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highladyluck · 4 years

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Here, have 4.5 pages of rambly Tuon meta. I wrote this to try to get a handle on Tuon’s character, and to develop the theoretical framework for a redemption arc for her. I’m hoping posting this doesn’t cut my motivation to actually write it...

Who is Tuon? Tuon Athaem Kore Paendrag, High Lady, Daughter of the Nine Moons; now the Empress of Seanchan (at least on the westlands side), Fortuona Athaem Kore Paendrag. To borrow some phrasing and framing from @websandwhiskers: She’s the pinnacle of Seanchan culture and an extremely functional tool of the state; responsible (both personally and institutionally) for psychologically and physically torturing people and enslaving them; she also has some compelling moral and personal qualities that she and the state have not yet managed to quash, which kind of makes it all worse, ethically speaking. She’s a villain whom the original narrative neither sufficiently condemns nor sufficiently redeems, married to one of the Big Damn Heroes in a match that’s both very odd couple and very complementary.

She respects people who stand up to her, as long as they aren't 'disrespectful' in the process- and the 'disrespect' is very situational, she'll accept things in private or in non-court settings that she can't let slide in court without losing face and therefore power. She cares very much about the legitimacy of authority, because it correlates positively with stability and is ingrained in her self-image, but she has an autocrat’s idea of what is legitimate. She assumes you know your own self-worth in relation to hers and are prepared to both display it and back it up. She has also internalized that other people's challenges of her are opportunities for her to prove her strength and fitness to rule, and she probably low-key seeks to provoke reactions now as validation/training, for herself and others.

She has rigid moral standards within the context she was raised in, and punishes herself first for perceived failure because if she does it first, perhaps she can avoid someone else doing it, with deadlier results. She has never been allowed to be less than perfect by her culture's standards- she can be (and has been) odd, but she cannot be flawed- and possibly expends all of her natural empathy on others instead of herself, because she can't afford that kind of indulgence herself, but she knows she owes it to lesser beings?

And as @websandwhiskers pointed out, she does have a lot of empathy within allowable contexts, and I think she is willing to push the envelope compared to her peers as long as she/the empire isn't directly threatened. That's what the kiss after Mat let the poisonous snake go was about. The snake was poisonous but not attacking, and not likely to attack unless someone escalated the situation, and Mat deescalated it. No harm, no foul. Mat responded to a fraught situation both logically and mercifully, in the way she imagined she would have if she had been in his shoes and known he same facts he did, and she rewarded him.

She’s competent and charismatic; I hesitate to say that she inspires loyalty in underlings because honestly with the damane it’s brainwashing (eurgh). But Selucia and Karede are both really into her, personally, even when there are societal inducements not to play favorites. Mat is loyal to her, though honestly Mat is loyal to like... anyone he’s responsible for, so maybe it’s more relevant to say that Mat genuinely likes her; at least, he likes the person he thinks he can coax out of her, and in terms of the persona she has more typically, I think he responds well to her competency and self-possession. The ability to project those things is probably a big part of what goes into charisma.

She thinks that the people who oppose her just don't have all the facts. She doesn't like to admit she's changed her mind; it looks like weakness; she's fine identifying it in others but not herself. Ideally she would pretend things have always been the way she now knows they are, and if she can't, she goes for the "Yes [fact], but [here's what I've decided is now germane to the argument at hand]." redefinition of the problem. She always thinks she’s right, though she does tend to leave some space between when she’s decided something and when she promulgates the decision, to allow for opposing arguments.

I think the original relationship Tuon has with omens is that she uses them to look for external justification from the universe for decisions she's already made. (I mostly like Sanderson's Tuon POVs, but I also I think Sanderson sometimes used omens as a 'make Tuon do OOC things for the plot' card.) Tuon's running dialogue with omens also shows that she's always observing the world and interpreting her effect on it and its effect on her. She loses her composure with omens when they are more concrete and less subject to her control (via interpretation), as with Lidya's fortune.

It makes sense that she's super controlling. It was how she was raised, and aside from having loyal/brainwashed companions (who are, themselves, a form of distributed control), being controlling is obviously the only thing that makes her feel safe. It's still interesting how it extends into a dialogue with the Pattern itself. Like Mat, she wants to survive and she wants to go her own way, and also like Mat she's caught up in the Pattern a little more tightly than others. I think she and Mat have both subconsciously decided that the only way to deal with what the universe wants you to do, when the universe is that powerful, is to say "Fine, I didn't really want to do that other thing anyway, let's learn how this path works and play to win."

She knows she makes bad decisions when angry, and I think in general she distrusts strong emotions, or at least tries to hold them at arms' length so they don't form part of her judgment. She's very very good at compartmentalizing, but as a result sometimes emotional stuff will come up and blindside her a little because she doesn't prioritize it or see it as a natural part of her decision-making. I think her emotions do influence her, usually subconsciously, but she's obviously a Thinking type. (Mat is also a compartmentalizer, but more somatic/emotionally focused; he's got his feelings directly wired into his body and together they make decisions that his brain then evaluates a second later, with running commentary that he never expresses to anyone else. They are both comedically un-self-aware, although Tuon is even less self-aware than Mat is, since at least on some level Mat knows he's been repeatedly traumatized even if he tries to pretend he isn't, while Tuon still thinks that her childhood was completely fine.)

Within the original narrative, I think her POVs are always a bit mysterious and her actions are always a little surprising. What’s impressive about that is that this is basically *always* true no matter what setting she’s in and what she’s doing. When you’re in her head you see her thought process ticking away, but RJ and Sanderson both have her constantly withholding important contextual details in her POVs, like Lidya’s prophecy (the hints are there and come out in bits and pieces, but she doesn’t reveal everything and slot it into context until 2 books later). Like with reading Mat, you’re aware that she obviously has reasons for what she’s doing and you even see her decision-making process, but because you’re missing the details, she remains opaque even though you’re in her head. (Mat’s decision-making process is more clear to the reader, but somewhat opaque to himself and definitely opaque to those around him.)

Meanwhile the things Tuon does share via narration or via action are always kind of buck-wild for the reader because her entire deal is such a culture shock. She’s obviously surprising Mat & co, but what’s weird is that she also seems to be constantly surprising her fellow Seanchan. Her scenes with her peers are usually punctuated with shocked murmuring in the background. They have trouble anticipating her, both because she keeps her cards close to her chest, and I also think because she’s a slightly different person from the one who lived her entire life in a cloistered murdersphere in Seanchan, and if she wasn’t a different person after leaving home, she’s definitely one after her kidnapping. But I think she is a fundamentally different person after leaving home, because of the structural parallels she has with Mat.

In Mat’s first POV chapter, he wakes up in Tar Valon with partial amnesia and a much stronger sense of self-preservation than he had before. As everybodyhatesrand points out (crediting but not tagging them since I feel like they wouldn’t appreciate being tagged in Tuon apologia), we have never been in pre-dagger!Mat’s head. We have never been in dagger!Mat’s head. Everyone in the books, throughout the books, is like “At least Mat’s still the same!” and yeah, he does do and say more or less the same things before and after the dagger. But we had to take it on faith that his personality is more or less intact pre- and post-dagger because we, the readers, only know post-dagger!Mat’s inner monologues. The Mat we inhabit in book 3? He’s been broken. The continuity between his old life and his new life has been disrupted (and will continue to be disrupted, including with an actual literal timeline reboot!) He immediately starts off to fix himself, others, and then eventually the world, so it’s motivating, but the hits really just keep coming...

Like Mat, Tuon’s first POV only appears after she’s left the traumatic environment that shaped her. We don’t know what travelling across the sea did to her sense of self (and we can’t really know since we don’t have that in-Seanchan-baseline), though we do know she’s changed after travelling with Mat (aside from catching feelings, I think she learned that the Seanchan are not always in possession of all the facts), and we know what becoming Empress did to her (she doubled down on duty and lost a lot of personal flexibility). I think there are major structural parallels between Mat and Tuon’s POVs because they’re both broken people who try their very best to act as if they are not broken. In Tuon’s case I think she just doesn’t know how broken she is. In Mat’s case, he knows, but he’s doing a weird balancing act of integrating lessons learned (healing!) while also, like, frantically trying to ignore or drown out the emotional cost of trauma (not healing!)

By the end of the series I think Tuon knows, but is not letting herself actually think, that being made damane is a) a real possibility for her, specifically, and b) that it is not, in fact, something she would willingly choose for herself even to serve the empire. I think this is different from the more intellectual disgust of the idea of herself channeling; that's abstract, and she imagines there's an actual choice for the person with the spark between channeling and not channeling, or possibly that there's an actual choice between learning to channel vs not learning to channel if you have the spark inborn. (We know that the actual choice if you have the spark is 'learn to channel properly or die'.) Tuon's out there like "If I were a marath'damane I would simply choose not to channel. RIP to marath'damane but I'm different".

She's never been a marath'damane in the sense of someone who started channeling involuntarily, and isn't interested in imagining herself as one, at least not when confronted by someone who is succeeding in making her angry. So even if you made her choose, as a theoretical marath'damane, between dying and learning to channel properly, I think she'd consider 'learning to channel properly' as 'becoming a murderer' and therefore the choice would be between dying and becoming a murderer. There's a clear argument to be made in that idiom that the marath'damane is 'becoming a murderer' in self-defense, which would have a different moral tenor (manslaughter vs murder). But Tuon strikes me as the type to say in an argument (and probably believe) that "The end result is the same & I would die before compromising my principles.”

I think in the confrontation with Egwene she probably internally justified not putting the collar on because there was a Seanchan audience and because the taunt came from an escaped damane, even though the actual reason was fear that it would work. She’s letting the circumstances invalidate the argument so she doesn’t have to think about it. I think if she were to let herself think about the authentic emotional response- and she probably has, I feel like she does a postmortem on all of her public discomposure- she would consciously know that her instinct was that it would work on her, and furthermore she would know that she does not want to be damane, even if the Empire would require her to be.

If she followed out the chain of reasoning, she’d know that if she were a damane, if she were actually leashed, she would be forced to channel. She’d know because she’s taken great pleasure in training and breaking damane, and she knows how to get damane to channel and how to break them. Therefore, if she were damane, she would know that she would need to be broken, and she knows how she would go about breaking herself. She probably thinks that her last act of free will would be to suicide if she possibly could. But I think that what she’s AFRAID OF is that she would actually convince herself that being the very best damane is all she wants out of life. And that's the scary, universe-ending thought she's avoiding the consequences of, because a) it’s about breaking herself (as Cadsuane points out, no one can easily think about breaking themselves) and b) the fact that she would need to be broken and that she doesn’t like the idea is a sign that she’s not the perfect avatar of the Empire that she thinks she should be.

I think becoming damane has been added- in the bare abstract- to her mental list of the price of failure. It's a very fundamental loss of control and identity, where all she has is resignation and brainwashing that- best case scenario- she does to herself. She's scared of it in a way she was not before, now that it's been made personal. Like Mat, she's going to shove that down deep and ignore the bad scary implications as long as she can, up until the point that they actually disable her or otherwise bleed out into her intellectual or physical world in ways that aren't as ignorable.

But while Tuon thinks she would die before compromising her principles, and even more secretly is extremely afraid that she *wouldn't*, I also think that like Mat, if it came down to it she would transform herself radically to survive *as herself*.

She’d realize that she has other principles, more human ones, underlying her socially acceptable and externally imposed principles of enforcing hierarchy and maintaining personal integrity. (Parallels to dagger!Mat being exorcised?) I think her basic motivations are that she should survive, that she should retain as much control/power over her own fate as possible, and that she should make decisions from a place of empathy rather than anger or fear. I think she would also realize that she does in fact value some principles over others. She would redefine the meaning of ‘personal integrity’ to separate it from what the state wants.

If she knew what was really driving her socially acceptable principles, and that there was a difference between what she really, fundamentally wanted & what she had been told to want, with encouragement she could prioritize the organic, primal ones and apply those to the external world. If she is a person, then everyone else is a person, and she should want for them what she wants for herself. I think she might get to the point of realizing there is an alternative path (of what looks like selfishness) but I don't think she's going to let herself be selfish (in this healing, positive way) without external prompting/confirmation, so this is probably where friends, positive role models, and finally omens come in.

#tuon paendrag #problematic fave tuon #meta #wheel of time #If I were a marath'damane I would simply choose not to channel. RIP to marath'damane but I'm different.

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girlobsessed21 · 4 years

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My thoughts on The 100 7x02

Despite all the negativity surrounding this episode, I adored it. The main reason being I’ve fallen in love with these characters over the years and seeing something good and peaceful happen in their lives is momentous. It was a little slow and consisted mostly of world building and exposition, though I enjoyed the tranquil and reflective pace. Unfortunately, this post will be more or less the same.

Five seconds = Three months

So, Octavia arrives on the new planet that Hope later names Skyring and finds Diyoza three months later, in labour. Dioyoza falls asleep right after giving birth and Octavia feeds baby Hope with her fingers just like Bellamy did with her. I’m a sentimentalist and that was as saccharine as scenes come. Too bad Hope figured out milk doesn’t come from a pinkie.

Octavia tries to figure out how a few seconds dilated into months and Diyoza says she’s not Einstein. Usually that’s a metaphor for genius, but in this case it’s meant literal given Einstein’s theory of special relativity is at play. You can watch an explanatory video here, but in laymen’s terms it means that times slows down for an object, the closer it’s velocity gets to the speed of light.

Aunty O

The place is perfect, no threats, plenty of food, fresh water, but Octavia can’t stay. I’ve heard people say that Octavia’s actions are selfish this episode, but she never intended to stay. It wasn’t her choice, her life or her narrative.

For the last few seasons, the Blakes have had quite a rocky relationship and both had some blame in it. I get that Diyoza saved Octavia’s life, but Bellamy saved it long before that. On the ark, all they had were each other, and Octavia was Bellamy’s entire world, he didn’t have anyone else. When she threw him into the fighting pits, she gave him tips that could lead to victory because, like she said, he is her blood.

At the end of season 5, she risked her life to save him in the gorge. Even though Bellamy knew that killing her, would save their problem of going to war over Eden, he couldn’t do it. They share a bond and a connection that none of us can comprehend because we didn’t grow up in the conditions or proximity they were forced to. Yes, Bellamy abandoned her in Sanctum, but his intentions were pure.

The point is, trying to get back to him may be selfish in a way, but she was had no other choice than to become Aunty O. The surrogate aunt not related by blood. I understand her reasons for trying to get back and make amends with her brother. She didn’t know Diyoza or Hope when she arrived, but her brother was a constant nagging loose wire inside of her.

It’s clear that she learned to love both of them as time wore on. I mean who couldn’t fall in love with that adorable little thing, but Octavia is not someone you can strap down and ask to listen to reason. She’s a wild spirit who lives on the wings of the wind. I think it’s important to remember that Octavia is not the selfless, nurturing leader that Bellamy and Clarke are, she has always been somewhat selfish, obstinate and unstoppable. The ache inside never diminished as her hope dwindled and naivety grew but I’d like to think that at some point she would have chosen to stay. I would have appreciated a scene where she pointedly decided on them.

Octavia and Diyoza together as a team and a family is something I need more of. They play so well for and against each other and that cute little kid is simply the cherry on a magnificent chocolate sundae. Boy, and that letter had a tear running down my cheek. Too bad it led to the disciples discovering them. My heart broke for poor little Hope when they took her parents away. That scene was absolutely devastating. But just before they shatter us, we learn a vital piece of information, the helmets keep their memories intact. So, how did O end up back in Sanctum with amnesia?

I must nit-pick on one thing; how did Echo find the letter a hundred years later without anyone else discovering it?

And one last quick question, did the Clarke, Bellamy and Madi line mean something? Is that a little foreshadowing? Fan service in my opinion but I’d love to hear yours.

Un?Welcome to Skyring

Hope’s personality springs into full throttle as soon as her memories return while Echo only cares about Bellamy’s whereabouts. We learn that the disciples took him to Bardo - the next stop on the anomaly/bridge. The same people who chased them through the woods. Oh, and they have a leader named Anders. It’s not a surprise that Hope traded Octavia for Diyoza, we all suspected that since the end of season 6.

Though the knife that Hope stabbed her with was a locator tag, she didn’t kill her. Does that mean Octavia is alive and well in Bardo? I guess so when looking at the scenes in the trailer where she wakes up in a lab.

Hope contacted Octavia via her biometric signature which is a tool similar to the ‘tagging gun’. Each mind has its own unique code, a thumbprint if you will, that can be accessed through the anomaly stone. This doesn’t quite make sense to me. If Hope contacted O, why did she write ‘Trust Bellamy’? Because why in the world would Bellamy help her after she stabbed his sister?

Another thing that doesn’t make sense is why the prisoner didn’t attack them immediately? Why wait until Echo found out that someone else was there? Now, I don’t like to discredit, but Tasya Teles’s acting is a little wooden throughout this episode, which could also be a result of bad directing.

I know a lot of people don’t like Echo, and while watching I thought of Hope as a personification for a lot of voices (not mine) in the fandom. I completely get it, Octavia obviously didn’t like her with valid reasons.

Now the important question, what is it about Bellamy that has otherwise sensible woman willing to die for him. My answer is, he’s willing to die for these women in return. Bellamy has a deep passion and loyalty to the people in his life, one he would gladly lay down for them. You’re in trouble once Bellamy Blake learns that he loves you, because that love runs deep and profound, shooting roots, left, right and centre.

Back to the story, Skyring is a prison where the disciples (highly trained warriors) are sent when they don’t pull their own weight. Also their way out five years from now. But Gabriel discovers Colin Benson was from Eligius III and his mind drive might have their key. I hope Gabriel will be more than just obsessing over the anomaly this season, I mean it’s cute, but it does become a little overbearing after a while.

He notices that a weekend on Bardo relates to five years on Skyring. So, is Bardo closer to the black whole than Skyring? Because my logic tells me differently if it’s the next stop on the bridge. Not sure if the Becca’s clip meant anything more than an explanation for the time dilation, we’ll see.

I enjoyed the sweet little moment of Echo comforting and reassuring Hope. Has Echo ever been that emotional with anyone except Bellamy, maybe? I like that she’s slowly but surely tapping into her own emotions. It can’t be easy for a nameless spy.

Onto the worst part of the episode… Why the hell did Gabriel come running out looking for a pen? Seriously, where the hell would they get a pen and why did he leave the device inside. That was such a ridiculous move. Clearly not a well thought out plot point. They could have done something a lot more realistic resulting in the same scenario - they’re trapped on Skyring for the next five years.

Well, that’s my thoughts for this week, can’t wait for the next episode and especially for Bellamy’s return, not sure when that will be.

#the 100 #the 100 7x02 #the100 #the100 s7 #the100 season 7 #octavia blake #hope diyoza #charmaine diyoza #echo #gabriel

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cinemavariety · 5 years

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The Director’s Series: David Lynch

The director series will consist of me concentrating on the filmography of all my favorite directors. I will rank each of their films according to my personal taste. I hope this project will provide everyone with quality recommendations and insight into films that they might not have known about.

Today’s director in spotlight is David Lynch

#10 - Dune (1984) Runtime: 2 hr 17 min Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

In the year 10,191, the world is at war for control of the desert planet Dune – the only place where the time-travel substance ‘Spice’ can be found. But when one leader gives up control, it’s only so he can stage a coup with some unsavory characters.

Verdict: Most directors who make enough films will always have a few misses. Dune is almost unwatchable with its convoluted storyline that will confuse anyone who hasn’t read the novel. I’ll give it this - the set and costume design are out of this world, no pun intended.

#9 - The Straight Story (1999) Runtime: 1 hr 52 min Aspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1 Film Format: 35 mm

A retired farmer and widower in his 70s, Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver’s license. Then he hits on the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey.

Verdict: The only one of Lynch’s films that could be considered purely “heartwarming”. It also feels the least like a Lynch film, with the director never really foraying into his autuerist territory. It is a simple, cute film that didn’t exactly leave much of an impression on me.

#8 - Lost Highway (1997) Runtime: 2 hr 14 min Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgangers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.

Verdict: Lost Highway has a few scenes that I find to be the most bone-chilling in Lynch’s oeuvre. However, I wish that the entirety of this film had the same effect on me. There are more than enough satisfying plot elements to this, but I also feel like Lynch utilizing a modern soundtrack more than Badalementi’s superb score really does make this film feel dated.

#7 - The Elephant Man (1980) Runtime: 2 hr 4 min Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

A Victorian surgeon rescues a heavily disfigured man being mistreated by his “owner” as a side-show freak. Behind his monstrous façade, there is revealed a person of great intelligence and sensitivity. Based on the true story of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man in 19th century London.

Verdict: The Elephant Man showcases how cruel human nature can be. It is one of Lynch’s most sentimental works that manages to be both horrendous and beautiful. John Hurt’s performance as the “elephant man” is multilayered and one of the most impressive, humanistic feats of an artist embodying a character with the utmost ingenuity.

#6 - Blue Velvet (1986) Runtime: 2 hr Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of criminals who have kidnapped her child.

Verdict: This is Lynch’s detective film, and I would say one of the best starting films for someone looking to get into his work. It has all of the surrealist plot motifs we come to expect from Lynch, but also has a pretty understandable storyline for the most part. Blue Velvet explores the dark underbelly beneath the fake “harmless” veneer of a seemingly quiet and peaceful small town.

#5 - Wild at Heart (1990) Runtime: 2 hr 5 min Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

Young lovers Sailor and Lula run from the variety of weirdos that Lula’s mom has hired to kill Sailor.

Verdict: Many might not see Wild at Heart as one of Lynch’s strongest works, but I personally find it to be the most fun film he has ever made. Lynch creates such a wide variety of scummy characters that truly make your stomach church (I am looking at you Willem Dafoe). It’s one of those so-bad-it’s-perfect movies and the Wizard of Oz allusions are a great addition to the story.

#4 - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Runtime: 2 hr 14 min Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

In the questionable town of Deer Meadow, Washington, FBI Agent Desmond inexplicably disappears while hunting for the man who murdered a teen girl. The killer is never apprehended, and, after experiencing dark visions and supernatural encounters, Agent Dale Cooper chillingly predicts that the culprit will claim another life. Meanwhile, in the more cozy town of Twin Peaks, hedonistic beauty Laura Palmer hangs with lowlifes and seems destined for a grisly fate. Verdict: I think it’s a real shame that this film was held in such low regard by both critics and fans alike when it was released. These people seemed to be truly confused as to the types of films Lynch makes. Thankfully, it has developed into a real cult classic since then. This film, which also serves as a prequel to the iconic television series, abandons the campy tone of the series and is Lynch achieving the vision that he wanted from the show. It’s a beautiful, haunting, and heartbreaking story.

#3 - Inland Empire (2006) Runtime: 3 hr Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1 Film Format: Mini DV & 35mm

An actress’s perception of reality becomes increasingly distorted as she finds herself falling for her co-star in a remake of an unfinished Polish production that was supposedly cursed.

Verdict: Lynch has yet to make a feature film since this one, and it truly is the director going off the rails with his style in the best of ways. Inland Empire is almost completely impossible to describe because it is more of an experience than it is a structured narrative. It returns to Lynch’s often-used idea of “hollywood is hell”. To me, this is Lynch’s scariest film. It’s utterly hopeless and the pixelated DV cinematography exudes a very cold and artificial aesthetic. Laura Dern deserved an Oscar for her performance as an actress who confuses her own life to the character she is playing.

#2 - Mulholland Drive (2001) Runtime: 2 hr 27 min Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

Blonde Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project.

Verdict: You will very rarely find such a perfect masterpiece of a film, but Mulholland Drive manages to do that. It also seems to reveal new layers every time I revisit. Lynch blurs the lines between the dream world and reality so masterfully in this film that it really does linger in your subconscious afterward - much akin to a haunting dream that you can’t seem to shake. Naomi Watts is electric as an LA newcomer who gets involved in the dark recesses of Hollywood.

#1 - Eraserhead (1977) Duration: 1 hr 29 min Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1 Film Format: 35mm

Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.

Verdict: By no means am I trying to say Eraserhead is Lynch’s “best” film - but for me it will probably always remain my personal favorite. This was my introduction to Lynch’s work and it holds a very sentimental spot for me as this was the time in my life when I really began exploring experimental film. Eraserhead is set in a dystopia that could also serve as an alternate reality altogether. Henry Spencer has to deal with his demanding wife and deformed child while daydreaming of a singing woman in the radiator. This is Lynch at his most surrealist, his most uncompromising, and his most nauseating. It truly is one the most impressive low-budget films ever made. It manages a fine line between repulsion and transcendence.

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themattress · 5 years

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I made this post last month about the main fixes that should be made to the story of Birth by Sleep in order to make it the best it could possibly be. While I don’t believe the flaws in the stories of the original KH, COM, and even KH2 are as damaging as the flaws in BBS, in the interest of fairness I’ve decided to make a post about what fixes should be made to them.

From Kingdom Hearts:

The World Order - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is a stupid rule. Not only is keeping the existence of other worlds a secret while visiting not the kind of the thing you want to hear in a crossover story, but it’s also a rule that keeps getting broken anyway. In just about every world the heroes visit, someone finds out about other worlds thanks to their presence and/or the presence of the Heartless. Certain residents of worlds become summonable allies for Sora and fight alongside him in other worlds. A group of villains, all from different worlds, are the central antagonists of the story. The Princesses of Heart all come from different worlds and end up banding together. The Beast goes to Hollow Bastion. And let’s not forget everyone in Traverse Town! The World Order is broken left and right, so why does it even exist? It shouldn’t. Other worlds’ existence should be common knowledge.

“The Heartless were using Maleficent from the beginning” - This line is just nonsense. The Heartless cannot use anyone, they are beings of instinct who cannot think or plan, they only exist to devour hearts and spread darkness everywhere. Maleficent was using them, period. Ansem, the special Heartless who says this line, was the only one using Maleficent.

The Placement of the “Oathkeeper” Scene - The scene where Sora tells Kairi to stay behind because “it’s way too dangerous”, and she gives him the Oathkeeper keychain, is problematic, and it didn’t need to be. If it was placed in Hollow Bastion, it would make perfect sense - not only would it link to the start of the scene, where Kairi explicitly references her grandmother’s story that was told to her in Hollow Bastion, but End of the World actually IS “way too dangerous” for Kairi. The notion that Hollow Bastion is too dangerous for her is laughable, since not only do Leon, Yuffie and Aerith proceed to leave her behind at Cid’s house and go to Hollow Bastion without any trouble, but the other six Princesses of Heart are also just fine being there! Because the scene is placed in Traverse Town and Kairi isn’t allowed to do something that she really should be allowed to do, it becomes the Franchise Original Sin of sidelining Kairi as a character. And that’s a damn shame, since it’s a great scene otherwise. The manga of all things actually corrected this and placed it at Hollow Bastion where it belongs (even though it made a joke out of it), so why couldn’t the game?

From Chain of Memories:

The Concept of Memory - The central concept of the story is pretty confusing. This game claims that memory, which everyone knows is an aspect of the mind, is actually an aspect of the heart. Apparently so much so that if someone’s memory was erased, their heart would be destroyed. But this doesn’t line up at all with subsequent games - people are constantly getting total amnesia and yet their hearts are just fine. What’s more, the Organization say they have memories of when they were human, except that as Nobodies, they lack hearts, so this should be impossible if memories come from the heart like this game claims they do! Memory should have just been kept as a mental thing, with how one feels about memories being emphasized, since that’s something related to memories were the heart is involved.

That 2nd Repliku Battle - The story gets dragged down by too many battles with the Riku Replica. One could afford to be cut, and it’s easy to choose which one: the second one. There is no reason for this battle to happen; Sora instigates it instead of Repliku, which makes it feel out of place. Repliku should’ve just said what he needed to say and then left.

Reverse/Rebirth - Riku’s story mode should not have been a story mode at all. There is clearly too little material to actually cover a full playable campaign, and the pre-prepared decks, overpowered Dark Mode (and Duel function in RE:COM) and story-less Disney worlds just add to how ridiculously short it is. The story of R/R should have instead been split between unlockable extra playable episodes, with Riku always at a set level where he has an equal chance of winning and losing the necessary battles. They could be unlocked through a New Game + for Sora, which would increase the length of the game’s playtime considerably.

DiZ as Ansem, Seeker of Darkness - This was a pointless story element for the sake of a “Gotcha!” twist, and not only does it make things needlessly confusing given that the real Ansem, Seeker of Darkness is already in the story, but it makes things even more confusing in KH2 when Riku ends up taking Ansem’s form and is stuck with it even though DiZ wasn’t, and when DiZ is revealed to actually be Ansem and Ansem, Seeker of Darkness to have always been an imposter! Just let DiZ always be DiZ, the story works a lot better that way.

Riku’s Lesson - The lesson Riku learns in R/R is “accept and use the Darkness, it will help you achieve your goals and reunite you with your friends”...which is exactly what he did in the first game and was rightly portrayed as wrong! And then in KH2, it ends up having disastrous consequences for Riku, so apparently it was still wrong! The lesson Riku should have learned was that he can’t fight the Darkness within himself because that’s acting out of anger, aggression and self-loathing...in other words, it only creates more Darkness. Only light can cast out Darkness, and so he should focus on reclaiming the Light rather than eliminating the Darkness. He doesn’t have to use it, but he does have to accept and tolerate it until it’s gone.

From Kingdom Hearts II:

The Prologue’s Length - I honestly think the infamous Prologue wouldn’t be nearly as controversial as it is if only it was shorter. A lot of cutscenes and things to do in it seem to be there just for the sake of padding it out. Cut it down by at least an hour and it’d be better.

No Clear Villainous Threat - A big problem KH2′s story has when compared to the first KH is the lack of a clear villainous threat. In the original game, the Heartless and the Disney Villains who commanded them were established as an imminent, world-destroying threat very early on. But here, the Heartless are just threats to people instead of entire worlds, while Pete is dismissed as a complete joke. It falls upon the Nobodies and Organization XIII to present the new threat...but for the longest time, they don’t. It’s just said that “they’re planning something and it’s probably bad”. They are so caught up in being mysterious that they fail to provide a sense of urgency or motivation as to why they should be stopped, or even what exactly they should be stopped from doing. This only changes midway through the game when they finally reveal their big evil plan to capture millions of hearts which Xemnas will use to ascend to godhood. They don’t have to reveal this early on, but they have to be doing something actively dangerous toward the universe in order to justify why Sora needs to fight them.

Underselling Maleficent - When Maleficent is revealed to have been resurrected, it should be a big deal. Pete shouldn’t be a joke anymore since he’s being backed by the sorceress who was the main villain for most of the first game. But instead, this bombshell just gets brushed aside without much fanfare by Sora and his friends. The first visits to Port Royal, Agrabah, Halloween Town and Pride Land would feel less like filler if Maleficent and Pete were treated with the same gravitas as Organization XIII by the narrative and its characters.

Cloud’s Side Story - It’s stupid, it’s pointless, don’t include it.

Worlds Revisited - A few of the stories in the Worlds Revisited stage of the game could have afforded to be rewritten, but much more importantly, this stage of the game needed to have proper narrative context. Because as it stands, it doesn’t. Sora, Donald and Goofy get clues that explicitly point to them needing to go to Twilight Town, and yet they don’t go there until after the Worlds Revisited stage is over with, and there is no reason given as to why they are revisiting all the worlds beyond “looking for a way to get into the Organization’s world” (again, why not check out Twilight Town for that way!?) They needed a narrative reason for Twilight Town to be blocked off (like, say, that fucking Dreadnought battle station from the Gummi Ship mission before it), and thus a reason for the Worlds Revisited stage of the game to happen (with Sora, Donald and Goofy looking for a gateway around the Dreadnought). They wouldn't find one, of course (Tron would instead unlock a way right through the Dreadnought at the end of the Space Paranoids revisit), but it’d still give a proper reason behind why they’re revisiting the worlds instead of just going to Twilight Town like they were directed to.

Kairi and Riku - The majority of Kairi’s screentime in this game is in the World That Never Was, and the entirety of Riku’s screentime as Riku is in the World That Never Was. Neither of them are very developed beyond two or three moments, and their personalities feel sadly two-dimensional compared to the orignal game: they are just The Chick and The Lancer respectively. Their roles and their characterizations should have been more fleshed out.

Organization XIII - @ultraericthered made a post about this. Although the Final Mix version of the game fixed a lot of problems with how Organization XIII was handled, there were still improvements that could have been made to make them an even more consistent presence.

#Disney #Square Enix #Kingdom Hearts #Chain of Memories #Kingdom Hearts II #Analysis #Opinion #Bad Writing #What Could Have Been #They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot

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popcultureliterary · 5 years

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Pop Culture Based on Novels Part 4: The Brave Little Toaster

November is drawing to a close. For those participating in this year’s National Novel Writing Month challenge, this final week is often a huge push as everyone tries to close out their November goals. Hopefully everyone is satisfied with their progress and finishes the month with a bang! At the very least, you should feel proud of yourself for making the effort to set type to page.

In solidarity with those of you taking on this challenge, we’re spending the month taking a look at pop culture narratives based on novels. Last week, we covered the popular TV crime drama, Bones, which came to a satisfying conclusion earlier this year. Today, we’re discussing a pop culture work that has been around since my own childhood, one which I never would never have guessed was based on a novel: The Brave Little Toaster.

A Hard Sell

The 1987 film The Brave Little Toaster was based on a novella written by Thomas M. Disch titled The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances, published in 1980. When he first approached publishers with his idea, they were reluctant to publish the story. In an interview with Strange Horizons, Disch states that the publishing companies believed that the notion of talking appliances was simply too farfetched for children to enjoy. Disch found their concerns to be ridiculous, considering the number of talking animal stories on the market. He persisted, and after publishing the story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, he finally managed to get Doubleday to take up the publication through a five-novel contract that they had with him. By then, the film was already being worked on.

Disch was a skilled writer who produced both poetry and prose during his lifetime. His works include The Genocides (his first novel, published in 1965), The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (winner of both the Hugo and Locus awards), and a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, among other works. Disch was also part of the collaborative minds behind the 1987 text-adventure Amnesia released by Electronic Arts. He passed away in 2008, the result of suicide that may have been related to the passing of his partner of three decades, Charles Naylor, in 2005. Although Disch is gone, he lives on through his works.

The Death of a Flower

Near the end of my high school days, I decided to rewatch a few childhood favorites with my younger brother before I left for college. One of the films on the list was The Brave Little Toaster. I remembered it containing a large number of dark themes for a kid’s movie, and was intrigued to see how I felt about it as an adult. The darkest scene was the horrifying junkyard scene where broken down cars sing about their lives before being smashed down by a crusher. Thinking of this scene in particular, we decided to amuse ourselves by counting how many characters in the movie died. By the time we passed 20, the game stopped being as funny.

One of the characters that I remember counting during our morbid game occurred toward the beginning of the movie. The appliances find themselves in a meadow, where they run into some trouble with the local wildlife and get separated. While trying to find the other appliances, Toaster stumbles upon a flower growing alone in a single ray of sunshine. Upon seeing its own reflection in the toaster’s shiny surface, the flower falls in love with its new false companion and tries to get the toaster to stay with it in the clearing. Toaster, feeling uncomfortable and needing to find the other appliances, brushes the flower off and retreats from the clearing. After losing its companion, the flower is seen wilting, seemingly unable to continue living after discovering how lonely it had been. The scene stood out to me due to the symbolism of a flower (often symbolic of innocence) dying after falling in love (with itself?).

I was surprised to learn that this same flower shows up in the novel. In the book, it is a daisy that speaks in verse. When she sees herself in Toaster’s reflection, she imagines the reflection is a male flower and falls in love. I haven’t read the novel myself, so I don’t know if this scene ends with the flower’s death.

Gender Discussions

A notable difference between the book and the movie revolves around gender. In film, it is often difficult to create characters with no genders due to voice acting. Voice actors typically have distinctly gendered voices, and the characters they voice often take on those genders even if the connection is unintended. The same goes for the Brave Little Toaster film. The appliances have distinct genders and pronouns in the film due to the constraints of voice acting.

The novel is not limited by these same constraints. The appliances have no genders in the novel. This is highlighted by a scene that doesn’t make it into the film in its entirety. Fans of the film might remember a scene where Blanket is blown away from the group by a terrible storm after setting up as their tent for the night. After an exhausting night, the appliances find Blanket in a tree and work together to bring him back down. The scene plays out a bit differently in the novel.

When Blanket blows away in the storm, it is a pair of squirrels that find it named Harold and Marjorie. The squirrels help rescue Blanket, and get a chance to meet the rest of the appliances as well. Upon discovering that the appliances have no gender, the squirrels are baffled by the concept. A discussion about having no gender is an interesting concept to find in a kid’s book from the 80’s, but it is not a surprise for Disch’s works. The Poetry Foundation notes that Disch’s work was often known for containing “gender-bending conceits”.

Surprising Moments from the Film

As with any film adaptation of a print-based work, the novel and movie differ significantly from one another. The basic plot, however, is relatively the same: the appliances find themselves separated from their Master and set out to find him so that they can continue to serve him. Their adventures take many twists and turns along the way. I don’t know about the book, but the film offers many startling moments that you won’t find in children’s movies today. Here are a few of my favorites:

Aneurysm. In the beginning of the film, the appliances get into an argument with a grumpy old air conditioner. The oldtimer tells the appliances that they shouldn’t try to find the Master, and continues to berate them with unnecessarily unkind words. When they stand up to the AC-unit, it flies into a rage that causes it to overheat and explode. The appliances feel bad for the now dead unit, but move on with their journey.

The Junkyard scene. This is perhaps one of the most memorable scenes in the film due to its terrifying and dark nature. As mentioned earlier, this scene takes place in a junkyard and features a number of cars singing about their amazing lives before being crushed to death by a scrap machine (you get to watch them as they are crushed). The vehicles all know what is coming, and an unlucky few of them located close to the scrap machine find themselves constantly sprayed by the crushed remnants of their fellow anthropomorphic automobiles. To add darkness to the scene, the cars also sing about how worthless they are. Looking back, I feel like this scene was where a significant portion of my brother’s and my death list came from.

Boobs. I don’t know why I noticed this image the last time that I watched the old static-ridden VHS my family has owned since the 90′s. The picture appears for only a second or two when the Rabbit-ears TV set tries desperately to capture the attention of the Master and his girlfriend. The man in the box rips several photos out of a filing cabinet while ranting about how amazing the junkyard is for used appliances. One of his photos (the one on the top of the stack) features a nude woman with star-shaped pasties over her nipples. In more recent editions, a bikini or bra was added to the photograph.

Sacrifice. In the end of the film, the Master finds himself on a collision-course with the scrap machine that previously spent an entire scene crushing terrified automobiles. He’s trapped, and a crushing seems inevitable until Toaster throws itself into the crusher’s gears in order to save him. It is smashed and twisted between the gears, but ultimately stops the machine and saves the Master, seemingly at the cost of its own life.

The above moments aren’t all of the dark moments in The Brave Little Toaster, and I can’t yet say whether or not the novella carries similarly dark themes. Given that Disch is also known for works that offer dark views of the future, it is possible that his novella contains similarly dark themes. Given this intriguing mystery, I know what I’m reading next.

Do you have a favorite novel that you’d love to see adapted into another medium, or know of any that have already received adaptations? Leave a shout-out in the comments! You can also connect on Twitter at @Popliterary, or send a message.

Be sure to check out my home Wordpress page for bonus content!

And as always, if you have a literary device you want to know more about, or a game, comic, show, or movie that you want to see make an appearance on the blog, leave a shout-out in the comments!

#Brave little toaster #novel #book #literature #lgbtq+#lgbtq+ literature #lgbtq literature #Thomas Disch #cartoon #movie #book adaptation #nanowrimo #national novel writing month

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ganymedesclock · 6 years

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Is interesting how in the comics we have two instances in which Pidge's mind has been affected. In the first volume a spore absorbed her mind, using her skills against her, and now there's a upcoming comic issue that will involve Pidge having temporary amnesia.

It makes sense as a challenge to throw against Pidge, because while Pidge isn’t the only smart person (and I’d even argue that Pidge isn’t exclusively the smartest the way the first comic volume suggests she is) it makes sense to give Pidge mind-loss-related plots how it doesn’t for Hunk.

It’s reflected very easily in their elements. Hunk is Earth, and Pidge is Wood.

Pidge is heavily cognitive. This makes her very “stereotypically” smart. She’s good at doing math quickly and she knows a lot of big words. She also has knowledge of a lot of different fields that are considered scholarly and academic, given her interest in technology and its history- she knows not only what a Turing machine is but also who Alan Turing himself was, and his historical background.

This tends to be why, I think, people frame her as smarter than Hunk, even though the only times we’ve seen Hunk not keep up with her, it boils down to a difference in fields, and he can match her jargon for jargon.

The thing is, though, Pidge is immature. Her youth works against her. She’s a fast-growing tree whose crown touches impressive heights but her roots are still shallow and divided.

Narratively, it’s very important to challenge characters at their weakest and strongest points. Pidge’s strongest point is her mind, her data-based worldview and algorithmic thought process- and her weakest point is when something takes that away from her.

Conversely, that’s not nearly so much of a challenge for Hunk because Hunk approaches knowledge a very different way. While Pidge is the stereotypical book smart nerd child, Hunk is a kind of genius that’s often taken for granted, and that even among his fans, people often don’t acknowledge quite how brilliant Hunk is outside of his much more stereotypical “nerdy” moments like when he rattles off the details about the Fraunhofer Line in s1e1.

Roughly, while both paladins have both, Pidge specializes in scholarly book-learning kind of intelligence, algorithm and pattern and code. In s2e4 a clear point is made that Pidge struggles with imagination and creativity- it takes her a lot of time before she can really accept the Olkari’s reverence for nature and deeply spiritual perspective.

We even see her and Lance play off each other negatively often- Lance, who’s all emotions and empathy and compassion and incidentally probably the most gifted paladin at immediately gelling with the whole Lion Bonding Thing (he gets immediately and reflexively on the same page as Blue). And at the beginning of s2e4, it’s Lance who kind of riffs on Pidge’s problem- not only does Pidge utterly ignore the spore fight (interpersonal team bonding) in favor of studying the spores but her earlier gushing about the castle beforehand prompts Lance to quip “it’s not a sunset, Pidge.”

Pidge’s reply- that sunsets just happen while the castle was made- is a fair point, but it’s also a somewhat callous one. Pidge doesn’t have much of an artistic spirit at this point. As the Olkari point out to her, nature from an architectural perspective is amazing and you can make incredible scientific progress using what nature is already good at.

This is in direct contrast to Hunk.

Hunk is shown preparing food in s1e3 and s2e7 (I’m leaving out s2e6 and the cookies because that was a relatively limited occurrence but even then it fits a few of these trends) and there are some obvious similarities.

Both times, Hunk is specifically not preparing food for himself, but presenting it to another person. It is also an immediate hit with those people, with Keith and Lance immediately scarfing it down and Hunk turning Sal’s restaurant into an overnight success.

And both times, the animation takes pains to show Hunk making incredibly precise, delicate finishing touches to the meal right before he serves it.

People often talk about Hunk and his relationship to food and one thing I think people overlook about it is that this relationship is distinctly artisanal. Hunk is not characterized as someone with poor control or driven by gluttony, but, in his own words, “an enthusiastic gourmand with an incredible palate.” He gets into trouble with the samples Sal’s offering not because he desperately wants to scarf down anything in his path, but because of his fascination and curiosity.

To Hunk, the presentation of food is important. Making food for other people is an act of compassion and nurturing, and something he takes great personal pride in, beyond just wanting to eat good things himself. Food is an experience and an avenue of nurturing. You don’t just eat things without thinking about it. Scenes featuring Hunk and food always emphasize something else about the situation and his feelings about it.

And yes, there’s a technical element of art. There always is. But there’s a huge distinction between Pidge and Hunk where Pidge kind of needs to develop her soul for art, and Hunk who has unabashedly one of the most artsy creative hobbies out of the team.

(I might call cooking more of a “passion” than a hobby for Hunk)

Hunk represents a very anchored, pragmatic, and worldly intelligence. He’s not the type to grimace at a heavy textbook, but at the end of the day he’ll learn more by putting his hands into an engine and experiencing it.

A lot of Pidge’s understandings build on themselves. She makes algorithms to get data and then uses the data to refine her algorithms. If she doesn’t have a search for that she just doesn’t.

Hunk? Hunk doesn’t need much. And part of this is, there’s a thematic point made that Pidge is the one least in tune with her own element- with who she is herself as a person. We see no other paladin have that kind of conflict with their own element- if anything, the other four are all shown to associate it with good things.

Keith didn’t mind spending time out in the desert in the heat. Lance’s beloved childhood home was an island and he’s shown to be an impressive swimmer. Hunk really prefers to be operating on solid ground, and Shiro’s a career astronaut who specifically wasn’t motivated out there by scientific curiosity.

Pidge also has an extant theme of being deprived of her comfort zone, forcefully- that was what started her story out. That’s a big problem and struggle for her- with Hunk, we’ve seen that he can operate out of his comfort zone, he doesn’t like it but he’s not afraid of it or seriously messed up by it the way that Pidge is, he’ll keep soldiering onward because he doesn’t want to leave his friends alone.

#voltron legendary defender #vld #Pidge #Hunk #readmore #Anonymous

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x----tine · 7 years

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CRISTINE BRACHE

I LOVE ME, I LOVE ME NOT FEBRUARY 10 – MARCH 19OPENING FEBRUARY 10, 6–8 PM127 HENRY STREETNEW YORK, NY 10002 I love me, I love me notby: Cristine BracheAnnotated by: manuel arturo abreu

Last December, while in Miami, I took some boxes out of storage to locate and transfer VHS home videos onto my computer. I found nine videos. The first video I played, “1 Families Chrismas” had been recorded over in its entirety with random HBO movies from the nineties. Unremarkably flat ones that I’ve never heard of, commercials included. If I could describe what it feels like to be a first generation American, with parents from Puerto Rico and Cuba, it would be like this: HBO colonizing a VHS cassette recording of an immigrant family’s Chrismas in Hialeah, Florida.

It’s troublesome to search for pieces of your past and find no evidence of existence. National Geographic conducted a study, sampling DNA from different biogeographical regions. In Puerto Rico, they sampled some twenty thousand people and found that a large portion of their DNA consisted of Native American ancestry, likely to be Taíno or Ciboney. All of it was female. They were unable to find any traces of male Native American DNA in a single one of their subjects.1

I want my family’s history to play linearly like a film. I want my ancestors to be the characters in the beginning except no one gets enslaved or sold. Women don’t get stolen and raped and men are not erased. Violence is embedded in the Caribbean.2 It is embedded in me. I walk around with it and I don’t understand what aspect of that violence my body comprises. Did my blood inflict it or was my blood subjected to it? Erased and written upon, then erased again. My blood does not have memory. It has cultural amnesia. Like amnesia, it continues to flow unaware of where it’s been. It is a clock without hands. I don’t know how to be counted. I want to be the happy ending.3

The other reference DNA populations are primarily from their biogeographical region with a mix of surrounding areas. For example, the average British person’s DNA can be described as follows, 69% British and Irish, 12% Scandinavian, 9% Western and Central European, 5% Southern European, 2% Eastern European, and 2% of the Jewish Diaspora. In contrast to my own which, after reviewing the results I was sadly reminded of my violent imprint: 77% Southern European, 11% Western and Central African, 7% Native American, 2% Scandinavian, and 2% North African.4

The internal violence of colonialism can be heard through the sound of my voice. It is me feeling like I’ve perfected my American English accent but still having my Puerto Rican accent detected and exoticized in rural and smaller cities in the U.S., no matter how hard I’ve tried to neutralize it. It can also be heard each time I visit my family in Puerto Rico when they tease me and call me a gringa because they notice the slightest American in my Spanish. I am denied authentic acceptance from both sides. I feel like parts of me identify with Puerto Rican culture more than I do with American, but I also feel the opposite and neither. What I am today is contradictory.

Western history assumes that Taíno people are extinct. Taíno people say they aren’t but they won’t tell us anything else. It’s a power play. If they tell us, they know we’ll take them away. I am not Taíno even if I am a descendant. I’d be foolish to think I haven’t been coerced into the hesitant position of a colonizer, after all, most of my blood is colonial. By giving my feelings and experience a name I am allowing them to be taken from me. In making you aware of it I know your instinct tells you you can take it and make it work for you.5

With each pass, from vessel to vessel.6

1 We look to the numbers because we think them incapable of lying. This may be the case but only because numbers are correlatively incapable of telling the truth. They just are, like wind or metaphor. We are taught to ascribe greater objectivity to them, to see mathematical processes as irrefutable -- that each time, without fail, they can be proven or falsified with enough rigor. But sooner or later the house of Badiou’s claim that “math = ontology” will reveal itself as built on quicksand, and each proof will betray its own performative investments.

2 The ostensible melancholy of the mestizo context -- the colonial imprint of southern european genes and values onto Caribbean and South American peoples and territories -- is such a revelation. Caught between the injunctions to honor our ancestors (all our ancestors, including the white ones) and absolve our roles in contemporary settler colonialism, mixed people find ourselves drawn to the veneer of concreteness and objectivity offered by such services as on-demand DNA tests. Surely the numbers will settle the unseen visions and heard silences, the touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries of the “mestizo experience,” validating the cultural bounty of Portuguese and Spaniard colonization while also divesting mestizaje from it. In a more specifically Caribbean context, these tests only play into the nationalist blood myth (“one-third Euro, one-third Afro, one-third Indio”) and its continuation of southern european cultural ideals. Blood myth logic serves to absolve the contemporary Caribbean of its participation in colonialism, when in fact the imperative political horizon for us is divestment from American governance by debt. Our convoluted racial imaginary only hinders this, and allows the continued oppression of Caribbean minorities (Afrocaribbeans, indigenous people, the rural poor) by arguing that ‘we are all the same.’

3 The situation looks different for each Caribbean Latin American nation. But the overall sense of displacement and melancholia felt by Caribbean mestizos , particularly in diaspora, resonates with many. The fantasy Brache describes -- “I want to be the happy ending” -- is exactly the catch-22 of mestizo melancholy and its desire to absolve itself from its own coloniality: how can one wish to continue existing as an embodiment of the past, while simultaneously wishing the past never happened? If colonialism never happened, there could be no Caribbean. This quixotic ontological conceit can often end up sublimating into imaginative identification with one’s ancestry. We see this in many neo-Taino and other pretend-native Caribbean organizations and individuals, who rely on the colonial narrative of complete Taino extinction in order to argue for themselves as its revivalists. This too is simply a micro-version of the blood myth.

4 In order to pursue this libidinal economy (which she both sincerely, abjectly felt and disinterestedly sought to dissect), Brache paid for a DNA test -- National Geographic’s Genogrƒaphic Project. Not coincidentally, the term “mestizo” has eugenic origins. Supremacist philosopher Jose Vasconcelos invented the term to describe a “cosmic race” an embodiment of the horizon of human development. Human mixing would allow an improvement on “the white race [which] has brought the world to a state in which all human types and cultures will be.able to fuse with each other,” organizing “the moral and material basis for the union of all men... the fruit of all the previous ones and amelioration of everything past.” Over time, “the uglier stocks will give way to the more handsome ... The Indian, by grafting onto the related race, would take the jump of millions of years that separate [him] from our times, and in a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the black may disappear ...” (Vasconcelos 1925: 72)

5 The Caribbean blood myth is thus laid bare as a project to mold a mixed stock in the image of whiteness, prizing the whiter mestizo over the black and native. Mestizo melancholy in this light is but a species of white fragility, a hope for colorblindness in a contemporary Caribbean context where people with European descent hold the most power and have the most ties to America. In embodying and analyzing the phenomenon of mestizo melancholy, Brache speaks to the gutted identities of islands colonized twice over by southern Europe and the United States.

6 Brache presents works that speak to the coloniality of mestizx identity, with its simultaneous assimilatory striving and inexorable sense of loss: a maple domino table with colonial-style legs features porcelain Hoyle-clone playing cards instead of dominos on the raised playing area, which has been coated in the “flesh” tones of silicone. Dealt blackjack style, the cards all feature the same two images: Brache herself photoshopped as the queen and king of hearts. Oxeye daisies, classically peeled petal by petal by pining europeans for the “they love me, they love me not” roulette game, take the place of poker chips and hourglass sand. Interpellations of white feminine fragility and stereotyped nonwhite resistance leave a disturbing residue of semantic vertigo on the work in the show, with Brache exploring the affective investments of the twee abject and objecthood as imprint or cross-section of historical process. In lieu of providing answers or palatable, easily categorized discomfort, she seeks to embody Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s claim that “one can render the troubling complexities of a situation and still be very specific in one’s fight without being totalising.”

For more information please email [email protected] or call 917 593 4086

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tebbyclinic11 · 6 years

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The National Vegetarian Museum and Chicago’s Forgo...

New Post has been published on https://kitchengadgetsreviews.com/the-national-vegetarian-museum-and-chicagos-forgo/

The National Vegetarian Museum and Chicago’s Forgo...

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A few weeks ago, Vienna Beef opened a history museum in Chicago as part of the company’s 125th anniversary celebration. Among the artifacts on display are hand-painted advertisements of mid-century vintage, a meat grinder dating from 1859, a gold-plated cocktail weenie, and a photo of the stand at the city’s world’s fair in 1893, where the Vienna Beef hot dog made its debut. Visitors who work up an appetite during a tour can head over to the factory store cafe and tuck into a Chicago-style dog.

On a recent afternoon, a mile east of the Vienna Beef museum, Kay Stepkin swung open the front door of the Lincoln Park library, where a very different Chicago food story was on view. The sprightly 75-year-old made a beeline to a small, carpeted room at the building’s rear that was the temporary home of the National Vegetarian Museum, which she founded in 2016 and debuted last year. The first vegetarian museum in the country, its name nods at grand ambition—but its present is rather humble. The nascent institution’s first travelling exhibit, “What Does It Mean to Be Vegetarian?,” has been on a tour of libraries across Chicago. It’s a modest display, made up of a dozen seven-foot-by-three-foot panels littered with archival materials (a reproduction of the 1974 debut issue of Vegetarian Times, featuring a recipe for mushroom loaf), persuasive factoids (“Up to 51% of greenhouse gases come from livestock”), and quotes from notable vegetarians (quoth Einstein: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet”). There’s also a small video installation that traces plant-based eating through the ages, from Pythagoreanism in the 6th century B.C. to the present day.

Having spotted Stepkin passing through the foyer, a librarian stepped out from behind a mountain of books on the front desk and sheepishly approached. “I’m so sorry, Kay,” she said in a whisper. “I turned off the video. Honestly, no one was watching it.”

The report didn’t seem to trouble Stepkin. “Oh, that’s okay,” she said, smiling. “Would you mind turning it back on?” The librarian fired up the monitor and the chirpy voice of the video’s narrator, vegan author and podcaster Victoria Moran, filled the otherwise empty room.

A longtime vegan raised in Chicago whose father who made his living as a wholesale meat dealer and delivery man, Stepkin always knew a vegetarian museum would be a tough sell here. The city’s most well-known culinary identity is deeply anchored in flesh—in slaughterhouses and steakhouses, in Polish sausage and Italian beef, in hot dogs and deadly serious hot dog condiment orthodoxy. But there’s another, long-neglected, chapter of Chicago food history: Around the turn of the 20th century, even as the city’s South Side was the capital of the U.S. meatpacking industry, Chicago emerged as the center of the American vegetarian movement. During that period, the city saw a then-unparalleled surge of new vegetarian restaurants, vegetarian grocery stores, vegetarian social clubs, and vegetarian publishing houses. To Stepkin, these facts add up to a kind of counterhistory, and a response to the prevailing narrative of Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World”—poet Carl Sandburg’s enduring description of the city circa 1914.

Stepkin was first acquainted with vegetarianism in the mid-1960s, during a two-year stint living in Berkeley, California. Upon returning to Chicago, she secured a loan from her father, and in 1971 opened the Bread Shop, a bakery and natural food store in the Lakeview neighborhood on the city’s North Side. “Until I opened the Bread Shop, I had never met another vegetarian in Chicago,” she says. “But as soon as I opened the doors, they started coming in.” Stepkin soon spun off an adjacent vegetarian restaurant, the Bread Shop Kitchen, which she shuttered in 1982. For more than 40 years, Stepkin had believed that the Bread Shop, which she closed in 1996, had been Chicago’s first business catering to vegetarians. To her knowledge, no one disputed the claim.

In the summer of 2012, Stepkin was writing a regular vegan recipe column called “The Veggie Cook” for the Chicago Tribune and began to receive invitations to speak publicly about vegetarian history. “I went to the library to see what there was that I didn’t know, not only about vegetarian history in Chicago but nationally,” she says. “I was absolutely stunned by my findings.”

Stepkin learned that Chicago was where American vegetarianism was first put on the international stage, during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the so-called New World. That exposure helped the city swiftly develop into the U.S. hub of organized vegetarianism. During the fair, a meat-free boarding house opened near the fairgrounds in the south-side Englewood neighborhood, catering to the delegates of vegetarian organizations who had arrived in the city from England, Germany, Switzerland, India, Australia, and beyond. That, it turned out, was Chicago’s first fully vegetarian business. It was soon joined by a handful of vegetarian clubs, local offshoots of the Vegetarian Society of America (VSA). By 1900, the VSA was compelled to relocate the headquarters of its national publication, The Vegetarian Magazine (formerly known as Food, Home and Garden), to Chicago from Philadelphia, the nation’s first capital of the meatless movement. That same year, Chicago’s first vegetarian restaurant, the Pure Food Lunch Room, opened in the downtown business district known as the Loop.

“I was just amazed! I thought I would’ve heard something—anything!—about this history,” says Stepkin, who had served as president of the Chicago Vegetarian Society from 1994-1998 and again in 2000. The experience planted in her the seed of the idea for the National Vegetarian Museum. “If I didn’t know the truth about Chicago’s vegetarian history, I thought, neither did anyone else.”

Stepkin was right, of course. Chicago’s vegetarian past “is forgotten,” says Tim Samuelson, the city’s official cultural historian. “It’s not written about. You don’t hear people talk about it at all. It just doesn’t come up.”

“There’s a real historical amnesia there,” agrees historian Adam D. Shprintzen, author of The Vegetarian Crusade, a woefully under-read book that delves deeper than any other into Chicago’s improbable rise as a hub for the meatless movement. “Vegetarians themselves have a kind of amnesia about this time period in Chicago, because it doesn’t fit neatly with our popular ideas of vegetarianism. We associate Chicago with industrial modernity—and people’s assumptions are that vegetarianism is this back-to-nature movement.” The modern vegetarian movement that grew in Chicago after the Columbian Exposition, Shprintzen explains, happened in lockstep with the industrial growth of the city. “There was a breaking away from vegetarianism with a social reform agenda and a move toward vegetarianism as a way to reform the self—to be competitive in an increasingly corporate society.”

In his book, Shprintzen charts this critical shift in vegetarianism in the 19th century: From 1817—when a migration of 41 meat-abstaining Bible Christians first brought organized vegetarianism to Philadelphia from England—until the start of the Civil War, various U.S. groups saw dietary reform largely as a route to progressive social reform: the abolition of slaves, women’s suffrage, gender and economic equity, an end to war. But the strain of vegetarianism that later took root in Chicago had a more commercial and individualist bent. In June 1893, during the world’s fair, some 200 vegetarian delegates representing groups from around the globe gathered at the newly opened Art Institute of Chicago for what was called the World’s Vegetarian Congress. Throughout three days of lectures, movement notables such as John Harvey Kellogg—the same Kellogg responsible for Corn Flakes was superintendent of the pioneering Battle Creek Sanitarium health spa and developed early meat substitutes such as Protose—extolled vegetarianism as a way for individuals to achieve health, physical strength, and industriousness, as well as economic success and social advancement.

“Chicago as a vegetarian center kind of made sense, because people there were more intimately involved in the implications of the modern meat industry,” Shprintzen says. “If you read accounts from the time period, during the summer, people could smell rotting meat wafting into the Loop.” In the classic muckraking novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair described the odor from the meat factories as “like the craters of hell.” The horrors depicted in the book led to the passage, in 1906, of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act—two landmark pieces of regulatory legislation.

“The Jungle led to a lot of people becoming vegetarian,” said Stepkin, gesturing toward a small image of the book’s iconic olive-green cover displayed in the exhibit. On the same panel is an advertisement for the Pure Food Lunch Room, which ran in the September 1900 issue of The Vegetarian Magazine. It billed Chicago’s first veg restaurant as “clean, airy,” with “good ventilation,” “quick service,” and “appetizing food” at “moderate prices.” The restaurant’s claim of serving “pure food” projected the healthful properties of vegetarian cuisine and also exploited a growing anxiety among people at the turn of the 20th century about the handling and processing of meat and milk. Neither Stepkin nor Shprintzen was able to dig up a Pure Food Lunch Room menu, but Shprintzen theorizes, based on the vegetarian cuisine of the time, that “lunches were pretty simple: things like asparagus on toast, broiled tomatoes—light fare. The idea was that a heavy meal would lead to less productivity in the afternoon.”

The opening of the Pure Food Lunch Room ushered in a boom of vegetarian businesses in Chicago in the early 1900s. The publishing house Vegetarian Company produced The Vegetarian Magazine, vegetarian cookbooks, and other pro-veg literature. Chicago’s vegetarian restaurant options, according to advertisements and classified listings in The Vegetarian, expanded to include such establishments as Mortimer Pure Food Company, the Ionia, the Vegetarian Good Health Restaurant, the Hygeia Dining Room, Robertson’s Physical Culture Restaurant, as well as scores of private vegetarian dining clubs. Popular vegetarian grocers included Benold’s Pure Food Store, an Old Town “bakery of the genuine unfermented whole wheat bread,” according to one ad. Berhalter’s Health Food Store and Bakery, also located in Old Town, asked Vegetarian readers, “Would you like to be a successful vegetarian?” The store pitched its products—wheat bread, rice, raisins, figs, olives, olive oil, et cetera—as “in accordance with Vegetarian Dietetics,” promising “progress in physical health and spiritual wealth.”

The salad days of Chicago vegetarianism would last until only the second decade of the 20th century. “When I finally found out the city’s vegetarian history goes back to the 1800s, I also realized the movement kind of came to a halt in the early 1920s,” Stepkin said as she concluded the exhibit tour. “It was World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and then vegetarians as a movement didn’t pop up again until the 1960s. I thought, This could easily happen again. I don’t want our history to get lost again.”

She held a grim expression for a moment. Then, suddenly, her face brightened. Something remarkable had happened: a real, live person had strolled into the room to check out the museum—the first in more than an hour. Stepkin watched intently as the woman browsed the exhibit panels.

“Hi! I just wanted to say hello!” Stepkin said after several minutes. “And to let you know we have fliers over there.”

“Thank you,” the woman said. “I came in to use the Internet, and I saw the sign as I was leaving the restroom.” She was in town from the Bay Area to escort her son, a DePaul University student, back home to California for the summer. “We’re both vegans,” she said. “It’s good to see information about it.”

“Well, California might be a bigger vegan center,” Stepkin said, “but this is the first vegetarian museum in the country!”

“Make sure it gets on the back of a truck and gets to lots of libraries,” the woman said. “Get the word out there any way you can.”

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: We have blind men, one-eyed men, squint-eyed men, men with long sight, short sight, clear sight, dim sight, [and] weak sight. All that is a faithful enough image of our understanding; but we are barely acquainted with [men of] false sight. — Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, 1924. Knopf, NY. [M]ost establishment…journalists tend to be like their writing, and so, duly warned by the tinkle of so many leper-bells, one avoids their company. — Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001, Abacus, 2001. I heard the news today, oh boy…! — John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “A Day in the Life”, 1968. Brief: The gulf dividing established institutions—governments, political parties, academia, the judiciary, legislature, bureaucracies, the national security state, think-tanks, lobby groups, and especially the mainstream media—and those within and across the broader body politic, particularly those who’d challenge the chokehold such institutions seek to impose on the information and knowledge that forms the foundation of our political discourse as well as that of the official historical record, is expanding at a rate of knots. With a focus on one man who saw it all coming, it’s time to reflect on the backstory of this bourgeoning, perilous impasse, and what the implications might be for geopolitical stability and security, and indeed, the future of humanity. Living in a Fog of Historical Myth With an attendant lack of transparency and accountability, the Fourth Estate routinely subordinates the basic tenets of ethical reportage in the public interest to the interests, demands, and expectations of what we now refer to as the ‘deep state’. This is largely driven by the failure or refusal of the corporate media to live up to its basic remit in holding the ‘deep staters’ in turn responsible for their decisions and actions. This palpable, vicious circle, downward spiral reality is especially evident in matters of war and peace. Sadly, as we’ll see it was ever thus. Trump going all wobbly on America To underscore such sentiments and prepare the ground as it were, accounts of two recent newspaper pieces should do the trick. A Washington Examiner report by one Tom Rogan called on the Kiev regime to bomb the just completed Crimean Bridge. Even given the anti-Russian fervour in the West at present, the unreserved call by any purportedly responsible media outlet of what is after all an unprovoked act of war against that nuclear-armed country might’ve once been unthinkable. In the Salem-like milieu that beclouds the Beltway, though, for British analyst Neil Clark such ‘hate-filled incitement, masquerading as “commentary”’ is now evidently ‘thinkable’. More to the point, it perfectly showcases one of our key premises: the propensity for the MSM to act as cheerleaders for the war mongering ‘deep staters’. We’ll return to the theme of the warmongering press in due course. But a quite different report—as surreal as that of the Examiner, but which also serves to highlight another of the motifs reflected in the opening—appeared via the New York Times. The erstwhile Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was quoted expressing deep distress on behalf of America’s democracy, saying amongst things there was a ‘crisis of ethics and integrity’ therein. Let’s place to one side the fact he was using the occasion to have a none-too-subtle dig or three at his old boss Donald Trump over the Oval One’s obvious shortcomings in this respect. Ditto for the reality that as the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, he was presumably never troubled by shareholder anxiety over him prioritising corporate social responsibility (“ethics” and “integrity” being key components thereof) ahead of their pecuniary interests. We might then marvel at why it took Tillerson so long to imbibe this reality and then share such disquiet with his fellow Americans. After advancing a scenario wherein we ‘allow our leaders to conceal the truth’, and/or ‘become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts’, Tillerson went on to say, ‘we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.’ For the ex-oilman, ‘even small falsehoods and exaggerations are problematic…[W]hen we…as a free people, go wobbly on the truth even on what may seem the most trivial matters, we go wobbly on America’. Now space herein limits a thorough unpacking of Tillerson’s profound insights. Suffice to say all manner of pundits would have a field day if invited to do so. Judging by what Tillerson himself doubtless views are heart-felt ruminations on the body politic, he sees this as a recent development. Yet contrary to his remarks, this scenario did not arise with Trump; as Chris Hedges and many others have noted, Number 45 is more a product of the malaise Tillerson described than he is a precursor. As it is, said “malaise” has been a work in progress for some time, with British historian David Andress observing that its roots run ‘deep into our history’. Declares Andress in his recent book Cultural Amnesia: How the West has Lost its History, and Risks losing everything Else, there’s now ‘a crippling void at the core of politics’, most notably in the historically leading nations in the West [Britain, France, the US]. He further says of this “void”: ‘[There is] an absence of reflection so profound it is hard for conventional commentary even to perceive it…[P]olitical perceptions are breaking dangerously free from a mooring in history.’ [My emphasis]. Central to that “malaise” or “void”, of course, is the corporate media, and herein we include the increasingly powerful—and insidious—social media forums such as Facebook, Twitter and the like. We might for good measure throw in Hollywood, Amazon, and the public relations industry as well. In juxtaposing dichotomous themes of trust and suspicion, truth and lies, facts and propaganda, reality and perception, acceptance and denial, reason and unreason, justice and injustice, democracy and autocracy, and to no lesser extent, war and peace, amongst our literary icons it was perhaps George Orwell who captured all this best. This is strikingly evident with regard to the mindset we as ‘consumers’ receive, process, and act on, knowledge about our history and from there, do same with information regarding the more contemporary events propelled by our political, media and bureaucratic elites and their paymasters. Of course, Orwell has been name checked to within an inch of his not insubstantial repute. But to paraphrase one of the English language’s other great wordsmiths Samuel Johnson, the man’s observations about the core rationale behind modern political psychopathy have touched little that haven’t adorned our day-to-day reality. These embrace the hidden motives that propel it into the public sphere, the ‘substance’ of the discourse that frames it, along with the amount of people reached and thus influenced by it. The outcome of this rationale as it’s applied doesn’t just suborn our history; by extension, it dilutes our memory and devalues our understanding of it. That it continues to do so is self-evident. At least it is if we allow the ‘evidence’ some ‘breathing space’. As for Orwell’s insights, what’s not to like about the following, each of which is pertinent in some way to our narrative and authored over 75 years ago?: ‘Who controls the past controls the future…Who controls the present controls the past’; ‘In our time political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible’; ‘Such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in….[T]hey may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions’; ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations’;…and last but not least, that perennial family favourite, ‘Big Brother is Watching You!’ There are many others on Orwell’s menu to be sure, but this will do for starters. From there, Orwell also sought to reveal how “Big Brother” and his siblings endeavour to disparage, marginalise, and then disenfranchise (or worse) those who might offer conflicting analyses outside their own tightly scripted ‘Newspeak’, ‘doublethink’ purview. A diverse range of folks from William Binney, Julian Assange, Coleen Rowley, John Kiriakou, Jesselyn Radack, Jeffrey Sterling, Karen Kwiatkowski, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden amongst others would, one suspects, provide ample testament to that reality. One of the most (ahem) memorable of plot devices in his novel 1984 was the concept of the memory hole. This was a process allowing for the modification or destruction of troublesome or awkward information in order to alter history and people’s memory of it or create the impression that something never happened. Two recent examples of the memory hole in action are worth mentioning briefly, both involving incidentally the West’s current bete noir Russia. The first is the recent documentary film Remembrance – Rewriting history: Red Army’s role in liberating Europe censored in the West, the title leaving one with no uncertainty as to what the narrative is all about. Suffice to say: Much of today’s generation is of the belief it was the US who did most of the heavy lifting in World War II, as ‘that’s what their textbooks tell them’. Yet as the historical record tells it, compared to American deaths in the European theatre (around 300,000), the Soviets suffered around 27 million or more including millions of massacred civilians; further their country was trashed, whilst America and its inhabitants remained largely untouched by the conflict. Put simply, the US got off light! Moreover, the Red Army fighting on its own turf killed over four times as many Germans as the US and its allies did on the Western Front. In fact, the D-Day invasion, belatedly opened the second front in Europe in June 1944 after being delayed several times over two years prior largely due to prevarications by the then UK PM Winston Churchill, much to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s justifiable chagrin. By this time, it was clear the Soviets could accomplish complete victory over the Nazis on their own, but by no means did this mean the allies were going to let them claim bragging rights to such an outcome. In any event, it appears this narrative has been quietly ‘memory-holed’. One is tempted to ask: To what end is this being done? It is straight out of the Orwell playbook. (The recent revival of the long dormant accusation the Russians were responsible for the downing of the MH-17 passenger plane over eastern Ukraine in 2014 is no coincidence. Again it provides further evidence that the West’s march to war with Russia remains very much on the agenda, with my own country Australia being amongst the most vocal in pointing the finger, sans it would appear anything resembling convincing new evidence.) And the second “memory hole” exemplar was an extraordinary interview with Mikhail Poltoranin, former Head of the Government Committee on the Declassification of KGB Archives. He revealed that in 1950, the U.S. Air Force actually attacked Soviet bases just outside Vladivostok and destroyed over 100 aircraft. Poltoranin further disclosed that Stalin himself was poisoned; ‘Uncle Joe’ didn’t die of natural causes! This assassination operation was carried out on Churchill’s instructions by British intelligence, themselves assisted by ‘some internal forces’ of the Soviet ruling elite, of which Stalin’s later successor Nikita Khrushchev was ‘certainly one’. On any number of levels this latter revelation is highly credible. Churchill himself was one of the earliest cheerleaders of the as yet unnamed Cold War with his hysterical 1946 “Iron Curtain” tirade thereby inaugurating one of history’s most consequential of self-fulfilling of prophecies. As well there was no love lost between these two former WWII allies, a reality laid bare in Susan Butler’s masterful 2015 book Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership. It is further noteworthy that when, during the course of this astonishing exchange, the interviewer expressed disbelief at his revelations, Poltoranin responded with a comment very pertinent to our narrative: ‘We hid a lot of things. Actually, we live in a fog of historical myth…’ The “we” here doubtless included the West! All Wars are Media Wars (Lest we Forget) To be sure if Orwell were to be somehow resurrected today and allowed at his leisure to take in the zeitgeist, even he’d be at pains to appreciate how insightful his prognosis was; how much he’d misjudged the power elites predisposition for orchestrated groupthink, perfidy, malevolence, disinformation, thought control, surveillance, censorship, manipulation, and oppression; and the degree to which the mass of ‘proles’ (that’s us cupcakes!) seem all too willing as it were, to ‘suck it all up’. This is despite the knowledge and information we supposedly have available today via the internet and especially social media, not least ironically the author’s own prescient admonitions via his writing or vicariously through others in the alternative media who are clued up on what’s happening! We might easily imagine the T-shirt cum bumper-sticker adage doing the rounds at present, to wit: ‘Memo to power elites: 1984 was not an instruction manual!’ would likely leave the fabled wordsmith at a loss for, well, words! You’ve read the book, seen the movie, now get the T-Shirt! All of the above insights into the psychopathologies of the human condition (to say little about the societies and polities that emerge from the way in which they’re permitted to manifest themselves over time), are interconnected, of course. Some of these will become evident throughout. Many others are self-evident. Let’s continue with another Orwellian maxim not included above, but still nonetheless crucial to our main leitmotif: ‘War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it’. With this in mind, in my own study and experience of history and the human drama and utterly avoidable tragedy at its core, I cannot recall a more precipitously dangerous time for humanity than the here and now. More to the point, when any of us spend time thinking about those who previously served, suffered or died for the noble cause (or the ‘noble lie’ whichever one prefers), even if they’d done so fighting for freedom, democracy, peace, love, understanding and the pursuit of happiness against the oppression, tyranny, and evil intent of the ‘bad guys’ (the de rigueur cover story for the “noble cause”/“noble lie”), they’d be, one imagines, furiously spinning in their eternally designated plots of terra firma at what is now unfolding. Put another way, what would they think of us allowing it all to happen déjà vu like all over again, especially given what we now know about how previous conflagrations unfolded and the real reasons why? To be sure, for its part “fake news” is now the new “conspiracy theory”: It is the political, economic, business, and financial power elites’ and assorted ruling classes’ preferred weapon of choice in their defence against those ‘heretics’ who challenge the official narratives of western capitalist governments and all those who seek via a range of tools (from cognitive infiltration, false consciousness to cultural hegemony and so many others not excluding plain old school, garden variety bullshit), to perpetuate the status quo. In the final analysis, fake or real, so much of today’s news becomes tomorrow’s history. For their part, the mainstream media mavens and their assorted paymasters cum patrons have adopted this ‘best form of defence is attack’ modus operandi for any number of reasons, not least of which is aimed to claw back the public’s trust and rebuild their credibility. With the more recent being those in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, so many conflicts have been feverishly championed by the major media outlets with few, if any, mea culpas forthcoming in the pear-shaped aftermath. Indeed, if anything, they have doubled down. It is largely because of this they’ve squandered whatever trust, integrity, and credibility upon which they might’ve once claimed bragging rights. The very things, of course, that animated Tillerson’s earlier comments. Yet whilst the road back up on to the high moral ground is invariably a rocky one even for the most redemptively minded, any attempt by the MSM to return there is likely to be little more than a ‘one-step forward, two steps back’ endeavour. And there’d be nothing remotely “moral” about the mission; its end-game will be all about perception management (their stock-in-trade after all), and rehabilitating their generic brand. Which is to say, their fundamental goal is the same as it ever was: a) to create and sustain believable, acceptable establishment narratives by which its elites might justify its policy decisions and thereby solicit public support for their often hidden, self-serving, progressively more dangerous, irrational agendas; b) to provide crucial camouflage for those individuals and institutions (including their very own) they seek to safeguard from public scrutiny regarding their true motives and [thereafter] impunity from legal accountability, and/or ethical and moral responsibility for their actions; c) to preserve and bolster these illusory narratives as well as to burnish the reputations, then solidify the legacies, of those who fashioned the mythologies and deceits that underpin the narratives in the first instance; and lastly, d) to establish an unassailable, yet still bogus, frame of reference (historical, political, educational, economic, psychological, social, intellectual, cultural) allowing for successive generations of elites to perpetuate then ‘recycle’ these “mythologies and deceits” to their own ends. If all this sounds like a purpose built, vicious-cycle, ‘keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em on bullshit’, perpetual motion construct for history repeating itself, then that’s possibly because it is difficult to view it as anything but. With the possible exception of wealth and poverty (issues themselves which I hope to similarly address in a follow-up, companion essay), in few other matters concerning the human condition and its oft presumed progressive betterment, the history of human endeavour, and the contemporary body politic is this more evident—or of greater import—than those to do with war and peace. For most reasonably informed observers of history and how the media works, if attended by an appreciation of the contemporary political landscape in general, they will immediately recognise it for what it is. Pope Gregory XV (1554-1623). ‘La Papa’ recognised the importance of a good PR arm. It’s worth noting here that the origin of the word “propaganda”—a concept that in its variant forms is a recurring motif herein—derives from the era of Pope Gregory XV. In 1622, the then Vatican (ahem) ‘commander-in-chief’ directed his cardinals responsible for foreign evangelical missions to establish the congregatio de propaganda fide, aka ‘congregation for propagation of the faith’, an organisation whose raison d’être should be self-explanatory. For some this is perhaps fitting if not surprising. Viewed another way, it’s the Catholic Church (the original “deep state” perhaps?), which might lay claim to having conceived the first ‘psy-ops’ gambit, a Holy See enterprise that around 400 years later is apparently still ‘Johnny Walker’! It is further notable that British philosopher John Gray in his compelling Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, opened with the following: Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith—moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion. And when it comes to the subject of propaganda, per se, although he deserves a ‘chapter’ all on his ‘Pat Malone’, we cannot, of course, not at least name-check Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s nephew—the man generally acknowledged as the father of modern public relations. Which brings us once again back to fake news. The descriptor might have only recently entered into political discourse and popular vernacular; but as the Scottish authors and bloggers Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor observe, it has ‘a long history’. It’s propaganda frocked up in a different guise. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor Via their website and their two published books (see here and here), Docherty and Macgregor’s excursions into the historical terrain of the most consequential event of the twentieth century—that being the Great War—have not just provided us with possibly the most compelling, far-reaching insight into the causes and conduct of this catastrophic inferno, but its, well, consequences. They’ve also delivered us a crucial understanding of how perfidious Albion (i.e. Great Britain) inveigled the rest of the world into fighting this war. With the ancien regime doing everything in its power to provoke Russia into war at present, this observation should not go unnoticed. (Those who think the British Empire as such had passed its UBD by 1945 haven’t been paying attention, need to get out more, or require a check up from the neck-up.) Now doubtless many folks will be having a “say wha?” moment at this point, to wit: Wasn’t it the Germans who provoked the First World War? Not so, according to Docherty and Macgregor. Even more than that, for our purposes herein, they’ve provided us with a telling insight into the key role the media mavens of the era knowingly played in facilitating the grand schemes of the ruling classes (termed the Secret Elites by the authors). The campaign to ‘sell the war’ to the British public and to the rest of the world began in earnest at least ten years prior to its outbreak. Although many abound, one example will suffice. This was the dogged manner in which various members of the Secret Elites coerced, cajoled and curried favour in the pre-war years with the various dominions and colonies specifically amongst their respective media outlets and leading politicians of the day—Australia, India, New Zealand, Canada to name the obvious ones—to ensure that once war began, there would be unstinting loyalty from all and sundry to the noble cause. It was all up, of course, an astonishing political, diplomatic and propaganda achievement, yet one we can now safely say, came at great cost for all those dominions and colonies, with little or nothing to show for it. To be sure, one of history’s greatest snow jobs perpetrated in the cause of perpetuating empire. This was Great Britain’s great propaganda machine at work, ‘an ‘infernal engine created in war…’ as described by author Richard Milton in his Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany: 100 years of Truth and Lies….‘…[b]ut impossible to switch off in peace….The indelible memory of atrocity stories that had taken place only in the imaginations of British propaganda agents proved to be stronger and more persistent than any facts. This curious discovery, the power of myths over facts, was the real legacy of the First World War.’ [My emphasis]. History Down the Memory Hole Now although it’s been rightly noted that “all wars are bankers’ wars” (underscored by the preceding Orwellian maxim about the “moneyed classes”), few could argue that the “bankers” would’ve had great difficulty selling their wars on their own; a pliant, subservient, gung-ho media is by definition crucial at the outset in mobilising the populace at large and from there manufacturing the collective consent needed to do so. Docherty and Macgregor’s follow-up tome—Prolonging the Agony: How International Bankers and their Political Partners Deliberately Extended World War 1, the title clearly underscoring what we’ve just observed—drives home the point. Which is to say, the war against Germany wasn’t just ‘sold’ to the world, with the establishment media at the time leading the charge and indispensible to this propaganda effort. The same media then played their own part in prolonging the war by ensuring the public did not lose their patriotic fervour. Moreover, the British political establishment—incestuously intertwined with not just each other, but with the press of the era, academia, business and finance, and the broader Western intellectual diaspora as well—ensured that through their control over the higher learning and research institutions and the education bureaucracy, they gave enduring, inviolable substance to Winston Churchill’s infamous maxim, ‘history is written by the victors’. (Along with being one of official history’s most acclaimed authors—whose genre specialty we might now say was historical fiction—Churchill himself, of course, was a ‘Secret Elitist’.) So effective was this propaganda exercise that the false narrative still stands today as the official version. It’s embraced by just about everyone from our politicians, our mainstream media, our academics, our military leaders, our veterans’ associations, and [to] our school curriculum writers and even those folks who end up teaching the fake history. Those rare folk who’d question this let alone decry it find themselves at best on the outside looking in. Herein, Docherty and Macgregor unambiguously lay out their stall: Lies masquerading as news are as old as news itself, with royalty, governments, public figures and the mainstream media purveying it to manipulate public opinion. In an Orwellian twist those very same groups now employ it as a pejorative term against the alternative media, truth writers and bloggers as a way of dismissing inconvenient truths and crushing dissent. We should all be aware of the state as keeper of ‘the truth’. “Fake History” is another powerful weapon that has long been used by those in authority to retain that power and keep the masses in the dark. Of course, we can travel further back in time to the Boer War (1899-1902) and the “splendid” Spanish American War (1898) to find examples of Western MSM perfidy in sounding the battle cry for freedom as a cover for highly dubious state-sponsored wars of aggression, conquest, dominion, plunder and oppression. Docherty and Macgregor cite the former as primarily a dress rehearsal for the Big One to follow, a war championed by the British establishment press of the era, whose prime objective was laying claim to the huge Transvaal gold mines. Less ‘White Man’s Burden’ then than ‘White Man’s Booty’ then!’ As they note: ‘Their ambition overrode humanity, and the consequences of their actions have been minimised, ignored or denied in official histories.’ Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in their heyday. And though opinion remains divided as to the impact the media played in the US declaring war on Spain, there can be little doubt it was decisive. The ensuing conflict has since been classified as the first “Media War”, with the two most notable press barons of the era William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer going toe to toe and above and beyond the call of journalistic duty in their efforts to inflame U.S. public sentiment against the Spanish and incite an otherwise indifferent populace to man the barricades. The propaganda onslaught included dodgy stories of atrocities allegedly committed by the Spanish against the Cubans—fortified by a conveniently timed false flag attack on the U.S. Navy ship the USS Maine anchored in Havana harbor thereby providing the pretext for the subsequent declaration of war—with then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, budding imperialist, and future POTUS Teddy “the Rough Rider” Roosevelt being amongst the most hot-to-trot of the leading politicians. If the U.S. emerged from the nineteenth century as a leading world power after this war there can be little doubt Hearst and Pulitzer had done their bit to bring this about as great American patriots might’ve been expected to. As a consequence the centuries-old blood-soaked Spanish empire was finally ‘deep-sixed’ for good with the U.S. taking control of Cuba and full possession of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, themselves the first baby steps towards expanding its own already considerably “blood-soaked” empire outside of its own territory. For any aspiring hegemonist, this had to be seen as both a good start and an excellent return on their piddling investment, which doubtless contributed in no small measure to its fabled designation as that “splendid little war”. That Hearst and Pulitzer sold a shit load of newspapers into the bargain—in an age when doing so actually meant something—and cemented their reputations as media monopolists and political power players to be reckoned with was, of course, neither here nor there. But they had in a sense pioneered a prototype of the more au courant phenomenon of fake news, in those days called “yellow journalism”. It is perhaps one of the supreme Orwellian ironies permeating the polity that the most sought after award in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize, is named after one of its most ruthless, opportunistic, and unethical of practitioners. Whether by accident or design, they’d moreover done their bit to inculcate firmly into the collective psycho-pathology and historical memory of the ruling classes and power elites in America an incipient, and from there an abiding, sense of ‘exceptionalism’ and manifest destiny, the essence of which has been sustained by and large through propaganda. With only occasional lapses, this has framed and underpinned political discourse in U.S. foreign policy, and been a key driver of its interventionist approach ever since. It set the template for the future manner in which the Western media mavens embraced their responsibilities insofar as they were expected to act in the public interest or guide civic opinion for the common good. Another example that is instructive herein, of course—one which Docherty and Macgregor again provide key insights into—is the way in which the British government, once it found the pretext to declare war on Germany in 1914, then persuaded the U.S. to join in the melee. Here again, the media’s role herein was decisive. The First World War was a pivotal point in the way in which news and information began to be more formally and precisely, albeit covertly, manipulated—and indeed frequently contrived—to serve the interests of those seeking to mould public opinion towards a certain consensual view. In this it is instructive to note it was the Great War that, if it did not quite give provenance to one of the great truisms in the history of conflict, that being, ‘Truth is the first casualty of war’, it facilitated from there its popular usage. Thus was the age of public relations born, and it was from there that Bernays and his ilk never looked back. At its most basic “public relations” was/is “fake news”; indeed PR became the new terminology designed to replace the increasingly repellent phrase “propaganda”. Such was the decisive impact of this new mode of communication, it’s difficult to see how Americans might’ve been convinced to enter the war on the side of Britain, and by extrapolation, how Britain and its allies could have avoided defeat at the hands of the Germans. Fake News Good, Real News Bad As the mainstream media—as deservedly much-maligned as it is malignant—descends further and further into deceptive arrogance and dangerous incoherence, it increasingly seeks, in indirect proportion it seems and with an equal mix of hubris, dishonesty, chutzpah, and hypocrisy, to double down in its attempts to preserve and maintain its façade of credibility and integrity. Western political, intellectual and media elites are veritably hyperventilating at the prospect that their own “fake news” is being viewed for what it is: a desperate attempt to paper over the cracks in the wall of a crumbling Anglo-American-Zionist empire. It’s instructive here to consider a few of the recent, most preposterous narratives that have been—or are being—breathlessly promulgated. These stories are ones amongst many that no serious media outlet claiming a modicum of integrity or credibility should be touching with the proverbial forty-foot barge pole. That is, of course, unless it’s to refute the generally always evidence-free claims that frequently attend them and ridicule then discredit the person(s) making them. Here are just three of the ‘greatest hits’ as it were, currently topping the MSM charts: a) the farcical, transparently duplicitous anti-Russian propaganda onslaught emanating from Britain and America that seeks amongst countless other high crimes and dastardly deeds to blame that country and its leader for constant interference in the affairs of other countries, whilst ignoring their own respective, and destructive track records in this regard; b) the illegal seven-year old, seemingly endless war currently being waged by Britain, America, and Israel against Syria and president Bashar al-Assad, one which he’s successfully fought with all the resources at his disposal despite the combined forces of the empire pulling out all stops to malign him and then terminate him with extreme prejudice; and, last but not least, c) the increasingly deranged Israeli despot Benjamin Netanyahu reprising once again his tried and true dog and pony show to sell-out audiences advocating war on Iran because he claims they’ve not adhered to the 2016 agreement not to build any nukes, whilst refusing point-blank to answer questions about his own country’s nuclear program. Whether in the U.S., Britain, Australia or anywhere else in the West for that matter, few of us should be under any illusions that the monolithic Fourth Estate remains steadfastly devoted to the ongoing betrayal of its purported brief by supporting the hidden—and not so hidden—agendas of those to whom it is, and indeed has always been, beholden. It’s notable that one of the U.S. establishment media’s flagship marques the ‘venerable’ Washington Post—whose high-minded, yet pedestrian positioning statement, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is so positively Orwellian one suspects its authors were wearing ‘Freudian slips’ at its moment of conception—was given a deliciously outsized serve of ridicule recently by the media watch organisation Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). And rightly so we might opine. The article, by Adam Johnson, chronicles the Wash-Post’s ‘top ten’ columns that he’s characterised as “sociopathic” in tone and temper. For ‘casually threatening economic ruin, inciting violence against entire populations, pushing for bombing faceless Muslims, or downplaying racism and child rape, there’s no better outlet’ Johnson says of the Post, ‘than [this] long-time echo chamber of power-serving conventional wisdom...’ ‘In the pages of the Post’s opinion section, you can say the most sociopathic things and get away with it, because you are, by definition, Serious People offering Serious Solutions in a Serious Paper. The human cost of these extreme, reactionary opinions is of little matter; what matters is packaging calls for violence, sexism and racism in a nice, official-sounding tone.’ Along with ‘pointing the bone’ at the paper’s editorial board itself for its own track record of sociopathic sensibilities when opining about the Big Issues, Johnson name-checks several of their high profile ‘by-liners’ past and present for special attention. These include Joshua Muravchik, John Bolton (now the White House’s Chief Chicken-hawk-in-Residence), and Richard Cohen amongst others. For Johnson, if there’s “one thing” the Post opinion editors love—and which is highly pertinent to the here and now along with being instructive in respect of our narrative—‘it’s columns threatening, plotting and advocating war against Iran. It’s the little black dress of foreign policy punditry—[it] never goes out of style’. To bolster his assertion, Johnson showcases a piece written in 2015 by Muravchik, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Muravchik’s op-ed piece was titled “War With Iran Is Probably Our Best Option”. Johnson responded with the following: [Muravchik]…argued nonchalantly that launching a war of aggression against Iran was “probably” “our” best “option.” He doesn’t explain who “our” refers to, or why a military attack was even an “option” to begin with….He [Muravchik] then asserts that Iran is uniquely irrational and cannot be compelled with material needs, asserting that “ideology is the raison d’etre of Iran’s regime” and concluding, as if he were settling on a Thai food order, that a bombing campaign that would kill tens of thousands is the “best option.” From this above ‘catalogue’ of dodgy Post reportage we might draw the following conclusion: It is in matters of war and peace that perhaps the MSM is most at conflict with the now decidedly old school journalistic canons, these being, of course: accuracy, fairness, accountability, objectivity, truthfulness, and impartiality. The current state of geopolitical affairs and international relations—as existentially precarious as it is—should be ample testament to this reality. The mainstream mastheads are not—and have never been known for being—bastions for the promotion of peace, love and understanding amongst nations, anymore than they have been known for their adherence to truthfulness, accuracy or any of the other “canons” cited earlier. As anyone who’s delved into the real (unofficial) backstory behind virtually all of the major wars and conflicts over the years knows, the “noble cause” is never, ever the real reason, the “noble lie” never, ever justified. And the “cause” will never be the real reason—or the “lie” rationally justified—whilst we as a species continue to tolerate those within our midst whose congenital and moral defects push them towards these ends. It’s critical for this reason alone then we all disabuse ourselves of the notion that what’s happening now has anything to do with making the world safe for democracy and freedom; enforcing the tenets of international law in the cause of human rights; ridding the world of evil men with evil ambitions as if inspired by some vague quasi-Manichean apocalyptically-minded desire to make the world a better place; or some other such transparently fatuous nonsense. The only thing we’re making the world safe (or better) for is an entrenched, ruthless plutocracy. The reality, though, is this: We should all try to open our eyes to how we as ordinary people allow our political, financial, intellectual, media, and corporate ‘elites’ hoodwink then railroad us into supporting—mostly without question as if collectively driven by some inner, yet inexplicable, Pavlovian suicidal impulse—their grandiose, self-serving, and wholly disastrous schemes. Such “schemes”—political, military, financial, economic, psychological, social, cultural, educational—are engineered entirely for the preservation of their own personal material fiefdoms and the collective fiefdoms that were then, and remain, those of power, ambition, wealth, control, dominion, and above all, empire. And in this “empire”, as in all, the benefits are few for the many and many for the few, with “power” (as noted again by Orwell) an end in itself, not a means. In the process, this ‘deep state’ cabal—whom Voltaire might’ve referred to as “tyrants of the soul”—have embraced ever more cunning, manipulative and (in every sense of the word) violent intrigues—and let’s not shy away from it, out and out gambits of the conspiratorial kind to cover their respective and collective asses—making them increasingly less transparent in their motives and therefore increasingly less accountable, before, during, or even well after the fact, for their actions. As a distinct corollary to this, they’ve sought—ever so successfully and as noted, with our increasing acquiescence—to exercise ever-greater control, influence and power over us, at the expense of not just our privacy, but our social, economic, and political security. This is evident not least in the backlash that is taking place against those folks and groups who dare to challenge the conventional wisdom, or more aptly, the conventional lunacy! ***** In order to bring things to a close, it is both prudent and relevant to name check the esteemed and courageous Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. As he frames it in his tellingly titled book Ten Myths about Israel—the nation that arguably best embodies and reflects the Orwellian verities we’ve visited herein along with being the one nation to which the deference of the mainstream media seems to recognise few limits: …history lies at the core of every conflict. A true, unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace…[T]he distortion or manipulation of history…will only sow disaster…. Of course, Pappe herein is referring to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, along with the subjugation—and what amounts to the ethnic cleansing—of its original, long-time inhabitants. ‘Historical disinformation’ he continues, ‘even of the most recent past, can do tremendous harm. This wilful misunderstanding of history can promote oppression…’ It is not surprising, therefore, that policies of disinformation and distortion continue to the present and play an important part in perpetuating [the occupation of Palestine], leaving very little hope for the future. Constructed fallacies about the past and the present…hinder us from understanding the origins of the conflict. Meanwhile, the constant manipulation of the relevant facts works against the interests of all those victimized by the ongoing bloodshed and violence. [My emphasis]. Pappe could, of course, be referencing any current ‘work-in-progress’ conflict, such as that which is brewing now, for example, between Israel, the U.S. and Iran; the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia; or the never-ending Anglo-American-Zionist campaign of regime change against Syria, whose allies are, of course, Russia and Iran. Anyone of these ‘hotspots’ could trigger a larger geopolitical conflict, and if it so happens this way, it will be largely because of “policies of disinformation and distortion”, especially those which have been facilitated by the Fourth Estate. In his seminal book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Canadian author John Ralston Saul noted that ‘[R]eason is a narrow system swollen into an ideology. With time and power it has become a dogma, devoid of direction and disguised as disinterested inquiry. Like most religions, [it] presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.’ Now whilst it’s reasonable (no pun intended) to assume our corporate media elites and those to whom they are most beholden would be reluctant to view themselves in any such light, from this writer’s vantage point, it seems like a pretty good ‘fit’ to me. Put another way, if this is truly what defines “reason” today, then we are ‘mos def’ in big trouble! http://clubof.info/

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symbianosgames · 7 years

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

I can’t speak for other historians, but I feel an overwhelming sense of personal guilt about the current state of affairs in America. Whether it’s the country’s collective amnesia regarding fascism and xenophobia or a Cabinet member blithely referring to slaves as “immigrants,” every day seems to bring a new event that causes my internal monologue to scream, “is anyone paying attention to history?!?!” The answer, of course, is usually “no.” As a historian, I could easily chalk this problem up to the decline of education funding throughout the country or the general history of anti-intellectualism in American life, but I know that scholars must share some of the blame as well. We haven’t been doing enough to share our knowledge – or, at least, we haven’t been doing enough to share our knowledge in the right spaces. What’s the use of a brilliant, historically researched critique of modern American life if it’s published in an obscure academic journal behind a paywall or delivered within the confines of a lecture hall? What historians need isn’t a new message about the past, but a new medium.

I attended GDC earlier this month to see if video games could be that new medium. I’ve spent the past four years pondering historical video games with other scholars on YouTube for my series History Respawned, but in that time I’ve done very little to reach out to the developers responsible for making these games. What draws them to set their games in history? What kind of problems did they encounter while adapting the past? Did they conduct research for their adaptations? Finally, is there space for scholarship in popular games? GDC17 provided the perfect occasion to begin to answer these questions. This year’s conference gave me the chance to attend panels on several history games, including Civilization, Civilization VI, Mafia III, and The Oregon Trail. In addition, this year’s GDC found the game industry making a push to save its own history through initiatives like the Video Game History Foundation and the National Videogame Museum. For a historian and gamer, GDC 17 seemed tailored to my specific interests.

My schedule at GDC brought me into contact with the past, present, and future of history games. I interviewed Don Rawitsch, one of the developers of the original Oregon Trail, and listened to Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley discuss the creation of the first Civilization. I also talked with Bill Harms about writing Mafia III, and Navid Khonsari about the critical acclaim for 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. I had the pleasure to play several history games on the expo floor, such as Frostrune and Quadrilateral Cowboy. Finally, I met with developers at Paradox and Kalypso to learn about historical games still in development, including Steel Division: Normandy 44 and Railway Empire.

What I found in all these interactions was that there was a motivation to pursue history as a subject that went beyond sales numbers, and that – regardless of their initial motivation – all of these developers shared a sense of responsibility for the history they adapted. Don Rawitsch’s work on Oregon Trail began in 1971 as a way to teach westward expansion to his American history course, but he continued to improve the project over the next several years using the diaries and journals of people who travelled the trail during the 19th century. Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley were focused on creating an entertaining (and sometimes comedic) game with the development of Civilization, but they still went to the trouble of developing the Civilopedia in order to give the game historical weight. Bill Harms wanted to avoid the “historical soapbox” with Mafia III, but the team at Hanger 13 still spent months researching the history of New Orleans and the 1960s to get an accurate feel for the time and place. Navid Khonsari and iNK Stories were also eager to avoid turning 1979 into edutainment, yet the team still managed to provide a wealth of historical information through the game’s use of archival audio tracks and photographs. Similarly, nothing got Alexis Le Dressay more animated during my preview of Steel Division than the game’s use of actual aerial reconnaissance photographs from the Normandy invasion.

All of the game developers I talked to expressed a genuine love of history, but they all worried about including too much history in their games. For them history is a useful tool to immediately connect the player to a game and its narrative, but they worried that if they include too much history in their game it will turn off their audience. Yet there was a bit of pushback against this assumption at GDC. During the Q&A for the Civilization postmortem, for instance, many audience members challenged Bruce Shelley’s notion that the game provided little educational value. Similarly, during the panel on Civilization VI, audience members encouraged Ed Beach to have his team double check the spelling of several South Asian place names and leaders. No one claimed that these developers had no right to adapt the past, but they did point to the fact that these games play a real role in developing the historical memories of players. Sid Meier said during the Civilization postmortem that one of the reasons the game was so successful was because “history is so rich with stuff we could steal.” It seems that popular history games, however, often leave something behind at the crime scene.

This realization encourages me to think there is a space for scholarship in popular games. If we borrow Sid Meier’s line of thinking and consider history game development to be some sort of heist, who is better placed than a historian to show developers where the best treasures are kept as well as where the potential traps lay? Some scholars would scoff at this idea, saying that presenting history in this way somehow lessens or dumbs down their analysis of the past. Yet this use of history will occur with or without the input of historians, and it will have a much larger influence on the minds of players than an academic book or journal article. Moreover, given the current crisis in the academy related to funding and public irrelevance, what do historians have to lose?

I think many scholars would be encouraged, as I was, to hear the GDC Microtalks given by Brie Code, Meg Jayanth, and Darby McDevitt, which argued that games should do more to engage with intellectually and culturally heavy topics and systems. There seems to be an opportunity, then, for historians and other scholars to meet developers somewhere in the middle. In a way, moving to this middle ground would be a return to the original relationship between history and video games. The first and arguably most successful history game of all time, The Oregon Trail, was developed in 1971 by a history instructor and his programming buddies. As Don Rawitsch told me during my interview with him, the development of The Oregon Trail occurred during an era when history instructors and professors were actively looking to break up old models of teaching and presenting history. I can’t say that video games represent a cure-all for everything that ails professional history today, but I do think scholars would do well to try to follow that same trail again.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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gooeyguy · 7 years

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email to my teacher (warning alot of personal stuff)

Hey so, sorry to email you out of nowhere like this? But i feel like maybe im finally at a point where i can explain more thoroughly why im having trouble with school or just succeeding in general. I think its really important that i tell you some of this junk because theres a chance it might make the rest of the year easier for you and me.

I wanted to start off with apologizing for all the trouble ive caused you throughout the year with the annoying comments, disruptions and backtalk. And most of all the terrible ability i have with doing and turning in work.

This email is mostly to explain my situation and reasoning for acting/struggling the way i have been (not to annoy you or be sarcastic).

Alright so, if you havent noticed i struggle with some things and one of them i never really bring up is ptsd. I have been diagnosed and im hoping to enlighten you on my specific issues with it, (everything i mention will apply to me as to make it less confusing from here on)

I have a specific type of ptsd called Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma) This type of ptsd is different in that it results from repetitive, prolonged trauma. My causes for being diagnosed are specifically natural-detachment from my mother and physical/sexual abuse growing up and some other things im not going to mention.

My side effects from this are,

Attachment – "problems with relationship boundaries, lack of trust, social isolation, difficulty perceiving and responding to other's emotional states, and lack of empathy"

This is strongly linked to my reactive attachment disorder and explains alot to why i am the way i am. Heres a link to a website http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-reactive-attachment-disorder#1 that explains a bit of what it is so that i do not have to make this already long email that much longer, i would also really appreciate it if you read even just a little.

I have an extreme lack of trust in others and am constantly doubting myself, there is not a second of the day where i dont think im a horrible person, i could be doing better, im disgusting to look at ect. The social isolation is a big problem for me, because im “this way” i feel that bothering others with my presence/problems/medical difficulties ect. is not necessary and for the better. Hence why i refrain from asking when i really need help, im scared to bother you. I dont want to make you angry and i know you and mrs mumford are already so stressed by the time my bell starts.

Biology – "sensory-motor developmental dysfunction, sensory-integration difficulties, somatization, and increased medical problems"

This ties into my Fibromyalgia and eds which ill explain more about after i go through ptsd. Its all kind of one big mixed bag of disorders that tie together and make me the way i am.

Affect or emotional regulation – "poor affect regulation, difficulty identifying and expressing emotions and internal states, and difficulties communicating needs, wants, and wishes"

Like i talked about before i feel extremely useless and annoying when asking for help or even talking about the things i enjoy. And when trying to explain my difficulties i stop midsentence or forget words/forget what my problem is and it becomes frustrating.

Dissociation – "amnesia, depersonalization, discrete states of consciousness with discrete memories, affect, and functioning, and impaired memory for state-based events"

THIS is what i blame for never being able to remember anything. With fibromyalgia i have whats called “brain fog” and with the constant dream like state im in because of dissociation it makes my memory absolutely terrible. Remembering your names in class took me until almost 3rd quarter and it was utterly embarrassing(i still forget sometimes), its even more embarrassing when i forget basic buttons on the calculator and have to ask in front of everyone looking like an idiot.Or when i try to shout out an answer in class and it comes out gibberish because my mind is everywhere all at once, Or when we have a test on the formula we learned a week ago, and of course my mind draws a blank. I cant remember, and it makes me so frustrated with myself that i want to break down right there in class. It renders me doing weird things too, like the other day i put the icecream in the bread drawer, and on sunday i woke up and got ready for school. Theres alot of other things i could say but its as if fibro is laughing in my face.

Dissociation in my own words is feeling like nothing is real, things dont feel like they happened. What does feel real is the pain/feeling in my body, i am a very anxious and jumpy person so im very sensitive to loud sounds/touch/weather and certain (triggering) talk among students. And yet i still feel in a daze,My vision will sometimes blur and i am very prone to falling/accidents, staying focused can be extremely frustrating because my brain feels like a cloud, its almost uncontrollable like a dream. I dont think anyone can control those very much so i think its a good example.

Behavioural control – "problems with impulse control, aggression, pathological self-soothing, and sleep problems"

Im pretty okay with impulses, i of course have alot of very impulsive thoughts but i am good at controlling them id say, same with aggression but i very much so struggle with sleep problems because of nightmares from ptsd and chronic pain from fibro, i have not been diagnosed with insomnia but im sure i fit the criteria im just really bad at opening up with doctors/people ect.

These are just a couple more symptoms to help explain,

Cognition – "difficulty regulating attention, problems with a variety of "executive functions" such as planning, judgement, initiation, use of materials, and self-monitoring, difficulty processing new information, difficulty focusing and completing tasks, poor object constancy, problems with "cause-effect" thinking, and language developmental problems such as a gap between receptive and expressive communication abilities."

Self-concept – "fragmented and disconnected autobiographical narrative, disturbed body image, low self-esteem, excessive shame, and negative internal working models of self".

Alterations in relations with others, including isolation and withdrawal, persistent distrust, a repeated search for a rescuer, disruption in intimate relationships and repeated failures of self-protection.

Loss of, or changes in, one's system of meanings, which may include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair.

Variations in consciousness, including forgetting traumatic events (i.e., psychogenic amnesia), reliving experiences (either in the form of intrusive PTSD symptoms or in ruminative preoccupation), or having episodes of dissociation.

Changes in self-perception, such as a chronic and pervasive sense of helplessness, paralysis of initiative, shame, guilt, self-blame, a sense of defilement or stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings

Now that im done explaining the ptsd, Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disorder that my doctor believes to be linked to my other disorders, Fibromyalgia has to do with the senses we as humans all have, feeling, hearing, taste, and sight. The difference between someone with fibro and an average healthy person is lets say theres a knob for how strong each of these senses are, so imagine someone taking all those knobs and turning them all the way up to max sensitivity. Youd think oh cool youre like a super hero (like my sister likes to say) but no its the exact opposite, it does not benefit me whatsoever. Feeling, paired with ehlers danlos syndrome both my joints and my muscles are constantly in pain and some days ill have what you call a “flare up” which is where getting out of bed usually isnt an option for my body, i cannot remember the last time i didnt feel at least a dull ache in my head, i get migraines at least once everyday and unfortunately i get nauseous so i dont eat very much . Almost everything is irritating to my skin, a simple light rub of my finger on the top of my forearm is irritating and raw feeling (like ive been sitting there rubbing the same spot for hours) /Writing is over all painful, including typing as well/

If youve ever woken up in the morning with sore muscles from pushing yourself too hard the day before,that is how the muscles in my body feel, if you press on them they ache, and sting/burn when i use them. painful touch for most of my body paired with constant anxiety of getting bumped into/touched is stressful and tiring. On a good day my pain scale is a 5 from 1-10 but thats if im really lucky.

Then theres the weather, if im too hot and i start to sweat, the sweat stings my skin and i end up going into a frenzy of scratching and agony. If its too cold my joints will start to lock up and become painful, its like they freeze and when i move them it feels like im shattering ice in my hand mixed with dull muscle ache. If its a good temperature theres still the feeling and i swear, the sound i can hear of my joints grinding together like two pieces of rubber being rubbed against eachother slowly.

Hearing is also bad, loud sounds are very irritating to my ears and will cause my migraine to get worse.(Talking too loud)Other irritating sounds, paper rubbing against paper roughly making that blblblb sound, high pitched noises of any loudness, squeaks, repetitive beeps ect.

Sight wise turning on lights abruptly is painful and makes my migraine worse, any bright light in general.

Taste doesnt really matter so i wont mention, but because these knobs are turned full blast it means the nerves and pain receptors in my body are being over worked constantly by my brain

And my brain thinks its doing its job by constantly acting like ive been running triathalons.

The recollection of pain comes in avalanches of distress for me. I usually experience the intense turmoil of fibromyalgia in the winter, or whenever cold fronts shatter the air and its frail victims. My limbs cannot contain the strength possible to function during those cold spells. Fibromyalgia’s lengthy sentence comes and goes for some, but, as a teenager, it’s disheartening. For the rest of my life, I will never be able to remember living without every waking moment marked by pain.

The abnormality of fibro weighs on my shoulders when I’m asleep, awake, or anywhere inbetween. I wake up at 4:30 each morning in order to be shuffling around by 6:20 a.m. The heaviness of my body pulls me down and pains me as I take a shower, put on my clothes, and put my small backpack on my shoulder to head out to school. Any sense of touch creates extreme levels of pain for me. Touching my arm, poking my leg, and brushing against my back hurt as much as twisting my ankle. My distraught reaction is a lot like a dog crying in pain and distrust after you accidentally step on its paw. Because im always in pain im always right next to the emotional breaking point, im always on the verge of tears. The smallest things can make me break down.

The pain prohibits me from being a teenager. Thanks to fibro, I cannot dress up in my favorite clothes and be what you call “Extra” everyday as i so much wish to be during the winter. My hands are crooked and shake too much usually to apply makeup. I struggle with applying eyeliner, because my hands hurt too much wrapped around a brush. The uncomfortable school chairs make me weep when I return home, because they destroy my concentration, forcing me to focus on the overwhelming pain I feel. I used to excel in school, but now, I can barely think fast enough, and come off as ditzy. I feel like I’m constantly struggling to maintain the fragments of my intelligence I lost due to fibro medication and fibromyalgia itself.

My GPA, became my ball and chain in school, rather than an accomplishment worth sharing. During the year, my schedule is dictated by the weather. Cold weather causes agonizing, excruciating pain that races down my spine and branches through my limbs. If a cold front passes, rain falls, snow falls, or temperatures drop, I freeze like the Tin Man, except there isn’t any oil to move my joints. The way I get sleep should be considered a torture method. Many people feel refreshed or renewed when they wake up after 8 hours, but I feel completely restless and exhausted. And thats if the nightmares from the PTSD dont interrupt. I toss and turn for hours in pain, because the pain signals interrupt the sleep cycle. I cry intensely whenever I think of sleep; school usually means a lack of sleep, but I am further deprived without choice. My biological system cannot allow me to rest, and continues to tense my muscles in a constant state of flight or fight.

With most schools starting at 8 a.m., my body struggles to run on 8 hours of sleep (which really feels like two). The exhaustion prevents me from hanging out with some of my closest friends. In the early stages of having fibromyalgia, I used to be able to do school clubs, hang out with my best friend, and go to cons with my friends often. Now, I spend my time huddled down, trying to make up for the nights of lost sleep. The lack of sleep and the endless pain contribute to extreme depression. And to keep my mood relatively happy i act like a goose in school with friends which doesnt do me good with teachers, I do it to not break down and let myself get too low around others because i know id regret embarrassing myself like that more than anything. The pain yearns for my thoughts to leap toward suicidal thoughts, and I was obsessed with death for years and still am. There was a time when I searched for ways to end my life, because nobody could help me and I couldn’t face living the rest of my life knowing that I’ll always be in pain. I still have these thoughts, and I believe I always will as long as I emit pain. Hence why i was in the hospital for a week recently, the hopelessness and embarrassment is dragging me down. The whole idea of having fibromyalgia embarrasses me. I’m embarrassed that I am constantly being called crippled, disabled, or chronically ill.Or worse not being noticed at all while struggling. I’m embarrassed that fibromyalgia makes me feel like I’m 67 instead of 16. I’m embarrassed that I will never be able to be an artsy beat poet like Patti Smith, or a rock ‘n’ roll guitarist like Keith Richards.

So i think thats as much as i can cover for you right now with my two of my biggest problems , im extremely exhausted and im not joking when i say my fingers feel like they are gonna fall off haha.

Im terribly sorry for how long this email is but i think i got most everything with these two topics in there, also dont feel obliged to reply to this, im already embarrassed i even wrote all this down (terribly).

Quick thing i would like to say before i end the email, with all respect i am not looking for sympathy in any way. I am simply stating the way i am in hopes that if you understand itll make things less stressful for me and you. So dont feel like you have to do anything for me.

Thankyou for reading if you got this far, really. (btw forwarding this to Mrs. m******d is totally okay with me)

#i was up at 2 am writing this #its kinda gross #but it explains so much

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