#the only thing that changes is the immediacy of that suicide but it's not that different in substance

[mesetacadre]

usamericans are like "damn those crazy orientals japanese really did commit suicide for their country they must have been really brainwashed" and then see no problem in joining the military

[shadowgast-recs-weekly]

Good/Complicated Mom Deirta

This week, we've got ten fics that feature a Deirta Thelyss as either a good - or at least complicated mother. Check them out underneath the cut, and comment and kudos if you like them!

What Luminous Worlds Await by essektheyless (divinationwizard) (178674, Mature) Reccer's Content Notes: Choose Not to Warn

After a thousand years of sleep, the Luxon's Champion reawakens to a changed Exandria. The memory of Caleb is ever present, the soul of his mother is tucked in the beacon he carries, and Leylas' madness is tumbling the world toward war again.

Reccer says: The second person narrative gives this such an immediacy! This fic makes me wish I could temporarily forget everything I know about CR so I could try reading it completely fresh; I think it would hold up and be a very cool way to be introduced to the world.

some things time can't fix by Chrome (25930, Mature) Reccer's Content Notes: No Content Notes

Essek is arrested for treason. The Dynasty severs the daemons of prisoners before executing them so they can’t be reborn.

Reccer says: great hurt comfort and an AU, but also a nice depiction of a caring Deirta

Lay Your Bones by LadyOrpheus (53578, Teen) Reccer's Content Notes: No Content Notes

Thinking only of justice and restoring his family's honor after Essek's betrayal, Verin Thelyss finds something he never expected, an Essek he never expected. A mission for justice turns into a race against time and a family finds their world upended.

Reccer says: I love how complicated Deirta is in this fic - that she's bound by her station but still finding ways to act on Essek's behalf

Not the Needle, Nor the Thread by Operafloozy (2149, Teen) Reccer's Content Notes: No Content Notes

Consecuted Deirta is forced to live with her son from another life, it's Essek, things are complicated.

Reccer says: It's part of a series and I loved the series so much, this installment really focusses on Deirta and Essek and also the hurt they caused eachother and how to continue on now that they are both different people.

(and) i'll come running if you call by vagabondfirelily (6489, Teen) Reccer's Content Notes: Choose Not to Warn

Essek goes to Bazzoxan to save Verin. Doing that, he runs into his mother.

Reccer says: It is so bittersweet and so realistic. A very good portray of a complicated relationship between two very similar people. And Verin is there!

until it doesn't hurt by breitweisergallery (3.8k, General) Reccer's Content Notes: No Content Notes

5 times Deirta sends to her sons and one time they send to her

Reccer says: I liked it!

When Broken Shells Make Christmas Bells by LuckyOwlsFoot (12348, Teen) Reccer's Content Notes: Rape/Non-con, Dubcon/Consensual Non Consent, Non-consensual arranged marriage, threats of rape (nothing explicitly happens)

Essek gets forced into an arranged marriage to avoid execution and Caleb rescues him at the altar.

Reccer says: Lots of Essek angst and comfort and support from Deirta and Verin

a star in your sunset by Laeveteinn (2200, Teen) Reccer's Content Notes: Discussion or implications of a suicide attempt

When I find you at the foot of the stairs, my first thought is that a stranger is wearing my son’s face, because there is a standing call for Essek Thelyss's arrest the moment he is seen this side of the Ashkeepers.

Reccer says: It's from Deirta's point of view - which feels rare, and the way that the author shows how well Deirta actually knows and loves Essek - how much we can figure out about Essek's emotional state and probable motives - is amazing, especially with how little is said.

And then we have multiple recs for these last two fics!

And After the Scripture (Your Mother Beside Me) by SaltCore (9531, Mature) Reccer's Content Notes: Major Character Death

Essek is so very loved - so much so, that when he dies, his mother enlists the Nein to smuggle him out of Rosohna so that he may live again.

Reccer 1 says: What isn't there to like? Deirta gets explored as a mother, as a leader, and as a person. The Drow society gets examined and sketched out, painted with a history that reaches back before the Calamity. We get to see more of the Thelyss family, and we see the respect that these strangers give to the Nein solely based on the fact that Essek loved them. The interactions Deirta have with the Nein (mostly Caleb) highlight how shrewd and savvy she is, completely zooms in on what it must be like to be an Umavi, even from the Nein's POV. It's such a stunning story, both in craft and content! Reccer 2 says: the characterization in this fic is incredible. for a character who never appears on screen, deirta has a real tendency to haunt the narrative for a lot of shadowgast writers. the version of her who appears here is a completely convincing—and heartbreaking—portrayal of both one of the most powerful people in the dynasty and someone who is fundamentally essek's mother in spite of that. it makes me cry every time i read it, in the best possible way. mind the warnings—but even as someone who has a hard time with major character death fics, this one is completely worth the read. Reccer 3 says: Genuinely my favorite depiction of Deirta Thelyss I’ve seen. Incredibly complicated but so clearly loves her children in a way that makes sense for a woman that old.

Starburst Hearts by kaeda (4805, Teen) Reccer's Content Notes: No Content Notes

Told from Deirta’s pov. A meeting between mother and son while Essek has been on the run.

Reccer 1 says: One of my favorite characterizations for Deirta as a complicated person who loves her son but struggles to show it and doesn’t understand him well. Also a lovely outsider’s perspective on the dynamic of the Mighty Nein as well as Caleb/Essek. Reccer 2 says: It's so wonderfully bittersweet! Also the outsider perspective on the rest of the Nein is very funny

Want more fics with Deirta? Check out our reclist themed with featuring another Thelyss!

This is one of our weekly communally-generated shadowgast rec lists. Every week we announce a new theme and allow anyone to submit a fic recommendation. 

And hey, anyone includes you, if you're so inclined!

Next week, we'll be featuring fics with Astrid and/or Eadwulf in them. Any fics coming to mind? Well, then use this form to submit!

[hatosaur]

tlou hbo ep.4 & ep.5 thoughts.

more analyze-y than the others ones because i’m talkin thru my damn feelings >:,(

getting ep. 4 outta the way real quick because it was mostly setting up for ep. 5 but also i didn’t get to rewatch it since last sunday so memory’s fuzzy.

i’ve seen people have mixed reactions to ep.4 and i get it, because it was so different to how it played out in the game. biggest breaking point from game-joel was a) him talking about tess (which i felt broke a rule for his character) and b) him being openly kind to ellie. being soft with her when she shoots the hunter. laughing at her joke. these aren’t the end of the world. i can see how it was all to show he’s warming up to ellie but it did still feel odd.

i do kinda get the sense that him being mean old joel would wreck the momentum and tone, since we’re not watching pre-rendered cutscenes sandwiched between gameplay segments. you can’t have the danger happening and THEN joel’s yelling at ellie. that’s just TENSION TENSION TENSION; him being nice and open was a good way to balance things out and give us (and ellie) a breather.

so ep. 5. i have to fuckin take deep breaths.

once again, i can’t fucking believe that i can know exactly what’s going to happen and this show will still floor me. i’m broken over the immediacy that henry killed sam with, different from henry talking out his thoughts in the game. his scared, stammered “what did i do?” as he looks to joel, because he can’t believe what he just did.

when i look back to game-henry, it wasn’t emphasized all that much that he was pretty much still a kid, taking care of a kid. show-henry had plenty of those moments. both versions are cocky but the cockiness show-henry has was more kid-like, especially in his interactions with joel, and it only made it hit harder when he looked at him in those last moments, as if for help, and when joel tried to gently get the gun away from him. i’m very glad for them amping up the connection between joel and henry.

the choices they made with sam were amazing. the kid was a great actor and i love seeing all the extra bits that came with him being deaf. i knew it wouldn’t matter all that much that he was younger and deaf; what mattered at the end of the day was his connection with ellie and they fuckin knocked it out of the park. i love that even without them being close in age, they latched onto each other anyway.

the bit with ellie’s blood was such an interesting change. because that was a stellar way of showing despite her maturity, she’s still a kid too. you can tell she really believed she could save him.

this coupled with sam’s superhero fixation...god. the thought of him thinking of her as a hero because of that.

another big change was showing ellie’s reaction to henry’s suicide, instead of joel’s like the game. in the game, i think it was to remind joel about the fragility and impermanence of good things. the show’s not really joel city, they can’t really keep it on him the whole time because that’s boring. not to mention, it’s about more than him. in the show, you can tell it’s to show the impact it’s going to have on ellie’s journey.

i wasn’t a big fan of kathleen initially -- felt she wasn’t intimidating enough as a leader -- but as we saw her more in ep. 5, i was disgusted with her, which is good! i do like the complexity of her, how she’s the leader of this big resistance movement but also seemed unsure and grasping in a lot of moments (of which surprisingly did not include the moments where she ordered people to be killed or argued that ellie and sam should die because “kids die”).

brief note, the child clicker was cool but like...a bit farfetched right?? i mean unless she was bit as a baby and has just been turning since then? aside from that, i do like that she foreshadowed sam’s turning in a way. kid infected is such a gutpunch.

another thing i liked were the parts ripped straight from the gameplay. just watching joel reach the house with the sniper in it caused a lotta moments where i was like “OH YEA THAT HAPPENED.”

WHEN THE INFECTED CAME OUTTA THE GROUND??? i was like “OH YEA THAT WAS PART OF IT.” this show’s great. i love seeing the funny ways they tie back to the game.

all the episodes have been good so far but it really seems like the odd-numbered ones have consistently been bangers.

NEXT ONE THO. JACKSON TIME. TOMMY. MARIA. LET’S GOOO >:)

[baph0meat]

several years ago I asked you "tips on turning 21?" and you gave some damn good advice that helped me so much when i turned 21. so, got a tip for turning 25 and suddenly being very aware of the process of self-actualization?

[continued] “i asked my older sibling and they said "don't eat trash food" lmfao”

well i actually first off actually unironically agree w your older sibling -- it feels like a drag to get nagged abt it but genuinely switching from like. “hot pockets from the corner store every night bc i’m tired” to gritting my teeth and putting in the planning and time to cook for myself and eat in ways that were kinder to my body did a LOT for like, both just my overall wellness and also my fucking wallet bc trash food is literally so fucking expensive out the gate. there’s like. a whole BUNCH i could get into as someone who has worked in The Health Food Industry abt how a lot of what you’re paying for w processed food is convenience and immediacy and that a lot of times “Healthy Food” costs more in terms of time and preparation and getting WAY fewer calories per dollar in ways that aren’t feasible if you’re food insecure etc etc etc but i’m not getting into that i’m just gonna say: when you CAN, whenever you’re able, gritting your teeth and prying yourself up and over to the kitchen and not having trash food actually does do a lot for u overall.

anyway. cw for brief suicide mention as i talk abt this but i’ll try not to get too heavy abt it

i’m abt to turn 27 next month and have finally hit the point where my life has like... stabilized in a way i never thought would’ve been possible. (i got married, did i say that on this blog ever? hi, it’s me, ira, i got married to the coolest woman alive and moved to spain.) but the thing is i’ve said that every year. like, fuckin, on an absolute clockwork schedule once a year i’ve been like “hi guys wow things have been so crazy but everything in my life has FINALLY settled so i’ll be around a lot more” etc etc. so: your life is never settled and it is also always settling and eventually i have found i just stop noticing. i think also as things settle i’ve noticed i’ve started like, really getting struck by my life STRETCHING OUT in front of me, esp since i was suicidal for most of my life til now and like, i never had to THINK abt or plan for stuff, and now suddenly sometimes it’s like. even tho i’m so happy w my life now it’s still so exhausting sometimes to think abt doing this fucking forever lmao. forever! every day! life is so long and my brain is so small!

all this to say: never expect stuff to be Done esp a concept as huge as self-actualization and also expect to be tired. expect to freak out a little. i know we’ve all heard “nobody has it figured out in their 20s” and we’re like “yeah yeah cool except i look around and other ppl in their 20s seem to at LEAST have it more together than i do” and my solution for that so far has been oh my god stop looking in other people’s windows, ira. 

i’m getting really rambly and disorganized here so i’m just gonna post a list of things that have really, really helped me in the mid-20s zone and that made me healthier and happier than early-20s me

i don’t drink or use substances when i’m in a bad mood anymore. ever. even if i’m just like “lightly bummed out” -- total stop, total red light, no substance use. this one rule has changed my life entirely and i take it extremely seriously. i have to be happy and feeling good going into it, or i don’t take anything/don’t have any drinks, period. (i tentatively make an exception for this re: using weed to medicate anxiety but i personally still try to keep that a last resort.)

every time you feel like bitching about something you don’t like on social media, make a post abt something else that you like instead. every time u feel like saying something meanspirited or vague or unpleasant abt someone you can’t stand, find a genuine, wholehearted compliment abt someone you really like instead. i’m obviously not saying “never complain ever” but i’m saying only complain when it like.... matters, and take vicious, merciless inventory of when it actually matters bc it u might find that inventory doesn’t line up w your actions generally

related to that: be very cautious abt like, friend groups who bond over shit they hate instead of bonding over shit they like.

talk to yourself a lot. talk to yourself before you say or do things. ask yourself questions about how you’re feeling, why you’re reacting to things the way you do, esp if you’re feeling/acting negatively and feel lost abt Why. cultivate a relationship w yourself in a tangible, daily way so that you can understand your feelings and actions better

find something screenless that you enjoy doing every day. i’m not trying to sound like crotchety specter of Fucking Log Off but i am that and i think the internet is evil and i think it’s making our brains dribble out our ears in liquid form and finding offline things to fill my days up with every day and only coming online when i’m done with those things has probly done more for my growth as a person than anyone else. this place is evil

related to all of this, i guess: everything 21 year old you thought was super boring/would have refused to do if commanded is probably really really good for you and will make you feel better

that’s my advice happy birthday

[flych1]

Kehlani singer on her new album

Kehlani, singer on her new album

Photo: Pari Dukovic

Kehlani

In early March, Kehlani was due to meet his label. She was preparing to release her second album - her first since she had a baby and a return to her roots R-B. She was scheduled to perform the first part of Justin Bieber's Changes tour, as well as a number of dream solo dates. Atlantic executives told him they believed in the album, which was scheduled for release on April 24, its 25th anniversary, but the coronavirus pandemic made it impossible to develop a promotion plan. We'd have to postpone it. "I was casting actors and actresses. I was doing all kinds of things," she says of all the pre-production she had completed at the time of the mid-March meeting. We're talking about a video call from Zoom; Kehlani sits alone in a sunny room in his Los Angeles home. (Later, she will be joined by her dog, a pint of ice cream and a tequila-based drink with a slice of orange coming out). It just so happens that today is the original release date. They said, "We don't think you should take it out,"" she said. "And then I went to my room and made the 'Toxic' video on my laptop." She posted it on YouTube at the end of March. "People messed with it," she adds. When Kehlani's label accepted her request to release the album this month, it was stipulated that she had to do it all herself. "If all we do is make music and press the button, then you can do it," she says. "And I was like, 'Okay, challenge accepted fucking.'" So now Kehlani and her photographer, with whom she's in quarantine, are planning and editing music videos, photoshoots, and album coverage. (She also lives with her daughter, two younger siblings, a close friend and her assistant). His garage has been converted into a two-level studio, one side for music, the other for visuals. Kehlani has been a professional musician since the age of 13. A series of mixtapes - full of overshares about having a heart built and broken - and a random but successful debut album have already made her a leading figure in the industry. His music is R-B in its purest form: songs about how love defeats you, about floating on the pure adrenaline of a crush, about the desire of someone you can't trust in your heart. It's no coincidence that when white artists like Bieber and Charlie Puth want to look into an R-B sound, they call on Kehlani to help them. The new album, It Was Good Until It Wasn't, is part of a revival of the genre in the midst of its fiercest debates. It is also a transition disc, a bridge between adolescence and adulthood. Throughout her career, Kehlani has been considered the daughter of the R-B: sexy but boyish. In her old music, she played with both sides of the binary. On the new record, it got too big. She did so immediately after giving birth to her daughter Adeya, who is now one year old. (She is currently co-parenting with her ex, Adeya's father, Javaughn Young-White, younger brother of Jaboukie from the Daily Show). "People would always be like, Kehlani is adorable or, like, Kehlani is cool hella. But then I had a baby and it made me look more feminine," she says. "So I guess I thought, OK, I'm going to start shaking my ass and talk about it." (She wanted Bieber to do a song for her album, but he refused. "Because he's a super-married guy now, it didn't really fit," she said. Kehlani's self-managed music video for "Toxic", filmed with the only camera on her MacBook, shows the nervous figure of the singer slipping and squirming, rubbing her arms and hips. "Don Julio has ridiculed me for you," she tells her former lover that she won't reach out to him, even if her body urges her to do it out of instinct. Kehlani insists this is not his last relationship, which ended publicly and painfully, with Compton rapper YG earlier this year. It's the kind of personal drama that made headlines and made Kehlani's blog famous. She writes songs that address all of this openly. Her fans grow up with her career because she is transparent, sometimes to excess. Or, as she says, I do in public, and it makes people feel like I'm not a stranger. I'm a person with a human ass. I'm screwing up in front of the whole world." The conversation about the state of the R-B was revived last November, when Lizzo, often considered a pop artist, won album of the year at the Soul Train Awards, beating soul singer Ari Lennox. ("It's clear that I'm not cool enough," Lennox tweeted after his loss. Last February, rapper Young M.A. went further, saying that "we barely have R-B". Indeed, in recent years, the superstars of the genre - like SWV, Boyz II Men, Ginuwine, Toni Braxton - and their musical descendants have mostly failed to stop the charts as they did two decades ago; many contemporary black musicians evade the label, preferring to be called "alternative R-B", while others experiment more with genres that were once declared out of bounds by the guardians. Kehlani, on the other hand, is part of a coterie of artists who maintain the relevant R-B today, alongside newcomers like Summer Walker, Bryson Tiller and Lennox. She has a song for every step of a relationship: going under it, going over it, watching the door ahead, a personal promise to stop texting her. His music seems new - not as a consistent copy of a Brandy song - but the influence is palpable. She finds the current debate about gender - what the R-B is, what it was and where it has gone - boring. It may no longer sound like it did in the 90s, but rappers (think, more recently, Drake) have expanded it beyond the desperate desire (or desperate loves) of the last century. "I think people don't know enough about music to make these kinds of accusations [that the R-B no longer exists]. The R-B is simple lyrics and a great song. Lots of harmonies and batteries and melodic production," she says, as if it were easy. "I'll never be able to make 90s R-B music. I'm never going to be able to make R-B music from the early 2000s, because that's not when I was making music. It wasn't when I experienced things that shaped my words and my sound." Kehlani was born in Oakland and raised by her aunt. His mother struggled with drug addiction, and his father died when he was 24 years old and she was very young. A stint on America's Got Talent put her in touch with Nick Cannon, who paid for her to spend time in the studio to make her first mixtape in 2014. On Cloud 19, you can hear the beginnings of a great talent: his voice is more acute and younger, but it is overflowing with emotion. On the deck of Cloud 19's "As I Am" film, she sings and succeeds in the chorus of a Mary J. Blige classic. A week after the release of her second mixtape in 2015, she signed with Atlantic Records. Kehlani turned to pop with his debut album of 2017, SweetSexySavage, an album full of rushed and half-finished ideas. It was carried out amid a personal mental health crisis, sparked by rumors that she cheated on her ex-boyfriend, NBA player Kyrie Irving, in 2016. The relentless online bullying led her to attempt suicide. (Kyrie Irving later admitted that she had never been unfaithful.) "I started an album as a person and experienced the most traumatic event of my life," she says. Her label held on until the deadline, letting her make an album from songs she barely recognized. "I had no connection with the music," she says. "I was embarrassed about everything." The new record is a reset, closer to the Grammy-nominated mixtapes that made it famous. It Was Good Until It Wasn't Gives you the Pure B-R rush, the R-B "waiting for you to call me", the R-B "the only thing that interests me is you": the hits of Brandy and Monica in the 90s, the classics of Alicia Keys of the early 2000s who fall in love. She is also less affected by the nostalgia of adolescence than by the immediacy of adult desires. His first mixtapes were about childhood and adolescence; It Was Good Until It Wasn't at peace with the way most conflicts or heartaches unfold. The title comes from a conversation with a friend about her recent breakup. That's the life of this, you know? she said. The is good and then it's not good anymore. Although she has been in the industry since she was a teenager, Kehlani has never had any decisive success for her career, and it is unlikely that the new album will deliver one. "F-MU" is hot and dancing, and the collaboration with Canadian R-B star Tory Lanez, "Can I," is a sexy earworm - although neither song seems particularly suited to virality. His greatest successes are gossip blogs that overshadow his music. His three-month relationship with YG ended just after they released a song together proclaiming their love. (Their duet came out on the eve of Valentine's Day 2020; three days later, she released a breakup song after images of him cheating her surfaced). Minutes before one of our calls, Kehlani posted a series of tweets about a feud with another Oakland native, rapper Kamaiyah, who slammed her on Instagram Live about a previously unreleased mixtape and accused her of being a colorist, among other things. "She gave the green light to my family and me and told everyone in Oakland to kill us for a song," Kehlani says. (Kamaiyah later replied, telling Kehlani, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't threaten you," but added that "a green light means going like a fight, not shooting"). A moment after our discussion, she answered a phone call from a friend and nervously asked if her tweets - which had let the rapper know there was no bad blood - were correct, if she had handled the situation properly. Kehlani and Kamaiyah had long argued over a joint mixtape, which was to be released before the release of their two albums. Her production was difficult, and even the basic decisions - how many songs she should have, what it should be called, what the visual aesthetic should be - met, according to Kehlani, with Kamaiyah's resistance. In the end, she had had enough of back and forth, and the mixtape didn't seem as essential to her as the release of her album. When she came back to our call, her mood was appalled. I tried to contact her to do good business and she said, "If the project doesn't come out, you can't have it [one piece]," she says. "Even though I wrote it." Once again, she was swept away in a drama she couldn't control, tweeting clarifications about a quarrel she didn't care about, instead of celebrating the upcoming release of her album. But why challenge a misinterpretation if she is tired of getting carried away by the drama? How can I put this to rest and out of my body? Because I don't want to wear them," Kehlani says. "Even if you never want to piss me off again, how can I make sure you know it's love on this side?" she tweeted Kamaiyah to let the rapper know she wished him the best. She is satisfied with the way she has defused an unexpected quarrel. A few years ago, it would not have been as weighted. It took a lot of to get to this point, she says. The death of two friends in three months has put a lot of things in perspective. Philadelphia rapper Chynna overdosed in April at age 25; Minnesota rapper Lexii Alijai, whom Kehlani considered "a little sister," overdosed on New Year's Day at just 21 years of age. Lexii Alijai was scheduled to perform the first part of the post-Bieber tour as the headliner. "I couldn't believe it because Alijai was so young," she says. "It was a click, it was amazing, it was sad and it was heartbreaking. I'm always trying to find the best way to help them continue their legacy." Being 25 was also more than a quarter of a life. It was a horizon she never thought she would see. "I've always had a strange feeling about being 25 or older," she says. "It's a shock because I'm now older than my father was." that's part of what made It Was Good Until It Wasn't feel like the album she finally grew up on. "I wanted to be 25 on this one," she says.

Instagram

from flych https://ift.tt/3fOJi2U via https://ift.tt/2SkgjJX

[allthemarvelousrage]

And the Moon to Watch Over You (A Rubicon Short Story)

So. Some of you are aware that @solivar​ and I have been brewing our own urban fantasy universe, Rubicon. I wrote a short story for Bae, set in that universe. Here it is. 

Be warned: queer relationships, blatant disaster gays, filthy with feelings, werewolves and angels and fairies, oh my.

CW: brief mention of suicidal ideation, smut, cursing, definitely not safe for public.

And the Moon to Watch Over You

Most of the time, Rafael Roman loved his work. He had come through fire and blood and pain and death to make something of himself, and that something he had made happened to come with the privilege of being in a position to help others get through their own traumas. He cherished every smile, every shakily tearful laugh, every heartfelt catharsis he witnessed. He treasured the pain his clients chose to share with him, was always humbled by the trust they showed him when they confessed their burdens.

This was not one of those days.

He scrubbed his face as he sat in his car, staring bleakly at the doors of the Emergency department through the rain-streaked windshield and wishing like hell it had been a different outcome. His eyes burned. He swallowed hard to get past the lump in his throat. Ground his heels hard against his eyes as he rubbed them. Gods above and below, he thought, letting his head thump softly back against the headrest. This day needs to end.

The driver side door abruptly opened, and it was a measure of his exhaustion that he barely reacted, only turned wearily to eye the interloper. Somehow, he was unsurprised to see that it was Hope, the mass of loose green curls framing her face perfectly immune to the rain and wind lashing at the ends of her stylish woolen trench coat.

She stared in at him for a moment, her vibrant green eyes piercing and gentle, so much so that he had to look away as the lump rose in his throat again. Then her hand touched his forehead, cool and soft, and he released a shaky breath and fought not to lean gratefully into that simple point of contact. “You’ve looked better, Rafael,” she said, not unkindly. “Moodily staring out the window in the hospital parking lot is not a good aesthetic for you.”

Despite himself, he huffed a laugh. A tired, short and almost humorless laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. “Let me guess. Felix called you to be my support pixie after he pried me out of the waiting room.”

“Before, actually,” she said with a smile, and her head tilted. “How bad is it?”

Just like that, the bile rolled back up in his throat and he swallowed convulsively again. “Bad enough,” he said, low and raw, and gave into the urge to scrub his face again. “Maybe if I hadn’t sent Ron home, he wouldn’t have—”

Hope’s finger slid across his lips, shushing him before he could complete that thought. “You’re not omnipotent, Rafael,” she said sternly. “And you know as well as I do that, even as powerful as we are, we can’t help absolutely everyone.”

“Doesn’t make it less shitty when we fail,” he muttered, and sighed. “Did you just come for the pep talk, or is there an ulterior motive lurking in your springy green curls?”

She gave him an exasperated look, tempered with a fond smile. “I came,” she replied, and nudged him firmly by the shoulder, “to drive you home. You’re in no shape, so budge over.”

Rafe eyed her, debated arguing, but eventually gave up the notion that he’d actually win an argument with her in his current condition. He turned to critically examine the space between the driver’s seat and the passenger, attempted to discern if he had the flexibility to slide over without getting out of the car, and decided not to chance it. The last thing he needed was the gearshift ending up somewhere sensitive.

“You don’t have to, you know,” he said, entire body protesting as he forced it upright into the rain, and turned up his collar as he hurried around the front bumper and slid into the shotgun seat with a minimum of rain trickling down the back of his neck.

“I am well aware of that, Rafael,” Hope replied primly, as she tucked herself into the driver’s seat and adjusted it to her comfort. “You could no doubt call almost anyone in this town and they’d be quite willing to give you a ride anywhere you wanted to go, but right now, you need family.” A delicate pause. “I assume Julius and Joel are…”

“First day of the full moon,” Rafe said tiredly, and closed his eyes as Hope finished adjusting mirrors and the seat position to her liking. His faint sigh disappeared in the sound of the engine turning over. “They’ll be gone for a few more nights.”

“Wolves,” she said, only semi-scathingly, and reversed out of the parking space. “The moon is a treacherous thing, you know. You can’t trust it.”

“I’m a sun god,” he replied with a grin, but didn’t open his eyes, because the lassitude was spreading, and he stifled a yawn. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

Hope’s fingers drifted briefly along his temple, brushing through his hair. “Sleep, Rafe,” she murmured, and he felt the pull of her magic tugging at his consciousness, trying to nudge it under. He could fight it, but didn’t bother. It would take Hope at least twenty minutes to reach his place with the speed at which she drove, and he figured it would take him at least that long to recharge enough energy to drag himself into a brief shower before he collapsed in bed.

He let the hum of the road, and the hypnotic rhythm of Hope’s magic, and his own exhaustion pull him to slumber, and hoped he wouldn’t dream.

---

He jolted awake as the door to his right opened to let the rain and wind in, and he blinked owlishly at the rain-soaked gables of his own house. The immediacy of it was unsettling, as if it had been a long blink between the hospital parking lot and his driveway, and he took a moment to settle his breathing at the apparent suddenness.

Hope reached in over him to press the release latch of his seat belt buckle, the scent of her hair abruptly filling his nose with spring and verdance and budding flowers. “Come on, feathers,” she murmured, and stroked a hand through his hair. “Let’s get you upstairs and into bed.”

“I’m not a child,” he complained, though he didn’t try to stop her from helping him out of the car, slipping the keys into his jacket pocket as she tucked an arm around his waist. “I’m actually very old.”

“So are the hills,” Hope replied sweetly, and manhandled him up the path leading to his front door. “And they fall right the fuck apart without some help to keep them in one piece.”

“I hate you,” he said sincerely, as she opened the door for them both. “So very much.”

“I know,” she said, and stripped his coat off him, hanging it on its customary hook. “You need help with your shoes, or are you good from here?”

He bit back his kneejerk instinctual response — that he was just fine by himself, thank you very much — and actually let himself consider the question, factoring in the stairs, the shower, his empty stomach, and sighed. “I could use a cup of tea and a sandwich,” he admitted, grudgingly, and tried not to roll his eyes when Hope bent to untie his shoes.

“I know where the kitchen is,” she said, when she straightened again, and actually attempted to loosen his tie for him before he batted at her hands, knocking them away. “You go get a shower, get changed, and I’ll feed you when you’re done.”

“Yes mom,” he grumbled, and shuffled towards the stairs, working his tie out of its knot and unbuttoning his dress shirt, like a big boy. He debated whether or not to let his clothing fall wherever he happened to be when shedding it, but decided against that, at least until he was in the private suite he shared with Jules. The last time he’d left laundry in public, he’d been lucky to find the scent-drunk wolf rolling around in it before Jules had.

To say his mate was possessive and territorial at times was hilariously understating it. He’d mellowed out some in recent years, but Rafe still did his best to reduce opportunities for the feral wolf king of old to raise his hackles anew.

He stuffed his shed clothes into the basket just outside the en suite bathroom, and scrubbed his hands tiredly through his hair as he padded naked towards the decadently multi-head shower enclosure. He turned the water as hot as it could go, waited the perfunctory minute for the spray to warm up, and stepped in, groaning loudly in sheer delight as those decadent heads angled perfectly to hit his back in all its sorest spots obligingly began pounding the knots out of his shoulders and spine.

He leaned against the tiled wall of the enclosure, eyes closed and mind blessedly blank of all thoughts but enjoyment of his day finally washing down the drain under his feet. Only when he felt his skin start to prune did he reach for the shower gel and his favorite shampoo, and finish the process of feeling like a person again.

With his hair still damp but smelling delightfully like cucumber and pear, he dragged one of Jules’ worn long-sleeve shirts out of a drawer and hauled sweatpants over his hips. Absently, he pulled the hem of the shirt to his nose, inhaling the soft, faded scent of his mate embedded in the cotton, and made his way back downstairs before the energy the shower had refilled wore off.

Hope should have looked utterly ridiculous, slathering peanut butter on bread, in her mint blue Vince Camuto off-shoulder dress and strappy teal Jimmy Choos, especially with Rafe’s own Caution: Cook will be hot frilly apron tied neatly around her neck and waist, but one of the more irritating things Rafe had discovered about the fae during his long partnership with her was that a fairy could make anything work for them. Instead of looking like a crayon factory fire, she looked somehow elegant and cultured.

Rafe slid grudgingly onto a stool across the floating island where Hope was doing something ungodly with dill pickles and peanut butter, and he eyed the abomination taking shape on the plate he sincerely hoped was not his. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s good, is what it is,” Hope replied serenely, over the distinctive sound as she screwed the lid back onto the pickle jar, licked peanut butter off her thumb, and nudged the plate towards him. “It’s crunchy, which you like, and smooth, which you try to be,” she added, turning to fetch a cup and a teabag, and adding hot water from the recently-boiled kettle. “Everything a glowing body needs. Eat up.”

He prodded it gingerly, resolutely suppressing his mouth’s urge to water profusely at the oddly enticing scents rose to tickle his nose. “There are easier ways to get my half of our practice without poisoning me.”

She set the cup down in front of him and sighed dramatically, hands going behind her back to untie the apron. “Sometimes I miss the old days,” she lamented. “If this were my kingdom, I could have you beheaded for impertinence.”

“If this were my kingdom,” Rafe replied sweetly, girding his loins and picking one of the neat quarters off the plate. “Oh wait, it is my kingdom. Lucky for you we stopped beheading people ages ago.”

Hope smiled, reached across the island and ruffled his hair. “Eat your fucking sandwich, feathers.”

He leaned into her hand, eyes drifting closed, and felt only a minor pang of loss when she pulled her hand gently back and sat across from him with her own cup of tea. “Thanks, Hope,” he said, and gingerly nibbled on a corner. Once his mouth had recovered from the assault of taste and flavors, he made a noise of deep enjoyment and wolfed the rest of it down, groaning in delight the whole time.

“Told you,” Hope murmured, smiling smugly, and sipped her tea. “Want another?”

“Fuck yes,” he said, heartfelt, and held his plate out for more. “Please and thank you.”

She made him two this time, while he gulped his tea only barely mindful of its temperature, and one for herself. As she settled back into place, she eyed him, the smile fading. “Do you want to talk about tonight, Rafe?” she asked quietly, a hand going across the island counter to rest cool fingertips across his wrist. “I understand if you don’t, but…”

“No,” Rafe said, turning his hand under hers so he could link their fingers. “No, I don’t want to, but that just means I should.” He scrubbed his face tiredly and ate another quarter sandwich. “I’m going to replay it until I figure out what I missed. Ron’s always ideated suicide, but I never thought he’d—” His throat closed and he swallowed painfully, squeezing his eyes shut.

“I reviewed his session tape before I came to pick you up,” Hope said, in the silence that surrounded them, and her hand squeezed his reassuringly. “I wouldn’t have thought he would either. And maybe he didn’t think he would, until he did. Even being able to read minds doesn’t make us perfect therapists, Rafe. You know that.”

“I know,” he said, dipping his head and inhaling the scent of Jules from the hem of his shirt again, wishing fruitlessly he could have the real thing tonight instead of a phantom stand-in. “I know. I just… I hate when I have to sign someone into a psych hold against their wishes. I … I just really fucking hate it.”

“I know,” Hope said soothingly, her other hand coming to cover their linked fingers. “But sometimes, it’s part of the job.” A delicate pause, long enough for him to flick his eyes up to meet hers. “Do you want me to take over as his therapist, Rafe?” she asked finally. “Or maybe find someone else for him going forward?”

Rafe’s mouth opened, shut, opened again, and closed with a sigh. “Might be for the best,” he said wryly, shoved the final quarter of sandwich into his mouth, and chewed before continuing. “But I don’t want to make any decisions when I’m this tired and this emotional. Only bad things come from me doing that.”

“Smart idea,” Hope agreed, smiled gently at him, and extricated her hands from his in order to begin cleaning up the dishes. “Do you need anything else before I take off?” she asked over her shoulder as she turned to rinse their plates in the sink.

Rafe felt an uncharacteristic pang of panic at the thought of being alone tonight, a rapid two-step hammer of his heart rate abruptly picking up speed, and the subsequent surge of adrenaline that came with it, but wrestled all those responses back. “Can’t convince you to stay?” he asked, with a half-hearted and wry grin. “You could read Grimm’s fairy tales to lull me to sleep.”

Hope smirked, and her eyes flicked over his shoulder, just as he heard the sliding door open, and a chilled breeze gust against the back of his neck. “I think I’d be something of a third wheel tonight,” she murmured demurely, drying her hands and turning to face him. “Good evening, Julius. I’ll be out of your fur presently. Kindly save the porn until I’m safely out of the room?”

The deep, amused whuff of assent behind him, gruff and beloved and as familiar to him as his own name, brought tears to Rafe’s eyes. “You told Tempe I needed Jules, didn’t you?” he said, faintly accusatory but finding it hard to actually be upset with her.

She shrugged one shoulder with a pleased smile playing around the corners of her mouth. “What’s the point of having an identical sister in your husband’s pack if I can’t telepathically relay your needs to your mate?”

“I hate you,” he said around the lump in his throat, sliding off the stool at the sound of toe claws clicking across the kitchen floor, and buried his face in Jules’ ruff, fingers burrowing deep into his fur.

“Yes, I know.” He felt her bend to press a kiss to the crown of his head, and her hand touched the back of his neck, warm and bright and infused with her magic. “I bid thee farewell for the evening, Rafael. You’ve thanked me twice this night, and for that doubled insult, I leave you with a wolf to chase you, and the moon to watch over you. Try not to enjoy yourself too  much, and take tomorrow off, hm?”

Whatever pithy comment he would normally retort to an exit like that was lost in the head-swimming scent of Jules’ fur against his cheek, the solid, muscular warmth of him as he growled softly, in just that way that always weakened Rafe’s knees. Fur became skin, muscles shifted under his touch, but Jules’ growl didn’t change with him.

“I called you,” Jules said, deep and rumbling, sliding a hand into Rafe’s curls to pull his head back. “Before I left.”

Rafe’s breath caught in his lungs, low fire abruptly flaring in his groin, because Jules did not look particularly happy with him, and that meant a very good night ahead. “You did,” he croaked, and closed his eyes reflexively as Jules bent his head back further with the grip in his hair, nuzzled along the lines of his throat with hot lips and sharp teeth.

“Do you remember what you said to me?” A hand tipped with sharp claws traced delicate lines down his cheek, and Rafe bit back a whimper of desire.

“I told you I was fine,” he whispered, mouth gone dry as a bone and erection leaping to life as Jules nipped his neck, the faint scarred place where he’d sealed their bond long ago. “And I was. I was fine.”

“Angel…” Jules’s grip on him gentled, hands framing Rafe’s face and allowing him to get a proper look at his mate for the first time. His breath caught again, desire flaring higher, at the wildness in Jules’s eyes, the feeling of danger edging into the pinpricks of his clawtips against Rafe’s skin, the soft, exasperatedly fond look that was as familiar to him as his own name. “You’re not fine. You’re wearing sweatpants.”

He laughed, despite himself, buried his face in the side of Jules’ throat and clung to him as he laughed until he was crying, until his breath came ragged and gasping, until all the energy he’d managed to scrape together from his shower and meal had drained again, leaving him limp and listless in Jules’ carefully cradling embrace. “Yes,” he said, when he caught his breath again, sank a hand in Jules’ windblown hair and kissed him, light and sweet. “I’m wearing sweatpants. Clearly, a cry for help.”

“When it’s you, my prissy sweatpants-are-for-plebians mate,” Jules said wryly, “yes, it is.” His hands smoothed up Rafe’s back under the shirt, warm and broad and shivery-good, and it took superhuman effort for Rafe to not melt into a puddle right then and there. “You’re wearing my shirt,” he said, sounding faintly pleased. “You don’t do that when I’m home.”

“I don’t need to do it when you’re home,” Rafe shot back, sighed with a lopsided smile. “I have the real thing when you’re home.” Jules’ eyes darkened into true gold at that, heated and intense, and his thumb traced Rafe’s lower lip. A thrill shot up Rafe’s spine, and shivered back down. “Stop it,” he said, completely without conviction, as a smug, alpha-male grin curved Jules’ mouth. “It’s comforting. I had a shitty day.”

In one fluid motion, Jules surged to his and lifted Rafe right along with him, a move that absolutely did not make him squeak in surprise. Jules’ mouth came down on his, hard and breathstealing and possessive. You belong to me, Jules rumbled, nudging Rafe’s knees apart and wrapping his legs around his waist, as Rafe’s ass nudged up against the edge of the island, slid onto it.

Rafe broke for air, breathless and flustered, and laced his fingers together behind Jules’ head. “You’re such a fucking heathen, old wolf.”

“Infernal wolf god of the underworld,” Jules agreed, nuzzling his cheek. “You wanna talk about your shitty day?”

Rafe considered, playing with the hair at the back of Jules’ neck. “No,” he said after a moment. “Not anymore.”

Jules grinned, he could feel it curve against the pulse point under his jaw, and he jumped as Jules’ teeth scraped his skin again. “You want me to take you upstairs and tuck you into bed?”

That required no consideration whatsoever. “Abso-fucking-lutely,” he said, locking his ankles together and finding a grin of his own curving his mouth. “Bonus points if we actually make it to the bed itself this time.”

---

They did not quite make it to the bed.

Rafe’s sweatpants lay in ribbons somewhere on the stairs leading up to their private suite, and he had enough mental wherewithal to be distantly sorry for whatever wolf Jules caught rolling around in it in the morning. It was his last coherent thought for some time.

His back hit the wall just beside the double door opening into their suite, and he had just enough time to gasp and fist his hands in Jules’ hair as the sadistic bastard abruptly dropped to his knees and sucked Rafe’s cock into his mouth, quick and hard. The moan that crawled out of his throat was high and keening, hips flexing helplessly against the iron claw-tipped grip keeping him still.

“Julius!” he gasped, scrabbling for purchase against the wall, his mate’s shoulders, clutching for anything to keep him from collapsing as a long, inhuman tongue curled and flexed and teased the underside of his shaft. “Oh fuck, Julius!”

A growl rumbled out of Jules’ chest, vibrated along the entire length of his cock, and Rafe’s head cracked back against the wall as his back arched abruptly. A hoarse, sobbing noise too raw to be a cry crawled from Rafe’s throat, and his hips jerked free to thrust eagerly into Jules’ wicked mouth. Pleasure built fast, shook his legs, whistled through his keening breath, an almost overwhelming wave rushing furiously through his veins.

Jules, he pleaded brokenly, helpless and writhing, clawing for support as his orgasm swept through him. Yes, fuck yes, almost there, almost….

He howled and thrashed as Jules abruptly pulled back from him, pulled free with a wet, sucking pop, hands pinning him to the wall as he whimpered and jerked, orgasm denied at the last possible second. His eyes snapped open, his teeth ground together, and he glared absolute death at Jules’ smugly serene smile. “Not… fucking… fair,” he whined, rolling his hips in a fruitless search for friction.

“Bed first,” Jules said with a smirk and, one hand keeping his wrists together, the other scooping under his knees, he hoisted Rafe into his arms and carried him into the room, where he dumped him unceremoniously onto the bed and hauled his own shirt over his head.

Rafe, flustered and raw, froze dead at the sight of Jules chest coming bare, his mouth running dry just like it always did, watching the interplay of light and shadow over the lines of his muscles. “God, you’re fucking hot,” he heard himself say, breathless and awed, and reached to tug the button of Jules’ jeans out from its slit in the denim.

Jules’ return chuckle was deep, smug and all male, and his eyes closed in blatant pleasure as Rafe slid his jeans over his hips, and closed a hand around his length, hard and eager and already leaking. “Keep that up,” he murmured, hips rocking lightly in time with Rafe’s strokes, “and I’m gonna forget you’ve had a shitty day and just fuck you until you can’t remember anyone’s name but mine.”

“Seems like as good a way as any to forget about my shitty day,” Rafe replied, and leaned in to brush a kiss to the very tip of him, delighted with the shuddery spasm and muffled grunt that resulted. “You’ll have to tell me which name, though, old wolf. You’ve had so many throughout the years.”

Something primal, ancient and untamed flashed through his eyes, and his grin was full of dark promise and sharp fangs as he crawled with inhuman grace onto the bed, pulling Rafe under him and fumbling with the cap to the lubricant kept on his nightstand. “You know which one,” he murmured, and captured Rafe’s mouth in a brutally possessive kiss, hand tight enough on Rafe’s hip to leave bruises.

Rafe whimpered, head forced back as Jules bit at his throat, and his own nails dug into Jules’ shoulders, making breathless noises as Jules slicked him, then eased into him with surprising gentleness. “I love you, old wolf,” he whispered into Jules’ sweat-damp hair, clutching him desperately as he pulled almost all the way out again.

“That’s not my name,” Jules said gleefully, and snapped his hips forward, driving into him deep and hard, and Rafe’s cry was bitten off in a long, wordless howl as Jules fucked him fast and mercilessly, breath harsh and hot against his throat, growls savage and loud in his ear.

Every muscle whipped tight and tense, and Rafe keened through his nose, short, sharp pants as his balls tightened and his cock swelled, eyes squeezed shut as he spilled, helplessly, furiously, against the friction of their bellies in a dizzying crash of pleasure that made his head swim. “Calu,” he cried, locked his legs and arms tight around his mate, rutting against him even as the pleasure reached the point of too much.

“Rath,” Jules rasped, face buried in Rafe’s neck, and Rafe cradled him tight through his climax, whimpering and panting, and Jules’ bone-deep groan of relief and the hot spill of seed inside pulled another moan of bliss from him.

They lay together in the aftermath, a tangle of limbs and sweat-slicked skin and exhaustion. Rafe nestled against Jules, sated and exhausted, eyes drooping as the rhythmic caress of Jules’ hand up and down his back lulled him towards sleep.

A quiet, almost inaudible but clearly satisfied whuff from Jules roused him just a little, though, and he cracked open an eye to stare at him. “I didn’t want you to miss your full moon pack night,” he said softly, answering the unasked question hanging in the air from earlier. “I know how important they are to you. And to the pack.”

Jules heaved a sigh, soft and drawn-out. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re ever going to get it through your head that I love you more than I love running with my pack,” he said finally, and shifted to stroking through Rafe’s hair as Rafe laid his head on his shoulder. “You saw fit to give me a perfectly capable son who is more than qualified to fill in for my pack duties whenever I need him to.”

Rafe traced a fingertip through the hair dusting Jules’ chest, silent as he thought about how to phrase his reply. “I don’t like presuming,” he started, only to find Jules hand sliding across his mouth to shush him.

“No one comes before you and our cub, Rafael,” he said firmly, and followed it up with a brief, but no-nonsense kiss. “Order of priority negotiable. Now, go to sleep. We’ll talk more about this in the morning.”

“Such a fucking heathen beast,” Rafe grumbled, but obediently shut his eyes and this time, didn’t fight slumber as it came for him, falling asleep curled tight and safe in his mate’s arms, with the scent of home easing his dreams.

[comicreliefmorlock]

#1, #15 and #4 for the writing asks!

#1- What is your favorite punctuation mark?

After being indoctrinated into the Cult of the En-Dash, I'd have to say I really do adore it. (And I probably use it incorrectly rather often... >.>) However, I love the semicolon. Not only for the way it's being used to represent surviving suicide attempts/thoughts, but also because it's just so handy to slap an additional thought onto the first one without losing a bit of pace.

#4- What tense do you prefer and why?

My eternal agony... LOL

I default to past tense because the majority of what I've read has been written in it. And I'm the "writer" who learned by reading a lot. No, seriously. I read a lOT. (Now if I could just REMEMBER everything I read...) And so the writing style I have has been slapped together after reading thousands (yes, literally) of books, most of which have been written in past tense.

I do love the immediacy of present tense; I just don't manage it without concentrated effort. So when I'm trying to just GET THE DAMN STORY DOWN, I'll swing right back to past tense.

#15- Do you let people read your rough drafts?

:D You're assuming I have final drafts.

All of my postings on Wattpad are literally first drafts. I wrote them and posted them up without batting an eyelash because hiding them away until they're "polished" means they wouldn't see the light of day for a decade or more.

The writing is rough, the pacing is jerky and things may not always make sense, but when I write, I'm only focused on telling the story as thoroughly as I can. And the base skeleton of the story isn't going to change, even when the rest is polished up. So if people like the story well enough to read through a rough draft, I feel much more confident about asking them to read it again when it's been prettied up.

[millicentthecat]

Why The Last Jedi is a Reactionary Propaganda Film

I've been waiting for my thoughts to coalesce (and for the "spoiler" window to pass) to make a unifying analysis of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  This is not a position piece on whether you should or should not enjoy the movie.  It is not any kind of call to action.  It is only an analysis on how The Last Jedi works as a propaganda film.  It’s my personal interpretation based on my experience with assembling message.  This post is tagged "tlj critical" and "discourse" in hopes that will assist people in finding or blocking the content they wish to read.

To begin:   

As important as diversity in representation is, so too is balanced programming of message.  Programming message involves building value by presenting the very ideologies and mechanisms which sustain paradigms of injustice.  Will these be established as inescapable, natural, desirable, or effective?  The Last Jedi (TLJ henceforth) promotes integration with these ideologies and mechanisms.  It does not promote Resistance.

There are three central messages repeating in TLJ.  They are:

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

After The Force Awakens, my understanding of Poe Dameron's character was that he was designed as a classic rogue-individualist pilot--a hotheaded "flyboy," as it were.  This was not the fanon interpretation, which is understandable; The Force Awakens gave us a lot of poetic material to take in different directions.  I felt my interpretation was valid as it was supported by the visual dictionary (which calls Poe a rogue, I believe) and a line in The Force Awakens novelization about how some people are inherently more important than others.

In short, Poe Dameron was an individual who trusted his own instincts more than others and didn't believe in always playing nice.  In TLJ, this manifests in his relationship with a new character: Vice Admiral Holdo.  Now one of the only things we know FOR SURE about Poe Dameron is that he has no problem taking orders from women, respecting a female General, and trusting her experience.  This is demonstrated by his relationship to Leia, who he knows.  Holdo is a stranger who Poe has never met.  She is not just a woman, but an unknown woman.  EVEN SO, Poe is willing to trust her (at first) by sharing his assessment of the situation--essentially, submitting what he knows for her consideration, sharing his thoughts.  She responds to this by withholding information, reminding him of his recent demotion, and calling him names.  She responded to his  gesture of openness and respect with domination and authority.

This is well within her right, as established by both in-universe and our-universe rules of institutional hierarchy.  Poe, however, does not blindly trust authority figures OR institutional hierarchy more than his own instincts.  It's actually pretty unusual for a protagonist in this universe to do that, for reasons.

Later, General Leia reveals to both Poe and the audience that Holdo had information she was not willing to share.  She is strongly moralized as having been "right" about her plan: Poe takes his reprimand from Leia like a boy accepting a scolding.  Holdo is martyred and established as an example of strong leadership.  Her decision to withhold information from her subordinate is never highlighted (by a narrative authority or third party, such as Leia) as a mistake.  In our society, the rules of hierarchy dictate that "superiors" do not have to share what they have with "inferiors" or treat them with respect.  Those with more power are not beholden to those with less.  Poe is reprimanded for challenging that.

I was almost willing to overlook this deliberately moralized messaging as a botched attempt at a feminist moment before encountering the reviews about TLJ.  In general, there are a large number of reviews for this film which insinuate that most of the people who dislike this film are white male bigots, threatened by the presence of women. (a, b , c , d , e , f , g , h) .  This is not my experience.  The other thing many reviews point to is how Feminist this film is (as a selling point.)  It is an eerily unanimous opinion in mainstream, corporate media that Poe mistrusted Holdo because of her femininity--not her behaviors.  On social media where unpaid people are speaking, many young women are challenging this.  The shouting-down of women's opinions by accusing us of misogyny is a separate topic, but I did want to call attention to the discrepancy between the corporate media response and the social media response.  To me this is evidence of a deliberate misdirection.

Another story arc which enforces the position that we should trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy is in the reestablishment of the Jedi Order, via Luke, Yoda's Force Ghost, and, more significantly, Rey.  Now, much has been written (on this blog, and in many more prestigious place and by better known writers.  See Tom Carson's "Jedi Uber Alles," for instance) in the way of criticism of the Jedi.  The child abducting, the mind control, the over-extension of executive powers, the militarized cult status, the extermination of the Sith race, the monopolization of the Force; their crimes go on and on.  Moreover these are not just mistakes the Jedi made--crimes secondary to their nature--but rather these are the very nature of what their institution stood for.  The Jedi are not "the Light."  They are a specific religion with specific, inherently problematic practices and ideologies.

The Last Jedi is literally a movie about how it's ok that there are going to be more Jedi.

Luke's not on board with that, at first.  Master Yoda (from beyond the grave) reasserts the divine right of the Jedi to rule, as badly and indefinitely as they like.  Because even their failure is valuable.  Try try again, one supposes.  Whatever happened to, "there is no try?"  Oh yes, I remember.  The laws of the privileged do not apply to them.  

Last but not least, the character most overtly challenge institutional hierarchy in TLJ is Kylo Ren, when he kills Supreme Leader Snoke.  This move is not specifically negatively moralized (unless you read Kylo as the villain, which I prefer to) but it also very clearly does not result in a positive or progressive change for Kylo.  At the end of the film, he is miserable; his coup changed nothing.

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

"It's all a machine, brother," slurs an alcoholic loner-character known as "Don't Join," sometime after dropping the news on us that Good Guys and Bad Guys buy their weapons from the same arms dealer.  His general sense of hopelessness rubs off on Finn, who grows in his story arc from being willing to Unjoin, himself (as a deserter) to throwing himself into a suicide run for the Resistance.  What stops Finn from a kamikaze end is Rose: she saves him.  For the young viewer who agrees with DJ and sees machinery in war and capitalism, this suicide run represents the realistic (and popular trope) outcome of "joining."  War leads to death.  Capitalism leads to death.  Our generation knows this and we ask, as many before have asked, "why should I be a hero?  I'll just end up dead!"

The Last Jedi does what every great work of propaganda targeting young men does.  It gives a reason.  Why be a hero?  Because girls, that's why.

Before this pact is made, however, there needs to be a little softening-of-the-way--a little grooming.  The word "hero" has been deconstructed in the language enough that people know to associate it with self sacrifice.  We are wary of heros.  The Last Jedi substitutes the word "leader" to mean what hero once meant: a person in power whose sacrifices are gratified with moral rightness in the narrative.  This subverts any counter-programming people were able to apply towards "heroic" stories.  Leadership is presented as an inherently positive and desirable quality, linked to selflessness, sacrifice, martyrdom, and rewarded with female attention.

This same re-programming wordplay is employed in Rose Tico's call to action: "not fighting what we hate.  Saving what we love!"  Question: if the behaviors and outcome are the same, does the mental engineering matter?  Is a Rose by any other name still a Rose?

Is war still war if you call it love?

At this point I also want to call attention to the fact that there is AGAIN very little opportunity in this film where to SEE the First Order committing atrocities: abducting kids, repressing a labor uprising, etc etc.  The First Order is never called fascist (nor, if I recall, are they referred to as an actual nation.)  Their politics aren't even alluded to.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that the film implies it doesn't matter which side you join, but I think there's definitely an argument that being involves with one side or the other is lauded more highly than staying neutral.

Worth mentioning: "Girls like guys who Join" is also the message of Luke's story arc.  Both Rey and Leia wanted Luke to rejoin the arena.  Rey even expresses a willingness to get closer to Kylo--while he is acting like a Joiner.  The minute he makes it clear that he wants no part in either side of the conflict (No Jedi, No Sith, no ties to the past, etc) Rey's trust is broken.  She leaves.  Her rejection IMMEDIATELY follows his insistence on leaving tribal war in the past.  It does not correspond with any immediacy to his acts of violence, nor to his stubborn declaration that she "will be the one to turn."

A brief note.  Army enrollment messaging is a necessary and functional part of maintaining an imperial state.  The in-text discourse positions an offensive/insurgent military organization against a defensive military organization, during combat.  "Join up" is therefore an aggressively interventionist and arguably imperialist position.

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

This is one of the oldest motifs in storytelling, so when I say it's conservative I mean really, really conservative.  Traditional gender roles and traditional family values are just that: extremely traditional.  Many people find comfort in them and are extremely threatened by their breakdown.  For this reason, storytellers are authorized to hand-wave or sexualize an inordinate amount of violence toward women in order to keep paradigms of labor as gendered as possible.

First of all, there are literal feminine-coded creatures on the island of Ahch-to called "caretakers."  These aliens watch over the island and look after the hutts where Luke Skywalker has taken up residence.

Second of all, Holdo's arc with Poe and Rose's arc with Finn are full of nods to the idea that women must teach and lead men.  Men (who are inherently dogs, apparently) will speak over us, desert us, aim guns at us, and otherwise challenge us, and it is our duty to keep them in line.  This is to be expected.  Flyboys will be flyboys.

Third, it is Rey's sacred duty to prepare Luke to return to the arena of battle.  When Luke fails to step into that role, she turns to Kylo Ren.  Rey and Leia both possess Force-related powers.  Both spend most of their time directing these powers to trying to save, protect, or heal male warriors around them.  When they do fight, rather than act themselves as subjects, they punish men who objectify them inappropriately as a corrective measure.

To be fair, Admiral Holdo and Paige Tico both act directly against the enemy.  They also both have close mentor relationships with other women.  However, Paige and Holdo both die in the course of the film.

A final personal note: in my opinion, there are many ways socially problematic and coercive content offers comfort to a population where uncomfortable traditions feel like the only option.  However, this way of life is not the only option, and this media is not comforting to everyone.

[fuller-writing]

Knowledge is Power

The grainy surveillance footage was from the 7-11 across from Kalela Jones’s house. The policeman pointed at her dot sprinting towards her front door and then to the man following her, Tony Albeniz.

On the screen, Dr. Jones seemed to trip and almost topple over. She paused for a second, and then continued running. Later, Martin identified her expensive high heels that she had been so proud of lying forgotten in a snowbank. The right shoe had a broken heel, and Martin knew that while she ran from her attacker, nothing else had mattered to her except escape.

The video showed the man approaching Kalela as she frantically tried to unlock her door. At first, he only shouted and pleaded with her. Eventually, he grabbed her arm and Kalela shrieked and kicked out her leg in his direction. He jumped back and her bare foot scraped uselessly across the ice of her driveway. She redoubled her efforts to open the garage door, strange sobs escaping her throat.

“Please, Dr. Jones, just tell me. I swear, no one else will find out. You have my word,” Tony Albeniz had told the police later that he’d said that.

Kalela shoved him away and managed to lock herself inside her house. For a moment, the video surveillance seemed peaceful as Albeniz seemed to be walking away.

Inside, Kalela pulled out her cell phone and dialed 9-11.

April 2, 2020. 11:15 EST

Martin had worked with Dr. Jones since they were both in college and he had never seen her lose control like this. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, which practically vibrated with fear. If her emotion hadn’t been a huge factor in their experiment, he wouldn’t have cared. On his worse days, he might have relished in her stress.

Martin exchanged a look with Andrea, who held Dr. Jones’s right hand. For a second, they battled silently about who should comfort Dr. Jones, and in the end, he lost.

“You’re ready,” He said. Martin knew Dr. Jones would appreciate the succinctness of his compassion. As it was, she still glared coldly at him, just will less energy than usual.

“I am,” Dr. Jones agreed.

When she stood, she looked as statue-like as ever. All traces of doubt left her figure and she began placing the electrodes on her forehead and heart with admiral detachment. When she was ready, she nodded once to Martin and Andrea, before calmly striding to her execution chair.

Martin, Andrea, and the twelve assistants took their places, none of them sparing a glance at Dr. Jones. Now, she was just another practice dummy. The beats of her heart echoing through the chamber sounded no different than the simulation.

It seemed to Martin as though the team worked to the beat of Dr. Jones’s heart. On the diastole of the beat, he engaged the program. On the systole, he typed in the first command. On the diastole, the fourth in command administered the first shock. On the systole, another shock. After two more, Dr. Jones’s heart beat one last long diastole and gave out.

Without her heart to guide them, the work felt more chaotic and terrifying. The worst part was that there was nothing left to do now except wait and monitor for four full days. As the team began to turn their computers to autopilot and discuss the experiment in low voices, Andrea clapped Martin on the back. The pat felt more like she was trying to dislodge a piece of food from his throat than encouragement, but he smiled wanly at her. He doubted he would sleep for the next four days.

April 6, 2020. 11:15 EST

Life went on while Dr. Jones turned grayer. The machines kept her cells from rupturing and releasing the enzymes that would decompose her body. For all intents and purposes, Dr. Jones was dead; Her brain and heart no longer sent signals through her body. But the team kept enough of her body fighting that bringing her back would be possible, even after four days. The hardest part was maintaining her consciousness throughout the procedure.

For years, Dr. Jones and Martin had researched. Well, Martin thought ruefully, Dr. Jones had researched and Martin, a Harvard graduate, had brought her take-out. Finally, three years ago, Dr. Jones created ‘the thinker’. This machine didn’t really think, but used a tiny part of Dr. Jones brain to channel conscience streams onto its hard drive. When she woke, Dr. Jones could examine ‘the thinker’s’ conscience as though it were her own.

Martin wasn’t worried about waking Dr. Jones. Her body was in optimal condition for resurrection. All day they had worked slowly to revive her organs and remove some waste products that had built up. Now it was as simple as restarting her heart with the defibrillators.

“Ready?” Martin whispered into the intercom.

A shock went through the body. Then another one. For ten whole minutes of terror, Martin thought it might not work. But then the assistant at station 8 announced that she was breathing. Four doctors approached Dr. Jones and their fiddling obscured her from Martin’s view.

“We have to download the memories now, before she can make true sense of the real world. Otherwise they might be tainted by her experiences now,” Andrea reminded Martin.

Martin commed to the 8th assistant as much. One of the doctors pressed the ‘eject’ button. It took only a second for Dr. Jones to process her new memories, but in that time Martin could tell something was terribly wrong. Her eyes screwed up like she might sneeze, and then she screamed and didn’t stop until her voice gave out.

August 29, 2020. 18:12 EST

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Kalela Jones, Nobel prize winner for physiology and medicine and the scientist that recently discovered the answer to humanity’s oldest question: what happens after death.”

Kalela squeezed Martin’s hand once before she stood. He didn’t start when she made gestures of affection like this anymore. This new and softer Kalela had taken some getting used to, and even more surprising was that Martin actually quite liked her when she wasn’t so stuck-up. The audience clapped politely, although they stopped quickly, too eager to hear Kalela talk.

“Thank you,” She smiled graciously, “Thank you New York City for inviting me to this incredible dinner. I must be completely forthright with you: my decision has not changed. I will not now or ever release the contents of my fifteen year investigation. I will take this secret to the grave and it will die with me. I have found the bounds of science. More than anything else, I have discovered a branch of science that should never again be investigated. There are some things that humans are not meant to know. Not yet, although you will find out eventually.

“I have discovered the power of knowledge over and over through my years, but this is the most conclusive evidence I have ever found that humans are slaves to curiosity. My team and I are most guilty of this. We sought power over our curiosity. We achieved that power, and now I must wield it wisely. There is no higher responsibility in my life than ensuring that no one else ever repeats this experiment or endeavors to understand death again. If you looked at the ramifications of this knowledge logically, you would agree with me.

Religion would become extinct or else transmogrify into a horrible cult-like imitation. Without the fear of the unknown, murder, war, and suicide would increase. Everything that once was beautiful because of the immediacy of death will dim: music, art, laughter, family. No amount of grandieur or money’s worth the collapse of society.

That being said, my various patents and notes on the subject have been destroyed. Anyone wishing to know the answer will simply have to wait, or waste years of their life recreating my inventions.”

Kalela’s voice dropped in volume and she spoke tenderly, as if to a child.

“I can tell you this. There is nothing so important as life. You’ve heard it all before, but cherish every second and especially every person. Something I’ve realized is that the thing we call power which humans crave with every fiber of their being is truly a craving for love and admiration. With love comes responsibility. A responsibility to our loved ones and to that which we love. A promise that we will not destroy each other for personal gain. A promise that we will be loved and love as many people as possible. I swear to you that if you do this, you will feel powerful.”

Kalela nodded to the silent audience. It was the first time in Martin’s memory that an audience did not clap. Some were obviously angry, while others looked thoughtful. Everyone was too absorbed in their thoughts to notice Kalela’s quiet descent from stage.

August 29, 2020. 21:47 EST

“Please don’t make me walk home alone,” Kalela said, her hand hovering over her seatbelt, her eyes pleading with Martin.

Martin glanced at the bus, where the driver looked pointedly at his watch.

“Sorry ‘Lela, I really do have to get going. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, yeah?”

Kalela looked like she wanted to storm off, and six months ago, she would have. But tonight she only smiled her forgiveness and hugged Martin with one arm. Martin watched her head of enormous hair disappear and boarded the bus again.

September 20, 2020. 14:47 EST

Later, a combination of the police, Tony Albeníz, and security footage helped Martin piece together what had happened on Kalela’s fateful walk home.

Albeníz, a desperate, sad man, had followed her all the way from the dinner in the City. Neighbors reported screaming for minutes before the first gunshot, which had shattered Kalela’s patio door, but missed her. The second bullet shattered part of her rib cage and ruptured her liver.

In her case, it didn’t matter at all that Kalala hadn’t suffered much. All Martin could think of was her horrible drawn out scream after she woke up after her experiment.

He turned the small leatherbound diary over in his hand. It was the only record Kalela hadn’t destroyed, although he didn’t understand why she hadn’t. Or why she had left it to him in her will, but Martin knew what he had to do. She was giving him the option to know information that Tony Albeniz had been willing to kill for. He supposed it was her way of saying…he didn’t know. Maybe ‘sorry’ for treating him so poorly for most of their time together. Maybe as a sign of respect to him for standing by her side for so long. Maybe. But he couldn’t help thinking that, knowing Kalela, it was probably a test. Did he trust her enough to heed her last warning?

He stuffed the book under the fold of the ridiculous dress the embalmers had stuffed her into. “I guess you really will take this secret to the grave,” he murmured. Martin thought that Kalela would have liked his attempt at humor. He took one last look at the body, so much like how he’s seen her for those four days before everything changed.

As he walked away, he remembered one more thing, “Thank you.”

[eyesaremosaics]

Hi! 😊 What type of philosophy do you like the most? Nihilism I think it's good for people to learn about, it's such a different perspective than people are used to. I like reading about existentialism. I think sometimes as a society we place too much significance on ego..

In my younger days–I would have agreed with you. I began studying philosophy extensively in my late teens and early twenties. Nihilism (Nietzsche in particular) resonated with me most at that time, as did existentialism. Existentialism is still prominent in my thoughts and ideology to this day. When I was seventeen, I experienced my first existential crisis. This whole idea that we are alone with no excuses, matched with the meaninglessness associated with the adopted nihilism, led me into a suicidal depression.

For those of you who are not familiar with philosophic terminology, nihilism is the rejection of all religious and moral principles. Essentially it is the belief that life is inherently meaningless. Existentialism is a philosophical theory that emphasizes the existence of the individual as a free/responsible agent determining their own development through acts of will. Basically you are solely responsible for creating your own reality.

My whole life has been a battle between spirituality and atheism. My experiences have led me to believe there is more to reality than what we are consciously or visually aware of. However, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong. That my beliefs are a trick of the light, or experiential illusions. There is always the possibility of blackness. Sometimes that is a source of comfort, at other times–terror.

Anyone who has read this blog consistently will see the shades of this in my writing. As I age, my beliefs have shifted. It’s important to study all approaches to philosophy. My feeling about any form of belief, is to study it objectively. Wether that is all the world religions, or different branches of philosophy, psychology etc.–As the majority of these ideas are not founded in fact, you can absorb all the information, and whatever resonates with you should become a part of your personalized belief system.

Idealism (starting with Plato in Ancient Greece), has resonated with me more recently. Idealism is a philosophic approach that centers around the notion that ideas are the only true reality, and ultimately–the only thing worth knowing. In a search for truth, beauty, and justice that is enduring and everlasting, the focus is on conscious reasoning in the mind.

Plato,who was the father of Idealism, detailed this view about 400 years BC, in his famous book, The Republic. Plato believed that there are two worlds. The first is the spiritual or mental world, which is eternal, permanent, orderly, regular, and universal. There is also the world of appearance, the world experienced through sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound, that is changing, imperfect, and disorderly. This division is often referred to as the duality of mind and body. Reacting against what he perceived as too much of a focus on the immediacy of the physical and sensory world, Plato described a utopian society in which “education to body and soul all the beauty and perfection of which they are capable” as an ideal. In his allegory of the cave, the shadows of the sensory world must be overcome with the light of reason or universal truth. To understand truth, one must pursue knowledge and identify with the Absolute Mind. Plato also believed that the soul is fully formed prior to birth and is perfect and at one with the Universal Being. The birth process checks this perfection, so education requires bringing latent ideas (fully formed concepts) to consciousness.In idealism, the aim of education is to discover and develop each individual’s abilities and full moral excellence in order to better serve society. The curricular emphasis is subject matter of mind: literature, history, philosophy, and religion. Teaching methods focus on handling ideas through lecture, discussion, and Socratic dialogue (a method of teaching that uses questioning to help students discover and clarify knowledge). Introspection, intuition, insight, and whole-part logic are used to bring to consciousness the forms or concepts which are latent in the mind. Character is developed through imitating examples and heroes for example.

Metaphysics has been a large portion of my belief system as well. The term metaphysics literally means “beyond the physical.” This area of philosophy focuses on the nature of reality. Metaphysics attempts to find unity across the domains of experience and thought.

Thank you for asking, it was invigorating to answer this question.

[filmstruck]

The Pied Piper of Saipan: HELL TO ETERNITY (’60) by R. Emmet Sweeney

In June of 1944 Private Guy Gabaldon was a member of the Second Marine Division unit that invaded Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands. An eighteen-year-old Mexican-American kid from East Lost Angeles, he utilized the smattering of Japanese he learned from his community upbringing to single-handedly capture over 1,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians alive, during a period when many were opting for suicide. His remarkable story was brought to the screen by director Phil Karlson and Allied Artists in 1960 with HELL TO ETERNITY, now streaming on FilmStruck.

Gabaldon earned a Silver Star for his actions, gaining the nickname “The Pied Piper of Saipan.” It was an appearance on THIS IS YOUR LIFE (’55-’03) in 1957, however, that provided him with national renown. The episode made the Marines re-evaluate his honors – and his award was upgraded to a Navy Cross (one level below the Medal of Honor). It also led Gramercy Pictures to purchase the screen rights to Gabaldon’s life story. The rights eventually changed hands, landing as a co-production between Atlantic Pictures and Allied Artists.

In the story by Gil Doud and the script by Ted Sherdeman and Walter Roeber Schmidt, Gil Gabaldon’s life is followed from his orphaned youth to his improbable success on the battlefield – though his ethnicity is erased by the casting of Jeffrey Hunter in the role. Gil is shown losing his parents at a young age, and being taken in by a loving Japanese foster family led by their matriarch Mother Une (Tsuru Aoki). When Pearl Harbor is attacked, the Unes are ostracized, attacked, and eventually sent to an internment camp – while their sons go to war (including George Takei in an early role). After initially being declined admission due to a punctured eardrum, his knowledge of Japanese gets Gil into the service.

Once deployed, he pals around with Sgt. Bill Hazen (David Janssen) and Cpl. Pete Lewis (pop crooner Vic Damone), including a raucously attended striptease sequence in Hawaii which was heavily cut down by censors. But when the invasion of Saipan begins, Karlson pulls back to display the massive scale of the operation, and the brutal human cost. One of the more haunting images is a close-up of a soldier trying to snap his finger, only to fail as rivulets of blood run down his hand. Abstracted from the rest of his body, it is an image of utter dehumanization. Gil has to deal with the cognitive dissonance of going to war against the homeland of the people who raised him, causing him to freeze with terror at first landing. After American victory is assured, Japanese soldiers run suicide missions, while their families commit suicide – jumping off of high cliffs to the shores below.

Through his rudimentary command of the language, Gil is able to convince small pockets of Japanese soldiers to surrender, and then one afternoon convinces a General (played by silent star Sessue Hayakawa) to give up his weapons peacefully, thereby capturing 800 people by himself. Phil Karlson best features feel like documentaries – THE PHENIX CITY STORY (’55, also streaming on FilmStruck) has the immediacy of verité. Karlson told Todd McCarthy and Charles McGrath in Kings of the Bs about his reliance on realism: 

Every successful picture I’ve made has been based on fact. Sure, plenty of fiction enters into it, but the basic idea is true - . The last picture that I did for Allied Artists, thirteen years ago, was Hell to Eternity, and Hell to Eternity is one of the most important pictures that I may ever make because it was the true story of the Nisei, what happened in this country. But Allied Artists, even at that point, looked at it as a great war story that you could make for a price. They had no idea what I was doing. But when the picture was so successful, they started to see things in it they had never seen before. Forget the fact that I used five thousand Japanese and five thousand Marines that we were getting for nothing. I shot it in Okinawa in Japan for under $800,000. I defy any company to make that picture for $5,000,000 today.

Karlson may have been inspired by the “basic story” of Gabaldon’s life, but many liberties were taken, beginning with the casting of Jeffrey Hunter. Hunter was a strapping 6’ tall white guy, while Gabaldon was a 5’4” Mexican-American. Undoubtedly casting Hunter was a prerequisite for getting funding, but it fundamentally alters the arc of the story. Gabaldon is an underdog of the underclass, having to overcome poverty and racism to earn his spot in American history. The presence of Hunter erases that underdog narrative – he is built like a linebacker and looks like Tom Brady.

However, it is not that aspect of the story that Karlson is so proud of – it is his depiction of the internment of Gabaldon’s Japanese foster family, which is forcefully depicted as an inhuman and counterproductive act. Hunter, rather bland even on the battlefield, emerges with his most impassioned dialogues at this, ranting aloud at why the army isn’t rounding up the families of Germans and Italians as well. The answer is left unsaid, though it is made clear enough by the slurs thrown at one of Gil’s Japanese-American friends at a drive-in.

By all accounts HELL TO ETERNITY was a box office smash, and Karlson is rightfully proud to have included such progressive content into a chart topper. Seen today, it is both moving and ungainly, the intimacy of its early sections giving way to cliché and overlong drunken sailor routines, only to regain its footing with the nearly wordless battle sequences. The movie works best for me in its early sections, with Gil getting to know the Une family, and both assimilating in the other’s direction. Tsuru Aoki gives a heartbreaking performance as Mother Une, trying to give a stiff upper lip as she abandons the home she built to be imprisoned while her children go off to die in a war fighting on behalf of her wardens.

[stringserver25-blog]

Professor Brad Evans published in the LA Review of Books

“You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I’m the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm.” — Mark Rothko

 As a critical theorist who works on aesthetics and who believes that the political is an art form, I am continually haunted by the relationship between violence and images. Is there anything left to say about this relationship, when the triumph of the spectacle seemingly denies any sustained reflection? While the figurative remained a dominant standard for representation until the post-war period, the nihilism of the times brought the very figure of the human as an aesthetic form into question. Humanity had to confront the violence of its own humanism. As Barnett Newman noted, “After the monstrosity of the war, what do we do? What is there to paint? We have to start all over again.” The emergence of abstract expressionism became synonymous with those artists who were so disillusioned by the violence of the human condition, consecrated and mobilized by aesthetic ideas of its perfectibility, they turned away from the figurative to ask still unanswered questions about what it means to be human. While disavowing any formal association with any movement, no artists better captured the early power of this aesthetic turn than Mark Rothko, whose immersive mindscapes are less about the Dante inspired journey into the flesh of the earth, than opening up wounds in time.

Rothko’s life (as is well documented) was full of personal tragedy, culminating in his suicide in 1970. It is perhaps no coincidence he was notably inspired by the great tragic dramatists, from Aeschylus after whom a number of his paintings are named, onto Shakespeare and Nietzsche. In an essay titled “Whenever one begins to speculate,” Rothko draws attention to the importance of Nietzsche and his The Birth of Tragedy. As he explained, “It left an indelible impression on my mind and has forever coloured the syntax of my own reflections in questions of the art. And if it be asked why an essay which deals with Greek tragedy should play such a large part in a painter’s life, I can only say that the basic concerns for life are no different from the artist, for the poet, or the musician.” Such concerns for Rothko were the complete opposite of being “academic” and studiously painting whatever with technical mastery: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.”

During a recent visit to the TATE modern, I spent most of the occasion in the Rothko room in the privileged company of an abstract artist. Featuring a series of nine large murals, the viewer is reminded by the curatorial instruction of the artists intention who attempted to do what Michelangelo managed at the Laurentian Library in Florence, which for the Rothko “achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after — he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.” One of the lesser populated rooms at the time (Rothko in fact shows the real limits and failures of the modern gallery, horded with tourists passing each exhibit, looking without seeing, having to get through to witness everything with no time to reflect), the dimly lit space, which hosts these large and yet very intimate portraits, creates an immersive experience full of tragedy, terror, violence and yet optimism. Confronted by these large blocks of red, black and maroon colours, in the tranquillity of this setting, slowly you are unsure whether you are entering into the scene or whether the canvas is surrounding you as the active witness or unassuming accomplice to their drama. Being open to this immersive experience, the obscurities of his multiple layers begin to appear and envelope, though not as paint applied onto canvas, but rather as if the colours themselves are emerging from behind the frame. Rothko manages to give depth and perspective, while turning these flat and fixed installations into something truly dynamic in all their tensions. Rothko in fact not only takes us on a journey into the intimate depths of the psychic life of power, he allows you to glimpse at the void as you enter into a different relationship that is lost between space and time.

The brilliance of Rothko is to show how the abstract is not “outer-worldly.” On the contrary it is to take a journey into the intimate depths of human existence. Art was, as he indicated, “an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.” This has always been the fundamental mistake those who critique the abstract in thought also continue to make in their assumptions. Of course, to ask questions regarding the emotional and sensorial qualities of humanity does require alternative conceptual insight and the formation of new grammatical interventions. The scientist armed with their surgical tools is fully capable of dissecting a body, telling you how it functions, but never truly how it feels. And we can often remember how the feeling strikes us, much more than technical procedure, which is really irrelevant to our lived and shared experience. Thus as Rothko shows, to say the abstract is esoteric is born of the greatest ignorance, set in place by all too reductive regimes of truth. Rothko paints a battlefield of the soul, where the intimate is expelled for all to see, where the beauty and pain are revealed as part of all that we are emotionally, politically and philosophically, and where the greater task we confront is to face the obscure beasts that dwell within all our bodies. As the artist himself explained: “it was not that the figure had been removed… but the symbols for the figure. These new shapes say… what the figures said.”

Rothko asks how the eyes perceive, in the radiating darkness of color, the unknown depths of the void. While from a distance, the portraits simply look like linear boxes neatly mapped out, upon closer inspection they appear more like indeterminable gates whose lines are far from limiting or fixed into place. You can imagine their points of entry disappearing at any given moment. The lines Rothko paints flow through the time of the composition. He knows the shadows of emptiness, the temporality of the exhausting gradient to possible nothingness. That the black may swallow up the red any moment, this is the impression; and yet nothing is determined, for in changing depths of the emotional field, filled with unknowable possibility, everything returns. Rothko paints the passion of wound. His canvases bear witness to the scar that is never healed, like the future life of a ghost witnessing its own demise, but yet to be destroyed. He knows the layers, the depths of pain, and the blood that seeps out despite the attempt to mask the violence. Rothko paints the history of humanity, its passion and pain, the slow unfolding of time, life broken apart through the continuous movements of its devastating contradictions. He demands intensive reflection, to have the time to feel every emotion, to short circuit the immediacy of sensation, to be able to feel anew beyond the frustrations of representational schematics and the demands for immediate communication and truth. These portraits are far from static; they are a whirlwind in time, which in the slowness of witnessing the slow re and de composition of color intensifies everything. Rothko is burning. And his flames light a passage into the void for all to enter.

The layering of Rothko’s compositions is truly astounding, and terrifying as a result. What he effectively achieves is to bring light to the disappeared pigmentations of existence. Of course, Rothko’s work is haunted by a silence. There is no other way to engage with their presence. And what lies beneath does threaten to vanish at any given moment as time passes over their almost invisible semblances. Though it’s sometimes difficult to tell if something is emerging or fading away. It’s all a matter of perception. And it is a question of bringing things into light. Still what remains is precisely everything. The layers of history appear in the faintest of defiant specks. There is no nihilistic triumph or victory march into the realm of pure denial. Unlike Goya, Rothko doesn’t surrender or willingly give over to the violence the power of his colours. What is abstract defeats the abstention! And yet still there is no lasting comfort, for the terror of Rothko behind the open terrors of the wound is to confront the simplicity of disappearance as it appears in all its visible manifestations. Yet while nothing is certain, such simplicity on the part of the artist should not be confused for the mediocre. It takes a sophisticated mastery to achieve a visual idea that looking at what remains possible can confronts the notion that things can simply vanish. That history overlays and seeps out, reveals as much as it denies. Such can only be achieved with attention to the historic process.

Rothko shows how the artist is not merely someone who documents history. His work is a form of transgressive witnessing, in which the viewer is accompanied into the void of humanity by the obscure presence of many other poets from history. Nietzsche seemed to fear the abyss insomuch as it was a journey one undertook in solitude and from which one could return truly scarred by the most monstrous disfigurements. Unlike Dante, it is true that Rothko’s gates require you to enter alone. Virgil is not there to hold your hand. The passage into the non-place demands the intensity of solitary reflection. But in the absence of the figurative, the solitude quickly evaporates as this opening or wound in time allows you to both connect with the intimacy of a shared existence and feel the force of those colours, which paint the imagination. But again, unlike Dante, the return doesn’t guarantee paradise. As I left the room I returned back into the adjacent space, which housed Claude Monet’s “Water lilies.” I couldn’t help but feel this was the most violent image I had ever seen — or that every image has the potential to be truly violent if we give to it a certain narrative and eviscerate the human.

 So what can we take from Rothko in terms of rethinking the ongoing struggle against the forces of nihilism? The artist asks, as I chose to hear, two very clear questions: What does it mean to disappear a body, a memory or an idea? And why is art so important in affirming our humanity is response to the real force that threatens our existence – the nihilism of the void? Disappearance as Rothko shows is precisely the evisceration of the creative act. It is the denial of a life and a surrendering to violence such that what really disappears is the idea and vision that the world can be different. While it is tempting to see humanity here as a universal subject, total in its unity, which emerges from the realization it is some endangered form, Rothko reminds us that the opposite is true. Humanity lives and breathes through its creative expressions. It outlives the suffocations and forced disappearances, which can either occur through forced complicity or outright annihilation.

Rothko thus provides us with the aesthetic opening through which the world’s beauty and pain can be rethought. His work is the lightning storm that may just be capable of destroying those alters of sacrifice, if only we are truly able to resurrect what remains yet to be discovered about the abstract in thought. Rothko’s call as we might chose to listen is for a timeless poetic reverie — an all too human connection to the ineffable, which recognizing the violence and confronting the intolerable at least asks whether a different order for thinking the meaning of existence is possible. This demands a rethinking of the political imagination and its images of thought. Art as Rothko shows, has an eternal future in the affirmation of its expression. When you give yourself the task of painting with whatever grammatical tools the pain of humanity, he reminds us that you are tracing invisible wounds. Not that the canvas is you as a pure reflection of the world or that you are the canvas like some authentic representational piece in the human jigsaw. There is no canvas as such, only a marking on a surface revealing the wounds of time.

Rothko shows us what was invisible now appears in the lines and movements, the depth of colour not merely representative, but a deep field of sensation which opens onto the abyss of despair. This forces us to give over to an uncomfortable concession. We need to recognize that the violence is also immersive, for it allows no separation between its past and future. But this is not to be defeated. Neither is it to confront violence with a purer “non-violent violence” of whatever critical persuasion. Such orientations are after-all merely a resurrection of the sacrificial by another more considered name. It demands instead a willingness to confront the intolerable depths of human suffering to steer history in a different direction. This cannot be achieved in denial or through absolution. The pain of humanity needs to be felt. This is why the transgressive witness must take that leap into the void. There is no alternative. But what does it mean to truly feel the beauty and pain of all the worlds obscure beasts? How do we even begin to try and find tenderness in its savagery, while being alert to the brutalities of devastating angelic disfigurements? What is the angelic and the bestial — of heaven and hell — are after all of this life, this world. Obscured yet all too real, their ghostly presence fills the void, shape shifting yet appearing with uncertain clarity, from a time within time. But still the unsettling questions continue to appear: Does anybody really have the courage to go there? Who dares to venture into this non-place? And how might we return anew, without being defeated by the pessimism of what is witnessed and confronting there and after? We know that very few send back postcards from the void. It is more than uncertain. It is the unknown unknowns.

The politics of pessimism and the dialecticians of history are merely complicit here in the unfolding drama of a history that remains wedded to the sacrificial model. When Nietzsche says that we need art to prevent us from dying from the truth, he can be seen to be placing art in direct conflict with hope. It’s not that hope is too idealistic. Rather hope is all too pessimistic. It only finds reasons in the yet to come, forgetting the poetics of past and present. Art as Rothko testifies is the counter to such hope. It offers us a resistance in the present, drawing its energies from the past, while instigating an affirmative movement from the abstract to the real, which in the very act of creation positions itself against the pessimism of the defeated. Art thus reveals the tragedy of hope. Hope as a false promise, guided by visions of water lilies and gardens of Eden. It is the actualization of the affirmative conditions of reality that short-circuits the reductiveness of idealism, the living towards a possible future that never was except for now in its actualization. But we shouldn’t idealize ourselves here. Art can undoubtedly speak to the pessimism of humanity. It can also appear enslaved and defeated, as the motor of a history that merely objectifies and consumes the realms of all appearance. And yet even the most pessimistic of artists (worthy of the naming) evokes the pessimistic in the denial of any image of a future, which is foreclosed for all eternity. Its message continues to outlive the investiture of human denials. Art then is not the fire. It’s the air that gives rise to the dancing flame defiantly raging in the wind — the unknowable force that dissolves pessimism as it is mobilized towards the effacement of the image, towards the image yet to come in all its poetic and brutally honest abstract realism. Or to put it another way, what would it mean to do justice to thoughts, words and actions in the same way that Rothko does justice to the intimate aesthetic field of human sensations?

Header image: Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958. 

Source: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/wounds-time-need-rothko-ever/

[harpersings]

TO ESCAPE VELOCITY

A BRIEF TREATISE ON TRANSPOETICS

An escape, a freedom. To escape velocity is a phrase that dances with the aporia of being trans and using language. To escape velocity is the motion through four moments of contradiction that shall serve as the spine of this brief treatise on transpoetics:

i. SPEED WITHOUT DIRECTION / DIRECTION WITHOUT SPEED. Velocity is measured speed. If something is moving in a direction, it has velocity. This demands a centre, a point of reference with which to measure direction. Moving from A to B at 20mph. Language, poetry, works at a speed. How fast you talk, how fast a line reads. It also works towards a point. To the end. To the next word, the next letter. Downwards from the title. To escape velocity then, we must refuse speed and direction. But to refuse both is to stand still. To become a centre. To refuse both is to not talk, and fall into silence. SPEED WITHOUT DIRECTION might then be employed. To move without reference to a centre, without measurement. We move without going anywhere. We speak without a centre. We speak then, often past intelligibility, with some degree of difficulty. Everything happens so fast, and things blur. Individual details cannot be understood. You might flick your eyes when staring out of a car window and catch one still image of a hedgerow, the blooms, the stems, the stalks. But you’ve missed the next flower completely, and the hundreds after that. If you let your eye stay still, and watch the blur as a whole, you might catch greens, flashes of yellows. The flowers are here, undoubtedly, but you cannot see them. You can only look at their effect. DIRECTION WITHOUT SPEED might also be employed. To go without speed. To be with no means of being. To realise the injustices we face. To recognise and make the ethical demand to be treated right. To have healthcare, to have it immediately. To say your name, and for it to be your name, immediately. To be trans, and to not have transitioned, or to be post-transition, or to never transition. To stand still when told to move: to resist direction. To assert your pronouns, to refuse to be called a boy, or to be a boy, to act like a boy. To refuse to die, to shut up. To continue, to grow, to endure, to survive, when told you’re an impossibility, or a fancy, or a mistake. This impossible ethics, to be with no means of being, is

ii. FREEDOM HAVING NEVER ESCAPED / ESCAPE TO NO FREEDOM. It is to recognise, immediately, your freedom, your autonomy, without it never being achieved. Trans people deserve good lives. We deserve healthcare, and a freedom from aggression, from murder, from suicide, from trauma. Yet so often, our only way to achieve this is assimilation: to become part of the systems that have historically killed us. To sell queer on a t-shirt. To free words like tranny, faggot, queer, and adopt them into our our language, our own autonomy. To make pride out of violences. In this, there is FREEDOM HAVING NEVER ESCAPED. And if we do? If I do transition, go stealth, be safe, and cared for, there is always another sister with a mutilated body, and a deadname on her tombstone. She is usually black. Usually a sex worker. If given the grace of ascendency into a statistic, she is once more categorised into a cisgendered language that will then most likely mis-categorise her. If I commit suicide or if I am murdered, it is an ESCAPE TO NO FREEDOM. I cannot enjoy my life as a woman, I cannot be a woman, I cannot perform it any longer. That agency is in the hands of others: in the living world of memory, of history, of language. This is where the transpoetic embodiment of language lives. To enact a freedom beyond the grave, and to be recognised, immediately in your own terms, your own voice. It is to

iii. SAY SOMETHING WITH NO LANGUAGE / SAY NOTHING WITH LANGUAGE.

A poem that uses only numbers, a poem that cannot be read aloud. Poetry with attention to pattern, to visual detail. The trans body. Our performances, the way we walk, talk, dress, look. Crossing the street, getting home safe. To SAY SOMETHING WITH NO LANGUAGE. Our interactions with the material world, and our poetic disturbances of the linguistic world. Both come with an immediacy, and they are never silent. They are the irrefutable facts of our existence outside of the cisgendered linguistic centre. It is when you look at me: the girl with a beard. It is when you read my poetry. When you see this, when you read this, now what do you do? Do you refuse to read? You can’t. Once you’ve learnt how to read you cannot not read, there is no choice. Even the impossibilities, and the typos, and the coinage, and the numbers and the patterns: they all must be read. These impossibilities are here. I am here. I’m a typo and you’ve read me. You’ve read my name and seen my skin and heard my voice say “she/her”. These impossibilities are here even when we SAY NOTHING WITH LANGUAGE. When we make a poem that cannot be read, or understood; that celebrates its difficulty and refusal to be read - whilst still making the formal and linguistic demand to be read. When we talk amongst ourselves, in poetics, in theory, in our day-to-day. Our slang, our language. Gaff, pussy, queen, serve, real, stealth, read, shade, tea, trade, tits, trans-, fish voice, fish, sissy, femboy, dick, packer, tuck, clit, bashing, closet, coming out, girlslikeus, mother, legend, tranny, faggot, queer. These words, this language, has its own violent history. Of colonial domination: the global imposition of the supremacy of the heterosexual nuclear family. The evisceration of native gender definition, of gendered language. The impressions of Man and Wife that are the stamp of the missionary world. Of working man, of the property-less wife, of the queer child cast out of the family and into the street to die. Of straightness: the Real, the referent by which we are all measured. The capitalist beast that conquers and lives and breathes through language can only in transpoetics be fought and defied through language. We are forced to iv. USE LANGUAGE TO DESTROY ITSELF / USE DESTRUCTION TO CREATE LANGUAGE. We are told again and again we are not real. But in this, who is being told? Who is listening? The negative definitions of the post-structural space answer: we are. We, the impossible, the eviscerated, can now talk. In our violent relation to language, in merely using language, we destroy its central capacity. This allows us to then USE DESTRUCTION TO CREATE LANGUAGE. To embrace the violences of aporia, to embrace coinage, the typo, the mistake. To form our own names, to name our own forms. Transpoetics then arises alongside the tradition of reclaiming slurs, from the empty space left in the ruin of the centre, in the infinite possibilities of incomprehension, metaphor, simile, poetry. This new language, these new names, new motions of unintelligibility, are all then staged to escape the language that we use, that ensnares us, that sets itself up as centre, and then removes us violently from that. There is always something self-destructive in this. Suicide, self-harm, even the desire to change oneself beyond recognition, to pass, invisible, in the cis eye. To escape one’s own body, the site of violence we carry each and every day of our lives. A body constantly resisting the whim of the cisnorm to have the last ruling say on it: a man’s body, with a man’s name. So much has been said of poetry and artifice performing immortality, but here, transpoetics is scaled back and offers not immortality per se, but a life in itself. Writing one’s name, saying one’s name. Expressing the violence that is imbued in your body, into language - exposing that violence, finding the violence not only in your material body, but in the words you use, even in the poetry. There is no escape. And yet we write, and our names are printed, and our experiences and voices heard. We achieve so much not without violence, without destroying the language we are writing in, by destroying form, by pushing at intelligibility, by performing our autonomy in poetry. It is in so much that we write and re-write, repetition becomes a self-validating process, a performance. It impresses your autonomy, leaves your mark: your name in the stone wall. The more one repeats this message, lives it, stands by it, writes it, in the same way, in various ways; the more one becomes self-contextualizing and self-validating. The more one becomes real. The more we attest ourselves, this impossible existence outside of the centre, it the more we collapse the centre. Hence our play with form and language. A desire to destroy and break language by using it refuses the boundaries of the centre and collapses it. Language is destroyed and yet made anew. We continue to exist in language. It is impossible to escape, but with our violence we can draw attention to the originator of the violence and hash our new language, our reality, into existence. Something that will linger beyond the police report, something that resists straightforward interpretation. Such a motion can be captured in the impossible and necessary desire TO ESCAPE VELOCITY.

[amdoca-blog]

diane arbus: in the beginning  

I don’t know why the gallery has used lower case lettering in its promotional material.

 Hayward Gallery, 13 February to 6 May 2019

Organised by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Curated by Jeff L Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs: with Karen Rinaldo, Collections Specialist, Photographs; Martha Deese, Senior Administrator for Exhibitions; and Emily Foss Registrar.  

Supported by Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation and Alexander Graham, with additional support from Michael G and C Jane Wilson.  (Hayward Gallery, 2019).

 This exhibition primarily features photographs made with 35mm cameras in and around New York City between 1956 to 1962.  Most of the exhibition photographs are gelatin silver prints made by Arbus.  Most are held in private collections, and in the Diane Arbus Archive at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

There is also one room displaying A Box of Ten Photographs, a project she worked on between 1969 and 1971.  These photographs, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, were printed posthumously by her assistant and student Neil Selkirk (Guggenheim, 2019).

I wondered why nine of these later works are being displayed in a separate room at an exhibition subtitled ‘in the beginning’.  Xmas Tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1962 is in the previous room.  There is no explanation why.  Were they included to show how her work changed over time?  They are already kept in London.  

There are two rooms of photographs arranged on grids of white columns, “…visitors are free to follow any path they choose as there are only beginnings – no middle and probably no end…”  (Hayward Gallery, 2019).  I found myself first walking to the back of the room, up and down ‘aisles’ in the opposite direction to other exhibition-goers, to avoid crowding around the prints and to get a better view.  Also, what does this statement mean; that her work endures?  After visiting the exhibition, I did some reading. I found this quote from a letter she sent to friends in 1957,

 “… I am full of a sense of promise, like I often have, the feeling of always being at the beginning…” (Arbus et al, 2012: 141).

I do not know if the organisers of the exhibition are alluding to this remark.  I learned that Arbus committed suicide a year after A Box of Ten, a limited portfolio of special prints, with inscribed vellums, was published (Smithsonian, s.d)

Only four sets are known to have been bought in her lifetime, “...by an elite group..” . (Hayward Gallery notice).  The notice tells us Marvin Israel designed the packaging, but does not explain who he was.  During my reading after the event I learned he was her partner; an artist and, from 1961, art director of Harper’s Bazaar which published her work during the period the Hayward exhibition mainly focusses on.

Between 1956 and 1962 Arbus stopped using a medium format Rolleiflex in favour of a 35mm Nikon (Arbus et al, 2012: 139). Unlike bulky 2 ¼ cameras which “…require the subject’s cooperation and participation…”  (Arbus et al, 2012: 59), 35 mm SLRs allow photographers to capture moments and quickly disconnect from the subject.  

Images such as:

Old Woman in hospital bed, NYC 1958

Lady in the shower, Coney Island, N.Y. 1959

Man in hat, trunks, sock and shoes, Coney Island 1960

Two girls by a brick wall, NYC 1961

raise the question in my mind about whether these people gave their consent to be photographed, or if some were staged.

In a letter to Marvin Israel she confessed that when visiting the shrine of a disinterred saint , she,

 “…got a terrible impulse to photograph her and I tremulously did which wasn’t legal so I pretended to be praying and pregnant…” (Arbus et al, 2012: 146)

In a postcard she sent to Marvin Israel in 1960 she wrote,

“…This photographing is really the business of stealing… I feel indebted to everything for having taken it or being about to…” (Arbus et al, 2012: 147)

I took some notes during my tour of the exhibition of images I found noteworthy. This image Mother Cabrini, a disinterred saint in her glass and gold casket, N.Y.C. 1960 was not among them.  I found the story behind the image more interesting.  Knowing the photograph is a furtive snap changes its meaning; the exhibition does not explain much.  I don’t remember if there was an audio guide.  How many people were there like me wa/ondering around the grid?

I did not buy the catalogue, priced at £35, but noted that Revelations was priced at £75. I thought the price was quite high.   However, I thought the reproductions were of a better quality and saw that one of the editors was her daughter. I assumed Doon Arbus would be able to share more information about her mother than any other writer.  I bought a cheaper copy online.  

On reading Revelations I found out that, up until 1958, Arbus experimented with cropping.  Photographers and art editors at the time used this technique retrospectively to reveal an image within an image.  It could,

“…impose a sense of immediacy, or of a privileged, almost private view after the fact…”  (Arbus et al, 2012:52)

Boy above a crowd NYC 1957 illustrates this idea but I do not know whether Arbus cropped it, not having seen the contact sheets.  The title does not indicate to the audience what the audience depicted are looking at.  They are looking to the left, the boy Arbus wants us to focus on is looking directly at us.

In 1956 Arbus ended her photographic partnership with her husband.  She felt her role in their commercial business was as “a glorified stylist” (Arbus et al, 2012: 139).  She joined two photography courses taught by Lisette Model (1956 and 57).  In the 1940s, Model photographed ordinary people in the streets of New York City.  

In 1971 Arbus told students in a master class,

“…In the beginning… I used to make very grainy things.  I’d be fascinated by  what the grain did because it would make a tapestry of all these little           dots…Skin would be the same as water would be the same as sky and you      would be dealing mostly in dark and light not so much in flesh and blood… It   was my teacher…who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you            are, the more general it’ll be…”  

(Arbus et al, 2012: 141)

I do not remember seeing Coney Island 1960 (Windy Group) in the exhibition.  It is in Revelations, but I am unable to locate the image online.  It shows a group of people on a windy beach; a woman is bending over away from the camera and her stripy dress is blowing in the wind. It is extremely grainy; did Arbus intend the grain to suggest a sand storm?

Towards the end of her life Arbus told her students,

“…I remember a long time ago when I first began to photograph I thought,       There are an awful lot of people in the world and it’s going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human being, everybody will recognize it…And there are certain evasions, certain        nicenesses that I think you have to get out of..”  (Arbus et al, 1992:10)

At the Hayward exhibition, I noticed that,

Kid in black face NYC, 1957 is exhibited near, Lady on a bus NYC, 1957.

Was the year-long (1955-6) Montgomery Bus Boycott in Arbus’s mind?  Around this time Arbus was trying to find photographic editorial work and took some photographs of litter for a magazine, for which she was unpaid.

 “…I followed flying newspapers…running like mad to keep up with dick tracy…” (Arbus et al, 2012: 142)

Windblown headline on a dark pavement, NYC 1956.  Most of the photographs in this exhibition are of people.  I did not understand the appeal of some of the photographs lacking them, such as those of “…psuedo places…” (Arbus et al, 2012: 163) for example, A castle in Disneyland, cal., 1962, or Rocks on heels, Disneyland, Cal., 1963, but I thought this particular print was inspiring.  

I noted a number of photographs taken inside and outside cinemas.  Several are of the screen, taken at some distance from it, from the audience’s viewpoint;

A Dominant Picture 1958

Man on screen being choked 1958

had a personal resonance.   There is also a close up, probably taken in a cinema, of a scene from the controversial film Baby Doll, 1956.

In Movie theater usher standing by the box office NYC, 1956 an usher stands by the box office in an oversized uniform.  It occurred to me, after seeing an online reproduction of this photograph away from the exhibition, that it is reminiscent of a Soviet style uniform.  Was Arbus intending to remind us of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising?

In 42nd Street Movie Theater Audience NYC 1958 Arbus’s camera is placed some distance away from the scene.  A projector beam cuts through the fug of cigarette smoke.  It is not easy to tell what people are doing; there is some blurring, perhaps there are people asleep and a couple kissing.  A print made by Neil Selkirk, her student and assistant, is valued at between $20,000 - 30,000.  I quite liked the photograph at the exhibition, but I do not think it is that extraordinary.

It seemed to me that Arbus’s intention was to make the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary.  In The Backwards Man in his hotel room, 1961 a man is standing in a standard hotel room. His head is directed to the left of the frame, his feet to the right.  He is wearing a full length clear plastic mac indoors.  Is this to draw attention to his body?  After the exhibition I learned he was a contortionist from Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus in Times Square called Joe Allen;

 “… Joe Allen is a metaphor for human destiny – walking blind into the future with an eye on the past…”  note in her appointment book (Arbus, 2012:154)

Sontag offered a suggestion as to why Arbus chose her subjects.

“…At the beginning of the sixties, the thriving Freak Show at Coney Island     was outlawed; the pressure is on to raze the Times Square turf of drag      queens and hustlers and cover it with skyscrapers.  And the inhabitants of           deviant underworlds are evicted from their restricted territories – banned as        unseemly, a public nuisance, obscene, of just unprofitable…”

(Sontag, 1973. 43-44)

There are many photographs of female drag artists in the show.  Two different interpretations of ‘woman’ can be seen in the fleshy beauty of Girl in her circus costume backstage, Palisades Park, N.J. 1960, and the haughty and fabulous Blonde female impersonator standing by a dressing table, Hempstead L.I 1959, a coded appropriation of ‘womanliness’.

In October 1959 Arbus started work on a project about aspects of New York life for Esquire magazine, photographing “…the posh to the sordid…” (typewritten letter to Robert Benton, art director of Esquire (Revelations, 2012: 333)

I made a note of the title, Woman in white fur with cigarette, Mulberry Street NYC 1958, at the time of visiting the exhibition, but did not really reflect on the photograph.  I felt pressurised by the crowd to move on.  The unnamed woman’s stance could be interpreted as expressing her annoyance at being photographed, self-confidence, or self-entitlement.  Is she scowling?  She fills the frame, and appears quite large.  The lights in the background, possibly Xmas street lights, appear to surround her head.  Are we meant to see a Valkyrie?  The location is Mulberry Street, NYC; the street name made me think of expensive handbags. Is the woman in the background, who I have only just noticed, smiling obsequiously or simply smiling?  

For me, Arbus’s titles often suggest a deadpan or sardonic humour, which I enjoy.  This title, Miss Maria Seymour dancing with Baron Theo Von Roth at the Grand Opera Ball, NYC 1959, is similar to captions of photographs in society magazines. I don’t know now why I thought this was funny; I did not make adequate notes at the exhibition because I thought I would be able to access the image online at home afterwards.  

For some of this work she obtained a Police pass (Revelations, 2012:144); Corpse with receding hairline and a toe tag, N.Y.C. 1959

Looking at photographs of Israel after the exhibition, (Revelations, 2012:145), could this photograph be an inside joke?  A notice on the wall at entrance of the Hayward states,

“…This exhibition contains images that some visitors may find upsetting and some that contain nudity.  If you require further information, please speak to an exhibition host…”

In postcards sent to Marvin Israel in January 1960 she wrote about a disturbing scene she had photographed,

“… I am not ghoulish am I? I absolutely hate to have a bad conscience, I think it is lewd…Is everyone ghoulish?  It wouldn’t anyway have been better to turn away, would it…?”  (Revelations, 2012: 145-6).

All layers of society are portrayed in the exhibition.  Among the photographs of society people are photographs of performers at the Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus in Times Square, such as Hezekiah Trambles, ‘The Jungle Creep’. The close up of ‘The Jungle Creep’ is a powerful image.  He played a ‘Wild Man of Borneo’ racist stereotype for a living.  Tramble’s face fills the frame; the photograph is blurred and grainy.  A light source catches highlights in his eyes, perhaps a button over his Adams apple, and a tooth.  How many teeth does he have?  Are their tears in his upwardly directed eyes?  His eyes appear unfocussed.  He is photographed from below; he looks monumental.

Arbus photographed various people who she described as ‘freaks’, ‘The Sensitives’ and ‘singular people’.  In 1971 she told her students,

“…Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot… There’s a quality of legend         about freaks…Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic  experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed       their test in life.  They’re aristocrats…” (Arbus et al, 1992:3).

By making us look up at Trambles’ face, did Arbus intend us to see someone deranged?  Or a Man with human dignity?  

In a notebook she wrote,

 “..If we are all freaks the task is to become as much as possible the freak we are...” (Revelations, 2012: 54) and in a postcard to Marvin Israel in 1960 she wrote,

 “..Freaks are a fairy tale for grownups.  A metaphor which bleeds…”  (Revelations, 2012: 54)

 In 1961 Arbus completed a story, “The Full Circle” which included portraits of six people including Stormé de Larverie from the Jewel Box Revue’s touring drag artist show, ‘Twenty-Five Men and a Girl’, Miss Stormé de Larverie, the Lady who appears to be a Gentleman NYC 1961.

Neither Esquire nor Harper’s Bazaar published the story with de Larverie. Esquire wanted to leave out Stormé “…due to lack of space.  Infinity, the publication of the American Society of Magazine Photographers published the story in 1962 which included de Larverie.  Was the de Larverie photograph initially excluded because it depicted a lesbian, or because editors regarded the print as being unremarkable?  The Hayward gallery offers no information about de Larverie’s historical importance.

I wasn’t sure if the exhibition was presenting Arbus as a feminist;

Barbershop interior through a glass door, NYC 1957

Blurry woman gazing up smiling, NYC 1957-8

Mood meter machine, NYC 1957  

In the barbershop interior we can see men looking at a woman taking photographs in the street at night.  Their various expressions include puzzlement, amusement and incredulity.  The presence of the woman photographer is only suggested by her reflection in the glass. I am that woman now looking from the outside in.  Am I obliged to become involved with what I photograph?

Of the Box of Ten photographs, one of my favourites is,  

Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning NJ 1963

I see this as a cosy and affectionate. Soft sunlight filters through the net curtains; it is a domestic scene with a twist.

Arbus described her experience of taking photographs in nudist camps in 1971, where she was required to take photographs naked,

“…You may think you’re not (a nudist) but you are…” (Arbus et al, 1992: 4-5)

As a suburban, semi-educated, left-leaning liberal standing in a contemporary Western art gallery, the wall notice warning about nudity surprised me a bit; I wasn’t concerned by the nudity displayed within this context.

Neil Selkirk, who printed the Box of Ten, believed Arbus’s prints look different from other photographers’.  She did no dodging or burning,

“…If she ever had the urge or the knowledge to make the print beautiful in a conventional sense, she resisted it. The unique quality of Diane’s prints seems a direct response to what is required if one is extremely curious and utterly dispassionate...” (Revelations, 2012: 275)

He thought she had intended to make the final image look like snapshots or newspaper photographs.   To me, the 35 mm photographs in the exhibition generally look like snapshots; the Box of Ten artworks look like beautiful parodies of photographs specific to glossy magazine features.  Arbus’ photographs could be seen as diverting, rather like a day out at an art gallery  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arbus, D (edited by Arbus, Doon, Israel, M) (1992) Diane Arbus, London, Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.

 Arbus, Diane, Arbus Doon, Phillips; S, Sussmann E, Selkirk N,  J L Rosenheim (2012) Revelations: Diane Arbus, Munich, Schirmer/Mosel

Guggenheim, K (2019) Diane Arbus: An interview with Jeff L. Rosenheim and Karan Rinaldo.  At: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/diane-arbus-interview-jeff-rosenheim-karan-rinaldo-hayward-gallery  (Accessed on 24 March 2019)

Hayward Gallery (2019) Hayward Gallery Exhibition Guide, London, Hayward Gallery

Metropolitan Museum of Art (2019) diane arbus in the beginning [online] At https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/diane-arbus (Accessed on 30 March 2019)

Smithsonian American Art Museum (s.d)  A box of ten photographs [online press release] At: https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.saam.media/files/documents/2018-04/wall%20text.pdf  (Accessed on 30 March 2019).  

Sontag S (1973) ‘America seen through photographs, darkly’ in On Photography (1979) London, Penguin Books Ltd

[travelworldnetwork]

By Eliza Apperly

29 March 2019

At the end of a quiet, suburban cul-de-sac in north-eastern Berlin, Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer quickly ushers me into his garage. He casts a watchful glance down the road, as if to check I’ve come here alone.

“I’d ask you not to mention the precise location,” he said. “The neighbours all know what I do, but I don’t want any outside trouble.”

Inside, the garage smells of fresh cement, with lingering wafts of strong coffee and cigarettes. There’s a back door open onto a garden, letting in a wash of late-afternoon sun. A large-scale map of Germany is pinned to the far wall. In the corner, there’s a simple workbench, where Friedrichs-Friedländer has left a hammer, a set of metal stamps, and a sheet of paper bearing a series of names, dates and the word ‘Auschwitz’.

For the last 14 years, Friedrichs-Friedländer has hand-engraved individual Holocaust fates onto small commemorative plaques called Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’. Each plaque is a 10cm brass square affixed on top of a cuboid concrete block that’s installed into the pavement directly before a Holocaust victim’s last known, voluntary residence.

View image of Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’, are commemorative plaques honouring victims of the Holocaust (Credit: Credit: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy)

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There are now more than 70,000 of these stones around the world, spanning 20 different languages. They can be found in 2,000-plus towns and cities across 24 countries, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Together, they constitute the world’s largest decentralised memorial.

For all this international reach, the Stolpersteine are highly individual in form. The project’s motto is ‘one victim, one stone’, referencing a teaching in the Talmud, the book of Jewish law, that ‘a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten’.

Each plaque’s inscription begins ‘HERE LIVED’ in the local language, followed by the individual’s name, date of birth and fate. For some, this is exile to another country. For others, it is suicide. For a few, it is liberation from a concentration camp. But for the vast majority, it is deportation and murder.

You won’t fall, but if you stumble and look, you must bow down with your head and your heart

The project began in 1992, when Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig first laid plaques in this format for Sinti and Roma victims of the Holocaust, who during that time were commonly referred to as ‘Gypsies’. He called the plaques ‘stumbling stones’ as a metaphor. “You won’t fall,” he recently told CNN. “But if you stumble and look, you must bow down with your head and your heart.”

For Demnig, the immediacy of each location – directly in front of a victim’s last known home – is critical to the memorial’s impact. “When people see the terror started in their city, their neighbourhood, maybe even in the house they are living in, it all becomes quite concrete,” he said in a recent interview with Deutsche Welle.

By 2005, the Stolpersteine project had expanded so much that Demnig could no longer both make and install each plaque. That’s when he asked Friedrichs-Friedländer to take on the production.

“I knew within five minutes we could work together,” Friedrichs-Friedländer said. “For me it is the strongest form of Holocaust memorial you can have. You bring the names back.”

View image of Each plaque is highly individual, featuring the person’s name, date of birth and fate (Credit: Credit: Adam Berry/Alamy)

Friedrichs-Friedländer is a burly, softly spoken man who moves with quiet, methodical purpose around his garage, which is not open to the public. He works alone, in silence, six days and at least 50 hours a week. As he sits down for a quick coffee break, he rubs bloodshot eyes. It is nearing 16:00, and he does not eat lunch.

“I need the blood in my brain,” he said, “not in my stomach.”

Friedrichs-Friedländer engraves each plaque by hand – stamp by stamp, letter by letter, fate after fate. Although there’s now a minimum nine-month waiting list for a Stolpersteine, he vehemently rejects mechanising the process.

“As soon as you bring in a mechanised element, it becomes anonymous,” he said.

View image of Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer engraves each plaque by hand (Credit: Credit: Aleksandra Koneva)

To date, Friedrichs-Friedländer has engraved more than 63,000 Stolpersteine in more than 20 languages. The work is regularly traumatic. His eyes water as he describes a set of 34 stones for a former Jewish orphanage in Hamburg. The children were all between one and six years old.

“With the youngsters it always hits particularly hard,” he said.

As much as the plaques serve to commemorate individual lives, the Stolpersteine also trace the malign mechanics of deportation. Multiple stones in front of the same building show how the Gestapo returned to the same house again and again, splintering neighbours and family members along the routes to Treblinka, Theresienstadt, the Riga ghetto and Kaiserwald, and Auschwitz.

“I’ve done stones for families of 20 members,” said Friedrichs-Friedländer, “all sent in different directions, deported on different days.”

But when the Stolpersteine are laid before a building, “families are reunited,” he explained, brought back together in front of the home they once shared.

View image of Since 1992, more than 70,000 Stolpersteine have been installed in 24 countries around the world (Credit: Credit: Sean O’Connor)

The Stolpersteine also foster relationships between present-day residents of a building or street. The majority of stumbling stones are researched and funded by local neighbourhood initiatives.

Dietmar Schewe, a retired school principal in Berlin, recently coordinated a set of stumbling stones with his neighbours. “It was really the first time our apartment building felt like a community” he said.

Likewise, the stumbling stones can reunite a victim’s surviving family members. Those who undertake the research required to produce a Stolpersteine must make contact with as many of the victim’s relatives as they can find – both to secure their approval and to invite them to the stone-laying ceremony.

For me it is the strongest form of Holocaust memorial you can have

Schewe welcomed 25 visitors from Israel to the Stolpersteine ceremony in front of his building.

“It was very harmonious, as well as very emotional,” he said. “We were able to show our visitors exactly which apartment their family members had lived in. It felt like a small but important encounter with the lived environment of their relatives.”

Friedrichs-Friedländer tells me of another installation ceremony in Cologne, where 34 relatives gathered from different countries around the world. “People have discovered relatives they never knew they had,” he said.

Such is the power of the Stolpersteine that a number of schools in the German-speaking world have now integrated the project into their curriculum, with students grouping together to research local Holocaust victims. It’s another important motivation for Friedrichs-Friedländer, who describes his own youth in Germany as a series of unanswered questions. “Teachers, parents… nobody wanted to tell you anything. It was as if the Third Reich never happened.”

View image of The majority of Stolpersteine are researched and funded by local neighbourhood initiatives (Credit: Credit: dpa picture alliance/Alamy)

As dusk settles outside, Friedrichs-Friedländer turns on the garage light, casting a soft glow over a pallet of finished stones ready to be delivered to districts across Berlin. Their freshly stamped inscriptions are like pristine telegrams, each bearing details of a life stolen or undone.

Soon, Friedrichs-Friedländer will lock up the garage for the night, take a walk, buy some groceries and have dinner with his family. He tries hard not to bring his work home with him, but it can be a struggle.

One must be present – one must suffer

“There are awful days when all I can do is cry,” he said. But the whole point of the Stolpersteine is their humanity – the emotional connection they require with the life and fate of each victim.

“One must be present. One must suffer,” Friedrichs-Friedländer continued. “If I ever get used to the work, if it ever becomes routine, I’ll stop.”

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[whatsonforperth]

Troll Hunting review: Ginger Gorman goes in search of the online bullies

Troll Hunting, by Ginger Gorman It worked out OK in places. Knowledge systems are now laid bare to be mined by the curious or ignored by the determined. Facts are available, and mutable, as never before. And yes, we can talk to each other, almost all the others; that in itself being perhaps the biggest cultural revolution in history. In media, the corporatised core of legacy systems was all but crushed before new titans gathered themselves and worked out how to first control then monetise a democratised chaos of information. In politics? Well, the internet and social media have probably been a disaster, delivering a suddenly immediate and accusatory polity that needed to be gamed and so came to favour the gamers, political professionals who saw a new divide in social communication between fact and feeling and realised there were probably more votes in feeling. Slowly but surely earnestness has withdrawn from the game of power, replaced by an agile, precisely targeted, sometimes even subliminal, populism. And then there was the great truth that dawned as the social media age unfolded and became ubiquitous: a lot of us were not very nice. You could do worse than ask journalist Ginger Gorman about this last bit, she's been the target of invective, threats, the vilest of fearful abuse. The worst of it was some years back, a transcontinental tsunami of bile, and rather than cower, retreating quietly from the online fray as perhaps her online assailants hoped she might she has been consumed since by a determination to track down the perpetrators of this abuse, her trolls. To know them. To understand their methods and motivation. Troll Hunting documents that rather intense, and personal, quest. It was 2010 when Gorman, then an ABC journalist in Far North Queensland, got something badly wrong. "In retrospect the conversation was remarkable because of its ordinariness." Gorman was working on a cross-media project on discrimination against LGBTI people when she interviewed Peter Truong, Mark Newton, and their five-year-old son. Their image become the frontispiece for her ABC online gender project. Gorman writes of how she'd asked an awkward question of the men on their experience of the adoption process: " I was compelled to ask, 'Do you think there was a suspicion that this must be something dodgy? There must be some paedophilic thing going on here?' Both Newton and Truong smiled at the absurdity of the idea they might somehow be suspect. 'We're just a family like any other family.' " By 2013, in the United States, Newton had been sentenced to 40 years jail, Truong for 30, for conspiring to sexually exploit a child. Gorman limped away, confronted both by her unseeing proximity to such utter evil and by a sudden, vicious and unstemmable stream of online abuse accusing her, at best, of a politically correct blindness, at worst of being complicit. She was trolled mercilessly. She wrote Troll Hunting in catharsis; an attempt to reach an understanding of how that hounding happened, who its leading perpetrators were and why those men (almost only men) act to direct such hate-filled abuse to strangers, people only visible through the intimate, yet abstract, connections of social media. Gorman would discover that she is anything but alone. She worked with the Australia Institute to survey the incidence of Australian cyber abuse. The survey found that 44 per cent of the women among its 1557 respondents had experienced some form of online harassment, same for 39 per cent of men; add it up, extrapolate, and that is maybe 9 million Australians. Abusive language is the most common 27 per cent followed by unwanted sexual messages or images 18 per cent and death threats 8 per cent. In this online jungle of hunters and hunted the most vulnerable are the vulnerable, especially if they are women. Gorman walks us through the sad case of Charlotte Dawson, whose suicide in 2012 may or may not have been facilitated by online abuse pushing her toward that outcome, much of it gathered under the hashtag #diecharlotte. The questions rattle: who would send these snippets of hate to a stranger? Is it a behaviour that was always there, in pubs and kitchens, and has simply been amplified by the immediacy and anonymity of the internet? Have we always quietly hated? Or is this a new human paradigm created by a confluence of social collapse, institutional frailty and nihilistic disenchantment; a change facilitated by digital instantaneousness, sweeping us up at a speed that is probably a little outside the capacity for calm human adjustment. The last is probably true, and as Gorman interrogates trolls, victims and experts, she brushes against those issues: the online life connected yet alone the desperate inequality economics, the gender, sexual and racial politics that are the roiling soup of modern life. The troll's intention and effect, she discovers, is to shock and disturb, to push the recipient to either distress or response. Gorman goes in search of motive, pursuing celebrity trolls such as weev and meepsheep in pursuit of some logical explanation that would make sense of online nastiness so widespread it has almost become a normalised vernacular. In a way, to ask that question is to display a view of human conversation that lacks the nihilistic absence of empathy required to comprehend the answer. Trolling, they tell her, with what feels like a shrug, just is. For LOLS.The impact of those new formulas of discourse, however, are terribly real, for both individuals and the broader culture. In this book, Gorman tugs back from broader social movements' implications to return again and again to the predatory individual, the world of the troll it's a fascination driven by her own experience, but one that does this consideration of the dark side of online conversation the disservice of a nagging narrowness. She condenses what is now the dominant pattern of social, and therefore political, communication to a serial patchwork of isolated attacks. Yet it's so much worse than that. An attack on the individual, by winged hordes of unknown, vicious haters is horrific, cruel and stultifying. It has real-world consequence. But the greater real-world consequence lies in the assiduous appropriation of this new social mood to the ends of corporate and political power. That change has been transformative, a shift fatally disruptive to public civility in its broadest sense. This is a world in which "social justice warrior" is an insult, in which "Nazi" is a casual taunt thrown in fits of moral offence. A world in which the restless diversions and extremity of a Donald Trump are political exemplars. It is possibly an unreasonable expectation of Gorman's book so settled is it in the author's own quest for some glimmer of very narrow personal understanding but a more significant accounting of the trolling world would document not just its isolated prevalence, but also its sudden normalisation. Lone tweeters still flock to torment, threaten and tease, but they are stirred cynically by figures of the established media and politics, people promoting fear, loathing and, yes, even their opposites, for their own ends. Gorman and the other individual victims of idly malignant abuse are a little lost in the trees, but the forest, the sturdy trunks of civil culture, is quickly being clear felled. That's personal. But not. Jonathan Green is the editor of Meanjin. 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