#and beyond

[amazingspidermans]

Peter P: Harold New Year, Mr. Stark!

Tony: ...Harold?

Happy: the kid's been replacing everything that has the word "happy" in it with my name, please make it stop

[disney]

To infinity...

[wordpress-blaze-129103422]

Song of the Day: Leonard Cohen - Suzanne

A fine song and even finer piece of poetry (it began life as a poem, published in 1966 as part of a collection titled Parasites of Heaven), Leonard Cohen's signature Suzanne remains one of the most well-regarded and widely-appreciated popular compositions never to crack the Top 40. Part autobiography, part religious allegory, it seems to mean something profound to almost everyone, even though its real meaning is, I've discovered, a matter of fierce debate. In completing my customary research for this entry, I encountered all sorts of interpretations, various writers peeling away layer upon layer of supposed substance, and honestly, I've never in my life had to wade through such a morass of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, while emerging none the wiser.

Maybe the self-anointed intelligentsia are making it more difficult than it needs to be. There’s certainly not a lot of allegorical sub-text to the first and final verses, which actually form a straightforward account of his relationship as a young man with one Suzanne Vaillancourt, née Verdal, a bohemian performance artist and blithe free spirit with whom Cohen became close in his years circulating among the various artistes of the Montreal cultural scene. She was, by all accounts, almost irresistibly alluring, and according to Cohen every man she met fell in love with her. Alas, she was married to a fellow artist, a man so attractive in his own right that apparently, every woman who met him fell in love too, and in his best moments, listening to his better angels, Cohen wasn’t about to do anything to insert himself between the two, even if she’d been amenable, which she wasn’t; he once told an interviewer that as a couple, they were inviolate, you just didn’t intrude into the kind of shared glory that they manifested. Not that he didn’t think about it, of course, c'mon, a guy couldn't help but at least toy with the idea, just in the abstract, but he satisfied himself with an entirely platonic, albeit exquisitely intimate, relationship that never developed into anything untoward. This is from an interview conducted by Kate Saunders of the BBC:

Saunders: The song is about the meeting of spirits. It’s a very intimate lyric, very, very intimate.

Suzanne: This is it.

Saunders: It seems very sad that the spirits moved apart.

Suzanne: Yes, I agree and I believe it’s material forces at hand that do this to many the greatest of lovers (laughs).

Saunders: So would you say in a way, in the spiritual sense, you were great lovers at some level?

Suzanne: Oh yes, yes, I don’t hesitate to speak of this, absolutely. As I say, you can glance at a person and that moment is eternal and it’s the deepest of touches and that’s what we’d shared, Leonard and I, I believe.

It was beautiful as it was, and it was enough. Well, mainly it was enough. As Suzanne remembered later, once when he was visiting Montreal, I saw him briefly in a hotel and it was a very, very wonderful, happy moment because he was on his way to becoming the great success he is. And the moment arose that we could have a moment together intimately, and I declined. Over the years, there don’t seem to have been a lot of women who said no to Cohen. But Suzanne didn't want to spoil their special bond.

So this is entirely based in reality, an honest account of a precious moment set to poetry in which no poetic licence is taken:

Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever And you know that she's half crazy, and that's why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China And just when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her She gets you on her wavelength, and lets the river answer That you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you think you'll maybe trust her For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

Suzanne really did have a place down by the St. Lawrence River, where the two used to meet and watch the ships go by. She really did serve him mandarin oranges and exotic, orange-flavoured tea from somewhere in the far east. The poem is practically a photograph.

Saunders: When you heard the song as opposed to hearing the poem, did you instantly think, that’s me?

Suzanne: Oh yes, definitely. That was me. That is me still, yes...

Saunders: Could you describe one of the typical evenings that you spent with Leonard Cohen at the time the song was written?

Suzanne: Oh yes. I would always light a candle and serve tea and it would be quiet for several minutes, then we would speak. And I would speak about life and poetry and we’d share ideas.

Saunders: So it really was the tea and oranges that are in the song?

Suzanne: Very definitely, very definitely, and the candle, who I named Anastasia, the flame of the candle was Anastasia to me. Don’t ask me why. It just was a spiritual moment that I had with the lighting of the candle. And I may or may not have spoken to Leonard about, you know I did pray to Christ, to Jesus Christ and to St. Joan at the time, and still do.

Saunders: And that was something you shared, both of you?

Suzanne: Yes, and I guess he retained that.

Thus the subsequent lines about Jesus, so moving and in a sense enigmatic, written, as they were, by a Jewish artist, would appear to have everything to do with the deep spirituality of his relationship with Suzanne, Cohen seeming to equate reverence for the divine with his intense artistic and aesthetic appreciation of his beautiful muse. His description of Jesus as a sailor was derived, perhaps, from one of his most lasting impressions of Montreal, where he used to look out over the water and think about the perils faced by the men who go to sea, those thoughts becoming intertwined with his memory of watching the ships go by at Suzanne's place on the river. Said Cohen, recalling the genesis of the poem:

And I knew it was a song about Montreal, it seemed to come out of that landscape that I loved very much in Montreal, which was the harbour, and the waterfront, and the sailors’ church there, called Notre Dame de Bon Secour, which stood out over the river. I knew that there was a harbour and I knew there was Our Lady of the Harbour, which was the virgin on the church which stretched out her arms towards the seamen, and you can climb up to the tower and look out over the river and this song came from that vision.

Black-hearted stone-atheist I may be, but I've always been especially touched by this mournful depiction of a Saviour coming to realize, as he suffers on the cross, that his charges can't be saved, not, anyway, until it's too late to make a difference:

And Jesus was a sailor when He walked upon the water And He spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower And when He knew for certain only drowning men could see Him He said all men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free them But He himself was broken long before the sky would open Forsaken almost human, He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Only drowning men could see him; it's almost a corollary of the old saying that there aren't any atheists in foxholes, Cohen contending that on the other hand, there aren't any believers outside of them, either. In Cohen's telling, people only turn to God when they're in extremis. Until then they live like sailors too, like Jesus did, lonely and at peril out to sea, until finally, at the end, they come to appreciate what Cohen already understood, and had ever since he used to commune with lovely, beloved Suzanne, the deep, captivating woman in the Salvation Army hand-me-downs who saw beauty in the mundane, knew how to find the treasures amid the uncollected refuse, and held the mirror in which the poet saw himself through her eyes.

+++++++++

Suzanne Verdal

Source: Song of the Day: Leonard Cohen - Suzanne

[khaliasama]

oh boy guys DAI is going to be moddable! i'm so excited for it!

i just can't wait to see all the white washing mods, the 'let's make dorian straight' mods, and the completely unnecessary 'more beautiful/improved' companion mods!

it's going to be amazing!!!!!!!!

[not-a-perfect-metaphor]

This touch-

-reminds me a lot of this touch:

***

Also, can we say platonic-my-@$$?

[iamnotawomanimagod]

Look, all these issues matter, but we can't possibly care about all of them, all the time. There's even a word for it - 'compassion fatigue.' It's like we have fifty tabs open in our mental browsers, and we're about to crash. Something's gotta change. ... So this is what I'm pitching: for 2020, give yourself a break. Just pick a couple things to not care about, for your sanity. I'm not saying 'shut down your browser.' Just close a couple tabs. ... Now, I know it's weird hearing this from the show that tells you to care about something new every week - and we're not gonna stop doing that! But I also understand if you gotta take a breather. That's why, after you're done with this episode, you have every right close a tab in your brain. Especially if it helps you double down on the issues that really matter to you. So over the holidays, sleep well - but not that well! I'll see you guys in 2020. We've got a few more tabs to open.

Hasan Minhaj, Patriot Act, vol 5 ep 8.

[charmac]

Check out this show with an infinite number of seasons, they said. It’s fun and casual they said.

[wordpress-blaze-129103422]

Song of the Day: Leonard Cohen - Suzanne

A fine song and even finer piece of poetry (it began life as a poem, published in 1966 as part of a collection titled Parasites of Heaven), Leonard Cohen's signature Suzanne remains one of the most well-regarded and widely-appreciated popular compositions never to crack the Top 40. Part autobiography, part religious allegory, it seems to mean something profound to almost everyone, even though its real meaning is, I've discovered, a matter of fierce debate. In completing my customary research for this entry, I encountered all sorts of interpretations, various writers peeling away layer upon layer of supposed substance, and honestly, I've never in my life had to wade through such a morass of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, while emerging none the wiser.

Maybe the self-anointed intelligentsia are making it more difficult than it needs to be. There’s certainly not a lot of allegorical sub-text to the first and final verses, which actually form a straightforward account of his relationship as a young man with one Suzanne Vaillancourt, née Verdal, a bohemian performance artist and blithe free spirit with whom Cohen became close in his years circulating among the various artistes of the Montreal cultural scene. She was, by all accounts, almost irresistibly alluring, and according to Cohen every man she met fell in love with her. Alas, she was married to a fellow artist, a man so attractive in his own right that apparently, every woman who met him fell in love too, and in his best moments, listening to his better angels, Cohen wasn’t about to do anything to insert himself between the two, even if she’d been amenable, which she wasn’t; he once told an interviewer that as a couple, they were inviolate, you just didn’t intrude into the kind of shared glory that they manifested. Not that he didn’t think about it, of course, c'mon, a guy couldn't help but at least toy with the idea, just in the abstract, but he satisfied himself with an entirely platonic, albeit exquisitely intimate, relationship that never developed into anything untoward. This is from an interview conducted by Kate Saunders of the BBC:

Saunders: The song is about the meeting of spirits. It’s a very intimate lyric, very, very intimate.

Suzanne: This is it.

Saunders: It seems very sad that the spirits moved apart.

Suzanne: Yes, I agree and I believe it’s material forces at hand that do this to many the greatest of lovers (laughs).

Saunders: So would you say in a way, in the spiritual sense, you were great lovers at some level?

Suzanne: Oh yes, yes, I don’t hesitate to speak of this, absolutely. As I say, you can glance at a person and that moment is eternal and it’s the deepest of touches and that’s what we’d shared, Leonard and I, I believe.

It was beautiful as it was, and it was enough. Well, mainly it was enough. As Suzanne remembered later, once when he was visiting Montreal, I saw him briefly in a hotel and it was a very, very wonderful, happy moment because he was on his way to becoming the great success he is. And the moment arose that we could have a moment together intimately, and I declined. Over the years, there don’t seem to have been a lot of women who said no to Cohen. But Suzanne didn't want to spoil their special bond.

So this is entirely based in reality, an honest account of a precious moment set to poetry in which no poetic licence is taken:

Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever And you know that she's half crazy, and that's why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China And just when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her She gets you on her wavelength, and lets the river answer That you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you think you'll maybe trust her For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

Suzanne really did have a place down by the St. Lawrence River, where the two used to meet and watch the ships go by. She really did serve him mandarin oranges and exotic, orange-flavoured tea from somewhere in the far east. The poem is practically a photograph.

Saunders: When you heard the song as opposed to hearing the poem, did you instantly think, that’s me?

Suzanne: Oh yes, definitely. That was me. That is me still, yes...

Saunders: Could you describe one of the typical evenings that you spent with Leonard Cohen at the time the song was written?

Suzanne: Oh yes. I would always light a candle and serve tea and it would be quiet for several minutes, then we would speak. And I would speak about life and poetry and we’d share ideas.

Saunders: So it really was the tea and oranges that are in the song?

Suzanne: Very definitely, very definitely, and the candle, who I named Anastasia, the flame of the candle was Anastasia to me. Don’t ask me why. It just was a spiritual moment that I had with the lighting of the candle. And I may or may not have spoken to Leonard about, you know I did pray to Christ, to Jesus Christ and to St. Joan at the time, and still do.

Saunders: And that was something you shared, both of you?

Suzanne: Yes, and I guess he retained that.

Thus the subsequent lines about Jesus, so moving and in a sense enigmatic, written, as they were, by a Jewish artist, would appear to have everything to do with the deep spirituality of his relationship with Suzanne, Cohen seeming to equate reverence for the divine with his intense artistic and aesthetic appreciation of his beautiful muse. His description of Jesus as a sailor was derived, perhaps, from one of his most lasting impressions of Montreal, where he used to look out over the water and think about the perils faced by the men who go to sea, those thoughts becoming intertwined with his memory of watching the ships go by at Suzanne's place on the river. Said Cohen, recalling the genesis of the poem:

And I knew it was a song about Montreal, it seemed to come out of that landscape that I loved very much in Montreal, which was the harbour, and the waterfront, and the sailors’ church there, called Notre Dame de Bon Secour, which stood out over the river. I knew that there was a harbour and I knew there was Our Lady of the Harbour, which was the virgin on the church which stretched out her arms towards the seamen, and you can climb up to the tower and look out over the river and this song came from that vision.

Black-hearted stone-atheist I may be, but I've always been especially touched by this mournful depiction of a Saviour coming to realize, as he suffers on the cross, that his charges can't be saved, not, anyway, until it's too late to make a difference:

And Jesus was a sailor when He walked upon the water And He spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower And when He knew for certain only drowning men could see Him He said all men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free them But He himself was broken long before the sky would open Forsaken almost human, He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Only drowning men could see him; it's almost a corollary of the old saying that there aren't any atheists in foxholes, Cohen contending that on the other hand, there aren't any believers outside of them, either. In Cohen's telling, people only turn to God when they're in extremis. Until then they live like sailors too, like Jesus did, lonely and at peril out to sea, until finally, at the end, they come to appreciate what Cohen already understood, and had ever since he used to commune with lovely, beloved Suzanne, the deep, captivating woman in the Salvation Army hand-me-downs who saw beauty in the mundane, knew how to find the treasures amid the uncollected refuse, and held the mirror in which the poet saw himself through her eyes.

+++++++++

Suzanne Verdal

Source: Song of the Day: Leonard Cohen - Suzanne

[putrids]

... AND BEYOND- MODERN BASEBALL

[singledadkuroo]

bucky barnes adopting like six dogs, all with missing legs

tony stark engineering cybernetic legs for each dog

bucky barnes being licked and cuddled by animals who love him

bucky barnes

[levy-mcredfox]

Just some of my favourite Gajevy moments ^.^

[not-a-perfect-metaphor]

Jensen: “All we can do is make the best show we can.”

“-and get Jared naked.”

Jared (while answering a question about working with Sandy): “-I’m obviously very close to Jen, too.”

“But I don’t kiss Jensen...”

“-in public...”

Jared: “He prepared a scene for the season finale.”

“It’s a sex scene.”

“-with me.”

These two were at it early!

And often...😉😏

[indieiphonewallpapers]

and beyond // modern baseball

[gameinfomercal]

My reaction if I saw the Tardis.

[isaacspellman]

Roller skate to beyond 🎆

why do I have a feeling I was drawing power rangers 💙❤️💛

#assassass

Tumblr l Instagram l Website

[supernaturalfreewill]

Friendly reminders on this Monday:

- drink lots of water - eat some fruits and veggies - get up and stretch - deep breaths in and out - I love you and you are important and special to me! :)

[orionsangel86]

I hope you’re not planning on leaving here when Supernatural does eventually end, I’d definitely miss you :-)

Aww! Well! That entirely depends on what I plan to do after Supernatural ends! Whether I’ll move on to some new and exciting fandom, or whether I’ll just stubbornly stick around and binge watch Supernatural from the start again and meta the entire series. I have absolutely no idea what will happen then!

I suppose it also depends on how it ends. Because it could go one of three ways:

1. I rage quit and drown myself in a liquor store (and probably cry for a good few weeks before never speaking of Supernatural ever again) (you’ll find my blog deactivated in this scenario. Sorry nonny. You’ll never hear from me again. It’ll hurt too damn much to stick around.)

2. I heavily meta the season finale enough to satisfy myself that it ended in a way I was happy with and block and ignore all the naysayers - this will probably go on for a few months - probably until there is some expose-all commentary/book/documentary about the behind the scenes and a comment somewhere from one of the showrunners about authorial intent that makes the antis really mad whilst we continue to celebrate but also grumble that they could have made it MORE obvious... I believe this will also involve heavy drinking on my part. But I’ll probably stick around in this case and do the series binge watch and extreme meta from the start just to back up the authorial intent expose all and the meta ending that was still somewhat ambiguous to those audience members who are extremely heteronormative - but still obvious enough to get EW and MTV and Buzzfeed to write about how it was definitely subtly made canon. You’ll probably still find me here arguing with people about it for years to come.

3. I don’t meta a damn thing because I’m too busy celebrating in a giddy drunken state, probably with overpriced bubbly with a few of my fellow UK meta writer friends whilst the only thing you will find on my blog for several weeks is a post in massive text size saying I TOLD YOU SO BITCHES before eventually going back and giffing and reblogging every single second of glorious footage and then yeah, probably the year long full series binge watch and meta to back up every claim I have ever made about this show and why meta writers were right in all their analysis followed by several years of just blog maintenance and shit posts on tumblr saying “remember when destiel became canon” and soaking up the glory that it will be.

Lets hope for option 3. Option 2 is okay too I suppose - more realistic perhaps. Option 1 is unthinkable. I wanna stick around. :)

[madtiitan]

Please Reblog !!! Super impactful way to share and support for this amazing day, for Muslim Woman’s Day, go here !!!