#this era will be very fun no matter what direction he goes with

[revelisms]

...yes, I fell down a tunnel of potential references in the name Perpetua instead of writing an email. shshh

cw: death mention

Perpetua, derived from Latin 'perpetuus,' means continuous, everlasting, and eternal. The name was often associated in ancient times with eternity and immortality (x)

It is most likely a reference to Saint Perpetua, a 3rd-century Christian martyr with child at the time, who wrote an account of her and other martyrs' imprisonment in Carthage in the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity prior to their execution (x)

The martyrdom of Perpetua, Felicitas, Revocatus, Saturninus and Saturus from the Menologion of Basil II (c. AD 1000)

In the above account, Perpetua notes having several visions related to her and her fellow martyrs' fates. In one, she envisions herself as a man defeating a figure in battle, interpreted as battling wild beasts and/or the Devil. A narrator then describes the events leading up to their deaths, where their throats are cut. Prior to her death, Perpetua gives birth to a baby girl (x)

The feast day of Saint Perpetua was traditionally celebrated on March 7th in the Philocalian Calendar and remains a date of commemoration/remembrance in various churches. This commonly occurs during Lent, a time of reflection for the suffering Jesus faced during his death and ressurection (x, x)

She is a patron of mothers (incl. expectant mothers), ranchers, butchers, Carthage, and Catalonia (x)

[jesuistrestriste]

The other posts before just kink shaming people. Calling people weirdos and creeps and that the authorities should be called and some how writing men squirting, "because its not biologically possible" is in the same category as well like damn have abit of whimsy

helloo !

so i guess a user who follows me, or used to follow me, is posting on their acc snippets of my work and talking about how im weird and gross (as well as some other unspecified challengers writers) bc i wrote about ‘puppy’ stuff and ‘men squirting’. they blurred out my user but my writing was directly referenced.

they basically likened the puppy play stuff to sexualizing real animals, and said that it was also creepy to write about men squirting bc it’s not ‘biologically possible’

i don’t wanna make this into a big deal, bc it’s genuinely not, but i’m responding to it to hopefully give this individual some clarification and also to defend the users who actually enjoy this type of kink content (bc i do too)

so. first of all — puppy play. i, for one, in the particular drabble they screenshotted, do not have the reader treating art like an actual dog. the reader only calls art ‘puppy’ and he is submissive. those are literally the only two things involved that are similar to puppy play. however, many people enjoy/write about other more direct aspects of puppy play, like collaring and leashing and etc, and that does NOT mean they like sexualizing real animals. it is NOT bestiality. i’m going to assume that the user in question who likened it to bestiality is not informed on what puppy play actually is/represents, and just took the concept of calling someone ‘puppy’ = sexualizing dogs and ran with it. that’s definitely not what it is, and i certainly was not writing it that way. for many, puppy play is simply about the power dynamics of it all. do i enjoy puppy play in its entirety? no, not really (i like certain bits and pieces), but i respect those who do. it also goes without saying that i do not advocate for or support the sexualization of real animals in any way shape or form ..? that’s disgusting.

— more info below the cut —

second of all — squirting. men squirting is possible, just the same as how women squirting is possible. if you don’t believe me, look it up on pornhub lol; it’s definitely possible. to my knowledge, the anatomical/bodily processes that allow someone to squirt are the exact same ones involved in. well. peeing. like. if you can pee, you have the anatomy necessary to be able to squirt. i’m mid-writing this and i can’t believe im talking in depth about what squirting is and how it works. help. but yea, is squirting = pee ? no. no, it’s not (controversial lol). but even if it was, some people are into that. no need to yuck someone else’s yum. you’re entitled to your opinion though. if you don’t enjoy it/understand it and think it’s ‘creepy’, that’s cool too ! idc—it’s your life! do what you want !

third of all — i read their post and they also talked about how it’s weird to write about puppy!stuff because some users (i don’t know if they were talking about me in this instance or just some writers on challengers tumblr in general) are writing about ‘real men’ and that these men should be ‘calling the authorities’. i know for me, im not writing about mike faist in a puppy play context. im writing about art donaldson. a fictional man. and i promise you, art donaldson will not be reading my stuff. and for that matter, neither will mike faist. that man wants nothing to do with social media, let alone tumblr (rip to his tumblr era though).

bottom line, kink shaming is not cool. it’s not fun, it’s not kind, it’s not cute, it’s not very demure.

some people use kinks as an escape from harsh aspects of their reality like past trauma, etc. or to process those traumas. that being said, you are 1000% allowed to not like something. that is your business ! but posting about someone’s work and making grotesque claims about their character and what they stand for based on smut writing is very odd. i do not appreciate it !

i am in no way trying to attack/hate on the person who made the posts, but i think it’s important to try to address stuff like this and educate those who may be confused or misinterpreting. to the user who made the posts: i hope you have a good day, and i hope this clears things up ! if you see this and want to talk more about it, my dms are open. all love.

UPDATE: i was just informed that the user in question used to write for (tw) school shooters and apparently cleared all evidence of it from their account except for some lingering tags.

i take it all back ! ! as someone who has experienced the effects of a school shooting + has been in a uni community targeted and affected by an act of gun violence, that is absolutely disgusting, and you can rot ! seek therapy ! :)

[undertheopensky]

Catch Your Breath

Whumptober Day 30: “Not much longer…”

Characters: Legend, Sky

Trigger warnings: allergies, breathing difficulty, asthma, falling

Read on Ao3!

---

A lot of people, Sky reflects, thought of allergies as kind of funny. Lots of sneezing, watery eyes, even gastrointestinal misery is just funny. People looking foolish when their bodies betray them.

As he watches Legend struggle to breathe, he thinks those people are stupid.

---

It’s not that they didn’t know Legend has an allergy.

Way back when, when the group as a group was new, and Wind asked what the white stuff Wild was adding to the stew was, they’d realised in short order the differences in their eras had real consequences. Sky and Wind can’t have any kind of dairy. Time has a nut allergy that he says was worse when he was a kid, but no one wants to risk it. Shellfish makes Four violently sick. And Legend?

Legend’s allergic to feathers.

“Okay, I know we promised not to make fun of each other for medical stuff, but feathers?” Warriors says. “That is hilarious. Are you pulling my leg?”

“Nope,” says Legend. He’s unbothered, more interested in arranging the contents of his bag to his liking. “When I visited my grandparent’s farm, I was always banned from the cucco coop and anything to do with the pigeons. Prob’ly not as bad as the Old Man’s nut allergy –” and he points a bizarrely carved little twig in Time’s direction that Sky suddenly desperately needs to see in detail – “but it’s something I’m supposed to tell the healers, so.”

“Yes, and thankyou, Legend, it’s important to know,” says Hyrule. The healer smacks Warriors when he goes to open his mouth again, and that’s pretty much the end of it.

After that, it just… doesn’t come up. The one time they visit the ranch and Legend accidentally ends up on cucco duty, he quietly switches out with Four. Otherwise, there’s just not much cause for the heroes to interact with feathered creatures. Though several of them have had experiences with marauding crows, the mischievous birds don’t really count as monsters. They’ve never come across any infected ones at least. (“Not that those bastards need to get any smarter,” Four grumbles with uncharacteristic acid in his tone.) In fact, none of the infected monster hordes they hunt down includes any feathery fiends, except as very occasional decoration. It never seems to bother him, and Legend never brings it up himself. It falls to the back of everyone’s minds.

---

Sky’s carefully cleaning dark blood from Fi when he hears Wind groan in complaint. “What, already?”

He can’t help but agree. It’s been less than five minutes since the last stalfos fell; they’re still breathing hard, still patching up scrapes and bruises and the one arrow-slice from where Wild had not quite dodged in time. And they’re already being thrown through another portal?

At least it didn’t show up right as they were bedding down this time.

One by one, they head for the portal, Sky following at the tail end of the line. It’s not on purpose. He’s just feeling it, a bit, feeling the poor sleep from the night before (ha) and the heavy weight of the humidity. Actually the thought of leaving the humidity behind is what finally drives him to step through and let the dark nothingness of the portal suck him under.

It’s always an eerie feeling. Ghostly fingers trailing over exposed skin. The cold chill of the void, so dark it doesn’t matter whether your eyes are open or closed. The adrenaline rush of falling. Wind yanking at his hair, his clothes –

No, wait, there’s no wind in the void. He’s really falling.

Sky opens his eyes to a landscape of eye-searing white touched with blue and gold. It’s dizzying, it’s blinding, it’s familiar. For a moment all he can feel is the incandescent joy of coming home.

Then he remembers eight heroes with no loftwings to catch them, and his whistle is more than a little desperate.

Flashes of colour spread out below him, bright against the clouds; Sky starts marking a path in his head, who to catch first. Wars and Time and Hyrule and Twilight, all the people without gliding items. He prays the others can hold out long enough for him to come back for them. None of them are meant for true flight, but with so many already – can Crimson even take the weight? If it came down to it, who would he leave behind –

A loftwing’s cry breaks his train of thought, and the relief would knock him over if he was standing. Crimson’s diving for him, but a pair of Skyloft knights are diving alongside, aiming for his scattered friends. He doesn’t have to catch all of them.

Sky twists on himself to face the clouds; the wind is tearing at his hair, at his sailcloth, at his blurred and watering eyes. It’s freezing, he’s not wearing as many layers after Wild’s muggy jungles, but he doesn’t have time to change. All he really needs right now is his sailcloth, not to catch but to stabilise.

Crimson’s back rises to meet him. Sky hits the saddle with stinging force and scrambles to get into position; to see over Crimson’s head and tip him back down towards his still-falling brothers. Who’s closest, who’s –

There’s a flash of red that isn’t Crimson, as Legend wrestles with his Roc’s Cape and tries to keep it from tearing free. It’s not made for this kind of use, and – he’s close. If he spirals around – Four is lighter and his cape held him longer, and Crimson can snatch him out of the sky with his talons before it gives out, and then they’re dropping through the sky after Legend when the magic in his Cape falters and fails.

Four screams. Sky can’t spare the breath or the focus to reassure him – they’re drawing even with Legend, then easing underneath, then coming out of the dive in a smooth arc that intercepts Legend’s fall at the precise moment he crosses Sky’s saddle.

Before his momentum can drag him back into open air Sky snaps an arm around Legend’s waist, as ungiving as iron. Legend helps by clinging to Crimson’s saddle. Passenger secured, Sky quickly scans the air. The last scrap of colour has just been snatched up by a third Knight, and if he squints he thinks he counts out the six of them, all safely in someone’s charge. Everyone is safe. He didn’t lose any of them.

Adrenaline and panic-sweat cooling on his skin, Sky shivers. They’d gotten almost frighteningly close to the cloud layer – Sky’s a knight, he’s used to seeing it, never mind how often he’s deliberately dropped through it – so it takes a few heavy wingbeats for Crimson to steer their trajectory back upward. It’s slow going. It gives him time to sit back, to steady his breathing, to realise just how fast his heart was beating and let the grey haze at the edges of his vision fade away.

Legend coughs. Then coughs again.

Sky frowns. There’s a thin whistle to the vet’s breathing that the wind had disguised. “Legend, you okay?” he asks, just as the veteran doubles over into a real coughing fit.

He sounds awful. He hadn’t taken any real blows in the fight, he shouldn’t be struggling to breathe like this. Had he been hiding an illness? After the fit Hyrule threw the last time Wind pretended he didn’t have a cold the whole group had wordlessly decided to just let the healer have his way, and he’d thought Legend was on board with that.

It doesn’t – it doesn’t sound like he’s trying to bring something up, though it’s deep and in his chest. It sounds like he can’t get any air, almost like Sky when the thick air of the Surface gets overwhelming. Like his throat is closing over, wind whistling through narrower and narrower passages –

Sky realises all at once.

Not an injury, not an illness – Legend’s allergic to feathers, and he just crash-landed on a whole platform of them.

Sky scrambles to prop him up, though he suspects the damage is done. Legend leans back against him. His breathing is maybe a little easier with his chest open, coughs louder and further apart. When he sucks in air, it sounds like it’s screaming through metal pipes, high and thin. But he can breathe.

They level out. There’s an island in the distance that the overloaded knights are headed for, but it’s small and isolated, intended as a jumping point for people with loftwings to catch them. It’ll take time to explain the situation, that they don’t have loftwings and need lifts back to the mainland, and that’s time Legend may not have.

Sky leans forward, holding Legend to his chest, and tries to think.

They need the infirmary, they’ll be able to treat the breath attack – but then they need somewhere feather free for Legend to rest, and there’s nowhere on Skyloft that fits that description. Loftwings are everywhere. The infirmary’s even got special-built troughs for them when their riders are in there and they refuse to leave! Every building has windows Loftwings can open and at least stick their heads in, if not hop straight through, and every floor bears scratches from their talons.

Legend wheezes. His fingers dig painfully into Sky’s supporting arm.

Determination solidifies. That will have to wait.

Sky leans into the turn as Crimson changes headings. Goddess, he loves his loftwing – as soon as Sky realised what they needed Crimson was responding. It’s the loss of this kind of bond that’s so devastating to him, when he considers the disappearance of loftwings over the ages. That the others have never known having a partner who knows your every move.

Legend’s stopped coughing but his breathing’s worse: pained little wheezes as he struggles to breathe, shuddering with every inhale like it’s a fight – his face is red and his eyes are wet and Sky doesn’t know if it’s breathlessness or pain.

“Hang in there Legend, we’re nearly there,” he says.

When they make landfall Crimson hovers long enough to drop Four the short, safe distance to the thickly grassed area meant for such deposits, then they’re off again. Sky hears Four shout behind them. Realises belatedly that between the wind and his own terror Four likely didn’t know what was happening – but he’s safe where he is, and if someone else finds him they can help him regroup if the others don’t land in the same spot, and –

That’s a problem for later. Right now, he needs to save Legend’s life.

No sailcloth dives with a passenger. Crimson lands on the tiles right in front of the infirmary with a soft grunt, and Sky flashes gratitude at him as he throws himself off his back and runs.

“Aren,” he shouts as he shoulders the door open, “Aren, I need help!”

[pumpkinstrawbrew]

🆃🅷🅴 🆆🅸⨢.🅲🅷🅸🅽🅶 🅷△🆄🆁.

>>> the grim adventures of jon n' jack. feat batman n' spiderman. <<<

...

it was only a matter of time, before i would have made another crossover with those two. i can't deny, that they are very 1:1 for me, when it comes to comics supervillains. so why not to mix one awesome n' beloved thing with another? esp since funny enough, they do have quite a few similar plot-points. well, the halloween themed costume aside. i mean it goes as far as jack once having the bat-themed boyfriend pal, which reminds me of someone else, i know.

anyho'...

i've tried to make my notes more or less readable here, but they still might be a bit scattered. i attempted to keep them as short as possible, but i just cannot talk 'small'.

1. the first art is low-key based on underdeveloped AU, that i have about the early comic scarecrow n' modern jack meeting n' hitting it off serial killiar style. considering, that both of them possess killing methods, which have a noticable tradmark to it, i imagine that they will leave one hell of a mess behind, while traveling across the country. in that timeline, batman is dead. n' jack's shitty foster dad was killed off earlier on. neither of them knows what to do with themselves, since the people who they had *twisted* emotional conection with are gone. without any direction, they meet in the middle, n' decide that they can as well team-up n' try to make being a villain fun again. jon might experiment on their victims *or torture them if its his ex bullies* n' then give them to jack, who would scoop their brains out and put candle inside their skull. n' uh yeah, he literally did it in the comic. i was honestly surpised that marvel come up with smth that creepy. it really sounds more alined with dc, if anything. but either way, here they are. two *grieving* psychos going downtown. they will make one another so much worse, i imagine. n' they will totally kill that npc dude btw.

2. dark magic n' the drip. or jon n' jack at their corniest. like, jonathan looks like he watched too much the nightmare before christmas n' jack dress up like count dracula for no reason. it's so random-ish n' cheesy. but with this being said, i love both of those designs, n' think, that they really suit the vibe of comic issues in which they were featured. jack always came off as a he-witch to me, but it was nice to see it being played on in a different way. n' then, crane really rocks his own outfit as well. i totally need to draw him in it more often, haha. they dress up for a halloween party for real this time. n' well, i added batman n' spiderman into the mix here, bc i kinda wish that they got to fight / interact with those versions of jon n' jack. it would have been fun for a few reasons. also this can be technically counted as shipping art, but can be viewed as your typical gloating bad guy n' helpless hero thing too. n' to clear any possible questions, i only create stuff with adult peter parker. like cartoon era/late early comics, 20 smth one. i love my spiderman being of age, where he can legally mingle with his villains, not be detained at school lol.

3. the classic four from the timeline, when the comic plots were a bit more ligthearted. aka during the times, when the deadly mercenary n' crazy scientist were robbing banks, instead of harming *torturing* people. i love dark stuff, but there is charm to how 'simple' the scarecrow's and jack's goals once were. n' i love how the scarecrow used to do the lil, dorky dances. it really suits him. n' since at least 2 or maybe, most of jack o' lanterns are southernish in their roots like jon, i had an idea of them having a country dance *in the middle of graveyard* kinda just makes sense to me, haha. batman and spiderman merely happen to find them like that. n' well, it's kinda awkward. esp bc they technically don't do anything bad. i also imagine spiderman being like 'oh, so you have one of those too'. which is mostly a ref to how both the scarecrow n' jack were called 'the reject from land of oz' by other characters. they can rejoice here.

4. the develish & undead duo!! my friend once told me to try n' watch older superhero cartoons, and at first i was like 'welp, they prob be hella boring'. but then i caved in, n' watched a couple of superfriends episodes. as result, i fell in love with their scarecrow's desingh! it was unexpected tbh. usually, i prefer jon's older, classic scarecrow look. so no straw hair, less features exposed, just a hat n' a sack on his head, but their version of him actually did it for me. i find their crane both creepy n' cute. n' i also read on wiki, that he might be undead. so that bit interested me as well. non-human jonathan crane, what a concept! him returning from the grave just to be a menace to batman. n' to accompany him, there is an undead jack o' lantern from the ghost rider comic. his corpse literally got possessed by satan. anyways, both of them raised army of zombies. both of them undead n' prob won't ever get out of their spooky suits, since i don't think that they can. n' funny enough, jack's hometown was called sleepy hollows, if i remember correctly. so they can haunt people there, make it into a truly cursed land.

5. the last one was kinda spontaneous on my part. the other day, i was looking at what kind of action figures the scarecrow n' jack have. saw one, where jon was looking kinda strange, all black n' yellow. which is how i find out that he *apparently* got yellow lantern powers in newer comics, even if it was like for 10 seconds or smth. i didn't read the issue itself, but i found the idea kinda fun, n' his design was decent enough for me to get interested n' wonder what i can do with it. then, a bit later, i saw that jack had a venom-funko figure. i don't think, that he was ever canonically venomized in any of the actual comic issues, but once again, the mere idea of it happening was enough for me to consider doing smth with it. i mean, a venom-like tongue, but its made out of fire? dang. that's kinda cool. so yeah. the yellow lantern scarecrow n' symbiote jack o' lantern being the double trouble. if they weren't enough of a mean goblin-man before, now they surely will be.

[codecicle-archive]

hi ash, could i utilise your mega autism for a moment? would it be possible for you to provide me with some good reference images for drawing Charlie's face ie front and side profiles ect? plus any tips on details you think are important? No pressure ofc! Just thought this might be something you had a lot of thoughts about anyway, if not then please don't go out of your way I am indeed capable of using google, it just takes longer and is less fun than talking to a cool guy XD

YES. YES ALWAYS AND FOREVER. GLADLY. ABSOLUTELY. Here's references + notes under the cut!

First of all, go -> here <- for a guide by razberypuck, which is perfect and explains everything better than I ever could.

Second of all, he has some pretty distinct features of both his face and his body that are important to keep in mind, which is mainly what I'll be talking about :-)

Third of all, not all these features need to be kept, especially when you consider styles and the tendency to drop certain parts of the body or face once you've learned the rules enough to break them. Im just listing them all so people know what features work well with their style and what features don't ^_^

His hair is very messy and fluffy, kinda like cowlicks for his entire head. His front hair typically comes down into bangs that curve towards the right, while the rest goes in every direction possible. (This is also true going back years ago. He just combed it a certain way, so you'd only see the fluffy cowlicks in the back of his head)

Another thing I wanna point out is his Adam's apple, which is very prominent ! I kept ted in the photo to show the difference ^_^

Also! No matter what era you're drawing from, his eyebrows shape a LOT of his face. They're really thick!

3/4ths views to show it more clearly, his jawline is relatively soft! And his old frames are clunky. He has a really pretty hooked nose which curves down towards the tip of it. Otherwise, it's pretty much a triangle! If you're drawing him from the side, keeping the little triangle dip on the side of his nose can help you find the general shape easier.

Also! The above images are really good examples of his mouth. I don't have many notes on this, but if you're going for anything 1 to 1 of him, I'd recommend keeping the curve of his cheeks downward when his mouth is closed, and the curve upward when he's smiling. He has visible cheekbones that make the area around his mouth appear very round

^ this is a great reference that shows everything I've been talking about. 1: triangle on the side of his nose to show the curve from the front 2: thick eyebrows 3: visible cheekbones and small curves around his mouth 4: cowlick hair

Also, he's very buff! Chulked out 2 the max. Some of these images came from me being a major hater over art of him, before remembering people can do whatever they want forever. But I can use it now! Charlie has wide shoulders, natural tummy, and gigantic tits.

He's visibly wider than Tommy and Ranboo, with a frame closer to Sneeg and James in build. He's strong!! He's really really strong!! I feel like people forget Just How Strong This Guy Is.

Also heres an image from and older post of mine, which I designed while trying to explain why he doesn't look That Different without the glasses (2 me). It's pretty much everything I said above, but summarized in a photo!

source: bro trust me and also source: the final 2 images i could fit on mobile which are 2 random face studies I have of him nearby. I have better one's but i can't find them right now so take these okay bye bye

+ I'm so sorry if this made 0 sense I'm very tired ^_^

[whisperingspinesliterary]

My First DNF of 2025

Greetings, adventurers, welcome back to the library!

2025 came in hot and fast. I'm not quite sure how it got here so early, or how January is already passing us by so fast. But with the new year comes new books - new goals, new challenges, new TBR lists. Going into this year, I decided to start a reading challenge. Something that would give me some direction for my upcoming reads, that way I wasn't stuck in a cycle of indecision. Which would ultimately end with reading nothing at all. Or five books at once. Both of those would be unfortunate outcomes.

I was scrolling through Pinterest when I came across this template -

I've never done a book challenge before, so I thought this would be an easy one to start off with. The very first book on my reading list for this was The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlyn Starling. I've owned it since its release in 2021.

The book is about a woman named Jane Lawrence, who is very independent and wishes for a marriage of convenience. Since this is a gaslamp fantasy, the story is set in an alternate version of Victorian-era England. Which means that Jane can't live on her own without a husband, but her care takers can't afford to bring them with them when they move. Thus enters Augustine Lawrence, the unwed town doctor. Although originally reluctant, he agrees to marry Jane on the condition that she never come to the family manor, Lindridge Hall.

It's a good premise for the suspenseful gothic horror book it was supposed to be.

However —

That is about where the decent things I have to say about it goes. This is not the book I thought I was waiting four years to read. I started the book three or four times, but never really got past the first third of the book. This time, I was three-quarters of the way through before I decided enough was enough.

In the beginning of the book, Jane was a stubborn woman determined to keep her independence no matter what. She wanted a marriage of convenience with a husband who’s nice and understanding. She doesn’t want to marry for love or have a gaggle of children. She just wants to live her life; while seeming to do what society expects of her.

This characterization of Jane does not last long. Almost as soon as Augustine steps into the room for her interview and marriage proposal it all gets thrown out the window. She's blushing and flustered, the entirety of her strong will seems to melt away for some kind of instalove.

Jane goes to his surgery, as a test to see if she can truly be a doctor's wife, where a patient comes in with a strange bowel obstruction. He ultimately ends up dying, but not before Augustine calls a friend who handles mental patients who study magic (foreshadowing). Jane, of course, isn't prepared for all the blood and death. She just wanted to be an accountant. The book does a good job, as a whole, showing how someone who isn't prepared for a surgeon's life handles death and disease. Which is to say, Jane is definitely traumatized.

Jane and Augustine get married rather quickly after that, but the carriage takes them to the family manor after the ceremony. Since Jane promised she'd never go, they turn around to take her back to town. However, a storm comes and washes out the road, which causes the carriage to overturn. Jane treks back on foot to Lindridge Hall.

This is about where things begin to go downhill. Jane is suddenly absolutely swooning for Augustine. They consummated their marriage, and then Jane can't bear to look at the bed. Augustine's pushy college friends come to visit, and Jane discovers they've been working magic. I usually think secret occult societies at a college are such a fun addition. But after this introduction, the whole story just kind of gets messy.

Jane starts seeing things, Augustine gaslights her into thinking that its a dream. Then all of the sudden he's trapped in the basement and Jane has to get him out by staying awake for seven days and doing outrageous things. I will say, it's interesting to watch as Jane becomes an unreliable narrator. She isn't sure if she's asleep or awake, or if the things she's seeing are real. Also, the first couple of times Jane does the ritual for the Work - it gave me goosebumps. Unfortunately, those moments are few and few between and fleeting.

The middle into the last third of the book, things are happening. But it also feels like nothing is happening at the same time. I spent a lot of time confused, which is ultimately why I ended up giving up on it. I wasn't sure if I wanted to read the last 150 or so pages. Jane's trip through her seven sleepless days became a bit tedious to read. Even then, she was doing to get a chance to open the basement back up to let out Augustine. Who, I think, was trapped by his dead wife that he performed a ritual on because she was dying? That's around the part I start getting a little hazy.

Overall, I just didn't enjoy the book as much as I was hoping I would. I ended up giving it only 2 stars. If you like gothic, occult books - you could give it try and see if it's your cup of tea. I might try again in the future and see if my opinion of it changes any. But, for now, it's sitting on the DNF shelf, right next to Beneath Devil's Bridge and What Moves the Dead for me.

Thanks for reading, I hope you stop by the library again soon!

- Whisper

Let Me Know: Have you read The Death of Jane Lawrence? If you did, what did you think? What books have you DNF'd and why?

[crystalelemental]

Crystal Lore: Final Fantasy X was the first Final Fantasy I played to completion. At the time, my friends at school who had Playstation consoles were all big into FF7, and insisted I should try it. Well as fortune would have it, my step-brothers had a Playstation 2, so there was hope. But by that point, FF7 was hard to specifically find, and it would take a while before I got ahold of it. FF10, however, was current, so my father got me that. It was the second RPG I ever played, after Grandia 2, which was part of a Dreamcast bundle game my dad got. The fact that both games heavily featured an evil church and defeating god with a group of teenagers meant that I assumed every RPG was just like that.

Anyway, all this to say I actually really like FF10. It's a fun game! It's goofy, but in a way that felt sincere! The specific dialogue is awkward at times, more a matter of direction than anything, but but I loved this game. So unlike the PS1 era, my recollection of its main story was very strong, and I went into this kinda knowing I'd vibe with it. Still, much to talk about.

Usual disclaimer going into this: a lot of my desire to replay the series as a whole stems from playing the Pixel Remasters, then watching Professor Bopper's analysis videos on the games. He has one out for the PS2 games now, and as usual, the assessment of game's themes is deeper than anything I would've come up with on my own, so I'll be trying to stick to personal thoughts or anything I can add while shilling his videos. I like them a lot.

Shortly after the era in which I played this, we had that era of the internet where reviewers would kinda tear into everything for sport. FF10 was, of course, caught in the blast, for being kind of bizarre in a lot of its framing and stilted in its voice direction. Of particular harm was Tidus, a protagonist who is cringe as hell. His dad is a major star sportsman who became a legendary guardian, turning around his shittier ways for the sake of saving a world he barely knows. Comparatively, Tidus is often seen as a whiny braggart who acts petulant about most things. I'm not here to say that Tidus is not those things, but I am here to say that's kind of why I vibe with him.

A major takeaway of the Bopper video is that Tidus, as someone external to Spira who doesn't think like its inhabitants, is the only one capable of looking for solutions outside of the cycle of abuse, violence, and death. Examining Tidus through that lens does offer quite a lot, pretty much from second one. The blitzball angle is played up a lot, and one of the earliest scenes around it is Tidus agreeing to play for Wakka's team. When he asks Wakka about his goals, Wakka expresses he just wants to do his best with no regrets, to which Tidus (correctly) goes "no, absolutely not, if you're gonna play you play to win." The idea of actually winning at the sport he plays never even crossed Wakka's mind. It just never seemed like a possibility, and thus wasn't something worth pursuing. How could there be anything outside of his belief?

This continues all the way through their confrontation with Yunalesca in Zanarkand. They're told the Final Aeon is bunk, they're told that Yuna and one of the guardians must die to see it through anyway, and start lining up to volunteer. When Tidus presses his objections, the others call him childish, and he has to ask "then what would an adult do? Just let Yuna die?"

What I wound up really liking about Tidus is that, while his visions of what should be done seem loftly to the point of absent idealism, he's grounded in material outcomes. You play the sport because you want to win. You fight Sin because you want it gone for good, and no half-measures will cut it. No one should die for something that won't fix a problem. Any fight that's lasted hundreds of years means something is being done wrong. It's an interesting angle, having your petulant, childish protagonist actually be the most materially sensible person here. It also makes for a strong contrast with Seymour, who is similarly about material ends. He signs off on the Operation Mi'ihen plan to destroy Sin with machina, not because he thinks it'll work, but because it's worth trying a different way, and everyone is doing this for the right reasons. Tidus even comments that while it's not something he's supposed to say for his station, what Seymour says there made sense to him.

But their differences are the thematic heart of the story. While Tidus seeks a way to fully defeat Sin, Seymour, like the rest of Spira, cannot see beyond what they know. Seymour's only perceived solution is to accelerate the cycle until it can no longer replicate. When everything is dead, nothing can die, and thus we have defeated Sin. He embodies the defeatist attitudes of the world at large, and the depressing acceptance that things just have to be this way.

The other angle I think is interesting is the dynamics of power and those at the top. There's the obvious in Jecht's braggart nature and constantly putting down his son, but you also have things like the Luca Goers being poor sports and getting away with it because they're favored to win, Biran and Yenke being assholes to Kimahri because Biran's the strongest of the Ronso, or the maesters of Yevon doing whatever they want because you know we need proper leadership so we'll twist the teachings for ourselves while the rest of you sacrifice yourselves. There's a constant sort of bullying going on in the foreground, and wild abuses of power within the structures that govern the world.

But it's important to remember that in his world, Tidus was at the top. He was the best player of the best team, and from his position at the top...he's willing to teach kids how to play, engages more casually with his fans, and builds up Wakka's team of losers so bad they've never won a singular game by insisting any of them could learn the Jecht Shot with enough practice. Tidus is unique in Spira, in how he refuses to really abuse his position. It's a huge point of pride he has, and it's something he throws around a bit to show why he's able to back up his claims, but he's never hostile toward others about it.

This leads into the bigger aspect: everyone in Spira is really bad at love.

Auron makes a point of showing Tidus that no, Jecht really did love you. He cared deeply, but his means of showing that were atrocious. Similarly, Biran and Yenke torment Kimahri, with the belief that if he holds to shame, he will improve as a warrior like they'd want for him. This doesn't work, Kimahri can't overcome them until he finds someone he's willing to fight and potentially die for, but the point remains. In Spira, love is shown in the manner you think is best for them, and it...does not go well.

Yuna's arranged marriage to Seymour really hammers this in. Lulu talks about how sure, she would want Yuna to marry for love, but she can't. Yuna is destined to sacrifice herself, and thus there is no place for her feelings in the matter. The love she must endure is what others want for her, and only Tidus really calls this out as incredibly messed up. Seymour's ambition here is to become the Final Aeon and jump to Sin, which is fully explained when you meet Yunalesca and understand the process. Yunalesca explains the Final Aeon as an "act of love," be it between partners or friends. The willingness to sacrifice yourself for another is the act of love that can defeat Sin.

...except we know that doesn't work. Lingering in the background the whole game is Chappu, Lulu's fiance and Wakka's brother, who became a Crusader to fight Sin. In his passed-on words, he believed "Keeping your girl close is good, but keeping Sin far away from her is better." With that belief that the way Lulu needed to be loved was by him fighting...he died. Uselessly, he died, and the trauma of his loss continues to hurt Lulu and Wakka even now. By loving them in the way he felt best, rather than in the way they would have wanted, he caused more harm than good. This is a microcosm of the cycle of Sin. The Final Aeon is born from an act of love - the love you believe is best for others. But this act causes others harm, and it contorts, recreating Sin in an endless cycle.

(Quick note I can't fit in anywhere else: this is also why Seymour is the way he is. His mother sacrifices herself to become an aeon, anticipating it will make him strong enough to live on his own as he needs to being half-human half-Guado, but loving him like she thinks is best fails him entirely and he falls into a sense that death is the only way out, so whoopsie.)

This is, again, where Tidus is unique. He alone loves others as they would want. He cares deeply for Yuna as a person, and engages her at a personal level, never once deciding that self-sacrifice is a viable option. He connects with Wakka over blitzball and resolves to help Wakka, but pushes Wakka to remember why he picked up the game in the first place. He encourages Kimahri to push back on Biran and Yenke's abuse. For all his whining in Luca about "Why did I have to know, why did it have to be me?" He's right. No one ever really considered his feelings in the matter on...well, anything. And in his position as a star player, in what capacity he can, he's determined not to inflict that same pain on anyone else. He loves deeply and earnestly, but most important, he loves others in the way they would want, and doesn't impose what he believes is best on anyone. I dunno, I...really liked Tidus, actually.

By gameplay, the game is excellent. Characters feel distinct from one another, but notably, the system allows for a fast-paced rotation of characters in and out of battle without consuming a turn. By setting up enemy encounters with a sort of "X beats Y" mentality, you rotate your party around frequently, giving everyone ample play, in order to make the most of your characters. At a basic level, Tidus can beat the fast wolf and lizard enemies, Wakka beats fliers, Lulu beats elementals, and Yuna summons for the major HP blobs like Ochu. What this culminates in is boss fights where you have a machine weak to Electric attacks, but it has a flying magic-suppressant, so you lead with Wakka and Kimahri to take out the suppressor then swap in Yuna and Lulu to dish out heavy damage. It's a great system.

The level up system is also replaced with the Sphere Grid. You actively move your character along a line of progression toward stat boosts and skills, and it's...okay, it's a little too heavy on micromanagement, but it's not much of a problem, and opens up options for customization. Kimahri is the poster child for this, being your Blue Mage who can take any given path to copy another player's stats and skills. I went with White Mage because healing good, but I made sure to grab Steal and Use too for utility. I was also able to double back and get Lulu Lancet so MP was never a concern, and had Yuna (and Kimahri) cross over into Lulu's grid to pick up -aga spells late-game. The grid works out okay.

There are smaller systems, like powering up your Aeons or applying custom effects to equipment, but I never used them. Much like FF9, equipment determines additional effects and skills, but unlike FF9, you're kinda at the mercy of whatever skills drop on items, as customizing takes rare items and quite a lot of them to apply. It's also meaningless. I never bought any equipment, and I rarely swapped things around. Armor for immunities or resistances, sure, but weapons? Not once.

*sigh* At this point, I do need to consider something. It's a question that's been eating at me for nearly two weeks now. When assessing the quality of a game as a full experience...should the optional post-game content count against it?

Because if yes, oh my god does this game fall apart. FF10's postgame is, bar nothing, the worst postgame experience I have ever endured. I finished the main game in like 22-24 hours. My save file is currently sitting at 69 hours, and we have way too many more hours to go. We're frankly not even close to done.

See, the postgame goes through multiple phases. First is monster catching. You're introduced to this early, but the short is you eventually go back and catch 10 of every monster in the world. It's super tedious because there's always a rare one, and you need special equipment to do it. Hooray.

Second is getting the Celestial Weapons. These are infuriating, because they required you to engage with some of the worst minigames known to man. Dodge 200 lightning bolts with precision timing! Race a chocobo that barely listens to you without getting hit by obstacles that swerve a full 90 degrees to hit you! Play Blitzball for like six hours, resetting the league at least twice and starting all your progress over! It's painful, but somehow, at least the pain is a sensation.

Step three! From the captured monsters, you can now fight really strong fiends that are frankly too strong for you, hope you found Anima and/or Magus Sisters, because now you have to farm stat boosting spheres to apply to the sphere grid to cap stats! This involves also farming a billion activation spheres, which were never a problem in the main game but are a massive roadblock now, and dealing with exceptionally slow fights like Jumbo Flan, who takes several minutes to beat one (1) time. You will farm it at least 10 times. All of this is to cap everyone's stats and get all skills on the sphere grid, which has the side-effect of removing the sense of unique attributes each character had, in favor of "Everyone is max speed and attack, and just spams Quick Hit until Yuna summons to block an instant kill death attack." It sucks.

But wait! That's just to beat Nemesis, the strongest fight in the old NA version! The Remaster is international, which means my childhood self can fulfill its desire to beat the Dark Aeons and Penance! You know! Once you farm 300 HP spheres because Break HP Limit feels goddamned mandatory on these fights, and also 53 luck spheres from the worst fight known to the series. Because the Dark Aeons involve fights that can dodge every attack if you didn't cap luck. Yeah, turns out no matter how high your accuracy is, if your foe is even just kinda evasive, you'll never hit. You need to cap luck. But that also means farming Fortune Spheres from another awful monster arena boss. See, both Luck and Fortune spheres are dropped by monsters that counterattack every move you make with high animation time spells. They have 1.5 million and 1.1 million HP respectively, which if you hit damage cap each swing, is 16 and 12 attacks respectively. Oh and the former casts Ultima, which is 12 goddamned seconds of animation. That fight lasts 5 minutes on a good run, and like 80% of it is watching its goddamned counter animation. And you do all of this...so your Quick Hits will connect, and you can tank their counterattacks. Provided you made equipment that has Break HP Limit (farm Nemesis, other Dark Aeons, or fight Shinryu 25 times for one (1) character), Ribbon or Stoneproof because they all inflict petrification that instant shatters removing the party member entirely, and Auto-Haste, which requires a shitload of cash to bribe an encounter enemy, which sucks because you also need a ton of cash to even fight these arena fights (the asshole charges you to deal with this) and then over 3 million to remove the worthless sphere grid nodes with Clear Spheres. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: the sphere grid is cluttered with useless +1, +2, and +3 stat point nodes, and all HP nodes are +200. Remove literally all of them, undoing all your progress and replacing them with the farmed stat boost spheres, or you don't have enough room to get your stats where they need to go in order to participate in the postgame fights. Anyway, you beat all the Dark Aeons with this and then find out Penance doesn't even use status, it just uses big damage so you want Auto-Protect to cut that down and Auto-Regen to recover BUT WAIT! Skills can't be overwritten on equipment in this game, so while you need Break HP Limit and Auto-Haste, you don't need Ribbon, and that earlier equipment is useless, so you have to start that process all over again! Isn't that fun?! Hahaha! HAHAHA! HAAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Fortunately, I didn't count postgame against 7 or 8, so I won't count it against 10. 10's really good, I liked it a lot. I think 5 and 9 outrank it just on preference for gameplay, but this might be #3. Just do not look at postgame. Ignore it. There is nothing worse. Engage with the really nice story and snappy gameplay and live freely and beautifully. Don't even think about the Celestial Weapons, they're not important. Just keep moving forward. Do get Anima, though. Such a cool summon.

[deathfavor]

Hanma didn't take losing Kisaki well. No matter how their bond is viewed, Kisaki brought color into Hanma's life. He was entertaining and thrilling and, for Hanma, Kisaki gave him to be a reason to be engaged in the world. Not a reason, Hanma's apathy to his own life has always been there, but now he's IN the world. Sure, he didn't really give a shit about the gangs, not really, but it was fun. He wanted to see where Kisaki would go, wanted to help him reach those goals. Finally Hanma was real. He wasn't just a passive observer watching the world change around him. Sure he got into fights and some of those were fun, but those are always so temporary, just like any other momentary thrill he managed to find. But Kisaki? Kisaki was always fun.

But death is never far from the reaper. It's followed Hanma, wherever he shows up, so does death for someone in some version of the timelines. Moebius, Bloody Halloween, Bad Toman, so on and so forth. And death didn't spare Kisaki. And suddenly, Hanma is back in a world that isn't moving for him anymore. Because what is there? Kisaki's gone, most people hate or dislike him, Kazutora's in jail, so now its him standing alone again. He goes from feeling alive to feeling like a ghost again. And Hanma doesn't even know how to grieve because he's never lost someone like that. Someone who gave him a reason to be involved in the world. It's a new loss. Something personal.

The worst part is that Hanma can't even properly mourn. He can't say goodbye, can't go to the wake, because now he's a fugitive on the run and everyone knows Hanma was always around with Kisaki once that team up happened. So of course there's going to be police swarming everywhere that Hanma might show up. Instead he's on the run. He drinks, he smokes, he sleeps around, he does odd jobs, he fights, takes life-or-death gambles sometimes, whatever it takes to get by one day at a time. He puts his photography skills to use, his fighting skills for hire, his handyman abilities, always moving and traveling. It doesn't stop him from losing weight and sleeping rough, scraping by day by day and month by month. He does what he needs to get by. Hanma doesn't linger anywhere very long - he's a ghost in every sense of the word other than physically.

He doesn't even have nightmares or dreams to help or keep Kisaki alive in a way or hell, even use sleep as an excuse. It's just darkness. Hanma very rarely dreams, good or bad, so he can't even be haunted. He'd take being haunted over the slow numbness. Hanma went from actually feeling again to being hurt, and then...the numbness. The familiar apathy that starts to come back and take over everything. The pain starts to dull. And Hanma would rather feel the pain, he'd rather be haunted. Sometimes he has nightmares of his mangled body or remembers it, but it's so fleeting that he doesn't bleed from it. And it's awful.

Once the heat begins to die down, Hanma risks returning and finally paying a visit to Kisaki's grave for a few hours. And it rips things open again, finally he gets to really feel that grief even when he tries to play it off casual. And it makes it all the more painful knowing Kisaki would be PISSED because Hanma's stopped caring again and not taking proper care of himself. He's doing stupid shit, reckless shit, but Hanma just doesn't care. He's bored of this dull world again. He knows Kisaki would be upset and tries to play it off, chat about being late but he got stuck in traffic and stuff that is empty. But he doesn't know what else to do. He doesn't have any direction anymore, he's just...breathing and living.

It shows too in the case of ever getting to write fugitive era threads or Kanto or anything after. Being around other people sometimes instigates him and he'll still start shit just because ( because he wants to feel, because he wants entertainment ) but there's times when he's just quiet or doesn't react. He's a pawn left behind by a king like draken left behind by mikey and he's just floating along. He comes back for Kanto because it's convenient, because Hanma is a thing that won't just die, so he comes back but he doesn't care too much. Not till he gets to fight Toman again and he can feel more alive. But...Even so. The world isn't the same without Kisaki. It's dull again with occasional bursts of color, but that's all.

He's a reaper left alone in the graveyard of the world.

[broccolini-cellini]

Dosier annotation

I took an intuitive approach with this assignment. I regret this a little bit now, because looking at everything all together, it feels like I just complained a lot. It is a mixed bag of books, films and exhibitions I have seen for fun and research. (Although the line between the two has blurred.) In a more pragmatic tone, I approached this to solve a series of problems, and so I looked at different artists who are good at tackling similar types of problems. A minimum requirement of a selection is that I like it, but I've found that my entries almost always circle back to (1) affect, (2) being poetic, and (3) the legacies of World War II and/or the postwar era.

First: I looked at Miyazaki for his work's affective qualities. He does this so well, and this most likely owes to his process of working out the stories of his films based on how he feels, and translates this to how he wants the audience to feel. In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, it is revealed that he does not ever write a script. He storyboards directly, and it takes about a year to finish. What’s more astounding is that even before he completes storyboarding, his team already starts animating. The production crew doesn't know how the film will end until their animation catches up. This organic, intuitive, wild card approach is felt when you watch his films. The narrative feels almost non-linear, propelled by emotion through sumptuous visuals and sweeping scores. In the documentary, Miyazaki is established as a notorious perfectionist. This careful and laborious orchestration to achieve such affect is what I'm striving for in my own practice.

Second: On being poetic (and even cheeky): Nguyen and Parker had this quality in their practices. Both can hold their audiences in such a charismatic manner. They touch on their own lived experiences and the politics that surrounds them in a sentimental but gripping way, without being indulgent and sappy. Suh, who by now I probably have a one-sided love-hate relationship with, also does this, albeit in a quieter form.

I am drawn to the approaches of these artists since my sculptural installation practice needs to oscillate between the personal and the public. Recently, my works have become a form of psychoanalysis. I have been having to conduct a psychological enquiry within myself but also bearing the responsibility to contextualise my experiences. The direction of enquiry goes inward before having to go outward. The private has to go public, otherwise, does it even matter? My practice cannot exist in a bubble. Installation art also demands embodied viewers.

Third: My gravitation towards the second world war and the postwar owes to how recent it has been and the legacies that are very much felt today and even dictate my life. Filipinos are still reeling from centuries of colonialism, and my practice is at a point where psychoanalysis is shifting into a form of mental decolonisation. Looking at Snare for birds, research and enquiry is an ongoing decolonisation, piecing together our fractured histories and identities, and taking control of our narratives. While my artworks don't necessarily engage with archives, the struggle and need to find what we once thought was lost is necessary to imagine how we can possibly move forward, with better ownership and understanding of ourselves.

[newmusicradionetwork]

TJ Doyle “Meant To Be Together”

TJ Doyle, is an American artist with a world view, a love of Earth and a feel for what it takes to care for the planet we are on. He also takes a song, wraps it in melodic yet compelling music and delivers it with a sense of fun, responsibility and subtle but strong Americana sensibilities. The result is amazing success on the world’s stage including entering 2018 in the #1 position on the Radio Indie Top 40 Charts with 2 new releases from his 2nd album “Everything” and “Living In Our Dream”. Sitting at or near the top of the charts is not new for TJ Doyle. During the year 2017 he was in the Top 5 of the Indie Top 40 from late summer with his song “Anonymous” followed by “Unconditional”, and now “Living In Our Dream”. TJ was nominated for the prestigious Round Glass Award in the Rock Song category with “Anonymous”. The Award is designed to reward musicians who create socially responsible music for Wellness, Environmental Consciousness and Peace. TJ says, “Even to be nominated makes me feel honored, humbled and “Anonymous” is a tribute to anyone who has felt marginalized”, says Doyle. As TJ’s lyrics say, “Don’t you know that you are golden, Don’t believe you’re anonymous”. TJ has been lauded by critics for having his own musical and vocal styles, although he admits to his strong vocals being reminiscent of Neil Young . “That’s the way I sing. Can’t help it”. Raised in 5 Eastern cities by the age of 10, TJ now lives in a community on the edge of the Angeles National Forest above LA where he writes songs that transmit an authenticity harking back to the 60s. Does “harking back” mean he lives in the past? Not at all. “That era of music was when artists were writing about the challenges of a generation instead of the more personal and relationship-oriented pop and rock that currently dominates the airwaves.” He goes after that vision delivering his passion for the environment. “Nature is free from the human condition that afflicts humanity, and is an inspiration that can help us all. By observing nature we can learn more about our own true natures.” Musically TJ, who has a touring history covering the northern American Midwest and Southern California, surrounds himself with some of the top musician’s musicians to be found today on his recordings like Rock Deadrick, Drums & Percussion (Tracy Chapman) David Sutton, Bass (Tracy Chapman) Matt Laug, Drums (Slash’s Snakepit), Lance Morrison, Bass, (Don Henley) Tim Pierce, Guitar (Crowded House, Dave Matthews) or in his live performances like Phil Parlapiano, Keyboards, (Lowen & Navarro), and Hank Van Sickle, Bass, (John Mayall). Legendary venues such as The Whiskey and The Roxy have hosted his band, “but it’s time to expand on that. The plan is to get out into the rest of the world,” fostered recently by extensive airplay in Europe, from his most recent album “On The Horizon”. The TJ brand of music is also picking up steam in Australia, New Zealand and, of course, across North America. At a time when divisions seem to be so loud in people’s minds, TJ Doyle feels music can bring calm, so he presents ideas that help dissuade the internal discourse that is prevalent in our society today. In “Anonymous” particularly, the singer/songwriter says, ” It is my hope the listener can take away the thought they have something very special in them, and start to fan the flames of this ‘self’, so they can ‘spread their wings and FLY’!” Doyle, describes his music in general as a vehicle to “help people make sense of themselves and the world. That is my prime directive with my music and lyrics.” “Anonymous”, produced by David Z Rivkin (Prince, Fine Young Cannibals) is part of a planned EP, “or maybe an album. “It doesn’t matter anymore. People can now enjoy music from an artist one song at a time. The album will arrive when it’s the ‘right time Incendiary American: “As TJ Doyle Music releases albums and singles, you can hear that he’s more than just a songwriter. He’s a visionary whose work calls for the collaborative effort of musicians who are determined to see it through. Once the textures and dynamics in the music are appropriately executed, Doyle’s unique voice makes that vision complete.” Additional Artist/Song Information: Artist Name: TJ Doyle Song Title: Meant To Be Together Publishing: TJ Doyle Music Publishing Affiliation: BMI Album Title: Meant To Be Together Record Label: Totem Artists Radio Promotion: Loggins Promotion Paul Loggins 310-325-2800 Contact LP Publicity/PR: Loggins Promotion Paul Loggins 310-325-2800 Contact LP Read the full article

[s4kasaki]

hey can i request ❝  sometimes i feel i’m being crushed under the weight of everything i’ll never be.  ❞ for izumi from ur recent if that’s okay??

hehe hello— my devices are still broke but look, im an izumi lover. I gotta do my job. so this, is gonna be fun y'know? Izumi is such a tough guy but deep down he needs comfort too because it's okay to be greedy sometimes so that's what we're gonna give him!!

♡ — my words are up to interpretation.

‣ tws/cws: angst (?) , other than that not a thimg

‣ reader: gender neutral - they/them

‣ author's note: izumi's emotions, they're like locked behind bars that goes invisible when confronted :cry: . I'm gonna say this, the dialogue is non-existent,it's mostly just.. izumi centric. and NO dialogue almost.

Izumi Sena was an abundance of things, but the first and essential was that he was painfully confident and self-aware. He knew exactly who and what he was, and who and what he carried to be. The two things were solely correlated to each other, he was an 'abnormal one'. And he knew that, but he didn't despise it enough to have any agency in changing it. That just wasn’t part of his life, not part of the plan ever.

He wasn’t as desirable as his devotees made him out to be. It was additionally the statements directing people to think such. Izumi Sena was supposed to be this perfect pretty, tainted person. A person that would stand above his peers no matter the expense, constantly making the top-tier, something kin to little-miss perfect. He was looked up with respect and admiration. It got so out of hand people at yumenosaki considered him more of a naggy grandma than a student due to the never-ending fondness he received, making him wish to project his talents onto others. He was similarly aware that he had many people who held sentimental feelings for him. A lady and man-killer. The most attractive member in the unit Knights.

It wasn’t like he wasn’t pretty! he knew he was striking. It’s just that he speculated that society and his fans built this character around his charm. One he repeatedly, for greedy explanations, swapped into. Izumi played the part of the one to build Knight's to what it is now, the part of poised. And while most of his classmates didn’t know about the dreadful experience he went through during the war era; he brought a lot of those feelings and characteristics into his unit-mates and the ones he cared for most

To add up with that, he took his job very seriously, he even held deep pride for his capabilities to be an idol and a model at the same time and make it work with ease. Yet he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter whether he liked it or not. He had taken the role even as a child and he wasn't gonna betray modelling like Makoto did, would he?

But boy, was he good at it! Other models from all-around had praised him for upholding such an often pressuring job so eloquently. Izumi at the age of 13 was praised for being “mature for his age” by the adults who observed his modeling career to the very end. Of course, he was mature. He planned to be. Yet years later he had decided to become an idol and not even himself can come to an excuse as to why he did. He met wonderful friends along the way of course not that he'd ever admit that they were his friends in any other way than in his actions. Those friends we're also his saviors. Saving and preventing him from not completely giving in to depression and guilt. Izumi didn’t get where he was by being sympathetic to those who failed to do the simplest of simple things. He had to start making mature actions. And he’d continue to be a beacon of maturity and keep his mind grounded in reality.

His only regret is that he never apologized for his harsh words towards the ones he hurt afterward.

That was who and what Izumi Sena was supposed to be.

Izumi Sena is a living distraction, and the most undesirable person in Knights. His words have a thousand different meanings, his temper volatile, his grip over his unit-leader's dependency on him nearing possessive. 

 

They had scolded him saying, “Jeez… I thought you of all psople were more reasonable than this,” he was being reasonable. God was he being reasonable. trying so hard to be mature. Being reasonable and mature so his beloved childhood friend did not have to. 

So much that even Makoto didn’t know who and what he was. And it was better that way. He should never know what elders worry about. And now Makoto is making his own decisions. Coming to his conclusions. And it’s messy and he disagrees but who is he to stop Makoto from becoming somebody when he still wasn’t. When Izumi could never be. Yet it scares Izumi to see him walking away. Walking towards different relationships so easily, not even trying to be on guard. Putting himself in danger for them not against. It drove him crazy and it drove him crazier that he knew his difference would eventually drive Makoto away.

So he continued with his words that dripped off lies, trying to convince everyones thought to that he was the person they thought he was. He had become so used to it that it barely felt like a mask or an act than a cover story for how he really is.

It’s why this fandom around him made him feel so uncomfortable. Every confession felt like it was supposed to be for someone else. 

Talking about how honest and respectable he was— There was nothing honest about him. He was a perfectly hidden lie.

That’s what made him feel like he was an undesirable person. At his core, he could never be what anyone wanted. And he could never be what he wanted. Hell. He hardly knew who that was. He couldn’t let himself think about who he was. He wasn’t the person they thought they wanted, and there’s nothing more undesirable than a sour, uncooperative person.

 

That’s who Izumi Sena is. 

Of course, he desires things too like any other normal person would. He desired entertainment and a day to himself to just be a teenager. He hated his classmates lollygagging around and pulling pranks and going on dates with people they love without even having to put an effort. He wanted to be like that. Able to be a free, Izumi had never been free.

 

Izumi desired his closest friends safety. The aforementioned goal was to make sure his friends never step a foot on the path of loneliness he had learned to strut along with a fake kick to his step. Hide them from the lies they’d have to live. A large part of him was saddened by how even Sora was starting to see him for who he really was behind the fake him.

 He also desires friends. He can’t really say he’s relatively close to anyone besides Knight's

Well, that’s practically a lie. The closest thing he has to a real friend, was you, dear dear idiot y/n. And trying to explain what you meant to him was quite hard, but the affection he held for you was far from just producer and ‘Izumi-San’. It wasn’t even a fully developed real friendship, but It was pure admiration for him. An admiration that was hard for even you to explain or see as anything but romantic. He couldn’t ever tell you how he truly feels, it was against the rules.

He's tired, tired of playing the tuff guy role. It wasn’t an unknown thought. He often told him this. But no one ever realized what he indicated when he spoke these thoughts on subtleties, and with that: Izumi's words twist to be interpreted as whatever you want them to be.

“Sometimes I just feel like I'm just being crushed by the weight of everything I'll never be, ugh.”

His words were often up to interpretation as they sounded so careless, but he let them be that way. It was up to those he cared for to understand what his word meant. And if you didn’t understand well…

Well, that wasn’t exactly a fault of his. Izumi had truly never made it easy.

Yeah, it wasn’t your fault you didn’t know his struggles.

Not in the slightest.

[blouisparadise]

Today’s rec list consists of bottom Louis fics that take place in the country, the Midwest, or any rural area. We hope you enjoy. If you do, please be sure to like and reblog this post to help spread the word. Happy reading!

1) Save A Horse | Explicit | 2400 words

Louis goes to a rodeo with Liam, and gets a lot more than he bargained for. Featuring bull rider Harry, obnoxious t-shirts, and one hell of a night.

“Come on Jackson ain’t you been practicin? It ain’t fun for me if I always beat you,” the boy drawls out, voice slow and thick like molasses. “You comin out tonight?” he asks, nudging him with his elbow.

“Not tonight H, me and Liam are going to grab something to eat,” Jackson replies, the blush returning to Liam’s cheeks.

“What about you, what’re your plans for the night darlin’?” Harry asks, crooking an eyebrow in Louis’s direction.

Louis, who is the epitome of outgoing and confident, is at a total loss for words. He starts to say something but freezes, Harry now raising his other eyebrow and smirking, awaiting Louis’s response. “I uh- I’ll probably just go home,” Louis manages to stammer out, and what the fuck? Who is this man and how has he turned Louis into an introvert in a matter of seconds?

2) Gunsmoke | Explicit | 6527 words

Harry 'Gunsmoke' Styles and his boys Liam, Zayn, and Niall are all traveling cowboys who come across a small town on their journey to nowhere. They hang out at a tavern where Harry meets Louis, a cute and fiery bartender, and they may or may not fall in love.

3) Hey I Heard You Were A Wild One (If I Took You Home It'd Be A Homerun) | Explicit | 12106 words

Harry came to the bar to forget. Louis gives him a night to remember.

4) This Land Is More Than Dreams | Explicit | 12878 words

Louis is a student taking a gap year, travelling through the States. His plans change when he meets a cute cowboy-wannabe in one of the towns.

5) Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy | Mature | 13356 words

Harry owns a farm and Louis rides horses (and pretty boys sometimes) for a living. Harry hurts himself by being clumsy before he gets to ride a horse with Louis.

6) Manifest Destiny | Explicit | 15210 words

Louis is a Pony Express rider and Harry runs a station along the trail.

7) Baby Blue | Explicit | 39439 words

Harry Styles takes his time coming out to greet them. Louis only knows what he’s seen on file and what he’s heard them talking about, but he fully lives up to the image he had inside of his head.

He saunters down the front steps of the farmhouse in his Levi’s, brown snakeskin boots curving out from underneath the denim Louis’ sure he had specially made. He’s got on a plaid button-down tucked into the jeans because of course he does, curls spilling out from either side of his cowboy hat around his sunglasses and country-tan skin.

“Harry Styles,” he drawls, extending a hand to Louis’ manager, “Pleased to meet ya’ll.”

8) I Ain’t Gonna Fence You In | Mature | 40645 words

Louis Tomlinson is a 18 year old city boy who is forced to spend his summer before his senior year at his aunts farm. There, he meets Harry, a 19 year old country boy his aunt hired to help around the farm.

Maybe the farm isn't the worst place to fall in love?

9) Boiling Blood Will Circulate | Explicit | 42420 words

The wait isn’t long before something starts rustling in the bushes. Harry takes aim, squeezes the trigger, body moving unconsciously. They’re motions he’s done a thousand times before, and his body knows how to do it without the input of his brain now. It’s what makes him such a good shot.

He misses. The shot misses.

Something howls in the woods, a pretty clear indication that Harry hit it, but there’s no telltale sounds of a big body dropping, no animal charging out at him to take him out before he can finish the job.

Something does turn and run, though. “Fuck,” Harry spits out, scrambling to his feet and slinging the rifle back over his shoulder, giving chase. He’s not going to lose this hunt.

The trail of blood goes on longer than Harry thought it would. He doesn’t know how long he runs for, but his muscles are burning, chest heaving with exertion, until the trail just - goes dead. No more blood, just like that.

“Fuck,” Harry says.

10) Your Touch Shouldn't Make Me Feel Like This | Explicit | 48883 words

Uni AU in which Alpha Harry has been in love with his omega friend for the longest time and one motorbike trip to the countryside with Louis made him realize that he could no longer hold back his feelings.

11) For the Sake of Propriety | Mature | 52360 words

Louis Tomlinson is the caretaker of an estate that is not truly his, and when his Uncle calls upon him to take it back, Louis knows he will soon be out on the streets with four overly zealous sisters to care for.  His only solution: wed the eldest two off and pray for the best.  When an even better solution unexpectedly presents itself in the form of the charming Mr. Styles, Louis is faced with a difficult choice.  But as with all things in the regency era, reputation very well may threaten to outweigh the fleeting matters of his heart.

12) Through The Wheatfields And The Coastlines | Explicit | 52855 words

“You’re not from around here, are ya?” Hot Cowboy asks, tracking his little lamb with his eyes. Louis frowns slightly, having thought he was doing pretty well at not sticking out like a sore thumb. It’s not like he’s not from around here — it’s not his first summer he’s spent at his grandparents'. But he supposes that the Manhattan city lifestyle that he’s used to is always going to shine through.

“I’m visiting family for the summer,” Louis explains, cheeks a little pink. “Trying to get some work done without distractions.”

13) The Bachelor | Explicit | 53953 words

The one where Harry dates six other guys and still falls in love with Louis Tomlinson.

14) Apples Always Fall (As I Do For You) | Mature | 54609 words | Sequel

Louis is staying at his Aunt's farm in a small town in Minnesota for four months. To deal with the boredom that sets in a week into his stay, he starts working at the local apple orchard, owned by twenty six year old Harry Styles.

Louis quickly finds himself falling in love with the orchard, and he finds a family in Harry's friends Niall, Liam, and Zayn.

He also starts to fall in love with Harry.

Falling in love with him turns out to be the easy part.

15) Such Good Luck | Explicit | 66025 words

An Edwardian AU where Harry is a young aristocratic lord and Louis is a working class dairy farmer. Secrets are a necessary part of their relationship, but Louis has one that could topple their whole world.

16) Given a Chance | Explicit | 173511 words

Five years after One Direction took their last tour, the last thing Louis Tomlinson ever expected to happen while on a tea run at the local Piggly Wiggly was to run into his ex-boyfriend and ex-bandmate Harry Styles.

The odds of them ever running into each other again had to be super slim, right?

Wrong.

What happens when you mix ex-boyfriends with a large serving of Small Town America? Will Louis and Harry be able to set aside their differences, or will Louis be able to stay breezy as fuck in the wake of Harry’s arrival?

Check out our other fic rec lists by category here and by title here.

[ophiuchus-interactive]

Originality, Criticism, and Entitlement

After joining the IF community, I've come to see (and experience) the accusation that there are IF writers who steal, copy, or even plagiarize another author's work. I'm going to explain why throwing such accusations around is harmful not only to the accused, but the community as a whole.

This is also an explanation as to why they're incredibly stupid criticisms, and unless there is actual, direct evidence that the work is being copied or stolen, it is not, as such "critics" want to call it, "ripping off" anybody.

(Long read)

Star Wars (1977) is considered by many to be the world's first real blockbuster, with such sensation and hype that even over thirty years since its original release date, it reminds a key figure in our pop culture and media today. In every form or fashion, Star Wars was groundbreaking in terms of cinematic storytelling and movie-going experience.

But Star Wars is nothing new.

George Lucas, the creator, has discussed many times over the years just how precisely the world of Star Wars came to be, and its origins go back much, much farther than you think.

George Lucas claimed that the idea of Star Wars was inspired by Flash Gordon serials, a comic book series that was turned into a TV show in the 1930s. The famous title crawl that appears at the beginning of every Star Wars movie?

Look familiar?

It is also a pretty well known fact that the Galactic Empire and Rebels, along with the battle scenes within the movies, also take heavy inspiration from WWII. Stormtroopers are German Gestapo, the X-Wings and TIE Fighters are inspired by WWII aerial combat: https://youtu.be/msb8OdvBBjU

There is a clear right and wrong that is written into the Star Wars universe, and that most assuredly comes from the material and real world events that George Lucas was inspired by; serial comics and shows of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, leaned heavily into black and white morality. This is why superheroes from that era like Superman or Batman were originally written as static characters. "Superman is invincible, that's not as interesting as the X-Men struggling with their place in society!" Well, yeah, that's because Superman was meant to be nothing more than a comic book character that allows children to act out their power fantasy- "you can't make me go to bed, mom! Superman doesn't go to bed!" etc. etc.

But Star Wars has inspiration that goes back even further than the 1930s. It goes back to ancient Mesopotamia.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the world's oldest and most notable form of literature that we know of. It is an epic that describes the heroic journey of one Gilgamesh, told in five parts. This is the earliest known example of what is known as "The Hero's Journey" in literature.

If you have any knowledge of the first movie of Star Wars, you're well aware of the story beats that you can read out in this diagram, as well be able to distinguish the similarities it has with The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Does this mean that Star Wars ripped off The Epic of Gilgamesh?

No. It doesn't. Because even though the story shares similar story beats, and features a black-and-white morality, a sci-fi space opera is a far cry from ancient Mesopotamian gods battling with each other. George Lucas didn't read the epic in school and decide "ah ha! I know how I'm going to make money!"

He was inspired, and he took that inspiration and created a multi-billion dollar franchise that millions love across the globe. He wrote that story and directed that movie, he put in the blood, sweat (lots of sweat- they filmed in Tunisia) and tears to make something WHOLLY NEW, and yet in some ways...similar.

Humans are very complex creatures, and our brain loves nothing more than finding patterns in things. Why is there such a thing as the Rule of Three in literature, a rule that dictates the satisfaction the reader gets when a story has a plot that occurs in three parts? Why is there traditionally only three acts? It is, simply put, satisfying. This traditional three-part structure often times creates stories that may look or feel similar simply because of how it is structured. This is not copying. This is a literature technique that humans have been using since the beginning of language itself.

And this is why I have such a problem with the people suggesting that authors are "copying" popular works- no one solely invented story beats, no one invented the supernatural fiction, no one, singular person, solely created the concepts that we are using today. No one. Not a single thing written is wholly original.

Originality is overrated. We are products of our environment, our culture, our media we consume- if an IF writer has a story with vampires and other supernatural creatures, and the MC is a detective attempting to solve crimes, was that invented by the very popular Wayhaven Chronicles by Mishka Jenkins? No. Vampires in media are nothing new, detectives in media are nothing new, and if they so happen to exist in other stories, what of it? Did Mishka invent vampires? No. They're a cultural phenomenon that has existed in multiple civilizations at once. Did she invent detectives? Obviously not.

Mishka was inspired and so were countless of other IF writers to write a story that involved the supernatural. These IF writers may have similar story beats, they may have similar themes, but that does not make it copying.

You know what makes Star Wars or The Wayhaven Chronicles or any other form of entertaining media great? Innovation.

It is how the authors tell the story, and why it is being written that creates such vast differences in genres. Star Wars isn't The Epic of Gilgamesh because its just "in space", it is the magnificent, innovative storytelling behind Star Wars that makes it so unique in our minds. The cinematography, the storytelling, the dialogue, the acting- all of that hard work into making something worthwhile and good is what makes it so unique when comparing it to other media that feature the literary use of "The Hero's Journey".

We all have something to bring to the table, to tell our stories that have a piece of us inside them. They are influenced by our laughter, our tears, our horror, our love, our rage or terrible indifference. They are influenced by our passions, our delusions, and they are written because we wish it to be so.

Are all impressionists copying Monet because he popularized impressionism? Are all artists who paint in similar styles copying off of the one who created the style in the first place? No. They're not.

To accuse IF authors, particularly the INNOCENT ones of copying others is an unbelievably insulting and ignorant statement that disregards the author's creativity and free will to write whatever the hell they want. If all you have to see out of a story is the basic, bare bones elements to it, then allow me to speak for all IF authors out there and say:

You're missing the fucking point!

We've all put our hard work into not only LEARNING a coding language (which, surprise, not ALL of us know and have to spend HOURS figuring out) but we've learned a coding language to create a game for other people to enjoy, and we'll be damn fucking lucky if we're able to get any money off of our work that we have put in it.

This criticism becomes a form of entitlement real fast, as if a reader has any say as to the pace or way an IF story (or any art for that matter) is written.

Most of us are doing this because we love the idea of putting our work out there as an IF fiction for fun. Some of us have to work jobs, some of us have complicated lives that demand constant attention, some of us wish to do this as a living, but all of us?

All of us deserve the courtesy of being a creator that is sharing their work with the world.

The next time you decide to accuse an IF writer of copying another person, ask yourself if it's legitimate plagiarism or you're just someone who doesn't have the capacity to consider that literary themes, tropes, cliches, and genres, are not the same thing as "copying".

[shihalyfie]

I think Jeff Nimoy and Bob Buchholz are the ones most responsible for ruining the 02 dub. They like to claim that it was Saban and network interference that made them add all those "jokes", but I think they're two-faced liars. Nimoy has bragged in various articles about how much fun he had in adding all those terrible one-liners to the movie, even though he also says that they were "forced" to do so. Which one is it, Jeff?

I think both are true. Or I suppose another way to put it is that while I think Jeff and Bob were definitely proud of the things they added, on the other hand, the situation was also very obviously exacerbated on the Saban/Fox end and would not have improved a single bit even if completely different writers were in charge. Mainly because of the following:

The biggest obvious one is that this practice was extremely common not just to Jeff and Bob but also a vast number of other writers and companies in the industry. This was just "the accepted norm", and not doing this might have gotten your work pinned as unusual or boring (by others in the industry at least, I think the kids would have been fine). There's a reason 4Kids is the one with the infamous reputation of doing this, not Saban, and you can probably notice how fandoms like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball will have similar original vs. dub fights.

If you know anything about Haim Saban (the CEO of Saban Entertainment and later Saban Brands), you can find a whole bunch of unpleasant things about his attitude about the Japanese material he was working with (in particular, he was basically mocking the same tokusatsu he was adapting to Power Rangers). The issue goes way beyond just Jeff and Bob.

Notably, when Jeff worked on Digimon for any other company besides Saban, the dub changes got significantly less off-the-rails. Digimon dubbing shifted to Disney in the last portion of Tamers, and said portion of Tamers, all of Frontier and Data Squad, and the fourth through seventh Digimon movies (which were done during this period) are much closer to the original, and at the very least are not at the level of severe "character became unrecognizable and plot fell apart" that Adventure and 02 got even if a few jokes and tonal changes were added here and there (Jeff’s background from that era of dub writing still shows, so that’s why it’s apparent he does somewhat enjoy this style of writing). There's very good reason I've seen dub-only people cite that Davis still felt strangely different and "unusually nice" with Revenge of Diaboromon and Kizuna -- because the disparity between Davis in the original 02 dub and Davis in dubs that were obviously closer to the Japanese version was that apparent. Also, Frontier was still done in the same era as the others, so you can't even pin this on changing of the times alone...

...especially since Digimon Fusion, on the other hand, was completely off the rails even to the point dub-only people in Digimon fandom often don't have it in them to defend it, despite having been done in 2013. By this point, Saban was infamous for being stuck in the past and doing these kinds of outdated dubbing practices (see their handling of Power Rangers and PreCu...uh, Glitter Force in the same era). That one was squarely Saban, albeit technically rebranded from Entertainment to Brands, but nevertheless still under original leadership, and there's no other explanation why this particular company had to be so completely off the rails with what it was doing in an era where most others weren't.

Incidentally, Power Rangers fans can also apparently attest that there was a massive shift in direction from Saban to Disney to Saban again (although you’d be better off asking a fandom member there since the wars over which era was best can get pretty nasty), so there is undoubtedly some corporate or directional culture going on here no matter how you look at it.

In the end, when a problem is systematic like this, I don't tend to concern myself about which person specifically was responsible for what, because it's too obvious changing only one part of the process wouldn't have helped -- like, for instance, some of the tri. scriptwriters have said some honestly kind of appalling things about the original series, but we also have it on record that even when they were trying to be conscientious, the director still rejected their scripts anyway, so the end result is I can only conclude "it is what it is, and all I can do is deal with the fact the end product exists no matter what else I do." It's not like we ever have a chance of getting a redub given how much the fandom worships it (and the only comparable situation I can think of is Sailor Moon, which is on a completely different scale and still has people refusing to acknowledge the new one because it's not the one in their childhood). This is why I'm personally less concerned about trying to point fingers at who was responsible and more about the fact that even 20 years later you still have people claiming the dub didn't have significant changes or didn't have severely adverse effects on how well 02 holds up (or get kind of culturally insensitive at times). I really do understand the feelings of people who have it so close to their hearts that they can't completely dismiss it, regardless of whatever negative things went on back there, but I think the fandom way of putting it on such a sacred cow's pedestal -- to the point you're not allowed to have criticisms about its impact on the series without being taken as making an attack on people who like it -- really didn't need to be dragged out for 20 years, and I think that's a fandom problem more than it is a problem with the original source that we can't do anything about.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[cowboylarries]

Ok you asked me to do h&l as cars characters and that shitpost is in the works but i know you heard @swimmingleo in the tags

I raise you: ot5 as cars. Enlighten us all please. Extra points for aesthetic value.

you asked and i am delivering. although im not sure if i can top your answer to mine. sorry to everyone who hates us by now, but this is the last one and then we will be out of your grill (get it?).

alright. ot5 as cars under the cut. leave if you hate cars.

starting us off is niall! mater is the obvious choice here. i fully believe in my heart that they are the same.

mater loves having fun and is goofy and makes people laugh, just like niall. he has his sensitive spots and he is in touch with his emotions, although i can't be certain to say the same for niall. mater loves backwards driving and tractor tipping and you can't convince me that niall wouldn't try tractor tipping if someone asked. also, a direct quote from the cars wiki says, "[Mater] is also a very non-judgemental person" which goes hand in hand with niall's hit, no judgment. plus flicker is country, i don't care what anyone else says.

next up is liam! he is mack without a shadow of a doubt.

just look at those grins!! mack is the most loyal and selfless character in the movie because he agrees to drive across the country with no sleep so that lightning can make it to the race track first even though he knows he's going to fall asleep. he also pushes lightning to fulfill his sponsorship with rust-eze even though lightning hates it which feels like big lima cap energy (not me bringing astrology into this). mack likes to have fun while on the job but he doesn't let it distract him (for the most part). also liam is the most built out of the boys and mack is an 18-wheeler so it feels right.

okay zayn's turn. he was hard to pin down because i couldn't quite decide what direction i wanted it to go in. but ultimately i decided on doc hudson.

so hear me out. doc is the most private character in the movie and he doesn't talk about his past to anyone. he is friendly enough to the people living in his town but he doesn't like the idea of opening up to strangers. i feel like zayn is the same way. he is very private, like living on a farm in rural pa private but he enjoys spending his time with his family and the people that mean a lot to him. also doc doesn't say much but when he does, you better listen. both of them like to have fun too but it has to be on their terms with their selected people. also that 2014 amas curl is just giving me doc hudson.

okay here come the hardest parts. i agree that fillmore is harry, like those doe eyes are almost too much BUT when i first sent the ask to you i had someone else in mind. flo. harry is flo.

i mean just look at her. and maybe it's just the fine line era outfits that have me mesmerized but you can't deny there's some similarity here. flo is kind and cares a lot about her customers that come to her cafe and even though she is a transplant, she cares about radiator springs a lot too. she is very helpful to others and is always looking out for her friends. her license plate reads "SHO GRL" which just makes sense with harry being the pop princess that he is. they both can get a bit sassy if needed, but everyone knows that they care about them deep down. also take a look at those tailfins!

and last but certainly not least is louis. he was another tricky one to pin down but then i saw him next to sally and my mind was made up.

sally is passionate and committed to her cause of restoring radiator springs no matter what just like i can imagine that louis is with anything he puts his mind to. she is a transplant to radiator springs who missed the heyday of the neon and she is dedicated to making it a place on the map again. also she calls lightning "stickers", who else calls their love interest by nicknames only?? they are both often judged and underestimated by others only to prove them wrong. and once you get past that hard exterior, there's a soft human on the inside (manifesto, in case you didn't get the reference). also did i mention the baby blues?????!!!? AND the ass tatts??

whew. it's a lot to take in but i'm glad you asked because i wholeheartedly stand by every point i made here. boogity boogity bitches.