insisted they do. They haven’t been the past couple of nights because of all this. Part of being….’famous’ is that you have to leave your loved ones for long periods of time.” “My field is the same way. I don’t see my mom more than twice a year.”

You shuddered, “I can barely handle not seeing my mom as much as I used to before ‘fame’. I can’t imagine it in your shoes.” You sighed.

Emily popped open her salad box, “do you mind if I eat with you?” She smiled.

And she smiled wider when you smiled back, “feel free. By the way, I’m sorry about snapping at you. It’s been rough.”

“I know how you feel.” Emily would tell you about Doyle if it helped you open up more about this guy.

“Have you been stalked?”

Emily nodded, “by an abusive ex.” Was all she said.

You grimaced, “so we’ve gone through similar things.” “Was this guy an ex?” You shook your head, “we were thirteen and fourteen, as kids navigating those feelings can be hard. I’d say we were close to dating then he...he pushed too far. I wasn’t raped, but he touched me inappropriately, then harassed me over text. Then continued for three years, he’s been silent ever since and now all of a sudden 12 years later he’s back.” You laughed bitterly, “and I have no doubts he’s done things to other women. Do you think because I didn’t report, it’s my fault that this is happening? And he’s most likely doing this to other women?” You asked her.

Emily shook her head, “It’s not your fault Y/N, it never will be. He’s a sick creep, and we’re gonna get him.” She assured you. “Can we talk about something else?” You asked.

“Sure.” Emily smiled.

You felt your heart stutter.

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Over the next few days, you and Emily had fallen into a routine.

You ate all your meals together. Breakfast at 6am in the hotel lobby, lunch in the dance rehearsal room, dinner in the backstage area.

Of course, your friends teased you relentlessly. And her team teased her relentlessly.

But you two didn’t care, you found solitude in each other's company, considering both of your worlds were hectic and crazy.

You two were eating chicken tenders for lunch before vocal and dance rehearsal in the dance room when Marcus walked in, “hey, some fanmail was left for you.” He handed you a blue box.

“I’m surprised you can bring it to me.” You said grabbing it.

“It went through security first.”

That was a good sign, you opened it and saw a diamond necklace, “holy shit.” You murmured, it was stunning and sparkly.

Emily thought it described you personally.

You took it out of the box and set the box on the ground. Emily saw a tag in the box. She grabbed it. She pulled it and it revealed a bigger note. She picked it up and read it.

“Y/N….” Emily started.

“What?” You asked, scared.

Emily cleared her throat, “for you my love, it matches your smile. Remember that night under the stars at that restaurant our parents took us to as kids? It’s one of my fondest memories.” You dropped the necklace as if it had burned you.

It had.

It clattered against the floor, you shot off the ground. “Get it away from me! Get the box away from me! Get it all away!” You started crying. “No, no, no, no.”

“Go get my team, now!” She ordered Marcus who ran off with his concern and protectiveness in his eyes.

She approached you, “can I touch you?” She asked.

You fell into her arms, “he found me. He actually fucking found a way to torment me. After all these years, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. Please don’t let him get me.” You sobbed into her arms.

She looked at the diamonds on the ground, the sparkling contrasted against the dull gray floor, she stroked your hair as she said, “I won’t, he will never touch you again.”

And she would die to ensure that that promise was kept.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two hours later, you were in vocal rehearsals. You had to do questioning as well as calm down from your panic attack.

You would only allow Emily near you.

You two walked side by side to vocal rehearsals, the girls immediately rushed to hug you. Emily stepped back as the three of them hugged you. It was a huge group hug.

“Oh sweetheart.” Brooke said and kissed your head. “Baby, we tried to get in there but they wouldn’t let us.” Zoey said, “I almost kicked that damn door down but Ramona pulled me away.”

“We got you, that bastard isn’t going anywhere near you,” Liz declared.

Emily heard a sniffle from you, and the girls all “aww’d.”

“Babyyy.” Liz cooed as they all held you tighter.

After about three minutes of you trying to calm down, you four separated, all of you were wiping your eyes. “God, we really do feed off each other huh?” You tried to lighten the mood. They all smiled, trying to keep the light mood going.

They all said hi to Emily, then headed towards a couch. You four then sat down and began singing.

Okay, she had heard your records, after all your band was one of the biggest bands in the world, the biggest girl group.

But God, she did not expect you to not have an auto-tuned voice. None of you do. All four of you have amazing voices but yours…

It was rich like dark chocolate, she wanted to hear you sing all. the. time. It was like a siren, captivating and lustful. You were calm while singing, nobody would know that your stalker had just dropped off a box with diamonds in it two hours ago.

Then to make you laugh Zoey broke out with an off key note and made you burst out laughing.

That laugh warmed Emily, she realized how much she loved your company and what she would do to make you laugh like that at her.

Oh God, she was falling for you. And she was falling hard.

Shit.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two hours before the show was supposed to go on, they caught him.

He was staking out before the show, Garcia had his picture sent to all the guards and they found him.

Everyone else went to question him, while Emily stayed with you. It was a few minutes before showtime, makeup artists and hair stylists were doing final touches. As well as the stylists.

“Twitters blowing up.” Ramona said from her chair.

“About?” You asked, jumping to shake the nerves.

“The guy who got arrested in front of the venue.”

You looked at Emily, “dear god.”

“JJ will handle it.” She assured you all.

“Good.” Zoey said.

You nodded to a corner at Emily, she nodded and followed you over. “I just wanna say, thank you for helping me and spending time with me. I know it’s your job but,” you sighed, “if you’d allow me, I’d like to take you out on a date when we have a show in DC. We’re staying for a couple days doing press and I’d like to go out on a date with you, if you’d like?” Emily smiled and blushed hard, “I would be honored, Y/N.”

The smile you had could light up the night sky, “thank you, Emily. You won’t regret it.”

“Ramona called, “Y/N! Show time!”

“One sec!” Then shoved a piece of paper into her hand, “I hope to hear from you.” Then you kissed her cheek and ran off to stage.

She opened the piece of paper, “to my hero, I hope to hear from you.” Then underneath was your number.

She sighed happily, then went to find her seat in the stadium so she could watch her siren queen perform.

#Criminal Minds #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds x you #criminal minds x y/n #jj criminal minds #emily prentiss #emily prentiss x reader #emily prentiss x you #Paget Brewster #paget brewster x reader #Jennifer Jareau #jennifer jareau x reader #jennifer jareau x you #aaron hotchner #aaron hotch x reader #david rossi #derek morgan #derek morgan x reader

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years ago

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Virginia Beach

Those poor people in Virginia Beach! They weren’t children. They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t young people dancing the night away in a cool nightspot. They weren’t worshipers in synagogue or people gathered in church for Bible study. Nor were they high school kids rushing from home room to their first classes of the day. In other words, they were just people—regular, grown-up, working people busily attending to their non-flashy jobs in a non-flashy office compound in a city known mostly for having a pretty beach. And now they appear actually to have met posthumous the fate that I feared��but also half-expected—would end up being theirs: front page news for a day or two, then the subject of a follow-up story buried somewhere in the back of the first section a few days later, then, depending on the newspaper and the politics of its editorial board, either forgotten entirely or followed up a couple of days after that with a human interest piece describing of some of the victim’s funerals and then allowed to sink into gun-violence oblivion.

Mass shootings are resembling more and more hurricanes in this violent land of ours: named in the first place to make it possible to keep them all straight in your mind, but mostly forgotten anyway as soon as the skies clear…other than by the people whose homes they ruined or whose livelihoods. Yes, everybody remembers Sandy…but mostly because it inflicted something like 70 billion dollars’ worth of damage. But what about Beryl, Chris, Florence, Helene, Isaac, Leslie, Michael, and Oscar—to name only Atlantic hurricanes that hit the United States in the last year? My guess is not so much. Unless you had to deal with the destruction these storms left in their wake personally, probably not so much at all!

People think about things in the abstract entirely differently than when they are asked their opinion about the very same issues not as pristine philosophical concepts but rather as nuts-and-bolts issues set into the real-life world of actual people. The most famous example, known to most from Philosophy 101 in college, is the famous “trolley-car problem.” It has a thousand different versions, but the basic concept is always that the same people who speak loftily and movingly about the inestimable value of human life—and who claim wholeheartedly to accept the corollary of that idea, namely that it is impossible (i.e., not only morally reprehensible but actually not doable) to place a specific dollar value on a specific human life—those same people when presented with the dilemma of a trolley-car driver having to choose between plowing his run-away vehicle into a crowd of thirty healthy kindergarten children or veering off to the side even though it will mean hitting a terminally ill centenarian who has just a few days left to live invariably say they would aim at the old man rather than take the lives of thirty little children. So much for the inestimable, thus uncalculatable, value of human life!

There are lots of variations. You may have heard the version featuring an individual standing next to a hugely fat man on a bridge and watching a train (not a trolley in this version for some reason) hurtling towards the thirty children. The only way to stop the train is to shove the fat man off the bridge onto the tracks below, which act will almost certainly save the children’s lives at the expense of the fat man’s. It’s basically the same situation as the one with the trolley-car conductor, yet whereas a clear majority almost always say that they would be okay about flipping the switch to save the children at the expense of the elderly sick guy, a majority almost always also say that they would not go so far as actually to shove the fat man off the bridge to accomplish exactly the same goal. (For a fascinating examination of these issues from a Jewish point of view by Tsuriel Rashi, a professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel, click here. You won’t be disappointed!)

To translate this into modern American terms is simple: we all say that we think that the loss of even a single life is tragic, but we have become so inured to gun violence in our country that we only respond viscerally when there is something particularly horrific about the incident: merely being shot to death by a maniac with a gun is nowhere near enough in today’s America to sustain the interest of the nation over more than a day or two. (Oh yeah? I heard that! Columbine is near Denver and Parkland is near Miami…but where exactly is Highlands Ranch again?)

The question, as always, is how we should respond to yet another of these incidents. I have to admit that I have trouble keeping them all straight in my head—and I’m guessing that that’s how we all feel. To militate for stricter controls on gun purchases, to insist that the government find a way to make guns useless other than in the hands of their legitimate owners (which wouldn’t have worked in Virginia Beach, since the shooter owned his guns legally), to push for more intensive background checks before people are permitted to acquire firearms—all these seem like reasonable steps forward, none of which would infringe on any non-criminal, mentally-stable citizen’s right to bear arms. But there’s also an attitudinal change we need to work towards and, at that, not one specifically related to the NRA or to the Second Amendment but rather to the way we think of the victims of these shootings.

They appear briefly on the front page of the nation’s newspapers for a day or two. If there is something particularly gruesome about the incident that took their lives, then their hold on our national imagination is stronger—and, indeed, the victims at Columbine, Orlando, Parkland, Pittsburgh, and Charleston actually have become part of our national narrative. But what of the rest?

I took note the other day of the two-hundredth birthday of the most original of all American poets and Long Island’s greatest son, Walt Whitman. I’ve been a fan for a long time—the boy in my story “Under the Wheel” who walks around high school with a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in his knapsack was my adolescent self—and my admiration for the man has only grown over the years. I mention the anniversary of his birth on May 31, 1819, in Huntington, New York, however, not merely to take note of his bicentenary, but because he, of all people, suggests to me how to respond to the endless spate of gun murders in our nation.

If there was one thing Whitman stood for, and in every conceivable way, it was the sacrosanct autonomy of the individual. Over and over in Leaves of Grass the poet returns to that specific idea, but also to the one he presents as its corollary: the paradoxical notion that the justification for democracy itself rests in the core concept that the individual possesses an inviolate right to live free of the constraints of others and the restraints of society…and that the perfect nation (in his unabashed conception, our own) is one in which citizens band together to promote a society that promotes the inalienable autonomy of the individual.

In other words, the core concept that permeates all of Whitman’s work is that, unlike in the world of insects where the swarm is the thing and the individual bugs that make it up are basically indistinguishable from each other even in their own eyes, in the world of human beings the individual is not merely the building block of society but an entire universe unto him or herself, one that has no more need of the permission of others to rotate on its own axis and at its own speed than the Milky Way needs the permission of other galaxies to travel endlessly through the cosmos on its own and in its own way.

My proposal is that we honor Whitman’s memory by rededicating ourselves to the notion that each man, woman, or child killed in an act of senseless gun violence is best to be taken not a mere individual, but as the nation itself, and that the incident that took that person’s life is thus correctly to be understood as an act of aggression not against that one man or woman but against the American people itself. That core concept—that the individual is the nation and the nation is each of its citizens—is Whitman’s personal gift to the question of how to respond to gun violence in America.

A young man of eighteen, Kendrick Ray Castillo, gave his life on May 7 in the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting in Douglas County, Colorado, while trying to disarm one of the two shooters who had entered the school building. (Two others joined him in the effort, both of who survived.) Kendrick was lionized in the national press briefly, particularly since the Highlands Ranch shooting occurred just a week after the shooting at the University of North Carolina Charlotte campus in which a different young man, Riley Howell, also lost his life while selflessly and bravely trying to tackle the gunman and thus to give his classmates time to escape. Both men were heroes and deserve to be remembered as such, but as the days pass and the stories of these two particularly school shootings—just two among eight shootings in American schools this year so far and surely not the last—join non-school incidents (148 this year so far and counting) in becoming impossible for any of us to keep straight in our heads, we need to resolve to consider each loss separately and to feel personally aggressed against whenever an innocent life is taken by some angry person with a gun. E pluribus unum does not mean that when we come together as a people we abandon our identities as individuals, but just the opposite: that, as Whitman wrote over and over, the republic exists as a monument to the supreme value of the individual and so, from membership among the many comes the strength of the one to endure….and to flourish unimpeded by the violent machinations of others. The attacks that took the lives of 6,027 Americans (not a typo: click here) in acts of gun-related violence so far this year alone are attacks against the republic itself because each American individual is the nation. That was Whitman’s greatest lesson and it the one I suggest we all take to heart as we attempt not to file Virginia Beach away as just one more tragedy to take stock of and then to move on from.

#Virginia Beach #Walt Whitman #Gun Violence #Kendrick Ray Castillo #Riley Howell

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throwaway-sinfulwriter · 5 years ago

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The Same - Chapter 7 - 4/6

Sitting in Dr. Brown's living room, Malcolm and JT question her until she finally begins to divulge.

"Was Alice Downey taking LSD on your order?" Bright asks the woman, a small tape recorder in his hand. The throw pillows on the chairs and couch reminded him of his father's eyes. He tries not to look at them too often, focusing on Elaine instead.

"This isn't 1963, Detective. I can't make anyone do anything." For a moment, he and JT share a look.

"Except, you can. With your credentials and authority, you could make anyone do anything. How long did these experiments last? How many students participated in them?" The pillows were mocking him. They were simple, a blue to green gradient with shimmery thread and sparse beads.

He questions her, mouth running on auto-pilot as his mind slowly drifts off to another place. He sees recognition in her eyes as he lists off what they know about their suspect.

Bright faintly hears the name Dominic Render as his eyes glaze over.

Malcolm fully spaces out.

He couldn't get his father off of his mind. Shutting his eyes, Malcolm remembers every glance Martin had ever gave him. How his eyes darkened when annoyed, lit up when he was joyful. How straight and perfectly white his teeth were when he smiled.

"-right?"

Malcolm just wants to sit here, and think about things he usually never allows himself. Just for a moment. A sinful, forbidden moment. Think of his father's hands, how they were still bigger than his, even when he was fully grown.

How his father would put on records and play classical music to dance to, how he read sonnets to him as a child. Doctor Whitly taught him to play the piano at a young age.

He was remembering the small details, the ones that hurt to think about when his father wasn't there.

Martin loved the rain. He would always make Malcolm hot chocolate and read to him when it rained. Kept him warm, even when a storm was raging outside.

"Bright? Bright? Malcolm blinked his eyes open, and instinctively clicked stop on his tape recorder.

"Uh.. sorry. I'm just.. uh.. I'll just.. I'll go wait in the car." He stood and walked outside, sighing as the cold air hit his face.

He was thoroughly embarrassed about losing himself like that. Making a fool of himself in front of JT, who already hated his guts.

Malcolm enters the car, resting his head on the back of the seat and taking a few deep breaths. He just needed to get back into control. Become closed off from his emotions.

He knew how to do it, his heart was just hurting so bad he didn't know if he could. Malcolm needed to escape from his mind. Focus on something else.

JT. How long had the man been calling out for him while he was trapped in his childhood memories? Seconds? Minutes?

He didn't know. Bright sighs, his tired eyes refusing to rest as he fiddled with the car door. In fact, he knew nothing about JT. Only that his humor was incredibly strange, and he did not like Malcolm.

The driver's door open, and said man hopped in the car. "Elaine is settled down for the night with some chamomile."

Malcolm nodded, pushing down the discomfort at the mention of tea. His mother always tried making it for him, but he refused to drink it. It was how his father drugged his victims.

Tea laced with ketamine.

Needless to say, Bright was more of a coffee fan.

"Hey, what happened in there? You completely zoned out." JT asks, hands on the steering wheel.

He shrugs. "Yeah, that happens sometimes. My body can shut down at times."

"Gil and Dani are off looking for Render. He wants me to stay on Professor Bad Trip."

Malcolm stares at him.

"That means you can go home."

He doesn't respond to that. "What does JT stand for? Joseph? Jake? Jason? Julian? J-"

JT interrupts him.

"I don't think you're stakeout material."

Bright shakes his head. "I'm a chronic insomniac. I was made for this."

JT looks past him, observing Elaine's house. Only the porch and living room lights were on.

"How many kid's brains do you think she scrambled to get that house?" Malcolm glares at him, crossing his arms.

"…Sorry." He says reluctantly. "I know she's your people "

The profiler next to him hums, non-committal. "No. You're my people."

JT gives him a certain look, and Malcolm raises his eyebrows. "Tell me why I'm wrong."

"In the service, we have a hierarchy." So, JT had been in the service. Malcolm had guessed this the first time they had met, but now his assumption was confirmed. He smirked lightly.

"Your rank earns you respect. It's the same for cops, y'know. I have a badge. But you don't respect me."

Irritation grows in Bright. How could the man be so daft?

"Listen.. when I was a kid, a cop came to my house and took the bad guy away. He saved me. Saved me from hell on earth, from a lifetime of fear. There is not a single person that respects the badge more than I do, okay?"

Malcolm is uncomfortable with opening up to JT, but he knew that he had clear this up now, to prevent anything from happening later.

"Any respect I haven't given you is what you've been giving to me. You've been an absolute dick since I started consulting, and it's really not helping any of us. Including yourself."

"I'm doing my best. I might not have the most orthodox methods, and I know I come off as strange to you, but I do my best to get justice for everyone. Just like Gil tried to give my family justice." Tried being the keyword.

He doesn't want to get too emotional, so he runs his hand under his nose and sniffs.

"I need to ask Dr. Brown a question. For the profile." He exits the car.

-------

Sitting in Doctor Elaine Brown's living room, Malcolm Whitly opens up about his case. It was quite sad to call his life a case, but that was what it had been since he was 10 years old.

Legal documents, testimonies, and news articles. It wasn't much of a life for a child. And it didn't lessen as he got older. People had always expected he would turn out like his father.

"Your case is a testament of the humans mind to endure trauma."

Malcolm winces. Ouch. Not exactly the support he had been looking for.

"Uh.. thanks? I guess? Was that a compliment?" Elaine just raises her eyebrows and drinks more of her tea.

Bright shudders in his seat, the scent of chamomile in the air.

He continues on, telling her about his "controversial" repressed memories, and everything he had been diagnosed with.

She asks him if he believed he had been drugged, and Malcolm nods, fingers tapping in a rhythm on the arm chair to stop the tremors.

"Have you ever smelled chloroform?"

"..Well, it's not my drug of choice." She gives him that look, a look that his therapist gave to him often. He knows he's deflecting, okay, but he's not very comfortable talking about this with anyone.

Unlike his therapist, Dr. Brown continues on.

"It has extreme chemical notes, but it's actually quite sweet smelling."

He swallows hard. Thinking of his father's clean, crisp cologne with a hint of chemical and sweetness.

"A familiar smell can trigger repressed memories."

Malcolm stands from his chair, going over to a desk in the far side of the room. Fingers resting on his hip bones.

"Do you have any fears?"

He asks, shuffling through the papers on the desk. Looking at different files, with graphs and charts. Dr. Brown doesn't say anything about him going through her things.

"I have regrets." She says, and Malcolm turns to look at her curiously.

Elaine continues. "If your memories are blocked, it must be because your mind is afraid of something in your memories. You'll need to overcome that fear to access them."

Malcolm notes this, vowing to remember that fact once the case was over.

He turns, eyes raking over the room. Meticulously looking at every detail, trying to find something that would aid him.

His eyes catch on a glass display of tribal masks, and his head tilts. Something clicking in his mind.

"These are.. interesting." Bright says, going up to the case and staring at the one displayed in the middle. There were four in total, but he couldn't tear his eyes off the one.

"What is this one?" He asks, finger poised just inches from the glass case.

"It's African." Malcolm exhales through his nostrils, trying not to snap at the woman. He knew that. He wasn't an idiot.

"It's an artistic interpretation of Lucifer." A cold shiver travels from the base of Malcolm's skull to his tailbone.

"Has Dominic Render ever been here?"

"Yes, he along with many other students.. he.. he was always fascinated by those masks.."

Malcolm sprints back to the desk, gripping the folder with the copy of the notes left by Render.

One thing he hasn't understood earlier was the circular shapes Dominic had formed with his words. At the time, separately, it hadn't made much sense.

But now..

Bright moves the papers around, his own panting breath loud in his ears. Stepping back, he looks at all of the papers. They form a face. His head snaps to the left, at the Lucifer mask, and back.

"He wants you to understand him. To find him." Dread washes over Malcolm as he quickly takes a picture of the papers and shoves his phone back in his pocket.

"This is where he's planning on killing you. It has sentimental value to him."

"S-something's wrong." Dr. Brown tells him, and his heart drops to his stomach as he turns to her. She's sweating, pupils dialated. "My pulse is racing, my thoughts are shifting. It-It's the tea. The chamomile."

Malcolm rushes over to her, biting the inside of his cheek so hard the bitter taste of blood fills his mouth. He should have known to not trust the tea. Dammit.

At least it wasn't ketamin. If it was, he wouldn't be able to function. Wouldn't be able to help the woman.

He ignores the pain at the thought for now, hesitantly placing his hands on Elaine's arms to get her out of the chair. His stomach flips unpleasantly at the touch.

"You've been laced with LSD. We need to get you out of here." Bright leads her to the door, and goes to open it when all the lights cut out.

Left in the dark, the only sound Elaine's drugged babbling and his own panicked breathing, Malcolm knows what he has to do.

"Come on, let's go back." He pulls her away from the door, and she holds onto him, pupils unnaturally dilated. "Shh, shh. Come on. Sit back down.."

"Stay here. Don't go anywhere." Bright tells her, making sure she doesn't get up, and leaves the room.

Outside, in the hallway, is a record player. A record is already sitting in it.

Malcolm takes out his phone, ringing JT. He waits in tense silence until the man finally answers.

"JT. Dominic Render is in the house. Get in here." He hangs up, not waiting to hear the man's response. Malcolm would have to go find the mentally ill man, prevent him from getting to Dr. Brown.

Thankfully, due to his father's love of classical music and all things retro, they had a record player in their home. He and his father used to dance to Frank Sinatra.

Thank you, Martin. Malcolm thinks as he turns the player on, pressing the needle onto the record.

He flinches as rock music started playing. It was definitely no Sinatra, and it hurt his ears quite a lot, but hopefully it would delay Render.

The loud music should confuse the man, and if Malcolm was lucky he might hallucinate due to sensory overload. A part of Bright feels guilty for undoubtedly causing a mentally ill man more pain.

But, thinking back to the Professor's empty head and the many blades next to Carl Mitchell, Malcolm can't take any chance.

Malcolm stops by the fireplace, grabbing a fire poker and holding it ahead of him like a weapon.

Walking through the house slowly, hands in front of him, Malcolm tries to talk Render down.

"Dominic Render!" He calls out over the booming music, trying to hide the fear that was bubbling at the surface. Malcolm couldn't let the man to have the advantage.

"No one else needs to die." He comes around the corner, muscles tensing in anticipation of the killer being there. He isn't.

Where could he be?

Malcolm goes over the entire house, not finding the suspect. That only leaves one place.. upstairs.

"I know how you feel. I've had my fair share of nightmares."

He begins slowly ascending the stairs, his breathing erratic and undoubtedly afraid. His palm runs over the wooden railing of the staircase. It does little to calm him, but Malcolm memorizes the grain of the wood underneath his hand.

"But they trapped you inside yours, didn't they?" Bright prided himself in his skill of talking people down, getting a Masters in Psychology hadn't just been for show. He reverently studied conversation, and the act of talking to a person who was dangerous.

It helped him in the sociopathic aspect (he was not a sociopath, he just had tendencies). He understood empathy more, though he could not accurately emulate it without looking quite robotic.

It also helped in his career as a profiler. He had many personal conversations with killers, which was especially easy due to his background. Malcolm was quite good at subduing killers, talking them down from suicide after they had been caught. Showing at their trials, convincing them serving time was better than death.

He wanted to use this skill to help Dominic Render, but so far the man had yet to show. This worried him. Bright not be able to talk him out of it.

"..Dominic, I know you're scared." Malcolm reaches the top of the staircase, walking towards a closed doors on the left. "I am, too."

The door opened, and the next thing Bright knew, he was being hurtled backwards, into a picture on the wall. He feels the glass shatter as he hits it, all breath leaving his body. Hitting the wall so hard, his knees wobble.

He fights back with the fire poker, holding it in front of him so Dominic couldn't stab him. Malcolm pushes against him, giving him enough space to get away from the wall.

Dominic's hand hits the wall, and Bright is behind him. He grabs Malcolm by the shoulders, trying to get him down the stairs so he could subdue him properly. This doesn't work well, as Render's elbow comes back and hits him in the face. The hit causes his shaking knees to give in, and he collapses to the floor.

Render stands over him, pressing him with his foot to the edge of the staircase.

"This is how I respond to fear."

He crouches over Malcolm, raising his blade.

Malcolm's eyes go wide, pure, unbridled fear in his eyes. This is it. He's going to die. Dominic is going to kill him, take his brain and.. and what? Do what with it? He didn't know, there was no time, he couldn't even open his mouth for his last words-

There's an incredibly loud bang, and Render is off of him, a warm splatter of blood on his face. Unlike the time at Quantico, when the feelings that followed were resentment for a person that could be saved, all Malcolm felt was satisfaction.

If that was how Dominic reacted to someone who was trying to help him, he couldn't imagine how he would react to someone prosecuting him.

He doesn't wipe the blood off of his face, sitting up calmly and looking back. Dr. Elaine Brown is standing on the staircase, shotgun still in hand.

"I-I did it. I killed him." Something twists in Malcolm's chest, and he slowly desends down the stairs. There's a large crash somewhere in the house and then a cry of, "Police!"

JT enters the archway near the staircase and raises his gun. "No!" Malcolm tells him. "No. Wait."

"Elaine, you're in the middle of an intense psychedelic episode. I know it may seem like a lot right now, but in the end it's just going to be a bad trip." He manages to take the gun from her, taking out the bullets and turning the safety on, throwing it to the side.

"You can't run from the fear. You just have to.. fall into it, okay? You did this." He gestures up the stairs at Render's body. Cold and lifeless. "You have to live with it now."

#my fic #my writing #the same #prxdigal sxn #malcolm bright #malcolm whitly #malcolm/martin #martin whitly #jt tarmel #dead dove do not eat #i apologize to this fandom

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ratherhavetheblues · 3 years ago

Text

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI and TONINO GUERRA’S ‘LA NOTTE’ “I lacked the courage to go all the way”

�� Having finally, in the preceding essay, L’Avventura, ventured upon the cues of poet-film writer, Tonino Guerra, one might proceed with gusto upon the second campaign, namely, La Notte (The Night), 1961.

However, before thrilling to a rare lucidity from Guerra, I must describe how wrong my first impressions of this film were. (Not that it matters what I did; but there is a lapse which everyone involved has missed, a crucial mistake.) In those days, Antonioni could do no wrong in my eyes. But an anonymous note which I stumbled upon back in 2013 for a blog , in Wonders in the Dark, concerning La Notte, and promptly forgot, might have wakened me up a bit. The preamble of the “behind the scenes,” involved another fan, shoring up the Antonioni line. “I’ve become fascinated in gradually realizing that almost the full complement of this indie—yes—but also guerrilla art, had been met with censure. It was something of a jolt to learn that the film on tap here, La Notte, hinged upon two great performers (and specialists to boots) concerning problematic incitement, namely, Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, who hated this assignment and did not take seriously the roles they were to sustain. Mastroianni, in particular, spent quite a bit of time on the set quarrelling with one of the writers, Tonino Guerra. And that rancor, with its behind the scenes clutter, cues our special concern here, regarding the precise nature of Antonioni’s pristine closures within complex and even Byzantine involvement by associates, though contrarian with regard to conventional filmmaking, unlikely to have absorbed the unique physicality of his inspiration.”

One more time: “… unlikely to have absorbed the unique physicality? ” The unique physicality was entirely the initiative of that trouble-maker!

Let’s see if I can make amends. Guerra, the necessary “nuisance,” would have constructed for the Antonioni appellation, a seeming hot intellectual subject, namely, “alienation,” wherein to place a far more comprehensive and far more profound demand. Right from the opening credits, with a steep, steady drop of an empty glass elevator, there is an oblique indication that human authority has stepped back a move. We’re in Milano, with its heady schemes, but that steady fall steals the show. Very soon a moving car with a man and a woman on board, nearly becomes crushed by a wreckless heavy- construction worker. The escapees use an elevator to reach a friend in a hospital. As they approach their destination, we notice that each of them conveys a remarkably vivid shadow. We imagine that the anxiety here (terminal cancer) has been given a graphic form. That form, with its mundane, shadow aspect, can stand as a promise that another force has to be reckoned with, despite being lost to the “realists.” During this event, we notice varying intensity (including that of the victim and the victim’s mother); and, sometimes, also no shadow at all. This forum of potential mystery and potential power consists by way of an agency unseen per se. But when one has an inkling to be fully alive, that constituent will see what one’s made of. The elevator was an entrée. The rest of the saga is out of this world.

Therefore, when the host of the occasion, Tommas, asks, “What’s new?” he’s really hoping for a moment of courage, not another diversion. Not that it’s another humdrum moment, but Tommas, providing his own expected response, “Your book comes out today!” has other matters on his mind. Intensity, but missing the boat. Giovanni, the novelist in the room, tells him, “Let’s not talk about that.”/ “Why not?” Tommas asks. Giovanni shrugs off that news with, “One has to do these things…” (launching a supposed important book). If we take the writer to be not simply being polite in his good fortune, we’ve encountered a gigantic lack of gusto. (No serious lift, here, from the strongest of helpers.) Right here, we are face-to face with eliciting the elements from our own courage and from what love collaborates. Tommas, also a writer, exhorts, “And your books, the only thing that really matters.” Grossly lost perspective. But on the other hand, there is his most recent essay in an obscure journal. And though all but a dead man, Tommas feels the wonderfulness of the moment. He makes a distinct shadow of his upper body. He has made a statement of understanding. He’ll, unfortunately, declare, “I see things more clearly now… So many things become clear when you’re all alone.” (He had just blurted out that he strongly felt at home with them. Could he be both?!) “I feel like I’m watching from the sidelines, when I should have been more involved.” (Easier said than done.) “I lacked the courage to go all the way.”

“All the way…” Giovanni praises Tommas’ powers. “You, a quitter? Then I should give up writing!” (Before the film ends, he does just that.) The flood of dynamics moving into solidity. The dying man slips into self-pity. “I wasn’t smart enough, anyway.” Smart is not the matter. Tommas had well disclosed the dilemma: courage. Our saga, with its black graphics freefall, was only one of many vigorous gifts of disinterestedness. While those two dig into careers, and perhaps slip a bit (or slip a lot), the full gift may be just around the corner. It also may be elsewhere. The latter does not mean that reflections can’t rally. All the actions to come pertain to perseverance. So while the brave patient, the brave mother and the very questionable couple move apace, those shadows of promise need to be understood. Giovanni has only one moment of wit that makes perfect sense. He tells Tommas, “You give success the slip.” (Guerra, the true genius, gave “success” [fame and fortune] the slip, while embracing the depths of art.) But that room of irony, a bit of magic in full body, flourishes. Tommas’ mother, we learn from the patient, had had a regular seven hour train ride; and was now struggling without sleep. More little moments to ponder.

Instead of Antonioni’s easy and fashionable alienation (being a picture, in fact of Giovanni and Lidia [his wife]), Guerra, the adult, opens his eyes to a portal of maturity, vastly more exciting and penetrating. Lidia bails out early from Giovanni’s opening. She embarks upon a long afternoon in the city, beginning with jay-walking across a very hectic and dangerous street, which she manages with remarkable panache, pivoting like a matador. An Olympian there. But hardly, in other matters. (We’re reminded of the non-athletes in the film, L’Avventura [1960], capering over deadly rockfaces.) If she can do that, she can be brave in other matters. It’s all in the culture. A culture destroying itself.

Lidia’s afternoon voyage has a destination. Soon she has entered a slum, with a crying toddler. She does not linger long. She sees fit to tell the child, “What’s the matter?” Then she looks for a moment to a blackened burned wall. A jet roars over. She takes a taxi to an industrial area. She tells the driver to wait. Then a series of events, pertaining to physical power, occurs. Along with that, there is the recognition that she has had much to do with the area, though their car, as we’ll see, is a very expensive one, and their apparel is affluent. But we shouldn’t conclude that she was born there. She was, in fact, as much a patrician as he. (Bergman on the job.) But she has unfinished business to ponder here. In the hospital, Tommas remarks, “I regret spoiling many of your evenings with my presence in your lovely apartment.”/ Giovanni responds, crazily, with, “It’s your home too. You know that…” (A cliché, to measure how far they are apart.)

Though classically patrician at heart, there had, it seems, a spate of rebellion based in this precinct. The rebellion, with a safety net, would have been short lived. But here, Lidia, when the odds seem frighteningly wrong, there was a fantasy to cling to, a sensibility of earthiness. She wanders in the familiar range, and soon she’s upon a familiar event, a brawl involving young boys , with one of the fighters smashing the other to a pulp. Too real, she finds, and with her sense of authority she ends that savagery. On she continues, to a large field where young boys (once again) look for a silver lining. There we see a group of boys shooting off rockets. More implacable dynamics, their elevation involving—along with the violent noise and speed—keening for something unheard of (while what is heard of, continues to make them sick, an uncanny sickness). She phones up the reluctant novelist to come out there with her, to hopefully, once again cross that dangerous road. “They go up really high. It’s beautiful!” Giovanni proves to be in no mood for neither something new nor nostalgia. His patrician sense of advantage does not budge; but that has left him with nothing. On reaching the place of the former experiment, all he has to say is, “These tracks used to be in service when we used to come here.” The cantina where Lidia was on the phone, pipes out from a radio, “Our program continues with more easy listening.”

Back at home in their killer digs, Lidia, not easily to be squelched, tells him, “I don’t feel like staying in.” Her first choice was a party at a villa. But on realizing the host would want to take up again the question of Giovanni’s being hopefully compromised in his writing, she thinks of something much better. (She signs off from that cloud with, “Every millionaire wants his own intellectual. You must be his choice.”) Feeble shadows. She looks at him and glares. The subject of ditching the hardness. “What’s wrong?” he asks. In response she mocks, “Would you fasten me?” Dead gestures, and the shadow being lost. “I’d rather we went out by ourselves,” the minor matador decides. As things go by, she likes the show; but she should have liked it much better. A statuesque, black dancer and her retinue, does something even more amazing with her sensibility, her body, and her heart than the climbers and the jay-walker. Giovanni tells her, “Look at her. She’s not bad at all.” Not bad!? Then he looks away to check a woman server. The performer holds an empty wine glass in her hand. She slowly, very gracefully, performs a forward roll, ending by placing the glass being filled on her forehead. A dimension of incredible grace. Then many awe-inspiring twists and turns follow. There is a close-up of Lidia. She touches Giovanni’s cufflink. “You remember?” she urges, when sexy was more than that. His response is, “You’re really trying to distract me.” She smiles but it’s light-years away. This night has the beginning of a watershed. Her subsequent move, “I can have thoughts of my own,” promises what she can’t deliver. She feebly backs off, “I don’t have any at this moment, but I’m expecting one. I can feel it coming.” The sax easing the dancer’s magic. Though having recently frowned upon the world of patricians, Lidia now thinks her best hope could be an infiltration of irony. Silence as virtue. There is no kick-start of a jaunty elevator, here.

It’s an all-night party, but no one gets out alive. This last hurrah in Lidia’s reflections needs close attention amidst scheming and waste. Confronted with the usual crowd, which she had failed to comprehend and master (an almost hopeless task), she was quite unique in largely evading the patrician bonhomie. Her evasive stalk in the darkness of the grounds (far more pedestrian than her ways of taming hot-blooded racers) leaves her ordinary. And yet, what your patrician can’t appreciate, is seeing someone in the grip of a toil which can’t be bought off. On the other hand, Giovanni has a busy ream of business, easily about the normal. However, one of his businesses brushes, concerning the young, Valentine, the boss’ daughter, and her questioning (also questionable) elicits alertness. Before that, she is found, ironically, in Lidia’s solitary meandering within the mansion—seen from a distance—reading the avant-garde novel, The Sleepwalker, by Hermann Broch (and its resemblance to the work of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky). And then, aptly, Giovanni, brought into the connection as a playmate for the girl’s version of roulette, with jewels for the counter.

One other player we haven’t mentioned here, is a man who has attempted a few times, during the evening, to speak with Lidia. He is definitely not a stranger. He perseveres, and manages to escort her to the dance floor. To her surprise, he cannot dance. (Not a close liaison.) Passion interrupted. Passion never happening. A heavy rain occurs, and they run to his car. While plunging into the downpour, another world announces itself. The windshield has become nearly opaque, a rushing quaisi-black oil with curious flashes from the streetlights. Both of them laugh, feeling definitely a highlight of the festivities of the party. He parks; a slight moment of sense. There her visage on the window had become like a monster. Deep shadow with no room to grow. To them it’s only unusually dark, like a tunnel of love. Lidia comes across with, “Where are you taking me?” Ambiguity running amok. The gutter along the top of the sportscar becomes a little river. The real show, however, is as if it never happened. At a deserted stop light, they caress. She snubs his invitation. “I can’t. “I’m sorry…”

An all-night band at the gala. Another sax player, but how to match what we’ve already seen and heard? As it happens, there is mastery to spare. Where is the door to touch that polyglot integrity?

During Giovanni’s hopes to improve on Lidia by way of Valentine (the sort of ruthlessness which Antonioni would find to be trenchant), she plays a tape for him. “Promise not to make fun of me,” she insists./ “I promise,” he vows./ “From the living room today you could hear dialogue from a TV: ‘If I were you, Jim, I wouldn’t do that.’ After that, the howling of a dog, slow and sure, rising in a perfect arc and tailing off in an great sadness. Then I thought I heard an airplane, but there was silence, made up of sounds. If you press your ear to a tree and listen, after a while you’ll hear a sound. Perhaps it comes from us, but I prefer to think it’s the tree. Within that silence were strange noises that disturbed the soundscape around me. I closed the window, but the noises persisted. I’d thought I’d gone crazy. I don’t want to hear useless sounds. I want to manage… So many words, I’d rather not hear, but you can’t escape them. You must resign yourself to them.” She erases the tape. Unfinished business. (Try not to use the word, “soundscape.” Try not to make a fetish from a vegetable. Try to grow up.)

It’s dawn, and Lidia, on quitting the damaged monarchy, suggests to Giovanni lingering on the plutocrat’s golf course abutting that heaven. She admits that years of generosity from Tommas’ insights could never elicit serious thought from her. “I wasn’t interested in the least,” she tells him. “His persistence nearly drove me mad. I began to hate him for it. And never once did he talk about himself; he talked about me.” (This preamble is not about disparate personalities. It’s about patricians: those having been expected for many generations to hold riches and powers, even if valuing ludicrous, slack and superficial understanding, even if lacking vision, even if gutless, even as cherishing violence to see themselves as alphas—the way of life, right?) It is Lidia’s pleasure (not struggle) to picture that carelessness pertaining to the young Lidia, as, “I never realized what was happening. How foolish we are in our youth. It seems like nothing will ever end. But you talked to me only about yourself. That was new for me.” (Had you ever heard your relatives speaking?) “I was so pleased! Nothing in the world felt sweeter. Maybe because I loved you.” Then again, could it be that that connection is about a billion dollars; and the generous one had lived in one room? (That, however, she had kept in touch with the thinker for a long time, cannot be entirely ignored.) “I loved you, not him. That’s why his adoration wore on me… Whereas you were flattered by it. Isn’t that true?”/ “Yes, but not much.”/ “He was so vulnerable.” In her reminiscence, she walks to a table, feeling sad. “The reason I feel like dying is I don’t love you anymore. That’s why I feel so miserable. I wish I were already old, so I’d were already dedicated my life to you. I wish I didn’t exist anymore because I can’t love you anymore. There it is. That’s the thought that came to me at that nightclub, you were so bored.”/ Giovanni says, “But if you say all this, if you wish you were already dead, it means you still love me.” (That being an encore of sorts, of the father, whistling in the dark, in L’Avventura.) / Lidia argues, “No, it’s just pity.”

Giovanni stalks away. She follows. He sits down at the lip of a bunker. (A shot, way beyond his skills.) Soon both of them are at the lip. Soon both of them admit they lacked adult resolve. Lidia has brought in her purse a sheet of paper she might have carried for many days. This was the day: “When I awoke this morning you were still asleep. As I slowly emerged from my slumber, I heard your gentle breathing, and through the wisps of hair over your face I saw your closed eyes and I was certain of my emotion. I wanted to cry out, to wake you up, because you slept so deeply, you almost seemed lifeless. [Ironies abounding.] In the half-life, the skin of your arms and throat, so vivid, so warm that I long to press my lips against it, but the thought of disturbing your sleep, of having you awake in my arms held me back…” There is more, unfortunately. But we don’t need the full doggerel. One more time!: “At that moment I understood how much I loved you. Lidia, and the eternity of the emotion was such… etcetera.”

About mid-disaster, the supposed novelist became stern. By the end, he was ready to condemn the enterprise in the strongest language. “Who wrote that?” he sneered./ “You did…” And yet, Guerra has much more in store. Lidia kisses his hand. There is a weak caress; and the embarrassed writer (having, during the night, quit the work he never came close to what Thomas did), somewhat pounced upon Lidia, in a form, much more than dominance than affection. While being manhandled in the sands, she calls out, “No… I don’t love you anymore! And you don’t love me either!” This elicits from him, “Be quiet.” / “Say it!” she demands. / “No, I won’t say it!”

The camera draws back in stages. Then it pans away from them altogether. What it doesn’t show is that there is a modest withdrawal from the heavily tainted story and the heavily tainted discoveries which Lidia, the patrician softy, had done her, not all so bad, best. Here she becomes a potpourri. She becomes a figure of pathos, while also maintaining a figure of bathos. Keep trying. You’re not alone.

#Tonino Guerra

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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Host Director’s Dashcam Takes Pandemic Horror to Scarier Place

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Creating an interesting protagonist in a horror movie is a difficult thing. Conventional wisdom suggests they should be blandly appealing, and thereby a surrogate for any viewer to insert themselves into the nightmare. More often than not though, they are treated as disposable. Interchangeable faces who eventually become pieces of meat, lambs to the slaughter. Whether by fluke or design, the “heroes” of entire popular movements in the genre—slasher flicks in the ‘80s, torture porn in the 2000s—eventually devolved into figures of ridicule: victims who the audience would root against, sometimes uncomfortably so.

All of which is a long way to note the uniquely diabolical nature of Rob Savage’s Dashcam and its hero Annie (played by Annie Hardy). Following in the footsteps of Savage’s Zoom shocker from last year, Host, Dashcam is a relentless found footage chiller that is more scary for how it reflects our status quo in a post-COVID world than its use of any demons, witches, or whatever else is rattling up there inside Savage’s imagination. Indeed, one could argue the biggest monster of Dashcam is its main character herself.

Vividly played with a total fearlessness by Hardy, who apparently improvised much of Annie’s dialogue and her penchant for sick rhymes with an even sicker lack of political correctness, Annie is a COVID denying, racial stereotyping, anti-masker who’s spent her quarantine cultivating minor internet fame by being an online troll who is game for any laugh. She’s the type of strident personality who’d be run off most college campuses on a rail. She’s also a very difficult character to like and an even harder one to cheer for when creatures in the woods descend on her head. Which makes her self-made predicaments fascinating as a narrative, as well as a potential test for the viewer’s threshold for empathy.

Set and filmed during the tail-end of 2020 lockdowns, Dashcam finds Annie at a moment of extreme boredom. Constantly streaming her daily activities and off-the-cuff vitriol in some nether region of the web, she’s a person who would now say her best friends are fellow trolls and malcontents that egg on her diatribes about rejecting masks and CDC guidelines. Their anonymous and often gleefully offensive banter is visible in a near constant stream of text on the side of the screen for the whole film. We watch Annie’s experiences through their bitter eyes. They delight when she ignores State Department recommendations and flies to the UK in that surreal pre-vaccine era where airports resembled ghost towns; and they’re frothing with blood in the mouth when she reunites with a former band mate from back in the day, Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), and his mask-wearing, sanitizer-using girlfriend.

At first, Stretch is amused that his riotous old chum has showed up at his flat unannounced, even taking her around London as he makes deliveries as a driver and spits some rhymes for Annie’s fans. But things quickly get too toxic after Annie refuses to wear masks inside of restaurants and leaves a “Make America Great Again” hat out for Stretch’s progressive girlfriend to find. That’s small potatoes though when compared to Annie taking Stretch’s car and also his gig as an on-demand driver. When she picks up one passenger who doesn’t seem well (Angela Enahoro) and agrees to drive her to a strange house in the woods, abstract dangers become a lot more immediate for both Annie and any friends who bother to come looking for her.

Dashcam clearly follows in the footsteps of Host, wherein a group of bored friends spend their quarantine summoning a demon on Zoom. But whereas that horror film used modern technology to tell an old-fashioned haunted house yarn, Savage attempts to tell a distinctly current thriller that could only be made in this exact moment with Dashcam. During a time of extreme polarization and tribalism, a woman vomiting blood in the backseat is almost relieving—here is something we can all agree is screwed up, right?

The irony of Dashcam is the perpetual flood of abusive text and edgelord flippancy on the side of the screen suggests otherwise. It’s clear that Annie’s let her online life drive her toward performative levels of toxicity, but of course that digital space is no help to her when shit gets real. The question then is once she finds herself in a pseudo-Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity situation, complete with running in the forest from unseen spooky forces, will anyone care? And that goes for the audience at home as much as it does for Stretch or any of her online kindred spirits.

This pseudo-ethical dilemma has made Dashcam an already more polarizing film than Host. To be sure, Host is the stronger and more coherent experience, with its events all occurring in one digital space (and a handful of physical places), which also doesn’t need to have the audience suspend so much disbelief about why the characters keep recording. By contrast, Annie and other characters have no reason to keep streaming the events of Dashcam after about the halfway mark of the movie. However, for all its chaotic and eventually impenetrable weirdness that reaches a bonkers crescendo in the third act, I suspect the real reason Dashcam is a more divisive film has everything to do with its inkblot test of a heroine.

Can you have empathy with someone who doesn’t care if she spreads a plague that you (hopefully) are still concerned about right now? And can you root for her to survive a genuinely grueling experience? That might be the most interesting thing about Dashcam’s reception when Blumhouse releases it to a wide audience down the road. Personally, I cheered on some of the side characters in this film, but found my relationship to Annie and her struggles constantly evolving, which in turn led me to question my own more horrific instincts in These Times™.

For Dashcam to invite that kind of interior interrogation, and likely a vast array of reactions—especially when the bifurcated realm of social media discourse gets its hands on this—is a bold choice by bold storytellers. More, please.

Dashcam premiered Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It currently has no release date.

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blyanten · 7 years ago

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THE DUCK AVENGER PK2: #12 BLACKOUT

Today’s theme is LIGHT. It travels at 300 000km per second, and it all ends up at Duckmall. At least the Christmas version does, because those lights are all over the place, drawing people in like… mosquitoes?

Wrong insect, but the point is, Tempest is not a fan of the Christmas rush. Bloom thinks it’s nice. Donald doesn’t comment.

The trio is checking in on the mall Santa when Bloom stops a pick-pocket he’s familiar with, and gets hit over the head.

From the minor crime of theft to violent assault.

Donald gives chase, somehow going from being some meters behind the guy…

to this:

Christ. If you can teleport, use your powers to get out of there. No wonder you’re just a pick-pocket with these decision skills.

Donald then fights the guy, while parents assure their kids there’s definitely a good reason Santa’s getting beat up, before ending the fight by tricking the pick-pocket into thinking he’s being shot at.

Tempest and Bloom catch up, telling Donald the pick-pocket is a familiar face around Duckmall, but the incident seems to have disturbed Bloom quite a bit. He calls everyone together to give them some news.

He’s planning on retiring. The incident just reinforced that he’s not as young as he used to be, and working security… well, even at a mall, it’s not the safest job. If the pick-pocket had been armed, today could have ended very differently.

There’s also the matter of who’ll take over. Bloom has decided it will be one of the team, and he’ll spend the next six months deciding who.

Over at some Ducklair Infotronics, Everett is holding a press conference. The Ducklairs are trying out a new initiative, called Life, where criminals who have served their sentence will be given a job at Ducklair Enterprises for one year in an effort to get them back in the game.

Angus is bored by it, calling it Christmas charity, and for once he’s probably right. But reformed criminals would need help, so eh.

And as this is a project focused on the future, a young person should run it. Because our children are the future.

Juniper’s in charge.

Angus decides this is the time to liven the conference up a bit, and starts accusing Everett of hiding behind Juniper in an effort to hide his shady dealings.

Aw, look at that, they have the same sense of humor.

Everett and Juniper seems to find this more amusing than annoying, sharing a joke that maybe Angus should participate, though it would probably be hopeless. While Everett keeps introducing Juniper and the project, Juniper zones out, thinking of her sister, missing her cue to take over. She soon recovers, and takes over.

Meanwhile, Korinna survived sinking with the spaceship, and is on her way back to Duckburg, having hitched a ride with a truckdriver. Unfortunately, he’s not going there, so she’ll have to find alternative transportation for the rest of the way.

She stopped from entering the town of Bancroft by the police, who doesn’t want loafers around. They’d like to see her papers. When Korinna refuses, they mock her, calling her a tough cookie and if she’s trying to scare them.

Korinna says yes.

I like the contrast between the truckdriver and the cops. The driver is nice, and so Korinna is nice back, the cops are rude and so Korinna presumably leaves them screaming from their own nightmares. It’s very… hmmm, childish isn’t quite the word, but lacking in nuance? She could have made the cops let her pass, easily, but instead it’s implied she goes to town on them. It’s a lot more noticeable and would make it easier to find her if the news about what happened spread. Which I suppose bring us to the complete lack of actual life experience she has. Sometimes you just have to let stuff go and be nice, if only for your own sake.

At Ducklair Infotronics, or at least across the road from it, Juniper is struggling with the phone. Not for long though.

And a very similar temper!

She brings Trentor, the man she wanted to talk to back to her office. He worked for Ducklair Enterprises for 12 years, until he was arrested for industrial espionage and hacking.

Trentor says it’s true, but that he thought she already knew. If she wants him out of the program… Juniper finally gets to the point. She doesn’t want him to leave the program. She uses her powers on him and asks if he hates her father. He does, right? It was Everett who sent him to prison.

Juniper is clearly done messing around.

Nah. Trentor hates Anymore Boring. He’s the one who had him arrested.

I will never stop being amused that despite everything, practically nobody who deals with Everett professionally seems to have a problem with him. Everett is apparently a firm believer in separating business from pleasure.

But Juniper isn’t about to let minor details like her chosen pawn hating the wrong man get in the way. The Life project offers an opportunity for revenge, and Juniper just wants to help.

So where Korinna seems to be impulsive and reactionary, Juniper is a stone cold planner.

A few days later, at Ducklair Refineries, things start to happen. A lot of things go wrong, and it ends with a big boom. The news next day inform us there are no victims, but a whole lot of property damage. Everett is pissed, because this is one of 12 incidents, though obviously none of the others were as noticeable.

Juniper puts on an excellent show of being ignorant and worried, but as soon as Everett leaves, shows how she really feels.

The angry, angry duckling at work.

At work, Juniper immediately goes to see Trentor, congratulating him on last nights success and generally acting like his sweet supporter. He offers to demonstrate how the machine he made works.

He hooks himself up to a computer, creating a virtual version of himself that can travel though computer systems and mess with things. So like a less advanced version of the Total Immersion Interface system.

That’s actually kinda fascinating, how the rest of the world is slowly catching up to the alien super genius.

Juniper isn’t all the interested though, she wants him to attack again and she wants another disaster, something to make people fear Ducklair Enterprises. Trentor hesitates, worried about getting caught. Juniper realizes her mental control over him is weakening, and decides to strengthen it.

She does this while he’s hooked up to the machine, creating what seems like a minor backlash and an unexpected outcome.

Yay, it’s the less charming, human version of Two.

Trentor is now stuck in the computer system, and he’s free of her mental control. He also knows that he’s free of her mental control, leaving Juniper in a precarious position. Juniper asks what he wants, and he tells her not to worry about that. They’re partners now.

So Juniper’s first plan isn’t quite turning out the way she hoped. But much like her sister, this seems to be less about her abilities, and more about her lack of actual experience. Using her powers on a man connected via his brain/mind to something she can’t affect… someone who’d actually gotten to live their life with those powers might have been more hesitant to do that.

Elsewhere, a train is speeding up and the instruments are not responding. It derails off a thankfully realtively low bridge, and once again, no victims. At the harbor, the computers stopped working, leaving ships without proper navigation, but again, everything is fine!

So I think, realistically, the everybody is fine, because Disney comic. But in-universe, the sheer unlikelihood of nobody getting hurt or dying makes me wonder if a certain someone doesn’t have some kind of reality warping protection shielding him from the worst consequences of this mess.

Especially since, after the stock market freezes, all signs point to Ducklair Enterprises. It’s their equipment going haywire, after all.

Juniper is at home, watching the news when the Avenger knocks on the window. She’s just so happy to see him, since she didn’t know how to contact him, and she thinks this all might be her fault.

Look at that poor innocent angel.

She brings the Avenger to Trentor’s lab, claiming he was working on a revolutionary anti-virus program when things went wrong and he got trapped in the machine. The Avenger asks why she didn’t ask her father for help, but Juniper explains she didn’t want to tell her father that her first task went from zero to disaster.

The Avenger prepares to follow Trentor inside the machine, and he notes to himself that at least he has some experience with similar contraptions, like the T.I.I hall. He figures it shouldn’t be too different, it’s still Ducklair Tech after all.

Juniper asks if he’s ready. The Avenger wants to know if she wants the truth. She wants a white lie, and the Avenger gives her an adorable thumbs up, declaring that he is ready for this new, exciting adventure.

There are white lies and there are entire performances. +1 for the extra effort, Avenger.

The virtual reality looks remarkably like rocks connected by spider-webs.

The Avenger quickly locates Trentor, making his way there via the webs. Trentor appears to be unconscious, and the Avenger, using his previous experience, thinks he encountered a surveillance program.

Of course, this is a trap, so Trentor takes him by surprise, knocking him off the rock their standing on. As the Avenger falls, Trentor calls Juniper, telling her it’s done. Juniper brings Trentor back to the real world, apologizing to the Avenger for tricking him. She had no choice.

Stone cold. I may be in love.

Trentor gets up, wearing the Avenger’s body. Oh, and Trentor no longer exists, there is only Cormack-D.

Cormack being Trentor’s first name, and yes, he’s been called that for some pages now, but he was introduced as Trentor so I’m sticking with that.

Now Trentor is free to attack Boring, and all blame will fall on the Avenger. Juniper makes a move to attack, but Trentor grabs her wrists, suggestion that her mind powers still won’t work on him.

At Bancroft station, Korinna has found a train. She’ll be sharing a cabin with Judith Taylor, who’s going to Duckburg for work. Korinna says she’s going for a family reunion.

At Ducklair Tower, Everett is helping out the police. He’s offered to help, claiming that while he’s a nice person… uh, well, I believe you want to be one… he knows how to defend himself. So he’s made something that will let him find and destroy the mysterious attackers.

Malice is awfully nice here, considering. *whispers* Reality warping protective powers.

He quickly locates an anomalous impulse that has to be the attacker, but since the attacker is gone, it’s the Avenger still stuck in the system. The Avenger lucked out by landing on a different rock, but now he has to find his way back to where he was. He tries travelling via the webs again, which works, but it’s also what alerted Everett to his presence

The Avenger dodges, surprising Everett, who made that program to completely annihilate the attacker. Does ruthlessness run in the family too?

Though, I doubt anybody thought it was a person in there.

The Avenger keeps dodging, and Juniper is informed that the Avenger is in danger by the system. She claims he wasn’t supposed to be in danger, but also that it might he chance at getting even with Trentor.

Trentor is busy leaving so he can get started on his roaring rampage of revenge against Boring. He’s slowed down for a second by looking for keys to the Duckmobile, but the car responds to “the master’s hand” as he puts it, opening at a touch.

The real Avenger is rather busy surviving, when he works out that he can access his shield in the virtual reality. He immediately destroys Everett’s program, for a while at least, causing Malice to go for the nuclear option, completely isolating any electrical networks and the phone network, causing a complete blackout. Everett thinks that’s worse than what the attacker does, but she claims the damage will be limited, as it’s in the middle of the night.

Ducklair Tower has an emergency generator, so they’ll be fine, while lights all over the city goes out. And hopefully, anyplace important has emergency generators too.

Somewhere far from Duckburg, Korinna’s train stops.

Inside the system, the Avenger watches as the spider-webs disappears, swearing to himself that he’ll never set foot in a place like this again, and if he does, he’ll deserve it. He goes for the original rock, and wakes up in Trentor’s body.

Everett notices that the anomalous impulse is gone. Boring congratulates him, but Everett says it’s not over until they know where it went.

Back with Juniper, the Avenger notices the problem.

No comment.

Juniper explains, while also claiming Trentor came back as a raving maniac. She also insists it’s not his fault, which is entirely true, but not for the reasons the Avenger thinks. Juniper calls for her car, with a robot driver, and let’s the Avenger in on Trentor hating Boring before he goes.

At the train, Korinna gets to know a little more about her roommate. Judith is a governess, on her way to work for a Mr. Fletcher, who has two kids and conveniently only knows her by her references.

Impulsiveness again. What do you know about kids?

In Duckburg, the Avenger goes to Century, complaining all the way about Trentor being in shitty shape. Inside he runs into Lyo, who is not convinced when the Avenger tells him who he is. Luckily, Lyo is easily convinced with the mention of the old superhero Astrongman.

Those old heroes can’t have been very famous, or maybe the info was suppressed somehow, if just knowing about them means it can only be the Avenger. Yeah, they’re mostly used for jokes, but they still existed.

The Avenger digs up the remote control for the Duckmobile, and locates Trentor.

Trentor for his part has started his attack on Ducklair Tower, but barely gets anywhere before the Avenger arrived. Unfortunately, it turns out that Trentor’s body is in truly awful shape as the Avenger quickly loses the fight and has to duck behind a couch to avoid getting shot.

Then the police arrive downstairs and both the Avenger and Trentor just runs off. Right in front of them While the police just stand there. It’s truly ridiculous.

Outside, the Avenger decide to grab onto the outside of the Duckmobile. Trentor tries to scrape him off, but the Avenger still manage to cling to it, long enough to cause a crash that knocks Trentor out.

While a very, very risky move, the Avenger relied on the car’s protective systems to keep his body from being killed. But still, damn.

Well, could, but there’s only so mch time I’m gonna spend searching for gifs.

He drags Trentor back to Juniper, who switches them back. She then erases Trentor’s memory of everything that’s happened. The Avenger worries his brain got fried in the system, but Juniper is quick to reassure him that Trentor is fine. Because she knows that based on… being the person who started this mess.

The only explanation for not noticing that is that the green glow is a visual cue for us. So there’s that settled.

Trentor turns out to be a fan, and the Avenger lets it go.

At the Duckburg train station, a young, amnesiac woman is found.

At the house of a Mr. Fletcher, his two kids are being introduced to their new governess.

This one is okay-to-good. The idea is cool, and the callback to the Avenger’s previous virtual reality experiences is also cool, but it doesn’t go deeply enough into any of it to be truly good. But hile I’d like more of the Avenger, this is really Juniper’s issue.

Juniper’s messy start into darkness, that I really like. Especially since she’s a) completely ruthless and b) aims really high, and c) but then fails because she screwed up, but then manages to turn it, if not entirely to her favor, onto something that leaves her blameless and in a position of trust with the Avenger. For a first outing as the villain, that’s a solid B.

The relationships within the Ducklair family are also starting to really take shape here, and the contrasts and similarities between the three are starting to show.

#PKNA #duck avenger #pk2 #comic #review #sort of #for fun

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culturejunkies · 5 years ago

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Joker Review

By Kenshiro

So let me get something out of the way first, I was not a fan of this movie being made. The primary reason being that an origin film for the arch nemesis of Batman is wholly unnecessary. Part of the allure of a character like the Joker is the enigma that is the Joker. No one knows the origin story of the deranged madman. In The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s Academy Award Winning portrayal gave us a Joker who told at least 3 different versions behind how he got his scar. To him, his origin was a complete whimsical story whose sparse detail served as another punchline to tell to his victims. Currently in the comics from which he sprang from, there is said to be at least THREE versions of the Joker, each with their own separate beginning that no one knows! There is no understanding his madness, and that’s what makes him work as a character. He’s not to be understood; He’s not to be reasoned with; He just is who he is, and that’s the joke.

Now with that being said, the movie has been made and Joaquin Phoenix was tapped to play the titular role. Most people were excited to see his take on it, and rightfully so. If any actor would be able to emote the character with the realistic trappings that Todd Phillips wanted to paint his canvas with, Phoenix would be it. Much has been made of the controversy of the creation of this film. Some argued that a film of this nature would be a rallying cry to white-male incels who view the world from a skewed perspective and believe that the world owes them a debt they refuse to pay. Some worried about potential mass-shootings being kicked off based on what happened in Colorado during the opening weekend of The Dark Knight Rises. Personally, people are entitled to feel how they feel. The shooting in Colorado was a horrific situation, and no one should go through a situation like that in life. Ever. However, I don’t believe we should stifle artistic expression simply because certain people lack better judgement. Perspectives should be explored, regardless of how painful they may be. In this regard, I feel Joker was very much needed, just not in the way you may think.

Joaquin Phoenix was mesmerising in the titular role. We deserve the sequel we’re never going to get.

This country has a real problem on its hand in the form of mental illness awareness and treatment. Society has been far too dismissive of the plight of mentally ill individuals, preferring to shun them away, families electing to keep closely guarded secrets instead of dealing with difficult subjects. Mental illness touches us all, whether we like to acknowledge it or not. That’s what made the story of Arthur Fleck pretty compelling in my eyes. Phoenix is absolutely remarkable in the role of Fleck, who is very much a forgotten, discarded man. As we follow him through, we see how everyone loves to pass the buck in dealing with his condition and how the lack of funding to help keep him regulated set him loose upon the world around him. We also are forced to look at how we deal with whose we don’t understand. We subject them to physical and verbal abuse for things that are beyond their control which honestly can only serve to make things worse. As we follow Arthur, it is fascinating to see all of the ways in which he starts to slowly descend into madness when mostly he just wants to be treated kindly, and not be treated as subhuman, as a throwaway…as a freak.

The film falls short for me in the areas where Phillips’ lazily attempts to tie Batman’s own origin to Fleck via his relationship with Thomas Wayne. So much so that the film is much better served without the loose comic book ties it has. Replacing Gotham City and Thomas Wayne with any other city and billionaire would not affect this movie in the slightest. It would be the same film, and I can only hope some YouTube content creator actually does a recut and show how little all of those details mattered to the overall story. Phillips’ own comments betray his feelings about the comic book medium and it shows. He even pokes fun at Batman’s original origin by showing the Wayne’s taking their young son to see Zorro The Gay Blade, when they actually took him to see The Mask of Zorro. Todd Phillips wanted to make a film about mental illness, our lack of awareness of it, and the repercussions of such actions on the people we ignore. Yet, nothing he did was original. He closely channeled the classic film Taxi Driver, down to casting that film’s star Robert De Niro, and pitting him in a role opposite to one he played in The King of Comedy. The story beats were largely the same found in the mixing of both films.

I feel its not right to judge this as a comic book film, because it doesn’t even attempt to embrace what the source represents. It does an even poorer job at trying to be a “comic book” film than Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy of films. When you judge it as a film devoid of comic book origins, it fares a lot better, yet it still has its flaws. The other thing that lessens its potential impact is that Todd Phillips has no plans to make a follow-up, preferring instead to have the film stand alone as a think piece for the viewer to interpret. I can rationalize that thought, but I can’t help shake the feeling that something really special could’ve come out of this with Phoenix’s portrayal, but this will never come to pass. Which leaves me feeling even more upset that the film exists. If this film was not going to embrace the aspects of its comic book history, and now we’re almost certain to be subject to another director’s interpretation of The Joker, then what was the point of this film at all?

#Batman #DC Entertainment #Joker #Movies

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seven-for-president · 8 years ago

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RFA reacting to MC who is a big Killing Stalking fan

_Yoosung_

° you were re-reading Killing Stalking while sitting infront of the TV

° as captivating as the Story is, you didn´t recognize Yoosung enterd the house

° it was the chapter where Yoon Bum got hung up at the ceiling

° your entire Focus of Attention was on your Screen and so you sqeaked in suprise as you heard Yoosung speak up

° “Hey Babe, what´re you reading?”

° oh shit, he saw

° “Ehh, just some new manwah” (^^ゞ

° please look away, please look away, please look away

° “Oh god why is he hanging from the ceiling? Isn´t his friend going to help him??”

° inside of you was the battle of telling him the truth or leaving him in his sweet, naive thoughts

° while you were in thoughts you didn´t notice him, now interested in how it might turn out, swiping to the next page

° there he met the holy glowing d*ck of Sangwoo

° “ What is he doing?! Is her jerk- is he really doing that to the other one hanging??!”

° you had the Feeling there´s a LOT of explaining to do (；´д｀)ゞ

° “You see, that´s a Thing now between me and my friends.”

° what a bad lie

° it took almost an hour for you to convince him that you´re not mental unstable

° or have some weird fetish Σ(ＴωＴ)

° it takes him a while to accept that you like that kind of stuff but he has to

° nevertheless he is still worried about your mental health from time to time

° poor, uneducated, naive bby XD

_Jaehee_

° since your computer broke she was nice enough to lend you her private one

° but even with a borrowed PC you just can´t live without your weekly dosis of korean thriller-yaoi

° AKA KILLING STALKING

° but after you got a new/fixed PC you just gave Jaehee her one back without Clearing the browser-history

° which is like the worst mistake a human being can make btw

° so being the super careful office worker she is, she checked the browser history Σ（￣□￣；）

° she was Born to, check browser-histories

° when she saw a link leading to a thing called killing stalking she thought about you having some serious issues

° MOMMY-JAEHEE-MODE ACTIVATED

° luckily she decided to talk with you first before calling a therapist ﾍ(ﾟ∇ﾟﾍ)

° “Hey MC can we talk for bit ?”

° you were a Little confused, was something wrong with the computer you returned?

° “Sure, what´s up?”

° “You know, I´ve bee looking at the browser history on the other Computer. If you think about harming yourself please talk with me and we´ll find help.”

° by the end of her sentence she started to cry ( ˃̩̩⌂˂̩̩ )

° “But there´s nothing wrong with me. How can you think that.”

° you suddenly felt the urgent need to hug her and pat on her head

° “But why are you reading those things then?”

° after a second or two you got a Feeling to know what she´s talking about

° “Are you thinking of Killing Stalking?” ∑(⌒◇⌒；)

° all she could do was nod and continue sobbing

° “But that´s just the name of a manwah I´m currently reading.”

° after you said that she asked a Million questions

° why is it called Killing Stalking

° do the characters have some issues?

° SOME?

° so you show her......aaaaand she´s gone

° jk she just states it isn´t her type of Story and then she never talks about it again

° maybe she´s distusted....... or horrified XD

° but she still has the number of the next therapist on a sticky note inside her calender ∑(O_O；)

_Zen_

° he was at a rehersal so you just sat in the living room and chatted with your friend about the latest chapter of Killing Stalking

° but being the lazy-ass you are you switched to voice messages in the middle of it

° since this is thing you´re very passionate about you don´t notice somebody entering the room

° “Yeah, it was so stupid when he was like let me suck your dick -No you´re too creepy, and now he´s like didn´t you want too suck it? I mean can´t he decide?!”

° Bam!

° you heard a bag drop on the ground and then silence

° you were frozen for afew seconds and then slowly turned around

° only to see a very confused/perplexed Zen

° “Oh, hey. Didn´t know you´re finished early today babe.”

° he´s still at a loss for words and just stands in the hallway

° “What were you talking about?”

° OMG a complete sentence, that must mean he´s back to consciousness

° it then hit you that he must have heard your last message

° “Oh, just this new manwah me and my frind are currently reading. nothing special.” (￣ω￣;)

° Sure MC, sure

° “But what for my sake is this about?”

° so you showed him a chapter, and another one, and another one

° by the time you were done explaining he was as white as his rat tail

° “ You sure you don´t need to throw up Zen?”

° “No, I´m alright.”

° he then threw up

° but since it´s fictional he doesn´t mind if you read it

° I mean he as an actor knows some fans are into weird stuff

° nevertheless you are now more conscious of your surroundings while reading those things XD

_Jumin_

° he was in a meeting and you were in front of the conference room waiting for him

° beacuse he knew you´ll be bored he gave you his phone to entertain yourself

° your´s was still in the car with Driver kim

° so you thought why not catch up on the latest Killing Stalking chapters when you have the time now

° but right when you were captivated by the chapter´s climax the door opend and Jumin stepped out

° to his disappointment your attention wasn´t on him but on his phone

° being the sneaky Daddy Person he is he just snatched it away from you

° “MC, please come home with me I think we need to talk about ...this”

° you felt like one of your worst nightmares just came true

° you were very nervous the whole ride back home and neither of you spoke a word

° by the timeyou entered the penthouse you just knew he would be nagging you nonstop about this

° “So, Jumin what do you want to talk about?”Σ(ＴωＴ)

° “Would you care and explain to me just what you were reading on my phone?!”

° to our suprise he was very calm but you somehow felt very arfaid

° “This was just this new manwah I´m reading andthe new chapters are out so I wanted to read them while I waited for you to finish your meeting and-”

° “It´s okay I wasn´t going to scold you, please don´t be afraid”

° It was only then you realized that you sounded very terrified

° “I´m sorry, I just thought you were angry at me.”

° “Why would I be angy at you I was just interested in what you were so fascinated with. But depending on the Images I saw I´d like for you to explain the plot to me.”

° so you did as asked and when you were at the part where Yoon Bum got hang up by Sangwoo he just told you to stop XD

° “Not that I mind but should you really be reading those Storys?”

° when you told him about your Passion for it he understood that he should just leave it at that

° to your suprise he manages to get you an autograph from Koogi (the creater of Killing Stalking) and it was the best day ever

° and by day I also mean the night ( ° ʖ °) if you know what I mean

_Saeyoung/Seven_

° the new chapter was out and since Seven was busy working you decided to change into fangirl-mode and read it

° bad for you Seven observed everything you did while using his wifi

° so when he was on a break he glanced on the tab where youre browser-history was displayed

° “MC why are you reading the new chapter without me?!”

° you were so suprised you almost dropped your phone on the ground

° “Don´t shoch me like that I almost dropped my phone!”

° That´s all you´re worrying about MC?

° but before you realized what he just said you already felt the matress sink in and another persons presence by your side

° “Go back to the beginning I want us to read it together. <3″

° now you were really confused (・_・ヾ

° “You know Killing Stalking?”

° “Of course I know. Who do you think I am?” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

° you just kept quiet and both of you read the new capter together

° while reading he was suprisingly concentrated and focused

° you expected him to make bad jokes every 0.07 sec, but he didn´t

° but this moment of peace only lasted till the last page

° “OMG MC did you see that glorious dick just now?”

° “Saeyoung keep you voice down Saeran is next door!”

° guess who opened the door just in that Moment

° he somehow looked a bit disappointed

° maybe he expected to see his brother without pants and looked forward to laugh about him

° as soon as he saw you being alright he left

° your head was as red as Seven´s hair and you kept throwing pillows at him

° in the meantime he just laughed his ass off

° the next time the new chapter was out you made sure to either besomewhere else or locking doors and Windows

° poor Seven ( ≧Д≦)

Dear Lord forgive me, for I have sinned

That´s it for now, maybe I´m going to add Saeran and V but I´m not sure yet o(^▽^)o

If you enjoyed reading or are a fan /victim of Killing Stalking leave a like or a comment , which wold make me very happy (/^▽^)/

Also if you have a request for a HC don´t hesitate and just ask（。＞ω＜）。

#mystic messenger #mystic messenger headcanon #killing stalking #saeyoung choi #jumin han #zen #seven #yoosung #jaehee kang

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chestnutpost · 6 years ago

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Opinion: NFL proves it has learned nothing as Kareem Hunt signs with Browns

Kelvin Kuo/Associated Press

Almost a year ago to the day, on Feb. 10, 2018, Kareem Hunt shoved a woman in a hotel hallway, shoved another individual so hard that he tumbled into the woman and knocked her down, and then kicked the woman as she crouched on the floor.

Early Monday afternoon, the Browns signed Hunt to a one-year, $1 million contract.

Congratulations, NFL: business as usual is back, and it’s booming.

There’s video of what Hunt did, from multiple angles. It’s a chaotic scene: a 216-pound athlete lashing out.

A CNN report cited three separate calls to police dispatch. It also noted that the hallway assault was one of three violent off-field acts of which he was accused in 2018: In January, a man told police in Kansas City, Missouri, that his nose and ribs were broken by Hunt and teammate George Atkinson during a nightclub brawl, and a witness said Hunt punched another individual during an altercation in June.

The Chiefs, who said they were aware of the February assault and had already spoken to Hunt even while he took the field for them every week at the start of the season, released Hunt when TMZ released the video in November.

But the NFL no longer has to worry about crimes and allegations from about 200 news cycles ago. Ratings are up. The 2018 season was a big hit. Even minor league football is suddenly popular.

We’re in a new golden age for the league, wherein the biggest controversy is a blown call in a playoff game. Concerns about violence against women are soooo 2014 in the NFL. Here’s a million dollars, Kareem Hunt: You learned your lesson, probably, and deserve a second chance, for some reason.

Oh, the NFL itself will discipline Hunt (on the commissioner’s exempt list as the league investigates the assault) with its usual swiftness and precision. Hunt’s shoving and kicking a woman is supposed to be punished with a minimum six-game suspension, which means by the time it is announced, it will probably be watered down to about three games, the same length as Jameis Winston’s suspension last season for groping an Uber driver in 2016.

Why would the league possibly cut its prescribed suspension in half in the face of such shocking evidence? It’s the NFL’s new math: Suspensions are adjusted based on the public’s attention span. Grope an Uber driver? Three games. Physically abuse your wife? One game. Soon, we’ll be so desensitized that the punishment for kicking a woman will be a benching for a quarter of a preseason game.

Jameis Winston was suspended three games last season for groping an Uber driver in 2016.Joe Robbins/Getty Images

The NFL offers counseling as part of its conduct policy. Ian Rapoport of NFL Network reported that Hunt has already started anger management and alcohol counseling. Let’s hope he takes it seriously and it helps him. But it’s easy to be skeptical when a team is so quick to fork over money.

If Hunt had hurt his knee in November, teams would order a dozen MRIs before handing him a contract. But extreme behavioral modification? That can be knocked out in a few therapy sessions.

If this column comes across as a little jaded and cynical, you only needed to take a glance at Twitter in the moments after the Hunt signing was announced in order to see why. Here’s a sample from my feed, with the names scrubbed away and the thoughts paraphrased:

NFL Analyst 1: “Interesting. John Dorsey drafted Hunt for the Chiefs. The shrewd Browns general manager obviously still has faith in Hunt.”

NFL Analyst 2: “How odd: The Browns already have Nick Chubb and Duke Johnson Jr. It will be fascinating to see where Hunt fits in a crowded backfield.”

NFL Analyst 3: “Perchance the Browns hope to trade Hunt after his suspension now that they have procured his services at a discount rate. A bold player personnel tactic, indeed.”

Depth chart talk? Trade speculation? Pigskin analysis?

Hunt kicked a woman. It’s on video. It happened only one year ago, we learned about it mere months ago, and it’s already little more than a point of procedure.

The internet outrage eventually arrived, because internet outrage always eventually arrives. But it took the local instead of the express, and much of it sounded perfunctory and a little weary when it finally showed up.

Five years ago, footage of a football player violently assaulting a woman sparked around-the-clock coverage from hard-news outlets. Owners held press conferences to quell the outrage caused by the cover-up. We had a nationwide conversation about violence against women, its root causes and how the NFL can be part of the solution.

Now, many of us are reluctant to even make fun of the Browns for doing something stupid and awful because the Browns are a feel-good story. Heck, the whole darn NFL is a feel-good story. Bright new stars like Patrick Mahomes! Eternal champions like Tom Brady! Tense playoff duels! Young hotshot coaches! Ratings! Revenues!

Why talk about domestic violence, protesting racism or any of that boring old real-world stuff when we can watch some no-look passes?

This is NFL paradise. The league and its teams must only pay the barest lip service to having a social conscience while doing whatever they want to do. If Hunt can make the Browns 2 percent better or generate a few more dollars, who cares what happened last year?

Kareem Hunt was placed on the commissioner’s exempt list late last season after a video was published that showed the former Chiefs running back shoving and kicking a woman.Kelvin Kuo/Associated Press

Claiming that the NFL learned nothing from Ray Rice, Greg Hardy or other controversies that overshadowed the league in recent years would be 100 percent incorrect. The NFL learned exactly what it wanted to learn.

News cycles and angry internet mobs come and go. Fans come back, no matter what, as long as the games are exciting. Survivors’ names and stories begin to pale in comparison. And “the shield” endures, no matter what.

The NFL learned that the best way to solve all its problems is to score more touchdowns.

So now we must hold our noses and choke down Hunt’s imminent return to the NFL. He’ll attend Browns minicamps while the NFL twiddles with its investigation. By the time we hear about his suspension—which will inevitably be appealed—we’ll have been force-fed a redemption narrative.

And by the time Hunt scores his first touchdown, television analysts and columnists like me will shorthand what he did as a vague “incident” or “mistake” so we don’t keep tripping over the phrase “repeatedly shoved and kicked a woman” every time we mention him.

Of course, many will forget about the victim. In fact, many already have.

We can blame the NFL and its teams for being callous, insincere, insensitive, tone-deaf and utterly indifferent to everything but dollars, win totals and ratings points. But we must also remember that many of us trained the NFL to be that way.

As fans and observers, we’re easily distracted. We forget more easily than we forgive. We crave football so much that it’s unhealthy.

We swallowed CTE, Rice, Hardy, the Colin Kaepernick blackballing. What’s a guy kicking a woman compared to all that? Get mad on the internet today, talk about Kyler Murray tomorrow, draft Hunt in your fantasy league as soon as his suspension lifts.

Business as usual is all of our business. We should hold the NFL and its teams more accountable. We should hold ourselves more accountable.

Until then, the league will always offer second or third chances to the likes of Kareem Hunt and worry about whether they deserve them later.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter: @MikeTanier.

The post Opinion: NFL proves it has learned nothing as Kareem Hunt signs with Browns appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://www.thechestnutpost.com/news/opinion-nfl-proves-it-has-learned-nothing-as-kareem-hunt-signs-with-browns/

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fadingfartconnoisseur · 8 years ago

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AK Monthly Recap: January 2017

Once again, I went a full month without leaving New York! I barely even left Manhattan, venturing to Brooklyn a total of twice.

The first time I did that, in April of last year, I was shocked and horrified at myself. This time, I welcomed it! The past few months were much busier than I anticipated (a six-week trip to Europe and Australia, a nine-day trip to Germany, plus three trips home to Massachusetts), so I needed some time to recuperate.

And that was a smart decision. I spent this month working hard on my fitness regime, spending time with friends, and gearing up for a busy year.

Destinations Visited

New York, NY

Highlights

Taking part in the Women’s March! Millions of people marched all over the world to stand up for the rights of women, black people, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT people, and the environment. I didn’t go to DC but I was thrilled to march with my sister and our two close friends from home in New York City.

I couldn’t get over how huge the march was. It took us an hour to even get to the point where we could march, period! Everyone was friendly and in great spirits. And most importantly, when my kids and grandkids ask me how I stood up to Trump, I’ll be able to show them photographic proof. This is only the beginning.

The NO PANTS SUBWAY RIDE! On the coldest Sunday of the year, my friend Anna from Crazy in the Rain and I joined a group of strangers, got on the subway, and took our pants off, acting nonchalant about it when asked. We lucked out and ended up with a cool group of new friends and we finished our subway ride with a dance party in Union Square!

The No Pants Subway Ride takes place in lots of cities each year, but it originated in New York. Definitely join next year! It’s so much fun, even in the cold!

Image: @roamtheamericas on Twitter

Speaking at the New York Times Travel Show. This was my second time speaking and first time speaking at Industry Day. I was on a panel called “The Future of Travel Media” and I was the modern blogger paired with three more traditional travel writers, so I was a bit of a foil to the rest of them! We had a great talk and it seems like the audience really enjoyed it.

And because the show is such a big event, lots of my blogger friends were in town. The good times most definitely rolled.

Hosting my friend Amanda for a few days. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a houseguest, so I was happy to have Amanda from A Dangerous Business come stay with me during the show! We hung out, explored the city, took tons of pictures (including Times Square at night, which I hadn’t yet done), and made a visit to the Oculus, which I recommend seeing if you’re in Lower Manhattan.

A visit from a special puppy. Christine from C’est Christine brought her pug puppy Gertie to Harlem for a visit! She is the cutest, funniest thing and her fur is SO soft. You can see more of her at cestgertie on Instagram.

Seeing Maria Abramovic speak about her work. I’ve been fascinated by her performance art — she did the project at the MoMA where people would sit across from her and receive uninterrupted eye contact — so it was interesting to see her talk about art. I was surprised at how funny she was, in spite of her often-serious work, and now I’m eager to read her new memoir.

Finally getting framed art on the walls. After living in my apartment for almost a year, I finally have stuff on the walls! Should have done that a long time ago. I used Framebridge to frame everything, they were fabulous, and they gave me a discount code to share with you: adventurouskate15.

Challenges

This new presidency. I wasn’t going to watch the inauguration, but I was at the gym and it was on all the TVs. I thought that would be my low point of the week, but no. It kept getting worse and worse.

As Dan Rather said, “For many Americans, in the two weeks since the inauguration, we have whipsawed from tragedy, to farce, to the theater of the absurd.” I’m deeply worried by what we’ve seen so far. I’m standing up for the most vulnerable, I’m preparing to lose my healthcare (because we all know there’s no Obamacare replacement waiting in the wings), and I’m looking to continue my political activism and action here in New York and beyond.

Seeing a bike messenger almost get run over by a car. Not only that, the driver got out of the car and they almost had a fistfight. So scary, especially since lots of bike messengers don’t have health insurance — or at least they didn’t in the pre-Obamacare days, and they’re about to lose it again.