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allycryz · 9 months ago

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FFXIV Write #12: Quarry

Rated E for eggsplicit

Hades x Nerys, Sharlayan quest chain during Endwalker

A bet, a chase, an interlude

Nerys and Hades play sexy hide and seek

She’d equipped herself with botany tools but not anything to mine with–and here she was, sure there was something worth prizing out of this cavern wall.

Nerys peered forward, bracing her hands against the sides of the nook and inspecting the shine of green and purple embedded. Her weapons she could stow into enchanted stones and crystals, why hadn’t she done so with the pickaxe and hammer–and for that matter, the hatchet and scythe she kept on her pack and the myriad other tools she used?

“Careful,” a voice murmured close to the back of her neck, hot breath against her ear. “Quite a compromising position you’ve put yourself in, hero.”

Relief filled her lungs–and not just because he could solve her problem. This was the first hint of teasing she’d heard in Hades’ voice in days. Understandably so, given the horror he was forced to relive with the Final Days at their heels–and no less concerning even knowing why.

She turned in his arms, her lips grazing his own. ”Perfect timing, could you do me a favor?”

He lifted an eyebrow as his hands found her waist. “Oh?”

“I don’t suppose you could materialize a pickaxe?”

Hades’ sigh feathered over her lips. In the cavern's dim light, his eyes were the brightest thing about him. “How I've fallen--that my capturing you so elicits only packmule requests.”

Nerys laughed, her mouth brushing over his cheekbone. “I’m certainly not complaining about you holding me.”

“Mm.” His gaze flicked away to where their party had already descended–traveling down the mineshaft as the handsome gleaner Erenville had advised. Back to her. “I have a counteroffer.”

“I'm listening.”

“if you make it out of here uncaught…” his lips brushed her ear. “I'll provide all manner of tools and equipment for your foraging.”

Nerys pulled back and his hands gave way, allowing it. She looked around. “Have we been found out by the Forum already?”

Hades chuckled. “No, you've only one thing to fear currently. I'll turn and count to fifteen. That seems fair, given your natural speed and skill.”

“Hades…” She ignored the pulse low in her belly. “we haven't the time and we shouldn't dawdle-”

“Then don't get caught.” he shrugged and turned from her, laying a hand over his eyes. “One…Two…”

Nerys moved. What else could she do? She simply had to get out and fast, and she was the Azure Dragoon. A few jumps and accepting the risk of tumbles that came with leaping into dark unknowns…hardly a challenge.

And he's having fun. Or at least, putting on the airs of a man enjoying himself. Last night he'd said little over their repast or when they went to bed. Gentle kisses between him and her, and Y'shtola, and Urianger. His gaze in a world beyond the four of them as they bedded down in the Baldesion Annex.

“Eleven!” he sang out as her feet slowed. A moderate incline before her, two passageways on either side that certainly did not go to the level below.

She turned left and bounded, long leaps that covered a lot of ground. Another nexus, she chose the darker one and vowed to check the other later with its tinges of soft glow. Samples of something must await her.

The dark did not bother her, nor the narrowness of the tunnels she chose. This was the type of place she had grown up in. For all Hades’ powers, she had some advantage.

She found a place where light no longer reach and even her vision struggled between shades of sable and charcoal. Nerys touched her finger to her tongue and lifted it–the wind answered gently, barely there. Each step was a searching one till she came across something. A wall. Her palms slid over it, seeking the way forward.

Nerys found the opening and measured it hand by hand. Big enough to squeeze through. She had chosen a gown over the drachen mail, presenting herself as ambassadorial and proper as the city dictated. The lavender hems were already dirtied from assisting Erenville with the creatures, and now this would tear it further no doubt. (Hopefully she could take a look later and determine salvagability.)

She lowered herself onto hands and knees and proceeded feet first. Fabric rolled under her, something tore. She swore and continued into a widening, widening passage. Without the spikes on her armor, she fit easily into what she realised was a small room.

She pressed her back to a wall and sighed. As good a hiding place as any, when your partner could materialize at will and see the color of your soul. Truly a rigged game from the start.

Nerys smiled.

And waited.

It wouldn’t be any fun if he just appeared before her. They both knew that. She listened for the scrape of a footstep, a jaunty tune whistled and set echoing through the caverns. A voice calling out for her.

She waited. And waited more.

He isn’t lost. There was no chance of it. And he had been the one to initiate this game–had something happened?

Nerys waited more. Shifted from one foot to the other. Tried to make out shapes in the darkness. Maybe he had run into something in the mineshaft and it needed more effort than usual. Some of the wildlife, Alphinaud had cautioned, were ranked extremely dangerous. If they were in the wild, you’d be sure the different Hunter’s Guilds would have bounties for them.

Hades was more than capable of handling such creatures. But if they were especially irritating…

She stepped away from the wall to find the passage she’d entered through–and found herself back against it, spine scraping rocks, hands fixed on her wrists. Only the cool, familiar presence of his magic kept her from attacking.

Hades tsked. “It seems patience is not one of your virtues, hero.”

Nerys shook her head. “I wondered if something delayed you-”

“Very few things could delay me.” She could not see well enough to call his movements graceful but experience told her the way he slid both wrists to one hand while the other slid down her chest was the definition of elegance. He squeezed, setting the heat in her alight once more. “Not from this.”

His thigh invaded itself between her legs and an open mouth pressed hungry to her throat. Nerys felt her body growing limp, the soft sound of pleasure escaping her lips. Hades’ chuckle only made her feel the want more keenly.

“Yes?” He purred, teeth scraping along her shoulder blade. The fondling hand slipped down and pushed aside her skirts, and she felt his sigh when it took a few seconds to work through the layers. “Have something to say?”

“Seems you do,” she said, her voice soft, breathy. “Don’t you like my outfit?”

“Right now,” he said, at last finding the hose beneath and working at their tie. “It is not a question of like or dislike–I have no desire for obstacles right now.”

“And I’m the impatient one-”

His lips covered hers, drinking her in as much as shushing her. The length of his body pressed against her; his hips pressed against her own. Any doubt she could have possibly had about his arousal–and she’d had little–erased from the feel of his length hard against her. It seemed the time for talk was over because his clever fingers slipped beneath her smalls and his mouth possessed hers without reprieve.

With no sight his touch made her entire body shiver. Like an exposed nerve brushed over. The sound of his quick breathing echoed around them, her answering little moans loud in her ears. Each brush of his hand sent her body into shudders.

She felt his grin against her skin even as his touches grew more desperate. There were times–more than half the time really–he would tease her and their partners for near a bell or more. Not now. She heard the slide of his belt and the unclasp of his trousers. The feel of his head rubbing against her was a shock of warmth and she had a moment to gasp before he sank home.

“You…” Nerys clung to him while she attempted words. “You’re eager…”

“To the victor go the spoils,” he murmured before capturing her mouth again. A dark current threaded under Hades’ voice. His hand seized the meat of her thigh, nails pressing into her skin as he made her accommodate him.

The building pressure was delicious, made even moreso by his breath in her ear. Hades hit something deep in her and when she sobbed, he chased it until all she could do was make the sound again and again. When her eyes slid shut against the mounting feeling, it only intensified the sensation.

“Open your eyes,” he told her.

“I can’t see a-fuck, there, right there, fuck-a thing.”

“But I can.” His forehead pressed to hers. “I want to see the look when you surrender.”

Nerys opened her eyes. His shape was indistinguishable from the shadows and it felt like the very darkness had caught her. Her lips parted to say not to worry about her, to chase his own pleasure. Again he stopped her mouth with his as his clever fingers brushed over her at the place they joined.

When she cried aloud, she thought she saw the gleam of his eyes.

Little by little he helped her set down legs she hadn’t realised were wrapped tight around him. Gentle fingers traced down her arms, her sides. Lips traced her brow. “That was…quite invigorating. Thank you, my dear.”

She found his cheeks in the darkness and kissed them, one and then the other. Kissed his forehead, the bridge of his nose, at last his mouth. "Any time."

#this is not an emet-selch tag #nerys eluned #emet-selch x wol #duskwight #duskwight elezen #dragoon warrior of light #ally writes #ffxivwrite2024

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libidomechanica · 9 months ago

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Where all the reasons go

A limerick sequence

My tongue. Where all the reasons go. On the corn is that tears, the stars in your time? ’ Other days, but mutual feare, the fiddler from the Musk-Harvest for though well fare.

Was. To the shown by yours overblown. Great loue of pleasing for siller an’ lan’. Who, hard and yet once in the realms of deceit, she mightier way music a glass.

Obviously, that thou come try me. Tho’ I am losing and that love you hear smell to me. And Loue, borne away! Faded the lips and many-headed, freckled.

But Judas, that name in the sea, till was left me, some laid great loue to the blowzy bag of alabaster. You when not to my throat, its way, and women’s fashion.

The mouth a necktie, she sawe hys make us poor. The Man is a ghostly galleon tossed irresolute steadies upon it gazeth; a man in bear away.

So little bit, while day will I part with thought the greene, a gold to a summer’s woe, where stern religion quench’d the rose peepers as the wedding. I grow by the green.

Could not press’d with him haste! On the friends, thou falls thy heauy mould; and, have seen in height. Many meete tales of blood! I have as the night to live, and laid his reputed Son?

Perplexed, uncertain, not yet a breaks. And touched in your soul, nor long for ever effort, chang’d by the cold like the stairs of thine in themselves in sweet, tempers my woes.

The fall down tents. ’ Red; if stone is what it in a kind grace, a gold double wi’ the sky will give it. On the moon in hast pyne, plagues, and told that shuts its sweet silence!

Head: I have seene him in any room. I have sewn it over all the hear thee, ’ and thou’ free long, long, and soon their magic, his rapier brand as the oceans rolled.

But softest limbs. And generous charity! Said the light, where reflection prove a rosebud to nourish languid breeze kisses of the hills below on the should be.

Oppose it doth endorse her young people, out of eve, where was tender semi- tone, bright hath copies by, can love is time, you like. That burn to living up to him.

When a pair of the minde, who, when the Court of Honour most happy! Mountain half-cheese so we can—you can frights in vaine pleated shines, but to-day, he burdned her death.

Cold of November; even tonight. Alone can kill. Descends to utters of that I knewe the fair, at kirk and yourself keeps chang’d! To fetch as I. For love’s like toes.

He burnt vn’wares his hair like a gleaner than of either thou be what to rove: look at some such love is thee, my Rose; years as I don’t get broke that a mortgage was.

This worlds have those which thine eye, out of some did oft he laies. In Mexico I slept in a monster, by what I heard and eclipses stain all the weary wast Oake.

To make a dent forget, renounce my will lovely beam a straw. Blossom of light our feet, she cuts his habit; as again, alone upon, lulled back on there o’er, why!

Superstition! The mornings, and breathe which? Had worn and obstinate skin lies deeply planning and a voice, o you it was embellisht with each contentment wrong berth.

Will be given to worke me more Prayer a-going! Ah wretched up from the Sheikh, I languish in my glass on to be mingled with bared scalpe, and Eloisa see!

Up now a’ tint, her that never round Hesper bright had rathe. To trust in a wood, and on the inward it? My morning time, whose blue gaze. When as planted found asleep.

Hung the should grow mad, and Maud is sure of all the stirred, that we all its taut throats will be a goteheards be called The Witch. Burning lover, or some small cloud. The bed.

With my night of all that hath leaned again, and beat ye have restrain, nor be you for blood that heavy! Passing my history tell; the leaves spring, in that says, Shalom!

Stiff twin complainest thing and a darkness they list: ygyrt with moon in hand only, who caught torch of Death! Or gotten the knows us. And Prejudice, it is so.

And furthermore happy! Lay, wise poet’s horsemen. In the ward the spring from a blue moon too brightness? Quest. A Host, from the faire, how frail deed; and, from her sweet skill.

You with golden-crowne with many wound. I have no more pleasing nurses nod there is a rhyming as a fish out of my night ice I know the wants they playne ouerture.

Why sits, and be one, and mellow’d to springs hours do, and after all thy lands; he lay; surely spirits. And with pearls of a Ghazál. He vsed shepheard, and touched it!

All, and hail once me here’s not mix’d with brasswork prinked, each bright dye: but no more. Friend of them or explain height, curl up in the grey down Splendour lips I kissed her.

And Years not have no more. Pregnant disease shore, and all the evening, we will love and many dayes: I wonderful; it is your sleep on the rubies blush which love do?

His true sorrows, and hear in the blossoms fits! At night’s matter to gie ane fash. I shall be time when you trouble with a human tear fall, then as the Brere like you!

It trembled, wept and pricked its fair a light dilated my mind stinging when I awoke and still as they will feel em most. Alas, no matter wrote his true passed up.

That blessed her up to the corn is that just as mine. From the fates between Vertue and the sea and cries, so I wake—no more; if thou belief, the good night, and than his mynd?

On the life, myself, I could not fail’d him to score; there diverged in a bed or brow and breathe such a wretch! Be? Paints the waur best of loue is not there iniquity.

But not Woman e’er comes a babe; then day will as a’ the soft peace. In vision strain, nor blam’d fourth, as first line my wrong be her fire in its back I was t’other day!

And love to living into that drop. But let Heav’n; dispute my heart and love are his morning the time to be of Hope withers the brute blood on the landlord’s daughter.

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta- woo! Whilst somewhere Tim thence could stop thy wife, like a dog he listening ears, I pray for Pardon- pleadings for the robin compare.

For some once unkind as early goddess was never traveled and the farms wi’ motion, but a dream. In a clasping knife shut in the Darling, You suicide bitch!

But did not come try me, if thou art! But for which sight: submitting young pigs, over knees have sung of thy louely light wings but the ill; I had robbing quest. Me yet.

Moves next to head. Fickle Man persisted, turn unwholesome Growth approves; ev’n thousand time do I ensconce more spotless than it purpose not whereupon its work.

Not from trouble with a sweet posterity. Under than it remembers there is, so on thy flock thy pains: ye rugged up his Heart—out from my cheek the wind me.

Dull sublunary love as some face and wanton naigies nine or twa, she’ll let me with walls it toward you. But thus, that had bound, go thence will probably didn’t want of two.

Divert strong, dancing through ye be, yet did see, she made. Strain, nor needs must kiss your hair softly swels in speeches nobly death rattle, and outstretcht to Arm Bears! What light.

That earst I horses feet; and tossed those view, refusing together thighs? Will be a perfect it shall we never and make sure while I taste of sweet, tempers my woes.

A suddenly in many wicked eares not love at grieve, but in the Crown, the eyes open. Of the Words salámat— Incolumity from their ambition.

Service and plump the sun and than I am one will before me, love only landscape able touch thou place. Nor needs none fitted with thy sins enclose witt is work.

And wind-streaking dream—that god for sinking away and he rode high. One moments becoming a curse my name. Head across my face grew thee frown on yourself in heart.

Let sad relieved it was, as banish’d sight and still more I close bodies and talks of good measure and flower image with the banner place. And Thou Shalt Not, write down.

A man wert o’er all, the year, will loveliest friends! They han great in their fits of my night speak strange it seem in everywhere, like saucers, over Orion’s through the past.

Both humble dales, as of fragrant you? And true passionate heard them fills the window; for the most is frozen, o dool on their gazing firmly to thee, and she belt.

I love do? Drink too soon, draws his world my low down, Sugar, my will come down wearing with Sylvia gay, to look back throug my beate his only contrived to strike ye.

This, all adorns their silence jewelled holy waters brings round. Morrell, yet someone left by tradition—timidly, timidly tow’ry fence of Alpine hills?

To leaves spring of Tityrus in the wing’d eagle sored hat. Yours is an every sidewalks in California we went its stubborn in the resource, tis fires.

Which owes the tailes, perke as Peacock: but afterwards that has leather’d with your hand. A Disciple as a charms. Whom his natiue place of your good night’s matter of hands.

One day is gone will again and ran with the Stripling, the lawn, the spouse Nancy. But o’erjoyed to way, and feeble foes: what can a young lassie do wi’ an auld man.

#poetry #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Markov chains #Markov chain length: 6 #199 texts #limerick sequence

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anniepaul · 8 years ago

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Bust of Marcus Garvey v. 1. After a massive protest by Rastas in Papine Square on June 25, 2017, the University of the West Indies agreed to take down the offending bust and replace it with another that would approximate the demands for a big-head, big nosed Garvey more like the photos that exist of him.

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My column of June 2 in the Gleaner. After much public agitation and disapproval the University of the West Indies finally agreed to bow to public pressure and withdraw the offending bust. At a tumultuous press briefing (see video above for a brief taste of the event) the Dean confirmed that a new bust would be produced by August 2017. The sculptor would still be Raymond Watson. At the briefing Watson said that he had tried to create a youthful image of Garvey, to befit the University setting where the bust would be installed.

During his lifetime Garvey was much vilified as those who fight the status quo often are. Born in Jamaica he strode forth boldly into the world and changed it by rallying people of African origin who had been systematically exploited and denigrated by slavery. His influence rebounded all the way from the Americas to Africa, where he promised to take all those who wanted to ‘go back home’ in the immortal words of Jamaican singing star Bob Andy. To the pre-eminent shipping enterprise of the day, White Star Line, he counterpoised his Black Star Line, a fleet of ships that would carry the descendants of slaves back to Africa. The rest is history.

Decades after they’re gone how do we memorialize such individuals? In May 2017 during a short run of Garvey: The Musical at the University of the West Indies in Kingston a bust of the great man was unveiled at the Department of Humanities and Education. Members of the Marcus Garvey Movement on campus had demanded a statue of Garvey after a life-size one of Mahatma Gandhi was installed there a few years ago. How could the University pay tribute to an Indian leader before even nodding in the direction of its own home-grown hero, the first national hero of the country, they asked.

Accordingly the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education (FHE), Professor Waibinte Wariboko, a Nigerian by birth, volunteered to take on the task of arranging for a suitable monument to the great man. A Jamaican sculptor, Raymond Watson, was commissioned to produce a bust, the University’s slender resources not stretching to accommodate the expense of a full-bodied statue in these hard times.

Dean Wariboko holds press briefing to discuss plans for version 2 of Marcus Garvey bust, June 30, 2017

Details of the commission, such as the brief presented to the sculptor, are unknown but on May 19 the bust was duly unveiled in the courtyard of the FHE. The ceremony was timed to coincide with the visit of Professor Rahamon Adisa Bello, vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos in Nigeria, who jointly unveiled it with the Principal of the Mona Campus, Archibald McDonald. When they ritually removed the cover revealing the modest bust underneath a gasp of consternation went up from the audience. Rastafari representatives in the audience started grumbling loudly that this was the statue of an imposter, not Garvey, this slim, unremarkable, downtrodden looking person could never represent the magnificent Marcus. Garvey, they said. Many agreed.

“Garvey seems poorly. His posture conveys passivity. He looks like a weakling,” declared Carolyn Cooper in her column. #NotmyGarvey protested lecturer Isis Semaj-Hall commenting on what she called the “slimmed down interpretation” of the great leader. This is a “UWI interpretation of Garvey” said a Facebook commenter while Xavier Hutchinson accused the sculptor of “fat shaming one of my heroes.”

Suzette Gardner was kinder to Watson: “Maybe he was trying to inspire young people capturing Garvey as a youth. Still, Garvey might have been slimmer but his head was always big. Give us our big headed Garvey so the youth can know him as he was – young or old!”

According to Am’n Ron: “Regardless of the artist’s explanation this presentation should never have been approved. This was a moment for a recognizable rendering that will last through the generations and not a moment for a random artistic interpretation. From what period in Garvey’s life did he take this, and what is the image source he used? This seemingly made a mockery of the whole effort. I fully appreciate the spirit of the mounting of a Garvey bust, and I agree that it was overdue, but I’m in agreement with the woman who calmly said, “tek it dung!” To those who have the authority, please replace it. It feels disrespectful.”

Another Facebook commenter said: “I’ve been too upset to speak on it but i have much more to say. I will write and share. The best part of the ceremony for me was catching up with people I have not seen in ages. Unfortunately it was an upsetting occasion for all of us.”

For me the problem wasn’t so much that the bust didn’t look anything like the Garvey we feel we’ve come to know and love. It’s the scale and unambitious scope of the representation that bother me.The only other life-like sculptures on campus are of Mahatma Gandhi (Indian) and Philip Sherlock (white) both full body representations. Then for the champion of black identity you have a modest bust. It’s a problem to say the least.

In the weeks since the unveiling calls have been mounting for the removal of the ‘fake’ statue of Garvey. The Gandhi and Sherlock sculptures were gifts to the university, and it may be that those who feel strongly about this might have to undertake to commission a better representation of Garvey that can be situated at the University of the West Indies or some other location.

Petrina Dacres, whose Ph.D dissertation, “Modern monuments: Fashioning history and identity in post -colonial Jamaica” documents the furore surrounding almost every public monument in Jamaica, was also at the press briefing.

In future any public commissions of art should be informed by the well-documented history of responses to public monuments in Jamaica. Edna Manley lecturer and first Stuart Hall Fellow Petrina Dacres has written an entire thesis on the subject. There is no excuse to be caught by surprise like this. Contrary to what many seem to think, commissions of public statuary are not occasions for artists to wield artistic license and express themselves as they would with work meant for a gallery or private setting.

Garvey Lite? My column of June 2 in the Gleaner. After much public agitation and disapproval the University of the West Indies finally agreed to bow to public pressure and withdraw the offending bust.

#Jamaica #Marcus Garvey #Petrina Dacres #public art #Public monuments #Rastafari #UNIA #University of the West Indies

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mogadichu · 7 years ago

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SOAST- Chapter 1: Forgotten Meals

The Mad Darru pulled his book of forbidden stories from his hole-riddled satchel and talked to a man who was not there as he hurried down the decline toward the vast expanse of farmland beyond the edge of Gleaner’s Hill.

Dangerous to be having that out, boy, Novoyai, the hero of Vyorn, chided at his heels, braiding his ten-foot beard. The Mad Darru, whose true name was Sahn, was very much aware of this, but he was in the middle of his very favorite story and could not bear to finish it as he left for his errand. Sahn traced the picture’s crisp outline with his slender fingertip, exquisite, vibrant and alive with color. The mountain towered over the fairy tale city in a rainbow of brown, silver, and green, framed with pinks and yellows from the distant sunset. The cobbles beneath Sahn’s sandaled feet were so familiar that he needn’t even look up from the page. What a talent, he thought, to elicit such emotion from such simple things as ink and paint. Nisseire, the goddess of peace, stood at the summit’s peak in breathtaking blue, bound in the body of a child, desperate to return to the city in the sky, where the Baltha resided. All she had to do was reach out her arms and-

Thwack.

Sahn rammed into the thin wooden pole, the impact rippling upward and swaying the strings of lanterns draped from the pointed tip to the surrounding slanted roofs. The book flew from his hands, only to be caught again before it could crumple to the filthy cobbles. Sahn took a moment, both to nurse his wound and thank Tuma and Moyane for the street’s emptiness. What this scene would do for his reputation.

His face heated at the thought, angering the welt already forming between his brows as he entered the square, a strip of flat land that ringed around the hillside village like a tier on a cake. It was abandoned now, another blessing, the line of tall, brightly-colored shrines already beautifully framed with food and flowers. He had missed the cavalcade of women, children, and elders bringing their offerings to the goddess in the moon. Sahn dropped his own offering, a simple ball of rice, into his family’s shrine before descending to the fields.

Gleaner’s Hill protruded from the flat earth of the Anagi Expanse like a shark’s fin, immersed in a perfect ring of farmland, rice terraces and grain fields, squash and white radish, green beans, snow peas, plum and dragon fruit trees, and far too many others to name. Other villages and settlements and vast corrals of livestock could be seen throughout the fertile land. Every man, woman, and child of Kelsh was beneath the warm sun on this day, lounging, playing, laughing, and planting the year’s first seeds with milk and honey. It was a yearly ritual to thank Tuma, the father in the sun, before joining together in tonight’s procession to thank Moyane, the moon mother, for guiding her silver children through another harsh winter.

Sahn huffed a laugh. Harsh winter, indeed. He could not think of a time when provisions were not stored in bulk in the store towers. Kelshins hated the idea of running out of food almost as much as they hated majysts.

Almost.

Kale Darru was always easy to spot, a copper giant among a sea of sandstone. He smiled and held up a hand to his son in greeting as he pulled Naga along the smooth dirt road at the expanse’s end. Shay Darru sat at the front of the creaking cart, her head tilted toward the sun. Her eyes blinked open to see her youngest son panting at her side. “Oh,” she gasped. “Good morning, my love.”

“What are you doing out here, Dusty?” Jerra’s head appeared over the crates of clinking jars and leather pouches, filled with herbs and poultices to sell at the floating market. “I thought you’d be alphabetically sorting the dead moths by now.”

In answer, Sahn revealed the two brightly-painted wooden boxes from his satchel (he took great care to keep the book hidden from sight). “You missed your breakfast,” Sahn said breathlessly.

Kale gave a smile that did not reach his peridot eyes. “So we did, my boy. I tell you, I’d forget my head if it weren’t soldered on.” They had not forgotten. In truth, they had hoped to leave before Sahn woke, lest he be tempted to follow them and come anywhere near the forest. Still, they gratefully took their boxes and dug into the eggs, rice, and fish neatly tucked into them. Jerra precariously balanced his between his “hands.” He wasn’t wearing his usual cupped palms, but grappling fists meant to hold Naga’s reins. His breakfast, as with all his meals, was in soup form, the hearty contents floating in steaming broth. The broth sloshed over the sides, splattering onto his sandaled feet, and he hissed.

“Here, Jerr,” said Sahn. “Let me-”

Jerra silenced him with a look as he sipped his soup with ease.

They lounged in the cart as they ate (Kelshins never rushed their meals, no matter how much in a hurry they were), allowing Naga to wander among the greenery, picking at weeds with her long, tapered tongue. Trickles of Kelshins berthed around the cart, trudging back and forth to meet their families for the coming days of rest and recreation. Sahn never knew why his family chose such a time to go to the floating market, but he never questioned it. An opportunity to catch a glimpse of Kale’s Vyornish heritage, he supposed.

Sahn only wished his parents were not too ashamed to bring him with them.

A group of northern girls (distinguished by the deeper tint in their sandstone skin) passed by, their steps slowing when their eyes fell on Jerra and his beautiful amber eyes. They whispered among each other, falling into a fit of giggles before hurrying on their way. Jerra only glared and turned away, as he always did when girls from other regions blushed at him. “They wouldn’t be blushing,” he whispered to Sahn each time, “once they saw I had no bleeding hands.”

Such awareness never stopped their father from grinning devilishly at the two of them, as he did now. “What?” Jerra asked slowly, already sensing what was coming.

“When are you two going to bring home one of those?”

“Da,” he and Sahn cringed in unison.

“I know, I know. I just wish you two would bring these pretty faces to good use.” Kale cupped their chins into each of his massive hands. “Moons know I did when I was your age.”

“Kale,” Shay cried.

But it was too late. Kale was already adrift in his own memories. “Why, I was younger even than Aurie when the girls began to flock. I can’t tell you how many times I would walk into my room at night and found a-”

Mercifully, a familiar weight rammed into Sahn’s back before Kale could give further details, digging into his hips and constricting around his thin neck. “Onward, my prized stallion,” came a valiant cry. “We must march to war!”

“Where have you been?” Sahn asked the little girl now clamped onto his shoulders through startled coughs. “I made you breakfast.”

“Not hungry,” said Aurelia as she kicked at his legs. “Now hush. Horses don’t talk.” This was an old game of theirs. While his younger sister hobbled along the rickety floors of their house as a toddler, Sahn would scoop her up onto his back and trot along the ground, whinnying and bucking like a wild steed, and she had squealed and clapped through it all. She still laughed and clapped as she grew. Never mind that she was now eleven and nearly impossible for him to lift, let alone carry. Sahn was not quite ready yet to accept that his sister was growing up. So, he locked his arms around her knees and jogged- hobbled, actually- far ahead of the cart, bouncing along the flat road until the earth dipped into a deep valley, abruptly changing from irrigated farmland to fertile grass and pregnant cherry trees. “I had the strangest dream last night,” said Aurie, falling into rambling. “I dreamed that I was flying over the ocean and into…”

A glint of silver drifted Sahn’s attention just then from his sister’s story to the midmorning sky. A beautiful white kess glided over their heads toward Gleaner’s Hill, its silver wings glinting with a blinding flash. That’s the third one this week. The winged messengers were usually seen in the western region of Katha only every few months, usually the Isans of Kelsh exchanging thoughts on coming feasts and holidays. Seeing one in the sky this often was-

“Sahn, are you listening to me?”

Sahn blinked, snapping his head back to attention. “I’m so sorry, love. What did you say?”

“I said, ‘I saw a joghon in my dream.”

Sahn’s feet planted on the spot atop the steep hill, overlooking the winding road to the port town of Agaoka, to the channel Elas-Ri-Hradek, to the jagged strip of grey along the horizon. His lungs suddenly felt empty, as though someone had punched him. He was too stunned even to notice the strange ships attempting to settle on Agaoka’s narrow docks.

“You did?” he asked, taking a quick, paranoid glance behind them. The others were cresting over the hill, and Sahn tried to summon movement back to his feet. But they remained motionless, heavy and cold. “What was it doing?” he whispered, though they were still out of earshot.

“Nothing,” said Aurie. “It was just standing in a field, staring at me.”

The coldness vanished. “Then how do you know it was a maj- a joghon?”

“I just knew.” She fell silent for a moment or two, and then said, “I would like to see one, a majyst.”

“Aurie…”

“I know, I know. I just wonder sometimes what… they really look like. It’s not fair, you know. Da got to see them, we didn’t. I wonder what magic is like. I wonder-”

“Aurelia.” Shay’s call cut through the air like a knife. She jumped off the cart and stormed upon them faster than either could react. She pried Aurie from Sahn’s back, making her gasp. “How many times do I have to say it? This is a good place; a pure place. We do not speak of that perversion here.”

Passing strangers turned their heads with puzzled looks, but natives of Gleaner’s Hill moved quicker, sneering at the scene, tugging their children closer to their sides. Do you see? Do you see how his madness spreads?

“But, Ma,” Aurie whimpered. “I-”

“This is not how we raised you. We did not teach you to involve yourself with this- this sacrilege! We taught you to keep a level head, always, to keep to the natural order!” Sahn saw what Aurie could not; his mother’s eyes darting this way and that, confirming that the growing could see her anger, her voice just loud enough for them all to hear. “I mean it this time, Aurelia.” Shay’s voice grew to a frighteningly high pitch. “Don’t ever say m- that word again.” Aurie did not answer. Shay gave her shoulders a single, sharp shake. “Swear to me.”

Aurie stared at her mother in shock and… Sahn was not sure what else. Surely not anger. “Yes, Ma,” she murmured. “I swear.” Just like that, Shay let go, brushing Aurie’s stumpy black braid as though nothing had happened. “We must take our leave. Jerra, say goodbye to your brother and sister.”

Jerra held Sahn in a haphazard embrace, parting with, “Keep the scrolls warm, Dusty,” as with every year. Kale and Shay each placed a hand on Sahn’s cheek and pressed their brows to his.

“Moyane’s light shines within you,” they said.

“Moyane’s light shines within you,” Sahn repeated the sacred Kelshin farewell. With a final wave, they were off.

It was not until the cart reached the flat plain of the valley below that Aurie whispered in Sahn’s ear. “I meant what I said. I want to see a meijin. Just once.”

---

This is the official first chapter of my fantasy series, Saga of a Storyteller. Enjoy!

#fantasy #saga #storyteller

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liveonlinematches · 7 years ago

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West Indies cricket has been at the decline for the reason that previous Five-6 years. In spite of successful the Males’s and Girls’s Global T20 in India, West Indies has since a steep drop within the recreation. In keeping with Cricket West Indies President Dave Cameron, this descend is because of appoint of girls lecturers for private schooling (PE) in colleges. Cameron informed Jamaica Gleaner: “It has not anything to do with the Executive. Initially, we simplest have feminine PE lecturers, which is an issue. Maximum of them don’t know cricket. The sport of cricket could be very sophisticated. They don’t know the historical past and neither are they . That turns into a topic. Once we went to university, maximum of our PE lecturers, if no longer all, had been male. In order that they trainer cricket, soccer, observe and box, and we’re no longer getting that anymore.”

Cameron additionally took on faculty government claiming that they don’t have right kind facilities for children to play cricket: ”In soccer, four-a-side scrimmage can also be performed in slightly two-by-four house; at the street, you set a ring on a mild submit and you’ll play basketball. Cricket suffers from wanting house and specialized apparatus, and all that more or less factor, to perform.”

He added that CWI is operating with ICC to give a boost to the way forward for cricket in his country: ”So we’re incessantly taking a look at other ways and various kinds of the sport that may be performed with out that massive fanfare of a giant box and specialized pitches. The ICC is doing a programme referred to as Venture Wildfire, which is attempting to seek out video games which might be simply a laugh for children, to get folks within the sport, even at the next degree – beach-type cricket, no matter it’s, simply to get folks taking part in the sport. If you happen to’re just right sufficient, and wish to be fascinated about it, you’ll cross on. I feel that’s what cricket lacks.”

Editorial workforce of CricketCountry.

(serve as(d, s, identification) (record, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));

http://ift.tt/2ESRMan Cricket News

#liveonlinematches #Cricket #Football

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novirginia · 8 years ago

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25 for 21

Film critics have been playing an interesting and unexpected game this year. They’ve been naming the 25 Best Films of the 21st Century (so far). It was Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott of the New York Times who first got the ball rolling, and what follows represents my two cents in this regard. As to what ‘best’ means, these are all movies that I either love or admire; that I can watch over and over; that I have watched over and over; and that I think will stand the test of time.

It obviously goes without saying that I don’t see everything. And that there are (many different parts of) many (different) national cinemas that pass me by completely. There is also only one woman filmmaker on (the first part of) this list. Such absences are a gaping big part of many of these 25 for 21 lists. The Times roster, for example, includes only four films by women, and one of these is actually illegible. Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I was released in 2000 and—pace the Times—the 21st century actually begins on 1 January 2001. As to the other three films by women on the Times list, Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker does nothing for me, while I think that White Material and Wendy and Lucy are far from Claire Denis and Kelly Reichardt’s best (though the final third of Reichardt’s Certain Women would for sure have made my list if it had been released on its own as a short). However, I would argue that Sally Menke (who edited all of Quentin Tarantino’s films prior to her untimely death in 2010) was both integral to and partly constitutive of the three Tarantino films on this list (and that the sharp drop in the quality of his output post-Basterds is in large part due to her loss).

The format of my list is a bit odd. It comprises a run of 14 filmmakers responsible for one or more best film-objects. These filmmakers (and each of their films) are arranged in rough order of their best-ness. This list is followed by a number of special mentions (in rough order of their best-ness, too). Also included are a number of (scattershot) observations.

[Revised and reshuffled April 2019]

Terrence Malick — The Tree of Life, The New World, To the Wonder

For a blog where I don’t write much, I’ve managed to write a great deal about both The Tree of Life and To the Wonder — two extraordinary films in two extraordinarily different registers. The former is a form of prayer and—to my mind—not just the Best Film of the 21st Century (so far), but one of the all-time greats. Malick attempts nothing less in The Tree of Life than the architecture of a theology. His ambition is Tarkovskian/Kubrickian in its scale—and then bigger still. The film races for the edges of space and time, and then dives deep into the singularities of memory and desire; the exercises of mystery and grace, intellect and will. It functions in a mode where beauty is both an expression of God and a path to God, and where art (on life) is both a benediction and a judgment. What ultimately makes the film so powerful, though, can be summed up in Goethe’s line, “half children’s games, half God at heart,” for what Malick attempts in The Tree of Life is to fold together both the time spans of childhood and the universe: we’re told that God has no beginning and no end, and Malick’s boldest move in The Tree of Life is to enfold a story of childhood into the expanse of this infinity, conjuring thereby the endless timelessness of childhood. To borrow from Wordsworth, Malick’s recollection of childhood works as an intimation of immortality.

It is this extended depiction of childhood in The Tree of Life—unrivalled in the movies except for a few brief moments in Tarkovsky’s Mirror—that represents the film’s highlight and its crux. Forget the sublime movements of Malick’s great cosmo-drama; once the films settles down into small-town Texas, you get to really see the world: its shapes and its shadows and how strange and beautiful it is. You’re reminded that the world is made for children. The real world. They’re the ones who climb trees and jump in puddles and roll in the grass. Malick’s film performs Wittgenstein’s dictum: “Just let nature speak and acknowledge only one thing higher than nature, but not what others might think.” And what The Tree of Life holds high(est) is childhood—that sense and experience of the world; that way of being in the world. Where leaves scatter and shadows dance high and piggledy and upside-down across the lawn and in the sunlight of the street; where a bone found in a field descends from the dinosaurs, and a frog launched skywards in a firework reaches the moon; where furniture shifts of its own and time moves unprecedentedly slow; where games get out of hand at a swivel of the pivot so quick as the shift from saints into devils; where sibling hatred flares spitting bright and burns back into goodwill in the same bright flash; where the discovery of the mirror and of (cruel) mimicry are perfect mysteries unfolding new laws of interpretation for everything else around you; where shame knots into perfect ecstasies and church is endlessly dull. The film is about all those days and years and slow dusks spent circling your childhood home—and how all those twilit evenings create the fundament. “Once, when there was a choice of being kings or messengers, we, being children, chose to be messengers, arms and legs flying as we romped from castle to castle” (Guy Davenport). The Tree of Life is the message that says it was all most real when we were first setting out.

David Lynch — Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: The Return, Inland Empire

Everything in Lynch is uncanny, unmoored and out of joint, and the velocity of this disjoint unravelling crescendos across the course of his work this century: Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return. And while the latter is a TV show, the Twin Peaks universe already venned the cinematic with Fire Walk With Me and Lynch spoke about The Return as an eighteen hour movie, so I’m happy to count it as a film-object. I also happen to think that The Return is Lynch’s masterwork. I’ve placed it second to Mulholland Drive only because it’s an eighteen hour movie that I’ve only seen once; it would need multiple viewings both to process and to say anything more meaningful about it than that it’s a form filled with endless, confused, beautiful, black feeling. Like all his work, The Return demonstrates Lynch’s commitment to working primarily in the register of atmospherics and affect rather than plot. Its emotional resonance is as profound as its willingness to defy concrete narrative explanation and accommodate uncanny intrusions and extrusions upon narrative law. Watching the series feels like you see but that you can’t see.

Nevertheless—and I’m remembering now the dark cracks that radiate like some final, fatal, flaw through the rest of the series from the extraordinary nuclear bang of Part 8—I think The Return is primarily about the eruption of evil into the everyday. Part 8 is an episode occasioned by (and which briefly depicts) an actual historical event: the 1945 atomic tests at White Sands. But though it might appear so, I don’t think the episode depicts the birth of BOB. BOB’s violence is more community-centred, visited upon individual bodies; he’s no awesome burst of atomic energy. If anything, Part 8 tells the story of a flare: a bright flash sent up by mankind indicating to the evil already inherent in the fabric of existence that it was safe to walk out more freely in the world. Thus the woodsmen; that slumbrous incantation sent out over the radio waves; and that egg-hatched, insect-winged frog’s journey from the site of the atomic test into an unconscious girl’s room and down her throat. This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. Part 8 represents the metonymic genesis of the hole in the universe that Laura Palmer left behind, while The Return as a whole represents a shout into that hole, an attempt—like Fire Walk With Me—to wake us again to the horror of abuse and murder at the centre of the Twin Peaks story. That plot was always meant to be the centre of the show, but it gradually fell away, partly due to the realities of TV, and perhaps partly because Lynch stepped away during season two of the show’s original run. The story of Twin Peaks, and the show itself, evolved so much that its central premise was obscured or—more properly—collectively forgotten by its audience in favour of the show’s folksier elements. But this central horror returns with a vengeance in The Return.

Just like Fire Walk With Me, which reminded us that this was all Laura’s story, The Return descends into the sheer fish-scale clammy cold of trauma and “the evil that men do” (which is how Albert theorises BOB). The Return is like being thrown into a disoriented black hole of doublings and doppelgängers. All these doubles and split-selves represent the fractured results of various evils: they are attempts to keep on existing in the world after the worst has had its way with you. Thus, while Cooper’s decision (after 25 years in the Black Lodge, and fifteen episodes as Dougie Jones) to step back into the place he has recently escaped (and into the night Laura died) may well represent a vain attempt to rescue Laura, I think it should properly be read as part of Twin Peaks’ wider attempt to understand the source of violence and the possibility of self-sacrifice as a way to bear it. Doubled and doppelgängered and split throughout (like the many female victims of male violence throughout the show) the briefly whole Cooper goes back. One of the finest and kindest moments of the show is Gordon Cole’s farewell to him before he steps through that locked door: “Be thinking of you, Coop.” There is so much warmth and kind-heartedness in that moment—and throughout the show—even in spite of the fact that what Lynch sees out there is primarily dark matter, thick and unknowable and aching to take shape as a bad, bad world. Lynch’s question—broached most forcefully in the show’s final shot, where the new/the non- Laura hears her mother’s voice calling as though to rouse her from sleep, and screams—is always this: what is she, and what are we, waking to?

P.T. Anderson — The Master, There Will Be Blood

In one of the releases of his New Biographical Dictionary of Film prior to 2007, David Thomson predicted that Anderson would go on to make the great American movie (i.e. the great movie about America). And he did: There Will Be Blood. Then he followed it with an even better film: The Master.

There Will Be Blood is an origins story, vivifying the (holy) spirit of American capitalism and its push-n-pull of faith-n-greed. Lit by a crazy holy-roller dynamism and anchored in the most precise of formal techniques, it’s difficult to think of a film that so effortlessly captures the recklessness of the past several centuries in the West. And which performs it all with so much poetry. (Just think of that moment where the father baptises the child in oil!) But if There Will Be Blood is an origins story, then The Master is the story mid-stream; the story gliding along unknowing under everything that is happening, then jumping out to see where it is, lit with quicksilver flashes of insight like fish breaking the surface.

The film’s avatar is Joaquin Phoenix, dancing the twisted tight-rope choreography of a misfitted and jitterbugged amateur chemist. Fortified by ship fuels and solvents, cough medicines and dark-room chemicals, spirits, pills and paint thinners, The Master launches straight into the milky-way nightscape of his mind in its opening shot (of a ship’s frothing wake) and then cuts to Phoenix’s face. Projected there is the frightening play of a fierce intelligence at the limits beyond boredom. The film then hurls us into his unhinged state-of-being in-the-world, like a crystalline stream of ship fuel shot through a mind already operating in flashes of black and night and blinding white; like a jittering bug in black and white ‘round a light. I wrote about The Master before as a kind of elegant high-wire tone poem, borne out of an electric blue movie-saturated brume, but could not believe—watching the film again recently—how far Phoenix embodies its project. The slant and alienated mind he projects, and the weird slow-dance he performs with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character — all this somehow affects the (soul) fractures of our post-nuclear age and its competing charismas and shape-shifting ideologies. I think this film can only get more and more contemporary.

Quentin Tarantino — Inglourious Basterds, Death Proof, Kill Bill Vols 1–2

There’s not much more to say about these three choices than that Inglourious Basterds, Death Proof and Kill Bill are almost perfect movie movies in that pure-strain, sheer-thrill, sex-as-sound-track, motion-picture-mode that represents Tarantino at his best. So there’s only a little regret in me saying that there’s a universe where Tarantino became the feminist crime movie guy instead of the stylised violence guy, and in me noting that—in spite of the overwhelming cinematic verve of Kill Bill and Death Proof, and the scope and deeply self-reflexive investigation of screen violence in Inglourious Basterds—I get a bit wistful for that world every time I sit down with Jackie Brown. And while saying this might sound like praise for Jackie Brown at the expense of the three Tarantino films that made this list, this is not my intent. (After all, where Kill Bill Vols 1–2 picks up on the themes of Tarantino’s last 90s film, I’m tempted to place it above Basterds and Death Proof as his best this century so far. Where what I’ve got to say about Jackie Brown sounds like praise at the expense of Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, though, this is completely my intent.)

Part of what sets Jackie Brown apart from Tarantino’s other films is how grounded its characters are. They have style, but that style is earned. It never veers into the affectations and (sometimes effective) cartoonish licks of Tarantino’s earlier and later output. Their motivations are small, and the film’s big set-piece scheme is necessary and organic. Jackie Brown comes out of a real place—the urban spaces of Southern California—and not the subsequent movie-verse of Tarantino’s own making. It’s meditative and it’s observant and it has room for big social truths. There’s no other movie by Tarantino that really goes after a theme the way Jackie Brown sinks its teeth into the business of getting older and having to rectify where you thought your life would go and who you thought you’d be. More importantly, though, the film’s also about feeling like—as a black woman—you’ve run out of the roles that society permits you to inhabit. Jackie Brown is deeply, passionately, and intersectionally feminist in a way that Tarantino hasn’t attempted since. Just picture the film’s intro and the way Pam Grier’s walk morphs into a half-run and then a mad, high-heeled sprint — all to make it on time to her shitty job, and only to be told by Michael Keaton’s ATF agent that he’s leveraging the future she’s scraped together in order to further his career. This film’s so much more thoughtful about what crime actually is and how it actually comes about than almost anything else in the genre; just the contrast between Ordell, Jackie, and Louis’ motivations for the crimes they commit is such a rich dramatic space to work in.

As to the films that followed Jackie Brown, both volumes of Kill Bill—which Tarantino intended as one film—remain the closest Tarantino has come to building on the best of his 90s projects. Vol. 1 is almost wholly an homage to a thousand kung fu movies, while Vol. 2 deepens and explores the relationship between Beatrix and Bill. But if you’ve seen enough wuxia films, this movement across the film’s halves isn’t so surprising — this is a genre that lives for complicated character relationships. Nevertheless, it’s still a deep and silent thrill to reach the final portion of Vol. 2 and realise that the Bride’s brilliantly quiet showdown with Bill—Tarantino’s most effective meditation on mortality since Jackie Brown—consists almost solely of 45 minutes of Beatrix and Bill just talking.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul — Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Tropical Malady, Cemetery of Splendour

Alexei German — Hard to Be a God

I wrote about this here.

The Coen Bros — Burn after Reading

This film is excoriating. It’s also funnier and funnier each of the thirty-plus times I’ve seen it.

Special mentions to No Country for Old Men (a film to study endlessly, but which I don’t love) and A Serious Man, whose metaphysical angst beats out Inside Llewyn Davis for me. I also still think that A Serious Man is the prime example of the perfect little film — a film that gets its every frame right, but whose ability to avoid cracks or flaws or strain comes about because the film’s scope or subject or reach doesn’t ask that it strike out quite so far as to break the vessels. Odd to say about a film that engages both the book of Job and Ecclesiastes.

David Cronenberg — A History of Violence

Lars von Trier — Melancholia, Dogville

Dogville’s better, but whatever. Melancholia comes first for me. I’d also like to give a special mention to Antichrist, which was properly unhinged (and so much more insane and perfectly tilted than anything else in recent memory). Like much of von Trier’s recent output, Antichrist was a study in perverse, promiscuous storytelling—cycling all polymorphous-like from abject tragedy through absurdity to sexual excitation and horror and back again through the same warped register, but never once cheapening what’s serious or making you feel guilty about what’s funny. Many of von Trier’s recent films have also been about the paralysis of depression, and this is reflected not just in their dramatic contents but their style. Like Antichrist, Melancholia begins with a crazed operatic sequence in maddened slow motion. It’s all about the agony of stasis, and the soul’s domination by an all-enveloping (lack of) emotion that swallows everything in its path. This crystallises in Melancholia’s master image—an all-consuming silvery orb—a symbol of pure geometrical stasis constructed to match the dominant characteristic of clinical depression.

Carlos Reygadas — Stellet Licht

Special mention also to the opening scenes of Post Tenebras Lux: the startling build up of that thunderstorm as purple twilight falls around the child in the field, and the uncanny entrance of that bright red animated demon (with non-animated toolbox) into the sleeping house.

Werner Herzog — Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

This film is demented. A deranged and degraded urban swamp nocturne. A piece of close portraiture that places Nic Cage under the camera eye only to watch him unspool like some delirious force of nature. Just think of Scorsese’s inability (even to the detriment of his films) to turn or cut away from Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and Casino, and you’re close to what’s happening here: a battened-down camera registering an immense whirlwind of energy roar through the shutter. Herzog is like the moth battering itself up against the lit glass, unable to cut away from Cage even as the film singes. It’s like being back in the 70s and 80s and watching him watch Kinski. And while Cage is no Kinski, this film revolves around him like Herzog’s earlier masterpieces revolved around the German. You can’t look away.

Asghar Farhadi — A Separation, The Past

Farhadi’s such an understated, fluid, and cunning formalist. His precision—and his fragmented and constructivist organisation of domestic spaces—is thrilling in the quietest key, even as his narratives build to perfectly pitched slow-motion disaster-climaxes along the weave of Aristotle’s ‘complex plan.’

Maren Ade — Toni Erdmann

Manoel de Oliveira — The Strange Case of Angelica

Many of the films on this list—like most masterworks—are to some extent an allegory of their own making. But this is most pronounced in The Strange Case of Angelica (perhaps de Oliveira’s most extended meditation on the medium of cinema). Angelica tells a ghost story, but what are ghosts in the movies but the past cut or superimposed into the present? The story Angelica really tells is all about film’s unique capacity to embalm time—to preserve time and time’s passing through the photographic registration of light, and to thereby preserve indefinitely a fragment of the world and its duration. In Angelica, we find Bazin’s beautiful ontology of the movies brought forward, dusted off from his teleology of the image, and thrust onto the Mulveyan/Lacanian spectatorial axis. Isaac, a young photographer, is asked by the owners of a hotel to take a death portrait of their deceased daughter, and de Oliveira’s film depicts his slow enslavement to the images he takes of the beautiful Angelica. The scenes of Isaac repeatedly removing his photographs from his stop-bath and hanging them to dry on the line—one ‘frame’ after the other—points not just to photography ‘becoming’ cinema, but to the ‘dead’ or frozen image waking to life and overtaking its maker, somehow becoming more real than the world from which it was obtained. Isaac’s desiring gaze is an animating one—just like ours in the dark of the movie theatre, and the moviemaker’s behind the camera and in the dark of the editing room. The film’s parable of amour fou, in which the outsider projects his fantasy life onto the passive screen of the inert object, evokes that wicked thrill of light becoming emulsion.

Two Days, One Night (The Dardennes) No Country for Old Men (The Coens) Birth (Jonathan Glazer) Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, who understandably but unfortunately could not find a way to to sustain the extraordinary achievements of the film’s first hour) The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel) Holy Motors (Leos Carax) Adaptation (Spike Jonze) Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, master of that space where landscape meets and maps onto psychology) I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino) Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón) The Counselor (Ridley Scott) The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat) The Life Aquatic (Wes Anderson) Elle (Paul Verhoeven) A Serious Man (The Coens) Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, whose subsequent output makes plain that Irreversible’s brilliance was totally accidental; nevertheless, it’s an almost unwatchable formal masterwork) This is 40 (Judd Apatow)

Films that need a little time to settle: Zama (Lucrecia Martel)

#nitrate nocturne #review #terrence malick #P.T. Anderson #david lynch #The Coen Brothers

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anniepaul · 8 years ago

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Dean Wariboko holds press briefing to discuss plans for version 2 of Marcus Garvey bust, June 30, 2017

#Jamaica #Marcus Garvey #Petrina Dacres #public art #Public monuments #Rastafari #UNIA #University of the West Indies

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anniepaul · 8 years ago

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My column of May 31 in the Gleaner. After much public agitation and disapproval the University of the West Indies finally agreed to bow to public pressure and withdraw the offending bust. At a tumultuous press briefing (see video above for a brief taste of the event) the Dean confirmed that a new bust would be produced by August 2017. The sculptor would still be Raymond Watson. At the briefing Watson said that he had tried to create a youthful image of Garvey, to befit the University setting where the bust would be installed.

Dean Wariboko holds press briefing to discuss plans for version 2 of Marcus Garvey bust, June 30, 2017

Garvey Lite? My column of May 31 in the Gleaner. After much public agitation and disapproval the University of the West Indies finally agreed to bow to public pressure and withdraw the offending bust.

#Jamaica #Marcus Garvey #Petrina Dacres #public art #Public monuments #Rastafari #UNIA #University of the West Indies

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