#come to think of it why are so many of my recent gothic reads centered on college?

[ianthe-is-a-bitch-and-i-love-her]

A little detail from All That Consumes Us that I keep thinking about is how it plays with the trope of the Improbably Diverse Cast - which, to be clear, is not a trope that bothers me, but every once in a while it can be blatant enough to knock me out of the fiction for just a moment. Like, okay, there's only one cishet white guy in this old money ivy league type secret society? I'll roll with it, but I have noticed. The thing that All That Consumes Us does that I really liked was when the knives came out and the horror was exposed one of the main characters went "oh shit, they picked us because we have shaky support systems and limited opportunities and they could use that to make us dependent on them." And I just always get a little bit of satisfaction when a story has a good diegetic reason to back up a kind of tropey premise.

[elekinetic]

hfkjadsndsfdjldsafjk hi yes hello the anon who asked about the script stuff- 1st, thank you for answering!!!, 2nd, i saw your tags and am back because ohmygodineedtotalkaboutthisrightnow

okay so! i'm planning to go to film school for college, but that's still a bit away so i'm trying to learn a little bit by myself beforehand- hence why the screenplay question came up, because turns out THIS IS VERY HARD TO LEARN ABOUT INFORMALLY

but i've had an idea for a movie floating around in my head for a while, and like. it's never gonna get made, but i have SO many thoughts about it and i thought 'hey, might as well give writing it down a shot just as a fun project'

the concept is essentially a modern slasher/horror film centered around a woman who runs a true crime podcast/youtube channel, who's That kind of true crime fan that treats real victims' stories like jokes and is just INCREDIBLY disrespectful- i'm sure you know what i'm talking about, it's unfortunately EVERYWHERE right now.

but like for main inspiration and stuff i guess i've had both spree (the 2020 movie with joe keery) and fresh (the 2022 movie with sebastian stan) in mind the entire time? from spree, the concept of the internet fueling toxicity and actual physical harm to real people because of not only the anonymity of an online persona, but also because of the inherent clout-chasing that's born from the way that so much social media is structured. from fresh, it's more of the way that it's shot- i really likedthe cinematography from that film, i thought it was super neat and easy to understand even from a beginner's point of view.

on top of both of those, i really enjoy gothic horror in literature and movies, so my goal is to kind of draw from the concept of humanizing the "villain" that's so huge in gothic literature. gothic horror is about the inherent horror OF humanity- i'd love to be able to play off of that by not only having an antagonist with incredibly understandable if twisted reasoning, but also by having a protagonist that undergoes a severe shift in their moral code after recognizing the bad things that they've done. and i know that just sounds like a basic character arc because i'm not doing a good job of explaining it lmao- but i'd really love to have the horror come not from a man with a knife and a scary mask, but from the reality of the situation, where the audience can recognize that it's very real and a genuine problem in modern internet culture, if that makes sense?

and finally, i LOVE guillermo del toro's work. god, what i would GIVE to talk to him about some of his project, they're absolutely incredible- so i suppose there's some aspect of that admiration that's been floating around in my brain and adding spice to this project.

but. yeah. sorry for the rant in your inbox, but LORD i've needed a chance to talk about this somewhere, so thank you if you read this LMAO

god, anon. anon i have been thinking abt the whole true crime thesis thing FOR MONTHS THANK YOU, YOUR IDEA IS SUCH A GREAT WAY TO CONVEY THE TOXICITY ugh i need to watch more horror bc it as a medium to explore/comment on human experiences is so !!! and the commodification of human suffering for personal gain that is so fleeting? the self fulfilling prophecy of centering yourself in stories of real pain? when the protagonist isn’t the hero? GOD. super cool.

this was a lovely read and god your inspirations!! spree and fresh have been on my list forever, will definitely be checking these out now. and gothic horror, god, YES. i wrote an essay in high school about how henry from the picture of dorian gray was a vampire in all ways but physical and how oscar wilde was actually writing a horror novel. reread it recently and i don’t agree w 100% of it but it was making a similar point as you!

vís-a-vís learning informally: i’ve talked a little on here about stuff i’ve learned in college/things i’ve adopted into my process, all under the tag #film stuff. also happy to answer questions abt film school or share stuff i’ve learned! i’m by no means an expert but i can tell you what i’ve been told (abt storytelling and abt the industry)

[pheonixfire4015]

Only the Moon and the Stars Know

NOTE: Hello all, I thought I would take a crack at another fic in order to help us all get through the 3 weeks till a new SVU. This one can correlate to the previous fic I wrote last week “Peace in the Midst of the Storm.” I was listening to Sia’s “My Love” and the images just came flooding in. So I again neglected my homework in order to dream up a beautiful E/O moment. I also drew inspiration from the beautiful super moon we had recently. I hope you enjoy your moon dance :). I have never posted on fic sites before but if someone wants to review my work for mistakes I am fine with it being posted elsewhere as long as my name is attached. Forgive any mistakes missed. 

As always I own nothing, Elliot and Olivia belong to Dick Wolf and NBC. This is E/O centered based on what I hope we see at Fins wedding. A girl can hope for a kiss right? Or is a kiss and a dance too much to ask for ;). Heres the link to Sia’s masterpiece: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWyOPaTWXOw

Rated: PG

The night was cool but warmth hung gently in the air, inviting. In the darkness the moon dazzled in all its glory, flashes of brilliant whites and peeking through a conspicuous gentle hint of pink. Not a cloud in site, the vastness going on into eternity. Like a pearl, a precious rare stone being found in the darkness… In its brilliance… being seen for the first time. The stars each twinkled in their individual radiance but almost appearing to step back in awe… allowing the moon its moment. In the backdrop the waves ungulated, mesmerizing, as each wave sparkled in the magnificent miraculous light of the heavenly bodies above.

Liv looked up, eyes wide taking in the breathtaking beauty of it, the gothic magical stillness. Their light shimmering in the pools of her twin deep golden iris’. She held her beath feeling like any slight noise would interrupt the peace settling all around her. Holding every inch of her near. She took a deep breath closing her eyes to preserve the moment in the recesses of her mind. As if it was a painting lovingly created just for her eyes to see. How long had it been, could she even remember a time she felt… relief, peace, lightness… Hope. The last few months had been filled with turmoil and yet laced with healing honesty and promise. With all the sorrow and evil heaviness she had endured and seen, every millisecond of peace was like the first breath taken in too long. It filled her lungs and trickled warm life through her whole being.

When she was a child the only hope in the darkness was the dream of finding a place to belong… a home… a family. The hope that she was not just created for one thing, brokenness. Over time as age crept in she had learned that many precious lights in this world wandered this journey alone. That was just reality. If you were incredibly lucky you found one, one soul wondering… who was willing to see you for the reality… stripping away the exterior to see the awesome jewel you are within… they will fight… they will claw… they will love deeply if it meant they could remain near. Suffocating sorrow, pain, and loss are of the wisest of teachers. They remove the scales covering our sight, allowing us to see the smallest of moments like a precious work of art. Breathe… in and out…. In and out….

The music behind brought Liv back to reality. Their ascending notes only highlighting the sight before her. To most eyes Fin’s wedding would not be seen as a fairy tale spectacle but to those who knew and loved him, it fit them perfectly. A smile graced her face, she was happy for them. They had found one another, grasping on, among the thrashing waves of life. One of the lucky ones.

In a moment she felt a shift in the atmosphere around her. Time slowed... There was a gravitational pull coming near. Without turning around she knew the only soul who possessed that sway over her being. She felt his presence fall into her orbit, had he always fit there so perfectly? His warm heavy breath fanned the back of her neck.

“Liv….” That voice had both haunted her dreams and healed wounds. Had he always been her destiny? Had her waging war not been in vain? Had all those moments led up to this… prepared that scared broken little girl for this very moment in time? Had the moon and stars stopped for the honor of viewing one life collide with another? Exploding within the nebula of space, creating life.

She felt his hand lightly brush against hers igniting electricity causing ever hair to stand on end.  Liv turned around. Those eyes had her, held her. In them she saw 22 years-worth of fight, struggle, desperate love and loyalty. His eyes searched her face, read her eyes. A slight glittering smile reached his eyes before they passed the massage to his mouth.  For a few moments there was silence, he took her in… imprinting this woman, he has longed for, for longer than he could recall anymore. Being away from her for 12 years had just made them all the more difficult to ignore.  

“You look”…. Words seem to utterly escape him… “Beautiful.” He knew this woman before him- he knew her demons, her fears, her hopes, her strength, her wounds, her beauty- but in that moment, he felt he was seeing her clearly for the first time. Why had he allowed so much time to be lost?

Liv broke the pull of his eyes and her head fell. Hair cascading down around her like a protective shell. Had she ever felt more vulnerable? “Thank you.”

There was so much he wanted… needed to say. So many feelings and too few words. So in the moment he did the only thing that made sense. Elliot ran his hand down her arm- leaving a trail of fire in the wake of his touch- till it slid perfectly into the mold of her hand. She looked up at him, pulling her in deeper. He had her, there was no escape.

“Dance with me Liv.” Elliot guided her outside of the tent and away from prying eyes.

He looked down seeing where the concrete stopped and the sand began. A smile crept across Elliot’s face, his feet moved and he kicked off the shoes he took out of his closet once a year, pulled off his socks with them. Liv looked over at his discarded shoes, amused… she stepped out of her own. With her hand still in his they walked onto the shifting surface. Liv stopped for a moment wiggling her toes deeper into the warm grains. There was something about the beach that brough out the child in everyone. Amazed that each grain of sand at one time was a part of something living.  Liv looked up at Elliot with a smile.

“It’s nice to see that you know…” She looked at him confused… “A smile.” Without giving her a chance to think he guided her closer to the waves. Liv’s feet sunk into the sand and for an instant she lost her footing. Instinctively Elliot caught her. A laugh erupted from Liv.

“Well, we know one thing that hasn’t changed.” She smacked the side of his arm.

“If you get me wet Elliot Stabler I swear to God I am not above using defensive maneuvers and you will be going home with a wet suit.” Liv had a glint in her eyes, one he had seen so many times before. He smiled, pretending not to be amusing, “We will just have to see about that now won’t we.” They slid back into old patterns with such ease as if no time had transpired between them. In that moment he finally realized just how much he needed all of this back. He had missed his best friend.

They both stopped for a moment, taking in the dazzling display before them. Waves crashing in and then retreating in a delicate dance.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” She squeezed his hand. “Actually, this is all Noah has been talking about for the last month. He is at a friend’s house tonight. They have a telescope and planned a party around the “Super Pink Moon Event of the Century.” She laughed. “Last time I checked my phone I have already gotten about 40 pictures of the moon via text message from every angle possible, they are even convinced they may have seen a UFO.”

At that Elliot laughed, “You’re kidding me?” Liv smiled and shook her head, “Nope.”

With that a long silence hung between them again neither one of them acknowledging that their hands were still intertwined, like they were afraid if they lost contact the other would simply drift out into the vastness of space. Elliot signed, looking down at their connection. He pulled a little to get her attention. She looked at him with a smile, “You can barely hear the music from here.” Elliot looked over at the tent in the distance. “I think we will do just fine, besides the waves are giving off their own beat and I’d take that over music any day of the week.”

With that said she stepping into his embrace. One hand in his the other coming up to cup the back of his neck. His free hand sliding gently onto the curve of her side. Their eye contact never wavering. For a minute they both just stood there, reveling in just how good it felt to be near one another. Slowly Elliot began to move in rhythmic circles, pulling her with him. Soon it became clear that more contact was needed, wanted. He pulled her closer as her other hand came up around his neck. Both of Elliot’s hand snaked around her waist pulling her more firmly to him. He longed to be as close as he could get. Liv’s head dropped to his shoulder. Breathing him in deeply. Had she forgotten how safe it felt here? For what felt like an eternity they swayed… moved against each other, reveling in the sensation of loving and being loved. The soft cadence of the waves their only music.

Elliot nuzzled into the side of her head and whispered gently into her ear, “I meant what I said the other night you know, at the intervention.” With that Liv stopped moving, she pulled her head away just enough to look into his eyes. So close that their breath had become intermingled. “It may not have come out the way I had hoped, or when, but I meant every word Liv.” With that said Liv’s emotions caused her chin to move of its own accord and tears began to well up in her eyes. She closed her them, freeing the tears that had been pooling there. Liv rested her forehead against his, letting out a trembling breath. For a long moment they just stood there… listening to the rhythmic pattern of the waves and their own breathing.

When Liv felt her emotions wrangle themselves in, she said… “I know you did.”

Elliot pulled her into an embrace, squeezing her tightly to himself. “Let’s get you home, huh?” With a sigh she broke free of his secure embrace instantly missing the protective cocoon he had created around her. He looked down at her for a moment, and reached up to stroke a piece of errant hair behind her ear.

“Did you drive here?” She asked with an unsteady voice.

“No, I took an uber. I figured you wouldn’t mind me hitching a ride back with you.” Elliot smiled.

“Well, I can’t promise I won’t charge you for the gas and the milage, or make you listen to some ridiculously cheesy music.” Liv grinned easing the tension that lingered.  

“I guess Ill take my chances, if all else fails I can always jump ship and walk home.”

With that they both laughed. They walked hand in hand to her car parked to the far end of the event tent. Unwilling to lose the last remaining connection between them.

The ride home was uneventful. Liv did her best to keep her thoughts in line. There was a part of her that wanted to reciprocate his feelings and the other part that was simply unsure. Feeling she had tried for years to bury. There was still so much to work through. In the corners of her mind was a small pang of guilt, it had only been 6 months since Kathy’s death. Could she trust his emotions? There was also a part of Liv that wanted to protect herself as she knew deep down she could not endure losing him again and come out the other end… sane.

The car pulled to a stop outside of Elliot’s apartment. A silent tension hung in the air between them. “Would you walk with me a bit before you go?”

She was tired, but the other part of her simply longed for his presence. “Sure, I guess I can do that.”

They silently walked along the sidewalks of New York, the city that never slept no matter how late. “Your quiet, I wish you would tell me what your thinking Liv.”

With a sigh she contemplated her next words carefully. Did she have the strength to be honest or was it best to do what they did best, hide and avoid.

“Look Elliot, there has been so much at once I can’t keep my head on straight. A lot… happened when you were gone.”

He looked at her with tormented hooded eyes. “Fin… shared with me some of it but he wanted to let you share your own experiences.” Elliot shook his head, tears briming.  “I am sorry Liv. I can’t promise you, if I had been here, I would not have killed that son of a bitch for what he did to you.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t regret the fact I wasn’t here.”

Liv sighed and shook her head… “Elliot, I need you to hear me. My life is not your responsibility, of all the things I learned from this that is one of them. And I think I understand better why you felt you needed to leave, but that doesn’t change my experience of it. Of who you were in my life. Somehow… my whole life and existence had become wrapped up in you. You were my partner, my family, my best friend. I couldn’t remember a time in my life without you in it. I had to learn to live a different way without that… without you. Then you come back and your emotions are all over the place. I don’t know if I can trust them or you. Or even trust myself…” There was a silent pause.

“You just lost your wife Elliot. I just don’t know what to do with all of this. It’s not that I don’t… have feelings… I just don’t know if I can even trust them right now.”

Elliot was silent for along moment, wanting to get his words right. He could see his apartment coming back into view, somehow they had already made their way back.

“You’re right Liv.”

They both stopped at the front door of his apartment building. Elliot reached out and pulled Olivia into his embrace.

“Listen to me Liv, I am all over the place and you have every right to question me but that doesn’t mean the things I have felt have not been there between us for a long time. They didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. With all of this, it has just made it more glaringly obvious I… we have not been honest with each other. Look…”

Elliot pulled slightly away and his finger came up to slowly lift her chin. Her eyes locked with his.

“I don’t expect anything from you Liv. If you want space I’ll give you space. I just want a chance to make this right.”

With that said Liv’s chin again quivered. “I don’t want space Elliot.”

“Then what do you want?”

She looked up at him, reading his face, unsure how to articulate the balled-up mass of emotions and thoughts.

“I just want to know this is real, that you will get some help, that you won’t disappear again. I can’t continue on this roller-coaster.”

Elliot shook his head, “I hear you Liv.”

He pulled her into his arms again and she clung on desperately. Within a part of herself was this sense of shame, like some of the work she had done over the last 12 years was being quickly undone. While the rest of her felt she was finally home again.

Liv pulled away… allowing her forehead to find its way to his, if only to remain close for a bit longer.

In a voice above a whisper, she said… “I love you to.”

Elliot pulled his head from hers. Looking deeply into those dark brown eyes. Olivia’s hand gently stroked his cheek of their own accord.

He looked down to her lips and then back to those eyes again. She did not move; she did not pull away. Elliot leaned in slowly, allowing his nose to stroke the side of her own. Her breath fanned hot against his face. Liv’s mouth opened slightly but she did not move, she simply waited. Elliot’s mouth delicately caressed the softness of her top lip. Liv’s eyes shut involuntarily at the sensations of his mouth on her own. He stepped closer into her allowing his mouth to conform more fully to hers, the slightest of pressure. Liv angled here head to allow for more contact, grasping at the back of his neck. Before she knew it, he was pulling away when all she wanted was… more of him.

His sight rested on hers. The look in his eyes all too familiar took on a new and profound meaning. With hooded eyes she blinked slowly up at him, stroking his stubbled cheek. Nothing more needed to be said. It had not been a passionate frenzied kiss, but what it was… was honest. It was a promise of things to come. With a smile he rested his forehead to hers one more time. If only to hold on for a few more minutes.

“Wanna grab coffee tomorrow?”

She pulled away and smiled, “If you’re buying.”

Liv walked slowly to her car, every sound and sight muffled, as if she was walking through the haze of a dream. Each step coming as if in slow motion.

Their eyes met one last time above the car.

“You call me when you get home, alright, because if you don’t you will have the entire precinct at your doorstep in about 20 minutes.”

Without saying a word, she smiled and slid back into the driver’s side of the car. Elliot watched her slowly pull away until he could no longer see her car.

Far off in the distant, the moon and the stars followed, watching with bated breath. Rejoicing in one lost light finding its way to another, on this journey called life.

[josiecarioca]

On Soren’s love life and Audrey (also Lavinia).

In a recent post I asked you which of my fictional couples you’d like to read more about, and @artisticreptilequeen  and   @latitisoso  Soren x Audrey and @artisticreptilequeen mentioned wanting to know more about Soren´s dating/love life.

This is a question @snapescapades also asked me once, and it’s an interesting topic to go back to.

To quote my answer to @snapescapades :

(Soren) flirts with the same ease everybody else breathes. And he flirts with anyone, particularly if there’s something in it for him (the Slytherin runs deep). 

Soren is very much “in love with the idea of love”, he´s a musician, an opera singer, an avid reader,  he’s very attracted by the concept of love and the idea of all consuming passion as played on a stage or in the pages of a Gothic novel. That doesn´t necessarily translate into actual romantic relationships in life.

Soren has a lot of “romantic friendships” with friends of any gender, that is relationships which have the intensity of a romantic relationship but without the sexual aspect. He´s only been in a traditional romantic relantioship twice in his life and both were with girls he’d been friends with since childhood 

I think if I absolutely had to label Soren, I’d say he’s panromantic and demisexual. Which basically means he tends to “fall in love” waaaaaaaay more frequently than he feels sexual attraction/compelled to engage in sex. In fact, for somebody who basically walks around looking like the embodiment of sex appeal, Soren simply doesn´t have a lot of sex. 

He is a consumate performer, he enjoys dressing up (from Armani suits to gowns, and every theatre costume you can imagine) and he loves being the center of attention. Wether he´s on stage, or going undercover to gather intelligence for the ministry, or just out and about partying, there´s a huge chance Soren will flirt with everybody he finds interesting, make most of them fall in love with him, and be in love with at least a dozen of them for maybe a week or so. Actually having sex with any of these people? Not necessarily. (he did go through a “Casanova period” as a teenager, but that was short lived and mostly a misguided attempt at trying to be popular/finding an identity)

Soren had a grand total of TWO actual relationships, if you consider “relationship” as a combination of romatic feelings and sexual attraction. And both of them happened to be with women who were in his life since childhood, and with whom he developped an extremely strong emotional bond. 

The first was Audrey, a muggle girl who lived near Soren´s grandmother. Soren and Audrey were born just a few months apart (him in October 2005, her in the following March), and have basically known each other since. Audrey is the only child of a very strict, very religious, and emotionally abusive mother (her father died when Audrey was still a toddler), who frequents the same church as Soren´s grandmother, Sophia. Sophia sort of took Audrey under her wing (sensing Audrey´s home situation wasn´t ideal) and invited her over so often that Soren became the girl´s most frequent playmate (she wasn’t allowed many). Soren grew extremely attached to her over the years, in part because Audrey´s personality was a soothing influence to his own mercurial one, and in part because Soren felt like she needed him, somehow. Of course he was too young to understand how emotionally abusive Audrey’s mother was, but he did understand Audrey was a  “sad” girl and he wanted to help her be happier. Audrey and Soren never really left each other’s lives, and through the years they were there for each other whenever needed, even as her muggle life and his magical life should have naturally separated them.

The second deep emotional attachment of his life was Lavinia Llwynog, a fellow Slytherin. Lavinia is the child of an unhappy marriage between a Voldemort sympathizer and a young woman half his age. Lavinia´s father narrowly avoided being prosecuted for aiding Death Eaters, and entered a marriage with her mother because she was the daughter of an important Ministry official (the bride´s family got access to his fortune, and he got important connections in the ministry, a win for everybody involved except Lavinia´s mother who was extremely unhappy in the marriage). For that reason both Lavinia and her older half-brother Hadrian, were frequent targets of malicious gossip and bullying (mostly coming from Gryffindors). Much like what happened bewtween him and Audrey, Soren also grew attached to Lavinia because of a feeling of protectiveness towards her, initially. Lavinia and Soren would continue to be lifelong friends and often work together in professional projects (Lavinia would end up being Soren´s ministry contact). While Audrey is always in his life as an emotional and sometimes moral guiding light, Lavinia tends to be the one who helps him work his own ambitions and impulses into organized goals.

In Evelyn’s words, Soren has this “overwhelming neeed to make the people around him happy” and he’s profoundly idealistic (which is ironic given who his father is, but Severus often notes he’s “his mother’s son through and through”). It’ s the reason he became an artist, and also the reason he became an auror, Soren needs to feel needed, and he longs to love in a profound, life changing way, the kind of love that only happens once or twice in a lifetime. Hence why he has so many platonic “romances”, and the only two people he felt the need to have complete intimacy with, also happened to be those who, he felt brought out the best in him, as a friend as much as a romantic partner.

[nofacenocaseblog]

𝗗𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 #3:  NARCOPISOS Inc. /Barcelona narcopisos, a necessary evil

The 3rd episode of Dope Stories is the most in-depth investigation of the series, so much that it took me nearly 3 years to gain the trust and respect of my contacts and more importantly, to get relevant insights about the local drug market and its players to show, under a different angle than mainstream media, what’s happening behind the closed doors of the Ciutat Veilla’s narrow streets.

Playground 1 - Raval, Barcelona / 2018 / iPhone 

“Drugs are ruining our neighborhood! “,  “Narcopisos are disrupting the real estate market!” ,  “ We don’t feel safe!”… 

Those are the slogans or headlines you see in the media or written on banners hanging from people’s balconies.  

“Narcopisos are filthy and dangerous!”

But are they though?

FOREWORD

Before getting started, I wanted to write a few words about Barcelona. After living more than a decade in New York, my wife and I moved to Catalan capital for about 4 years.  After reading this article you might think that I m not particularly fond of the town and its inhabitants.  I won’t lie, we didn’t receive the warmest welcome, especially from Catalans. This said, the town and its vibe are unique and galvanizing.  Very much like Marseille (my hometown), Barcelona is an harbor city with the port/marina right in the center, meaning: lots of traffics, smuggling, immigration, corruption, drugs etc… There is always “something going on”, if you catch my drift.  Shady, nasty, funny, ugly, beautiful, vulgar,  the cast of “pirate-like” characters gravitating around the city center is fascinating.

Occupied - Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / Nikon 3200

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn toward the forbidden,  the danger, the illicit, the hidden, the bad...  To my eyes, “ugly” has always been more interesting than “beautiful”.  Barcelona is not a dangerous city but you need to keep your guard up: pick pockets roaming the subway,  gypsies asking for money on La Rambla (the city’s most touristic avenue) while releasing your back pocket from your wallet, junkies selling stolen goods or begging for change for their next fix #nextfixandchill , black people selling fake airmax on the Barcelonetta marina, drunken street fights in the early hours of the morning... Tragicomic scenes are unravelling before your eyes in an surreal backdrop: Gaudi’s most beautiful “psychedelic” buildings (Sagrafa Familia, casa pedrera, Palau Guell...) in a jungle of gothic buildings ending on a fisherman village overseeing a beautiful beachfront promenade ending with the native “star’chitect” Bofill’s famous W... 

Poolside - Barcelonetta, Barcelona / 2018 / iPhone

Ok, enough with the touristic tour, time to get real!

Stairway to Hell - Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / iPhone

Embark on a descend to the heroin inferno that became Raval.  From the fields of Afghanistan to the bloodstreams of Spain...

La Ruta [Spanish for “the route”]

19,414 Pakistanis live in Barcelona, 6,600 of them are established in the neighborhood: El Raval (1) meaning more than 30% of the total community.  El Raval has always been my favorite barrio in town.  With 47% of immigrants (2) , the mosaic of faces, cultures and shops you encounter is dazzling .  Going back to the Pakistani population, I used the word “established” for a specific reason: they actually own many of the businesses in Raval: barbershop, cheap bars and restaurants, wholesale shops, import/export businesses, money transfer services (Western Union, Moneygram), food and grocery shops... I’m not accusing here the Pakistani business owners of backing the drug traffic but they basically created a web of small businesses in a tight net community with their own language, making it hard for the authorities to see through this social fabric potentially sheltering illegal activities. 

Why the Pakistani population is subject to speculation and doubt from the local authorities?  The answer is simple: Afghanistan.  Afghanistan  is by far the biggest producer of opium in the world. According to the US military, 90% of the world's heroin is made from opium grown in Afghanistan. It makes up 95% of the market in Europe (3).  The country has been the leader in opium poppy production since 2001.  Based on the 2014 report from the UNODC (United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime), Afghanistan not only grow opium but also process heroin in several laboratory as well as morphine (easier to produce from raw opium by adding calcium oxide and ammonium chloride).  From Afghanistan, several routes are used to smuggle their prime commodities: the Balkan route has been the primary route but things are changing and the Southern route has become more and more used.  Afghanistan share 2,400km of border with Pakistan and over 50% of illicit afghan opiates are trafficked through Pakistan which enjoys a a strategic location making it a perfect dispatch zone with readily accessible by land, sea (Gwadar and Karachi seaport) and air ways .  

The same UNODC report also indicates that the majority (37%) of the heroin seized in Pakistan was en-route for Europe..

*** Read and/or download the full report here ***

By the way, let’s not forget that Barcelona is also one of the Camorra’s stronghold.  And with Russians and Albanian mafias also present on the territory, Spain -where no powerful local crime syndicate operates and laws on prostitution and gambling are “blurred” to say the least-  has become one of organize crime’s favorite playgrounds for money laundering, drug smuggling, human trafficking, gambling and prostitution... Nothing really happens here without their “green light”, but that’s another story (5)

Back to our Southern route, once the product reaches Barcelona, it becomes very hard to pin point. Narcotics coming through the Balkan route also ends up in Barcelona but in different “retailers”’ hands:  Romanian family-based clans, based mostly in Besos (a run-down project in the heart of Poblenou) and  occupying one single narcopisos in Raval (they have moved 3 times over the 4-year period of my “investigation”) but known to have the purest and most processed Caballo sold in town. 

El Caballo [Spanish for “the horse”, street name of heroin ]

[WARNING]  Most of the photographs of this post are uncensored, quite graphic and… of poor quality…. my bad, I took them.  But I had circumstances: hidden cellphone, no flash, illegal activities going on, indoor, with very little to no light…  Shots are not the best (no pun intended) but you’ll step right into the infamous narcopisos you’ve heard of or read about. And not once they’ve been searched and trashed by the police like you’ve seen in the press but while they are in full operation. Raw, those images might be quite shocking to some of the readers, but take the emotion out of he equation and you’ll come to realized that, for lack a better choice, narcopisos are a necessary evil.   My intention here is not to start a polemic nor come out as a provocateur but to shed light on a real issue, still happening, involving real people, slowly dying, failed by a syste unable -or unwilling- to help them.

Gears - Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / iPhone

El Raval

1989,  US superstar Keith Harring is in Barcelona for his exhibition on La Rambla.  After speaking with an old friend of him from New York living here for awhile, he decided to paint a mural, his way to to show his love for and connection with the town. The next day, Harring chose the wall in Plaça de Salvador Segui in Raval.  He was warned that the area was one of the most dangerous areas in town. Back then, in the 80’s the Spanish government had the genius idea to decriminalize the use, but not the supply, of hard drugs and did not implement any proper treatments to sustain this measure...  Spaniards have ignored the issue and it sparked a heroin addiction epidemic that saw HIV rates soar (2a).The artist was attracted to the neighborhood and decided it would offer the perfect canvas for his message about the dangers of drugs and AIDS. At first it was supposed to be a temporary mural but in the end, up to this day, you can still enjoy Harring’s mural behind the MACBA museum. Below is a photograph I took of what became now hot-spot for skateboarder and cool bars

Tricks - Raval, Barcelona / 2016 / Nikon 3200

Beside its bad reputation, Raval has always been a magnet for artists and “cool kids”, misfits and outcasts but more recently the new kid on the block is named gentrification… in other word: Fun is over.   Well… not quite yet.  In Barcelona, everything moves slowly, gentrification included. The result is a mix of fancy hotels, art galleries, designer boutiques... mixed with prostitutes and their lovely clientele, dealers, junkies, businessmen, families of tourists wandering the streets… a fascinating mix of characters with theatrical scenes playing before your eyes: hustlers trying to rip off tourists, white collars finding themselves buying bad cocaine from a kid in a narrow, sketchy alley… the show is in the street, but not only. 

The Narrows - Raval, Barcelona / 2016 / Nikon 3200

What businesses, in Barcelona, are open 24/7, have no vacancy, a steady stream of customers and a product that sells itself? The answer: Narcopisos Inc.

The phenomenon of the Narcopisos emerged in 2016 (a year after I moved to Barcelona) following Spain’s property crash.  Foreclosed or unsold apartments, owned by banks and investment funds were left emptied, abandoned, in a country in full housing crisis...  It wasn’t long before the vacant spaces started being squatted: some by respectable families, in need of a place to live, some by drug dealers using them as selling point and shooting gallery.  A place where you can get a cheap fix in a relatively clean room.

Ritual - Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / iPhone

Helped - Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / iPhone

Thanks to my various contacts, I had access to different types of narcopisos, but from crack to dope houses, most of them were operating the same way: - a cctv video surveillance in place at the street level or someone looking out for the cops. - a room with junkies to confuse police upon arrival and make it look like they are actually squatting the place - 1 to 3 dealers serving customers one a the time. - An exit back door (if available) in case the police knocks on the front door. - One or two rooms for users. - Hourly cleaning of the premises to make the place look “decent” and “squatted” in case of a bust - Little quantity of drugs at the time, no more than 10 grams of each. - Open 24/7 - Re-up every hour or so - Single use paraphernalia available to the users - In some cases, Narcan at hand (medicine used to reverse the effect of an OD).

Cleaning Session - Career d’en Road 22, Raval, Barcelona / 2016 / iPhone

My connections in the Pakistani community took time to build but  strengthen throughout the years to reached a level of trust where we came to split the bread at several occasions… no seriously, we actually got invited in their Halal “canteen” in Raval where only Pakistanis could enjoy their local cuisine, a unique experience… They also gave me access to two of their stash houses: located in legit apartments, in proper buildings, on the outskirt of Raval, close to Sant-Antoni, less prone to police check.  No users there, only wholesalers, dispatching heroin to “representatives” of each narcopisos at below retail-price: between 20 and 40 euros the gram depending on the quantity purchased. 

Going back to the narcopisos, some were run by junkies (where the product was often cut from the bash they were getting from the stash houses), some by pakistani or afghan immigrants, with decent quality product, some by Catalan families, living there for decades under stabilized rent and with their own connection and product of fluctuant quality.  Last but not least, one narcopiso was occupied by the Romanian clan mentioned earlier.  Below are some photos of one of their spot at 22 Carrer d’en Roig, later busted and walled by the Mossos d’esquadra (Catalan police)

Romanian at work - Career d’en Road 22, Raval, Barcelona / 2016 / iPhone

Boss - Career d’en Road 22, Raval, Barcelona / 2016 / iPhone

If narcopisos was selling both crack and heroin, two rooms were at the disposal of users, one for smoking their bottles or pipes and the other room to shoot up or smoke heroin on tiny pieces of foil.

Sterile hospital-like garbage disposal were available for discarding the used paraphernalia.

Bloodstream Hunt - Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / iPhone

#NextFixandChill - Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / iPhone

Everything is provided to avoid the spread of disease and the use of the drug in plain sight in the street therefore reduce public disorder.

Not that dealers became humanitarian all of a sudden, but kicking customers with their (illegal) purchase out in the street expose them to being ratted on or worst, having an overdose in plain sight attracting the police and paramedics... either way, it’s not good for business so narcopisos’ “managers” rather keep their clientele indoor until they’re done using and good to do.

Now, there is another type of business in Barcelona dealing with drug users and addiction: it’s called Centre de Dispensació de Metadona - Centre d'Atenció Primària Casc Antic (the methadone clinic in short....). 

* They’re not open 24/7 but rather in the morning only * It can take up to 2 weeks to see a doctor in order to enroll in a Methadone Maintenance Treatment -MMT (true story...when a single day can be the last one for a heroin addict living in the street) * Last but not least, since the doctors and nurses’ work schedule is way more important tthan their patients’ care, some centers give up 3 to 4 days worth of supply of methadone at once to heroin users so the health workers can have their days and weekends off. The result of this amazing system: the methadone is sold in the street by users so they can buy their heroin and/or in certain case, the methadone is saved up (for rainy days) and the patient keeps using heroin instead.  Yes, the patient: let’s not forget that those “filthy junkies” actually are patients (even if they’re hardly seen as such in those centers),  suffering from a disease called addiction, or substance abuse disorder if you prefer the american way of calling it, and in need of medical care but what can I say... old habits die hard (both way...). 

Patients taking methadone to treat opioid dependance must receive the medication under the supervision of a practitioner. After a period of stability (based on progress and proven, consistent compliance with the medication dosage) and only then, patients may be allowed to take methadone at home between program visits... but not in Barcelona.

Methadone substitution as a treatment of opioid addiction does not function as much to curb addiction as to redirect it and maintain dependency on legal channels. Methadone has been designed that way, as a lifetime treatment whereas alternative palliatives such as Buprenorphine are not even considered by doctors when those therapies would be more efficient in certain cases: with users who do not shoot the drug for example, or with users wishing to quiet and get sober... but let's be honest here, sobriety has never been the objective of those methadone programs.  The real goal of this public service is not to cure addiction, but to make sure junkies don’t use, steal, rob and/or commit act of violence in the streets to feed their habits

The patient here is not the users but the society.   Those centers aren’t trying to help the user quit his habit, but to make sure the society doesn’t suffer from it.  Good or bad, Narcopisos are curbing down the spread of diseases, cleaning up the streets from users as they offering temporary shelter to their customers and operate around the clock..  It seems to me that their function is almost... complementary if not necessary.

So before eradicating narcopisos from the face of Raval, let’s pause and look at the alternative: junkies buying and using drugs in the streets of the city center, in the worst sanitary condition possible with no regard for the residents around.

Mañana

So what’s next? Keeping those illegal activities going on? Certainly not.

But before jumping the gun and closing it all at once, better get ready for the alternative because drug addiction will not disappear with the narcopisos. In my last article, I speak about users stigmatization and how society still struggles to see addiction as a disease and not a will power issue, turning the blind eye to a sheer amount of studies and discoveries explaining how heroin addiction, over time, modify the pathway of your brain frontal lobe and affect your decisional power, making it hard -to not say impossible- to say “no”. 

Don’t take me wrong.  It would be naïve to think all users roaming the streets are here trying to quit and become their better self. Most of them have no intention to do so. I’m not here to judge nor take side.  But in order to find a solution to the narcopiso situation, I would like to introduce Barcelona to his neighbor: Portugal.

Portugal had one of the worst heroin epidemic in Europe back in the 90′s and after the failed many “US war on drug”-type of approaches. They finally shift approach and started treated drug addicts as patients who needed help, not as criminals” says Goulao, the architect of Portugal drug policy.  After the decriminalization and treatments, they planned to open “supervised drug consumption facilities” Naina Bajekal says in her 2018 article in the Time “where drug users can consume drugs in safer conditions with the assistance of trained staff. Such facilities have been running in Europe since 1986, when the first was opened in Berne, Switzerland.”(5)

The result? Evidence (6) shows these these type of sites save lives, reduce public disorder, and curb the spread of diseases.

Does that sound familiar? Yes, that's right, the first of the two businesses we spoke about: Narcopisos Inc.

Purgatory - Carrer d’en Roig 22, Raval, Barcelona / 2017 / iPhone

For No Face No Case: Dope Stories chapter 4, we’re going to Italy.  Don’t worry, it won’t be another mafia-related article explaining how the N’Drangheta and Camorra became the most powerful crime syndicates in the world, you can watch that on TV.  Called “Il Racconto dei Racconti”  (Tales of Tales in english), the article will keep it real, street style: short stories from North to South: Torino, Milano, Genoa, Roma, Napoli... Stay tuned for some dope stories on how drugs are sold, used and abused in the Renaissance country 

References (1) https://www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/featuresx/report-barcelona-pakistani-community/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Raval (3) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444 (4)https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2018/12/07/inenglish/1544171107_204329.html (5) https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization/ (6) https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/portugal-heroin-decriminalization/

[aion-rsa]

Rebecca: Leaving Hitchcock Behind for Something Darker

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This article contains spoilers for the film and book versions of Rebecca.

Leave it to Ben Wheatley to remake Alfred Hitchcock. The younger British filmmaking iconoclast has been nothing if not provocative with his filmography so far, which includes the disturbing horror-crime hybrid Kill List (2011), the serial killer black comedy Sightseers (2012), the psychedelic, very weird A Field in England (2014), and the unsettling dystopian nightmare, High-Rise (2015). But with Rebecca he takes on not just a classic Hitchcock film, but the master’s sole Best Picture winner. Why not, right?

We’re being facetious, of course. Wheatley’s version of Rebecca (now on Netflix) is not a remake of the 1940 film but a new adaptation of the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier on which it is based. Both films are mostly faithful to the book (with a couple of notable exceptions), but Wheatley and his screenwriters (Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse) coax a moral ambiguity and feminist twist out of du Maurier’s multi-layered Gothic romance that wasn’t permissible in the 1940 film.

“I mean, it’s the same conversation I have about every film,” Wheatley says when we ask him over Zoom what drew him to the project. “It’s like, ‘Oh it’s a comedy. The last one you did was a horror film,’ or, ‘Oh it’s a fashion movie and last thing you did was a family drama,’ or whatever. I try and choose stuff that’s at 90 degrees from the last thing I did every time, and I’ve been lucky enough to do that.”

Wheatley adds that reading the script led him to rethink his assumptions about the story and the Hitchcock film. “What attracted me to it was initially Jane Goldman’s script,” he explains. “When I read it, I was really surprised by it. I felt all the twists and laughed at all the right bits of it. And that surprised me doubly because I had seen the Hitchcock film and I’d read the book. So I thought that was really odd, that I would misremember it in that way. I talked to a few other people and they were kind of like, ‘Yeah, Rebecca. It’s just this beautiful romance, isn’t it?’ And I’m like, ‘No. That’s not the half of it.’”

It’s fair to say that Rebecca deceptively starts off as a “beautiful romance.” In the new film–as in the book and the 1940 version–the main character is an unnamed young woman (played now by Lily James), who is working as a personal assistant to a wealthy older American (Ann Dowd) on holiday. In Monte Carlo, the young woman meets Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), also rich, who is quite dashing and recently widowed.

The two strike up a whirlwind courtship that results in de Winter whisking the young woman back to his ancestral estate, Manderley, as the new Mrs. de Winter. But once ensconced there, she discovers that the house is permeated with the lingering presence of her predecessor, Rebecca, who still commands the unhealthy loyalty of the mansion’s housekeeper, the sinister Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas). It is here that Rebecca pivots from romance to thriller, with the plot turns and psychological subtexts piling up like the waves crashing at the bottom of the treacherous cliff upon which Manderley sits.

“When I reread [the book], I just imagined du Maurier had written Rebecca as a dare or something,” says Wheatley. “That it was kind of, ‘You like romantic fiction? Well, I’ll write a book that will stop you reading romantic fiction forever. I’ll take the tropes of it, which is the widower and the holiday romance, and the rags to riches, and then I’ll really smash it and rub your nose in it.’ I loved it.”

In the book and both versions of the film, it’s revealed that Rebecca was not the perfect wife and society hostess that she was reputed to be. In fact, she was a cruel, selfish woman who claimed to Maxim on the night of her death that she was pregnant with another man’s child and would force Maxim to raise it as his own, a revelation that leads her tormented husband to shoot her dead. He disposes of her body at sea, but when the corpse washes up a year later, Maxim reveals the truth to his new wife.

Hitchcock’s film, due to the moral decrees of the Hays Production Code that was in existence at the time, had to change Rebecca’s death to a suicide since movies were not allowed to show murderers going unpunished. Under no such constraints, Wheatley takes his Rebecca a step further: The new Mrs. de Winter evolves into a protector of her husband, taking action to clear his name while at the same time fully aware that she is complicit in the cover-up of a murder.

“The moral structure of it is very different because of the things that were missing from the ’40s adaptation due to the Hays Code,” says Wheatley. “So the actual heart of the book is the idea that Maxim de Winter has murdered his wife and that you then side with de Winter and the second Mrs. de Winter as an audience member, and basically root for them to win throughout the rest of the story–which is utterly despicable. But I thought that that felt like a good reason to revisit it.”

His reasons to approach the source material aside, Wheatley knew he might touch some kind of third rail of cinema by taking on a story that the general public remembers as a Hitchcock masterpiece (it didn’t work out too well for Gus van Sant and his 1998 remake of Psycho, which like the original was also based on a novel). Getting all that noise out of his head was the first step Wheatley took.

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“Right at the beginning of the process I went, ‘Oh, right. I’m going to get a kicking for this,’” he says with a laugh. “And then I didn’t think about it anymore and I made the film. I put it right to the back of my head.” But the subject inevitably came up as the director began promoting the film. “I saw the reviews [and it was like] ‘Oh my God. It’s all about Hitchcock.’ But that’s inevitable. It’s fine. The audience that’s there for this movie is a much bigger audience than just the audience of people who’ve seen that version of it.”

Wheatley says he’s less concerned with his movie being compared to Hitchcock’s than feeling as if he did justice to the novel. “I had a lot of questions about filling the shoes of Hitchcock and all this,” he remarks. “It really isn’t about that. It’s filling the shoes of du Maurier. That’s the challenge and the fear of taking a book that is so beloved and so central within a culture in lots of ways and so influential. To take that and balls that up is the problem. The other adaptation is done and everyone loves it. There’s going to be no shifting of that from the pedestal of cinema history by anything I did.”

Of course Wheatley wasn’t the only one dealing with the ghosts of adaptations past. His trio of leads–James, Hammer, and Thomas–took on characters first embodied on the screen by Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, and Dame Judith Anderson.

“With Lily, we talked a lot about the agency of the character,” says Wheatley when asked how he approached each actor about their roles. “But there’s the aspect of the book where you don’t know if you believe what the first-person narrative is saying. She says she’s very weak, but at the same time her actions are strong. So is she slightly self-serving in how she talks about herself? And is the whole truth there?”

He continues, “That’s the craft, I think, of Lily James’ performance, trying to be nervous and terrified, but also not capsizing the movie by being irritating or being too confident or strong.”

Kerry Brown / Netflix

As for Hammer’s portrayal of the equally enigmatic Maxim de Winter, “It was more the other way around of taking someone from the position of being completely in control and being like a matinee idol and then just destroying them over the period of the movie,” Wheatley says. “But then as usual, the film is not shot in chronological order. So it’s an absolute nightmare to track all those kinds of performances. But that’s basically what we talked about a lot.”

When it came to casting Mrs. Danvers, perhaps the most iconic of the story’s three leads, Wheatley says he was “totally” enraptured with the idea of the great Kristin Scott Thomas taking on the part. “This version of it is a kind of more sympathetic Danvers,” he reveals. “I think that had come out of reading it and going, ‘I feel like she’s the moral center of it in many ways.’ There was a lot of quite complicated emotional stuff that she had to do–to go from being stern to being vulnerable, from beat to beat to beat. And I think that it took someone of her kind of pedigree to be able to do that.”

Whether viewers come to the new Rebecca with their own memories of the book or the original movie, or tune into Wheatley’s version with no preconceptions in mind, the director thinks that a new version of the story, some 82 years after the book was first published and 80 since the release of Hitchcock’s film, could have a different impact on new generations of viewers experiencing it for the first time.

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“I think every film that you make is putting the film through your experience of the moment,” he explains. “So I think that there are things that are happening now which become more pertinent, and there’s also general universal truths. The idea of, what is your history of your own partner? How do you deal with the jealousy of that and the obsession? What would you do in this situation? How do you compete with ex-partners? That kind of stuff. It’s also a tale of privilege, of someone who can float through life because they’re good-looking and rich, and they do what they like and get away with murder.”

Rebecca is streaming now on Netflix.

The post Rebecca: Leaving Hitchcock Behind for Something Darker appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[hannahstarshade]

Pride month has come and gone, but we are still here

Gif credit: @bisexualdonatello

I don’t talk about it very often (mostly because I am not officially out) but I’m bisexual. I am attracted to those who identify as my own gender (female) and those who identify as an opposing gender. It has taken a few years of rationalizing and actually sitting with myself to come to accept this. In fact, very recently I had contemplated the legitimacy of my sexuality again. This is due to a few things: I have never had a relationship of any kind, I live in a conservative community, and I am still learning about the terminology and culture that comes from the LGBTQA+ community as a whole. Popular media—visual media specifically—has been a great influence in this regard. The older I got, the more access I had. The more access I had, the more I was able to learn. I grew to have a better understanding of the world around me and could explain how and why the media I consumed resonated with me personally. It took a while, but this is how I got here:

Bi Awakening (Film)

It was the late 00′s when I saw Van Helsing for the first time. I was immediately hooked. It has all the things I loved and still love to this day: monsters, a gothic aesthetic, an anti-hero with a heart of gold, bad-ass women who are immaculately dressed and fight hard, and a tragic ending. I had always been interested in Hugh Jackman ever since I watched him play Wolverine in the X-Men films. This character was what did it for me. Van Helsing was brave yet troubled. He had a knack for fighting evil and finding good where others couldn’t see it. This is a character I would daydream about going on long adventures around the world with. After watching the movie several times, my eyes also followed Anna Valerious, played by Kate Beckinsale. She was determined and a fighter through and through. Her skills and her dedication to her family drew me in. I wanted to hug her and fight monsters by her side. Oh, and did I mention they were both highly attractive? Because they are, just look at them, oh my gosh!! I took a while, but I finally admitted to myself that I like both men and women. Despite never acting on these feelings, I felt content with the conclusion I’d come to. This went on for a few years. It wasn’t until this year that I started questioning it all again.

Bi Confusion (YouTube)

I’ve watched my fair share of ContraPoints videos. In her video Shame, Natalie explains how she came to the conclusion that she is a lesbian. Throughout the video she explains how she was in a heterosexual relationship that, while loving and nice, was not fulfilling. She brings up the topic of compulsory heterosexuality, the feelings some women experience due to the norms of our society. I went in search of the “Am I a Lesbian” article mentioned in the video and read through the whole thing in one sitting. I came away from it feeling like I had unlocked some secret. Maybe I had been confused and conditioned all this time. Often my fantasies with women are more detailed and complex than my fantasies with men. That must mean I'd been avoiding one and embracing the other, right? And since I’ve never been in any kind of relationship, maybe I’d just been conditioned to include men in the equation from the start and couldn’t let it go? I had been entertaining a man I’d met online and had felt the relationship was forced on my end. Maybe I’m just not into men? After much consideration, I decided to give the lesbian label a try. That sounds horrible in retrospect, but I did it. I said the word to myself in private. I thought about spending my life pursuing only women. I excluding men from my fantasies. That didn’t last long. It just didn’t fit me. I learned through that exercise that my feelings for one gender don’t outweigh my feelings for another gender. The reason my fantasies vary is because of limited experience, not lack of interest. The reason I cut things off with the guy I’d been speaking with wasn’t because I was a lesbian, but because we just worked better as friends. I wasn’t a lesbian. I had just overthought my feelings. I’m attracted to people, not just their genders.

Bi Confirmation (Video Games)

My first exposure to Resident Evil was through several LP’s on YouTube. I have managed to play through a few games myself, though. The past few years have been really good for the Resident Evil franchise, the most noteworthy additions being the remake editions of Resident Evil 2 & 3. Leon’s a bad-ass super cop who just wants to do the right thing. Claire is an amazing person who cares so much about the people closest to her. Jill’s the most OP character in Resident Evil and just wants to save the world. Carlos is a genuinely good guy who wants to help. These people are heroic, bad-ass, and hot? Excuse me, I need a minute...Basically, I want to be these characters and be with them. I can confidently say that I am bisexual. There are other fictional characters I can point to that I would say affirm my sexuality—Casey Jones and April O’Neil from TMNT, Diana Prince and Steve Trevor from Wonder Woman, Markus from Detroit: Become Human, Harley Quinn from Birds of Prey—but Resident Evil has the most characters I love in a single franchise. When I was questioning my sexuality, I looked at these video game characters I had come to like and realized there was no denying myself. It’s okay to like both. Both is good.

Bi Acceptance (TikTok)

In conclusion, sexuality is weird. You might think you’re a young straight when all of a sudden you realize you find both a dashing monster hunter and a beautiful cursed princess attractive. Then, years later, you might watch a YouTube video that has you questioning yourself all over again, only to realize you are who you though you were after playing a game about fighting zombies. Basically, visual media helped me discover myself. But that’s not the end of it. I’ve found myself on TikTok a lot since the pandemic started. It’s nice seeing people in the LGBTQA+ community having fun and making the most of a shitty situation. I rediscovered Sarah Schauer, which was a nice surprise. Come to find out, she’s bisexual too. Seeing this community band together in times like these has been a heartening experience. So many positive vibes. There may be people out there who say you should only like one or another, or that being in a heterosexual relationship diminishes your sexuality, but those people are wrong. The bottom line is that you cannot tailor how you feel to fit the expectations of others. This post is kind of weird and out of nowhere, and a little very self centered, but I had to get this off my chest. This will likely never be read by anyone. However, if you are reading this and you have had a similarly weird experience, know that you are not alone. You may have just realized your feelings, you may have known for a long time, or you may still be trying to figure things out. That’s okay. Your feelings are valid. Your experience is valid. You are valid.

TL;DR Whenever I am questioning my sexuality I remember Resident Evil and I am at peace. Also through all this I’ve learned I have a type: bad-ass hero with a kind heart.

[tshepiso-reads-books]

Prepare For a Rant | Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray

Started: February 10th, 2020

Finished: February 14th, 2020

I have a lot of thoughts about Lair of Dreams [Goodreads] and most of them are negative. It took me what felt like several lightyears to finish this book and the reading experience sapped the joy of reading out of me for a while. This is going to be a long one folks, so buckle in. Before we jump into things I’d like to warn that this is going to be a spoilerific review so heed my warning before you jump in.

Lair of Dreams takes place shortly after the events of the first book in this series The Diviners. The city is on the cusp of an all-out outbreak as more and more cases of Sleeping Sickness, a mysterious illness that causes the afflicted to fall asleep and never wake up again, are cropping up in Chinatown. While the gang goes on wildly different adventures in this book they all ultimately come together to solve the mystery of the sleeping sickness.

On Character

My biggest problem with this book is the characters. They’re selfish, self-centered, naïve and don’t understand that actions hurt others. This is most evident in Evie, but every character in the book has moments of this scattered throughout the novel. However,  I feel uncomfortable throwing this fact as a criticism of the book because all of these characteristics are fundamental character traits of teenagers and I find it obtuse to criticize a young adult novel for accurately writing teenaged protagonists. But I can’t divorce this understanding from how absolutely infuriating I found so many moments in this book.

I will say just because our protagonists, and especially Evie, were annoying doesn’t mean they didn’t have depth. Libba Bray is a good writer and fully fleshed out every character in this book mellowing some of my frustrations with them. The perfect example of this is Sam Lloyd. The bad boy character archetype has been done to death in YA, but Sam stands apart from the crowd of tousled haired edge-lords by having a tragic backstory with legitimate weight to it. His search for his mother never felt like an afterthought or quirk. I genuinely felt his deep desire to find the truth and it made him well rounded. The same could be said about all the other characters in the story.

Evie was the only character I truly hated while reading this book. I understand the reason why Evie is the way she is and how her past influenced her bad behavior. But understanding that her PTSD and trauma are the cause of her actions was never enough to get me to sympathize with her. Every single character in this book has been through just as much if not more than she has and they never went as far as to abandon and betray their friends as consistently as Evie did. I could never get behind Evie, her selfishness went above and beyond teenaged immaturity and her inability to own up to her mistakes and change angered me.

Now on to Jericho Jones, my second least favorite character in this book. I genuinely liked Jericho in The Diviners, but his behavior in this book was appalling. I will admit he had the misfortune of falling into one of my least favorite tropes out there: “The Monster Inside Me“ [TV Tropes]. However, his particular brand of self-loathing went further than that. At the end of The Diviners Jericho was rejected by Evie causing a cycle of self-pity that verged on incel behavior. His constant monologuing about how “girls just don’t like guys him” was eye-roll inducing and his hurry to lash out at others because a girl he liked rejected him was gross. His actions depict a man who sees Evie as a prize rather than a human being.

Another problem I had with this book is how central protagonists from The Diviners were sidelined in the novel. It’s almost impossible in a reasonably sized book to follow eight different characters and give them all their due. The characters I feel most negatively effected by Bray’s shift in focus to new POVs were Memphis, Theta and Mabel. It would take over 500 more words to deep dive into my specific thoughts on each of their character arcs so in summation: these three were barely given anything to do and their character arcs didn’t move forward in any significant way. Mabel was given the harshest treatment of all because she had literally nothing to do in this book but pine after a guy who didn’t like her. No other character conflict she had from the previous book in this series was even mentioned or explored.

On Romance

Possibly my least favorite element in this book was its romantic subplot. So much page time was dedicated to it that it could reasonably be dubbed the main plot So here’s the rundown:

Mabel likes Jericho, but Jericho likes Evie.

Evie thinks she likes Jericho but doesn’t want to date him because of girl code.

Evie fake dates Sam and they both start catching feelings.

Jericho goes out with Mabel even though he knows that Mabel likes him and he still has feelings for Evie.

This is the kind of conflict I hate in books. This love triangle was so convoluted and contrived. It did nothing but make me hate Evie and Jericho, and I found none of the romantic tension exciting because the dynamics explored were built on a foundation of miscommunication and lies of omission.

On Representation

While I was pleasantly surprised by the anti-racism in The Diviners I was uncomfortable by the way some of the themes of diversity were explored in this book. In Lair of Dreams, we are introduced to Ling Chang a half Chinese girl with a recent case of infantile paralysis causing her to wear leg braces. She has a lot of self-hatred in regard to her disability. This trope while cliche wasn’t my problem, my problem was how this internal conflict is resolved. Another one of our protagonists, Henry, finds out about her disability and all her self loathing is resolved by him telling her she should love herself. This interaction is that it places Ling’s self-worth in the hands of an able-bodied person rather than focusing this her arc on self-acceptance. As an able-bodied person, I don’t want to cry ableism without shouting out actual disabled people’s voices on the matter so I would highly encourage you to seek out these voices. I’ve yet to encounter an ownvoices reviewer’s thought on Ling’s arc (believe me I looked) and this observation should in no way take away anything from disabled people who appreciated Bray’s writing.

There is so much that Bray does right when it comes to diversity and representation. I find her honest depictions of America’s ugly history timely and relevant and I admire her willingness to starkly show anti-semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, police brutality of the time. She clearly parallels America’s history with America’s present reminding you not so subtly that these toxic ideas still exist. I will warn readers that Bray graphically depicts racist imagery and I found the descriptive scenes of lynch mobs and the like very upsetting so be prepared for that.

One aspect of Bray’s depiction of American society I really liked was her pointed observation of the link between Evangelical Christianity and racism and xenophobia. I also liked how she depicted the ways people use American Exceptionalism (the idea that Americans are inherently superior to all others and that their position as a dominant world power is a God-given right rather than luck and historic subjugation) as a justification for bigotry and all detractors of this ideology is consistently labeled as anti-American by the people who benefit from bigotry.

On Everything Else

I will say Lair of Dreams was fairly well-plotted. Though the mystery element of this book very much felt like a subplot with the character conflicts taking center stage. While I didn’t find the sleeping sickness as outright terrifying as Naughty John in the first book Bray is good at building tension and suspense and the final climactic scene did get my heart racing. Bray’s ability to capture a creepy gothic atmosphere shines in this book and I loved her interlude chapters that showed brief snippets of our characters and the city itself.

Stars 🌟🌟🌟

I don’t know where I stand with this series. I found so much of the reading experience frustrating, but I am still invested in so many of the characters in the series and I would like to see how the final mystery unfolds. We’ll see if I continue on with the series because right now I don’t know.

[storyinmypocket]

Hey so this is going into its own post because recent posts have gotten me thinking, and I didn’t want to derail with my only tangentially related school shooting thoughts.

See, I was in high school when Columbine happened. It was my junior year, and I was already living with a modified school schedule because of severe depression and suicidal ideation and chronic illness. I came home from school that day, and the shooting was all anyone was talking about. School shootings were pretty new in the public consciousness at the time, so it was huge and terrifying, and all the news was about how:

1) The shooters were goth (they weren’t). 2) They listened to Marilyn Manson (despite common opinion this is unrelated to point 1, and also they didn’t). 3) OBVIOUSLY WE NEED TO STOP THE SPOOKY KIDS BEFORE THEY GO ON A MURDER SPREE.

Seriously, everyone came down hard on the “gothic lifestyle”, because it’s easier to target weird depressed kids than to dig into why angry white boys had access to that kind of weaponry. Nothing changes.

And there I was, who hadn’t worn non-black clothes to school since freshman year, who was morbid af and had a dark sense of humor and was going through pretty severe mental health issues. And I was queer. And I was ambiguously brown, though it would be another two and half years before that became another red flag when people looked at me.

I didn’t go to school the next day, because I knew how the backlash would play out, and my mom supported me in staying home. I was completely right about basically everything.

After missing one day of school, I came back to find that the administrators had called in literally every one of the weird kids and interrogated them. There were mass searches. There were cops everywhere. And what seemed like the entire student body was convinced I’d been expelled after someone found a “kill list” in my car. The car I didn’t own, to go with the driver’s license I still don’t have.

I lost track of how many people asked me, “Didn’t you get expelled?” which became my favorite question right up there with the half-joking, half-afraid, “Are you going to shoot us?”

We had a cop stationed at our school after that, and I could feel him watching me.

My senior year, after I’d been vocal about my plans to bring a girl I liked to prom, and when the school had instituted a uniform as a direct response to the idea that goth kids might flip out and kill some people (because being forced to wear khaki ever made any goth hate the world any less?)... They told me that, despite my chronic health issues and my mountain of legit doctor’s notes, I was going to have to repeat the year due to missing too many days, excellent grades be damned.

Their written policy was no more than eight unexcused absences in a year, or a student could be held back. I had two. One was the day after Columbine.

“I think it’s better if I just drop out,” I said, because like fucking hell was I going to stick around to be treated like a criminal for one more goddamn year.

“I think that’s a good idea,” said the principal, the same man who had argued so vehemently against me being homeschooled two years before, when going to school every day literally made me want to die, but hey, those amazing grades made their stats look good!

And that’s how the deaths of twelve kids and one teacher (which seems like such a small number now, and that breaks my goddamn heart) were used against a marginalized kid to push them out of the system that was supposed to be helping them. And I’m pretty fucking sure I wasn’t the only one.

I’m not trying to say being discriminated against because you dress weird is on par with being discriminated against for things you can’t change. I’ve experienced both, and fuck yeah, there’s a difference. I AM trying to say what several other people are saying more eloquently than I can: the way we respond to these tragedies is profoundly fucked up and wrong. I’m just coming at it from a different angle.

Because I read people I love and care about taking it for granted that they’ll be in a mass shooting someday. And it hurts, and I want to keep them safe. But I’m not scared of the shooters. I’m scared of the cops who’ll decide I’m a suspect and not a victim. I’m scared of bleeding out on the ground while the cops stand over me and don’t stop whoever’s actually shooting people.

This is nothing compared to what it’s like to be Black or Muslim in the current political climate. Or more obviously Latine than I am, for that matter. In most cases, if I really have to, I can pass. Pass for white, for straight, for neurotypical.

But no one should have to center their life around hiding everything that matters so they won’t be a target.

[antiquery]

some Thoughts after finishing lovecraft’s collected works:

sweet jesus christ, he influenced everything. like, i’m looking at a ton of the weird fiction i read/watched as a kid, and i can pick out a solid 70% of it that was definitively influenced by lovecraft. the whole mythology of the x files is probably the most egregious example, but even up to stuff i’ve gotten into more recently! there are a ton of nods to the mythos in george r.r. martin’s worldbuilding (from minor place names to the whole greyjoy-apocalypse deal), and the duffer brothers recently mentioned that the mind flayer in stranger things was specifically inspired by lovecraftian horror (i’d be willing to put money on “shadow out of time” specifically). it’s really awesome going back and noticing that all lovecraft’s work was so formative in so much of the horror/sci-fi/fantasy triad, stuff that i’ve loved since i was a kid— it’s fascinating to look at the origins of that.

speaking of origins: i’ve talked before about how big of an influence i think the great war was on lovecraft’s work (specifically the dreamlands stories), but it bears repeating. i do reception studies, so when i read a text my first instinct is to put it in its historical and literary context, try and pick out what events/other texts shaped it and why. from that perspective, lovecraft is really fun to read, especially ‘cause my research right now focuses on nativism and literary reception in ‘20s america. it’s so cool to see the conclusions i’ve already come to and written on being reinforced in work i’ve never seen before.

aaaaand speaking of historical context, let’s talk about the problem that faces every critical reader of lovecraft: bigotry. no matter how interesting his ideas or well-written his stories are, there’s always that nasty undercurrent, which is omnipresent even in his best work because so much of how lovecraft characterizes his worldbuilding comes from a place of deep-rooted xenophobia. there’s always the juxtaposition of wonder at the strange and foreign and unknown, and a desire to understand it, with this usually-unexamined fear of the Other— whether that other is actual aliens, or just people who don’t speak, look, or talk like your average anglo-saxon upper-class new englander. and that’s not even getting into the misogynistic element of his work, which admittedly is less prominent than the racism/classism/general xenophobia, and manifests itself more as “let’s not write about women ever” than anything else (”the thing on the doorstep” made me glad that this was generally the case).

i don’t honestly think that i’ve ever read anyone who manages to put purple prose to better use. lovecraft’s best stories take the inherent surreality that comes with superfluous language like that and actually use it to complement the (usually surreal, often melodramatic and camp) nature of the narrative. it’s a stark contrast to conventional wisdom, but in a weird, counterintuitive way, it works really well. in certain settings, that is— that kind of language might be fine for stories set in the dreamlands or an ancient antarctic civilization or in a necromancer’s underground new england lair, because all those places have an inherent strangeness that dovetails really well with crazy prose; but it falls apart when you’re trying to, i don’t know, write southern gothic. (there’s a reason flannery o’connor, whose style is very simple and clear and matter-of-fact, is considered one of the great masters of that genre.)

also language related: lovecraft should be restrained, forcibly if necessary, from writing dialect. i was cringing through a good fourth of “the shadow over innsmouth”

the whole concept of cosmic horror, in all its myriads of aspects and implications, is one that really resonates with me— especially the whole “things man was not meant to know” deal. i’m fascinated by the inherent tension between humankind’s desire for knowledge and the fact that there are in the world certain things that you would really, really be better off not knowing (just ask danforth, or peaslee, or crawford tillinghast, or dr willett— or, like, any other protagonist of any lovecraft story, ever). i love that, i think that’s so cool. 

also, i adore the creepy-old-book trope. sue me. 

finally, as many issues as lovecraft has, there is an awesome receptional tradition around his work, full of people taking the best aspects of his stories, pulling them apart, and putting them back together— sometimes to examine their inherent biases, sometimes to center people whose stories lovecraft never would have dreamed of telling, sometimes to examine glossed-over (but still fascinating or problematic or both) aspects of the original work. now that i’ve finished reading the source material, i’m really excited (as a student of literary reception, as someone who liked that source material a lot, and just as someone who loves a good horror story) to get into that.

[retro-friki]

New Utena manga: recap + analysis

(Our favorite gal-pals are back! Although we don’t see much of them)

First things first: Yes, there’s a new Utena manga and the escalation is available thanks to the people from Ohtori.nu. You can check it out here: (X)

Second important thing: In this post I’ll be writing about the plot in general and trying to analyze what’s going on there, if you don’t like spoilers I recommend reading the manga first and then maybe skipping to the analysis part of this writing.

Without further ado let’s recap this surrealist little story I like to call:

“Touga and Saionji’s Weird Gay Adventure”

It’s been 20 years and now Touga and Saionji are rival art dealers. It seems like Touga never really grew past his playboy phase and Saionji keeps suffering for his unrequited love towards his childhood friend.

(Just watch how salty he is)

One day they receive a mysterious leter urging them to go to their old school in order to gain “The Revolution”. Turns out “The Revolution” is a painting made by their former chairman (Akio) who committed suicide 20 years ago, however, a great amount of art pieces supposedly belonging to Akio had been discovered recently and are already being confiscated for taxation purposes, so Touga and Saionji decide to sneak in Ohtori to get “The Revolution” before anyone else.

Both men make a truce and team up to look for the painting, the problem is that neither of them haven’t seen “The Revolution” before, they only know that it’s a portrait of the chairman’s younger sister (Anthy). While talking about that, the ghost of Akio appears and asks them to protect the painting because someone’s trying to take it away from him. In exchange he’ll give them a will stipulating that Touga and Saionji are the legal heirs of all his possessions (I don’t think a will signed by a ghost has any legal validation, but whatever). Before Akio can disclose the thief’s identity he gets impaled by a sword that comes out of nowhere.

And it’s awesome.

The rose in the sword’s hilt looks familiar to Touga, but before he can remember anything, he and Saionji are whisked away into a  strange dream/memory. They are taken back to that fateful day of their childhood where both of them witnessed a catastrophe that took many lives. That same day, they found a little girl lying on a coffin who had lost her parents in that event (Utena). At first she tells them that life is unreliable, Touga agrees with her. However, she suddenly changes her mind and decides to keep up living and become a prince in order to rescue another girl who is also suffering.

(preciousbabyutena.jpg)

The dream/memory ends and the two men get back to Ohtori and realize that they had the same visions. Saionji looks at Touga’s phone and finds out that his friend is still buying paintings from a man that has been repeatedly proven to be a pedophile. Saionji being a decent human being calls out Touga on that, but Touga really doesn’t care about “morality” because beautiful art is eternal and therefore more important that human lives.

They start fighting with swords and get transported to the Dueling Arena, where they conclude that they have no choice but to keep fighting,ok...

Look, I get the impression that they want to put Touga like some kind of tragic antihero that was deeply affected by the catastrophe but I can’t really buy it. Specially considering that in this timeline Utena and Saionji went through the exact same thing and reached different conclusions.

Anyway, Touga’s being all cynic and gothic until Utena is prompted to literally descend from the skies to stop this nonsense. It’s then revealed that she was the one that called them back to Ohtori. She grants Touga the power to revolutionize the world under the form of her ring and sword. Why would she do that to Touga of all people? She probably thought he was the most noble man on Earth after listening that he’s not even sorry for the things he has done. Sure. (/sarcasm) (there’s actually an explanation, but more on that later).

Touga and Saionji get back to Ohtori and use Utena’s sword to open an entrance to Akio’s secret room where they finally find “The Revolution” (a nude painting of Anthy because the universe is unfair). Akio appears once again and tries to attack Touga but Saionji takes the hit. Touga asks Utena to grant him some of her princely power and manages to kill Akio with the sword.

I will never get tired of watching Akio getting stabbed repeatedly.

Once the danger is gone, the two men notice that the painting has changed and now it shows Utena and Anthy together. The painting vanishes and Touga explains that they may have indirectly helped Utena in her quest to rescue Anthy. As they walk away arm in arm, Touga and Saionji discover that maybe, the real treasure was the friendship they regained along the way (or maybe something more than friendship).

II Ok, So What’s Really Going On Here?

As happens with anything concerning to “Utena” this story also gives more questions than answers and it’s open to many interpretations. So far I’ve come to three different conclusions in order to answer all the questions raised by the story in a more or less satisfactory manner (for me, at least). These are the following:

1. This manga is an AU and it’s not related to the original anime

2. It’s all a quick reinterpretation of the events of the anime from Touga and Akio's P.O.V

3. The story is actually about how Touga got the power to revolutionize the world

Allow me to explain myself:

1. This manga is an AU

Seeing this manga as a story of its own that’s meant to be read without comparing it directly to the anime will help us avoid lots of frustrating questions like: Why is Akio a painter if that only happened in the movie (which can also be seen as an AU)? Why doesn’t Touga show any signs of the maturity that he seemed to be about to gain at the end of the anime? (in other words: Why is he still such a huge jerk?) Why is Utena a ghost, a prince or supernatural being now? Where’s everybody else? And most importantly: Since when Saionji’s been interested in art? Reading the story as an alternate universe where things went differently for the characters makes more sense. Besides there’s evidence that this might be the case.

Although it’s true that Touga and Saionji were Student Council members and everything implies that they also dueled on this continuity theirs and Utena’s backstory is completely different. Let’s remember that when the two boys met Utena for the first time in the anime, her parents had died in an accident, there wasn’t any catastrophe that killed lots of people. Besides, this manga seems to imply that Nanami died too, which might be the reason why this version of Touga is disillusioned with life.

2. The story is a quick reinterpretation of Utena’s story from Touga and Akio's P.O.V

In this manga we see Utena deciding to become a prince to save Anthy and ultimately achieving her goal. One might think that there was no need for Touga and Saionji to be there. In fact I don’t understand why did Utena need their help unless she couldn’t do anything once she became a prince and she needed to pass her powers to a human or maybe she was using them to distract Akio while she performed the theft of the century (could this be a case of “Utena’s Malice”?)

Another interpretation can be that nothing that Touga and Saionji saw that night was actually “real”, maybe Akio’s ghost is constantly reliving the events that led to him losing Anthy. The “Anthy” and “Utena” that Touga and Saionji encounter are merely shadows that remained in Ohtori while the real Utena and Anthy are actually free in the Real World.

After defeating Akio, Touga may have remembered what happened 20 years ago and he interpreted it as Utena becoming a prince and saving Anthy. Since he was closer to the events than Saionji he immediately understood what happened while Saionji could not. This interpretation can be applied wether you see this manga as an AU or as a sequel to the anime. However, this isn’t really a story about Utena, because this manga mainly focuses on Touga’s story.

3. Touga Kiryuu and the Power to Revolutionize the World

Touga is the main protagonist of this manga, there’s no doubt about it, therefore the story centers on his development (or lack of, depending of how you read it). In all iterations of “Utena” the Power to Revolutionize the World refers to a change, but this transformation is on a more intimate level in which the people that are benefited by the Revolution make a substantial change in the ways they have led their life.

Touga faces a disjunctive and has to chose between two options: becoming Akio’s heir or revolutionizing the world. Although the manga never shows Akio abusing his sister one can infer that this may be the case, specially since he treats her as an object and even Utena realized that Anthy was suffering. Akio is no different from the pedophile painter that Touga is financing. Becoming Akio’s heir meant that Touga would continue with his cynical attitude and more sooner than later he would also become a monster and lose his only friend. When Touga receives the Power to Revolutionize the World he gets the possibility to change, but he had to chose change by himself.

At the end, he decides to destroy Akio and he’s able to do this because he met someone that inspired him. Utena is someone that Touga feels identified with since she suffered like him and even came to the same conclusions about life. However, she changed in order to achieve a noble goal and that ultimately showed Touga that he could make a positive change in his life. So yeah, my interpretation is that after this story, Touga will finally become a better person and revolutionize the world.

Finally, I think the manga is mostly ok. This is a great Touga and Saionji story, however it does a disservice to Utena and Anthy’s arc and this is mainly because Anthy isn’t a character in this story. The problem here is that even if Utena was the only one that didn’t see Anthy as an object and manages to rescue her, Anthy doesn’t have any say in all this. It seems like the victims don’t really matter unless they serve as a motivation for other characters. On the other hand Anthy’s lack of involvement can be explained by concluding that this is Touga , Akio and Saionji’s POV and they never saw Anthy as a human being to begin with. The other explanation is that the author really didn’t care about Anthy…

Anyway, this was the 20th anniversary manga, let’s see what the next story has in store for us. If you have any corrections or alternative interpretations of this manga I’ll be happy to read them.

[qqueenofhades]

ok your medieval posts are all things of beauty and I am delightedly working my way through them to find new research materials for the lesbian-Robin-Hood-set-during-the-reign-of-Edward II webcomic I'm working on, THANK YOU. I've been listening to lectures and books on medieval times but the folks you've mentioned sound like they have more of the depth and specific focus I'm interested in, compared to the general stuff I've been poking at. THANKS!

Also, I was wondering if you have any favorite sources on ole Ned and family, particularly his last years? Or anything on the coup at Nottingham Castle? Isabella? Just like. All those fascinating, messy people? I don’t have enough familiarity with the scholarship around them to be able to tell if I’ve got good sources or no, so if you have the time I would love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, first of all, that sounds like an Amazing webcomic and if you ever finish/post it, please tag me because I would looooove to read it.

Next, general-overview books on medieval history can be very hit or miss, so I can imagine it’s been hard to find good stuff (and because of the obvious fact that 1000 years of history in a vast sociopolitical and geographical span does not at all fit easily into your average 300-page book). The book I am currently teaching to my first-year undergrads is Chris Wickham’s Medieval Europe, which I haven’t finished all the way yet, but he’s incredibly distinguished and accomplished (if you know The Inheritance of Rome, same guy – he’s professor at All Souls in Oxford, which is my dream job). I’ve also just come across Why The Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, which is more of a thematic study where individual experts submitted essays on a particular element – women, homosexuality, race, religion, labor, refugees, disability, the church/clerical abuse, and other relevant topics. It’s absolutely wonderful at challenging the ‘Dark Ages’ mindset and explaining the importance of socially engaged history and all the other stuff that I try to do in my work. So yes.

As for stuff on Edward II specifically, the first name that comes to mind is definitely Ian Mortimer. (He is the author of the Time Traveller’s Guide To… series if you’ve come across those, and The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England is set around the mid-14th century specifically, so that will be incredibly helpful for particular social and cultural details. I’ve read that one and it’s great, he has absolutely done his homework and used his reading of texts to answer the questions that we sometimes want to know about the past more than the abstract/macrohistorical stuff: what did they eat? What did they do? How did they dress? Etc. So yes, if you’re writing/drawing something set in the 14th century, absolutely get your hands on a copy of that.

Mortimer has also written (well, loads of stuff really, he’s quite prolific) The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, the 1st Earl of March. That will cover exactly the period you’re looking at (the end of Edward’s reign, Isabella and Mortimer’s coup, Mortimer’s execution, etc). He has written the forward for Kathryn Warner’s Edward II: The Unconventional King. (She has also just come out with a book on Isabella.) All of these are intended for a popular audience and should be fairly readable rather than a heavy academic slog, though I’ve not read them specifically. As I said, Mortimer is a bit of the ‘go to name’ for Edward II (you will certainly encounter his opinions on Edward’s supposed death in 1327 if you read any of his stuff) so you should be in good hands there.

Elizabeth Hallam has also written extensively on the Plantagenets. Of hers, there is Four Gothic Kings: The Turbulent History of Medieval England and the Plantagenet Kings (1216-1377), which covers Henry III and Edward I through III. (That link is to the 1987 version, but I think there’s been a revised version since then – you can get anything of hers quite cheap on abebooks) She also has The Itinerary of Edward II and His Household, 1307-1328, which may be a bit hard to get your hands on, as it’s an edited volume of his royal itinerary (as it says on the tin) and not really a popular press book. However, that will give you very detailed information on where Edward was when, and possibly also on household expenses (though you might need to find a copy of his Pipe Rolls for that – I’m not sure if they have those in printed editions, and it might be more research than you feel like doing as a non-specialist, but the option is out there…)

There are obviously many books written about the battle of Bannockburn if that’s going to be part of your research; I think the most recent is Bannockburn: Scotland’s Greatest Fight for Independence. A somewhat older (but still classic) book that covers the situation more generally is Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, though these are obviously both centered on the Scots rather than Edward II. They should cover both sides’ involvement and background, however, and in the case of the latter, Robert the Bruce’s political relationship with both Edward I and Edward II. 

Anyway, I hope this is a good start for you, and let me know how you get on with all that. And yes, create this webcomic, yesssss.

[summerdutkowsky]

A C D K L P R S T V W X Y F (Magicians or Leverage? // Myka/Helena or Parker/Hardison? // Books or comics? // ebooks or physical books? // 80° F (& above) or 70° F (& below) // swimming or sledding/snowboarding?)

Behind the cut again because wordiness!

A - If I’m in love: I..... yes actually. Very much so. I love them so very much and I’m so lucky I found this person and I literally every time I talk to them turn into a smiley mess and I really can’t find all the words right now to explain how much I care about this person but they’re very special and I haven’t felt this way about someone in so long 

C - How long it’s been since I’ve kissed: Like romantically? Since like high school (which is going on ten years ago now) which I don’t count anyway since I only ever did a quick peck thing and never had a real kiss.

D - If I have a preference for boys or girls: I don’t really, I guess I prefer girls but gender is a weird thing so I don’t really have a preference which is something I’ve come to realize only recently

K - What my full name is: Meghan Rae (really long Polish last name if you really want to know I’ll tell you but otherwise I’m an old timer and don’t put my full name on the internet

L - If I have siblings: I have one sibling, a brother, sitting on the other end of the couch from me right now

P - What kind of music I like: I like all kinds of music but my favorite band in the world is Delta Rae and they’re.... kind of hard to pin down music wise. I guess kind of southern gothic/folk/country? I don’t know but you should definitely listen to Bottom of the River which is the first song I ever heard by them and fell in love. I finally got to see them live two years ago and it was the most life changing concert ever and I love them they’re so sweet

R - For me to tell 10 of my curiosities: What you call curiosities my family calls annoyances: 

I have to have at least three cups of coffee a day

I can eat an entire bag of salt and vinegar chips in one sitting (which is what I’m doing right now and my tongue will not be able to taste anything for a week they’re so vinegary)

Same with a box of rice crispy treats

I can recite the entirety of Aladdin in time with the movie as I watch

If I love a movie (Alto for example) I will watch it every day until I forget to (I watched Alto every day for three months straight before I forgot to one day)

I have a nightly checklist of things I must do or else I can’t sleep that night knowing I forgot something on that list

I sleep in a semi sitting up position as a habit I picked up from spending so much time in hospital beds over the years

I make lists for everything

My eyes change shades of hazel depending on how tired I am

I can’t eat lettuce

S - 2 habits: I have to sleep under at least two blankets no matter the weather and every night I have to have a cup of tea before bed

T - 5 things I love unconditionally: My immediate family, my dog, my friends, the datemate, my dog (yes again because she’s so good and brings me so much joy)

V - 3 big dreams: Go to Italy and see where my grandparents came from, to get a place of my own in a big city somewhere, to finally have my disease under control and I can live a semi normal life

W - An idol: Carrie Fisher for so many many many reasons

X - If I’ve done something I regret very much: I regret how I ended my last relationship, very much, and I have a chance to make it better and every day I don’t I feel worse but I’m also not quite ready to talk to this person again....

Y - If I like my town and why: Yes and no. It’s very small so everyone is in everyone’s business and it can be really conservative and shitty sometimes but also it’s small and cute and I live in the center of town so I can walk to the store or the movies or to any number of restaurants

F - Give me any options: 

Magicians or Leverage? Leverage. Always and forever my go to feel good show I love my squad. Where’s my movie dammit????

Myka/Helena or Parker/Hardison? Parker/Hardison!! Feelings about pretzels

Books or comics? At the moment, comics. I don’t have the attention span to read a book and comics are such a nice escape. I noticed that the worse I feel mentally or physically the amount of comics I read go up. My need to be or for superheroes rise as my own self feels like it’s failing..... interesting. I may have to think on this more, it may be a nice hobby for the summer

ebooks or physical books? Ebooks. They’re way more convenient, cheaper, and as someone who likes to have her things with her and near her always I can have them on me at all times. However if I love a book enough, or collect them (like I do with The Stand) I will prefer physical copies

80° F (& above) or 70° F (& below): 70° and cooler. I hate the heat so much. I hate humidity I hate sweating. It’s always easier to put layers on and get warm if it’s too cold

swimming or sledding/snowboarding? Sledding, out of default because I don’t know how to do either of the other two despite living in Buffalo I’ve never been to the slopes to snowboard and I can’t even float so swimming is like yikes no thanks (though I love being around water....)

[mrmichaelchadler]

TCA 2018, Day 1: HBO's Deadwood Returns, My Brilliant Friend, Sharp Objects and More

It’s the first morning of my first trip to the Television Critics Association press tour, and I’m nervous. Sitting outside a ballroom at the Beverly Hilton, my mind races down the F.A.Q. one might keep tucked away in one’s brain for just such an occasion—Where do I sit? Will there be somewhere for me to plug in my computer? Should I ask questions? Can I ask questions? What if it’s a dumb question and they think I’m a fraud? Wait, am I a fraud? I’m a fraud, aren’t I? Oh god, what am I doing with my life?—when another writer, The A.V. Club’s Danette Chavez, appears like a miracle at my side and kindly mother-hens me toward the door, answering the more rational of my questions in a matter-of-fact way. She tells me about seating and power outlets and photos and so on; she assures me it won’t be nearly as overwhelming as it might seem.

Then we walk into the ballroom and within minutes I’m at a Delos counter, forced to choose: am I a black hat, or a white hat? Polite inquiries are also made about the bigness of my head, a line of questioning never depicted on “Westworld.” I confirm that yes, I have a very large head, and walk away, questioning the nature of my reality.

HBO’s panel isn’t nearly the terrifying experience I dreamed up, but overwhelming is, in fact, the best word for it. After selecting my black hat—for sartorial reasons—there are no more requests to interrogate my innermost nature. What there is instead is news, and it starts with news of the sort that TV writers simply lose their minds for—or this one does, at least.

Casey Bloys, President, HBO Programming: “Deadwood” Returns

The “Deadwood” movie is officially alive. Bloys starts his executive session off with that right-out-of-the-gate announcement, telling the TCA that the next, and presumably final, saga of David Milch’s revered Western has been greenlit by the network. “We're looking at an October start date,” he told the audience. “Dan Minahan is gonna direct it. Carolyn Strauss, Gregg Feinberg, David Milch, all of these people have worked very hard to get this together … it has been a logistics nightmare, getting all the cast members' schedules lined up, but we are there and it is greenlighted.”

When pressed, Bloys says that the network is hoping for an air date in the spring of 2019, but feels we really ought to be satisfied with the fact of its existence alone, which: fair. 

It’s easily the biggest, but is far from the only, piece of news from Bloys. He also confirms that “Confederate,” the controversial series from “Game of Thrones” heads David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, still has a pulse: “[Weiss and Beinoff] have gotta finish the final season of 'Game of Thrones' ...  And of course [they] have the 'Star Wars' movie. When they figure out their schedules they’ll come back to us. But nothing has been written and so no change in status there.” 

Also of note: repeated assurances that the AT&T/Time-Warner merger will not “dilute the HBO brand,” despite a tone of a recently leaked meeting between the new head of Warner Media and HBO’s CEO: “No one is asking us to take pitches of a 'Love Boat' reboot or anything like that.”

Other highlights: the five potential “Game of Thrones” spinoffs have been narrowed to one, though others may still be developed; “Game of Thrones” will return in the first half of 2019; “I have a newsflash, Meryl Streep is very, very good” in season two of “Big Little Lies”; buying “The Tale” at Sundance was a positive experience and he imagines they’ll do more of the sort in future. 

“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”: On the power of saying “I can prove that’s true.”

To try to summarize Oliver’s energetic conversation with TCA writers is a fool’s errand, and I shall not attempt it—when the subject of such a panel is witty, well-informed, and thorough for a living, his answers to questions will be pretty darn good. So let’s just stick with this particular gem, delivered in response to a question about the episode in which he bought, and then forgave, $15 million in medical debt:

“It’s one thing to say, you know, there are predatory companies that can buy people’s medical debt, and then turn their lives upside-down in the process, and the barrier of entry is too low to get into this. Saying that is true, but it feels like it kind of lands a little harder occasionally if you say and the barrier is too low to get into this, and I can prove that’s true. I am now a medical debt company, and I have done this. It’s kind of like showing that you have the ingredients for an atom bomb, and you shouldn’t have had access to those in the same way—I mean, it’s very rare that it works particularly that way, although, it did kind of with the church, as well, because it’s one thing to say churches are tax-exempt, and they can promise you anything and demand money. It’s another thing to say, 'I am now a church. Send me money. We will cure your Lupus. Send me fucking money.' That feels like you are kind of proving your argument in a slightly more visceral way. So that’s why sometimes we engage in those real-world examples.”

He also repeatedly invited the Olsen twins to prove that there are, in fact, two of them.

“My Brilliant Friend”: Elena Ferrante is “Like a Ghost”

The anonymity of the writer who works under the name Elena Ferrante is not what makes her books so good, but it’s a bit tantalizing all the same. Saverio Costanzo, director of the series adaptation of Ferrante’s book “My Brilliant Friend,” seems to agree. 

“We have been [emailing] each other since the beginning ... I don’t know who she is. I am not curious to know, actually. She was like writing with us from the beginning … She was collaborating a lot. She was not defending the novel she wrote.  She was just trying to guard us from making mistakes. She is, in my opinion, a very good script writer ... She can be very tough, but she can be also very gentle. But, you know, it’s –- like [working] with a ghost somehow. So, I’ve been writing [email] to someone who I don’t know who she is.”

Even in a crowded slate, “My Brilliant Friend” stood out. Look for it this fall.

“Jane Fonda in Five Acts”: A legend gets unsurprisingly candid

The phrase “living legend” gets tossed around with relative ease, but here’s a situation where it actually applies. The subject of HBO’s upcoming documentary takes to the stage with director and producer Susan Lacy for a candid conversation peppered with moments of refreshing, even moving, self-awareness. When asked what change in her life had the biggest impact on who she is, Fonda says “the Vietnam War,” without hesitation, adding that “prior to my becoming an anti-war activist, I had lived an eventful life, an interesting life, but a meaningless life. I was a kind of a pretty girl who made movies and [was] kind of hedonistic. And so when I decided to throw in my lot with the antiwar movement, everything shifted. Everything.”

That’s a pretty good indicator of the tenor of “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” something Lacy echoes when she’s asked about the way the documentary opens (which I won’t ruin here, but it involves Richard Nixon): “I wanted a signal that this was not a film about a movie star. I wanted to signal that right up front. Jane is a great movie star, she's a great actress but that is not I think the heart of her story.”

“Camping”: A charm offensive and a conspicuous absence 

The tempo for the session centered on “Camping,” the latest comedy-that’s-kind-of-a-drama from Jenni Konner and Lena Dunham, is set by star Jennifer Garner, who begins the proceedings by trying to chat with co-star David Tennant, appearing via satellite, who can’t hear her greetings at first—"Can you hear us now? Tardis to David Tennant," she says, to the delight of presumably many but certainly one (me). Before long, it’s all pelvic floors and paper planners, rattlesnakes and under-crackers, and references to a 400-hour gag reel of nothing but giggles. Fun and effervescence, loads of enthusiasm. Quite a show.

But it’s hard not to wonder how much of that conspicuous enthusiasm is meant to counteract the absence of Lena Dunham, first slated to appear in person, then via satellite, before HBO executive Amy Gravitt tells the audience that Dunham “got hit by the flu in New York.” The flu happens, that’s not weird. This particular flu, however, comes on the heels of the announcement that Dunham and Konner have parted ways as producing partners. 

Konner, asked about the split, says that she and the absent Dunham “feel super lucky to have had eight amazing years together. That's really long for a collaboration. And we just want to do different things. It's like, there's no drama to be found there. It's just work. It's just about the creative process.”

During the panel, Dunham sends a tweet about Frances McDormand. Frances McDormand is cool, that’s not weird.

“Sharp Objects”: Ending on time

The bulk of the session on “Sharp Objects,” HBO’s excellent miniseries adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s first novel, centers on characters, their language, their habits, and their sweating habits. That’s fitting, as Flynn’s novel is a dark character study disguised as a gothic southern murder mystery, wrapping a complicated, sometimes unlikable female protagonist in the kind of page-turning, reach-for-the-popcorn trappings one looks for in a beach read. 

Great as that conversation is—listening to Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina, breakout Eliza Scanlen, and unknown quantity Amy Adams talk about their craft is no small thing—the real news of the panel comes from showrunner Marti Noxon, who fields a question initially directed at Flynn with regard to a second season of the series. 

“We’re not talking about a season two,” Noxon says firmly. “This is it.” And then, with a chuckle, “So bask in it while you can.”

A series ending where its source material does shouldn’t be surprising, but “The Handmaid’s Tale” is set to get up to 10 seasons, and while part of me (and many others) would love a chance to see more of Clarkson and Adams sparring, there’s something reassuring and satisfying about knowing that this limited series is, in fact, limited. 

“Pod Save America”: O brave new world, that has such cameras in it

Like the “2 Dope Queens” before them, the gentlemen of the podcast “Pod Save America” are putting down their headsets and taking their show to your eyeballs. Asked about the changes the show will see now that it’s headed to television, hosts Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett had two contrasting responses.

Vietor, all facts: “This will be four episodes from various locations across the country that will air as one-hour specials on Friday nights, [which] will be very similar to [our] live shows with some different ... pieces that are special for HBO.”

Lovett, blowing minds: “Now, like, one of the biggest differences between the podcast and the show is that we're gonna use cameras, visual cameras, so [you] can see people, because that was something that HBO made clear to us is actually really important to their format. Being able to see and not only hear, which is obviously a learning experience for us, but [one] we think is very exciting.  

Other highlights from day one: A very promising panel on National Geographic’s “Valley of the Boom,” a hybrid narrative and documentary series that centers on the dotcom bubble with a streak of the irreverence of “The Big Short”; an appearance by Jeff Goldblum in support of his just-announced NatGeo series, “The Curiosity of Jeff Goldblum”; drinking a smoothie called “Bernard’s Brain Stimulant” or something like that and worrying I was going to find out I’m a Cylon—er, sorry, a Host. Wrong show. 

Day 2: “Chopped,” Bobby Brown, a feminist British murder mystery, and Tom Arnold’s “”Hunt for Trump Tapes.”

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[nancywait]

Women may buy bags for all sorts of reasons, but their main purpose is a container for things we want to carry around with us when we’re out. This carpet bag made in Prague, from a real carpet woven in Prague by old ladies who lived on the outskirts of the city that I bought online fifteen years ago, was not only a container of personal possessions, it was a bag of hope. And now it was in Brooklyn, over 4,000 miles away as the crow flies, but it looked and felt Old World. And it was something physical and tangible, an actual material I could wear slung over my shoulder or clenched in my hand. Whenever I looked at its warm reds and felt its softness, I remembered my dream of one day going to Prague. Of seeing the city in person, instead of just reading about it or viewing it on you tube.

The cards in the bag I took to Prague last month were the handy plastic kind that make a dream come true, in that they got me on the plane and into the hotel. But for fifteen years, as well as the carpet bag, there had been another set of cards that were not plastic—78 of them altogether—and these were the cards that fed the dream and kept it alive. Tarot cards. The Tarot of Prague. They helped nurture the dream. In the poem, Harlem, Langston Hughes asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” He wonders, “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” He suggests other, less appetizing fates. Meanwhile, I bided my time. I waited until my carpet bag so bulged with hope that it had to become a reality.

Each of the tarot cards was beautifully illustrated with different aspects of Prague’s gothic and baroque past, as well as the more recent art nouveau. Churches and statuary, bas-reliefs and carvings, bridges, archways, stairways and buildings, placed in such a way as to perfectly address the meaning of the cards. Fortune telling cards I would learn to interpret as I pored over the imagery until it was engraved on my brain. Cards that told me as much about myself as about the city’s medieval past that unaccountably had been left standing when so many others had been whisked away by bulldozers or bombs.

For fifteen years this bit of carpet and collection of cards bought online from the same shop in Prague, were my replacements for an actual visit. While I waited I found other bags that suited my more immediate needs. I found other tarot decks to engage with, and I forgot why I wanted to go to Prague in the first place. I had never thought about Prague at all until I watched the Velvet Revolution unfolding on TV at the end of 1989. It was mesmerizing. The Berlin Wall had fallen a few weeks before, and now crowds were gathering in Wenceslas Square every night, holding lighted candles, jingling their house keys, standing in solidarity. A few years later I read that Americans had started flocking to Prague, and I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could go too.

But the fifteen-year saga didn’t really start until some years after that when I read Patricia Hampl’s, A Romantic Education, a glorious, poetic memoir of her visit to Prague in the 1970s when it was still under Communist rule. Hampl, from Minnesota with a Czech grandmother, writes,

  Perhaps, if you go to the old country seeking, as third or fourth generation Americans often do, a strictly personal history based on bloodlines, then, the less intimate history of the nation cannot impose itself upon you very strongly. History is reduced to genealogy, which is supposed to satisfy a hunger that is clearly much larger.

  But if you go on a journey like this not to find somebody, but just to look around—then, in a country like Czechoslovakia (or perhaps only there, only in Prague), the country’s history is infused with the urgency of the classic search for personal identity. The country itself becomes the lost ancestry and, one finds, the country is eloquent. Its long story, its history, satisfy the instinct for kinship in a way that the discovery of a distant cousin could not. For it is really the longing for a lost culture that sends Americans on these pilgrimages.

Hampl describes how she “…stumbled through the ancient streets, stopped in the smoke-grimed coffeehouses,” and says, “I was simply in the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and it was grimy and sad and broken.”

  The weight of its history and the beauty of its architecture came to me first as an awareness of dirt, a sort of ancient grime I had never seen before. It bewitched me, that dirt, caught in the corners f baroque moldings and decorative cornices, and especially I loved the dusty filth of the long, grave windows at sunset when the light flared against the tall oblongs and caused them to look gilded.

That was the 70s. When Hampl returned to post-revolution Prague in the mid-90s, “Not only the color of the buildings has changed, but the entrepreneurial rush, especially in the center, has created a new kind of Kafkaesque unreality.” And, “It is as if, for the new earnest visitors from the West, Prague is a stage set—the improbable dream of the baroque city where Kafka and Rilke walked in exultation and anguish—but the purpose of the stage set eludes them. They worry that they have arrived “too late,” and have expatriated themselves to a theme park. They sense that the life of the place is something quite other than the charms purveyed by the rouged-up tourist center, beguiling though they are.”

I roamed around Prague in January, avoiding the hordes of tourists, and though the streets were far from empty, I didn’t once think I had arrived too late. For me, an off-season bargain through Hotels.com was the right time. But neither Hampl or the pile of guidebooks I read, (or the fifteen years I waited) had prepared me for the unexpected tears momentarily blurring my vision. At first glance, Wenceslas Square, my first view of the city, was a garish commercial strip with giant screens advertising sportswear. But I was on a journey back through time to feel the energy of ancient stone and brick, of auras that might still linger in churches and synagogues, or medieval streets forming a labyrinth around the Old Town Square. I could see past the video screens and souvenir shops.

Praha in Czech means threshold. A place of transition between the visible world and the invisible one. That was the place I was looking for. That line, that place of transition. That threshold. The closest I came to it was in the Kafka Museum where the windows were boarded up, the walls were painted black, and a video scored with Smetana’s Má Vlast, (My Country) constantly played. It was old footage of Prague in Kafka’s day, edited with special effects revealing distorted views of tilting houses and streets closing in upon each other to suggest an altered perception, a dimensional shift. The effect I enjoyed the most was when the screen rippled as if it was under water. Scenes washed over by the waters of time. As if those of us who’d crossed the Vltava over the 15th century Charles Bridge to Malá Strana, using our smart phones to guide us to the museum tucked away on a side street called Cihelná, hadn’t had our perception altered enough.

I left the carpet bag at home, and though I took the tarot cards with me, I didn’t look at them once, or even open my guidebook until the fifth day. I didn’t want to look anything up. I wanted to be in the moment, witnessing the present without comparing it to anything I’d seen before. I looked at the cards when I returned home, and realized that unknowingly I’d come upon the sights represented on the cards that were most meaningful to me. The Hermit and Temperance.

Temperance stands for moderation, balance, and inner peace. She had recently come up as my ‘Navigator.’ I came across the image that represents her in the tarot when I chanced to walk by the art deco façade in Široká Street in Josefov, the Jewish Quarter. Though I stopped to photograph her, I didn’t recall her image in the cards.

Nor did I remember the Hermit was standing in Golden Lane, one of the places at the top of my list to visit. The Hermit, as card number 9, represents my Destiny Number, therefore who I am in the tarot. In most decks, the Hermit was an old man with a beard holding a lantern to represent introspection, meditation, a deliberate withdrawal, and often foretells a quest of some kind.

In the Tarot of Prague, he stood in Golden Lane, known as the “Street of the Alchemists.” I knew Kafka had once lived at number 22, and the tarot reader, Mme. de Thebes, executed by the Nazis because she predicted Germany would lose the war, lived at number 14. None of the houses were known to be home to alchemists, but I’d felt an affinity to the place.

Before my trip I did a couple of watercolors of the tiny medieval houses.

I went to Prague for a week, and now it’s also a week since I’ve been home. The journey that began with a bag and a bunch of cards has shifted to an inner journey. Maybe it was always meant to be an inner journey. But how would I have known that if I hadn’t gone there first? This inner journey is about digesting the experience, integrating what I’ve seen and felt, perhaps coming up with new realizations. As I write about it, I’m already starting to see past the beauty of the sights to something deeper within. While I was there in the old city on the Vltava, I was too startled, too overcome by the views and vistas every which way I looked. But now, back on familiar ground, my inner eye has begun weaving together past and present.

A Bag and a Bunch of Cards Women may buy bags for all sorts of reasons, but their main purpose is a container for things we want to carry around with us when we’re out.