#i will say he's not triggered by unreality as much it just has the capacity to Affect him it doesnt Trigger until it reaches a certain leve

[parkers-gal]

can you do a part 2 to the one where y/n gets diagnosed with a brain tumor & tom stays with her and tries his best to help her through the side effects of chemo (like hair loss, fatigue, insomnia)?

yours

i know this is a peter gif but a bby is sad :(

wc | 1.4k

pairing | tom holland x reader

as mentioned above, there are (somewhat) in-depth mentions of vomiting, fatigue, hair loss, chemotherapy, and general diseases. this is your trigger warning

p.s. didn’t proofread so beware

—

“So… she’s decided already?”

Tom sighs, running a hand through his hair while nodding at his brother’s question. “Yeah… I let her decide on her own.”

“That’s good of you.”

“It’s all I can do,” he deadpans. “I’m so… useless.”

“Tom, you’re here. You’re supporting her. That’s the greatest gift in the world.”

Tom doesn’t waver. “Well it doesn’t feel like a gift.”

The conversation doesn’t go on for much longer. Tom excuses himself and you wake from your afternoon nap, having felt drained from your fourth chemo session already. You’re a lot weaker now, a lot more tired and even more upset — at yourself, the world, and sometimes even Tom. It’s not your fault, though. It never was.

“How’re you feeling, baby?”

“Tired,” you rub your eyes awake. “Hungry.”

“Do you feel like eating?”

You shrug, shoulders sagging while you glance at your fiddling fingers. Tom wills himself not to cry, sighing unsteadily while he places himself next to you on the mattress.

“We’re gonna get through this, y’know.” His arm wraps around your shoulder, bringing you into his embrace. You’re already losing weight and it’s only been a month. He pushes through, though, because you’re pushing too. “We’re gonna make it and- and you’re gonna be okay.”

You nod, wiping away a few fallen tears. “Yeah.”

You spend the rest of the night watching a few of your favorite movies and eating what you can. You laugh, wholeheartedly and genuinely, for the first time in awhile, and it makes Tom’s heart warm from the comfort and familiarity of it all. Peace is present throughout the house as the two of you settle down to sleep. Tom feels at home, with you in his arms, for the first time in a long time.

The peace doesn’t last long, however. You’re awake in the middle of the night, rushing out from under the covers and into the bathroom just in time to let the bile come up and out. It’s another side effect, another symptom, another fucking issue to deal with in this sea of madness. Tom’s by your side in a matter of seconds, rubbing your back and holding your hair while assuring you it’ll be okay. He’s speaking in a hushed tone, doing his best not to overwhelm you. And though you want to cry, you decide that you don’t have the mental capacity to do anything but allow everything to happen. It’s the least you can do.

After drinking some water and brushing your teeth, you settle back under the covers, each of you taking your previous positions. It’s not the same, though, because you both know how this night is going to go.

You’re blinking up at the bare ceiling, tracing the edges of the wall, finding the crevices where the wall meets the ceiling. It’s unbearable, counting for sheep or the stars to bore you to sleep. You don’t want to risk drinking milk or something cliche, and you certainly don’t want to trouble Tom when he deserves a night’s rest after taking care of you. It’s like his career, now, instead of his usual place in front of the camera. You want to feel guilty, but you’re too tired to protest anything. You’re so drained and constantly hungry, yet you’re never able to keep anything down. It’s a trick by god, you’re convinced. It’s so fucked that it feels unreal.

You exhale, almost too loudly, and Tom mirrors your actions. You both know you’re awake.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?”

Tom sighs, frowning even in the dark. “Because you’re not asleep.”

“We’ve been over this,” You don’t bother turning towards him, continuing to stare up at the ceiling in dissatisfaction. “I’m not gonna get much sleep. You know this; you need to get used to sleeping without me.”

“I can’t get used to that,” He reaches out to you but you shoot up, shoving the covers off of you while your feet dangle off the edge of the bed. You’re back-faced to Tom and he sighs again. A hand rubs at your forehead while the other rubs your eyes, trying to fight off the will to cry.

“Y/N…” He scoots over to you, leaning up with his elbow while his nimble fingers run up your forearm all the way to your shoulder. “Talk to me, baby.” You let out a wet breath, an obvious sign that you’re crying. Tom feels his heart break and suddenly he’s reverted to over a month ago, when he’d first lost his grip on you in the fighting sea of heartbreak.

“I’m… a liability, Tom. If I don’t make it, you’re gonna have to get used to doing everything without me. I just want to prepare you fo-”

“No,” he cuts you off with a click of his tongue. “We’re not talking about that. You’re gonna make it, Y/N. I’m not losing you.”

“But what if you do?!” You look at him with such despair in your eyes that Tom can’t help but let a tear fall.

“Then I go with you.”

You laugh dryly, humorlessly. “You and I both know that’s not happening. You need to live past me.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“You don’t know that!” You don’t mean to raise your voice, but it slips out because you’re just so goddamn frustrated. You can’t help but blame yourself — you wanted to be that steady thing in Tom’s life, but you don’t know if you can be that now.

“Y/N/N…” He pulls himself up, sitting next to you on the mattress, covers abandoned. His hair is an arranged mess, voice deep and fresh from sleep. You can see his silhouette, his most defined features through the light of the moon. He drags an arm around your shoulders, pulling you into his side. He’s pulling you close because he doesn’t want to let go; he doesn’t want to lose you.

“You’re going to make it. And,” he sucks in a breath, biting his lip while he tries not to cry. “And we’re gonna get our happy ending. We’re gonna grow old together,” another sniffle, “and be an old married couple that plays bingo and enjoys trivia nights.” He pulls you impossibly closer until you’re forced to rearrange onto his lap. He leans his forehead on the skin beside your shoulder and neck, sniffling and sucking in a sob. “I don’t know what made you think otherwise, but you’re the strongest person I know. You’re-” he hiccups, “You’re gonna fucking make it. We’re gonna make it through this.”

“I pulled out my hair the other day,” You whisper finally, breaking your silence with the beginning of your explanation. “They said it- it’d be a possibility but I didn’t think it’d happen so soon and it did and it-” you inhale shakily. “It made me feel like I’m already dying.”

Tom inhales sharply, caught off guard, and you let a tear fall down your cheek and into his mop of curls that lay below your chin, leaning on your body.

“It made me feel like I’m already… leaving you.”

He remains quiet for a few beats, eyebrows furrowing while he thinks of what to say next. He doesn’t want to face the possibility of losing you. Especially not when the treatment process has just progressed — he hopes you get better results. He hopes for the best because he knows you deserve the best. He doesn’t want to wait for the day where you don’t get what you deserve, because he’s afraid he might lose you then.

“I’m not leaving you. Not through this, not through any sickness or disease. I’m here to stay. I’m yours.”

Your arms wrap around him in a haste to bring him closer. He picks his head up, holding your face in both his palms while you nuzzle further into his hand. He’s so gentle, looking into your eyes as if you could slip from his grip right in this very moment. It shakes you to your core.

Your bottom lip trembles while his thumb traces over it calmly, lovingly. He’s memorizing the details of your face with his touch. He’s regripping his hold on you.

“Yours,” You repeat in a whisper, the cold of the night stopping just for two lovers. “I’m yours.”

[observantdrifter]

Activity Within a San Jose Party Hub on a Costa Rican Friday Night.

One must enter a spontaneous and impulsive mindset if interested in understanding the habits of a Costa Rican partygoer. Fully submitting to the experience is crucial, especially regarding new experiences. In this case, I was lounging in my home, sedated by inactivity in previous hours. This was disrupted by a call from a close friend of mine. She was in the neighborhood, and invited me to spend a night on the town with her. Naturally I told her to say no more, I’d be with her shortly.

First was beer, always beer. It’s important to lubricate the minds thought processing capability by diluting the consciousness. To be an impartial observer, alcohol is a great help. One liter in, the idea of making the trek about one kilometer west to “La Cali” came about. Neither one of us had any opinion on the matter, although a subliminal curiosity was present. Without much thought at all, we began walking in that direction.

La Cali is a street lined with loud bars and clubs of assorted themes. There’s something for a wide range of socialites. Reggae, Rock, Hip Hop, ect. Any mainstream entertainment seeker would find themselves right at home. For a person like me, a place like this is intolerable without first dissolving any concept of sobriety. 

Such a place, on such a night, attracts large flocks of traditional members of the mass mentality. Immediately after penetrating the anesthetized crowd countless red faces and glazed over eyes inspect you from head to toe, silently evaluating the random individual who has just entered their vicinity. Clouds of low-grade marijuana smoke came from unknown sources. They mingled with clouds of tobacco smoke coming from less clandestine regions. These predominant smells were joined by those of vomit, beer, sweat, and a hint of sewage. The few of those who did not have some sort of psychoactive substance in their system were feeding off the turbulent energy of the environment. This scene was scored by the unsettling loudness consequent to all of the locales’ sound systems operating at maximum capacity. 

The one kilometer walk to this strange place had made us dangerously sober and the smell of ditch weed triggered a craving. Our funds were severely limited, so the low-grade cannabis would have to do. We spent the next 20 minutes or so infiltrating the congregation from multiple angles. Periodically asking suspected stoners for some weed please. We asked multiple watchymans (Costa Rican term given to men who watch parked cars) and each time we were told “Wait right here while I go visit the doctor.” Often they would come back empty handed.

The lack of luck in comparison to the abundance of odor was mildly frustrating. If we were crack users we would be in a much different situation. Every time we would stand on a certain corner to assess potential marijuana users, we would witness countless crackheads coming and going contently. Each time saying hello to what seemed like old friends, handing them a bundle of coins and leaving with a couple loose pebbles of crack in their palms. I figured this out by asking a particularly shabby looking individual who had just exchanged a suspicious hand shake with a redheaded woman on a street corner. I asked, “Just out of pure curiosity, whatcha got there?” He proudly opened his hand and presented to me a small crack rock. “Crack! Hey, you want some? What do you need? I’ll get it for ya!” I kindly declined the offer.

This interaction raised suspicion in the dealer, who was now looking over at us frequently. She was surrounded by men within the next few minutes, all notably interested in our presence. We decided the area, although highly populated, was potentially dangerous and relocated. 

After we left we met a lively individual by the name of Ivo. He was selling lollipops for a living. This did not trouble him however, he was an extremely joyous man. We asked him for some weed please and he said he would go visit the doctor at once. To make sure we wouldn’t leave this business opportunity he left us his jar of lollipops as a certain binding contract. After a few minutes, he returned with a small twisted piece of plastic that contained what resembled a brownish-green pebble that weighed no more than a quarter of a gram. It also contained a balled up rolling paper. He charged us 2,500 colones for said brownish-green pebble. We refused and negotiated the price down to 1,025 colones. 

Now completely sober, we fled to the near by Parque Francia. We sat at a picnic table and I produced the twisted plastic containing the brownish-green pebble and rolling paper. I inspected the surface of the pebble closely, looking for any sort of unwelcome powders or particles. I deemed it OK to smoke and broke the pebble into minuscule crumbs. I rolled the pebble crumbs into a joint, and requested a light from a nearby couple. After introducing flame to flower, I smoked it viciously. My friend took much more modest drags. 

I hadn’t smoked in weeks, and the alcohol had expanded my blood vessels. There was no doubt in my mind that it was coming. The experience. The high achieved by ditch weed is very rough around the edges, negative side effects are often expected. While the effects where gradually overcoming me, I decided it would be best to do something pleasant as soon as possible to keep my mind off of these overwhelming side effects. I had remembered a large Datura plant in the vicinity of the park, and the signature sweet, aromatic smell that they release in the night to attract nocturnal pollinators. In this case the plant attracted a severely uncomfortable drug user. 

When we got to the tree, it had no flowers. I realized the dry season was upon us. As I looked up to the branches in disbelief, somewhere down the road a man began screaming. Threatening to kill something or someone. He was in a vehicle and his piercing screams amplified by the second as he seemingly accelerated towards us. We ran. The responsible man and his vehicle passed through a nearby intersection at fantastic velocity, and as the distance between him and us increased his voice faded. 

The panic did not fade. We continued running back to the park. By the time we got there I was completely overwhelmed. My heartbeat was pounding through my eardrums and I felt as if I was about to collapse. Beads of sweat ran down my forehead and beliefs of unreal dangers and threats bombarded my mind. My friend was not affected as severely as I was. We sat on a curb for several minutes while my debilitating mental state came and went in a series of waves, each diminishing in intensity. 

The effects subsided completely after about 30 minutes, and we walked home where it was warm and safe and abundant in delicious food. There was no more talk of the night that had just occurred. All we knew was that it was a great success in every strange and uncomfortable and sadistic way.  

[azumarocket]

Semi-important October update: transitioning, mental health, and when in the hell I’ll post original content again

TL;DR: Surgery this month, I declared war on depression but I'm an incompetent pacifist, and I’m actively writing again so expect a new story soon!

Hooooo boyyyy, where to start

(TW for eating disorder/ mental health/ transitioning stuff- nothing detailed or overtly triggering I don't think, but just mentioning it in case!)

Well, I'm over six months on T now, and holy shit!! I pass all the time now!! .....As a 13 year old boy, but I’ll take it!

This is probably the best thing happening in my life right now- I never passed before, mainly because of my voice, which in the last three months has gotten so much lower it feels unreal. When I listen to how I used to sound, it’s hard to believe that until very recently, that was me! That was the voice I had for so many years, and yet this one I'm growing into feels so much more familiar. It really does feel like this is what puberty was supposed to do the first time round.

I’ll sprinkle in the negatives between the positives so they're more palatable- mental health= BAD. Bad bad bad not good at all. My body image is the worst it's been in years (a fun side effect of taking T is it can cause bodywide water retention, which isn't ideal for someone with anorexia), and I'm struggling hard not to relapse. It's clouding everything else in my life right now so I'm basically just a ball of stress and self-loathing, which I acknowledge sounds dramatic in writing but it's the only way to say it really. My mind has a huge capacity for cruelty and right now it's got me cornered.

BUT I am working on that, and I hope that once I've had top surgery (check out that organic lean into our next topic) a lot of basic day-to-day things will become much easier for me. Just putting a t shirt on right now is up to an hour of stress, to give you a picture. There's some hope in knowing that most of the things I feel unable to do right now are solely because of Boob Dread, and once that's not a problem, I'll just be able to... do shit? Without agonising over my chest the whole time? Sounds fake but I've heard that's nice

Yeah, top surgery! I'm booked for the 24th this month, which I'm still kinda distantly assuming will get cancelled for some reason because my luck with things I'm excited for has not been fantastic. I know luck isn't a thing but I swear to god, every time I start relaxing about a new happy change and getting excited, it's like the hand of Zeus bitchslaps me back into reality. My working theory is he's threatened by me.

More sugary positives to counteract that lump of celery- I'm writing a new novel, which I have planned out from start to finish and am very optimistic about; I'm drawing much more and have improved a lot, and am also restarting work on my graphic novel; my focus seems to be improving, slowly but steadily! Which is a big deal because I used to be unable to watch a half hour show without it taking 2 hours because I had to keep rewinding.

I'm also working on commissions (finally), which is great for easing me back into Team Rocket-related creations. Expect the first chapter of a new Rocket fic sometime around Christmas!

And uhhhh I think that's about it! I just want to add that I’m aware I'm not as social online as I used to be, hence these updates, and it's not for a lack of loving this community/ the friends I've made here! I'm just going through a very stubborn rough patch where just sending a message feels like a marathon, but I'm determined to turn things around, and be more socially active again. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, and my love to you all 💖💖💖

[letterboxd]

America Lobotomized: The Rick Alverson Q&A.

“If I have any value now, my responsibility lies in nurturing the limitations of cinema and making them apparent.” —Filmmaker Rick Alverson chats with us about the irrelevance of ‘consumer cinema’, the fascinating failure of masculinity, and causing trouble with Jeff Goldblum.

Musician, writer and director Rick Alverson makes the kind of films that are, as Letterboxd member DirkH enthuses, “hard to love and impossible to enjoy”. One of the decade’s most challenging directors, his confrontational style is take-it-or-leave-it, but those who like to take it find something deeply profound in his take-downs of concepts like the American Dream.

Alverson’s newest feature, The Mountain, departs from the ironic realism of his earlier films, creating a lushly immaculate, desolate poke at American society. Set in the 1950s, The Mountain is loosely based on the controversial American neurologist Walter Freeman, here represented as the fictional Dr Wallace Fiennes.

While Alverson’s earlier films have tapped into the twisted comic talent of Tim and Eric (and friends), The Mountain uses the hefty star power of Jeff Goldblum (also a Tim and Eric alumnus) against itself, with Tye Sheridan (of the vulgar mime act in Alverson’s Entertainment) as a mostly wordless photographer who is selected to follow Goldblum’s Dr Fiennes on an asylum tour. French great Denis Lavant appears as an unconventional healer, in one of his few English-language roles; Alverson unleashes him at will.

“A rigorous, alienating work about the rot at the core of the nation”, The Mountain divided audiences when it premiered at Venice last year, and divides Letterboxd members still. “Easy answers don’t always have to be there,” writes Allison, “but it quickly became pointless and even monotonous.” “A modern master is at work,” counters Tyler. “It’s rare in these times to find a movie so precise. Every cut reveals a wonderful new, immaculately composed shot.”

Tye Sheridan and Jeff Goldblum in ‘The Mountain’ (2018).

Can you talk about when and how you got the inspiration for the premise of The Mountain and why you felt now was the right time to make this film? Rick Alverson: I’ve had an interest that I’ve explored since The Comedy and Entertainment where I’m trying to comprehend what fuels this blind propulsion of American progress in today’s political climate, where we’re romanticizing the white male privilege era of the 1950s.

It’s also something often romanticized in American cinema; if not in its subject matter, then it’s romanticized in its formal depiction. I wanted to take that on and watch it deflate and see how it would hold up to a more nuanced and muddy immersion of the era.

You’ve described the film as anti-utopian. Do you think nostalgia is a dangerous thing? Nostalgia is definitely a very rich intoxicant that’s difficult to pull oneself away from. Commercial American cinema peddles almost entirely on those triggers of compartmentalized representation and clean—marginally pornographic—singular dimensions. I find that troubling to some degree because it pretends to be something else.

The remake of The Lion King kinda sums that up. [Chuckles] Yeah.

Toxic masculinity has been central to many of your films and it’s in many ways the enemy of the moment right now. You’ve been ahead of the game in a way. Is that always your starting point? What influenced you to focus on men at their worst? I was raised at a time with influences that come from particular periods so there was a binary presentation of masculinity and I think it’s something that men are mired in. That has been problematic for men in a way that stripped away the wholeness of an individual.

Frailty, or a nuance of communication, hadn’t been as accessible to a generation of men, and that crippled them in a way which inflamed the damage that they did in their privileged space and [for] everyone around them. It’s a cyclone. In my demographic, we have been exposed to that, caught in it, and wrestled with it. Maybe that’s why I look at it so much.

I find failure in masculinity fascinating, too. The problematic American ‘wandering cinema’ of the 1970s is what made me want to do what I do. It’s the great unsung song of cinema that fell out of favor by the 1980s.

As a working American filmmaker, do you feel it’s your social responsibility to use your medium to comment on and expose what you’re seeing happening in this country? Is this your version of political activism? [Laughs] Maybe. I think that there needs to be a politics of form. It’s the responsibility of filmmakers to not be ignorant of this gesture and what it does to the population. There’s a responsibility of cinema to ask itself some very hard questions before it ends up wrapping into total irrelevancy. What is narrative? What value does it have? How is it destructive? How is it being used for destruction? Is it functional anymore? I think that a lot of consumer cinema doesn’t ask those questions because it’s afraid to expose its vulnerabilities or its potential irrelevance.

How did your experience with Entertainment affect your approach to The Mountain? Entertainment was the first film that played with cinematic influences that I had. It played with things that kind of grossed me out in cinema, with the defaults of metaphors and symbolism to create false profundities.

With The Comedy, I was focusing on a subset of class privilege in nuclear centers like New York City that I find reprehensible. I wanted to engage with it, investigate how to understand it, and make myself uncomfortable. Suddenly the medium felt a little more vital to me. It wasn’t just a propagandistic grandstanding, where essentially I would be showing off my likes and dislikes. I try to play a cat-and-mouse game with my own comfort and hopefully the audience finds some vitality in that.

Your last two films have felt very surreal, stylistically. They’re more lush yet still quite detached. What’s compelling you to stray from the slice-of-life realism you were using with your first few films? I had always wanted to have a career working with non-actors, but as I’ve gradually become more interested in the problems that make me uncomfortable I find myself engaging with them head-on, instead of just ignoring them for my comfort zone. The unreality of cinema has also become increasingly interesting to me.

There are some obsessive-compulsive approaches I took in The Mountain, which viewers might not see off-hand, that sort of heighten that falseness. Nobody leaves or enters the frame unless they go through a door. I’ve padded and loaded the film with limitations and, if I have any value now, my responsibility lies in nurturing the limitations of cinema and making them apparent.

For a long time we’ve been living in a fantasy land of unlimited potential and an abundance of opportunity, but the fact of the matter is we’ve been ignoring the beauty of the finite quality of the world. I think the same thing goes for cinema.

You’ve mentioned before that you don’t usually stick to a script but you did this time, though obviously the film utilizes a lot of long pauses and still imagery. Do you map out this sense of pacing in the script, or is there an element of you finding the film in the editing suite? How important is the sense of discovery in post for you? Editing the movie is incremental in its own way. But for me, the film really becomes alive during production and I find the pacing there. As far as mapping out those things in the script goes, it’s an obligation that I find tedious sometimes. My scripts used to be very short but they’re longer now because they’re a little bit more traditional on the page.

I do relish the moment when something isn’t satisfying our expectations. There’s a very exciting moment there when you let the comfort of distance go on too long. If you curtail it in the right way, it’s like surfing.

This is a reunion between you and Tye Sheridan. He’s grown a lot since Entertainment, very literally too. Yeah, at least 4 or 5 inches.

Was he your first choice for the role? How did he contribute to the film beyond what you and your co-writers had on the page? He was my first choice and we developed the film together. It was an idea I brought to him when Entertainment wrapped. I talked to him about playing a ‘black hole’—something neutral at the centre of everything—that the whole world would move around.

He has a tremendous amount of patience and generosity. He’s very disciplined and we had a lot of fun subverting some of his capacities for empathy and fragility as an actor to make him inaccessible. That was a mission statement for us.

His character is very literally an audience surrogate. He’s passive, then he becomes pacified. I’m wondering what that says about what you think of your own audience? Do you feel unheard and misunderstood? It’s hard to say. I guess we’re interested in the reception of the film because I do want to engage an audience and there’re all sort of experiments in flirtation of audience expectations—in a constructive sense, I hope.

I do think that audiences have been conditioned to prefer pacificity and media as an anesthesia. I’m trying in my little way to interrupt that. Maybe I’m just having a fit in the corner of the room, I don’t know.

So how did Jeff Goldblum come on board? I was very surprised to see him attached to one of your films, unless I’m underestimating his taste in modern arthouse cinema. He’s getting in the mud of it all. He’s up for anything these days. I think he’s having not just a popularity revival but a revival of his artistic interests. Jeff has a tremendous amount of vitality and he was very interested in causing a small trouble with me.

Director Rick Alverson.

In what way? He wanted to subvert expectations of the audiences of how they’ve considered him and what he does for them and we utilized that. He’s really keen and smart and I think he understood that it could have a potency in the film. This is one of his more muted performances, even though the personality of Goldblum percolates out of that. He restrained himself in a way I found really refreshing.

We really want to commend your location scout on a fantastic job. What were you looking for in the production design and the sets? Especially for the final shot. The final shot was its own kind of nightmare. We shot that on Mount Baker on the Canadian border in Washington and we isolated the location based on this expanse that’s usually full of four or five feet of snow most of the year. The night before we shot, they plowed all that snow for the parking lot underneath. Those sorts of things drive you crazy.

My production designer Jacqueline Abrahams—who worked on The Lobster among other great films—is an incredibly keen, hardworking person. We wanted to neuter some of the romance of the era, to make it muddy and give it a bland complexity. Obviously when making a period film, the production design and costume design are the most difficult but nerve-wrecking and exciting tools in the whole toolbox. I think we came at it obliquely enough that it became interesting.

Are you still hoping to make your KKK film soon? Now should be the time, right? I’d like to move back to it, but I’ve moved onto another project for now [a horror movie and a comedy series, according to IndieWire]. It still fascinates me, but I don’t want to be too reactionary. It’s a tough time now, for a lot of things.

Would you say you’re drawn to films similar to yours? What are your favorite recent films that challenged you? Oh gosh. The other day I saw Slack Bay by Bruno Dumont, which I found very funny. I’m sorry, I’m terrible at this question.

I’d say that’s a very on-brand choice for you. Thank you.

‘The Mountain’ is in select French cinemas now and opens in US cinemas on August 2.

[scathecraw]

Upon The Rock - Chapter 6 - Awakening

First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Read on FF.net | Ao3

With Superman tangled in a writhing mass of steely necks, Billy was distraught. Superman was THE hero. Without fail, he had saved Earth and who knows how many other planets. If he was lost, what could stop this thing?

As panic set in, a voice called out, cutting through the chaos. It was Talky, standing in an intersection, the crowd flowing around him like he wasn’t even there. “Billy. You know what you need to do. Say the name. Say-”

And like a bolt of lightning, the memories came flooding back. Everything, from the terrifying, unreal ride on the subway to the feeling of power as he called upon the gods. He remembered it all, and almost without even realizing it, said “SHAZAM.”

A true bolt of lightning crashed down onto him, splintering the concrete he stood on and setting off even more car alarms in the area. As the smoke cleared, he saw his perspective was changed, his stance, his clothes, everything was different. And he knew he could help. Something within him spoke, and he knew the hydra was his responsibility to deal with. As much as Superman could do to help Earth, this mythological monster was his duty.

He snapped into action, launching from his position faster than thought. There was no art to it, no grace. There was only the raw need to act. So act he did. Flinging himself bodily at the creature, he nearly missed it despite its size, and slammed into its lower body, then the ground. The beast was rocked when the Olympian man crashed into its side, bringing the quadruped onto two knees and triggering a roar of pain. Two of the necks unwound from their savaging of Superman to deal with the newcomer. They whipped down towards his recovering form, hoping to snatch him up and polish him off without any further trouble.

They were not so lucky. As they arced downwards, Shazam swung his fist to try and protect himself. It did more than that. The heads crashed into one another and recoiled, with broken teeth and bleeding maws. More heads whipped out of the mass that still struggled with the Man of Steel, but anything that could cause permanent damage was a much higher priority to the savage thing.

Its lack of thought served it badly. As soon as Superman was unoccupied by the endless gnashing maws, he broke free. He wound one neck around another in an attempt to stop the ruthless attacks without spawning any more heads. Its attention split, the hydra could pin down neither of the superheroes it was combating. Superman’s skill made up for the lack of permanent damage, and Shazam’s unchecked strength rocked the beast with each blow. The ground cratered beneath his mighty fists, crushing the hydra into the rubble pile of the street. The beast never let up. Cruel cleverness it may have had, its thoughts were no more than its own mindless hunger, beaten back by the duo. Broken teeth fell, shattered, to the ground and dissolved into nothingness, and soon the monster was a slumped pile of necks and bruises.

Superman floated to the ground carefully, perfectly controlled even after the struggle. He landed next to Shazam and eyed the lightning that still fizzed and popped around him. Fearless, he approached Shazam and extended a hand. “Thanks for the help there. I appreciate it. I’m Superman.”

Shazam’s eyes widened as his hero – THE hero – came close to shake his hand like he was a friend or a coworker. He sputtered. “I know. I mean, I know you’re Superman. I’m – I – Wow. I’m Shazam. Just wow. I never thought I’d – I mean I had always hoped to meet you.” He grabbed the Man of Steel’s hand enthusiastically.

With a chuckle, Superman accepted a handshake that would have crushed any normal person. “Shazam. That’s a good name. Careful with the lightning, though. People are about to start coming back.”

“Oh. Ha. Yeah. Umm, I’m not entirely sure how, but – Okay.” A deep breath later and the lightning did start to taper off, just as the crowd of people Superman predicted began to surge towards them.

But just as suddenly, they recoiled, and screams resounded once more. The hydra surged up again, more heads than before and more savage. It ignored strategy and tactics to seize the Man of Steel in two sets of jaws, trapping him immobile, lest he cause even more heads to rain destruction on the city. The heads that lunged after Shazam were not as on target. Bruised and swollen eyes misjudged their target even as they healed and tore up the earth even further as they skidded by, lunging back to wrap him like an anaconda’s coils.

Superman was pinned by multiple heads, all trying to tear at his impenetrable skin and failing, but still trapping him. Shazam’s cohort had him trapped, wrapped up to his waist and crawling higher, crushing tighter and tighter. The coils wrapped tighter and higher, capturing him, now, up to his chest and seeking to move higher. His arms were free, and he used them to beat down upon the rising tide of flesh.

There was no panic in him, though. There was fear – fear of failure, fear of what would happen in they couldn’t stop this thing, but surpassing all the fear was the courage to act and the wisdom to find a solution. The lightning scattered more strongly, and Shazam thought back to when he transformed. There was more power to what he was than strength and speed. He had more gifts to bring to bear than that.

He raised his fist, focusing on it. Focusing on the lighting that pumped through him, as vital and strengthening as blood. He focused and called upon all the power that he knew was inside him, feeling the charge build in his hand, and, once it reached a critical point, clenching and crushing the bolt into a mote of power more focused than anything he had ever seen. It only felt right, as he slammed this concentrated blast of everything he could bear into the scaly neck of the beast, to call out his name, his title, the essence of his power.

With that blow, the charge he had compressed and built was sent into the hydra, paralyzing it and filling it with more energy than its tenuous grip on reality could bear. It froze, twitching slightly, as the lightning carved a path to its core and filled it. Veins of visible electricity spread over its skin, drowning out the tone and color of its hardly real flesh. And as the fragment of power expanded further, past the capacity for the hydra to contain it, it shuddered, and with a flash, detonated and disintegrated.

Its body was no more. All that remained was the stolen scaffolding it had used – any stone, metal and wood it could grasp as its bulk expanded still remained and fell to the ground. The hydra was gone, entirely this time. The one bone that had began the hydra’s growth and eventual rampage gave off its last feeble energies, then flickered and gave out, falling inert. With that great bolt, the sky, too, announced its finale. The heavens opened and began to rain, the strange lightning and thunder that had plagued the city meeting their counterpart as the water finally fell.

Superman was less jocular, this time. Shazam was almost cowed to apology by the seriousness but for the part of him that screamed he had done nothing wrong. Despite his more sober look, there was still warmth in his voice as he said “That was quite some power there. And I didn’t know you could fly, too.”

With a startled glance down, Shazam realized he was flying. Well, less flying than floating, stationary in the air. But still effortlessly opposing gravity. Superman continued, “I think we need to have a talk. Mind if we head somewhere to speak privately?”

Shazam could only respond with agreement. He tried to steer by leaning, then by a sort of lunge forward, but nothing worked until his pushed some of the same power that called the lightning to move him forward. With that, he rocketed after the receding figure of Superman, barely maintaining control of his speed and steering in his excitement.

[kimberlylam1997]

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[carlkandutsch]

Photographer Todd Hido’s first monograph, House Hunting, was published in 2001. A second book called Outskirts was published the following year. Most of the photographs in these first efforts are pictures of ordinary American houses taken at night.

Hido’s procedure in making these pictures was straight-forward. He would drive around suburban neighborhoods, pull over, take the picture (in analog format using natural light) and drive away. Occasionally the police were called, but “[y]ou’re allowed to take pictures in public. It’s interesting that so many people regard their surroundings as inherently private.”

I am drawn to write about photographs because although we are surrounded and inundated by photographs every day, we don’t really know what a photograph is – at least I don’t. In fact, it seems to me that the more photographs there are[i], the less time and thought we give to the question of what a photograph really is, what kind of object we are seeing. We fail to see just how mysterious the thing we call a photograph really is, and its very familiarity in the so-called “digital age” only deepens the mystery. In other words, the existence and proliferation of photographs in contemporary life cannot but raise philosophical questions, because if you really look at a photograph, you’re bound to ask yourself at some point what it is you are seeing. In an ordinary photograph that has not been digitally manipulated, you see something that is real; but if the essence of “real” (as opposed to fictional, imaginary, etc.) has to do with its being present outside of one’s mind – its being there in the world – then what we are given to see in a photograph is also “unreal” because it is precisely not there at the moment you look at the photograph. Dreams and hallucinations and fantasies are like this, but these phenomena pass away when we wake up and reconstitute our attention; however, the photograph is still there just as it was even when we’ve finished looking at it, inviting us to reflect on the relationship between our perceptual experience and the world.

             What is unique about photographs, as opposed to, say, paintings, is that reality is made present in the photograph without being represented by a human being. Although the photographer selects the portion of the world that is framed by the viewfinder and the precise moment when the shutter is triggered, what appears in the fixed final image appears without human intervention or interpretation. Our experience of the reality projected on film is not mediated by brushstrokes or lines or other representational norms and techniques deployed by a human being. This is to say that the human is excluded from the world made present in the photograph.

Todd Hido’s pictures of homes at night are clearly about the experience of being excluded – of being outside of the world shown in the photograph. That someone, perhaps a solitary individual, a couple or a family, is inside the house, is suggested by the light emanating from within outward through the window; viewing the photograph, we are shut out of the world within, excluded not only from the quintessentially private space of someone’s home but from the lives of other human beings as such. This is why Hido’s night photographs can be and usually are seen as making a sociological and psychological statement about life in suburban middle America at the dawn of the 21st century. If the viewer of the photograph feels shut out, it is because the invisible occupants of the homes pictured are shut in. This view is in line with the usual interpretation of Hido’s photographs in other genres, for example, pictures of interiors and portraits, and it finds support in Hido’s comment (quoted above) on the fact when his presence with camera on the street at night is noticed, he is assumed to be up to no good, prompting calls to the police – because people “regard their surroundings as inherently private.” The word “private” here means sealed off, inaccessible, and secret. Residential streets are no longer seen as public spaces that are in principle shared with other members of one’s community, each of whom shares a common interest as formulated, for instance, in the Declaration of Independence. Since the conclusion of the Second World War, Americans have experienced a steady and accelerating erosion of the very idea of public space, which has historically been seen as an essential component of the social contract and of democracy itself. It so happens that this same historical period has seen the rise and consolidation of the mass media, television, the Internet, and now universal global connectivity by means of an array of “personal devices” that travel on one’s person allowing instantaneous, real-time publication (and simultaneous consumption) of information and images that not long ago were considered private and intimate, all but incommunicable – not to mention universal monitoring, surveillance and recording of these activities by the government and corporate interests. These phenomena also happen to coincide with the entry into public consciousness of the apocalyptic destructive power of the nuclear bomb, and slightly later of the long-term consequences of environmental degradation, including, now, ominous signs of irreversible global climate change and the potential obliteration of human life on planet Earth. I do not purport to explain the connection between these various developments and the birth of photography as a technology and one of the arts, but only to suggest a context in which such an explanation might be attempted.

According to Stanley Cavell, photography responds to our alienation from the world – that is, our collective sense at a particular historical juncture that reality had withdrawn from our capacities to represent it – by allowing that alienation to feel natural or inevitable (and therefore as something other than estrangement). Photography accomplishes this feat by virtue of its autonomism. The process of making a photograph is mechanical and chemical (and today, electronic); by triggering the camera’s shutter, the photographer unleashes a series of causes and effects that result in reality being made present in the print. But if the camera frees us from the burdens of representing the world, it does so by excluding us from the world made present in the photograph. The human subject is repositioned as a spectator, so that our withdrawl from the world feels as natural as projecting or taking in views of it. And it feels natural because it is not possible for us to reach the world projected on film, and therefore not possible to fail to reach it either.  “Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, as if from behind the self … as though the world’s projection [on a movie screen] explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know … The screen … makes displacement appear as our natural condition.”[i]

             The fact that the reality made present in a photograph is sensuously indistinguishable from the world in which we live implies that the world on film is our world – the objects it contains (even if displaced from their normal positions) occupy the same space that we occupy while viewing the photograph. Therefore, if we are barred from entering the photographed world, it not because that world is located elsewhere, but because the photograph shows the world as it was at the very instant light entered the camera’s lens, and that instant has passed by the time we view the photograph. “The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity) is a world past.”[ii] The world projected on film is a world past not in historical but in mythical time, like childhood. I can see the world on film, I can look at it, I can see myself in it, but I cannot be of that world. Photographs reveal and confirm that for us earth-bound humans, our experience of each moment is utterly specific, if only we have the courage to make ourselves present to the moment in face of the fact that time is always running out.  

             The “sociological” interpretation of Hido’s night photographs draws our attention to the structural fact that the viewer is ontologically outside of the world made present in a photograph. We see the exterior of a house; its occupants are shut in, while the camera, its operator and the viewer of the picture are shut out. Our sense that there is something illegitimate or illicit in observing someone’s house from the darkness of the street indicates the that being shut-out (and shut in) are not merely spatial relationships. They are human postures that that we have arrived at, and which reflect the structure of our relationship to the world in the age of photography – for example, the sense that humans’ ancient yearning for reality could only be satisfied at the price of our withdrawal from the world, so that what we see is seen from outside. The reality of the real, the thing’s presentness to us, consists in its being outside of our consciousness, and that implies that we are inside, as if in some way trapped and confined, gazing out at the world through a pane of glass.