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detectiveangel · 2 years ago

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post-traumatic synthesized dreamscape no. 1

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this digital sound composition is an attempt to transcribe (record, mollify, exorcise) my emotions looking back on the events of last february as i experienced them.

i was living in st. petersburg as a graduate student researcher, one of the dwindling ragtag lot of americans with no family ties to russia still trying to live there, when the russian military invaded ukraine early in the morning the day after february 23rd, the federal holiday honoring military men that was once red army day. i had already given up on my dream of living in russia for anything approaching the long term and was trying to stay for just as long as i safely could as History unfolded around me. i left russia 24 hours after the start of the invasion and made it back to the u.s. safe but mentally shattered. I’d spent months navigating or avoiding tense encounters with russian migration police as weekly updates to civil law gradually made it very nearly impossible to legally reside in russia as citizen of a designated “enemy nation;” and then finally found myself alone in a windowless room with an fsb agent in the remote checkpoint by the finnish border that terrible morning. my battered psyche imploded before the questioning, which was, objectively, very mild, even began.

back in the u.s., i spent months struggling to operate my own person before i realized that i had ptsd from a war to which i had barely been a distant bystander. i started therapy and saw massive improvement after just a few months. good fortune, which saw me safely through so many close calls and near-disasters during the grinding buildup and violent lurch into fully-fledged military rule in russia, blessed me yet again.

before entering formal therapy, i leaned very heavily on intoxicating substances (alcohol in russia, marijuana in the u.s.) and movies to keep the terror at bay. my understanding of myself in this phase of my life is heavily mediated by cinema, especially cinema made or set in the wwii and early “post-war” era. this time when society’s psychic wounds were only just scabbing over and could be seen on nearly everyone who crossed a camera feels less like the past and more like a parallel present still playing out in ever-more garbled reproductions in the nightmare fantasies that govern life in the places that never healed properly from the traumas of the ‘40s. to make beautiful or joyful art has become impossible, but the need to externalize our disordered response to trauma in art is stronger than ever. our voices can no longer carry a tune, but we have all history’s old recordings to grind and reshape into new kinds of music that may somehow express the emotions no amount of time and treatment can resolve.

some notes on the recordings i used as material for this piece

during this last year of trauma recovery, i saw myself most vividly in one particular cinematic incantation of postwar psychosis co-created by a brit and an american both too young to have experienced wwii but raised in its fallout as men in societies where the publicly synthesized idea of maleness is overwhelmingly suffused with the radioactive particles still emitting from the atoms of that war. watching mickey rourke’s performance in alan parker’s metaphysically-canted neo-noir “angel heart” (1987) somehow made a narrative out of the glossolalia of confusion and pain humming at the core of my being during the strung-out spring that followed the terrible winter of ’21-’22.

in the autumn before that winter, i had found strength and solace from the encroaching fascist terror in russia in the exploration and nurturing of my own masculinity. i had long identified more with a masculine perspective than a female one, but various factors limited the extent to which i expressed this identification. various other factors led to me reaching new levels of masculine identification and expression that fall, and this was a positive, self-actualizing experience that nurtured me during the months in which i lived under increasingly dire threat of repression from a government officially opposed to the existence of queers, americans, and gender studies researchers within its borders.

months of trudging alone through seedy hotels, anxious crowds, and icy boulevards, all while looking over my shoulder for police, were bearable if i saw myself as a sort of postmodern pastiche of film noir protagonists, a hardboiled detective working an increasingly dangerous case, an existentially bedraggled man in the wrong time, space, and body muttering clever wisecracks for the benefit of none but himself and perhaps some imaginary audience of ghosts and angels. at that time i hadn’t, to my knowledge, actually watched any of the classic bogart & co. detective movies, so my metaphysical drag act was itself composed from impressions and parodies. i was, however, quite intimate with other strains of 1940s cinema (i was in the archives mainly to study a film from that decade) and though my active memory has retained nothing of “casablanca” (1942), i did see that film at a Formative Age and this would seem the most likely source of my improbable and ultimately impossible lifelong obsession with becoming a jaded-yet-romantic american expat on the fringes of europe.

lying prone in the rubble of my exploded expat fantasies back in my native california, i watched movies projected on my ceiling and in most cases enjoyed a vacation from my psychological perspective through the temporary occupation of another. but once in a while, i caught my own reflection in the kino-eye. such was the case with “angel heart,” a meticulously formalist meditation on the fractured collective psyche of “postwar” america via the methodical deconstruction of a man composed entirely of echoes and fictions masking unbearable trauma from participating in ritual human sacrifice both literally (as an occultist) and metaphorically (as a soldier in the war). as a supernatural creation bearing the souls of both perpetrator and victim of the sacrifice, his trauma response is self-annihilating – a mystical representation of the psychosis experienced by all us cogs in the war machine, one-souled or otherwise. the two souls bound up in harry angel/johnny favorite both experienced the war from a sidelined, un-masculine position: one as a section 8 discharge dismissed after a brief, traumatizing stint of service, the other as an enlisted entertainer. this allegory resonated in the contours of my imagination with incredible sonority, but i saw my reflection well before the plot unfolded, in the very first scenes of the film, in the physical demeanor affected by mickey rourke loping awkwardly through dirty manhattan snow in a wool trenchcoat. i had caught a similar reflection many times in the windows of moscow and petersburg as i trudged through dirty snow, insulating my frightened self from a hostile world with a similar wool trenchcoat and self-effacing butch affect cribbed from cinema-mediated memories of ‘20s-‘30s tough guys.

my identification with this character/performance is only one undercurrent of this noise-music composition, but it is the one i feel needs the most explication. the meanings carried by the other voices (among them those of vyacheslav tikhonov portraying an exhausted soviet agent within the ss in early 1945 berlin, leonid utesov singing the praises of his beloved odessa, and alexander vertinsky crooning an emigrant’s lament for distant st. petersburg) are more self-apparent.

2/23/2023

media sampled here:

audio from the films

“the third man” (1949)

“семнадцать мгновения весны” (1972)

“angel heart” (1987)

“black angel” (1946)

“casablanca” (1942)

song recordings

“у чер��ого моря” (leonid utesov, 1953)

“girl of my dreams” (etta james, 1960)

“чужие города” (alexander vertinsky, 1936)

“крейсер «аврора»” (choir of the leningrad pioneers’ hall, 1982)

additionally

personal audio recordings

midi file created from the composition “песня о далекой родине” (1972) by mikаеl tariverdiev

the accompanying video was created with samples from the above-mentioned films, as well as personal recordings and archival footage from a filmed concert performance by leonid utesov in 1940.

audio edited & produced using ableton live 9

video edited & produced in windows movie maker + microsoft clipchamp

some notes on the recordings i used as material for this piece

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magnoliamyrrh · 2 years ago

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believing in female solidarity and class conciousness and sisterhood while dealing with western feminists is actually a nightmare lmao

im so tired of making an effort, i truly am. im so tired. im tired of feeling like i have to teach Basic Empathy and Caring abt Others and Class Conciousness 101. im tired of being the only one whose making an effort in this relation. im so tired of it being the case that its only the westerners who lose their little marbles over whatever feminist points i may be be trying to make, and they somehow don't understand the irony in them prepetually calling so many nonwestern feminists fascists or whatever the fuck else. yes yes, indian feminists are just stupid for trying to ban pornography and surrogacy, please enlighten them. south korean women are just evil brainwashed bitches, that's why they're radical separatists - south asia in general having a separatist and radical wave is for no reason whatsoever theyre just nazis lmao. african feminists, so many of them, are white supremecists for not exactly parroting your western bullshit, yup yup this makes sense. islamic feminists are "suspicious" lmao for the language we use in our writings (analysis of material reality). lets completely ignore that the feministms of the nonwestern world call for the abolition of prostitution. balkan sex trafficking victims, which are most prostitutes and child prostitues in the west, spending years speaking out against all this and trying to change laws? naaah we know nothing, we dont know nothing at all, the well of westerners who have no idea what theyre talking abt will englighten us abt that, while calling for the death of women who dont agree with their sex work bullshit lmao. we also have a bad habit of joking abt unifying and killing men and killing sex tourists, we should probably stop that bc its real offensive and scary to the westerners too

all this god damn endless performative sharade about LiSteN to WoMen of CoLour and LisTen to ThIrd WoRld WoMen and liSten to NonWeSteRn WoMen and poOr woMen and SeX TrAffIcking ViCtiMs (wait nvm they dont even say that now, bc only "sex workers" exist to them, ever) et fucking cetera. yea lmao. they dont actually give a shit about marginalized women though

god help us. how the hell is the cognitive dissonance of this whole situation not hitting them exactly? with. literally basically any other feminist on this planet but the liberal/mainstream westerners you can hold an actual conversation and discourse and understand each other. everyone but them and their postmodern brainrot understands this is a class struggle and understands the root of the opression of the female sex. "ThErES nO UnIvErSalLiTy BetWeEN wOmEn" just shut it already jfc. the fact that we can have international conversations on our struggles basically already proves there is - its only you who cant get what planet youre living on, with the endless relativity and individualism and choice and language politiquing and patriarchal bootlicking

i know, because ive been doing it for years. and ive been watching the feminist movements of the nonwestern world for years. i also know the only reason why on this blog i Can actually for the most part say things without being crucified is bc most of yall arent western or white or both

and apart from the ones who outright lose their mind or feel incredibly comfortable speaking over you or talking down to you - dont rly know how they havent choked on the entitlement yet -maybe they're just fucking lost and too far gone. but. even the rest. who are less hostile or just privileged and dont know better. im just tired, just tired.

the internet is chock full of the opinions of nonwestern women on feminism. the internet is chock full of the accounts of sex trafficking victims, of child prostitues, of prostitutes, of experts on human trafficking. its fucking full of it. and its on tv, and sometimes in newspapers. god fucking damn it so much has been written on this, so much has been done on this, so many efforts movements organizations documentaries whatever the fuck. spains laws were changed by our trafficked women but somehow its like this fact doesn't exist to the westenrs, or the have the gull to explain that, actually, they're wrong.

it is of absolutely no pleasure of me at all to educate the western "feminists" on shit they could educate themselves on in approximately 10 fucking minutes if theyd bother to do a google search and give a shit, actually give a shit and maybe, for fucking once, realize theyre not always right and the center of the world. its of no pleasure to me at all to have to keep my cool and be nice enough that whatever i say isnt just dismissed, because if youre too fucking angry over god damn sexual slavery you're just an evil crazy irrational bitch. im tired. whatever the hell i say has been said by so many before, so many times, for so long, but its like its been said to a wall or yelled out into space

sometimes i wonder what the hell we must even do for it to even matter. rationality and calmness hasnt helped. anger hasn't helped. detailed accounts of what its Actually like to be trafficked or a child prostitute or a prostitute or a sex slave, havent helped. we have bore our pain and sorrows and trauma and soul and so often it doesn't mean a single god damn thing to them. what. what needs to happen. should we just start having mental breakdowns and screaming our throaths raw infront of them? no, they will not care or understand even then. should we show them what the sexual slavery of children actually looks like - except wait, theres undercover journalism and documentaries and accounts written on this. it matters not. it matters not. Whats next? Interpretive dance?? What else we got, should we maybe just start trying to communicate through telepathic waves?? i wonder if some of them are simply doomed to be deaf and blind and unfeeling

im tired of making the effort, and im tired of reaching across the isle hoping that at least some of them can change their minds and give a shit and open their eyes to whats actually happening, and how detached their "feminism" is from the rest of ours. im tired of having to explain to the western women whose ideology is responsable for, lmao, our peoples sexual slavery, that this shit is real bad, and lmao in actuality imperialism, but having to do it nicely enough while They are x30 times more hostile with Me. lord. if youre going to call me a fascist and cancel me irl, if were just throwing words around, can i just start calling them slavers? except thats not going to get us anywhere, except no matter how many times i want to just snap, i know that doing so as badly as i want to to their face isnt going to get anything done

. and.what choice do i have, really? i cant simply leave the western feminists to their bullshit. because what they think becomes law in their own damn countries and then affects us, it becomes international law as well because it is their country who lead the international community. the bullshit that they think, actually, unfortunately direcly affects us. and not only that, but it affects the women and girl-children most vulnerable and opressed in their own countries, whom are still our sisters whose pain and saftey i am concerned with. so i cant just leave them to it, and there is little choice then to not educate, or not try to at least try to reach across the isle. theres little choice but to have the hope that some of them can care and understand, and that some is better than nothing and worth it and a start..... even with how fucking tired and fed up i am and how i wish i wouldnt have to keep bearing my god damn suffering just so theyd get it, im still. frankly so willing to do it with someone who is actually willing to listen and change. i dont believe in canceling people forever, and i have the hope and knowledge that changing one persons mind is a ripple effect, for then they change anothers mind, and on and on

i just wish. theyd at least meet me halfway. im tired of making the effort to still see them as sisters and women whose struggles i care about, while for the most part they could give less of a shit

#feminism

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verycleverboy · 1 month ago

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Portrait Of An American Sunset

The author's summary from Bluesky: "In a shocking week even by the low standards of Republicans, I wrote about where we are and how we got here, and how many often forget that supremacy and fascism are things Trump found and harnessed, not his innovations. He didn't invade; he was summoned."

Having our bodies and lives dominated forever by greedy religious freaks is still largely unpopular with the larger population of awesome freaks who are not greedy freaks or religious freaks, however, and it's also against our constitution, too boot. In order to deal with this problem of unpopular and illegal goals in a governmental system that's meant to run on what is popular and legal, the fascists also intend to end democracy, and they sure have been making strides with rules they've changed and rules they're changing. In the swing state of Georgia, Republican election saboteurs have seized control of the election process and are rather predictably sabotaging the election, which they claim they are doing in the name of protecting the election. And Republicans are pushing an election law they call SAVE, which they claim is written to protect elections from fraud, even though the danger they are safeguarding against is non-existent, and one real effect of the rule may be to prevent women from voting. And they're trying to move the goalposts in Nebraska—even though the voting has already started—to claw back a single electoral vote Republicans have managed to let squirt free of its moorings, and they say they're engaged in this clear disenfranchisement of the people in the name of letting the will of the people be heard. This means that every 2 years or so the main choice we're making is whether or not we ever get to make choices again, doesn't seem sustainable, probably because it isn't sustainable. It's like playing football against a team that only has to score a single touchdown to win no matter what the scoreboard says, because instead of playing football they spend their energy changing the rules, and now they've got one that states that if they (and only they) score one touchdown, then they get to execute any referees they don't like—according to the head referees, who they have been bribing. And if all the cheating fails and they lose anyway, then retaliatory violence is all but assured, partly because that's what happened last time and partly because that's what they are promising. This gang wants killing and they intend to have killing, one way or another.

Moxon's article not only touches on the Mark Robinson nightmare in my backyard, but the depressing contention that CNN (the outlet whose "unforgivably leftist" tag only works when you've cultivated a population that's never read or seen anything "unforgivably leftist" in their lives except as a sitcom trope) didn't even touch the worst of it because it was unpublishable. Which begs the question, "How do you (a corporate news source) define 'unpublishable' in 2024?"

And he includes a reminder that Mitt Romney, the Republican who other Republicans still send death threats for having one moment of conscience, also ran on an anti-immigration platform in 2012. The main difference between then and now, Moxon argues, is conservatives (in the leadership, at least) don't pretend to be decent about it anymore.

They're doing all this openly because doing it openly is maximally menacing for the people they want to target, and fascists enjoy the fear of others, because the fear of others demonstrates that they are still dominating others. They're lying about why they're doing it, not because most of them don't know that they are lying, but because getting away with lies demonstrates domination. And the lies are ridiculous and laughably obvious because getting away with obvious lies demonstrates more dominance than being forced to craft believable ones does. They're calling themselves heroes for doing it, even while they mock and scorn true heroism, because being held blameless for abuse when you are the cause demonstrates dominance most of all. And they're getting away with it, because our institutions and systems and even the political opposition favors civility and politeness to truth and consequences. Even acting as if fascists intend to do what they say they intend to do is seen as gauche. And so fascists play on, in a land of zero consequences for fascists.

(Oh for god sakes, read the full thing. Then when you're done reading, keep reading some more. Read harder. Read better.)

#donald trump #mark robinson #2024 elections #where American democracy dies #mitt romney #fascisim #opinion

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neo-luddism · 3 months ago

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Several things I'm thinking about

Here's what I think*...

You were already going to vote for the corpse of an old man. Deal with it. Nevermind.

Objectivity. Is it real? Who cares. It’s not real, but it’s also kinda real. We create the conditions for it. There often is a true depiction or right answer, sui generis, the value of which lies within the contextual meaning provided by the issuer.

you're usually wrong, tho.

Israel is a fascist state.

It’s long past time for the end of the nation-state. The political projects known as the United States of America, and Israel, can start the process with their termination.

A democratic lever is not made moral by its use. It is a good thing to have, but it is not good in and of itself. We must utilize the power in these levers while not losing sight of their fragile nature and requisite continuous care.

Some movies are good because they are thoughtful and meditative; some movies are good because they are consistent kinetic motion, and leave little room for extensive meditation. I think this is pretty cool.

Brussels sprouts and horseradish go really well together. Most of the time brussels sprouts are seasoned too sweetly or char overpowers the seasoning, or both. Just an opinion. Whatever.

The colonial power asserts control of the historical narrative by dominating the sources, creators and distributors of media, dictating the narrative through official statements, and proceeding to tighten the noose ever further with each reporter murdered, and piece of equipment confiscated, and finally, making their presence illegal. Silence and eradication is the goal.

It seems possible to me that we in the US have been living in our own version of the Italian years of lead. Obama is the resurgent far right’s JFK analog, and our center-right liberal opposition party happily complies with the effort to create a communist boogeyman. The contradictions are exponentially heightened, a low-level civil war simmers for the better part of two decades…it feels like a particularly stupid time to be alive.

🎶The hills are alive with the sound of stupid. If you want to view stupid, simply look around and view it.

We must navigate our morality through this swampy morass in order not to be captured by controlled opposition. We do seem to have some sense of the stage we are forced onto, both audience and performer, yet we feign surprise at the existence of puppet masters.

Our rights as travelers are to leave as minimal strain on our hosts’ as possible. To understand and respect our hosts, to learn as much as we can while there.

Maybe astral projection and other CIA projects were in and of themselves a form of mind control for capturing the curiosity of individuals that sought the Truth.

Once they pursue these esoteric rabbit holes they put themselves at risk of disassociation and loss of self.

Under the silver lake is representative of a particular male melodrama and nightmare: that of exclusion from ruling class vices as life milestones. Its relational fear is that of in-group exclusion. The “true” feeling is moral, but the social context is relational. He perceives a lack of belonging. What is truly revealed? The ontological patriarchy? It is the exclusion that lingers. What happens in the tunnels. You are not a part of.

I’d prefer to not have AI, to be honest. Maybe no internet, either. Probably for the best.

Short movie reviews

Furiosa - good movie.

Hitman - I don’t like this movie.

*Right at this particular moment, and after re-reading it a few times, too. So, it's not like it's just that one point in time. But also, sometimes I do change my mind, so there's that.

#deep thoughts

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mr-fangs · 7 months ago

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5 reasons you should read Spectral!

A semi-spoilery and super hyped review with way too many exclamation points. One might be tempted to ask - why 5? The answer is, because if I don’t limit myself I’ll give away the whole plot and you’ll all just scroll down to the TL;DR anyway after seeing all 273 reasons.

1. Do you love Corvids? Of course you do, they are the second-greatest Family of birds! And what’s the best way to make a crow even better? You guessed it, a dapper top hat. Prepare to have your mind blown by Kuro, the best supporting character this side of Skid Row.

2. Giant fuck-you sized anime swords! We all have dreamed about being able to wield a sword the size of our own body to bash giant undead entities in the face. Now you too can live vicariously though Luna as she lives out your dreams and bonks the stuffing out of horrifying monstrosities!

3. A female MC who is badass, sassy, and making her way through playing about the toughest hand somebody could be dealt in life! Speaking of Luna, she has had pretty much the worst childhood you can picture. Missing mom? Check. Deadbeat addict dad? Check. Terrifying cyberpunk slum-adjacent ghetto of a neighborhood? Check. You might ask how that can get any tougher for Luna - the answer is a mysterious case of her foster homes spontaneously combusting and a malicious Spectre tagging along for the ride as she tries to escape that nightmare.

4. One might be tempted to say - if we already have a dapper crow, is there any way we can include other supporting characters that are even close to compelling? The answer is you better believe it! We have the paternal golden boy detective Chu that I would do literally anything for. We have the super freaking cool ghost-hunting Vero who is trying to work out just what the heck is going on while also working to escape the shadow of her ruthlessly fascist and Machiavellian mother (who just so happens to be her boss). We have super spooky and mysterious undead entities that each have their own mysteries and motivations! And last but not least we have Hiro, the grizzled old man who has literally seen it all. If you thought that would living through a world war and a second civil war on top of decades of ghost hunting would wear a man down you’d sure as heck be right!

5. Super sexy white border cover! Now we all know they say not to judge a book by its covered by just look at this - your shelf has never looked better with this bad boy catching your guests eyes and making them realize your amazing taste in literature.

Now I know what you’re thinking - where can I get this amazing book? Spectral is going to be serializing starting today for your reading pleasure and I sincerely hope you take the chance to read it and enjoy it as much as I have as an ARC reader! The first few are up now with another weekly until completion.

#booklr #books #corvids #ghost #anime and manga #serial fiction #indie books #female mc

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valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn · 3 years ago

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You ever notice that the things that Wanda tends gets in trouble for are things she kinda does on accident not the willfully reckless things she's done?

I think people give her a lot of crap while at the same time ignoring the context and the situation she was in, and that's not fair.

It's almost as if the moment a character does something wrong they can't move on from that, they can't change and evolve and choose to be someone else... unless they have suffered some and have been in pain for a while enough for these fans to consider them cleansed and good guys again.

I will not be defending her putting nightmares in the Avengers' minds and yes, Hulk rampaging South Africa caused a lot of damage and probably a few deaths and we don't see her standing trial for it. But do we ever see any of the heroes go through that? We don't.

Did we ever see Stark stand trial for selling weapons and causing hundreds of deaths (if not more, let's remember the death of Wanda and Pietro's parents)? Do we ever see him judged for destroying Sokovia after building an AI robot behind the team's back? Do we ever see him facing a judge for trying to murder an innocent man? No, we do not.

No, usually the stans will tell you that Stark was kidnapped in his first movie and that was pain enough. They will tell you he felt oh so sad after Sokovia and that's pain enough. They will tell you he had just seen a video of his parents' murder and his state of mind was so bad that he was justified in trying to murder Bucky.

So what, all of a sudden Wanda's state of mind at the time she created the Hex in Westview doesn't matter? Or how scared she was in Lagos when she saw Steve in danger of death so she had to react quickly thus saving his life and the lives of many others on the street... only to be called a weapon of mass destruction by the same man who had created the weapons that killed her parents? Or her state of mind when she and her brother joined Hydra not because they wanted to kill people but because they wanted to change the status quo and Hydra lied to them enough to make them believe they were anti-system when in truth they wanted to become the very fascists Wanda and Pietro aimed to destroy?

I'm not defending Westview or her mind manipulation of Hulk, those actions were wrong. But there's a context to them and an explanation for them, and if we can understand that other characters made bad decisions because they were desperate or afraid or traumatized surely we can understand her story as well. Understand, not justify.

Frankly it blows my mind that so many fans want her to suffer from her actions as if she hasn't been in enough pain already. Volunteering for Hydra was wrong? Sokovia was destroyed and she lost Pietro. Then IW came along and not only Vision had to die, she had to kill him only to watch him revived by Thanos and killed again. Then after she loses her mind and creates the Hex the very moment she's forced to face what she has done does she protect the Hex and her family or does she destroy it? She destroys it and loses her family. Isn't that pain enough?

And yet a lot of what I read and hear is people calling Wanda a nazi and claiming she's a villain that gets everything justified and excused. If only!

#pro wanda maximoff #Wanda Maximoff #anti tony stark

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qqueenofhades · 3 years ago

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hello! idk if you remember me, but I’m youngin anon from all those years ago. I just turned 18, which means I am a Legal Adult. it’s feeling a bit scary, so I was wondering you could give your 18 year old self any advice, what would it be? do you think there’s much hope for the future?

YES HI HELLO! Of course I remember you and have thought about you a few times in the middle of /waves hand/ all this. You and your similarly-aged peers, who are inheriting an even worse world than what we old millennials got (which wasn't great to start with). How I do not envy what you're having to deal with, and what is still to come for all of us. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I'm super impressed with your thoughtfulness, your questions, and your determination to do the best job you can, even in this mess of colossal suckitude. If more of the Youth are like you, we might be okay.

As for the rest... ah. Oh boy. There's a lot to say here, and I'll try to keep it (somewhat) succinct. When I turned 18, I was a sheltered teen from an insular, middle-class, white town, heading across the country to an expensive private college and having the vague, unformed ideas about their future that every kid has at that age. I was very stupid in the ways that all 18-year-olds are, and I knew pretty much nothing about who I would end up becoming, but I was a thoughtful, independent, and self-motivated person, and I really did want to learn. In my freshman year, I earned good grades, participated in a ton of extracurriculars (yes, once upon a time, I was a social butterfly) and otherwise threw myself into the College Experience. Then sophomore year hit, and in came the depression like a trainwreck. I have always had mental health issues, which went unrecognized and undiagnosed as a kid, but sophomore year kicked my ass, and first made me aware of this fact in a systemic fashion. This is not an uncommon experience, and I eventually made it through with no detriment to my schoolwork/overall collegiate career, but the point is, even if you're an eager bright-eyed 18-year-old beaver, going to college and transitioning to full-time adult life is a difficult experience for everyone in different ways, and it helps to know and be prepared for that fact. It doesn't mean that you're defunct, broken, already washed up, unable to function, or anything else. Those first few years are tough, and it's okay if you buckle under a little. Just know where you can find help and that it doesn't mean it'll last forever, or reflect on you individually.

As for my adult life, I've talked before about how I kind of fell ass-backwardly into what I'm doing now (becoming a historian) and how after two years of total job-market futility, I'm seriously questioning whether it's worth it to pursue a formal career in academia, or I'm going to have to figure out something else, again. I don't necessarily feel like I've done that much with my life, and I definitely don't feel like I'm where I want to be. I know it's in the middle of a global pandemic and economic meltdown and everything else about where we've ended up, but likewise: this sucks. I have spent a decade-plus with things just being really hard all the time. I don't have any money, I don't have a steady job in the field that I want, I'm stuck living in places where I don't want to be, I'm terrified of ending up in a fascist authoritarian nightmare, and... yeah. I don't know what to tell you, or myself, about any of that. Other than that I'm still here, still trying, and I hope, however vainly, that it has to count for something.

On the other hand, there are some things about being an adult that are really fun. When you're young, you're so concerned with what other people think and what your parents think and what the internet thinks and etc etc., and while it doesn't go away, it changes. I know who I am now, I know what I believe in and what I stand for, I know what I'm good at, I know my own talents and independence and yes, my recurring problems. I can do what I want and go where I want (well, if I had money) and think what I want, and I don't mean this in the "NOTHING MATTERS BUT FREEDUMB FOR MEEEE ONLLLY" selfish way that has so painfully gripped our society for the last several years. It's just more of an ability to be comfortable with what I know about who I am and what makes me happy, and an ability to detach from, say, endless internet drama about whatever the topic du jour may be. Life is bigger than that, and more interesting, and you get to do more of it in better and less constricted ways. I think someone like you will make good use of that, and I hope you do.

Is there hope for the future? I honestly don't know. I struggle endlessly with that question myself. As a historian, I know that if you take the long view, things always evolve and change. They get worse -- sometimes dramatically so, and for a long time -- and they also get better. The problem with humans is that we don't live long enough to remember either one of those things, and our relatively short lifespan feels like the only existence that has ever been. Terrible things have happened in the world before, many times. Eventually they ended, or they evolved, or they became something else, and brought new problems, but no matter what, they didn't last forever. I think the number-one most frustrating thing about being human, and therefore aware that you will have to die one day, is not being able to learn how everything turns out. It's like reading a book, but only a few chapters at a time, and being forced to leave before you ever get to finish it and find out the ending. I know that this drives me crazy, at least. I want to know, dammit. But legacy, planting seeds in a garden you never get to see, so forth and etcetera. You just have to do your best and find what strength you can to keep going.

I do believe that there is always room to make better choices, and while the world as a whole has gone down a terrifying, destructive, and deeply regressionist path over the twenty-first century in general, that may not be the whole story about how things go. All the apocalyptic scenarios may not be the ultimate or the only thing that happens, and as we know, nothing lasts forever. It matters what you yourself do in your daily life, the choices you make, the way you treat the people you meet, and deciding what you want to do (to quote Gandalf) with the time that is given to us. I think we're all long past the point where we can rely on external structures (governments, politics, money, culture, etc) to give us hope or do a good job of preparing for the future. We're living in a moment where all our old institutions are comprehensively and systemically failing, but the entrenched interests they protect are doing their best to fight off the change that's necessary if we don't want our current society and civilization to collapse. That's fucking terrifying, and it's hard to live with. So whatever hope there is comes from you, your friends and family, and what you do next. And in that, there is a little ray of light. You are still a conscious being with agency and passion and drive and ability. You can still go out and make a difference, however small. That is what gets lost in all the macro-scale gloom and doom, but it still counts. And it may still be our deepest instinct.

I'll leave you with this: the other day, I read a news story about a plane trying to land during Storm Eunice (ah, Dudley and Eunice) at Manchester Airport in the UK. It was so bad that they couldn't get down, and had to divert to Glasgow (where they eventually landed safely). A passenger on the plane, while talking about how awful the overall experience was (turbulence, thinking they were going to die, people screaming and crying and throwing up) also said that everyone aboard, strangers or family, was trying to help each other. They were holding hands or sharing sweets or talking to each other and supporting them and assuring them that it was going to be all right and they would make it to safety (which, as noted, they eventually did). And I thought: well, maybe that's like life. We might all be stuck on an airplane in the middle of a storm, and it is thrashing and tipping and scaring the fucking shit out of us, but we can still, as people, make the choice to help each other and pull together, even if we don't know each other. And that may, in fact, be our deepest and most basic instinct, and that means something.

Anyway. I hope this made sense. I'm very proud of you and think you're well on your way to being an awesome adult.

#anonymous #ask #personal #long post

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itsagrimm · 3 years ago

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imperial!tech has melted my brain

Can’t stop thinking about the imperial tech idea. It is implausible yet alluring. So here we gooooo. would love some feed back since I am not sure if that feel is right.

CN insults, violence, murder, discriminatory behaviour, treats, very toxic behaviour, soldier life in a fascist state, tiny bit of fluff or Manipulation depends on your perspective, blood, pain, talk of injury

Imperial!tech X they*them Y/N reader, afab but does not really matter unless I write a part 2

“Welcome on Kamino!”, the officer declared striding into the hall, “I hope you are motivated and up to the task to serve the galactic empire.”

A few laughs and murmured words from the crowd arose. The officer in front of the newly recruited soldiers waited patiently for them to quiet down.

“You-“, he pointed at them,” have been selected from the best bounty hunters, fighters and planetary defence forces in the galaxy. This-“ another pointer into the air ”- is your moment.”

The anticipation in the room was tangible.

“We are ready, sir”, someone said. Other “yeahs” and “bring it on” voiced agreement.

“We will see.”, the officer smiled, “You are here as new recruits for the imperial army elite squad. A most unusual and experimental force. And may I point out, you are not the first to attempt and fail to join this most extraordinary unit.”

Again, the silence was unpleasantly deafening. Y/N looked around but this time no one dared to speak up. Hard, human, mostly men* had come with Y/N to Kamino, the most secretive of worlds where all the now imperial clone troopers came from. Y/N knew some from their time as a bounty hunter. But looking at these tense men* now, these identical uniforms, these faces Y/N didn’t recognize any of them.

“Allow me to introduce you to your commander. Clone Commander Tech will assess your performance and decide on your -” a last pointed gesture ”-fate within the imperial forces.”

With this the door opened and a single trooper walked in. Calmly and collected, giving not a glance to the newly recruited.

“Are these new soldiers, sir?”, the trooper asked quietly.

“I am afraid so.”

The trooper puffed, turned around and took his time looking at the recruits.

“What a disappointment.”, he finally stated while fixing his googles, “Listen up! I am your commander. You on the other hand are barley sentient, oxygen consuming, shit generating bags of meat.”

He looked down, his voice now lower. It was an odd moment. The hall was full of assertive and hardened fighters. Yet this skinny, pale, four eyed clone berated them.

“You think you are smart and impressive. But trust me – you are not. All you can hope to accomplish is following my precise order. Do you think you can do that?”

Silence.

Someone started to laugh and clap.

“Woooooowww”, the recruit stated, “What a show. Is this a joke?”

Others started to snicker.

The commander turned his head like an owl and fixed his eyes on the rebellious troublemaker.

“It really was quite impressive. But listen here googles – I am not following orders from a clone. You are nothing but brainless cannon fodder. So where is the real commander, officer?”

More snickering in the hall. Y/N got cold. Something bad was about to happen. They knew it.

“Don’t-“, they tried to voice something but a glance from the clone commander silenced Y/N.

Helplessly they watched as commander Tech took off his glasses.

In a fraction of a moment the commander lunged at the troublemaker and hit the frame of his glasses on his head. It took 3 few precise and fast strikes with the doomium frame before the skull shattered.

No one spoke as the commander cleaned his glasses with the uniform of the dead troublemaker before putting them on again.

“You “, he pointed at Y/N and their back went cold. “You anticipated my attack. Well done. I consider you bearable for the elite squad. Congratulations.”

XXXXXXX

The elite squad had a variety of tasks. Whenever necessary they got deployed to guard, assassinate, or downright slaughter. Y/N felt nothing. Life in the outer rim was hard enough without a war. Killing had been a necessity for survival for too long and Kamino had numbed what was left in Y/N to care.

Y/N was given a number within the unit. ES-01. There had been another ES-01 before Y/N but nobody liked to talk about that. And since the number was impractical, their squad members had shortened it into the moniker “ONCE”.

ONCE was fine with the squad. There was little talk between them. At night ONCE heard the others cry or whisper to each other about the commander and the horrors the had to endure. But ONCE did not want to talk and pretended to sleep.

Sleep was a rarity for the elite squad due to their deployments.

And Tech – their commander – never slept. ONCE saw him twice in the bunk room to get something or give out orders. But never had they witnessed their commander asleep. He was always off somewhere, either working on the squat space craft deep into the night or in the little lab were he meticulously planned out missions. He laboured like a mad man but nobody objected.

It was early. ONCE had woken up from a nightmare. The other members of the squad were still asleep. The bunk of the commander empty of course. ONCE got up. There was no point in staying here.

The long corridors were nearly empty. A few guards and droids patrolled or performed cleaning duties. But nobody paid attention to ONCE wandering around with a cup of caf.

Commander Tech was in the hangar, working on the ship.

“Commander, you are up already.”, ONCE stated.

“Still. I wasn’t finished.”, Tech replied. His voice was raspy as if he had talked to himself for hours, “What do you want?”

“Nothing. Just wanted to check on the insomniac commander.”

“Oh.”, it sounded like a treat, “There is no need for you to assess my sleeping pattern, soldier.”

He looked up from the bottom of the ship at ONCE and got up.

“But thank you for bringing me caf.”

“I didn-“

“I said thank you, soldier.”

Before any protest Tech took ONCE hand, twisted it with surgical accuracy for them to let go of the cup of caf and took it.

That kriffin clone.

ONCE inhaled.

“Hey, with all due respect commander, if you want a caf I can get you some. No need to take some by force from me.”

Tech just calmly sipped from the cup.

“How nice of you. How considered, dear ONCE.”, he said in a sweet voice, “But no, I do not require any more caf from you. Thank you very much. Tell me, is using the caf machine a task the little head of yours can process? Sooo many buttons… Sooo complicated… You must be so proud.”

ONCE did not flinch. Living in the outer Rim, spending time among killers and criminals had teachable effects. It did not pay off to go against bigger fish, but limits had to be set.

Without a second thought ONCE licked their finger and dipped it into the caf of their commander.

Tech – the clone commander who even talked over grand moff talkin once - was speechless.

For a moment ONCE thought he might hit them, already bracing for the impact of an armoured fist. Instead, the commander put down the cup.

“I should whip you for that.”

ONCE stayed silent and starred forward, at the side of the ship.

Tech moved closer. He was taller than them and his dark armour enhanced his shoulders. A dark bird of prey with big eyes starring down on measly prey.

“I will whip you for that.”

His fingers scratched over ONCEs pauldron upwards until he reached their neck, pocking painfully into the skin.

“But not now.”

Tech moved away.

XXXXXXXXXXX

Bracca had been a disaster. The elite squad was tasked to track and eliminate some deserters. But before they could implement commander Tech’s plan, contradictory orders came in from Kamino. Good soldiers follow orders. But what does that help with in the field when one order is to kill and the other to capture.

Now the commander was injured.

Alone in the med bay.

ONCE starred at the wall.

Tech was an unpleasant commander. The respect he commanded was gained by violence and constant critique of those he considered lesser.

But he deserved not to be alone when in pain, right? And back then in the hanger he had not hit ONCE. ONCE was aware that what they considered adequate or even caring behaviour was twisted by a life spent in danger, the imperial brain washing and the maddening time with the elite squad. But they didn’t care. Tech had all the chances to punish ONCE for their discretions. Yet he didn’t. That was nearly good behaviour from a man who had killed a recruit for disrespecting him. Wasn’t it?

ONCE head spinned. The other squad members whispered in their bunks about the mission. About their commander and how he got burned by an ion engine. Apparently, the deserters were the commanders former squad members. And they had left him. Twice.

Once he had a squad.

Once he was unharmed.

Once he was many things of which they did not know about.

ONCE got up. Checking on a wounded commander should not be such a loaded and complicated question.

The med bay was as sterile and uncaring as the rest of the kaminoan architecture.

The commander was laying on a cot. The bacta had worked well on the burns on the side of his head. But he still locked weak and hurt. Without his glasses, Tech starred at the ceiling, not even a holopad to distract himself.

“hello commander, I got you some caf.”

part 2

#the sad batch #the bad batch #star wars the clone wars #thebadbatch #imperial tech #tbb #the bad batch tech #tbb tech #toxic traits #tbb toxic tech

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dereksmcgrath · 3 years ago

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I had said before that the number 108 can be unlucky. It wasn’t unlucky at all for My Hero Academia: Vigilantes. But 108 is kind of unlucky for this episode: not only are we focusing on the Villains, but we just aren’t giving their story the structure and emotional weight it deserves.

(I either opened with those remarks or just made a bunch of corny jokes about how “Meta Liberation Army” can be abbreviated as MLA--and I’m saving those jokes for a future review.)

“My Villain Academia,” My Hero Academia Episode 108 (Season 5, Episode 20)

An adaptation of Chapters 220, 221, 222, 223, and 224 of the manga, by Kohei Horikoshi, translated by Caleb Cook with lettering by John Hunt and available from Viz.

My Hero Academia is available to stream on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Spoilers up to My Hero Academia Chapter 325.

When I teach literature, I refer to the plot as a problem: it is something that the protagonist is trying to solve. This problem can take various forms, but it is often as an antagonist that the protagonist confronts. When this episode has the Doctor refer to a “villain” as someone “who turns nonsense into action,” that’s kind of the point: the villain is here to get the plot rolling. Without them, you don’t have a hero, you don’t have a story.

It has been long accepted by a lot of fans and scholars that superheroes tend to uphold the status quo. I think the first time I gained awareness of this popular argument--although likely not the first time I encountered it--was Dr. Horrible’s mangled remark that “the status is not quo.” More recently, however, I have been reading academic books on superheroes, and not only does that argument persist--that superheroes represent law, order, and upholding traditional norms even in the face of new evidence or out of sheer obliviousness to the need for systemic change--but the argument has become that, if a superhero story does not have the heroes doing something to effect systemic change, then it’s not a good story. I may be misunderstanding that argument, but if I don’t, then it’s not an argument I can stand behind.

The argument is that superhero stories tend to reduce complex issues to having avatars for each side of the issue--the good guy and the bad guy--get into a fight, where we are focused on the spectacle rather than on seeing actual people engaging in the actual work needed to address problems not on the individual level--again, one good guy physically fighting one bad guy--but on a larger scope.

I am oversimplifying this argument, as even those same scholars will point out that, initially, of course there were superhero stories that had the protagonist taking the fight against the system. Superman is one of the ones named most frequently, whether in his initial comic book premiere doing what police and media would not to face down a corrupt senator (a sign of things to come in his later fights with Luthor and in Justice League Unlimited) or fighting the Klan (in the meta sense, fighting their analogue on the radio show and, more recently, literally in the comics). It kind of makes Superman look like one influence on the Peerless Thief in My Hero Academia, but we’ll get to him far later in these episodic reviews.

Even with that exception of Superman, it’s not hard for me to agree with the argument that heroes prop up the status quo. That has been the plot point for My Hero Academia and why this war against the villains has been incoming: a system that depended on just All Might, now depending on a wife-beating abusive father like Endeavor with his crimes not popularly known, has a level of corruption that cannot stand up with just one man’s shining example of honest goodness and integrity to be the Symbol of Peace. It was why I appreciated the manga eventually showing that, yes, there was an entire network of assassins within the Hero Public Safety Commission to keep All Might’s hands clean--and, in retrospect, while Lady Nagant was our first named example, given what Hawks ends up doing to Twice, deadly force may be frowned upon by law in MHA but has to have been something Hawks was told he had legal authority to do. (Also, as I will never stop pointing out, Endeavor unintentionally and unknowingly killed another Pro Hero in Vigilantes, and we’re just supposed to pretend that was fine.)

But going back to this academic argument, about how superhero stories tend to stick to one-on-one battles and don’t let the heroes effect systematic change, I’m ambivalent. There have been a range of superhero or superhero-adjacent stories that have the protagonist making on-page, on-screen, obvious work to not just get into fisticuffs with the bad guy. I already pointed out Superman’s first appearance and his fight against the Klan. I can also identify other examples, some hamfisted like Captain Planet, others more nuanced like Korra reaching out to Kuvira in The Legend of Korra. While the scholarship I read bristles at the idea of reducing these fights to just avatars for good and evil, I shrug and say that kind of comes with the territory of a superhero story. I hate justifying tropes: it’s like saying “this fanservice is acceptable because that’s part of the genre”--which leads to its own set of problems, especially when I hear fools defending sexualized fanservice that is just not needed for the story and is abusive by gender and representation. Heck, The Brave and the Bold animated series had Equinox and Batman battle as giants representing the avatars of chaos and order--which is confusing enough, with Equinox having a vaguely yin-yang motif that debunks any clean separation between chaos and order. And yet, here I am, arguing that this kind of fanservice of a hero and a villain beating each other up is to be expected: you have a debate about ideals of what a hero should do when you see Iron Man and Captain America each representing a side in a fight, whether the poorly handled comic book Civil War or the better film version, and even then, that film also lets the individual personalities get in the way of saying anything meaningful about government oversight and individual agency, ideas better handled in that other Captain America film, The Winter Soldier, and even then that film also gets stuck in just being about Steve and Bucky’s relationship.

All of this is me saying that, when you add a superhero to the fight, you’re going to feel disappointed that almost nothing systematically changes in its setting, not only because, as I’m hinting, these are stories about individuals fighting each other and not stories about the individual against society or nature, but also because a superhero can only change so much of their world for the better before that world no longer looks like our own or a new societal problem has to emerge to create the problem that is the plot itself for wherever the story goes next. Once a hero makes the setting into a utopia, either a new problem emerges to show the fiction of that story and that a dystopia is always married to a utopia, or the utopia is revealed to be hollow (Shigaraki’s word of the day) and fake. My Hero Academia already showed the utopia of a world where people get to live with their Quirks is fake, not only by (largely necessary) regulation of those Quirks but also, as we’ll see more with Spinner, Compress, Toga, Gigantomachia, and others, looking different, or being socially aware, or having disabilities, or being the “wrong” size, excluded you from that society.

What I’m trying to say is that, once you add superheroes into a story to fix the problem, you can’t show what systematic change looks like. How do you write a story where it makes sense that no hero came to save Tenko Shimura from becoming Tomura Shigaraki? What’s a story like My Hero Academia supposed to do to show the problems with a society, if you have superheroes who can fix those problems by beating up the bad guys?

Solution: You have the bad guys beat each other up.

In this corner, the League of Villains, people who were made outcasts because they did not fit in--which reveals the flaws of a society that is not accepting people who may not be able to change their past or their bodily conditions.

And in this corner, the Meta Liberation Army--which reveals how society breeds people in business, media, and politics who abuse laws and societal norms to elevate themselves and create a social Darwinist nightmare.

Granted, these are some foolish schmucks for starting up this fight in public, but I’ll address how the MLA just doesn’t work in a later episode review.

But for now, let the fight begin. No matter who wins, at least we see how society at large allowed these Villains to emerge--and we can either see All For One’s dictatorial forces get wrecked, or see Re-Destro’s fascistic oafs get wrecked.

Unfortunately, no matter who wins, the Pro Heroes are going to lose, too.

I am overly impressed with myself for realizing all of this. And I say “overly” not only because this is arrogant of me but also because I’m pretty sure just about every other person following this series already came to this conclusion: if you want to show actual systematic change, you have to show what the villains are up to, because they are the ones showing the holes in our society that need to be fixed. Either a villain exploits those holes to cause damage to people, or the villain is themselves representative of unfairness in the system and, by breaking the law to save themselves and others, are unfairly maligned as villains.

That being said, I’m not a big fan of the “[Insert villain’s name here] was right” arguments. Yes, Magneto is justified in his goals and ethics, and the debate is the means he takes to them, so his existence is to show why the X-Men are screwing up and need to be more radical. Yes, Killmonger is right that Wakanda’s isolationism is reckless and allows for travesties to persist, but his choices are largely out of individual desire for vengeance, so he’s an example that T’Challa can follow. Taken too far, though, and you get people who preach anti-establishment notions without having an alternative or are just trying to sound edgy rather than actually pointing to the actual problem: it’s someone who celebrates the Joker without recognizing that, no, you don’t want to be that asshole, or who celebrate villain-turned-hero Vegeta just because he looks cool and without appreciating what steps he took to change and what fall he experienced before he got to the point of being a villain.

In all these cases, if done poorly, you have the same tired trend of a villain existing only so long so that the hero changes for the better. It’s as tiresome as I unfortunately sometimes feel reading post after post celebrating how complex and sympathetic the League of Villains’ members can be when, still, a lot of them are just assholes using empty excuses to defend atrocious behavior (primarily, just All for One) or, for the most part, are people put into desperate situations (Shigaraki, Toga, Spinner, Dabi, Twice) who are doing the best they can (Twice, Spinner) even if their actions are not defensible (Toga) or also out of line (Shigaraki) due to their own refusal to seek the legitimate help they need to work through their issues (Dabi).

It’s hard to read posts online calling the League members sympathetic when we have not had a chance in the anime to know their full story. And as with the slow revelation that this setting is not really as welcoming of people of all shapes and sizes as initially hinted, so too do the villains’ backstories show that they were justified in some actions they took, except for those that led to deaths. Too bad none of that really pops up in a meaningful way in this episode that would rather tease out Shigaraki’s back story, keep dangling the obvious answer to who Dabi really is, and short-sells what should be a meaningful friendship between Twice and Giran but is just dropped as fast as Shigaraki takes off Twice’s mask. Jeez, Shigaraki, that is a dick move to Twice…

But I’m already on Page 4 of this rant, so let’s get to the episode already.

Pulling back the curtain yet again, these reviews tend to follow a pattern. Since I first wrote about the MHA anime, my process would be to first re-read the chapters, then watch the episode in Japanese, then watch the episode in English, so as to retrace my steps in how I first encountered most of these stories, as well as to see any patterns in the production process moving from manga to anime to localization. But with this episode, that practice was made nearly impossible given how prevalent the hostility towards this episode, this arc, and this season have been, especially when a friend shared numerous reactions from other viewers about this episode. Seriously, for all the whining I just did the previous four pages, you could read this person or this person who are much better at explaining why the introduction of Re-Destro to the anime sucks, for more than one reason.

So, I had a different approach: I already had the flaws to this episode shared with me by other viewers, then I listened to the English dub, then I re-read the chapters, then I watched the Japanese dub with English subtitles.

And, boy, am I grateful I took that approach, because this episode is a ton of talking--too much talking. For an anime adaptation that cut so much of Spinner’s Leonardo from Ninja Turtles narration, I’m shocked that they kept the boring parts of his narration and cut the only good parts, including the very opening that had a lot more action and gave us a reason to sympathize with these Villains.

I know I’m a snob regarding animation; I have expressed before how, despite my love for animated works, I tend to appreciate them more for what they do with storytelling rather than the spectacle of the visuals. I really dislike works where the value of the work is in the animation alone: I am here to see a story unfold, and if there is no narrative, no plot, no beginning-middle-and-end, then what I’m encountering is a museum piece, not a work of cinema. (Feel free to bash me for that hot take: I’m still railing against Patty Jenkins’s ridiculous argument from this week.)

And as with most forms of karmic punishment I experience, I pay the price: if I rail long enough about works that are only all about the animation and not the story, then my punishment is an episode where all we get is a lot of story and not much in the way of animation. Yet I can’t even say we got a story here, so much as back story, exposition, needless narration--it’s Blade Runner only bad. As much as I have loved how this anime’s storyboards stick so close to the manga panels, the pan over the League listening to Shigaraki’s vague back story felt like the least interesting way to handle this scene, especially when it excises so much of Spinner coming around from questioning Shigaraki to sympathizing with him. Who would have imagined cutting so much of Spinner’s initial narration and the opening from Chapter 220 would screw up how to adapt Shigaraki’s back story from Chapter 222.

The anime cuts how this arc begins in the manga: Chapter 220 starts with Spinner facing off against an extremist group that hates him for his reptilian appearance--a moment that would have garnered more sympathy from the audience for these Villains than this episode is exhorting. We needed a scene to get behind these villains and agree with them, before we are shocked to hear Shigaraki say what we have long expected, that he just wants to destroy everything and make everyone as miserable as he has felt, to wake us up that, no, you may sympathize with these outcasts (to use Twice’s one-word self-description), but you shouldn’t agree with Shigaraki’s goals. (I know Shigaraki relents somewhat when asked by Toga, but it’s hard to backtrack from “destroy it all” to “destroy it all but not the stuff my friends like.” How on Earth is Shigaraki going to destroy Izuku when Spinner somewhat admires the guy and Toga...well, yeah, best left unsaid.)

While watching this episode, I also was reviewing other topics about anime and manga I’m going to go into more detail about later this month, and one topic of discussion is the assumption that anime and manga, by their visual style and story tropes, especially shojo and shonen, tend to be about big expressions--emotional outpours in words, movements, facial expressions, and actions to more easily communicate what is happening, regardless of context.

I hate to keep repeating “ambivalent” in my reviews (another academic word I need to expunge from my lexicon for a bit), but I’m ambivalent about that argument, that anime and manga, especially shojo and shonen, are better at communicating. If your character is unreadable, that likely has an intentional reason: we don’t get much of a read on the Doctor in this episode, not helped by his mustache and glasses, but we also don’t get a read on what Shigaraki is up to.

This episode only heightens my regard, not just about anime, manga, shojo, or shonen, but in animation and comics at large, that not everything is readable in what a character is planning.

On the one hand, I do agree that visual works tend to make ideas easier to comprehend for some people who can engage with such visual works. As someone who teaches English literature and writing in a United States setting, I use comics in my teaching to cross language and cultural barriers, especially for students for whom English is not their primary language or who are the first in their family raised in the United States. And this teaching approach also helps in reverse: I include manga and anime in my teaching to show how not all details cross language and cultural barriers in a one-to-one correspondence, hence the challenges of translation and localization, and how all of us struggle to make ourselves understood within our own primary language to someone else who is fluent in that language, let alone trying to translate into another language or to present ourselves in a different set of cultural norms.

On the other hand, anime and manga are not a fixed genre. Yes, I agree that the images tend to emphasize big eyes, big expressions, and big motions--but that’s like saying all animation is Looney Tunes, or all animation is Disney, or is Dragon Ball, and so on. Likewise, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, shonen is more than just one type of storytelling, and the same goes for shojo. This arc of My Hero Academia is placing focus, after admittedly far too long, on the Villains as the protagonists--and their behavior pokes holes in the idea that things are obvious, when the Villains are themselves such liars, so crafty, have their own hidden agendas, are keeping secrets from each other. It’s as if their behavior is a commentary on this plot and how BONES is adapting it: the Villains are keeping secrets, so this plot is going to keep its secrets for just who Re-Destro and the Meta Liberation Army are, what their personalities are like, and what Shigaraki and the Doctor have in mind for getting what he wants. We’re even kept in the dark as to Shigaraki’s full back story; we’re in the same position he is, knowing just little bits and able to make assumptions from a handful of visual cues and memories, without fully knowing who the hell Tenko is. Add to that Spinner’s struggles to narrate all of this and to get into Toga’s mind and Shigaraki’s mind, as well as Dabi’s own secrets and agenda with Hawks, and we have a story that blows up the notion that anime and manga are easier for reading a character’s mindset: no, they are not always easier, not when the creators deliberately mislead the audience or keep them in the dark for a surprise.

By keeping so much of the audience in the dark, so that we become aware of how deceitful villains can be, and we are put into Shigaraki’s place of not knowing where he came from. This should be a set of brilliant choices by BONES to adapt this arc in this manner. But the problem is, no, almost none of this gets anywhere close to brilliant. It’s not brilliant--it’s frustrating, because we already know what is going to happen. You can just pull up the manga at low cost with a Viz account and read all of this in the order it was originally presented and get the answers ahead of time. And if you’ve been reading the manga all along, you already know how this arc ends, and you know stuff from the next set of arcs so that you do know already what Shigaraki’s back story is, what Dabi was really up to, who survives, who dies. You even learn more about Compress’s back story--stuff that really should have been hinted at much earlier in the manga, and could have been hinted in this adaptation but as of this episode has not.

Maybe that is why the anime removes Re-Destro murdering his assistant: it’s such an odd moment that it is challenging for me to get a read on Re-Destro, as he alternates in the manga between being very friendly and devoted to his comrades but also violent and heartless.

It may be obvious that I didn’t like much of this episode. I think when I stopped taking this episode seriously was when I heard the voices. Like I said, I tend to start with the Japanese dub first before getting to the English dub. And I have nothing at all against English dubs: I would not be listening to them as much as I have, often first before I ever hear the Japanese, and I would not be a fan of so many English-speaking actors in dubs if I had any animosity to the craft, their work, and the benefit they provide for creating a larger audience for these stories. And nothing against Larry Brantley and Sonny Strait, but some of this casting feels off. I wasn’t able to take this episode seriously as soon as I heard the voice distortion that was used for Re-Destro’s phone call: that took me out of the story. If I had the chance for localization, I would really need Twice or someone to call out how freaking ridiculous that Mickey Mouse voice sounded. You have freaking Sonny Strait here: use the Krillin voice, use the Chibi Ragnarok voice, use the Usopp voice--use something, really go bizarre here, it’s just a voice distortion device! And as I said, nothing against Strait, but when I hear Re-Destro when I read the manga, that’s not the voice I have in mind. For right now, HIroaki Hirata in the Japanese dub is closer to that smoothness I expected for this character. But I have no doubt Strait will do excellent as Re-Destro’s empowered form: think Strait’s role in The Intruder II from Toonami. It’s just that Re-Destro in the English dub is lacking that odd refinement I was expecting.

Granted, it’s the same problem for me when I hear Brantley as Spinner: I am making unfair assumptions that don’t suit the goals of the creators when it comes to this character. It is sadly not as obvious in this episode as it is in the manga: this arc in the manga starts with Horikoshi invoking Laird and Eastman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by having Spinner, who is already a sword-wielding reptilian martial artist, narrating just like how Leonardo narrating at the beginning of the very first issue of TMNT. I wanted a voice for the English dub that is like Leonardo’s, a little higher pitch and more youthful, like what Brian Tochi brought in the live-action Turtles film or what Cam Clarke and Michael Sinterniklaas bring in the animated versions. I think, for the Japanese dub, Ryo Iwasaki’s performance as Spinner is very close to what I expected. But that also may seem too obvious: Spinner may be young, but giving him an older-sounding voice can belie his inexperience, youthfulness, and naivete, similar to how people make assumptions about him by his reptilian appearance. The anime is putting me into my place--I think of Spinner one way other than who he really is, so I’m no better than the people around him who have discriminated against him for his physical appearance.

Just as I have a set of assumptions that unfairly influence how I would cast Spinner, I also think Re-Destro should have sounded more refined and less graveley in the English dub. But my expectations belie that, just the Joker whom he resembles, Re-Destro puts on this cultured facade to hide that he is just another violent gangster thug, someone who would kill his own assistant. I know I cited examples above about how complex Re-Destro is, but it’s hard for me to see him as sympathetic just because he’s crying over something he did out of his own volition: he coldly killed his office assistant Miyashita, his tears and kind words don’t suddenly make this a warm and cuddly death, we don’t get to think of him as our woobie. It only makes it more irritating that BONES so far has cut not only that scene of Re-Destro killing Miyashita but also Re-Destro’s TV commercial: it would clue us in that the reason he has that gravelly voice is because, no matter how much he tries to present himself on TV, he is not that kind of a man.

But since I invoked the Joker comparison to Re-Destro, yeah, I’m disappointed we didn’t get Troy Baker as Re-Destro, as unlikely as I imagine that would be to happen, regardless of Baker’s previous work with Funimation. It does lend a bit more to conspiracy theories on my part, though, given casting director Colleen Clinkenbeard telling Twitter followers to stop expecting Mark Hamill in MHA, it’s never happening--we can’t even get Troy Baker doing his Mark Hamill Joker.

(I’m not being fair to Baker: I’m not saying his Joker is at all bad--it is not, he has been excellent as Joker, especially playing him and Batman in the Ninja Turtles crossover film, but it is obvious Baker is performing the kind of Joker that came out of Hamill, so I’m trying to say he’s doing the “Hamill Joker,” rather than the “Nicholson Joker,” the “Ledger Joker,” or the “Caesar Romero Joker”).

It’s also a challenge to sympathize with these characters when we aren’t getting what this arc should give them: a re-introduction. I hate approaching this episode in a post-James Gunn The Suicide Squad world, but seeing how much MHA owes to not The Suicide Squad of the comics but that motif in so many superhero comics, there is that missed opportunity to reacquaint the audience with who are the members of the League of Villains. So, where the hell is my freeze-frame re-introduction to each League member? There was that fan theory a long time ago that Giran was really Present Mic in disguise: imagine doing Present Mic’s introduction of characters by name, Quirk, and pithy comment, only it’s Giran in the announcer seat this time.

(Don’t even get me started on how annoying it is to have Izuku handling the post-credit preview: give that to Spinner.)

Again, maybe it is brilliant for BONES not to include some re-introduction scenes, whether narrated by Giran or happening naturally in conversation between these characters. These Villains barely know each other’s back story, so there’s no artifice where they would believably share their back stories to each other in conversation in this context. And as I said, Shigaraki does not know enough about his own past, and Dabi is hiding his real identity. But when we’re stuck with Spinner as our half-hearted narrator, who seems not to know why he and Toga are still here with Stain being gone, and when Toga is this dull in her answer about what keeps her going after Stain’s arrest, and when Spinner himself seems not to know what he’s still doing here, all of that does not communicate a reason for us to keep going with this story.

I know this arc is going to get better, storywise at least, just based on how it went in the manga. I can only hope that the animation can capture the chaos that the original manga illustrations showed. But I am trying to think what a new viewer is going to do if this is their introduction to this series. I’m not invoking the Episode 7 Rule, I’m not doing a hypothetical experiment to gauge which episodes are the best to bring a newbie into this series--I am asking, honestly, if a fan was already into this series, and was watching it one Saturday morning, and a friend or roommate or relative saw them watching, they would be utterly lost about why they should care about this. Even the explanation for why Twice is indebted to Giran is presented as such an afterthought that does disservice to a potentially emotional moment, to what is supposed to be a pretty deep friendship, as deep as it can be for a weapons trader like Giran and an outcast-turned-criminal like Twice, so that, when Twice helps rescue Giran, we feel that emotional payoff.

It is honestly shocking that, for all the throwbacks, recaps, and flashbacks we get, including how Giran’s fingers match up to previous places where the League fought, that this still leaves a new viewer in the dark. And the problem lies at the feet of MHA arriving at a fifth-season slump: the series has gone on so long that things feel lazy and making far too many assumptions on what knowledge the audience is bringing. You’re not getting a bigger audience if you keep appealing to the diehard fans and the people reading the manga. After all, why would you keep doing ridiculous recaps and flashbacks if the fans already know what happened?

But speaking of the recaps and flashbacks, that should have been how this episode redeemed itself. As I said last time, if you re-worked the order of episodes to start with the Oboro Shirakumo story, that would be more shocking. But what if this episode could have been the very first episode of the season, and following the trend of previous seasons, make it a recap episode? We already had Izuku narrating a clip show, Class 1A at the pool, a photojournalist visiting the UA Dorms--it would be so much more interesting seeing “League of Villains camping in the woods while in the background Shigaraki gets squished by a giant.” Have the Villains tell campfire stories about how they got here: it would be a great excuse to re-use the animation and save on the budget. You could fit in a few gags, as Toga starts telling a really gruesome story but gets distracted by all the blood in it, while Twice’s story bounces between sugar-sweet happy and grim-and-dark chaos, while Compress and Spinner are stuck trying to keep them focused. It’d be a hell of a lot more interesting than how BONES somehow screwed up a potentially emotional volatile moment between Izuku and Amajiki that would put into question whether Izuku is going to have to kill a Villain and just how devastated Amajiki feels after Mirio lost his Quirk.

And speaking of whether Izuku is going to have to kill a Villain: obviously, this arc is setting up how much more dangerous Shigaraki is than UA gave him credit. Back in Season 2, I hated how Nezu and UA staff referred to him as a “man-child,” given the connotations that have surrounded masculinity and being a man. I wrote that before 2016; in this post-2016 atmosphere, and the increased prevalence of toxic masculinity, I am, once again, that annoying word ambivalent. I am likewise ambivalent how well this series has shown Shigaraki to be able to form the plan he does by episode’s end. We’re only told by Spinner how much faster Shigaraki is getting and how much slower Gigantomachia has become--but the animation doesn’t show that. And we’re being told how great Shigaraki’s plan is--when it sounds ridiculous.

By cutting so much of Spinner’s narration from the manga, we also don’t get a scene where Spinner confronts Shigaraki to ask him what is his plan. Up to that point, Shigaraki has said that, with Kurogiri gone over the last month and the computers at the old League hideout destroyed, they can’t reach the Doctor. Spinner is insistent: what is the plan? Shigaraki responds that he just told them--as Gigantomachia crashes through their hideout. The other characters explain for readers like me who aren’t following: Shigaraki just said Kurogiri was gone; to contact the Doctor, Kurogiri sought Gigantomachia; Gigantomachia would sniff out where Shigaraki is and bring him to the Doctor. Brilliant--that shows more attention to Shigaraki’s planning and scheming, and now, it’s not even here in the episode to make me think this guy is that smart. (This episode also had Shigaraki reveal his plan to have Gigantomachia attack the MLA, whereas it was Spinner who predicted that was going to be Shigaraki’s plan--so, again, we’re not letting Spinner stand out as smarter than we expected, either.)

I know Shigaraki is supposed to be our chessmaster, given his association with gaming, especially when he was faking his ignorance about shogi to lower Overhaul’s guard before defeating him and stealing his Quirk-cancelling bullets. But I’m having the same problem I had when following All For One throughout this anime: it just feels like these two antagonists are getting ahead out of sheer luck and because everyone else is a fool, not because either of them are that great as villains. Give me a Xanatos, give me a Luthor, give me a Norman Osborne (not Clone Saga Osborne, a different one). Show me Shigaraki is more than a pawn for All For One and the Doctor, because I don’t feel anything here, not even when we’re supposed to feel that Shigaraki has some legitimate concern for All For One that just isn’t getting communicated to me, whether by my stubbornness or because the content is not giving the animators and actors what they deserve. Eric Vale can sell the hell out of a scene, but Shigaraki’s talk about All For One is not giving that opportunity to the actor.

My remarks this time are a lot more disorganized and doesn’t really arrive at any conclusion. I have more to say about how this arc works and doesn’t work, especially when it comes to how ridiculous the MLA comes across in underestimating the League, but we’ll get to that next time.

#my hero academia #shigaraki #league of villains #meta liberation army #spinner #long post #mha spoilers

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npdbubblygum · 4 years ago

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Hi there, as a lot of people have seen there is a cluster fuck of a post in the npd tag about.. idek how to summarize it except glorifying empathy and villainizing personality disorders. They use narcissist, psychopath, abuser, and lots of degrading words interchangeably so be prepared for that. I won’t @ the person, partially because I don’t want to deal with the headache of them replying and partially because I don’t want to be responsible if they get harassed. They’re in the tag though publicly saying this so you could stumble upon it yourself, be careful and don’t read if it’ll hurt you! Tagged as #long post

It was so long so I decided to pick out the most relevant parts and comment on them.

People who know they have NPD don’t seem to go around calling people “unaware narcissists” as we know it’s difficult to notice and diagnose and increases stigma to do so. That’s something self proclaimed empaths do a lot though. Also, are you in this statement admitting that empaths can come across as self centred and “narcissistic” if people don’t understand what’s happening in their brain?

Personally I don’t feel any hatred for hyperempathetic people, that’s just a neutral trait some people have.

You can’t really say something is the opposite of a whole personality disorder that has several different diagnostic criteria and presents differently in different individuals. Brains aren’t black and white and antisocial PD isn’t only lack of empathy. The word for not being antisocial is prosocial what I know?

People can have compassion without empathy and people can lack compassion while having empathy, and it’s okay to not be loving as long as you aren’t harming people.

You shouldn’t passive aggressively say sorry to us in the same sentence you’re insulting us as “number out husks” and then go on to talk about how weak and cowardly we are. A lot of us had our empathy weaponized against us from such an early age that we had to turn it off to survive. If you value empathy so much, why aren’t you empathizing with that? I don’t really feel anything about it, it’s just a fact, but it’s also a fact that we shouldn’t have had to suffer through so much pain and then be blamed for how our brains developed. Also, if someone was born without empathy or had a traumatic head injury that impacted it they obviously didn’t choose that either. People who can feel a lot of empathy are also often scared of love and people without empathy can hate violence and conflict and have people they value enough to sacrifice themselves.

First of all, people in power are corrupt and become corrupt and are not the same as inventors or philosophers or any other great contributor, secondly those are exceptional people who stand out in history and didn’t have any access to therapy or self help or medication or anything else that helps mentally ill people function and cope. You can’t even go back in time and confirm who feels what level of empathy. People without empathy can also value peace, human lives, safety, etc. I constantly help caring for friends and community regardless of how little I feel about them. I don’t have to feel empathy, sympathy or compassion to do what is right, I can simply choose it, I can hate someone and devalue them and still choose to do what’s best for them.

The concept of empathy isn’t attacked we’re literally just saying we can exist without it and still be worthy human beings and people with empathy can be flawed and selfish still. We literally just want nuance and acceptance so people will have access to help.

Okay who thinks we’re actually out to destroy empathy? Maybe fascists are but come on. In the npd tag? You go into the npd tag thinking we have some kind of agenda to Destroy Empathy? People in society value empathy so much that calling someone empathetic is considered a huge compliment and calling someone unempathetic is an insult.

Fun fact! That’s how a lot of us were made! People literally broke our child-brains by using our empathy as a weapon against us and it was so overwhelming and terrible we couldn’t handle it :^) but yeah call abuse victims weak and pathetic that’s great love that for you

Also, a lot of us have really strong emotions that are incredibly overwhelming, not just a “dried up stream” lol

You talk about empaths needing a shield. Our “shield” was Not Having It.

Still unsure if you mean people with NPD or abusers or abusers with NPD but while there probably exists some people who go out with the intention to cause harm, most narcissists don’t and even most abusers work differently than that, they have a set of beliefs that they think justifies their harm it’s not really “oh how fun to destroy people” in a lot of cases. Of course it is unjustifiable though. I’ve read that abusive people seek out more empathetic people because they’re easier to convince that they can deserve it and often have qualities an abuser values, like a willingness to give more chances and staying quiet about mistreatment because they’d feel guilty or being guilt tripped easily. It’s often more about control than sadism, but sometimes it is sadism. Unempathetic people can also be abused and deserve to have resources.

Intelligence is actually not very easy to define and measure and intellectually disabled people should absolutely be included in that conversation and should absolutely not be called mindless, the mind is way more than the typical definition of intelligence. Heart doesn’t have a set definition and is even more loose than intelligence but if someone doesn’t experience the same types of emotions as me I’d still think they should be able to speak their minds about it.

Oh my god no one is denying the existence of empathy?? It is a well known concept, people study it, people who say they don’t feel it are admitting it exists because that’s what makes them different.

There are so many things to say here.. first of all are you equating npd to abuser again?

Secondly, this is a really toxic mindset. You don’t have to suffer through incredible emotional/psychological pain to be strong. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to “bear the burden”. If you’re in a situation that is bad for you, please do what you can to leave! You aren’t better or worse for not being able to handle the pain, you shouldn’t have to be in pain.

Thirdly, what do you think a narcissistic injury or crash is? It’s exactly that. Our sense of self and self worth crumbling when our defence mechanism doesn’t work. It’s not funny. It’s awful to go through. We do not have life on easy mode, life is a fucking nightmare, people with npd often have suicide attempts. How can you say any of this while claiming to empathize with people?

People with facial disfigurements have told me that disfigured is the word they want to be called, not deformed. Also, you shouldn’t vilify disfigurement like that, it’s not a bad thing and it’s ableist to use it to insult and to equate it with being an abusive person or having a mental illness. Also calling people monkeys is dehumanizing too. Don’t think you can get away with that.

You are actually correct about empathetic not being the real word - empathic is actually standard English. Not because -pathetic means you’re weak but because -pathic means suffering/experiencing/feeling/being moved by and -pathetic means means being able to move someone else. You’re being super fucking weird about it though.

Your pop culture references weren’t that accurate or relevant and you shouldn’t rely on made up stories to support your point when you’re talking about real psychology. So I won’t include them. I saw some other people already told you they were wrong.

Hopefully no one agrees with any of the shit you wrote it was a pain to make this post but it was eating at me when I tried to leave it alone so here you have it

#long post #ableism #npd #empathy #dehumanization tw #abuse tw

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romancandlemagazine · 3 years ago

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An Interview with Al Baker

I first came across Al Baker’s photography whilst looking through an old copy of a magazine called Flux I’d snaffled from Manchester’s world-famous second-hand wonderland, Empire Exchange.

Hidden in the magazine’s pages, between an interview with Mark E Smith and a review of a newly-released sci-fi film called The Matrix, were two black-and-white photos, snapped from the window of an ice-cream van, showing kids lined up for a bit of frozen respite from the summer heat. Reading the fairly minimal bit of text below, it turned out the photos were part of a series called ‘Ice Cream You Scream’.

I’d missed the exhibition by approximately 20 years, but thanks to the high-speed time-machine known as the internet, I managed to track him down. Here’s an interview about his fine photos, his time living in Hulme Crescents and the benefits of carrying cameras in a Kwik Save bag...

Classic ‘start of an interview’ question here, but when did you get into photography? Was there something in particular that set you off?

Like a lot of young people, I knew that I was creative but hadn’t quite found my place. I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a writer or in a band. I used to doodle, copy Picasso’s in biro, so off I went to art college and tried my hand at different things. All it really taught me was that I had neither the patience, technique or talent to become a painter. Photography seemed a much easier way to make images, a more instant result. Of course, the more you get into it you realise that whether you’re any good or not does rely upon patience, technique and talent after all.

Was ‘being a photographer’ something that people did in Manchester in the early 90s? Who did you look up to back then?

Not really. It was very rare to see another person wandering around with a camera back then. Even years later when I began photographing the club scene in Manchester no-one else seemed to be doing the same thing. Not at the night clubs I went to anyway.

Now it’s very different. These days you see people with cameras everywhere. Club nights almost always have a photographer. People are far more image-conscious due to social media. Today most people are busy documenting their own nights out with their phones. Look at footage from any major gig these days and half the room is filming it. Back in the 90s no-one seemed to care about documenting anything like that. You were very unlikely to see the photos that someone might be taking the next day or, in fact, ever. People often used to ask ‘What are you taking photos for?’ with genuine surprise or distain.

In terms of photographers whom I looked up to there are so many! There are great image masters like Cartier-Bresson or Elliott Erwitt. Photographers of war and social upheaval like Don McCullin and Phillip Jones-Griffiths. I liked Alexander Rodchenko and Andre Kertez, how they broke the conventions of their day with wit and invention.

I loved the dark and dirty images of Bill Brandt, and his inspiring nude studies too. I loved the city at night recorded by Brassai. Paris in the 1930s definitely seemed to be the place to be. Diane Arbus, Jane Bown and Shirley Baker. American street photographer Gary Winogrand was a huge influence on me, as was Nick Waplington’s book ‘Living Room’.

I was also quite lucky to be living in Manchester at that time. Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr had both attended Manchester Polytechnic. Denis Thorpe had worked for the Guardian in Manchester. I saw Kevin Cummins iconic Joy Division images, Ian Tilton documenting The Stone Roses. Both were regularly in among the inky pages of the NME.

I also saw an exhibition of Clement Cooper’s photographs of the Robin Hood pub in Moss Side, which was another big influence. I was also very lucky in that my very first photography tutor was Mark Warner, who produced very beautiful images, did a lot of work for Factory Records. He shot The Durutti Column’s (1989) Vini Reilly album sleeve. He was probably the first person who ever really encouraged me.

I really like that series of photos you took from inside an ice-cream van in the late 90s. What was the story behind that?

The initial idea for that project came from my friend Steve Hillman, who is an actor. At the time he was ‘between jobs’, which is an actor’s euphemism for being unemployed, so he was working an ice-cream round to help to pay the rent. I was at his flat one night, thinking aloud about where I might go next with my camera. I’d spent quite a long time following graffiti artists work around Hulme, and had my first exhibition based around that. But it only seemed to lead to offers of more work with graffiti artists, and I wanted to do something else.

I’d done a 2nd exhibition based around portraits of my friends in Hulme. I’d flirted with some one-day projects, like Belle Vue dog track, Speakers Corner in Hyde Park. Anyway, while I was talking, not really knowing what I was going to do next, Steve simply stated ‘You should come out on the ice-cream round with me. No-one ever comes to the van without a smile on their face.’ And it just struck me as a beautiful & simple idea. So, one day we just set off. 4 or 5 rolls of film and all the free ice-cream I could eat, which I discovered wasn’t very much!

What was the logistical side of those photos? Were they taken from the same van?

They were all shot on the same day, the same van, all around Salford. It was good fun, but actually very hard work. Trying to constantly find new angles, different framing and working on a hot August day in such a small confined space. By the end of the day I felt that I had enough strong images for my next exhibition. They were much jollier images than ones I’d made before. As a result, because it had more universal appeal, I got quite a lot of good publicity out of it, and Walls gave us hundreds of free Magnum ice-creams to give away on the opening night!

These days I could think of more than a few reasons why you probably shouldn’t drive around Salford photographing other people’s children without permission haha (in fact, I’m surprised that I wasn’t hung from the nearest lamppost!) but I was much younger and far more naive back then. Besides, that was something that I’d learned from living in Hulme. You don’t ask for permission. Someone will only say ‘No’. Just crack on and do it anyway.

You also documented the last years of the Hulme Crescents. A lot of people talk about that time and place in Manchester, even now—but what was the reality of it? What was a normal weekend there like?

It was quite unlike anywhere that I’d ever lived before. It looked like a fascist dystopian nightmare, only one peopled by Rastas and anarchists. Bleak concrete interconnecting walkways. No through roads whatsoever. A fortress feel to the place. The entire estate was earmarked for demolition before I arrived. Everyone else seemed to be busy moving out. But I was already spending a lot of time there, post-Hacienda, parties, friends, lost weekends.

There were lots of young people living there. Families had mainly moved out as the heating didn’t work properly, flats were cold & damp, often infested with cockroaches. There were traces of old Irish families, the Windrush generation, interwoven with punks and drop-outs.

There was a cultural & artistic flowering among the ruins. A Certain Ratio, Dub Sex, A Guy Called Gerald, Edward Barton, Ian Brown, Dave Haslam, Mick Hucknall, Lemn Sissay, all lived there at one time. It was the original home of Factory, where all the post-punk bands played. In turn that led to Factory Records, New Order, and the Hacienda. The PSV club later hosted raves and notorious Jungle nights. It was a good time to be young.

You lived there as well as shooting it. Do you think it’s important to be a part of the thing you’re photographing, rather than just an outsider with a camera?

I don’t know that it’s important to be a part of the thing you’re photographing, ‘embedded’ is what the war photographers call it, but you definitely capture different images. Certain things that might have been shocking to an outsider were commonplace, normal & every day to me. Boring even. On the other hand, I was much less likely to be robbed walking around. That meant I could take my camera places that other people couldn’t, or maybe shouldn’t!

I used to wear my camera beneath my coat so it couldn’t be seen, and I carried my film and lenses in a Kwik Save shopping bag so as not to attract unwanted attention. I got into the habit of handing that bag over the bar at the pubs I went in. I would collect it the next day if I could remember where I’d been the night before. Bless you, saintly barmaids of old Hulme.

If you look at my images of Hulme people they’re usually reacting to me and not the camera. Either that or they’re not reacting at all. They’re ignoring the fact that I’m taking a picture. That’s what gives them that ‘fly-on-the-wall’ feeling.

This is something that I put to greater effect later when I was photographing in night clubs, skulking stage side or hiding in a DJ booth. When DJs & MCs see you week in week out at the club doing the same thing they stop posing for the camera and just get used to you being there. You become part of the furniture. And when people stop being conscious of the camera, when they ignore that you’re even present, you can step in much closer. Put simply, you get better pictures. They’re much less performative and far more honest. It’s not often people can say they like it when they’re being ignored, but for photographers it’s a gift.

Do you think somewhere the Crescents could exist now, or was it just a case of the perfect accidental recipe for that kind of creative, DIY activity?

No, I don’t think anywhere like Hulme will ever happen again. I think the city council learned that lesson a long time ago. It was a dystopian utopia for us, but it grew out of failure. When I 1st went to university they warned us never to set foot there. I said, ‘But what if you live there already?’ and there was an embarrassed silence. They really hadn’t expected a poor boy from Hulme to be in the room. Now they own half of it and it’s all student Halls of Residence.

The city centre has been regenerated, redeveloped & gentrified. We can’t afford to live there anymore, and people like me are pushed out. Hulme was a failed social housing experiment, an eyesore & an embarrassment to the people who had commissioned it. People like me moved in & we made it our own. They’re never going to allow anything like that to happen again. Every quaint old fashioned pub that closes becomes a block of flats. The footprint is too valuable to property developers. One day all we will have will be faded photographs to bear witness to a very different way of living.

Was it through the Crescents that you started shooting graffiti? 

When I first arrived in Hulme I’d just spent 3 years living with mates in a couple of houses elsewhere in the city. It suddenly struck me that that part of my life was over and I had very few photographs of that time. I’d been too busy learning photography, taking the kind of photos that every art student takes: Broken windows; abandoned buildings, and bits of burnt wood. I vowed I wouldn’t do that again. I began documenting the life that was around me.

I started with the architecture, as it was quite unlike any other place I’d ever seen. It had a desperate, faded beauty even then. The whole estate had been condemned for demolition before I arrived, but the city council had given up on the place long before that.

I started to notice graffiti pieces going up, seeing the same names repeated. It was obvious that there was a small group of writers trying out their styles on a large canvas for the 1st time. Wanting to claim this derelict space as their own Hall Of Fame. I started to document them as they sprang up. Then I noted that context was crucial, and so I began to include the soon-to-be-derelict buildings in the images also. The shapes & colours of the graffiti looked positively psychedelic beside the drab monochrome of the setting.

With your graffiti shots, you show a lot more than just the pieces. Was it an intentional thing to show the act behind it a bit?

Because it was Hulme and no-one cared, these guys weren’t working in the dead of night like most graffiti writers do in the train yards and what-have-you. They were working during the day, right out in the open. So, documenting their work, it wasn’t long before I ran into Kelzo. He really didn’t trust me at first, but I kept coming back. So, I got to know them. They started to let me know where they were going to be painting next.

In 1995 Kelzo organised the 1st SMEAR JAM event (named after a young aspiring writer who used to come down to Hulme to learn, and had died suddenly from a nut allergy). That was such good fun that another event arrived the following year, another & another. Graf writers came from London, Edinburgh, Leeds, Sheffield, and as far afield as Spain. The local community came out to support and, as usual, it turned into a party that lasted all weekend.

I got into the habit of taking 2 cameras. One loaded with B&W film to capture the event itself, and another with colour transparency to document the finished artwork.

Graffiti… hip-hop… kids getting ice cream… I suppose there’s a few different subjects there, but was there an underlying thing or theme you wanted to show with your photos? Maybe getting a bit philosophical, but they’re all quite free acts—is it about enjoying what’s there?

It was more about documenting the life I saw around me. Moving to Hulme was what led to me capturing graffiti, and graffiti led to hip-hop events. Once Hulme was demolished I moved my camera into the city centre and began photographing club nights. House and hip-hop turned into Drum’n’Bass, and then dubstep. Residents and warm-up acts have now become headliners in their own right. Manchester has always been a great city for music, and it kept me busy throughout the naughty Noughties. I’ve pretty much retired from all of that now. I’d had enough after over 15 years of it. I no longer feel compelled to document something as ephemeral as a club night anymore when half of the audience are doing it themselves anyway. Then coronavirus came & properly killed it all off. I don’t know what it’s going to be like now going forward, but it’ll be someone else’s turn to document whatever that is.

What do you think makes a good photograph? 

You need to have a good eye. You need to notice & be aware of the world around you. You always see an image before you create one. You don’t require expensive equipment. Mine never was. And you don’t need to be trained. It’s one of those areas where you really can educate yourself. A certain amount of technique and technical understanding goes a long way but, again, you can pick those things up as you go along.

There are different kinds of photography, of course, but for me it was always about capturing a moment. The Decisive Moment, as Cartier-Bresson so eloquently put it. It’s something that the camera has over the canvas. For me the camera has always been a time machine. Like an evocative love song on the radio, it can transport you back immediately to a time & place long gone. It also acts as a witness for those people who were not there. Images tell stories. And we all like to hear and tell stories.

A couple of years ago I was invited to talk at the University of Lancaster for a symposium on documentary photography, which is a tradition that I had always considered my photographs sat within. But oddly, as I gave my slide-show presentation, images that I have seen and shown many times before, and thought I knew very well, I suddenly saw in a brand-new light. I could see myself in every image. Almost like a self-portrait from which I was absent but my own shadow cast large. I realised that I haven’t been documenting anything other than my own life. 25 year old images suddenly had something new to say, something new to tell me.

Do you still take photos today? What kind of things are you into shooting these days?

I don’t really do a lot of photography these days. I teach and facilitate as part of my job now. I still do the odd event but night club photography is a much younger man’s game. I really don’t have the levels of commitment, energy or enthusiasm I once did. I feel like I’ve taken enough images. If I never took another photograph ever again, that’s OK. Maybe, perhaps, I’ll get into a different kind of image making in my twilight years … but for now I’m trying to reassess the images I made 25 years ago. People are far more interested in them now than they ever were at the time. Now they have become documents of a time and place which has gone. The graffiti and the walls that they were written on have disappeared. Many of those night clubs have closed. Time moves on. The images and the memories are all that is left.

Over all those years, how has the art of photography changed for you?

Back when I started taking photographs, where I lived in Hulme, the kind of music that I was into, the magic of a night club moment, there were very few people I knew of who were doing the same thing. Now I am aware of others who were. Almost everyone is their own photographer now. Mobile phones & social media have given a platform for anyone to make & share images of their individual lives, whether it be their friends & families, holidays, public events or more private & intimate moments. Anyone can document their own lives now, so I no longer feel that I have to. I do still love photography, it’s still my favourite form of art, but I don’t feel compelled to capture it all anymore.

I suppose I’ve pestered you with questions for a while now. Have you got any wise words to wind this up with?

If you want to become a photographer you must learn your craft. Keep doing it, and you will get better. But you must remember to always be honest. Make honest images. Listen to the voice of your own integrity. Don’t worry too much if no-one sees any value in what you do. If you’re any good people will eventually see it. It may take years, it did for me, but images of the ordinary & everyday will one day become historical, meaningful & extraordinary.

We live in a world today mediated by images, a Society of the Spectacle, but we still need photographers: People who have a good eye, an innate feel for the decisive moment; what to point the camera at and when to press the shutter. The images that you make today will be the memories of the future.

See more of Al’s photos here.

#Photography #Interview #Al Baker #Manchester #Hulme Crescents

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quakerjoe · 4 years ago

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Is America really ready to reclaim democracy?

I’m going to share a fact with you — and you’re not going to like it.

America’s problems can be reduced to the following. White Americans want America to be a failed state — and that is its fundamental, deep, and long standing problem. That is how America ended up here — more than half a century of white hostility to any kind of social progress whatsoever — which resulted in social collapse, and culminated in Trumpism. White people made America a failed state.

But are white people ready to own this problem, of their own extremism? Is that long-term social position really about to change this election, finally, after more than half a century? Are white Americans ready to become a modern, functioning society? The answer, right about now, is a kind of hysterical “yes!” We all — all of us sane and thoughtful people anyways — want Biden to win, and put an end to the long nightmare of the Trump years. But — despite what the polls might say — how realistic is that?

“Kill Umair! Get him!!!” Maybe you’re foaming at the mouth, ready to dispute my simple fact. So take a hard look at the chart above. What does it say?

I have some bad news, and then I have some worse news. Don’t worry, you’ll thank me later. The first piece of bad news is this. Here’s a fact that most people underestimate. America is still about 80% white. 80%. Given the record-breaking turnout, this election is going to be more about America’s white majority than about minorities, probably, at least if every group turns out in record numbers roughly equally. Minorities have much less power than many imagine, precisely because they are still seriously in the…minority. This election is about white America, and if it really wants to live in a democracy — or if it’s happier living in a fascist society.

You might think that sounds over the top, so here’s the worse news. The chart above says this. It says that white Americans, as a group, have never, as a group, voted for a Democratic President. Never in modern history. In fact, the chart above in fact understates the problem. This trend goes back to JFK and perhaps before. Are you beginning to see the problem here? Why I say “America’s problem is that white people want it to be a failed state?”

Let me make it clearer. White Americans can be relied on, in the majority, as a group, to “vote Republican.” I put it in quotes because it’s worth examining what that anodyne statement really means. Liberal, sane, thoughtful White Americans often overestimate how many of them there are, how widespread their cause is. The result is that when I say “Americans are…” meaning of course the majority, which is still white, I get a wave of protest. Americans aren’t dumb! Americans aren’t dumb! They’re not violent, stupid racists! They want to live in a modern society! Are they, do they — at least the white majority? Let’s take a brief and hard look at reality.

Here are some things white Americans have been for, as a group, in their majority. Segregation. Endless war. Inequality. Billionaires. Capital. Guns and religion as primary social values. That is what the voting pattern above means. Conversely, here are some thing white Americans have been against, as a group, in their majority. Desegregation. Civil rights. Womens’ rights. Their own healthcare, retirement, and childcare. Public goods of any kind whatsoever. That is what the “voting pattern” above means in the real world. Need I go on? America’s problem is that white Americans as a social group, its majority social group, want America to be a failed state. They don’t want to live in a modern, civilised democracy, and never have.

White America is America’s problem. A big, white, ignorant problem. The problem of the white American voter — that white Americans don’t want to admit — goes back more than half a century at this point. If the answer is “Make America Great Again!” then the question is: “well, who brought it this point of self-destruction?” and the answer is….white Americans. They’re the ones responsible for the self-destruction of the society they still rule as a massive majority. Nobody else is responsible for their poverty, despair, and humiliation but them. That is what the chart above makes crystal clear.

Who voted, over and over again, to have worse lives? No healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare — no public goods of any kind whatsoever? White Americans did. What the? The question baffles the world. Why would anyone choose a worse life? The answer is that white Americans would not accept a society of true equals. “I won’t pay for those dirty, filthy peoples’ educations, healthcare, retirements! Why, their grandparents were my grandpappy’s slaves!” White Americans chose to retain power, supremacy, superiority, even in a failing society. They chose staying on top of decline and ruin, rather than prospering as equals.

Let me make that even clearer, by putting it in a global perspective. This is the part you’re really not going to like.

White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way. “Voting conservative” after all doesn’t mean nearly the same thing in Europe or Canada. There, even conservative parties agree on the basics — people should have healthcare, education, retirement, that the only point of the public purse isn’t endless war and death machines. Conservatism in America is off the charts, and so “voting” that way carries a very different meaning. It means that White Americans are the rich world’s most regressive, ignorant, and self-destructive political bloc — by such a long way that they might as well not be in the rich world at all.

I don’t mean any of that as an insult, by the way. I mean it objectively, literally, factually. You’d think that by now White Americans would have figured out that voting against their own standards of living ever rising just because it meant black and brown people would have public goods too was…imbecilic. Especially watching Europe and Canada rise and prosper. They’ve had more than half a century to figure that out. But they still haven’t. What else do you call the inability to learn from the world and history but…ignorance?

Do you know what the word imbecile means? Someone who can’t look after themselves. But that’s what has happened: white people are the ones who wrecked their very own lives, futures, and society — beginning the moment, decades back, that minorities finally gained a few rights, in a giant, stupid, endless, escalating temper tantrum, that culminated in Trumpism.

I know this sounds insulting. But to speak factually and empirically about levels of self-destruction this immense requires us to reach beyond the lines of everyday discourse. Let me try again, then.

White Americans really are different. From their peers — or at least the people they believe are their peers. But the truth that their political choices over decades reveals is this. White Americans have almost nothing in common with White Europeans or Canadians — who back the expansive social contracts of social democracies reliably. White Americans reliably reject such choices, which is how they made their society collapse. instead, they have more in common with the ethnic-religious-fundamentalist majorities of nations like Iran, or the authoritarian-nationalist majorities of nations like Russia. They are regressive, sectarian, fundamentalist, unable to change, trapped by their own ideologies.

That is how and why America collapsed. Black People didn’t make it so. Brown People didn’t. Native Americans didn’t. America is still about 80% white, and white Americans make a certain choice reliably and consistently and predictably as a group — they vote “conservative,” but conservative in America doesn’t mean what it does in the rest of the rich world — it means something much more like Iran or Russia. Bang.

White Americans impoverished themselves, through decades of such folly. Voting against their very own basic public goods. Which meant they had to pay monopolists eye-watering prices for those very things which could and should have been socially provided — healthcare, higher education, retirement, and so on. Today, the average American dies in $62,000 of debt. Do you know what that predicted, a few years ago? A fascist implosion. When majorities grow impoverished, they turn even more regressive, violent, ignorant, and brutal. America’s white majority was already all those things — and then they became even more so.

A demagogue came along, Trump, who blamed white America’s problems on everyone but white Americans. Mexican babies. Black mothers. Latino immigrants. Syrian refugees. Gay minority couples. Everyone but white Americans was responsible for the plight of white Americans. But how could they be? America was and is still 80% white. Nobody was ever responsible for white America’s stunning plunge into poverty, humiliation, and despair — but white America.

But nobody wants to blame themselves, do they? It’s only human to project one’s failings onto others. So white America took Trump’s bait. And it was easier, too, to sell that line of nonsense, that racism, that prejudice, that bigotry, to a white majority that was already those things, and always had been. It was a self-reinforcing process, which was inevitable once America’s white middle and working class began to implode. Fascism was coming to America.

And it did.

Those of us who warned of it were called alarmists and hysterics and so on, when we warned of camps, genocide, bans, raids, purges. As all those things came to pass, and, sick to our stomachs, we survivors tried to warn all over again, we were mocked, shamed, and condemned. By white Americans. Even the good ones. We were told we were underestimating the power of white America to do the right thing.

But we understood something that white American never has about itself. White America has never done the right thing. Ever. At least not in modern history. White America, again, the chart shows us, has been for segregation and war and brutality — and against desegregation, women’s rights, civil rights, and so on. White America, as a group, as a majority, has never, ever voted for anything even slightly towards greater equality, justice, freedom, for all. It has only ever voted to preserve, maintain, and expand its own power. Ever.

White Americans — the good and reasonable ones — overestimate their social group so badly that they probably imagine a majority of white people voted for Obama. Wrong. Even Obama couldn’t win a majority of whites. The only candidate who came close was Bill Clinton — and even he failed. White Americans, again, never voted any way but fanatically “conservative”, which, in global terms, means more like majorities in Iran or Russia than Canada or Europe — regressive, ignorant, brutal, hostile, selfish, and supremacist, not modern, gentle, fair, wise, sophisticated, thoughtful, peaceful, tolerant.

White America’s escalating temper tantrum — its pattern of regressive voting — finally escalated in Trumpism. That is how all of America ended up here. Ruled by white America’s fascists and fanatics, too. Which even the sane and thoughtful white Americans despair at. But will they finally understand themselves? Can they look in the mirror once and for all?

We survivors and scholars have seen all this before — the phenomenon of the deceptive majority. By “deceptive majority,” I mean the idea that good and reasonable white Americans have about themselves. That as a majority, they are good and reasonable, and so goodness and sanity and reason will prevail in the end. They have not in America precisely because white Americans badly overestimate just how sane and reasonable their group in society is. How can they be, when they think guns matter more than healthcare and human rights?

I’m sorry if that sounds harsh. But again, I am only speaking to you factually, empirically, objectively. White Americans have voted over again and again for their guns and their Bibles — but they have never, ever voted as group to have healthcare or retirement for all or any single aspect of a functioning modern society whatsoever. Not to this day.

White America seemed to prefer supremacism and theocracy and authoritarian-fascism over modernity, as a social group. And that is how America ended up being a failed state. That, my friend, is the ugly and difficult fact.

That is the problem of the white American voter. And it spells real trouble.

Because when we say things like “Biden will win in a landslide!” what we are really saying is: white American as a group will, for the first time in modern history, not vote Republican. That they will, as a group, vote for something other than regressivism of the most extreme kind on offer. That the massive tide and force of history will suddenly turn on its head. That a decades long trend will simply reverse itself en masse, like never before.

We are asking for something greater than we may know — for history to deliver us a genuine transformation in long-standing political and social attitudes amongst a majority that has never, ever felt the way we wish them to. Who have never, ever been on the side of modernity or greater democracy or more civilization.

We are hoping for change of the deepest kind. Are we overconfident, then?

I’m not saying that a Biden landslide is impossible. But I am willing, at this stage, to call it unlikely. I don’t think white America is suddenly going to reverse decades of history. I think history has a terrible momentum and inertia, which doesn’t turn itself around so easily. I think social attitudes and political preferences don’t simply magically upend themselves overnight. I don’t think white America as a majority is going to back Biden. (If it does, it will be thanks to young people, though.)

Where does that leave us? Not in a very good place. The problem of the white American voter is very, very real. More real than white Americans know — which is precisely why their pundits and intellectuals never discuss it: they are giving their own social group’s regressivism and imbecility a free pass. But it’s the elephant in the room, just how different white Americans really are, as a group, in the majority, how regressive, cruel, hostile, ignorant, and backwards. That’s not an opinion — it’s a sad, terrible, frightening fact.

It’s possible that minorities will deliver the election for Biden. That’s if turnout for them is much, much higher than for whites. We don’t know, really, if that’s the case. I’d say while the chances are slim, they are very real.

More likely, though, is the following scenario. White America votes the way it always has as a group, as a majority — to screw everyone else over, as hard as possible, even if it itself pays a price. That will lead to three possible outcomes. One, an outright Trump victory. Two, a undecided election, which the Supreme Court will obviously hand to Trump. Or three, the most likely, in my estimation, months of chaos, as America tries to figure out what to do next, about the mess its in, and the GOP makes every grab for raw power.

And the protests of the good and thoughtful white Americans don’t help: “not all of us!” Sure, Chet, not all of you. But enough of you have been like this for most of modern history. Embittered, hostile, cruel, backwards.

Is that about to change? I don’t know, my friends. I doubt it, but I hope so. So why do I tell you this? Because we minorities are what we have always been: barely tolerated interlopers and hated intruders in the Promised Land. You, my white American friend, are the only one with the power to change any of it.

Umair October 2020

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