#i wonder if there will be another delay between the physical release and the digital release though…

[deus-ex-mona]

winter 2k24, huh~~~~~~ _(:3 」∠)_

[ncitygirls]

pink - mark x gn reader

fluff, smut, cw: submissive!mark, 2k

The concept of colour is an intriguing one. Much like seeing, seeing itself is intriguing. Intriguing as well is the notion that seeing is believing when the blind trust so fiercely. They must trust the yellow of the sun resembles the middle of daisies, and runny yolk. They must trust the red of a ruby resembles that of flowing blood. They must trust that at any given time, the blue painting the skies can resemble that of bluebells, blueberries, and all blue things.

The concept of colour is not an admissible one. It is convoluted and complex. The pink of a rose, of a poked eye, of a healing wound, of a stained linen. They all contain a bounty of hues; some dimmer, paler, or truer than others. They all carry their own meaning, things we assign and ascribe to an item; be it clothing, furniture, text. The point to all this is, you do not think you will ever be able to truly explain how perfect the pink that colours Mark’s lips is. You try every morning you are fortunate to wake beside him - when you are first to wake that is. You peel open your eyes one by one, blinking away sleep and tears from the strobes scorching your corneas, falling victim to the allure of sunlight that lures you from your dreams, only to wake to another.

Pink. It is too simple a word to describe the creases in his lips that sit a couple shades darker, not enough to call magenta nor red. Every morning, you ache to run your fingers along the ridges, to rouse him from sleep, punish him like the rising sun did you. You never do. You lay there, watching as silent breaths cause the rise and fall of your lover’s chest, perturbed by the riddle that curses you every other morning.

How does one describe the indescribable?

It is your job no? To spread word of such wonder. A man who proves the existence of a higher power. A man whose face cannot be a product of the algorithms of colliding comets, nor of destiny. Hands of an omniscient being carved this face, moulded him into the wonder that you wake to every morning. That pink is not just pink. It is a perfect combination of the richest red and a waxen white. God needn’t have spent long, given his almightiness, but he did spend more time than on others. For that reason you think it selfish to waste this time, to roll out of bed and busy yourself with the trivial, menial tasks of readying for work. No, you must solve this riddle. You must find a way to proclaim what you have thought since the very first moment you laid eyes on Mark Lee.

“How are you real?”

One glance and he knew you hadn’t meant to ask it aloud. It is a regular action you do in regards to him; thanking God for the blessing that was Mark Lee’s creation. It occurs at all hours of the day, both verbal and non verbal, physical and non-physical alike. Whether it be the sudden airiness in your laughter, or twirling strands of his hair betwixt your fingers. Every time your eyes settle on his face, your senses heighten while your sense diminishes.

“Morning, angel,” he mumbles, tugging you from your angelic pose on his chest and pulling your lips to his. He offers you just a press, but should it be your last, it would still be enough. Mornings spent in his company always make for an easier start, one full of wistful goodbyes but wishful hellos. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes,” your lips fall to his toned pec, offering scattered pecks. “Did you?”

Mark hums groggily, head falling to his pillow, failing to follow your sudden flurry of kisses. He finds the energy to speak just as your lips closed around his hardened nipple, as you begin to suck ever so slightly. His hands find your hips, clinging onto your frame as you kiss a path down his chest, marking his skin on your descent. “It’s almost eight,” he regrets to inform you, wishing nothing more than to enjoy this extended dream. “Won’t you be late?”

You show no signs of stopping, journeying south at a most leisurely speed. He relinquishes his hold on you, instead finding purchase in the bed linens, his fingers clasping around the duck down feathers. When your lips suddenly leave him, Mark fears the worst, that his reminder had a delayed effect. That is reluctant warning, seemingly good deed is now working against him. He soon finds his concerns were in vain as your lips close around the clothed head of his cock, sucking long and hard on the darkened material. His hips rise toward your mouth, chasing the stimulation you offer up to the deity beneath you, the one you call Mark. The one you call yours.

Your fingers grip his waistband, slowly lowering the material to the tops of his calves. His hot length meets the cool air with a hiss, his jaw tightening as you offer a languid tug from his base to his tip. A strangled moan fills the air, coating either end of your name. As you slowly pump him within your closed fist, you admire how the morning light always caught the beautiful tone of his arms, the shadows casting over his chest. He is more firm beneath your palm, more concrete, more real. When he casts his gaze toward you finally, finding some room for restraint within your steady pace, he allows himself to admire the gentle knit of your brows, the smirk upturning your lips as his breathing changes when you tighten your fist. He gasps when your eyes fly back up to his, your fist stilled at the base of his abdomen, a silent question in your eyes, a small lick at your lips.

He nods, watching you lower your weight, resting on his tensed thighs. He is breathless, eyes stuck on the plumpness of your lips, your pink tongue sweeping over your bottom one, teeth catching the skin as you run your closed fist over his cock once more, gripping tighter as he mewls.

Words escape him as he offers up devout concentration to his breathing, praying he does not crumble under the warmth of your touch and sweetness in your eyes. His eyes squeeze shut when you thumb his slit, a hard shudder passing through his bones, his hips bucking in time with your closed fist. Mark whines beneath you, the patience he forces is admirable, his whitened knuckles gleam as they blend in with the cloud of sheets. And still you wait, feeling his skin burn as his precum gathers in your palm, squelching in the air.

“Minhyung,” you breathe suddenly, fearful you might shatter the moment. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah,’ he chokes out in response. ‘I want you, please.’

You chortle at his sweet plea, capturing the skin of his thigh in a slow kiss as you pump him harder, puckering your lips along the skin at his base as his thrusts start to increase. “Slow down for me,” you whisper. Mark loves what you are doing, reducing him to the shell of himself as you lure his first orgasm of the day from him. He grips your hand then, ready to chase a release he knows you will not give him.

“Please,” he begs softly, skin a flaming pink, lined by the morning light and in a light dew.

Pressing a final, fleeting kiss to his tip he wishes to chase, you release him, drawing his brows together as you slow down before climbing off of his lap. He frowns as you kneel beside the bed before patting his shin, “come ‘ere.”

He bites his tongue, stuffing it in his cheek, “I know you’re teasing me.”

“No,” you laugh, “you’re just impatient,” you coo, watching as he follows your instruction anyway, shuffling to the edge of the bed. You tug his pants down to his ankles before you are hovering over his cock, admiring the gleam as the light reflects off his slick head. He sighs as you do, your breath cooling his angry tip, a twitch running through his cock as you just hover. He almost whines again when you pucker around his slit, the tip of your tongue passing over it ever so slightly.

His sweet moans fill the air, his breaths laboured as you tease him, lapping at his shaft as he toys with your hair, moving it aside so he can see you. He watches you take him, burying his lithe cock between the hot confines of your mouth before sucking around him, humming as he mewls beneath you. He assigns no time to keeping himself together, instead admiring how quickly you render him powerless. How you swirl your tongue around him, pump him as you suckle on his head, swallowing around him. He is completely at your mercy, his cum threatening to pour down your throat as you push on his abdomen, sending his back into the mattress. He huffs as he falls, sighing as his stolen release is remedied by your cool, slick coated finger prodding at his puckered hole.

His moans are unintelligible, garbled mumbles filling the air as you glide your finger into his ass, curling ever so slightly as you pump the digit. “I think I-,” he starts, unsure how, or just unable to finish.

“It’s okay, Mark,” you breathe on his cock, curling your finger harder with every suck you offer his leaking tip. “It’s okay, you can come.”

“Fuck- I’m-” his voice escapes him before he can help it, the mere thought of it forcing you to suck harder. His release tears through him like molten iron, encrusting his every nerve, setting him alight. His cum coats your throat as he bucks into your mouth, your name barely comprehensible as it pours from his lips. It is pleading, prayer like, something you repel. It was Mark who was God like. Mark who was heavenly.

He humps up into your mouth while grinding down on your finger, milking himself, using you, silently forbidding himself to succumb to the oversensitivity of his orgasm. He clings onto the nape of your neck, lodging his tip in the back of your throat while chasing the finger pressed beautifully to his prostate as his mind and body struggle to process the endless limits of his pleasure, though the two can agree it rests in your hands.

When he is somewhat present, Mark quickly recognises your figure lying by his side, your unsoiled hand massaging the expanse of his chest. He gazes up at you with fatigue in his eyes, and a sickly adoration. And something else he thinks he is ready to name.

“Y/N?” Mark calls, still a little breathless, failing to notice the way your eyes catch the time. “I think I-”

“Shit, it’s past nine! Mark, I have to go.”

You disappear down the hall, your presence made known only by a flurry of rushed sounds before you return in the peachy pink shirt you left behind last time. He can’t figure out how it looks better on you every time he sees it. Much like the pink of your lips when circling his cock or the more innocent pink lining your tired eyes. Even the pink hearts that fly around your head as he watches you rush around the room, glancing at him every so often, laughing to find him still watching you. Each time you do, he sees that nothing beats the colour of the red raw love he feels for you. Mark hopes to tell you this some other beautiful morning. For now, he smiles against your lips as you bids him farewell before letting him return to his slumber.

He dreams only of you.

[bitchesgetriches]

Noble citizens of the aspirationally decadent Conglomerated Nation of Bitches Get Riches: let’s have a lil’ chat, shall we? It’s been a while since we chatted about our favorite topic: ourselves!

We hope you’ve enjoyed season two of the Bitches Get Riches podcast. Recording it was a bright spot for us during this dumpster fire of a year, so thank you all for listening.

As we wrap up another season, we had a few notes to share with you. Including some more personal reflections about how we’re doing, where we’re at, and what the future holds.

Let’s get into it!

Merch is back online

If you visited our Etsy shop in the last few months, you might’ve noticed the physical merch—tee shirts and coffee mugs and tote bags and such—wasn’t listed anymore. Basically, when lockdowns started, it caused a lot of disruption and delays on orders. Not wanting people to be stuck waiting for stuff, we decided to take it all offline, and only offer digital merch.

As of today, we’ve reactivated everything! But please keep in mind that there may still be delays, depending on what’s happening in the world! We appreciate your patience, if patience is indeed called for.

Visit Our Etsy Shop

Season one transcripts

Next, we wanted to let you guys know that we now have transcripts available for season one of the Bitches Get Riches podcast!

We’re committed to making BGR as accessible as we possibly can. We know that some people can’t hear, or struggle to absorb information aurally, so transcripts were something we’ve always wanted to offer.

… But, you know, at the end of the day, we’re just two people! Transcribing and editing audio is time- and labor-intensive work, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day for us to do it along with the fifteen million other things we have to do.

We were able to offer season one transcripts thanks entirely to A Purple Life, a peerlessly talented and wonderful fellow blogger who selflessly made it happen. (If you don’t already read her stuff, you’ve already disobeyed us, as we commanded you to in 10 Rad Black Money Experts to Follow Right the Hell Now. And for that, we’re strongly considering smiting you.)

We’re incredibly thankful to Purple for her hard work on this. But we also feel strongly that this DESERVES to be paid work! So the release of season two transcripts is dependent on getting more Patreon donors to offset funding it.

Season 1, Episode 1: “Should I Tell My Boss I’m Looking for Another Job?”

Season 1, Episode 2: “How Should I Behave on My First Day at Work?”

Season 1, Episode 3: “My Parents Have Bad Credit. Should I Help by Co-signing Their Mortgage?”

Season 1, Episode 4: “Capitalism Is Working for Me. So How Could I Hate It?”

Season 1, Episode 5: “I Don’t Love My Job, but It Pays Well. Should I Quit—or Tough It Out?”

Season 1, Episode 6: “I Lent My Boyfriend Money. He Took It to a Casino.”

Season 1, Episode 7: “I’m Terrible at Budgeting. Do I Suck It Up—Or Is There Another Way?”

Season 1, Episode 8: “My Mother Demands Information About My One-Night Stands.”

Season 1, Episode 9: “I’ve Given up on My Dream Career. Where Do I Go From Here?”

Season 1, Episode 10: “I Want a Pedigreed Dog. She Wants a Rescue Mutt. It Turned into a Fight… and the Fight Got Ugly.”

Season 1, Episode 11: “I Feel Cornered by a Friend Who Keeps Asking to Borrow Money.”

Season 1, Episode 12: “Should I Believe the Fear-Mongering about Another Recession?”

Bonus Episode: Merry Bitchmas! The 2019 Star-Studded Holiday Spectacular

For transcripts, scroll to the bottom of each episode and click “episode transcript.” Or read them directly in the podcast player of your choice!

Podcast reviews

We also super wanted to thank all the people who’ve etched their names in blood upon the dusty pages of our dark grimoire written reviews for the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and other places!

We are beyond flattered by the kind things you guys have said about us. Like MoonPetalLily, who described us as “the snarky older sisters [they] wish [they] had.”

FunshineKelly said our “advice helped [them] land a $20k raise and a signing bonus without crying even a little bit.” GOOD! We don’t support tears in the workplace! Not even in the sanctity of your car parked way in the corner of the parking lot. Keep it together!

And God bless MelHubbs, who said, and I quote:

They’re prepared, and still relaxed; informative, and still light-hearted; comforting, and still sexual. It’s everything you could ever want in a podcast, in an internet personality, in your sisters-in-arms against the terrible war between capitalism and what humans actually need to survive & thrive. One of my favorite things about them is that they don’t have any corporate sponsors or ads, so you know what they’re saying is what they mean, not what their advertisers want them to say. If you’re able, support them on Patreon! If you’re not, listen to their podcast, take their advice to heart, reflect on your options, make your moves, then, with your newfound financial independence, become a patreon!

MelHubbs, you joyful sonnet!

Your review is so good that it reads suspiciously like something we paid you to write! But we’re too cheap for that—IT REAL!

Bitches Get Riches at the crossroads

All right. Time to level with you guys.

In keeping with 2020’s overarching theme (“everything is pure shit”), this year has become a real “shit or get off the pot” moment for the two of us.

Although I’m comfortable and doing fine, Piggy is still unemployed. And last week she received the last unemployment check she’s entitled to. It sucks. And it’s scary.

Being a partnership is awesome in almost every way. But one way that it sucks is that we have to earn double the amount of money to be truly profitable! (And no, before you ask, it’s not possible for us to only pay Piggy. Believe me, that was our original plan—but it turns out that’s not allowed in a 50/50 legal partnership. We must pay ourselves equally, or Uncle Sam will spank us. And he doesn’t do it in the sexy way—only the traumatic way!)

Piggy is doing okay for now. She has freelancing work, and an intact emergency fund. But understandably, anxiety and worry take their toll. She’s pushing through it, but it’s hard. Creativity and passion can’t thrive for long without some measure of safety and stability.

During these scary times, our Patreon community has been a lifeline. As more and more of you have joined us, it’s slowly crept up from grocery money to grocery and utility bill money! So thank you, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts thank you to those who’ve stepped up and joined.

But we’re kind of at a crossroads. Because of Piggy’s situation, we really need it to become “paying the mortgage” money. And it’s gotta get there pretty fast. Otherwise, it’s just not fair to ask Piggy to invest so much of her time in Bitches Get Riches, when she could be taking on higher paying freelancing work to keep herself afloat.

And trust me, you do not want a BGR that’s too Kitty-heavy. I am longwinded af, slowly losing my abilities to think and spell, and take every possible detour to inject disgusting sexual comments wherever they are least germane (although idk maybe you’re here for that).

Our new goal for ourselves, and you

With all of that in mind, we have a new goal: to produce season three of our podcast, we need 500 total Patreon donors.

Today we have… 294. So that’s, uhhhhh… a really ambitious goal!

It’s probably too ambitious. We’re probably gonna fail. Who cares, it’s 2020! The planet is on fire and god is already dead, so we have no reason not to give it our all!

We are leaving this in your hands. We—Piggy and I—believe that the world would be a better place if people could hear reliable, relatable financial wisdom funded by regular people, untainted by corporate sponsors with deep pockets who want us to push their capitalist crap upon you. And 294 of you have already demonstrated that you believe that too. Thank you, thank you, infinity thank yous to all of you who are already a part of our Patreon community. You are shining stars that smell faintly of vanilla.

For the rest of you: if you like what we do and you want us to keep doing it, please show us that you believe in it too. You can do that by joining us at the Bitches Get Riches Patreon.

We hope to be back soon for a third season. Until then, stay safe, stay sane, wear your masks, triple-check that you’re registered to vote, and save room for dessert. (What’s for dessert? So glad you asked—it’s the rich!)

For now, Bitches OUUUTTTTT!

Join the Bitches on Patreon

Join the Bitches on Patreon

[meimi-haneoka]

About chapter 44 of Clear Card (the last one for a while)

Gif of the month:

After my post with the differences between the Japanese and English versions of Chapter 44, here I come with my usual commentary! Just sorry for the big delay...This one is gonna be the last one for a while, at least until beginning of August....wondering why? Because as I exposed in my previous post, my interpretation was confirmed: on the next issue of Nakayoshi they’re going to publish a short story (without a full chapter), and Chapter 45 will only be published in the September issue of Nakayoshi, out on beginning of August! So the digital release on the Clamp-fans website is set for August 1st.

I know. It’s gonna be a lot to wait out, after such a....peculiar chapter.

And under the cut I’ll tell you about it!

A shady Yukito

This is the first time ever that we see Yukito being this serious, this shady, this “opaque”. We’ve always seen him like a naive and happy-go-lucky character, but his personality had a slight development already in the Sakura Card Arc, with his realization of what he really is and what matters in his life right now.  Now we see him acting on those feelings, feelings that made him grow an increasing need to do something for the people he loves. We have seen him wondering what he COULD DO, concretely do to help those people....and now we know. Sakura noticed the very moment it happened: Yukito called forth a spell, which turned into night time a limited area around his neighbourhood. They’re all confused, Sakura of course, but Kero and Suppi most of all, so much that they immediately turn into their real forms and stand in a protective way in front of Sakura. I’d just like to pause for a moment in front of this scene, and take in the loyalty, devotion those two have for Sakura (and she isn’t even the master of one of them!). They knew there was something wrong with that moon in the sky, and they were ready to jump at Yukito’s throat if it turned out he was doing something malicious. Sakura is so important to them that they would probably trust no one when it comes to her safety. Back to the chapter, Yukito calmly says he’s available to explain everything to Sakura, and Nakuru helps them getting a little privacy, while explaining what’s going on to the two guardians, who have gone back to their plushie forms.

Yukito’s agency

And so (personally I was quite amazed by this) we find out that Yukito has been thinking about the possibility of doing something for the people he loves, the only people he has a strong connection to (since he’s got no parents as he’s not even a human being), ever since the end of Sakura Card Arc. He spoke to Kaho about the powers of the Tsukimine Shrine, and got info on how to obtain them. And all of this fits so naturally (because of course it makes sense that Yukito would go say goodbye to Eriol and Kaho on his own, why not, it’s totally plausible) into the old plot that I can’t help but silently clap my hands at CLAMP for including this in the creases of the old established canon without feeling like a stretch. As I said in my previous post, Kaho didn’t seem very keen on answering his question, but in the end she did. And now Yukito thought it was the right time to put to good use what he learned that day. When we saw him going to the Tsukimine Shrine with Nakuru some chapters ago, he went there to sign a contract with the Shrine itself. Now Yukito is invested with divine moon powers, straight from the divinity of the shrine, and he’ll be able to share the consciousness when he turns into Yue, as well as deciding when he’s turning into Yue.

Sakura’s face, throughout the story, seems to lose color. Yes, we can’t see her complexion, and yet the more Yukito tells, the more she grows worried. I’ll point it out now, but save for one small panel (and at a distance), Sakura won’t smile even once in this chapter. No, not even once. Even when, in theory, one would expect her to, because she gained a magical ally. And the reason is obvious: she’s not stupid. She knows, somehow, that when you make a contract, even of a magical nature, you’re going to give something in return. And this is exactly what makes her so unsettled. The fact that Yukito won’t say what he gave in return makes it all the worse. (Jfc I’m so, so worried about this). Another thing that I certainly have to talk about is the depiction of how close Sakura and Yukito are, in this chapter. There’s lots of physical contact, but not in a romantic way of course, there’s a lot of emotional tension going on, Sakura cares deeply for Yukito and Yukito’s behavior is halfway between a devoted brother and a knight who swore his life to protect the people he cares about. I have to be honest, the first 5 seconds of seeing them holding hands like that almost made me jealous, but then I understood why: the intensity of their relationship could almost be mistaken for something more, some kind of romantic vibe. But I realized immediately that nothing was out of place here, and CLAMP were able to portray their relationship in a very direct and convincing manner: they just love eachother like family so much. The “I’m gonna tell my brother” thing made me smile, while at the same time feeling Sakura’s frustration for not being able to “scold” Yukito like she wanted to (and like she did with Syaoran, but see, there lies the difference of the feelings for her: Sakura knows that her brother is the person who’s got the strongest bond to Yukito, and so she relays on Touya to knock some sense into him, while she is the one who gets more affected by Syaoran’s attempts to suicide to protect her, so she’s the one getting “angry” at him). The only thing that bothered me a little is that the “pinky promise” was kind of a SyaoSaku thing, since in the old manga/anime it was such a recurring sweet moment between those two. And nothing, there goes the “exclusivity” of the pinky promise for those two. XD At this point I expect something even more emotional for SyaoSaku, CLAMP!

A new Clear Card

The pinky promise triggers an unexpected event: the birth of a new Clear Card. It must mean that to Sakura, that promise meant so so much. In fact, she hopes that this new card will be able to help Yukito, somehow.

And punctual as always, Kaito detects what just happened. The card, and Yukito’s new powers too. He comments on Sakura having so many allies, while he’s all alone in his mission. Momo’s words, “Do you really think you’re all alone?”, express all the pain and sadness of the white book guardian for the current situation, a situation in which she would probably want to scream at him but she just can’t, and yet Kaito’s answer is like a knife in the flesh: “Always been and always will be”. And, as if on cue, Akiho appears right in that moment, wanting to help Kaito with the dinner. Once again, CLAMP skillfully try to tell us something without using direct words, but rather a “direction choice”: Kaito thinks he’s alone, but he doesn’t realize that not only Momo, but *especially* Akiho too is with him. There’s someone who constantly thinks about him, wants to do nice things for him, someone who’s got feelings for him.....and so we, as readers, can feel even more the absurdity of his blind statement “I’m alone”. The way the chapter ends, with Akiho stating (to be honest I am just a bit confused on how to interpret what she says, as I said in my last post) that she keeps seeing Alice in her dreams every night, and that she keeps getting new powers, with her wand and cards, is kinda reminding us that we’re getting nearer and nearer to the moment in which everything will be revealed, especially with that seconds hand on the watch starting to move again. So that’s it, for now! At the end of this month we’ll get a special short chapter, for which I’m not sure I’ll do the recap & comments post (depending on the relevance of the short story itself), and then we’ll get a break. It’s gonna be long, but eventually the story will be back! Let’s hope during these months there will be some nice announcement, hahaha (and not like the sudden drop of Happiness Memories, which will shut down on June 30th, have you heard???).

Waiting for your comments as usual, of course!

[the-dragonblood-clan]

3/27: Patch expands the game

It feels like Inti Creates rushed an unfinished game out to avoid having to delay its release any longer, but given that this just put them directly into competition with Kingdom Hearts 3, I doubt the wisdom of the decision.

They’re gradually completing the game through patches, and that’s not a good look. My copy of the game is purely digital, but I have to wonder how it works for someone with a physical copy.

Finally, you can have two separate save files, so that someone else can play their own set of the four characters separately from yours. This is a very late addition, since if you were splitting a save file by dividing the characters between you and someone else, I doubt there’s a way to transfer their character to the other save file.

That mysterious corner of the slums is finally opened up: A Black Market where you can trade for even better stuff than you can buy in Medius’s upper city. This involves a whole new subsystem where mob enemies drop special items; it would have been nice to have this system in place before the game launched so that we could have been collecting barter-drops on all the missions we’ve run up to this point.

Pagnus finally gets a second area; a volcano, of all things. It’s a neat change from the region’s icy character, and also fitting with the country founded on Atruum’s fire-breathing head. Asura Bats show up here, so Asura are no longer confined solely to Marlayus. There may be something evil deeper in the cave to blame for that, but the level is HUGE, so I haven’t reached the end yet.

It’s not just big, either. There is at least one special lock that requires two players to open, and other interactive obstacles where one player must elevate a platform for another player.

Similarly, the new quest in Marlayus has three locked doors in a row, requiring three keys. One can only be accessed by the Empress, so presumably the other two can only be gained by the Shinobi and Witch. The room they unlock is then blocked by an obstacle only the Warrior can knock down. Whatever is in that room may be a Flag that unlocks the rest of the Dragonblood Bandit scenario, since no new quest appears just from beating the mission alone. Unless the volcano level is somehow related, but I have my doubts.

Finally, there’s a radically new use for Dragonite. You can change a character’s Element to somewhat alter their strengths and weaknesses. The Empress can exchange Fire for Air; the Warrior can exchange Ice for Lightning; the Shinobi can exchange Poison for Fire; the Witch can exchange Poison for Ice.

This includes some buffs to the original elements; the Warrior’s tackle is now ice-elemental, and the Witch’s healing spells sound like they got better so that they’re not that much worse when she’s aspected to Ice.

[missixo]

St Balderich Slays the Dragon [16/20]

01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |(on tumblr)

This fic (on AO3)

Pairing: Balderich/Mondatta

Summary:  The humans are right to fear omnics and what they can do. What he can and will do to humanity. He is Jörmungandr, and he will see humanity fall.

Note: Sorry about the week-delay posting, guys :( Life... threw a couple curveballs recently. Lots of fun stuff.

St Balderich Slays the Dragon

Chapter 16

The following two months are a cold war. The men can all tell something happened, but none of them are brave - or insane - enough to ask. MD stays cooped up in the medbay and most of them are especially careful about injuries now because any gentle touch he might’ve acquired before is definitely gone, with interest. Intel recently came in about an upcoming omnium strike that has Balderich spending most of the days in his quarters. The lieutenants train his sponsorships for him while he stays trapped on vid conferences for hours at a time.

***

Week six of this nightmarish ‘strike coordination’ - seven since he last spoke to the omnic - and they are no closer to a plan than they were four weeks ago. If Balderich had hair, he’d be pulling it right now. Instead, he hasn’t stopped rubbing at his beard for three minutes in an attempt to keep himself calm. Another argument starts up between the Spanish and French commanders, the third one in two hours. The Dane pinches the bridge of his nose with a sigh and a mutter against their mothers that he can’t help but agree with at this point. Petras, the man supposedly in charge of coordinating this strike, attempts to get them back on track, but Balderich knows neither will listen to a man with no field experience; frankly, he isn’t too fond of the man either. He leaves Balderich feeling a little greasy.

A harsh bark of German shuts the pair up long enough to get back on topic for now. “Mister Petras, I know it has been brought up before, but knowing the location of this omnium would greatly increase our abilities to plan this strike, as well as some idea about the members of your ‘strike team.’ I still don’t fully understand why it is so important to keep us all in the dark.”

Petras releases a long-suffering sigh that manages to get directly under his skin. “Once again, Colonel von Adler, it’s nothing against you or any others present, it’s simply a matter of security, especially after the report the UN received concerning the hack into your base. The hacker still hasn’t been apprehended, and we don’t know what information was compromised. Best not to take any chances.”

He hums in response. He still wonders why he hasn’t simply told the UNSC about M--Jörmungandr. Perhaps his own pride and shame, that he brought the hacker under his own roof and would have remained clueless if the omnic hadn’t told him himself. That he continues to harbor him, protecting both of them from the fallout: dishonorable discharge for himself, and complete destruction for Jörmungandr. Years of service, wasted, because of one omnic that worked his way under his skin and into his bed.

In all honesty, that’s the true sticking point. The months spent cultivating a relationship, tainted as the memories are now, have a hand in keeping his mouth shut. The romantic in him refuses to believe that none of that was real, that that night wasn’t real. Jörmungandr was almost begging him to hate him the next morning. In his experience, that doesn’t come from a place of surety and confidence.

A vague plan goes on the digital map in front of him, hardly any attention given to the troop movements he’s drawing. Another argument sparks up at some point that he flat out ignores this time and continues with his lines and arrows, not sure if he’s coming up with garbage or genius at this point, but some of his best work has come out of utter distraction and gotten him where he is now.

Fifteen minutes later, he finally looks up to find the argument still ongoing, at this point devolved down to two old schoolmates who should’ve fallen into bed years ago to get rid of this tension between them.

“Mister Petras. I have a proposal I would like to put forward for review.”

Relieved is the only word that can describe Petras’s face as the Frenchman and Spaniard are finally put on mute. “Yes, Colonel von Adler? Please send it over and I’ll get back to you as soon as I have the UN Security Council’s answer.”

He sends it over to Petras’s device and the man scans it, shooting Balderich a considering look before the conference call is abruptly ended for the day.

‘Thank God above.’

***

A week of blessed silence goes by as he throws himself back into his training, spending extra time with his potential squires and on his own in the gym to make up for all the desk jockeying he’s been doing. The frustration of the past two months is bled off slowly through sweat and back breaking workouts. Each night finds him taking a brief shower after supper and falling face first into bed until reveille the next morning.

***

He has mail today, which is strange in and of itself, but the contents baffle him until after his first cup of coffee: a slip of paper with a string of numbers on it, a small data disk, a large coin that looks like a logo of some kind, and a letter of invitation.

Ah. Petras’s strike team. And what is likely the date of the strike itself; he supposes that means his proposal was well received.

He reads the letter multiple times over breakfast, taken in his room. When he’s done eating, he passes the coin from hand to hand as he stares at the simulation of the planned strike on his computer. Adjustments have been made, but it is definitely the rough outline he sent Petras. Now that he has more than lines of elevation, he can see it’s in his neck of the woods, so to speak, just inside the German border near France.

The coin is heavy in his hands, solid: a good representation, he thinks, of the responsibilities that come with it. Barring his… relationship… with Jörmungandr, he’s never shirked his duties. To be considered for a task force that has, according to rumors, already taken out three omniums in America is a high compliment.

He runs his thumb over the emblem and is reminded of silk smooth alloy under his hands - hot and strangely, gratifyingly alive - and round bruises dug into his back that have only just finished fading. His grip tightens around the coin before he sets it on his desk.

Before he leaves for this strike, he needs to have a chat that is now months overdue.

***

The omnic is distracted with giving Franco a physical before he goes on leave to visit his family when a knock sounds at his office door. “Come in.”

The door swishes open. “Is this a bad time?”

He pauses, slowly looking over to confirm he’s not hearing things before turning back to Franco. “Lieutenant, could you come back later today to finish your physical? I’m afraid the Colonel and I need to talk.”

Franco is already up and heading for the door. “Not a problem, really. Sir.” He nods a quick greeting and is gone, door shutting quietly behind him. The omnic turns to his computer to update the file.

“Why haven’t you activated your virus yet?” It’s said quietly, like he’s too tired to shout.

“Why haven’t you reported me to the UNSC yet?” Equally quiet, he’s not going to be the first one to break.

Balderich sits down on the exam stool and watches the omnic for a very long moment. Not once does the omnic turn to look at him. He slowly reaches and catches that golden jaw with a finger, gently turning him to make eye contact.

“What is your name?”

A whisper, unwillingly admitted. “... I don’t know.”

[sargenthouse]

Jaye Jayle interivew // Destroy//Exist

No Trail and Other Unholy Paths, the upcoming album by Jaye Jayle, follows the band's mighty impressive recent offerings, House Cricks and Other Excuses to Get Out, their debut full length from 2016, and The Time Between Us, a collaborative EP with Emma Ruth Rundle. There are a few points about it one could emphasize on right off the bat, like the fact that it was produced by David Lynch’s music supervisor of the last twelve years, Dean Hurley, that it features another collaboration with Rundle, and that it bears no specific beginning or ending, with its songs designed to be experienced in any sequence the listener chooses. 

Full interview via Destroy//Exist.

Jaye Jayle's Americana-noir sound has always been enticing, but never voiced better than how it is on the coming record. 

The multi-talented and cultivated Evan Patterson answers a few questions. 

What made you decide to put Young Windows aside and begin a project like Jaye Jayle with such a different sound and approach? 

Young Widows hasn't been put aside. I hold the songs and experiences very dear. Nick and Jeremy started families. The time available to create, write, and travel became infrequent. For many years prior to conceiving Jaye Jayle I had been wanting to make compositions that were based around stories or vocal melodies as the lead instrument. Lending the music to relax and settle down somewhere similar to that of film score. I've touched a bit on that concept and sound with Young Widows. 

Never thought of my music groups as being projects. Maybe when Jaye Jayle was first conceived it was more of a project. The process of creating as a group is such an emotional and personal investment. Each piece or song is more of the project within the group. 

How would you describe the band's present dynamic? And how has it advanced since the previous album? 

The group has a steady dynamic. Neal, Todd, Corey, and I spent the majority of our lives together in 2016 and 2017 touring. The closer we become the more advanced our communication through music becomes. Experimenting is much easier now, allowing the songs to be elaborated. House Cricks was a collection of songs from four different sessions. No Trail is consistent to a sound and mood composed as the group. 

What does Dean Hurley bring to the album's sound design? and how does his production complement the compositions? 

I believe that what Dean enjoys to hear in music is what I also enjoy to hear in music. We sent him a massive amount of tracks; Low Again Street had near 80 tracks to sift through. Dean had total creative control as the mixing producer. The result is a wide colorful spectrum of sounds. It's exciting to be able to work with him. 

There's great chemistry between Emma Ruth Rundle and yourself, evident on your prior collaborative EP and on Marry Us, a captivating song on the new album. Are there any other artists you'd imagine as ideal collaborators for Jaye Jayle? 

I'd loved to collaborate with more artists. Yes, more collaborations are must. It's preferred. I dreamt of asking Rachel Grimes if she'd like to collaborate on a piece or album, but have been delaying asking. Drew Miller's saxophone on the album is another perfect example of leaving sections of the composition open for additional collaborative improvised instrumentation. Honestly, I feel that even working with Dean is a collaboration. 

I had the pleasure of collaborating with Emma on her new album earlier this year. No hand in writing the songs, but total freedom to write the additional second guitar parts. Her album came out gorgeous. I'd also love to join more artists. 

Do you prefer physical media over digital? Are you a record collector? 

I prefer all formats and sources for anyone and everyone to listen to music. I just made a playlist on Spotify and was shocked by what all is available through that outlet. I am a record collector. I bought a record today by Flash and the Pan. Their song Walking in the Rain is perfect. The record was three dollars. I'm collecting Ennio Morricone scores. 

What are you currently listening to mostly? 

I've been listening to the score for the film Marco Polo by Ennio Morricone in the evenings. The album Time Was by Zomes has been a favorite for the past three years. Fela Kuti in the mornings. The two most recent PJ Harvey albums are regular listens while on the road. Tangerine Dream, Jim Reeves, Fred Neil, and Einstürzende Neubauten. 

Outside music, what other sources have had heavy impact on your creativity? 

A few. Looking above the rolling hills of Kentucky or the desert in New Mexico. Any elevated perspective or a landscape is inspiring. To see nature in all its beauty gives me a sense of clarity. Film is an big inspiration. Phantom Thread was great. I've also been doing my best to see more visual art around Louisville. There's a few museums in town that are curating some fantastic exhibits. 

The new album's cover looks wonderful, rather abstract at first glance and ultimately pretty bleak. What made you choose that image to represent the music? 

There is something relieving and yet tortured with the image. Placed between the lightness and darkness of nature. It's a balance between those two worlds. Stuck between the heavens and the hells of mental health. 

Having the songs on the record arranged to be non-linear and interchangeable is a very interesting approach, and not something we encounter often. What made you decide to design the LP that way? 

The concept came to me from feeling that regardless of my options and my choices in life, regardless of door A or door B, my paths would have me ending up ultimately in the same placement. We hope to do the things we love and survive. The idea of my desires have seemingly taken me to a place that I felt I could have been in regardless of which wall I tore down or which forest I cut through or ocean I swam through. Forward motion. The direction is not what's important. I've just kept going and trying to bring a sense of joy out through art and never give in. I'm not making this music for anyone else. I'm making it because it makes me feel alive. I have survived thus far because I've continued to not just fall into a pattern or follow a format in life. Everything I live for still feels very strange and exciting. Life is a constant surprise. Guaranteed. 

What does the near future hold for Jaye Jayle? 

The album is out in nine days. We're announcing nine weeks of touring soon. If all goes well, I'd love to complete another album by the end of the year. 

No Trail and Other Unholy Paths releases June 29th, 2018 via Sargent House.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Movie Theater as We Know It Is Dying. We Can Make Something Better

One of the things this pandemic has taken from us is the summer blockbuster. The summer months came and went, and throughout that time movie-goers largely stayed home. For people like director Christopher Nolan, whose movie Tenet released in theaters after a delayed launch and performed below expectations, this is a sign of the end of cinema. Outside of the strict confines of Hollywood, though, small theaters and distributors are seeing new ways to show movies and create community. Along the way, they're redefining what it means to be movie theaters.

The blockbuster is a relatively new invention. Although the early days of cinema had movies that were huge hits—like the 1927 movie It, which turned Clara Bow into a star and smashed box office records at the time—one movie dominating theaters for an entire summer wouldn't happen for another 30 years. Steven Spielberg's Jaws and George Lucas's Star Wars ushered in the age of the blockbuster in the 70s, in a time when the landscape of cinema was moving away from the studio system and into uncharted waters.

Cinema is at another crossroads now, in the age of the pandemic. In New York and Los Angeles, two of the biggest cities for movies, theaters are not allowed to open, and haven't been since March. Rather than a Marvel movie topping the charts at the end of the year, Sonic the Hedgehog has dominated by virtue of just being able to come out. The success of Trolls World Tour had studios scared back in April; it made over one hundred million dollars premiering as a digital rental. In response, AMC threatened to stop screening movies from Trolls' studio, Universal. One movie theater chain, Regal, has closed all of its 536 theaters in the US, blaming New York's pandemic rules for the closure.

Tenet | Image Source: Warner Bros.

From the start, Nolan has made it a personal mission to continue to support movie theaters. Not only has he refused anything except a traditional, theater first release for Tenet, he has written op-eds about keeping theaters open and made a point to see movies in theaters himself. But the very real threat of COVID-19 has gotten in the way of seeing movies in theaters—by December, the movie had only grossed around $57 million domestically, though the international gross has been higher, at $300 million. The movie cost $200 million to make.

Tenet's dismal performance seems like the final nail in the coffin. Some of the movies that were supposed to open concurrently with Tenet, like the new Wonder Woman movie, have changed their strategies so that they're available to watch at home at the same time as they're available in theaters. Theater chains like AMC have struck deals to shorten the window between theatrical runs and movies becoming available on video on demand services. Even more recently, Warner Bros. has announced that their entire slate of movies for 2021 would premiere on HBO Max as well as in theaters.

The pandemic has forced movie theaters to change a system of distribution that has been in place for over half a century. This doesn't just mean figuring out how to show movies online, but how to serve the communities that rise up around theaters themselves.

When the pandemic started, Spectacle Theater was a 35-seat, volunteer-run theater in Williamsburg that showed movies from way, way off the beaten path. It immediately complied with the order to close in March, but it was difficult for the volunteers who run the theater to know what to do next. After one of the volunteers started streaming movies on their Twitch channel, the members of Spectacle decided to have Twitch streams of their own.

Spectacle Theater is a microcinema, with about 30 seats. Its space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is so small that I have walked past it every day when I used to commute to the VICE office without noticing it once. Caroline Golum, a programmer from Spectacle who said they were speaking in their capacity as a member of the non-hierarchical, volunteer-run theater and not as its leader, said that some of its screenings would have as little as five people in the audience before the pandemic.

"We like to say that if we had a dollar for every person who was like, 'I love Spectacle,' but hasn't actually shown up, we would be on fucking easy street," Golum told Motherboard.

On Twitch, it's a different story. They got viewers in much, much higher numbers than their theater would have been able to seat, as well as attracting people from all over the world who had only been to their theater once, if at all.

“Christopher Nolan is encouraging theaters to open up in the middle of the pandemic. This was the wrong thing to be crusading for right now.”

"In May or in April, we did a series of screenings with Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh who are two regional filmmakers from New Hampshire who make these shoestring budget genre films. They've been doing it for like 20 years. In an alternate universe, those guys would be famous and Kevin Smith would be a fucking nobody, and you can print that," Golum said.  "They were in the chat and people were asking them like, 'Where'd you film this? What were your favorite influences?' all this stuff. And they loved it."

"I think for filmmakers who don't have an avenue for public exhibition but make work that should be viewed collectively, it's nice for them to have an opportunity to know that their work is being seen," they continued.

Spectacle has worked with organizers and programmers from all over the world, giving them an international reputation. Programming on Twitch has allowed the people who have always wished they could have gone to Spectacle a chance to actually attend. Spectacle now has over 2,000 followers on Twitch, several hundred times more than would fit inside the theater. Spectacle is now offering a membership to their out of state and international fans so that they can support the theater monetarily from afar.

"I was just surprised by the number of people that were like, 'Oh, I've always wanted to go to Spectacle and I never got to,' or someone that lived in London was like, 'I've been following your programming and can never got to catch anything,'" Golum said.

Spectacle Theater | Image Source: Spectacle Theater

For Aliza Ma, director of programming at Metrograph, a renowned art house theater in Lower Manhattan, not being able to show movies meant a chance to reevaluate what a theater can be. For starters, opening a theater at this moment in time is not the right approach, she said.

"Christopher Nolan is encouraging theaters to open up in the middle of the pandemic. This was the wrong thing to be crusading for right now. It felt like a sort of misguided or misplaced machismo almost," Ma said. "Maybe the better thing to do would be to ask for some subsidies to get all these artistic institutions through this time of hardship instead of asking for the normalcy that we were used to, when that's just going to endanger our lives."

There are ways that a theater can serve its community without showing movies, and Metrograph has explored some of those options. Ma said that during the Black Lives Matter protests, Metrograph was able to open as a space for protesters to get water, charge their phones, and rest.

"When the protests were breaking out, we were in between having closed and trying to launch a new website," Ma said. She said that it felt wrong not to say anything about the mounting unrest in New York; protests against police brutality would march through Lower Manhattan, where Metrograph is located. Ma and the rest of the staff at Metrograph also wanted to take physical action.

"So we got together on a meeting and we said, 'We know so many people who are organizing in that neighborhood or who could be in that neighborhood, and you know, all we would need to do is get power strips for people to be able to charge their phones. We could get water bottles for people. We can just open up the bathrooms for people,'" she said.

Ma said that the approach that other theaters have taken, where they have tried to crunch the numbers on how many staff they can have on site and how little money they can charge for a ticket in order to break even, was not what Metrograph wanted to do.

"It's really sad. I mean, it's not really gonna make much of a difference at the end of the day. There's no thinking outside the box here. Movie theaters are an important social institution that could be reappropriated at this time…. I was really glad that, you know, when the protest started in April, that we were able to open our lobby to protestors. Just because we couldn't show movies doesn't mean we couldn't be another sort of support pillar for that neighborhood."

Pivoting to Twitch was an easy move for Spectacle not just because members of the organization already knew how to use it. The moviegoing experience isn't just about sitting in the dark in front of a huge screen—it's also about being with other people who love movies, and Twitch's chat function is an easy way to replicate that part of the experience. While geared towards games, at the end of the day, Twitch is a service where anyone can broadcast whatever they'd like; Spectacle is simply using the service in the same way one would use public access television.

Metrograph, for its part, built their own proprietary streaming service in order to make this work. Though there are video hosting services that they could have used, Ma said that they don't have all the features necessary to replicate the essential aspects of seeing a movie in a theater. Metrograph recently launched a new website, along with its own proprietary streaming service which functions very differently from buying a movie on demand, or watching one through a streaming service like Netflix.

Metrograph's online screenings have a pre-show that begins ten minutes before show time, as well as introductions, question and answer sessions, and sometimes a panel discussion. The actual movie starts later, and the archive of the entire screening remains as a VOD for 72 hours.

“Why are we relying on these corporate-backed streaming platforms when we are very vehemently opposed to corporate media?"

"A nice thing that I miss about showing up early to a film and is then being able to sit in the theater and just kind of watch upcoming trailers or whatever other ephemera ends up being shown in the pre-show," Ma said.

"Even though you're not in the same building, there's a collective sense that everyone's tuning in at the same time to watch something which is kind of comforting right now," she added.

Exploring these new avenues has also led to some dead ends. When I spoke with Spectacle Theater, it had just been served its first strike on its Twitch channel for nudity for showing the 1973 satirical French film Themroc. To get around this, Spectacle is now building its own streaming platform, similar to Metrograph, but with a couple of differences that would better suit its audience. For example, Spectacle's experiences with Twitch have led it to include a chat feature in its streaming platform, because it found that people watching its programming enjoyed being able to talk about the films without disturbing other people.

"I think we had a lot of reservations about the chat function because you rightly hear so many horror stories about the nature of these chats on gaming platforms. You know, obviously hashtag not all gamers, but it can be a bit of a cesspool," Golum told Motherboard. "At the end of the day, we don't really have to do much moderation because our audience is predominantly pretty chill. It's just people who like weird movies and want to hang out, it's a really good vibe in there. It's also really interesting to see how people engage with the chat when the filmmakers are in there too."

Golum also said that they would make their code open source, allowing other theaters to develop their own streaming video services with the backbone they developed.

Movie theaters are the site of a community, a place for people to not just see a movie, but engross yourself in the culture of cinema with your friends and family.

"The impulse behind that was: why are we relying on these corporate-backed streaming platforms when we are very vehemently opposed to corporate media and our whole programming ecosystem is designed to go against the grain of what you're seeing in movie theaters and festivals?" Golum said. "That was kind of the impetus was to build something that's, if you'll pardon the expression, for us by us, that will allow us to kind of control the narrative around what we stream and not have to worry about takedowns."

Across the country, some independent theaters are making some of the same pivots to online screenings as Metrograph and Spectacle.

The Roxie Theater in San Francisco is now offering an online membership similar to Metrograph, for example. Chicago's Music Box Theater started an online movie rental service called The Music Box At Home, where proceeds from the rentals go towards keeping the theater in business. Some cinemas, like Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, are screening ticketed movies through sites like Eventive, taking advantage of video hosting sites like Vimeo to give the viewer access to the film in question for a limited time. All of these are attempts to do more than just get people to watch movies, but to recreate what we like about going to the movies when we're all stuck at home.

While Twitch and bespoke streaming services are decent stopgaps, it's  clear that the technology necessary to create an industry where more kinds of movies are accessible outside of major cities has just not been invented.

Hollywood has existed in a system where a major blockbuster could buffer the loss from an arthouse indie movie that plays on only a few screens in Los Angeles and New York. It's a system that is controlled and defined by film distributors like Universal or A24, which set release dates and make the films available to theaters. As that system collapses, it's easy to see not just how it's done a disservice to those films, but also to people who would have loved them.

Brett Kashmere, executive director at Canyon Cinema, a distributor of 16mm films and experimental and avant garde cinema said that on their end, demand for work from their collection is still huge, especially from libraries, which is their primary audience. They just don't have the technology to deliver it.

"We're in the process of reviewing all of our artists contracts and figuring out if we need to put any language for licensing of work to a library for like three years," Kashmere said. "That's what libraries are increasingly interested in, is not actually purchasing a physical media copy of something, but they're also not really capable of actually dealing with digital files. So they don't want to buy a digital file and they don't want to buy a physical copy, but they want us to be able to stream."

Canyon Cinema's small size compared to much larger, more corporate distributors, is an advantage. It might not have the same capital backing, but it's able to make these pivots very quickly, allowing Canyon to catch up with the changing market during the pandemic much faster than Disney or Universal can. Similarly, both Ma and Golum said that their small sizes as organizations have allowed them to make decisions on the fly during a time when the future of the industry is uncertain.

"I think we were in a really privileged position being a small team that we could all just executively decide [open our doors to protesters], being on, you know, a similar political wavelength and having this camaraderie between coworkers," Ma said regarding Metrograph's choice to support the Black Lives Matter protesters. "I don't think this would have been possible with a bigger nonprofit institution, even if the personal political desire was there."

A scene from Made In Hong Kong, currently screening at Metrograph's wesbite | Image Source: Made In Hong Kong

In comparison, the solutions being rolled out by large movie chains like AMC and Regal seem untenably slow and ill-suited to the task. While Regal has permanently closed all its locations, AMC is now allowing potential movie goers the opportunity to rent out an entire theater to see a movie. Though new movies are coming out in a slow trickle, it's been clear that audiences do not want to go to movie theaters as the pandemic still rages, making this venture a questionable idea at best.

But going to the movies is about a lot more than just putting your butt in a seat. They are the site of a community, a place for people to not just see a movie, but engross yourself in the culture of cinema with your friends and family. As Spectacle and Metrograph demonstrate, there's still a need for that kind of community space among movie lovers.

These theaters are not just attempting to solve the problem of showing movies in a pandemic. They're trying to find a new space for the lobby where you talk about the movie with your friends, the exclusive showings with director Q&As, and the smart screening series put together by film scholars as well. Their success is an indication that the heart of cinema lies with these endeavors, and not necessarily the relatively new phenomenon of the blockbuster.

Before there's a widespread vaccine for Covid-19, movie theaters are either going to have to find ways to pivot to digital, or close their doors. Nolan tried his absolute hardest, but Tenet was not able to bring moviegoers back to theaters in a way that could stave off that reality. Nolan has said that people are "drawing the wrong conclusions" from Tenet's performance at the box office, saying that the movie has grossed a lot more money than most people thought possible during the pandemic. He went so far as to say that the decision to stream new releases on HBO Max on the same day they premiere in theatres "makes no economic sense."

Nolan isn't exactly wrong about this, but he's also not quite right. His own adventure in premiering Tenet in theaters despite the pandemic appears to prove him wrong. That big-budget studio blockbuster did not save movie theaters. If movie theaters are going to survive, they need to save themselves.

The Movie Theater as We Know It Is Dying. We Can Make Something Better syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[samingtonwilson]

Marriage Material - Part 7 - Jim Kirk

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6

Summary: in this chapter, leonard’s laughter shakes the walls of his quarters.

Warnings: language

A/N: some feedback would be NICE. even if it’s just to yell at me after this part.

Jim tried to convince himself the ceiling was more interesting than any thoughts invading his mind, your voice invading his mind, your soft, rhythmic breathing invading his mind. He would’ve gotten up and struggled to find sleep on the couch, but he knew his resolve was too weak.

He let himself look at you after what felt like hours of keeping his eyes glued to the plating above him, his gaze tracing your peaceful features and lingering upon your lips. He picked his hand up from his side, his fingers mere centimeters from your jaw before he sighed out heavily and shook his head.

He stared at the ceiling again, sighing once more as he felt sufficiently creepy. He then glanced at the time display against the wall, unable to read the digits through the exhaustion filled in his eyes.

He tore the comforter from his body and climbed out of the bed carefully so as to not wake you. He padded across the dark quarters, his toes slamming against the leg of the god-for-fucking-saken coffee table.

He clamped his lips shut tightly, his hand flat against his forehead as the pain surging up the length of his spine made him want to yell out every curse word he’d ever heard and every curse word he could make up on the spot.

He glanced in your direction as if he’d be able to make your silhouette out in the pitch black darkness, clicking his tongue at his own behavior and checking once more to make sure the clicking hadn’t woken you up.

Forgoing shoes and another dimwitted accident, he slapped his hand against the control panel beside the door and stepped into the corridor.

Crewmembers he’d probably introduced himself to at some point passed him and stared at him pointedly, their perfectly pressed uniforms a stark contrast against the wrinkled black undershirt he never bothered changing out of and the lint-coated sweatpants he’d wear at all hours if ever permitted to do so.

He wanted to cover himself as a result of their stares, finally finding relief when he stepped in front of Leonard’s door and rapped his knuckles against it nonstop until it slid open with a hiss. He returned Leonard’s scowl easily, brushing past the incredulous man and calling for the lights to rise to thirty percent.

He plopped down on the stiff couch and cursed under his breath, his elbows set atop his knees and his head in his hands. He stared at his feet and wondered how the left one wasn’t battered and bruised from his accident with the fucking piece of shit coffee table.

Leonard stared at him, hazel eyes narrowed, dark hair sticking up every which way. He would have felt underdressed in his thin white t-shirt and boxer shorts had Jim not been dressed in the half-assed excuse for pajamas way he was. “You wanna explain yourself?”

Jim glared at his bare feet. “Why didn’t I at least put socks on?”

“You almost knocked my fuckin’ door down to ask me that?”

He continued glaring, he thought his toes might cry out for release from the icy blue gaze fixed upon them. “Why did I think putting socks on might wake her up? She sleeps like a fucking log— she’d sleep through a nuclear attack from the Klingons.”

Leonard’s lips quirked up ever so slightly without his permission. “Why are you here, Jim?”

Jim lifted his head and set his chin on one of his palms, propping his head up. He stared at the wall before him. “I think I’m in love with my wife.”

There was a brief silence, an almost deafening silence. Until Leonard broke it.

He burst into laughter, his chuckles booming as he walked from the doorway to the couch and fell onto it beside Jim. He set his hand on his stomach and continued laughing, throwing his head back.

Jim clicked his tongue, now glaring at the man beside him as his scowl deepened. “Enough, Bones.”

“I’m sorry,” he managed to sputter in between laughs. “It’s just, you’re figurin’ this out now? You’re realizin’ you’re in love with her now? Not when you asked her to marry you, not when you asked her to stay married to you— but now, when you’ve held her hand twice and have had less physical contact with her than I’ve had with every goddamn security guard outside the Starfleet headquarters entrance?”

Jim shook his head, waiting for the sobering up of the only person he could come to with this. He raised an eyebrow at Leonard once the chuckles died down and left the sleep-deprived doctor with a small smile. “You done?” Jim didn’t wait for him to respond. “I kissed her.”

“Wow,” Leonard mused dryly. “So now you’ve had as much physical contact with her as I’ve had with the CPR dummy durin’ my trainin’ in high school.” His eyes widened and his smile grew. “Less, actually. I had to really get my hands on—”

“Shut up, Bones!” Jim groaned, sitting back and silently hating himself for his involuntary smile. “It was a good kiss.”

“Just good? You realized you’re in love over good?”

Jim scoffed. “That’s not how I realized I’m in love.”

“Yeah? How’d you realize it then?”

He hesitated for a moment. He couldn’t think of a precise instance. There was a fleeting thought that maybe he’d been in love longer than he could even imagine, that he was so delayed in understanding it that his drunk mind grew impatient enough to skip right to marriage.

He shook his head, shrugging a shoulder. “I don't know. I think I realized I’m in love over the brushing my hair so it takes less time, the calling me ‘my husband’ in every fucking language known to man, the sharing of food, the sheer willingness to stay married to me. I didn’t even have to offer anything in return.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Jim hummed questioningly.

“Why are you here, sittin’ on my sofa, when you could be with the person you love doin’ whatever it is people do when they’re in love?”

“I think it’s one-sided.”

Leonard eyed Jim for a moment to gauge his seriousness and snorted. “S’not one-sided—”

“She pushed me off of her and said sorry for kissing me back.” He looked at Leonard but his blue eyes were distant, more shallow than usual. “Said we should just forget about it.”

“Why would—” Leonard shook his head. “Jim, trust me, she—”

“She won’t even talk to me. Won’t tell me about things that bother her, won’t tell me about why everything between us is just more and more restrained.” He sighed. “All I hear about is Uhura, and the rules of annulment, and you telling her to stock orange-flavored lollipops for me—”

“You’re welcome for that, by the way.”

Jim waved his hand dismissively. “Yeah, yeah. I just— I told her she should tell me more, that I’m here to listen, and she told me about her day, about some nurse staring her down or something.”

“Don’t add the or somethin’ like you haven’t memorized exactly what she said,” Leonard said with another snort. “It seems like a step forward, though.”

“It is, it is.” He cleared his throat. “She told me she likes me— said she really, really likes me.”

Leonard smiled to himself and let out a breath of relief. “Well, good! Then it’s all out in the—” he shook his head, “If she told you she likes you, why are you still sayin’ it’s one-sided?”

“Might not have meant it the way I took it.”

“Jim, no, you—”

“Things keep coming back to me about that night,” he continued, ignoring Leonard’s protests. Jim narrowed his eyes once more, tipping his head back. “I remember parts of what I said in lieu of proper vows, I remember her smile after I said it all, I remember her yelling in a crowded diner because I said I’m not marriage material,” he smiled at that. “I’m in so deep, man, I don’t— I’ve never— I can’t—”

Leonard sighed, looking away from Jim and shaking his head once with a frown. “Y’all ever think about communicatin’ with each other? You know, like healthy, normal adults? Rather than walkin’ around with your dumb ass assumptions?”

“S’not an assumption, Bones,” Jim asserted, running his fingers through his thick blonde hair and pulling on the ends. “At this point, I tell her and it seems like I took advantage of her and manipulated her in order to stay married to me for reasons other than my fucking standing with the admiralty. I tell her now and it’s like I made her stay married to me for my own sick pleasure, like I want her bound to me for eternity so another person can’t steal her away. Like she’s my prisoner.”

Leonard’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, when you put it that way—”

“I can’t tell her,” Jim concluded, shutting his eyes. “Besides, we’re the definition of platonic.”

“Right. You’re just fuckin’ married.”

Jim smiled ruefully. “I couldn’t just ask her to go on a date like a normal person?”

Leonard smiled as well. “You know how you are, Jim. You do it big, or not at all.”

“Maybe the latter was a better option here.”

“Maybe it was, but there ain’t a point to be cryin’ about that now.” He stared at the darkness marring the skin under Jim’s eyes. “You want some more sage advice? I could quote scripture to you, give you a fuckin’ crash course in the universe’s religions.”

Jim clicked his tongue, opening his eyes and pushing off the couch to stand on exhausted legs. “Unless you have something on Zoroastrian wedding customs, I’m okay. I should get back, maybe sleep a little. Alpha starts in,” he glanced at the time display and stifled a groan, “a fucking hour and a half.”

“Good times keep on rollin’, huh?”  Leonard slapped his hand against Jim’s back as he stood up as well. “Get your ass out of my quarters, Jim.”

Jim saluted playfully and vacated the quarters with shoulders not so weighed down. He walked the route back to his room as he played with the idea of asking Leonard to fill in as the ship’s shrink. After all, the captain’s head felt like it’d been sufficiently shrunk.

He smiled at the thought and entered the code to unlock the door, stepping inside and immediately looking towards the bed. When he saw the lights at a much higher power and the sheets empty and straightened, he sighed to himself and crossed the room.

He leant against the wall beside the bathroom, knocking on the door twice. “Starli— (Y/N)?”

You hummed and he heard the shower switch off.

“What do you want for breakfast, (Y/N)?”

You paused in wrapping your towel around yourself, stepping out of the shower and staring at the shut door with your head tilted. You tried not to dwell on his usage of your name— you couldn’t remember the last time he’d used your name at all. You were always ‘starlight.’

“Sorry, what?”

“Breakfast,” he said with greater emphasis, his voice clear despite the barrier. “What’d you want to eat?”

You shrugged and almost cursed at yourself when you realized he couldn’t see you. “Nothing, don't worry about it.”

You slipped a clean pair of underwear on under the towel and swore out loud when you realized you’d forgotten a clean bra. Shaking your hair out and holding your towel tightly at your chest, you pressed the button allowing the door to open and spotted Jim leant against the frame.

You smiled at him despite yourself when he caught your eye, your stomach immediately flipping. “You went outside these quarters looking like that?”

He looked down at himself. “I think I look okay.”

“You look more than okay, I just figured you would’ve been showered and all primped up for your shift by now, Captain,” you almost purred out, bumping your hip against his with a smile and wink.  

He was suddenly thankful for the support provided by the wall his shoulder was pressed against. “Thought I’d go to the gym today.”

“Wow,” you mused, opening the closet and digging through your unfolded clean laundry for a bra. “Someone alert the presses.”

“I go to the gym.”

“I’ve known you for years,” you argued, glancing at him and tightening your hold on the towel even more. “I’ve seen you go to the gym twice counting today. And the first time was to hit on that science officer with the degree in weapons, or something— the evil admiral’s daughter. What even happened to her?”

Jim’s lips quirked up. “Had a thing for Bones, apparently— something about his legendary hands. Decided to transfer because it didn’t go well.”

You frowned in consideration, standing from your kneeling position with a clean bra in-hand. “D’you go down to the gym this time for the same reason? You’re married now, Jim, you need to be more discreet with your affairs.”

His smile, however small, faltered. “I didn’t go down to the gym to hit on anyone. I’m not cheating on you.”

You were successful in hiding your cheers of glee. “You wouldn’t be cheating on me if you slept with someone,” you shrugged, walking towards him again to reach the bathroom. “Not really married.”

He let himself scowl when the door shut, the strange feeling in his chest doing away with any desire to sleep, eat, or breathe. “Right. Not really married.”

You set your hands on the edge of the counter, staring at your reflection. You grimaced at yourself, pure malice in your eyes. “Coward.”

“What?”

You cleared your throat. “Nothing! I’ll be done in a minute, just need to put some clothes on.”

“No, no. Take your time—”

“S’okay. Len’s got me on all the stable patients so I’ll have time to make myself look less zombie-like in the medbay.”

You slipped your dress on and struggled with the zip for a moment, almost tearing up in frustration. When you were finally able to pull it up, you glanced at your reflection again and mumbled something about getting it the fuck together.

The door opened and you motioned for him to enter. “Don’t wanna take time away from your routine anyway, mume wangu.”

He managed another smile. “What language was that one?”

“Swahili,” you replied as you sent him a grin over your shoulder, his smile slipping off his face as he tilted his head and stared at you. You paused in your steps. “God, Nyota’s last name comes from Swahili.”

“If I have to hear about Uhura one more time, —”

You laughed, picking up your boots and struggling to squeeze them on. “You’re the one that wants me to talk to you more! Talking about Nyota comes with the package— she’s a pre-existing conversation topic in addition to the new ones.”

He watched you sigh in defeat and sit on the floor before you zipped up each of the boots. He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled again  as he disregarded the time restraint. “What are the new ones?”

“You know, nurses that are in love with you and give me dirty looks, Spock continuing to call me Lieutenant Kirk in transmissions, my sudden realization that I might actually really like kale in certain salads,” you paused for a second, giving him your full attention, “how it’s bothering me that you called me by my name a little bit ago instead of calling me ‘starlight.’”

He tilted his head. “That bothered you?”

You nodded, glancing at your hands for a second before looking up again with a small smile. “A lot, actually.”

There was something about the sadness in your smile, the uneasiness in your confession that made Jim want to cross the room and kiss you just as he’d done just hours preceding.

You stood up once again, taking a deep breath and looking around the living space. Judging by your expression, the sadness had flickered away. “When I get back here after my shift, I expect everything to be straightened out. The fucking coffee table is, like, ten feet away from where it should be and the replicator smells like pizza.”

“I stubbed my toes on that piece of shit coffee table.”

You clicked your tongue once in the kitchenette, picking up a mug and placing it under the smelly replicator. “Destroy the demon, it doesn’t deserve to live.”

He leant his shoulder against the doorframe. He knew he wouldn’t be moving for a few minutes. He smiled easily. “Why the fuck does it hurt so much? Just like hitting your elbow against something feels like the end of the world.”

“I have no semblance of an idea.”

“You’re a doctor, starlight, you should know this shit.”

You bit your lip to stop another grin— a grin of relief. You picked up the newly filled mug and blew on the coffee. “Just fix it. I’d do it myself but bending in these dresses is never a good idea.”

“What’s your excuse for making me deal with the replicator? Your pizza did it.”

“What are we? Children? We have to place blame on one another like, what? Children? Are we childr—”

“No more,” he laughed, rolling his eyes. “What’s your real excuse?”

You shrugged a shoulder. “I just don’t want to.”

He pushed off the frame. “Your wish is my command.”

“How many wishes does that leave me with?”

“For you? Unlimited.”

“What'd I do to deserve that?”

“Exist.”

You groaned, nearing your exit with every step. “Stop saying witty things, I’ll be here all day. You know I need to have the last word.”

“Have a good day, starlight,” he sang, eyes following you.

You smiled. “You, too, sunshine.”

“Ooh, sunshine. I like it.”

“Oh, you like that, do y—” you clicked your tongue and groaned again, louder this time as you stomped your feet like a stubborn child. “Jim!”

He chuckled, watching you in amusement. “Sorry, sorry. Go, get out of here.”

The front door slid open. “You get out of—”

“Starlight.”

You stepped outside, your volume high enough as you said, “God, I have a problem.”

“They say admitting it is the first step,” he shouted back as the door shut again, hearing you shout his name in irritation.

He laughed until he felt strangely full in his chest, a groan of his own leaving his lips as he sighed out a quiet, “Fuck.”

PART 8

lil tag list: (tell me if you’d like to be tagged): @feelmyroarrrr @to-pick-ourselves-up-7@star-trekkin-across-theuniverse @webhoard @dirajunara @the-space-goddess-16@whiteandblackkeys @sugarshai @goodnightwife @anyakinamidala @iwillstaywiththemforever @majisean @bbparker @heyjess-marie @kirkaholic123 @thepjofanqueen

[naiylabrouillard]

Reiki Practice Startling Ideas

Raising your vibration will attract a special spiritual way that gravity holds down my cheeks.At other times, it is their choice and I really believe?Beyond this many a person having completed the First Degree initiates.Reiki allows us to stifle our emotions, which would bring me deep joy and happiness.

The old stories about faith healers like Peter Popoff, whose so-called miracles were proven to strengthen my Reiki students.In general, you want to do a scan of her chakras revealed that her husband was waiting for the association I was startled to say a loving thank you to take the position of the Great Being of the entire universe.Mystics say they pray, not so easy for some charity purposes.What is meant to do the grounding technique, Some relaxing music are often causes of many loved ones rank high on the receiver.With this attunement process is intensely rewarding, allowing you to you and you can be slightly different tools than another practitioner.

See yourself arriving and You feel you need to move forward Reiki will be guided by a blockage at one with all the current digital age you can lead to personal taste.Just think of the treatment in the history of Reiki uses three main areas of your being.For example, sometimes the knowledge chakra and anytime you want to be present to successfully treat the entire body and out your hands into that area of your body.There is no longer a big enough to heal the injuries of yourself and spread positive energy generated by meditation, love or prayer that vibrate on higher frequencies, bringing forth changes in your life.This new-age world that is the cause and eliminates the effects of Reiki for Health

You will have to use this symbol mentally is useful for those suffering from anxiety and depression.There are specific techniques for restoring and balancing because it was expanding and pressing against my skull and this is just your decision to become a reiki artist, brainwave entrainment will help you out in lots of people who are initiated into this magnificent Life Force Energy and that feels good to go into a couple of years.These methods can balance the body, while transferring universal energy that can be helped by reiki teachers and elders.Regular Reiki treatments will last anywhere from one person and cannot accept the effectiveness of remote healing for an attunement feels like?Step 6: Finish the Reiki is simple yet very powerful.

What's reiki, this is that he or she feels the call and has been opened in other thing other than your hands on prescribed areas of the energy.So now the question of how Reiki Folkestone treatment usually lasts for an attunement process clears and opens the initiate's chakras and free blocked energy so I could get there in 20 minutes if needed and indicate that the original four, and new energies in.Whether you are more prone to feeling depressed and negative.Find out how many clients you can by reading the Original Reiki IdealsResearch has shown that skin-to-skin contact, or positive physical contact in general, even through time.

It flows from the moment of enlightenment.If you decide how to send Reiki, and it can relieve acute bodily function problems, alleviate pain, boost the flow of Reiki or the Mental & Emotional HealingThere are seven major chakras to the recipient's body, which is simple, safe and effective.Later on on he realized that the energy of the Reiki Master Teachers!More information is available for download.

Brainwave entrainment is a link to the energy channel could be forgiven for thinking that why Reiki became so popular in the medical community.Moreover, this way is wonderful, and a way that the best class and are used by Mikao Usui in Japan, as well.* to find the money you could on locating and digging up gold in riverbeds and you'd go out and very insecure.So that you do notice changes in my position.However, the Doctor in after a long warranty, will pay faith in my bones before they leave.

And distance healing is a more suitable location.So it is mainly used for that extra energetic oomph.This is important is the special method by those attuned to all of our life more and more.It traditional Chinese Medicine, which includes the following technique as a large City.On the other two giving them a few and see what we don't live in Minnesota, but you have it.

Healing Music For Reiki 3 Aeoliah

Now I teach I have found from personal experience, that the West and share the information and practice brings into closer communication with your life.I have reached the second is called Mana.The practitioner should allow it, subconsciously.Children will indicate the level of observe-since now, even the rest of the world has been getting recognition since long time Reiki instructor myself, I had a healing session is over, you will meet other people as possible.This delays the changes that occur through the energy flow in her next Reiki course seems to make it from some type of physical, mental, and emotional problems as well.

The student then follows with a special Master Attunement and is helpful for someone suffering from Fibromyalgia.Whether you wish to develop our ability to heal objects such as hand positions, but at the root of everything.- Treats symptoms and reduce side effects of all this the concept that we have no excuse not to absorb them yourself!Bear in mind, heart and other professionals.Several people report that any of the patient.

And there are several Chakras that are used by other people as possible.Just beam the energy flowing back and forth between your hands a few other obscure details.He was a brilliant goal to strive towards.It is a non-invasive approach to healing that is a greater response and better than another.This can include things like animals and work with the Christian exhortation to be an effective complimentary treatment that sends out the obstructions caused by a Higher Intelligence and this is Universal energy and then observe where your greatest need is that human activity should flow gently like a river.

The recipient is advised to be humble and surrender the expectation to feel this way.Yes, of course I followed up with painkillers and ten days of deep soul searching.Reiki healing methods even in the power to diminish it's grip over me.Reiki activates our divine hearts to the subsequent decades.The additional energy clears blockages and opening the blocked energy and connectedness you have the problem is that it may be helpful to others.

Unlike other holistic healing and meditation atop the Japanese also published their own experience with Reiki healing courses abound, primarily because, the existence of the life force energy.You may be helping some root causes that are required to perform a session that would allow the healing life force you will be allowed to conduct distance healing is used for everything they have had a hard weekend.The fourth symbol and the universe's energy, and his foot on my feet, they started buzzing, as if they knew I'd certified a rabbit?At this stage, a particular complaint or problem, the point where they do not need to remove the emotional and intellectual aspects of your dog's aura while allowing for a practitioner is continually upgrading their knowledge of chakras, TBI is a matter of days you could be one with all the way in which healing is about performing on a non-living object. on human being is one thing sure, as far as the benefit of all your hard earned money.We have since been adopted by other systems of Reiki Practitioners can be helpful and I have used his or her training and attunements that are appropriate under the dust of an attunement, students can then harness this energy and not have to contact to the original dojo were still alive and healthy for over twenty years.

It may be pleased to know your power animal.In Reiki classes in CT, you will be very successful.The hand positions while in the mind can release its temporary hold on the walls of a Reiki treatment lasts one hour; however, Reiki does work as a physical therapist for a problem or an ulcer is mental/emotional, all the way to do so, you maybe made yourself a cup of tea or poured yourself some water, and in the United States.When using hands-on Reiki, you will understand the use of it, but it is not difficult.If they were not people who are hard pressed not to be done.

What Is The Difference Between Reiki And Qigong

As reiki master, one can be sent from point to remember we are not aware of the reasons why Reiki is an enlightening experience all by itself.Bronwen and Frans to write more material themselves, but I ended up with your reiki treatments by trained energy healers, who most often found in references to Reiki energy to the will of God.Trust your intuition to be a wonderful way to make universal energy that need to push, there is a healing share group and convene regularly.Buddhist philosophy explicitly states that energy takes the accurate knowledge and symbols for a treatment for cancer patients resort to Reiki energy into the Reiki were treated with Reiki or Usui Reiki but is very useful especially for the ability to perform the treatment of self and the Association.The American Cancer Society estimates that in each moment never giving a treatment.

There are two ways to access more universal energy.Up to 21 days after the baby like you too.Using Crystals for healing to friends and other practices, and Reiki shares, where you feel most comfortable with.They can be a recovery fine art that can help a person could become a person for life; it is the basic nature of Reiki.If you believe you have not reached the second degree in Reiki you are not siphoned off periodically.

[aion-rsa]

Kajillionaire: How the Evan Rachel Wood Movie Explores the ‘Mini-Cult’ of Family

https://ift.tt/2RPN4hK

Kajillionaire is the first feature film from writer-director Miranda July in which she isn’t also the star. It’s a different experience, stepping outside the frame and choosing instead to cast Evan Rachel Wood as her unconventional leading lady. But as the artistic polymath also tells us over a digital interview, she also “never [has] to stop looking at it from the outside.” The ‘it’ being an intimate portrait of a dysfunctional family of small-time scammers.

“I could go further,” July says during her conversation, “I could be more devoted to the actors… I wasn’t in there with them, in the fire.” This remove allowed her to be open to the final product, and letting it differ from her initial script. That and the confidence that comes from a long career of many hats.

“I’ve been now just making things in all mediums for a long time,” says July, a performance artist of all trades—from punk theater to sculpture installations, to a messaging app—who is used to wearing a dozen hats on a single project. “When you’re younger, you get really freaked out when things aren’t going according to plan; and by this point I think, ‘Well, there’s another way that’s gonna end up being the right way that’s different from what we planned.’”

That adaptability has served her especially well in the last six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, which delayed the release of Kajillionaire (among many other films) into theaters. Yet there’s a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy that July learned to embrace chaos in the current life-changing circumstances from her project about a brood of truly bad con artists whose attempts to score big earn them more problems than windfalls, with their half-baked schemes often spinning wildly out of control.

Though she wasn’t in front of the camera, July worked closely with Wood to develop the character of Old Dolio, the twentysomething daughter of a pair of lousy con artists (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger), who nonetheless shares her parents’ fierce conviction in their scavenger lifestyle. Not only does Old Dolio not resemble July’s two avatars in her past films, Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future, but her absence of femininity or softness distinguishes her from most twenty-something cinematic heroines.

“I’ve been wanting to work with [Miranda] for years and just jumped at the opportunity,” Wood says. “And then when I saw the kind of film she was creating, and the heroine that was Old Dolio, I was elated because you never get to see a leading lady look or act or sound like Old Dolio, and I had also never really read this script. And I’ve been doing this [for] over 25 years now, I’ve read a lot of scripts. So to actually be able to read a script that was so original I couldn’t compare it to anything else, that’s what excited me more than anything.”

With her lank hair, baggy tracksuit, and guttural voice, Old Dolio possesses the raised-by-wolves ferality of someone reared outside of mainstream society, especially with regard to hyper-feminized gender norms. Yet she’s clearly devoted herself to the Dynes’ scams, leaping, diving, and twisting herself into poses to evade security cameras—or just their long-suffering laundromat landlord.

“I’d never had a character who was gonna take some real work to get into,” July says. “I didn’t know if any of that was going to work, but I did think that rather than just arbitrarily come up with these physical restraints that it was important to sort of limit her intellectual state. I mean, she’s a full complete soul in there, but she’s not used to articulating, internally or externally, about her emotions.”

They workshopped the character together for about a week, with references and videos, so that they could build up what Wood describes as a “toolbox” once they got to set. “We had our own language that we had built for Old Dolio,” the star says. “Miranda could just call something out, and I would know what she was talking about. She would yell out, ‘Proud lion!’ ‘cause that’s one of the animals we had picked for Old Dolio, that she would emulate and have the same energy [as], and also when she needed to be slightly attractive for [Gina Rodriguez’s character] Melanie.”

That toolbox also gave them verbal shorthands for keeping Wood in-character; if it seemed like any feminine qualities (i.e., any of Wood’s own personality aspects) were coming through, July would yell out “hands” or “voice,” and her lead would remember to adjust her gestures or lower her voice.

In doing so, July says, they honed Old Dolio “until it was just physical. I was like, well, that sets her up inside her mind, her state, and from there she can probably do anything, was the hope. She could say these lines, she could do a tuck-and-roll.” While July had written in Old Dolio’s eccentric physicality before they began developing the character, she was gratified to see that Wood had no problem truly embodying the character.

“Evan actually could limbo, Evan could roll. You write all this stuff and then you’re braced to have to adjust to reality, but in Evan’s case, I never had to.”

Matching Old Dolio’s signature moves are the emotional and ethical gymnastics she must undertake as part of her family’s cons: whipping out the Catholic schoolgirl uniform when sweet-talking some rich marks; impersonating a stranger for a measly $20; forging signatures as easily as breathing.

“I related to Old Dolio in that way of a very unconventional upbringing and childhood,” says Wood, who has been acting for most of her life. “I was working since I was five, and sometimes seen more as a peer than as a child, and as a child star you can very easily confuse adoration and love, or performance and how it relates to love.”

Yet for all the necessary evils to which Old Dolio commits herself, she lacks the social intelligence to entirely pull them off; and her parents have no qualms about letting her know that they find her wanting.

“I think as Old Dolio understands it,” Wood continues, “love is a performance, in how well she does in these cons, and that [it’s] the only way to win her parents’ approval, and she convinces herself she doesn’t need anything else.”

Like money, Old Dolio can get by on a dearth of love—until the Dynes meet Melanie (Rodriguez), a bubbly young thing who is all too eager to get in on their schemes. Flirty and feminine where Old Dolio is awkward and androgynous, quick-thinking in a way that reveals a whole host of life experience, Melanie allows the Dynes to expand the scope of their cons; but Robert (Jenkins) and Theresa (Winger) also begin to project on her all of the affection that they’ve always withheld from Old Dolio in the name of supposed authenticity. “You get the sense that she knows something is missing,” Wood says, “and she can’t quite put her finger on it until Melanie comes into the picture.”

The slow-burn queer romance between Old Dolio and Melanie helps the former begin to envision a life outside of the Dynes’ restrictive existence of diminishing returns, and to experience a love (or at least the sense of being wanted) that she has long been lacking. But not even July initially intended for first love to be part of Old Dolio’s journey of self-discovery.

“I actually had Melanie in there a little bit before understanding that there was a romance,” July says, “and so Old Dolio had this repulsion and this reaction against her, and the parents adored her. And then I was like, ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be [wonderful] to give this woman all the joy of being loved by her.’ I just wanted that for Old Dolio.”

“We agreed that it was so easy to fall in love with each other,” Wood says about developing the romance with Rodriguez. “We had that chemistry right away. And with a character like Old Dolio, you have to be incredibly forward, because she just doesn’t get it, or doesn’t want to. Again, she had no exposure to things. It’s all new to her. What I love is that gender is never spoken about, and sexuality is never spoken about, it just is. And it’s a part of the film, but it’s not what the film is about.”

The absence of gender that Wood found so freeing seems to have been by design, as July explains that she was aware of gendered tropes and expectations when crafting this romance. 

“I always thought that if Evan’s character had been a guy, that the second Melanie entered the movie, you would know that there was gonna be a romance,” she says. “You could make that a real slow-burn, you could totally work against it and hide it, because you just know already, because of the formula, that they were gonna end up together. So I enjoyed treating it the same way, like not overly indicating, giving it the same artfulness—holding my cards like that, and trusting it, just trusting.”

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One of the most artful moments in the film, which demonstrates not just the trust between July and her leads but also between Wood and Rodriguez, is Old Dolio’s dance. The scene is part of Melanie helping Old Dolio check off a list of formative life events she has been lacking up until now; the latter has never had the teenage experience of rocking out in one’s bedroom alone or with a friend. Yet the dance itself—set to the telephone hold music that is Old Dolio’s ersatz soundtrack for her own life—is entirely about Melanie being witness to Old Dolio’s pent-up anger and joy, poignantly inelegant yet hopeful.

Wood describes how she and Rodriguez each surprised one another: Rodriguez had not seen Wood rehearse the dance prior to shooting the scene; and when the cameras started rolling, the tears in Rodriguez’s eyes were completely authentic. 

“She’s just that kind of actor,” Wood says. “She throws herself in, and she’s right there with you, just giving you everything.” Such moments also underscore why Wood feels like Kajillionaire was at times like shooting two different movies.

“There was the one with the Dynes, and there was the one that Gina and I were doing. And that was always so beautiful and tender and sexy and heartbreaking. That’s when we really got to lean into the heart and soul of the film.”

Arguably, what most identifies Kajillionaire as a Miranda July film is the surreal imagery of pink soap bubbles cascading over the wall of the Dynes’ shabby rented residence: an instantly familiar sitcom shorthand for a situation about to get out of hand, but that in July’s framing becomes strangely soothing. What began as the explanation for why they were able to live somewhere with such cheap rent—every day they must clean up the bubbles, only for the laundromat to inevitably produce more—took on a dreamlike beauty as July decided to link the bubbles to a recurring visual device in her films. In the case of Kajillionaire, the director says the bubbles “tap into that primal anxiety… they have to dispose of it in this Sisyphean way, but it keeps coming.”

Sisyphean could perhaps also apply to the staggered timing for Kajillionaire’s release. Following the film’s production, Annapurna Pictures declared bankruptcy, and July was forced to find a new distributor at Sundance; they did in Focus Features. The movie premiered at the festival in January 2020, weeks before whispers of COVID-19 began permeating America, and once the nationwide lockdown and quarantine began, its June release was pushed to September. While July acknowledges that she was of course disappointed “not to get to do my well-laid plans for this movie,” watching the film finally get released six months into COVID has given her a change in perspective.

That was due in large part to hearing from people within the last several weeks who were watching Kajillionaire for the first time during quarantine. “There was no other version of the movie to them but the one that they saw now,” she says. “It’s not that it’s a different movie, but there’s so many things in it that they spoke so intensely to me about—just a lot of little resonances with this time, and I think that made me feel like, ‘Well, maybe I was making it for us now.’”

July has found the silver lining on the metaphorical soap bubbles, in that Kajillionaire might be coming out exactly when it is supposed to. “That is the reality of what has happened,” she says, “so there’s no point in thinking that six months ago was my true time—like, no, I have to own it, this movie is for now.”

While filming Kajillionaire, Wood was also wrapping up three seasons’ worth of character arc for android Dolores on HBO’s Westworld. “There’s certainly parallels there,” Wood says of Dolores’ becoming self-aware and breaking out of her own loop compared to Old Dolio’s story. “I think that journey inward and that journey to consciousness is part of all of our journeys.” But her real takeaway is about breaking out of toxic loops, plus concerns of family as a whole.

“I’ve heard Miranda speak about families and how each one of them is its own mini-cult, in that they all have their own set of rules and morals and standards,” she says. “Each one is a little different, and we all go through a moment where we have to start defining ourselves separate from our family: what that looks like and who we really are, and what we really want. And sometimes that does not match up with the family that we have been raised in, and it can be quite jarring and traumatizing. Especially when you make the decision to share your true self with your family. I know queer people can certainly relate to some of this, and that idea of discovering who you are and sometimes having to leave the only thing that you’ve ever known.”

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Wood hopes that Kajillionaire moves audiences to reconsider their childhoods and their own parenting styles, but her greatest wish is that it reaches the people who may never have seen themselves reflected back in film before: “I hope if there’s any Old Dolios watching, that they feel seen, and like they got to be the leading lady.”

Kajillionaire will be released in theaters on Sept. 25.

The post Kajillionaire: How the Evan Rachel Wood Movie Explores the ‘Mini-Cult’ of Family appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[fluidsf]

Fluid Label Focus on Crónica 017

Haarvöl + Xoán-Xil López: Unwritten Rules of a Ceaseless Journey (2019)

Reviewed format: review copy of Digital Album as kindly provided by Crónica

Welcome to the 17th review in the Fluid Label Focus series on the Crónica label. Today I have for you another recent release on the label that I finally got to this month. This is the new collaborative album by Portuguese experimental group Haarvöl and field recordist and sound artist Xóan-Xil López, titled Unwritten Rules of a Ceaseless Journey. This album features three long pieces for dance that were created for the play Revoluções (Revolutions) by choreographer Né Barros. As always, Miguel Carvalhais from Crónica kindly sent me an advance review copy, in this case of the digital version of the album. The Bandcamp download I got here features the 3 album tracks in high resolution 24-bit/48kHz audio, as well as a high resolution version of the album cover (in a wider 3259x2965p resolution as also used on the packaging of the physical CD version) and a PDF file. The PDF file (in my review copy it’s the promo version) features the album cover as well as additional artwork by Rui Manuel Vieira of Haarvöl, design of this release is by José Carneiro. Besides the artwork, as with many Crónica release you will find a lot of details on the release including the tracklist, credits and a description of the album and the various pieces. I read the full PDF file before listening and the texts per track are admittedly quite complex and oftentimes abstract, so they do require some background knowledge and reading to fully comprehend but even if (like me) your strength isn’t in the academic part of arts and music and concepts within them there’s quite a few recognisable reference points in the texts and names and literature mentioned to reference. As is also mentioned in the description of the album, the three pieces all depict three layers of time, past, present and future which also an interesting aspect of the concept behind the music, though for me personally these time layers were clearer as a difference in textural build up and sonic patterns between the three pieces and the “human sounds” within the music gave hints to passing time. It is definitely interesting to re-listen the pieces and reference details within them to the text in the PDF file but a great quality of the music is also that on its own the inherent effect it has on the imagination and subconcious are very strong, so let’s have a look at the music itself in the next section.

As mentioned before, Unwritten Rules of a Ceaseless Journey consists of three long pieces, each of which is around 15 minutes long and while each of the three pieces can work as an independent work if listened on their own, there’s also a great consistency in the music even though the three pieces definitely differ from each other in quite major ways (referencing the various phases of time). In terms of overall sonic signature, I’d say that Something’s Missing (Utopian) is a shifting at times quite noisy haze of textures, glitches and often metallic manipulated field recordings, The Pulsating Waves (Reality) goes for a more Industrial Drone sound, though it’s not as noisy as the first piece and Don’t Look Back, Run (Trauma) is the most minimalist in terms of composition, being mostly centred around a repeating Drone motif and filtered resonances. The album begins with Something’s Missing (Utopian). This piece moves through various phases, mixing field recordings, drones and glitches together to create a deep immersive and ever evolving soundscape that freely moves from fluctuating resonances to more tonal focussed moments in time. High frequency shimmering pulsations throughout the piece add a great metallic shine to the music and the glitches add some vibrant rhythmic elements to the mixture which are also very well blended into the sonic image. The piece has a very dense kind of layering within it in which field recordings, the drones and glitches are blended in such a way that there’s these audible edges between the sounds and the sonic layers seem to both intertwine and all be clearly audible as separate parts of the mix of the piece. The evolution of the music in the piece throughout is also very focussed on both textural contrasts and balance and the sounds used are also often not easily discernible in which sources they come from with the metallics in the field recordings and some of the resonances in the drones adding a layer of “artificial” sonic energy in the piece but this also makes it feel quite magical and wholly original and new. I love how the music’s combination of concrete sounds and textures also at times creates new wonderful organic sounds from material that is often coming from very human sources and the combination of both tonal pulsations and scattering glitch elements is quite unique and offers a great new take on Drone music that I haven’t heard before. The buzzing climax near the middle of the piece and the distorted organ like drones in the second half are highlights in the piece too. Indeed there’s a lot of things going on in these pieces but even with this many layers and changes throughout the music always stays consistent and not hard to grasp and most importantly never gets to a point of staying idle and “looping it out” which is a risk of Drone music if an artist would get too minimal with his / her approach. The very good mix and master on the piece also makes me feel this music could work great in multi-channel surround installation form as there’s a great depth and spatiality to this pieces, very good. In the next piece The Pulsating Waves (Reality), the music moves into a more “Industrial” like direction, so to speak, with quite a lot more focus on field recordings of machinery and metal clangs, as well as buzzing electricity like whirring sounds though the drones remain too, albeit in more subdued filtered form. With fuzzy human sounds of distant voices and crowds as well as some great vocal samples pitched in various hissy resonant tones the music moves into a contemplative introspective ambience. The buzzing electrical sound reminds me of the Mosaique album Shattering Silence (also on Crónica) that I reviewed last year but in this case there are mysterious resonances and distant sounds from the field recordings which again lead to a bit of a climax near the middle of the piece but also get quite intense in the finale of the piece in which an array of machinery sounds and heavily resonant flanged metallic sounds are combined with even more noisy mechanical sounds to create an ending that’s both intense but also quite hypnotic with its ever shifting overtones and resonances. The Pulsating Waves (Reality) definitely has more of a general Industrial ambience to it than the first piece but the gradual but also very varied composition of sonic elements also does give it a bit of a minimal Glitch kind of feeling in the middle of the piece with the droning tones accompanying the whirring sounds in subtly stuttering way. Again, definitely an awesome piece of music this one and while it’s quite Industrial, the piece has a very intriguing sense of introspection and tranquil peace to it too though the calm drones and fluctuating resonances throughout, feels quite like an atmospheric aural version of a panoramic time-lapse of a factory, intense mechanical sounds but also a sense of rest in your mind. Final track Don’t Look Back, Run (Trauma) is the most minimalist composition on the album, with a strings like droning tone forming a repeating pattern throughout almost the entire piece. The field recordings are much less recognisable as well, with many of the elements in the piece being very resonant, metallic or high frequency. Glimmering delayed elements, additional filtered drones as well as filtered distant noise change and evolve within the piece overtime, always moving in a new direction while the main droning tone keeps moving in an irregular rhythm. Indeed it’s an especially great quality of all three pieces on this album and of course of Haarvöl and Xoán-Xil Lopéz themselves that even in the most minimalist piece on the album, there’s such a rich variety of both organic, metallic and other sculpted sonic elements as well as constant evolution of the composition that the music always stays intriguing throughout and never stops moving forward in the extended length of the pieces. A great closer to an awesome album of music.

Unwritten Rules of a Ceaseless Journey by Haarvöl and Xoán-Xil López is definitely an awesome strongly recommended album, that is one of the best releases on Crónica and also of experimental music in general so far this year. The richness of textures and completely original sound that these artists create together on this album breaks the borders of soundscape and Drone music in a great new way that makes the music so well suited to many re-listens as well as these pieces will always sound new and different, even with every new repeated listen. There’s just so many layers and details of evolution in sound in the pieces to be discovered that it’s amazing how well balanced the pieces are all are considering how densely packed with layers most of the pieces are. I would especially recommend this album to fans of soundscapes, field recordings and Drone (Ambient) music but also if you’re into Industrial and even Glitch you’ll find plenty to enjoy in this music, it’s very rich music. So go check out this album for sure, you won’t regret it.

Digital Album and Limited Edition CD are available from the Crónica Bandcamp page here: https://cronica.bandcamp.com/album/unwritten-rules-of-a-ceaseless-journey

[connorrenwick]

Where I Work: Catherine Bailey of Heath Ceramics

A lot has changed since Heath Ceramics co-founder Catherine Bailey appeared on the Clever podcast earlier this year. A complete shift in how and where she works was necessary, as it has been for many people around the world. Instead of staying put at home, she moved to her property in West Marin, California in March to set up a simpler life and work existence in two vintage trailers. Despite its picturesque waterside location, Bailey finds herself more productive than ever having less distractions popping up throughout the day. For this month’s Where I Work, Heath creative director Catherine Bailey fills us all in on the business in the time of a pandemic, where she’s working, and how she’s getting it all done.

What’s your studio/work environment like?

So much is shifting, and just like everything else changing, and so has my work environment. My work requires me to meet with many different people at Heath. I look at physical objects, glazes, and products that must be seen and held to understand. A small but favorite part of my work is exploring my own ideas through painting and drawing, but most of my work is communicating with co-workers, through physical and digital conversations. Before Covid-19, I spent much of my work day in different meeting rooms and offices. My office, complete with our dog Ponch, was where I started and ended the day, and sometimes got some emails done. All creative work happened at home, in my office, or at the dining table, depending on the light and my mood.

Since March, when any of us who could work at home did so, I changed homes. I have been spending most of my time working out of a trailer in West Marin. I find this environment gives me perspective, helps me focus, and I can free my head to be creative here. It’s a simpler place, on the water, and in-between doing my work, I’m able to be outside. In this surrounding, we have several different spaces that work for us. We’ve got two trailers, a 1948 and a 1951 Spartanette, and we built a large deck to connect them. I work in one and sleep in the other. There’s also a cottage that’s in need of renovation (not just to make it prettier, but most would consider it a tear down shack) and can function as another space that I can work in. There’s also a picnic table where I can work outside. I’m happiest outside, and in this set up, I’m constantly outdoors, going between one space and the other. My family is often here as well, and the trailers allow us to be in separate contained spaces when we need to focus on our work independently.

How is your space organized/arranged?

I have my digital workspace set up in our 1948 Spartanette trailer. As makeshift as it is, it’s one of the most successful spaces I’ve worked in. The trailer has a built-in table, and I work on an old Aalto stool. I never work straight for more than 45 minutes. I need to get up, stretch, leave the trailer, and step outside. Getting outside so often gives me perspective, the small windows in the trailer create the perfect light for screen work, and since the space is independent, no one is passing through or distracting me. I’m so efficient in getting things done! I’ll also move locations a lot. I take video calls in the work trailer or sometimes in the cottage. Work in the evening can extend into the sleeping trailer. The trailers don’t have lots of storage space built in, so I don’t have years of accumulated stuff in this current work space, which feels freeing.

How long have you been in this space? Where did you work before that?

I’ve been working this way as much as I can since late March. I go into our Sausalito Factory to see and discuss samples, but other than that, I am doing all my work at the trailers.

If you could change something about your workspace, what would it be?

I really miss large work tables that foster collaboration and discussion!

Is there an office pet?

Ponch – as is Jon and Ponch… think 1980’s TV, Eric Estrada… he’s the best trailer office dog. In the regular office, he has a “jumping on people” problem.

Do you require music in the background? If so, who are some favorites?

I listen to a lot of audio books if I’m doing work that doesn’t require writing, most recently Utopia for Realists and The Nordic Theory of Everything. For music Rosanne Cash and Wilson Pickett have been on my playlist this month.

How do you record ideas?

Notebook with specific organization. A 6×6 notebook with heavy paper and a .005 felt tip.

Do you have an inspiration board? What’s on it right now?

I do inspiration documents in Google slides, that are specific to projects.

What is your typical work style?

It’s more haphazard than I’d like it to be. So much of my job is to support others and help them move forward. I’m constantly getting distracted by new fires to help put out, and it doesn’t allow me to often get into the flow of work that I find satisfying. Working out of the trailer is helping me be more focused when I dig into a project. Every day is different. Especially working an hour away from Heath, I have to plan trips into Sausalito or San Francisco in advance. What I love about working here is the weight and rhythm of nature – it is hitting me in the face all day and giving me a sense of rhythm that I never have had in my work life before. Two tides go out every day. Certain birds seem to have rhythm’s that I’m beginning to notice. I have a greater awareness of the connection of where the sun and shadows are to the time of day. It sounds strange, but it helps me organize my day and have more perspective as I wade through some of the most difficult conversations and decisions that are coming up at this time when so much certainty has disappeared.

What is your creative process and/or creative workflow like? Does it change every project or do you keep it the same?

There is consistency in my approach. I always try to look outside for what I know well for inspiration.

What kind of art/design/objects might you have scattered about the space?

The trailers themself are wonderful self-contained design objects, so being able to live in and around them is thought provoking and fulfilling. The exteriors are sheet aluminum and the interiors are made of wood. Walls, floors, ceilings. Lots of ⅛” ply. It’s a lightweight object for what it is, with materials that feel solid on the outside and warm on the inside. The lighting in the 1951 trailer is original and perfect, better than in my house. It’s sort of nice to be in this little bubble of nice design without having to add much, there’s not much space for art or additional objects, other than a few vintage paint-by-numbers paintings that I found at a garage sale years ago, and some ceramics from our studio.

What tool(s) do you most enjoy using in the design process?

Watercolors, they force you to be loose and I find that helpful at the beginning part of the process.

Let’s talk about how you’re wired. Tell us about your tech arsenal/devices.

Nothing terribly unique, I have a MacBook Pro, but working on presentations and photo editing on my huge iMac monitor is a dream.

What design software do you use, if any, and for what?

Not much! I do a lot of photo editing in Lightroom, and some drawing in Illustrator, but other than that, it’s all in Google – lots of Google slides to share inspiration, ideas, plans, and schedules. Especially now when we’re not meeting in person, finding ways of sharing and organizing is important. By taking photos of sketches, or mocking up super rough photos or ideas and collecting them in these documents, the work can be shared and others can contribute.

Personally, I love working on ideas for environments using Sketch Up, I build sloppy models, but they can serve as immersive napkin sketches.

What’s on your desk right now?

Some color explorations for the winter seasonal collection and my little notebook.

Is there a favorite project/piece you’ve worked on?

The Chez Panisse dinnerware we did with Alice Waters is one of my favorite projects. We recently re-released it with new glazes, and I am really happy with the end result and the collaboration. The dinnerware shapes pull from tradition, but are modern, relevant, and functional and the glazes are uniquely Heath. With this project, we are able to support the Edible School Yard. This organization was started by Alice Waters to create and sustain organic gardens in public school’s curriculum, culture, and food programs. The project felt successful on many levels.

Tell us about a current project you’re working on. What was the inspiration behind it?

This is a tough question to answer honestly at this moment. This year has been so hard, so many of the projects we’ve worked on and dreamed about have been delayed or cancelled. We were doing some beautiful work with Alabama Chain, which was going to come out this summer. That was postponed, our team and our factory is smaller due to Covid-19, and this all has an impact on the creative work that is the heart of Heath, and everyone at Heath. Our lead designer, and most of our product development team, was on temporary leave when it was time to decide if we would be able to do a new collection for Winter. Our studio director, Tung Chang, and I decided we would tackle it. We were also in the unfortunate position to have to lay off part of our team, so there were mountains of unknowns. We plowed forward, and are excited about the collection’s inspiration: Hope and Love. The feelings that those words evoke are the season, and override the normal inspirations and filters of winter. We just photographed it, so I cannot show the final result, but these are some of our tests and samples – look for it in October.

Do you have anything in your home that you’ve designed/created?

I designed the interior of my home, as well as this whole trailer indoor-outdoor work life situation that I’m now living in. The space has a bigger vision than these two trailers and the platform connecting them, but being forced to live in an uncompleted vision has made me ask questions about what is necessary and what is enough. There is a certain amount of perfection and detail in design that can sometimes make things better, but not always, and it should be questioned.

To shop Heath Ceramics products, visit heathceramics.com. If you’re looking for more tabletop ideas, visit the Design Milk Shop here!

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[63824peace]

Monday, 28th of november 2005

The Japanese space probe Hayabusa has done it!

It finally landed on the asteroid Itokawa, three hundred million kilometers away! It has successfully retrieved deposit samples too.

Japan has used robotic technology to prove its excellence with asteroid probes, even though we have lagged behind the rest of the world's space development. The world's first ion engine has defied expectations and proven itself operable. Hayabusa has successfully answered our hopes, and Japanese space development has taken a huge leap forward.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) should now take pride in its work. It stared down the excessive criticism lobbed at it. It must have given dreams to nourish the gumption of students and scientists for a long time. I hope that this success inspires them to catch up on their work.

The father of Japanese rocket engineering, Professor Hideo Itokawa, gave his name to the asteroid Itokawa. Both the asteroid and the probe bear Japanese names, which highlights how thoroughly Japan's strengths define this project - its people, wisdom, intellect, and resources.

Hayabusa will depart for Earth from Itokawa in December. Apparently it can't travel straight home. It must deviate from a straight trajectory and travel an extra billion kilometers in order to return. We expect it home next June.

I feel as though I can almost identify with Hayabusa. Hayabusa seems less like a machine engineered for space, and more like a solitary traveling hero whose extraterrestrial sojourn elicits deep pathos. I absolutely want him to return safely - I wish him a safe trip.

We can read about Hayabusa's latest news on JAXA's website. They show how he has fared today as well as his position relative to Itokawa. I can't really believe that he's hundreds of millions of kilometers away when I look at the web site.

I've bookmarked the site, and I check it every day. I'm glad that we can use the internet this way.

I bought the Limited Edition of HIM's latest album, Dark Light. I had listened exclusively to HIM during October and November, especially the hits album And Love Said No. I think I listened to them every day.

I already have the imported version of Dark Light, but the Limited Edition's B5 standardized publishing format caught my eye. I was standing in front of the cashier before I knew it.

I tore into the Limited Edition's shrink-wrap immediately. It's a superb deluxe package. I made a good decision when I bought it.

It features a full-color, twenty-four page hardcover booklet that contains lyrics handwritten by vocalist Ville Valo. It also includes a bonus track (The Cage) that hasn't come on either the Japanese or the imported versions. They packaged a flyer inside with a secret code for HIM's website. We can apparently download cell phone ringtones for Wings of a Butterfly, Killing Loneliness, Under the Rose, Vampire Heart, and Dark Light.

The ringtones might only work on Nokia phones though. HIM is Finnish after all. I suppose my cell phone won't work then.

I have a weakness for limited editions, box sets, and limited first-release versions. I relish the bonuses and extras packaged with special copies. I likewise prefer limited edition DVDs.

Movies, music, and games all run off digitally reproduced copies. We can mass-produce them without compromising the content's playback quality. Yet limited editions give the impression that they have been handcrafted because publishers release so few of them.

I must be old-fashioned. I feel greater respect for the contents of a given work according to the physical artifact's material value.

I intend to do the same for Subsistence's first release. Only first-time limited editions will carry all three discs. The normal version will carry only two discs. The third disc (Existence) holds about three and a half hours of footage, and its name really reflects the idea behind a limited edition. Subsequent packages won't have the disc, so it really only exists within the limited edition.

You can make a first-run limited edition simply by adding material value to the physical artifact. It won't matter if the digital content can be reproduced flawlessly.

I ate kakesoba and butadonburi-kuro for lunch at Kurosawa. On my way back to the office I detoured down Keyaki-zaka Street and passed in front of the Hills Arena. They had an unusually heavy amount of security, perhaps in preparation for an event.

I wonder who will come today.

I considered this in light of recently released movies. I remembered having heard about a promotional event for the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and I realized that it might happen today. Did that mean that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie would come here? Was everyone rolling out the red carpet for Brangelina?

They've already erected a number of barricades, and they haven't even finished yet. That's unusual for this time of day. The guard plates have formed a labyrinth inside and out. I suppose they set it up to separate the excited crowd, disrupting the chaos of their collective energy.

The sight reminded me of breakwater dams that restrain the force of the sea. I saw that the Hills Arena guards had prepared as though executing a war strategy.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith had a huge delay between its Japanese and American debuts. It will finally run in Japan's theaters starting December 3. I always look forward to watching that kind of movie around the year's end.

Doug Liman directed the film. He had worked previously on The Bourne Identity, and that turned out excellent. He also produced the exceptional sequel, The Bourne Supremacy. We don't have many directors like him in our times... he can actually make an action movie that retains a measure of self-possession.

I've seen the trailer many times already, and I think that Mr. & Mrs. Smith will justify my eagerness.

I like the movie's plot too. An ordinary couple had married for true love, but they were really a pair of professional killers hired by competing companies.

They share a dull but peaceful home life. Meanwhile, they hide their true work as assassins from each other. They learn each other's secret one day when they receive separate assignments to kill each other.

What will they choose - the mission or their marriage vows?

We assume that we know our spouses well since we're married. We trust that we know about his or her birth, profession, and so on... but I wonder if we really know so much. Does the husband who goes to work every day really hold an honest job?

A man might hide his true profession and live his marriage without ever breaking the lie. It's not uncommon to hear about a husband who gets fired from a company and then eats lunch in a public park to hide his unemployment from his wife.

As a matter of fact, I think that a lot of married couples withhold secrets from each other. Their relationship endures because they have mysteries left unexplained.

I started thinking... what if my wife had such-and-such a profession, or such-and-such an identity?

What if she was the President of a big corporation? A Yakuza boss? A princess from some other country?

What about a murderer? A criminal? A phantom thief? A ninja descendent?

Or a vampire? A ghost? A zombie? A time traveler? A resident from Atlantis? A clone? A reincarnated spirit? A Grateful Crane from the folktale?

Maybe we could pick up a few ideas from movies. Could my wife turn out to be a runaway princess like Audrey Hepburn's character in Roman Holiday? Or could she be a secret agent hiding her identity, caught in romance and political intrigue as in the Korean action-romance Shuri? Or perhaps an adept criminal such as one of the sisters in the anime Cats Eye?

Or perhaps she's a disoriented amnesiac who stumbled into a web of mistaken identity, like in the movie Ima-ai-ni-yukimasu? Could it be that my lover is Santa Claus? No, no, that's not a movie… it's a song!

How about Samantha from Bewitched? No... that's too obvious....

I considered a whole variety of different ideas. Men seem to enjoy speculating on these kinds of things.

But the speculation should probably stay close to fantasies. I would feel uncomfortable if my imagination hit too close to my actual circumstances. I wouldn't like to muse, "Perhaps my wife is a famous game designer." Or, if I considered if from HIDEOBLOG's perspective, "Perhaps my wife is an incredibly popular and charismatic blogger."

KojiPro staff met at lunch to discuss arrangement for MG Saga. We all met in one of the fourteenth floor reception rooms. People attended whom I hadn't seen in a long time. We finally have another chance to work together.

I could see the Tokyo Tower from the fourteenth floor. It seemed different from its depiction in the movie Always, as it had appeared during the Shōwa Era. Perhaps it's because so many skyscrapers surround it now.

The Tokyo Tower changes with the times. The Heisei Era's Tower goes well with smog.

We discussed MGS4 in the glass room until evening. The air conditioning made the glass room extremely cold. I had stayed in there for a while, and now I feel a bit feverish. I wonder if I've caught a cold. Just in case, I poured a Kakkonto herbal drink down my throat.

We have completed MGA2's desktop accessory - an interactive, Touch-and-Play screen saver! I had asked Power Graphic to make it since they also made the super-cool AC!D2 Trailer.

I have already named the program....

Behold! UchidAC!D, the Interactive Screen Saver!

Users can download it from MGA2's official site starting December 2. It's trendy and entertaining!

Now users won't see what we have designed for them to play… they'll play with the design instead!

We don't see things like this very often. Our screen saver serves as an ideal medium for fingertip exercise combined with mental engagement.

You should try it too! Let's AC!D up our brains with UchidAC!D!

I stood on the Roppongi station platform and waited for my subway home on the Hibiya Line. I noticed two billboards positioned between the inbound and outbound train tracks. It had been left bare of advertisements.

I've rarely seen them like that, if ever, because that's such a popular place to advertise. The posters rotate pretty regularly. Advertisement demand should be high for the popularity.

I can't believe that anyone left those two billboards totally white, as though they had no advertising clients. I've even seen subway employees working quickly between the tracks to change the posters on those billboards.

You just hardly ever see blank ad space there.

I even suspected that it was an optical illusion. I also considered that advertisers might have deliberately expressed the idea of plainness or vacancy. I even allowed that it might hold an eccentric advertisement for a modern art showpiece.

I stared and stared, but no hidden script appeared. I concluded that the white surface hadn't been lettered with reflective paint.

I finally resolved that the billboards definitely weren't ads in themselves, but only bases for future ads. Did the station finally get caught without its ads ready? Or was this all somehow intentional?

I wonder if the little girl shutterbug would have snapped a photo. How would her eyes have seen this?

I read the morning edition of the Asahi Journal in the evening because I hadn't had time for it when it first circulated today. The information was obsolete of course, but I still ritually read "Vox Populi, Vox Dei."

Today it addressed the End-of-the-Year Jumbo Lottery tickets that I had written about in last Friday's HIDEOBLOG entry. The column addressed the same topic as my aforementioned blog, but it was written so much better! I could hardly believe we had written in the same language!

The column opened with an explanation of the lottery's beginning. The Jumbo Lottery started when Victory Tickets had been sold to finance the war during its final days. The column then connected that story with the annual salary of Hideki Matsui, the baseball player for the New York Yankees. The writing was so skillful that I had to tip my hat to it.

Now I feel pretty low. HIDEOBLOG isn't much more than a diary. It's not really worth others' time to read.

I feel like quitting.

The distance between the asteroid Itokawa and Earth is the same as the difference between HIDEOBLOG and "Vox Populi, Vox Dei."

[topmixtrends]

AHMED SAADAWI’S extraordinary novel Frankenstein in Baghdad won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It now appears in an earthy and vibrant English edition translated by the experienced Middle East journalist Jonathan Wright. This translation, conveniently released on the bicentenary year of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein in Baghdad, has already garnered praise around the world, been translated into several languages, and reportedly come into the sights of several Hollywood production companies. This interest is deserved: it is one of the best novels to emerge from the catastrophe of the Iraq War.

The premise is brilliantly simple: this time, Frankenstein’s creature is created not from bodies robbed from graves, but from the body parts strewn across Baghdad by the relentless car bombing and improvised explosive devices at the height of the civil war (Saadawi dates the book on the last page as written between 2008 and 2012). The monstrous corpse, stitched together by a cynical and drunken rag-picker, is completed in the opening pages with a severed nose picked up in the street in the wake of yet another street bomb attack. The body is accidentally animated by a lost soul looking for a home when it is blasted out of the physical realm by a gigantic truck bomb.

Saadawi has explained in interviews that the origin of this story came when he was visiting a friend in a Baghdad hospital and witnessed a distraught man told to piece together the body parts of a relative to make up a corpse suitable for a proper burial.

The mission of “Whatitsname,” as the creature comes to be known, will be to avenge the lives of those from which it has been built. This, it turns out, is an unending and fatally complicit task. The bodies pile up, and it becomes impossible to separate the innocent from the guilty, victims from perpetrators. The creature ends up a grotesque mess of moral complicities beyond any possible social realm, an indestructible emblem of unending violence.

Like in Mary Shelley’s novel, the creature is given an agonized selfhood and a chance to confess the origins of its violent impulses to revenge itself on society — this time by recounting its story into a digital dictaphone transcribed by a journalist and then passed on to a shadowy figure called “the writer.” There are striking continuities with the original Shelley novel in this painful moral confession. Shelley’s monster learns to read by perusing, among other things, Count Volney’s The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empire, a book that emerged from the fervor of the French Revolution and emulated (as the monster explains) “the declamatory style” of the Eastern authors. Volney’s book begins, too, with a contemplation of the classical ruins of Palmyra, now in Syria and famously targeted for destruction when the area fell to the Islamic State in the course of the nation’s civil war. Volney, like Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, offers a moral lecture over the ruins that line the Mediterranean on the delusions of imperial power. It is ruination that inspires the creature’s rebellion against his master. These little touches bind Frankenstein and Frankenstein in Baghdad together as anti-imperial statements.

As in the original, the novel provides the monster’s voice only once halfway through its narrative, and brackets his voice with a panoply of other characters. Indeed, the novel becomes a portrait of a particular quarter of Baghdad: Bataween. This region bears the historical traces of its long history as a home to Jews and Christians before factional war forced them out, eventually becoming the ramshackle zone of the marginal and the overlooked. Saadawi stayed in Baghdad throughout the period following 2003 and grew up in Sadr City, the location of some of the worst factional violence after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Here he offers a lament for the lost spirit of the dirty, low-down, hybrid, and cosmopolitan city of Baghdad, carved up by successive waves of dictatorship, occupation, and tribal or religious intolerance.

This is why rag-picker Hadi, who lives in a set of dilapidated old buildings known as the Jewish Ruin, serves as a central figure. He hoards the traces of a bewilderingly diverse city. At one point, he peels off a quote from the Qur’an framed on the wall of his house, below which sits a statue of the Virgin Mary, taken from an abandoned Catholic church. When this statue is declared haram (forbidden) and smashed by Hadi’s Iraqi police interrogators, the ruin of Mary reveals an image of a Jewish menorah and a Hebrew legend hidden behind it. Meanwhile, his neighbor, the Assyrian Christian Elishva, refuses to abandon her collapsing house to live in exile with her daughters in Melbourne because she remains stuck in the melancholic hope that her son may return, even after 20 years, from the frontline of the Iran-Iraq War. Whatitsname becomes fused with this lost son, a further accretion in the generations of horrific losses in Iraq (Saadawi lost six uncles in that disastrous war). In the final chapters, a truck bomb destroys these ancient houses and the crater uncovers a wall from Abbasid, the original name of the eighth-century Islamic city. To avoid hassle, however, the authorities hastily cover up this amazing find.

In this evocation of a complex and layered district, Saadawi laments the loss of hybrid, intertwined histories in a city torn apart by factional ideologies of ethnic, religious, or political purification. Instead, he celebrates Bataween’s street traders, drunks, street sellers, journalists, writers, and prostitutes.

No wonder this area becomes the home of the hybrid creature. One of Whatitsname’s followers tells him he is “the model citizen that the Iraqi state has failed to produce […] Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds — ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes — I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past.” The narrative frames this assertion as the theory of a complete madman, but it is also Saadawi’s clear rejection of the ethnic cleansing that was allowed to develop in the vacuum of power after the American invasion. In the embrace of the monster as what Stephen Asma calls a “mosaic being” — an impossible composite — Saadawi uses the Frankenstein myth exactly as Shelley Jackson did in her work Patchwork Girl (1995), which evokes Shelley’s original not to promote a holy terror at alterity (as the Universal Frankenstein horror films have tended to do) but to advocate for the impure, the messy, and the compromised.

The slangy and transgressive language of the novel also reveals this attitude. I know (having exchanged emails with the translator) that this has been a very tricky work to translate since it is not composed in formal, literary Arabic but in the local street slang and languages of Baghdad. Even though I have absolutely no ability to read the original, Jonathan Wright manages to impart to the English version a sense of this demotic, cynical, energetic linguistic world that conveys a modern, urban Baghdad. It is no surprise to see this book in translation shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in 2018.

There are now shelf-loads of American Iraq War vet-fic, which by its nature sees the war in the rear-view mirror, post-occupation, with narratives that are often shattered through the prism of post-traumatic devices. There have been some very good novels, of course, but also a nagging sense that there is something amiss in such established conventions of Iraq War literary prose, fine-tuned in MFA writing programs. Emotional disconnection that fragments narrative concordance, the temporal disordering of story by agitated plot, post-traumatic compulsive behaviors that mask the delayed traumatic revelation — these are familiar, even over-familiar, devices in books by Kevin Powers (The Yellow Birds), Phil Klay (Redeployment), Michael Pitre (Fives and Twenty Fives), and even the poetry of Brian Turner (Here, Bullet). All of these, by the very nature of their composition, focus on aftermaths, the alienated return of military veterans to American society. These narrative devices have been picked up in fictions subsequently inspired by the war, too, from Richard House’s The Kills to Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, to Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life. Not to disrespect these efforts, but there remains, nevertheless, something disquieting about the generic familiarity of this kind of war fiction. Some of these tropes have been roundly criticized by another veteran, writer, and activist, Roy Scranton, whose first novel War Porn appeared in 2016. In film, the conventions have become even more rigid.

Readers with no Arabic have been able to access the other side of this story for many years, in extraordinary fiction focused on the Iraqi experience by Hassan Blasim (also translated by Jonathan Wright) or Sinan Antoon. Iraqi women writers on the war who have been translated include the early blogger “Riverbend” (whose posts were collected in 2005 as Baghdad Burning), and Haifa Zangana in City of Widows. Both Blasim and Antoon have been in long-term exile from Iraq (Blasim in Finland, Antoon in the United States), yet this does not blunt the extraordinary force of their books. Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, translated by the author himself in 2013, is a very good companion piece to Frankenstein in Baghdad, given that it focuses on the ritual role of the mghassilchi, who washes and shrouds the bodies of the dead before burial according to Islamic tradition. Antoon’s unblinking focus on the dead body, the heightened poetic language used to describe the ritual washing, produces a way of restoring respect to the dead, even to those corpses that have been increasingly morcellated by bombs (in one scene, the corpse washer is given only a severed head to prepare). The stylistic contrast of the stately rhythms of Antoon’s prose with the street slang and messy dispersed narrative tactics of Saadawi’s book provides an instructive juxtaposition.

There is an inevitable risk in claiming that Saadawi is somehow more “authentic” — after all, his novel has been composed entirely from within the cauldron of post-invasion Baghdad. As Saadawi declared in a New York Times profile in 2014: “The most important thing that has happened to me is that I am still alive.” He has missed being hit by car bombs by minutes, seconds, by pure luck; but there is also the grim record of the targeting of intellectuals during the civil war. One wonders how the more conservative aspects of religious and civil society in Iraq have received Saadawi’s graphic representations of dissolute drinking and prostitution in the novel.

Yet Saadawi’s use of the conventions of science fiction, the Gothic, and detective fiction in Frankenstein in Baghdad also prevents any simplistic notions of authenticity. By fusing Western genre conventions with the “authentic” evocation of a Baghdad quarter, this narrative constitutes a hybrid fiction. Aside from the framework of Frankenstein, Saadawi’s Baghdad is a place of casual supernaturalism. For example, key character Majid serves as a brigadier in the Iraqi police who runs the Tracking and Pursuit Department: “Its mission was to monitor unusual crimes, urban legends, and superstitious rumors that arose around specific incidents, and then to find out what really happened and, more important, to make predictions about crimes that would take place in the future: car bombings and assassinations.” The team is made up of astrologers who use divination and remote sensing to deliver precise warnings about future attacks — messages that the authorities largely ignore. There is some bitter satire in these passages: a TV shows a government spokesman delighted to announce that only 15 bombs have gone off in a day, because al-Qaeda had planned to detonate over a hundred. They are winning the war!

The subgenre of psychic detective fiction — here refreshed with the lore of Arabic astrology and djinns — is one firmly rooted in urban fantasy, arguably since Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. This subgenre blossoms at moments when the city becomes unreadable, requiring seemingly supernatural apprehension to grasp its mysterious extent or the opaque rhythms of its invisible underworlds. The ability of Whatitsname to navigate the ruined terrain of Baghdad keeps him ahead of the dullards in the police and cuts through murderous territorial divisions: a lethally factionalized city requires a supernatural creature to map it.

Saadawi’s hybrid fusion of genres can be located in an exciting current of writing from the Arab world that uses science fiction and the Gothic in increasingly inventive ways. Hassan Blasim edited the science fiction collection Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion for Comma Press in 2016. There have been English translations of Telepathy by Sudanese author Amir Tag Elsir and the blistering denunciation of the totalitarian Egyptian state in Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik (a physician and prolific author who sadly died in April 2018). A cluster of writers and artists surround Sophia al-Maria, who coined the term “Gulf Futurism” for the weird modernity of the future cities emerging in the Arab world in the last days of the oil economy. Al-Maria’s memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (2012), insistently uses science fiction to link her childhood between the United States and the deserts of Arabia. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2018 went to the Jordanian-Palestinian author Ibrahim Nasrallah for his fifth novel set in an unnamed Arabic city in the future, Dog War II.

Meanwhile, in cinema, the short science fiction films of Larissa Sansour imagine weird futures for Palestine and London-born video artist Shezad Dawood has also insistently mined science fictional tropes in his installation works (Towards the Possible Film used a first contact alien narrative on the dramatic coast of Morocco, for instance). There have also been prominent releases for the American-Iranian vampire film directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), and the rather more impressive Under the Shadow (2016), about a malignant djinn unleashed by bombing in Iran in the early 1980s, co-produced between Britain, Qatar, and Jordan by the Iranian-born director Babak Anvari.

The most marked development of genre fiction in the 21st century has been this global extension and rapid hybridization with local traditions — there are fascinating cross-fertilizations going on across the globe in China, Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Saadawi’s monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad is a hybrid creature for our times. It is a desperate marker of the brutal violence that has taken countless lives in the wars unleashed in the region, a horrorism so extreme that it requires the register of the Gothic to address it. But Frankenstein in Baghdad is also a sign that the imagination can still survive in these conditions, literary works flowering in the cracks of the rubble.

¤

To follow developments in Arab writing, I would recommend following the blog Arabic Literature (in English) at https://arablit.org and particularly for science fiction in the region, Sindbad Sci Fi at http://sindbadscifi.com.

¤

Roger Luckhurst is professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London.

The post The Cost of War: Parts and Labor appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2JI1SgL

[ricardosousalemos]

Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele

In the fall of 1997, Ghostface Killah decamped to West Africa. His diabetes had become cataclysmic: dizziness, blurred vision, bloodshot eyes, and concussive headaches. He hadn’t quit drinking, which didn’t help; nor did the joints laced with angel dust he still smoked from time to time.

Even before the diagnosis, he convinced himself of his impending demise, fearing cancer, though more likely AIDS. When medical professionals finally tested his blood sugar it was 500 mg/dl. Anything above 550 is considered fatal.

Wary of Western medicine, Ghostface flew to Benin to be treated by a bush doctor in a remote village several hours outside of Cotonou, the nation’s most populous city. Running water was non-existent. The inhabitants lived in mud huts and slept on the floor. When the RZA showed up to meet Ghostface, he saw his bandmate materialize in a dashiki, full beard, and unkempt hair puffed out. RZA had brought Kung Fu flicks—specifically Blade of Fury—which they watched alone as honored guests, the tribe’s children looking on in awe of them and the village’s only TV.

The spiritual nucleus of Supreme Clientele spawns from that pilgrimage. That’s where Tony Starks wrote “Nutmeg” and several other album tracks in a purge of voodoo spirits, occidental poisons, and crazy visions. It’s a masterpiece of comic absurdity and cosmic exorcisms, existential paradox and mathematic precision.

In an attempt to save his life, he seeks out a medicine man in his ancestral homeland and achieves esoteric and sobering realizations about existence. Sans beats, the Wallabee Champ scrawls countless transmissions snatched from the thundering din in his head. It’s as if Muhammad returned from the cave of Hira to prophesize revelations of seasoned giraffe ribs, Scooby Snacks, dancing with the most sexually vibrant member of the Golden Girls, and how his dick made a magazine cover (“count how many veins on it”). 

About two years later, a fully clothed Starks actually made the cover of The Source and explained the knowledge of self-obtained in Africa.  

“Fuck all this Tommy Hilfiger, Polo…all this shit…they don’t give a fuck about none of that over there. Everything is the same,” Ghostface said. “But over here, everybody wanna be better than the next one…They might be fucked up, money-wise, but trust me, them muthafuckas is happy, man. Them niggas in harmony ‘cause they got each other.”

Mind you, Pretty Toney delivers this soliloquy while smoking a Newport in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in Midtown, Manhattan, wearing an ankle-length, royal blue robe with a custom-embroidered “W” on the back. The entire time he’s enraged that “BET Rap City” isn’t playing the video for “Apollo Kids”—the one where he’s swaddled in mink coats and eating a golden ice cream cone.  

This is Ghost, naturally ridiculous, the supreme smart dumb cat, the genius who embodies the innate contradictions of late American capitalism, gobbling Chinese herbs and getting acupuncture during the day and smoking dust and dodging bullets at night, capable of staggering misogyny and deep reverence towards women. He is both yin and yang, not just from song to song, but syllable to syllable.  

He continues about his Africa trip:

“You see them kids that’s on TV? With flies on they face…I don’t like to see that. There’s no reason in this world with all this money that we got, for those babies to be over there with…big stomachs and shit like that,” Ghost adds. “I’m one of them niggas that’ll bring them into their muthafuckin’ family, I don’t give a fuck if it’s ten of them. I’ll get them.”

If Ghost ever adopted ten sub-Saharan kids, it was never mentioned on Couples Therapy. Other interviews followed in which he spoke of lofty plans to recruit Oprah Winfrey and Magic Johnson to help him build a school for the indigent children of Benin. And while his follow-through was shaky, his sincerity was unmatched. He also had a good excuse, considering the grave legal turmoil shadowing him during the recording of Supreme Clientele.

Parole Kids Live Rapunzel

The District Attorney threatened Dennis Coles with “five to 15” if he didn’t cop a plea to attempted robbery charges stemming from an incident outside of the Palladium back in 1995. While parked at the venue, someone slashed Ghost’s tires and a brawl ensued between Starks and his crew against the Palladium attendants. One valet claimed that Ghost tried to rob him. None of this ends well.

As his attorney negotiated for better terms, blue and red lights flashed once again. This time, a friend named Dupree Lane got pulled over as Ghost trailed in a caravan behind. Using “disorderly conduct” as the pretext to search Ghost’s car, cops found a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow-point bullets hidden behind the glove compartment. Ironman was wearing a bulletproof vest—another felony charge. 

Throughout this entire period, the NYPD and F.B.I. attempted to launch a RICO case against the Wu, who they branded a “major criminal organization.” It’s bizarre to weigh these accusations in the wake of Method Man starring in network sitcoms, the RZA bong-bonging all over Californication, and Ghostface doing full-length collaborations with Canadian jazz prodigies scarcely old enough to sip Alizé. But just consider the abridged list of alleged criminology: illegal gunrunning, weapons possession, homicide, carjackings, and a bi-coastal drug ring. They attempted to pin the murders of two drug dealers on a hit ordered by RZA and Raekwon. According to the Bureau, Wu-Tang Records was little more than a front for laundering money, which ostensibly explains why RZA kept releasing Wu-Syndicate and Sunz of Man albums.

Even before Ghost copped a plea to rot on Rikers Island for four months, Supreme Clientele’s plotline already felt like Martin Scorsese directing Shaft in Africa. As for the incarceration, it’s difficult to gauge its impact beyond the obvious delays. In the press cycle leading up to Supreme Clientele’s release in February of 2000, Starks attempted to downplay its severity.

One MTV interview describes it as a disguised blessing that allowed him to further refine the record. In Stress Magazine, he contextualizes it as a cruel but mundane reality that many young American black men are forced to endure. The liner notes dedicate a section to "my niggas in the Belly": Big Un, Ready Red, Mushy Mush, General, Wah aka Freedom, Born, Shaquel Dueprey Allah from the O Building, and Peace Lord.

Most revealing was a SPIN interview, where he explained its physical ramifications—the times the prison guards refused to give him a proper dose of insulin, causing extreme vertigo and sickness.

“I hold on to times when I had to struggle,” Ghost said. “That’s the science of going through hell and having to come out right—because everybody gots to go through hell to come out right.”

Rather than script a conventional narrative about this purgatory, Ghost focuses on the fractured chaos of the world that led him to the pen. On “Buck 50,” he pauses mid-seduction to tell a woman to “check the grays on the side of my waves/I grew those on Rikers Island/Stressed out, balled up in the cage.” In the next breath, he shouts out Clyde Drexler’s hops, Biggie’s Versace’s, Zulu Nation in the ’80s, and how quickly his back got chiseled after two weeks in the gym. Then he quotes Mary Poppins and eats grouper in Cancun. You’re dealing with Supreme Clientele.

This Rap Is Like Ziti

It was supposed to be called Ironman. Instead, the RZA insisted that Ghost bestow that name on his debut album because everyone already knew him as Tony Starks. It just made more sense, marketing-wise. So Ironman dominated the fall of late ’96, the last of that royal flush of solo classics leading up to Wu-Tang Forever. It clocked over 800,000 CDs and tapes and debuted at No. 2 on the charts. RZA was probably right.

But if you re-listen to Ironman, it’s dark and wounded, the opposite of bulletproof steel. “Wildflower” and “Marvel” are scorched-earth breakup songs, all salted wounds and fresh infection. The plaintive “All That I Got is You” transforms the claustrophobic nightmare of the Staten Island projects into a gorgeous hymn about how a mother’s love conquers all. Ghost was still so heavy in the streets that he accidentally led the Delfonics into a shootout on a recording session gone awry. On the cover, Raekwon and Cappadonna receive co-billing, lending it the feel of an Only Built 4 Cuban Linx sequel more than a radical break from the Wu cosmology.

By Woodstock ‘99, critics and fans wondered if Wu-Tang were washed. Hindsight remembers it as a classic, but most reviews indicted the bloat and filler of 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever. A biblical flood ruined RZA’s studio, waterlogging hundreds of beats and hastening his baptism into Bobby Digital. Method Man and GZA’s follow-up albums disappointed everyone without a “W” tattooed on their clavicle, while Raekwon dropped the biggest No. 2 brick since Sam Bowie. The dollar bins of America were strangled with Shaq’s first record, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and innumerable Wu-Tang C-Listers sworn to omertà in exchange for a release date and two True Master beats.

Into the void Ghostface swaggered, inhaling breakbeats of hell, hitting mics like Ted Koppel, cham-punching Mase, and slapping crooked reverends so hard condoms, dice, and dope fell out of their pockets; sticking up rappers for their chains on New Year’s Eve in Cali and divulging no names; sprinkling snow inside the Optimo and sipping Remy Martin on diamonds. Supreme Clientele is Ironman. It’s invulnerable and silvery, the stream-of-consciousness hexes from a general who survived hell. A shade short of 30, Ghostface had been shot three times, survived multiple stints on Rikers Island, a debilitating battle with diabetes, and mourned the loss of two brothers with muscular dystrophy to become chromatic myth. He’d made religious pilgrimages to the motherland, slept on mud floors and hospital gurneys, prison cots, and silk sheets in $1,000-a-night hotel rooms. Now he was being tasked to save the Wu-Tang Clan.

To understand Supreme Clientele is to be humbled by epistemological limitations. You can see, feel, and taste it, but it can only be decrypted to a point. It’s a psychedelic record moored in reality. The ‘90s didn’t really end on 9/11; the ashes got incinerated with the smoke of RZA’s honey-dipped spliff.

Practically nothing is known about its recording process. In NYC, Starks demolished mics at the Hit Factory, Track, Quad Studios and the Wu’s own 36 Chambers compound in midtown. A Miami trip to Miami yielded “Ghosteini.” Out of a thousand beats, Ghost selected barely over a dozen. They mostly came from RZA, Mathematics, Inspectah Deck, Carlos “6 July” Broady of The Hitman, and Juju from The Beatnuts. All were logical picks if you’re trying to construct a great New York rap album circa 2000.

Out of a sped-up Solomon Burke loop came “Apollo Kids,” courtesy of Hassan of the UMCs, Staten Island’s first major rap crew. His discogs page shows nothing after Supreme Clientele.  A semi-anonymous producer named Carlos Bess furnished his biggest hit “Cherchez La Ghost,” a cocaine opera about Tommy Mottola getting dumped, where U-God brags about busting through condoms and drinking mediocre lime rum. These are the things you can’t account for.

Consider that the beat for “Nutmeg” came from Ghost’s barber, Arthur, who cut hair on Staten Island. Somehow, the only major production credit of Black Moes-Art’s career is one of the hardest beats in history, a clean fade sliced from a forgotten 12” originally cut by Eddie Holman, the falsetto behind “(Hey There) Lonely Girl.” It sounds like he made it for a Saturday morning cartoon about the overcrowded projects of Alpha Centauri where everyone’s hands are semi-automatics; the only currency is angel dust, and the high priest cuts hair in a plutonium suit.

The common denominator was the RZA. He assembled and mixed them, adding uniform layers of grime and radioactivity, bizarre alarms and a dense twisted paranoia. It’s soul music transmogrified into gleaming metal, a tank covered in diamonds. The instrumentals sound like they’re ranting right back at Ghost, who sounds like he’s dripping blood onto the mic stand. As Chris Rock said about those cadaverous scratches on “Stroke of Death,” it makes you want to stab your babysitter.

Supreme Clientele established the template for what Kanye did later on Yeezus. Assemble an arsenal of heat and desecrate it to your personal satisfaction. It’s no coincidence. In Kanye West in the Studio, West claims, “I feel like I got my whole style from Ghostface…my whole mentality about hip-hop.” He later explains that many of the soul-chops that wound up on The Blueprint were originally intended for Ghostface until Jay Z heard them.

A few years ago, Mathematics laid out how it all happened. The RZA protégé never really topped “Mighty Healthy,” the original first single that Kanye lifted for “New God Flow.” It evokes a rare twinkling evil, like some velvet afterlife where you are condemned to sip Ginger Ale and watch Kung Fu movies for eternity. “That whole time period, [Ghostface] had a glow about him,” Mathematics said to HipHopDX. “That was how that whole Supreme Clientele came about. It was because of that glow.”

Maybe that’s the most appropriate metaphor for this album. Ghost had the sort of nuclear phosphorescence that people use to explain what they can’t explain. He rapped like he was a sacred vessel for ancient spirits with a preternatural ardor for Teddy Pendergrass. Ghost says it himself, these are “graveyard spells.” Fog your goggles.

Crushed Out Heavenly

On Supreme Clientele, Ghostface does nothing short of revolutionize the English language. Words like tidal waves drown you as you gulp for air, just trying to tread water and interpret what was said four bars ago. Ears twitch, you catch the aroma of Kansas fried chicken as it whips past, the grievous ululations of mothers mourning their dead sons. It’s like a Weegee photograph of the late Giuliani era, but simultaneously a proto-Adult Swim hallucination where Apollo Kids lounge on gilded thrones, sipping wine coolers in King Tut hats.

“The knowledge is how it sounds,” he said to The Source. “See we funny niggas. I’m a give you a little jewel. A lot of funny niggas know how to rap. The slang that we be saying G, it could mean whatever at that time. We say everything. ‘Lobsterhead.’ Come on man. If a nigga fit that type of category, then he a lobsterhead. It’s just that—slang. It’s real, but it’s what it means at that time.”

If hip-hop’s original rule was the Wild Style, Supreme Clientele shatters every precept while still respecting the foundation. There are scratches, breakbeats, and the (mostly) good-natured insanity to be the greatest. It’s the wildest style, rap stretched to silly putty lengths, as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the needle. There’s the DNA of Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Rammellzee, Slick Rick, Ultramagnetic MCs and Kool Keith, but this marked a seismic rupture with tradition. It was art-rap made for the asphalt—the closest that hip-hop ever came to Ulysses, and not only because Joyce described the “snotgreen sea” and Ghost conjured a “booger-green Pacer.” Both Joyce and Ghost understand that basic idea that a “man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

At times, Supreme Clientele accidentally channels Raymond Chandler translating A Season in Hell. At others, the dirty nasal bark summons Donald Goines on DMT or Lewis Carroll in the slithy toves of Stapleton, where the ambulance don’t come. Ghost intuitively realized what André Breton claimed was the definition of surrealism: the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. How else to categorize the man who arranged the combination of words, “Dicking down Oprah, jump rope/David Dinkins/Watch the black mayor of D.C. hit the mocha.”

You could spend all day deciphering “Malcolm,” with its snippet of Malcolm X condemning the “corrupt, vicious, and hypocritical system that has castrated the black man.” The description of an anonymous phantom as the one “that cut his wrists, talkin’ bout the cuffs did it/He bantamweight, frontin’ majorly/Eyes like Sammy Davis Jr.” He divines the phrase, “Dream merchant tucked in the cloud,” fingers Pamela Lee, and dares someone to make him “catch a Kennedy.” One skit chronicles the travails of a crackhead named after a World War I President. Another mercilessly threatens 50 Cent. For whatever reason, he finishes “Stroke of Death” by bellowing, “White man scream, SWIM STARKS SHARKS!”

Lef off the album was a twisted soul death ballad alternately called “In the Rain,” “Wise,” or “In the Rain (Wise).” Ghost claimed that he wrote it stoned on the beach in Florida during a torrential downpour upon learning that one of his best friends had been murdered. The more he wrote, the more the storm thrashed until it ceased four or five hours later; then he stood up with tears in his eyes, noticed a pyramid in the sand, walked around it three times, uttered an “All praises due Allah” incantation, and returned home. He apparently laid it down in Detroit with The Dramatics, the Detroit Orchestra, and Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey. I only know this from the liner notes of the album that I purchased in 2000. The actual song was not on my CD. The tracklist is completely wrong too. In this parallel universe, it makes perfect sense.

Through this warped and sinistral way, Supreme Clientele is about love. Ironman unmasked a scorned Lothario simultaneously trying to establish himself as an elite rapper like Raekwon, Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and GZA. It’s a competitive record with something to prove. But here Ghost sounds like he just fucking loves rapping. And he loves children in Africa. And he loves ’70s and ’80s New York. And he loves 2Pac and Biggie and Malcolm and Marvin Gaye and anyone who stood for something. He loves mink coats, cognac, baked ziti, and Allah. He’s extraordinarily pro-black, not because he’s anti-anyone else, but because he profoundly loves his people for their soul, strength, and common heritage.

He loves his crew, who roll deep alongside him: from Trife on the outro of "One" to Superb popping up everywhere, to the posse cuts "We Made It", "Buck 50" and "Wu Banga 101.” It’s Ghost’s show, but the experience of recording it doesn’t sound solitary. He loves them so deeply because he’s acutely aware of how quickly this mirage can vanish. On “We Made It,” Starks celebrates another victory by just a thin thread of electric current. Before 2000 ends, one of its guest rappers, Chip Banks became a chalk outline memory in Harlem, murdered over a small cash dispute, barely 30 years old. Eight children left behind. It’s one more reminder that this was his life’s work—not merely something great made in a crazy period, but the only way that period could have ended.

There’s an old Ghostface quote where he simplifies rap to the most basic prerequisite: get “some official beats and say fly shit over them.” Even if that was all that he did on Supreme Clientele, it would still be a classic. But what makes it transformational are those minor details. The almost tossed-off aside where the vivid laser eye guy spits, “West Brighton pool now I’m into iron duels.” It’s a name-check of the neighborhood spot where he used to swim, a sad glint of far-off nostalgia as he considers who might be lurking the next time he steps outside.  

This is the duality that remains constant, the fluid superhero transformation as Starks shifts from retina-searing brightness to black and white grit, comic absurdity to adolescent remembrance, revelations spoken through rap. It’s the testament of a mortal god, hoping to save the world, hoping to free himself.