#magic is a metaphor for late stage capitalism

[betterbooksandthings]

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst is a delight. When revolutionaries force the librarian Kiela to flee the burning library she works for with her assistant Caz, a sentient spider plant, she returns to the small island she grew up on. She left with what may be the last remaining rare spell books from the capital's most prestigious library. Now, the only way Kiela and Caz can protect the books is to keep their existence a secret, even though helpful neighbors keep coming around to help them. Will they be able to protect their secret as the temptation to use the information inside the books to help everyone they meet grows? Can the surly Kiela resist the ever-helpful, sunshiny Larran forever? If you are looking for a warm hug of a cozy fantasy book look no further.

Now, I was inclined to like this book after enjoying many books in the cozy fantasy canon and many of Sarah Beth Durst’s backlist. Nevertheless, this book is a delight. The Spellshop explores what it means to come home and how people can redefine what home means to them at any stage of their lives. Kiela begins the book as an isolated character whose primary interactions are either with Caz or a library patron. She ends the book as a member of the community who cares about others and is cared for. Everything from the character dynamics to the magic system, to the political unrest just makes sense. As an aside if you are looking for a fantasy book that references the negative environmental effects of wealthy corporations and groups misusing natural resources to the detriment of the rest of society, you have found it.

Simply put, The Spellshop is a likable book. I like the main character and her slow-burn romantic relationship with her neighbor who just so happens to be her long-lost childhood friend. I like her friendship with her sentient plants. I like the townspeople and the bakery and the mermaids. The book just brought a smile to my face the whole time and I cannot recommend it more.

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst is set to release July 9, 2024, from Bramble with sprayed edges to complement its gorgeous cover, so I would recommend preordering a copy as soon as possible. I know I will. Thank you to Bramble for an eARC for an honest review.

[crimeronan]

hey kitkat, if its not too much trouble, could you make a propaganda post for the silt verses? I've been seeing you talk about it a lot (i have spoilers marked dw) but im afraid to look up anything about it. is it horror? all i know about it is val <- horrible woman(?) so im intrigued. was wondering if it'd be possible for a silt verses post a la that trc post you made a while back

OH, ABSOLUTELY. i think about 95% of my followers have no idea what this media is about, so this ask is very exciting. i'll preface it by saying that i think it's edged out the dreamer trilogy for my favorite story Ever -- it's exactly on par with the first two books in terms of Reading My Heart Off The Page.

the premise:

the silt verses is a now-complete horror-tragedy narrative podcast set in a fantasy world that has many parallels to our own. this fantasy world is embroiled in late-stage corporate capitalism and is ravaged by the effects of colonialism, war, and oppression.

in this world, gods are created through sacrifice and belief. there are thousands of them, with thousands of individual religions.

the problem is that gods must be fed through human sacrifice. and if they aren't fed, they die.

and people are very invested in keeping their gods alive.

sacrifice is considered a necessary part of society, something that's as essential as breathing. the idea of simply not making sacrifices is considered a violent, radical, leftist anarchist position that is simply unsustainable. or so the state would have you believe!

but. SOME gods have been outlawed, and worshiping them WILL get you killed by the government.

the state says that it's because these gods are uniquely evil, and too dangerous or sadistic or wild to be fed.

in actuality, gods are outlawed when they don't serve the state or corporations' purposes. the question at the heart of the worldbuilding is always, "is Anything you've been told about the gods and the magic true? how much of this world is socially constructed? who benefits from the way things are?"

Metaphors Abound.

-

the cast:

the first season follows four key narrators; the second season introduces a fifth; the third a sixth.

-

carpenter - sister carpenter is an older woman who was born into an outlawed river-worshiping faith. she has seen her entire family murdered by the state, including her brother, parents, and grandmother. she briefly left the faith but returned to the parish because she had nowhere else to go; her relationship with her river and her church is complicated at best.

carpenter begins the series as a """devout""" disciple of the river parish. in actuality, her faith has been slipping for a Long Time. she's no longer certain that she loves this god she's been killing for for her entire life.

she begins the series investigating some unexplained "miracles," aka Deeply Fucking Horrific Murders, that appear to have been done by her god.

alongside her is brother faulkner.

-

faulkner - faulkner is a kid, somewhere around 19 or 20 years old when the story starts. he was NOT born into the river faith, but was instead called to it, back when he was still a rural farm boy living with his father and brothers. his first sacrifice was his brother, who he drowned on the farm. he later left home to find the parish.

faulkner has been with the parish for a pretty short period of time, but he truly IS a devout fanatic. because of this, he does not get along with carpenter. the two of them bicker a lot. carpenter thinks that faulkner is a stupid country bumpkin who's naive and full of starry-eyed optimism, and he annoys the piss out of her.

faulkner is not a dumb country bumpkin.

but he knows how he sounds and he knows how he looks. so he plays the part of the starry-eyed child with ease.

he is planning to kill carpenter.

he knows she's slipping, he knows she's losing her faith, and he wants her dead. he's been asked to keep an eye on her because the parish knows she's slipping, too.

uh oh!

-

hayward - investigating officer hayward is a police officer in the religious homicides division of the greater glottage police force. this police force has jurisdiction over outlawed gods. hayward's job is to find outlawed gods, arrest/kill their worshipers, and report them to the government.

he is the main antagonist of season one. crucially, he's a Good Cop - he's friendly, affable, funny and likable. he's kind of a dickhead bastard, but in the way that the protagonists of Cop Tv Shows (TM) often are. he offers to "help" the people he's arresting. he's good at playing the role of a good guy who just needs to uphold the status quo for the good of society.

but. he is, first and foremost, a cop. and the narrative has a Lot to say about cops. and about other people whose job is to Enforce The Law.

so. don't think that him being a Good Cop means that he's Actually a good guy or that he's not dangerous to the protagonists. Hoo Boy.

-

paige - paige duplass is a corporate boardroom executive who works for a marketing firm that creates gods. her job is to do all the marketing and branding for new corporate mascots. what does the god look like? how does the worship work? how are the sacrifices made?

but her company's profits are waning. and they need to return value to the shareholders.

so. they're going to kill their employees.

not paige, of course! she's a highly valued member of the team. she just has to keep everyone calm and be a kind, upbeat manager while the Layoffs approach. everything is fine, everyone. we aren't going to kill you :) don't worry :) just keep smiling :)

the horror of this gives her a crisis of conscience; after all the murder goes down, she leaves to go on a long drive.

which becomes longer still when she's taken hostage by carpenter and faulkner.

-

shrue - season two introduces shrue, a spineless liberal politician who runs on a """left-wing""" platform but really could not care less about anything except polling numbers. they're willing to do rotten, ugly propagandist things for their campaign -- including killing the river god. and all of its followers. for the good PR! :)

not great news for carpenter, faulkner, or their people.

but then shrue experiences Actual Violence up close for the first time. and it Shakes Them To Their Core.

and, well. suddenly they're not so comfortable being a spineless liberal politician anymore.

too bad they've locked themselves into their role and cannot fucking escape it!!

-

val - introduced in season three, VAL is the saint of a god of liars, purposefully created by the government for use as a weapon. she is the remnants of a woman who killed herself to serve her country. she does not remember who she is or what else she wanted, aside from her mother's approval.

as the saint of a god of liars, whatever VAL says becomes true..... as long as someone is there to listen. you're a loyal soldier? no, you died of a tumor as a child. you're a politician begging for mercy for the sake of your infant child? no, your baby has an insatiable taste for flesh and ate your sorry ass. etc

she's a monster and a sadist; she enjoys killing people to try to fill the emptiness in her. she is in terrible pain all the time and does not understand why. and she is becoming increasingly disillusioned and sick with herself, the government she serves, and the Utter Pointlessness of all this systemic violence.

but how do you break a cycle when you Are the cycle?? how do you get better?? how do you change anything??

much to consider.

-

overall, it's as close to a perfect story as it gets imo. literally every detail is carefully, painstakingly chosen to further the themes, arcs, characterization, etc. the plotting is suspenseful, the horror is Deeply Fucking Scary, the storylines are gutwrenching, the voice acting is spine-chilling, and the characters are So Fucking Compelling.

also, i get frustrated by representation-first fiction recs, but if you get this far and want to know: it's Deeply queer. faulkner, paige, and shrue are all trans (shrue is they/them, paige is a post-transition trans woman, faulkner is a trans guy who's recently started T). carpenter is aroace, there's casual representation and normalization of trans n gay people throughout the ensemble cast.

and more importantly, it's just. So Damn Good.

@valtsv @deermouth you two are the other main silt verses bloggers i know, so if you want a pitch for your followers.... here is this!

[purplesaline]

Disney's Wish is a surprisingly anti-capitalist movie for the Mouse to have produced.

Okay so maybe not exactly anti-capitist if you view it as separate from current cultural experiences, which is likely how it got stuck past the executives, but come on!

A man who builds a kingdom in exchange for the deepest wishes of others (which they then forget), promising to keep them safe and once a month grant one of the wishes?

Come live in my kingdom and help make it great, in exchange you only need to give me your deepest wish, which I will keep safe from the dangers of the world so it doesn't get destroyed. You won't remember it so you won't be able to pursue it on your own, but don't worry because one day I just might grant it!

And this seems like a great deal because pursuing your deepest wish can be scary and there's no guarantee you'll ever make it happen but you've seen this guy grant people's wishes and last year he granted 14! Your odds of the king granting your wish seem much better than you making it happen yourself! And so what if you feel a little empty afterward, you don't remember what it felt like before you gave your wish away.

It's not even "sell me your soul" it's "give me your soul freely and maaaaaaaybe you'll get something in return but no promises (and if your wish is inconvenient for me I'm definitely never granting it)."

How is this not a metaphor for our current state of late-stage capitalism? I mean when the devil has the moral high ground you seriously need to question your societal model. At least you know up front what you get with him.

I will say it was nice to see a story where the power of ordinary people was what it took to save the day. We need more stories where we save each other instead of the endless chosen one with magical powers narratives. Those have a place for sure, but I think they've conditioned us to wait for someone special to make a difference and I'm sure that's part of why we're in this mess.

But yes, Wish! Great movie! Definitely recommend it! Go watch it and get inspired! Never forget that we're all made of stars.

[slicedblackolives]

the loss of magic due to technology isn't a statement against technology but against capitalistic alienation therefore onward (2020) is a film talking about emancipation from late stage tech-led capitalism using a magic as a metaphor for communism. in this essay i will—

[fishoutofcamelot]

Zombie symbolism in media? Body snatchers? That sounds extremely interesting 👀👀👀

OOOOOOOOOOH ARE YOU READY FOR ME TO RANT? CUZ I’M GONNA RANT BABY. YALL WANNA SEE HOW HARD I CAN HYPERFIXATE???

I’ll leave my ramblings under the cut.

The Bodysnatchers thing is a bit quicker to explain so I’ll start with that. Basically, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released in 1956, about a small town where the people are slowly but surely replaced and replicated by emotionless hivemind pod aliens. It was a pretty obvious metaphor for the red scare and America’s fear of the ‘growing threat of communism’ invading their society. A communist could look like anyone and be anyone, after all.

Naturally, the bodysnatcher concept got rebooted a few times - Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978), Body Snatchers (1993), and The Invasion (2007), just off the top of my head. You’re all probably very familiar with the core concept: people are slowly being replaced by foreign duplicates. 

But while the monster has remained roughly the same, the theme has not. In earlier renditions, Bodysnatchers symbolized communism. But in later renditions, the narratives shifted to symbolize freedom of expression and individualism - that is, people’s ability to express and think for themselves being taken away. That’s because freedom of thought/individuality is a much more pressing threat on our minds in the current climate. Most people aren’t scared of communists anymore, but we are scared of having our free will taken away from us. 

The best indicator of the era in which a story is created is its villain. Stories written circa 9/11 have villains that are foreign, because foreign terrorism was a big fear in the early 2000s. In the past, villains were black people, because white people were racist (and still are, but more blatantly so in the past). 

Alright, now for the fun part.

ZOMBIES

Although the concept has existed in Haitian voodooism for ages, the first instance of zombies in western fiction was a book called The Magic Island written by William Seabrook in 1929. Basically ol Seabrook took a trip to Haiti and saw all the slaves acting tired and ‘brutish’ and, having learned about the voodoo ‘zombi’, believed the slaves were zombies, and thus put them in his book.

The first zombie story in film was actually an adaptation of Seabrook’s accounts, called White Zombie (1932). It was about a couple who takes a trip to Haiti, only for the woman to be turned into a zombie and enchanted into being a Haitian’s romantic slave. SUPER racist, if you couldn’t tell, but not only does it reflect the state of entertainment of the era - Dracula and Frankenstein had both been released around the same time - but it also reflects American cultural fears. That is, the fear of white people losing their authoritative control over the world. White fright.

Naturally, the box office success of White Zombie inspired a whole bunch of other remakes and spinoffs in the newly minted zombie genre, most of them taking a similar Haitian voodoo approach. Within a decade, zombies had grown from an obscure bit of Haitian lore to a fully integrated part of American pop culture. Movies, songs, books, cocktails, etc. 

But this was also a time for WWII to roll around and, much like the Bodysnatchers, zombie symbolism evolved to fit the times. Now zombies experienced a shift from white fright and ethnic spirituality to something a bit more secular. Now they were a product of foreign science created to perpetuate warmongering schemes. In King of Zombies (1941), a spy uses zombies to try and force a US Admiral to share his secrets. And Steve Sekely’s Revenge of the Zombies (1943) became the first instance of Nazi zombies. 

Then came the atom bomb, and once more zombie symbolism shifted to fears of radiation and communism. The most on-the-nose example of this is Creature With the Atom Brain (1955).

Then came the Vietnam War, and people started fearing an uncontrollable, unconscionable military. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombies were caused by radiation from a space probe, combining both nuclear and space-race motifs, as well as a harsh government that would cause you just as much problems as the zombies. One could argue that the zombies in the Living Dead series represent military soldiers, or more likely the military-industrial complex as a whole, which is presented as mindless in its pursuit of violence.

The Living Dead series also introduced a new mainstay to the genre: guns. Military stuff. Fighting. Battle. And that became a major milestone in the evolution of zombie representation in media. This was only exacerbated by the political climate of the time. In the latter half of the 20th century, there were a lot of wars. Vietnam, Korea, Arab Spring, Bay of Pigs, America’s various invasions and attacks on Middle Eastern nations, etc. Naturally the public were concerned by all this fighting, and the nature of zombie fiction very much evolved to match this.

But the late 1900s weren’t just a place of war. They were also a place of increasing economic disparity and inequal wealth distribution. In the 70s and 80s, the wage gap widened astronomically, while consumerism remained steadily on the rise. And so, zombies symbolized something else: late-stage capitalism. Specifically, capitalist consumption - mindless consumption. For example, in Dawn of the Dead (1978), zombies attack a mall, and with it the hedonistic lifestyles of the people taking refuge there. This iteration props up zombies as the consumers, and it is their mindless consumption that causes the fall of the very system they were overindulging in.

Then there was the AIDS scare, and the zombie threat evolved to match something that we can all vibe with here in the time of COVID: contagion. Now the zombie condition was something you could get infected with and turn into. In a video game called Resident Evil (1996), the main antagonist was a pharmaceutical company called the Umbrella Corporation that’s been experimenting with viruses and bio-warfare. In 28 Days Later (2002), viral apes escape a research lab and infect an unsuspecting public.

Nowadays, zombies are a means of expressing our contemporary fears of apocalypse. It’s no secret that the world has been on the brink for a while now, and everyone is waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. Post-apocalypse zombie movies act as simultaneous male power fantasy, expression of contemporary cynicism, an expression of war sentiments, and a product of the zombie’s storied symbolic history. People are no longer able to trust the government, and in many ways people have a hard time trusting each other, and this manifests as an every-man-for-himself survivalist narrative. 

So why have zombies endured for so long, despite changing so much? Why are we so fascinated by them? Well, many say that it’s because zombies are a way for us to express our fears of apocalypse. Communism, radiation, contagion - these are all threats to the country’s wellbeing. Some might even say that zombies represent a threat to conversative America/white nationalism, what with the inclusion of voodooism, foreign entities, and late-stage capitalism being viewed as enemies.

Personally, I might partly agree with the conservative America thing, but I don’t think zombies exist to project our fears onto. That’s just how villains and monsters work in general. In fiction, the conflict’s stakes don’t hit home unless the villain is intimidating. The hero has to fight something scary for us to be invested in their struggles. But the definition of what makes something scary is different for every different generation and social group. Maybe that scary thing is foreign invaders, or illness, or losing a loved one, or a government takeover. As such, the stories of that era mold to fit the fears of that era. It’s why we see so many government conspiracy thrillers right now; it’s because we’re all afraid of the government and what it can do to us.

So if projecting societal fears onto the story’s villain is a commonplace practice, then what makes zombies so special? Why have they lasted so long and so prevalently? I would argue it’s because the concept of a zombie, at its core, plays at a long-standing American ideal: freedom.

Why did people migrate to the New World? Religious freedom. Why did we start the Revolutionary War and become our own country? Freedom from England’s authority. Why was the Civil War a thing? The south wanted freedom from the north - and in a remarkable display of irony, they wanted to use that freedom to oppress black people. Why are we so obsessed with capitalism? Economic freedom.

Look back at each symbolic iteration of the zombie. What’s the common thread? In the 20s/30s, it was about white fright. The fear that black people could rise up against them and take away their perceived ‘freedom’ (which was really just tyrannical authority, but whatever). During WWII, it was about foreign threats coming in and taking over our country. During Vietnam, it became about our military spinning out of control and hecking things up for the rest of us. In the 80s/90s, it was about capitalism turning us into mindless consumers. Then it was about plagues and hiveminds and the collapse of society as a whole, destroying everything we thought we knew and throwing our whole lives into disarray. In just about every symbolic iteration, freedom and power have been major elements under threat.

And even deeper than that, what is a zombie? It’s someone who, for whatever reason, is a mindlessly violent creature that cannot think beyond base animal impulses and a desire to consume flesh. You can no longer think for yourself. Everything that made you who you are is gone.

Becoming a zombie is the ultimate violation of someone’s personal freedom. And that terrifies Americans.

Although an interesting - and concerning - phenomenon is this new wave of wish fulfillment zombie-ism. You know, the gun-toting action movie hero who has the personality of soggy toast and a jaw so chiseled it could decapitate the undead. That violent survivalist notion of living off the grid and being a total badass all the while. It speaks to men who, for whatever reason, feel their masculinity and dominance is under threat. So they project their desires to compensate for their lack of masculine control onto zombie fiction, granting them personal freedom from obligations and expectations (and feminism) to live out their solo macho fantasies by engaging in low- to no-consequence combat. And in doing so, completely disregarding the fact that those same zombies were once people who cruelly had their freedom of self ripped away from them. Gaining their own freedom through the persecution of others (zombies). And if that doesn’t sum up the white conservative experience, I don’t know what does.

So yeah. That’s zombies, y’all.

Thanks for the ask!

[breakingbadfics]

Lets Go All The Way. An Analysis

CW: Discussion of Politics, discussion of 2020.

This song is the song that 2020 needed.

Lyrics: https://genius.com/Sly-fox-lets-go-all-the-way-lyrics

https://youtu.be/KAH4atCDm8k

Lets Go All The Way as written by Sly Fox is a song that was released at the tail end of 1985 and by all rights should not hit as hard as it does, and yet it could have been released over 40 years later and would fit in perfectly in the madness of 2020.

Lyrically it is packed with double meaning, multiple layers or metaphore and just the bangingest kind of bass drums you'll ever hear. It is a song that just starts strong and keeps going.

"Presidential Party. No one wants to dance" 2020 was an election year, a smouldering powder keg ready to explode The Republicans had dropped all facades and had proven they were monstrous and did NOT Care about the people who were dying from preventable causes during the covid-19 pandemic, or the marginalised people who were being brutaslised by police america. and yet the people charged the power to prevent stop the republicans did nothing. and worse in 2021 are still doing nothing, and in 2020 prove that they would sabotage the popular candidates just to prevent true change from occuring. The american political system is broken into a two party system, everyone knows it doesnt' work. But here we are, trapped in a dance hall with no reason or desire to dance.

And for the "normal people" who would rather not be involved in this? well the media is always "looking for a new star, to put you in a trance" Society

"Cartoon Capers happen in reality" What do you call it when the american president manages to cheat his way into the white house, openly stokes the flames of bigotry across the nation, sows doubt in the integrity of the system amongst the worst citizen in america, and somehow manages to get away with it. Twice.

What do you call it when the most popular democratic party candidate is painted poorly by the media and his peers inspite of winning every initial primary election? What do you call it when people who shared his beliefs suddenly pivot and endorse a man who many refer to as a "Democrat in Name Only"

"Working in a Factory, Eight Days a Week" $7.25 Just this past month the democrats despite having a total control of the american government, having rode the fabled Blue Wave to it's destination, caved and are not changing the Minimum Wage. (last I checked) in 2020 there are people who have to work, and and despiter givcing their whole life to their jobs are not making enough.

"Rich Man. Poor Man. Living in Fantasy" The most brilliantly based double meaning in the whole song. If you are somehow rich. Congrats. You have no worries. You have nothing to fear. You can have whatever you want. You Live in Fantasy. are you "poor?" Keep working. you will work till we say you're done, and take the money we give you. to thnk you can have better is a fantasy. Sorry.

These are not complicated or deep analysis. The Writers of the song themselves have explained that yes. This song is politics, about being jaded with the way america seems to function. The pain of living under late stage capitalism where the moment you infringe on the rights of a rich persons capacity to continue making the money he doesn't need he'll go "No. You can't make this money, thats not how the market works" and magically turn off the free market.

2020 showed us that there is something wrong here. That the system has failed so many people. And worse? it feels like nothing can be done.

But thats the thing. We can make a better way. We can fix this. We can do so much better and we can have what we need. But, in order to do this we have to go all the way.

Lets go all the way.

[less-than-hash]

A Lot to Process

I haven’t been making games lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not been writing. I took off at the beginning of the year to work on my prose fiction, finished drafting a novel provisionally titled These Subtle Games back in March, and finished revising it and began querying it last month. It’s a contemporary occult fantasy set in Boston, following a nonbinary game developer investigating the untimely and mysterious demise of her mentor, only to find herself drawn into a morass of conspiratorial cabals, mystical mobsters, and misogynist massholes - not to mention a sprawling hidden ARG that may or may not contain the secrets of New England cunning magic.

It’s basically autobiography.

In the meantime, I’ve begun writing a new novel, an industrial fantasy set in a world of sprawling empires both challenged and propped up by powerful mercantile houses and an aggressively expansionist church ruled by wizards. I found that the process I stumbled through in developing and writing These Subtle Games - a process that, despite the differences in media, grew out of my experience creating games - worked really well for me, so I’ve been following a more refined version for the new novel with similarly positive results. Furthermore, I’ve already begun applying it to a potential sequel to TSG. With Novelember coming up, I figured I’d share a little of that process with you.

The goals of my writing process are twofold: 

To apply some level of organization to my work, lest it follow in the footsteps of my first novel, which was basically “write until you’re done writing, and now you’ve got 141,000 words of experimental weirdness.”

To allow a lot of flexibility, preventing said organization from stifling my creativity. 

Details below the cut.

PRE-PRODUCTION, aka Background, Research, and Planning

I spend a lot of time with the concept for a novel (or a conversation in a game) before I begin writing anything that’ll make it into even the rough draft. Note that I didn’t use the “before I put pen to paper” metaphor here, because I do a lot of writing at this stage. Much of this is simple note-taking, whether on research or on ideas. I do a fair amount of this in an actual notebook, often because I’m off somewhere away from my computer.

Because this phase generally overlaps with the late phases of a previous project, and when I’m actually at my computer I’m generally working on the older piece. I was in this phase for Hidden Sanctum while recording VO for Seeker, Slayer, Survivor, for example, and for These Subtle Games while wrapping up my work on the Deadfire expansions.

I like to overlap projects like this for a few reasons:

It allows me to move smoothly from active work on one project to the next.

It engages a different part of my mind than drafting prose, keeping me fresh.

Because I spend a lot of time exploring an idea, it helps me determine whether or not I think the idea’s strong enough to sustain me through a project.

Things I do while planning:

Read extensively. I read work in the same vein or genre as the work I’m intending to write. In preparation for Deadfire, for example, I read The Gentleman Bastards books by Scott Lynch, Uprooted by Naomi Novik, and Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. Prior to starting work on These Subtle Games I read  Procession of the Dead by Darren Shan, War in Heaven by Charles Williams, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Lieber, Conversion by Katherine Howe, the Atlanta Burns books by Chuck Wendig,  A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, and Himself by Jess Kidd, among others. Before beginning the current novel, I read Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, The Incorruptibles by John Horner Jacobs, Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan, and Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, among other works. These are books I read specifically because I planned to do work in similar spaces. I approach these books analytically to get a sense of what’s been done before, as well as what might and might not work from a structural or stylistic standpoint. What I want to do and what I want to avoid.  Nor do I limit myself to books. As part of my pre-production for my current project I watched Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Les Miserable, L’Empereur de Paris, The Age of Innocence, and Carnival Row, as well as replaying parts of the Dishonored games. I also made myself a music playlist, the heart of which is Postmodern Jukebox’s cover of “Welcome to the Black Parade.”

Research broadly. I’m less of the school that one should write what they know than that they should know what they write. I generally write fantastic works, but without an understanding of matters related to the fantasy, the product feels hollow. This can include research into the history of sail and piracy, for example, or military technology, or fashion. For These Subtle Games I read numerous books on New England folklore and cunning folk, as well as on witch trials, both in Salem and globally. I read a lot about Harvard’s study of psychedelics, including Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. I also did a tremendous amount of deeply unpleasant research into online harassment. At this point in the process, I try to prioritize the forest for the trees (hence “broadly” above). I don’t need to know every maritime term to plot content set on a sailing vessel, I just need to know the broad strokes of how ships work, how the crew lives, and how that might impact someone living on the sea. My current project required a fair amount of exploration of subjects as diverse as industrial era mill towns, the history of the American and French revolutions, and dinosaurs. While doing this research, I keep an eye out for things I find interesting that can inform my plot. I’d never heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, for example, but reading about it inspired a plot point in the current project. That said, I don’t feel like I need to be an expert at this stage on anything I hope to write about. I’m almost certainly going to discard ideas and discover new ones as I go along, and I’ll have to dig deep into things like boot styles and fishing vessels (to pick two subjects from yesterday’s writing) as I go.

Figure out what I want to say. Here I work to nail down the broadest themes I want to explore in a work. These usually arise from a combination of my research and reflecting on the things I find interesting about whatever I’m making the subject of my project. Initially These Subtle Games was titled The Quiet Game (a title already claimed by a murder mystery set in Massachusetts) because of its interest in secrets (as reflected in the secret societies of Boston, the NDAs of the games industry, and the arcana of ARGs like the Jejune Institute). The new novel examines colonialism, capitalism, and power, as well as what actions are justified when resisting an overwhelming force. The three DLC for Deadfire interrogate the relationships between the gods of Eora and their followers, the Watcher included. Defining this helps guide all of the work to come, providing a benchmark by which to judge the effectiveness of an idea, plot point, or piece of writing.

Build out the world. These Subtle Games is set in modern Boston and Deadfire in Eora, both worlds that were well-defined long before I began creating fiction set in them. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t spend time fleshing out the corners of those worlds I intended to work within. TSG required that I determine the form of a fictionalized Boston games industry, as well as the shape of the secret cultures that inform the action of the novel. For Deadfire, each piece of content, each world map event, and each DLC island is a little world of its own, with its own story that feeds back into the larger ideas of the game. (Of course, I wasn’t working in a vacuum, nor alone.)  The current project, set in a new fantasy world, required the creation of a rough geography and history, populated with peoples, nations, and faiths. I designed these not merely to have verisimilitude, but to feed into the goals of the work. In the case of the new project, that meant huge colonial powers jockeying for the dwindling unclaimed territories and their resources, vast trade companies conspiring to wrest power from the entrenched nobility, a clergy focused on enforcing the rule of the gods over every nation of the world, and several species of magically-crafted servitors provided curtailed rights when they’re afforded any freedom at all. Here, again, I prefer to take a diffuse approach. I can get by with the broad strokes, and leaving things undefined offers me more room to maneuver as I write. I personally also find it useful to gather art references at this stage. I have a folder of illustrations that suggest the mood and style of the world of the new project, for example. For These Subtle Games, I commissioned an illustration of my protagonist from the fantastic Katorius (below).

Sketch out the major characters. Generally by this point I’ve got ideas for at least a few of the characters, but before I start writing I want to have a strong sense of who each of those characters is. I generally write a few pages about the major players, their background, their attitudes, their role in the plot. This is worldbuilding, albeit with a narrowed focus, so the rules above apply: I try to keep things vague and flexible. I knew at this stage, for example, that These Subtle Games protagonist Laurie’s best work friend Meri grew up in California, and that if she lost her job, she might move back. That she was a surfer and played ska were details that came out in the writing. She also grew from being only moral support to providing occasional practical aid to Laurie, as well as coming to rely on Laurie in turn. Similarly, in the current project, the six characters the novel focuses on, something of a band of scoundrels, shifted over the course of development from their sketches. The relationship between two characters who are fugitives from the imperial government, for example, changed dramatically. Whereas they had been initially written as an inseparable pair, I found it much more interesting if they were on the outs after years of traveling and working together, adding (another) fracture in the crew’s interpersonal dynamics. I’ve talked before about how Vatnir went from being a charming con-artist to a grumpy reluctant messiah after I saw concept art for him. Similarly, I knew from my first moments with Serafen that he possesses no qualms about employing violence in the course of his work; the delineations, though, that he creates for himself regarding when violence is appropriate was something developed over the course of writing him.

Identify big tentpole moments. Here’s the first bit of actual plot work. At this point I’ve likely got ideas of notes I absolutely want to hit. I knew, for example, that I wanted Laurie, the protagonist of These Subtle Games, to discover an object late in the novel that redefines her relationship to her uncle and her understanding of his role in the mystery she’s unraveling. Inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, I knew I wanted the crew in the new project to be party to the inadvertent destruction of a textile mill, one made all the worse for its owners having locked the workers within. In both cases, these moments speak directly to the ideas I’m exploring in the work. Once I’ve identified a few of my tentpoles, I order them in a way that makes dramatic sense to me, and that gives me not an outline, exactly, but guideposts for the narrative. As mentioned so many times above, the goal is to provide myself guidance, not to hem myself in or nail down every plot point.

Once I’m relatively comfortable with my sense of where I’m taking a work, I begin writing what I call my “plot doc.”

PRE-ALPHA, aka The Plot Doc

I don’t generally outline my work. I go from the extremely rough tentpole step mentioned above into a kind of extremely rough draft I call my plot doc. These provide the skeleton and heart of the novel onto which I can layer the muscle and flesh of actual writing. The plot doc is pretty long - the one for These Subtle Games was 49,000 words, about half the length of the finished novel. The plot doc for the current project weighs in at 31,000 words. 

Almost none of these words will end up in the actual book as-is. 

I care very little about the state of the writing at this step. Here I’m exploring the plot and the characters, drafting out how they go from tentpole to tentpole, figuring out what in the narrative works and hopefully identifying what doesn’t. I find where I’ve failed to establish needed details in my worldbuilding and further define my characters.

This step actually developed directly from my work in narrative design. Generally I (like many of the narrative designers I know) stub out a branching conversation before writing it, creating a kind of detailed outline (where everything is written with the same lack of polish as the LRs pictured in my post about interjections). This lets us establish the flow of the conversation, plot its structure without having to worry too much about details of style, and hopefully locate any holes or major bugs prior to fleshing out the file. Generally the text in stubs would be difficult to mistake for shippable writing. 

I personally find stubbing out conversations useful because I think differently during the mechanical work of structuring files than I do during the artistic work of crafting dialog and prose. I’ve found a similar division of labor incredibly useful when crafting plot. It relieves a lot of the pressure of writing, too. I don’t have to worry about both building a functional plot and writing enticing prose. Because I’m going to be the only person ever reading the plot doc.

(Unless, of course, I do something ridiculous like share pieces of it on my tumblr.)

Here’s an excerpt from the plot doc for These Subtle Games, which I’ll contrast with later versions below:

A car awaits her in Gloucester, and it brings her to Matthias’s house. It’s a sizable home, stone, and old, somewhat decrepit, even. Ivy climbs the turrets, and the copper roof has gone to streaked verdigris. He stands in the open door as she approaches, and she hugs him, grateful for the familiar, and he returns the gesture stiffly, patting her lightly on the back. He’s tall and rail thin, built much as she is, with a well-kept beard and receding hair. He feels old-fashioned to her, in a dressing gown and pajamas with warm, soft house shoes.

Hello, niece, he says.

Hello, uncle.

He offers her food, which she declines, and takes her to her room, just off the main room.

Ouch. It’s little more than stream of consciousness, just me getting the ideas out onto the page. Or 200 pages, in the case of this project.

ALPHA, aka The Rough Draft

Once I’ve completed the plot doc, I begin actually writing. I do this in a new file, referring to the plot doc for guidance as I go along. Often I do this a little inconsistently, letting myself write until I hit a lull before returning to the plot doc. That way the plot doc serves not merely a guiding role, but a motivating function.

The rough draft is the first actual composition I’m doing on the work, and much of it actually ends up in the finished version. I take significantly more time on each scene, on each sentence, trying to craft prose that breathes and dialog that feels real.

I also tend to be a bit loose and experimental at this stage. I play around, writing things that I find interesting to read. If I find myself weighing style against readability, I generally err on the side of style. I can clean shit up later.

Here’s the scene from before, taken from the rough draft:

The car Matthias hired lets Laurie off at the gate, which creaks opens on hydraulic pistons as she leaves her tip.

The driver nods towards the tree-lined darkness. “Hop back in, and I’ll run you up. Real door to door service. If you’d like.”

Having relaxed at an exponential rate with each mile she put between herself and the city, Laurie shakes her head with a faint smile. “I could use the walk.”

“You don’t think you’re fat, do you?” His gaze flits the length of her from knees to shoulders, efficiently dispelling the enchantment worked by the commuter rail ride through the dense New England night.

“What? No.”

“Because you’re a beanpole. Almost too skinny, if you ask me.”

She hadn’t. “That’s not what I meant. Just, I want to clear my head, thanks.”

He leaves her to it, and she walks up the curling drive towards the old stone Victorian. The curtained windows glow faintly from within, and warm lamps jut from the quoins. Sprawling ivy climbs the turrets, and rooftop copper has long given way to white-streaked verdigris. Matthias’s is a stately home, but aging, much like the man himself. He meets her at the door in a dressing gown over fine silk pajamas and plush slippers. Her uncle stands as long and lanky as Laurie, with high cheekbones, a higher forehead, and a well-trimmed beard.

She greets him with a hug. She keeps it gentler than she might like, given his age. He’s never appeared frail, exactly, but his features profess a wary delicateness, as if he’d been crafted of pudding cloth and porcelain.

“Niece,” he says quietly, squeezing her shoulder.

“Uncle,” she answers. It’s an old ritual, and with it Laurie’s remaining fear falls away, abandoning her to her exhaustion.

He admits her to the house, the pair padding silently across polished marble past floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Matthias’s home gives the impression of being larger on the inside than the out, a space out of time, populated by statues of stone and painted ceramic. A grand piano dominates one corner, the instrument on which Esme had performed several family recitals during Thanksgiving gatherings past. At thirteen, Laurie’d lugged her hollow-bodied electric through two airports and two more trains to her uncle’s house. After Esme played, Laurie’d produced the guitar and performed a show of her own, all barre and power chords joined to lyrics roundly condemning the evils of industrial capitalism and hypocrisy of American evangelism in terms both suggestive and explicit. The gathered family had clapped politely enough, but she later overheard her father’s sister thank him for leaving the amplifier back in Carrboro.

Esme had told Laurie she’d loved it.

“Are you hungry?” Uncle Matthias asks her as they pass the sliding double doors to the dining room and the kitchen beyond.

She shakes her head. “I’m very full of food, but thank you.”

The scene’s significantly longer now, and I’ve further defined the driver, detailed the house, and defined aspects of Laurie’s relationship to it and her family. And hey, now it’s got quotation marks! 

Once I finish the rough draft, I celebrate a bit. Hey, I wrote a fucking novel! 

But I don’t share. I know I’m not happy with the work yet. I’m sure it’s riddled with grammatical errors. It’s probably got some questionable shifts in verb tense. It likely sports an inconsistency or six. I know I can do better, so I set out to do so.

BETA, aka The First and Second Revision

Here’s where the hard work of revision begins. I read the book, taking notes on things I’d like to change, then go through carefully, making both the changes I’d noted and performing close editing. I try to polish overwritten lines and clarify confusing sentences. I look for inconsistencies, especially when moving scenes around. 

Were this a conversation in a game, this would be the point I marked it for review by a lead or solicit feedback from QA and my fellow designers. Having done a revision or two on a book, I’m feeling pretty confident in what I’ve made, so I give it to any beta readers I’ve enlisted, that they might remind me that I do, in fact, have a long-ass way to go before it’s good. 

GOLD, aka The “Finished” Product

Once I’ve got feedback from my readers (and have perhaps let the book sit for a bit to work on pre-production for an upcoming project - or just played a shit-ton of Final Fantasy XIV...), I return to the novel or conversation to polish it further. 

At this point I’m looking to flesh out details, to make sure each sentence serves a purpose. To chop off unnecessary phrases and to make sure each interaction is bringing out the characters’ personalities. 

Here’s the fourth (and currently final) revision of the scene from above:

Matthias’s hired car deposits Laurie at his gate, a break in the thick stone wall that separates the street from her uncle’s plot of dense, quiet woods. Hickories and pines obscure the sky, swaying gently on a salted breeze off of the Atlantic. As Laurie tips the driver, a pair of heavy, wrought iron hinges creak open with the low hiss of hydraulic pistons.

The man nods towards the tree-lined darkness, his gray hair half-circumscribing his bald pate. “Hop back in, and I’ll run you up. Real door to door service. If you’d like.”

Having relaxed exponentially with each mile she put between herself and the city—a charm cast by the long commuter rail ride through the dense New England night—Laurie shakes her head. “I could use the walk.”

“You don’t think you’re fat, do you?” His gaze flits the length of her, from knees to shoulders, efficiently dispelling the enchantment.

“What? No.”

“Because you’re a beanpole. Almost too skinny, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t.” Her fingernails bite her palms.

“Sure, suit yourself.” His window whispers back into place.

He pulls away, and she waits for his taillights to withdraw around the bend before walking the curled drive towards the old stone Victorian. The curtained windows glow faintly from within, and warm lamps jut from the quoins. Sprawling ivy climbs the turret, and rooftop copper has long given way to white-streaked verdigris. Matthias’s is a stately home but aging, not unlike the man himself. He meets her at the door in a dressing gown over fine silk pajamas and plush slippers. As long and lanky as his niece, Laurie’s uncle’s features add high cheekbones to a higher forehead and a well-trimmed beard.

She greets him with a gentle hug—gentler than she’d prefer, what with his age. He’s never struck her as frail, exactly, but his features profess a wary delicateness, as if he’d been crafted of pudding cloth and porcelain.

“Niece,” he says quietly, squeezing her shoulder.

“Uncle,” she answers. It’s an old ritual, and with it Laurie’s lingering fear falls away, abandoning her to her exhaustion. Her trapezius slackens beneath her uncle’s hand, her scapulae sinking as her frustration flows down her arms and through her twitching fingers. They flick the remnants away.

The pair pad silently across polished marble tiles past floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Matthias’s home gives the impression of being larger on the inside than the out, a space out of time, populated by statues of horses, deer, and dryads in stone and painted ceramic. A grand piano dominates one corner, an instrument on which Esme had performed a series of recitals following Thanksgiving dinners past. At thirteen, Laurie’d lugged her hollow-bodied electric through two airports and two more trains to her uncle’s house. After Esme played, Laurie’d produced the guitar and performed a show of her own, joining steely barre and power chords to lyrics condemning the evils of industrial capitalism and hypocrisy of American evangelism—in terms both suggestive and explicit. The family had clapped politely enough, but later she overheard her father’s sister thank him for leaving the amplifier back in Carrboro.

Esme, of course, had told Laurie she’d loved it. “Maybe my favorite song ever,” she’d said, the liar.

“Are you hungry?” Uncle Matthias asks her as they pass the sliding double doors to the dining room and the kitchen beyond.

Having stopped into a pizza joint on her way to North Station and walked out with a distended Styrofoam clamshell heavy with waffle fries drenched in cheese studded with olives, tomatoes, and jalapenos, she shakes her head. “I’m very full of food, but thank you.”

It’s not hugely different from the rough draft, but there’s a lot more detail, and the weaker phrases have been excised. Matthias no longer “admits her to the house,” for example, because it’s implied that she’s come in by the action. The details at the end about the waffle fries fill an inconsistency in the rough draft: originally Laurie’d eaten nothing that day, so why was she full here? (Deeply interesting, I know.) 

Laurie’s decision to snap back at the driver about his unasked for critique of her appearance was a result of beta reader feedback. The additional details about the decor in Matthias’s house subtly ties him to the locations of secret societies Laurie visits later in the book, details I’d not developed until the prior draft. The use of anatomical language to describe Laurie’s body reflects the character’s distance from it. She views it as something of an animate corpse she happens to inhabit rather than a core aspect of her self. Finally, Esme’s response is presented in dialog now, injecting her character into the scene and allowing the prose narration to reflect Laurie’s personality.

Nothing’s really done though. There are more hands for it to go through. Just as a game conversation undergoes changes suggested by QA, shifts in the recording booth, and may end up trimmed or entirely cut due to schedule and budget constraints or even to fix a nasty bug, a novel goes through several hands between the point where the author’s ready to query it and a publisher’s willing to put it on a shelf. But eventually you have to make the decision to be done with a piece, to mark it complete in JIRA and push it down the pipeline. 

Then you get to move on to whatever’s next. 

Cheers, <#

[youngster-monster]

Cardinal sins, deadly virtues

 Patience is the mother of all vices.

Kael’thas likes to think he’s a patient man. No one has ever accused him of being cool-headed before — fire mages have a reputation to uphold — and he doesn’t necessarily put thoughts into everything he does or says, but he was raised for diplomacy and leadership, and leniency is par for the course. He was a professor at the Kirin Tor for a while, too, and you don’t make it to such a career without learning some tolerance for mages’ shenanigans, which prepare you for anything.

And maybe Rommath would rather call him ���long-suffering’ than patient, but is there such a difference, really? As long as it keeps him from pyroblasting impudent noblemen for wasting his time, he thinks it’s fair game to call it patience.

But there’s a time in those endless, mostly-pointless hours of talking in circles — a moment, you see, a point, where it gets a little old to hear another of Sylvanas’ diatribes against the Alliance. He gets a little tired, a little done with her shit.

And most people are unaware of what a tired Kael’thas is like, because it’s rare for him to agree to be in the presence of anyone alive while tired. The royal guards has been called countless times during his studies after his professors or fellow students at the Kirin Tor believed him to have been abducted, while he had in fact holed up in the darkest, most isolated corner of the place, hissing at whoever dares to approach, gripping his thirtieth cup of tar-black coffee in a white knuckled grip.

(Metaphorically, of course. He has standards. But he does tend to isolate himself… Or force people to isolate him by being an ill-tempered, insufferable, easily irritated prick until he finally passes out from sheer exhaustion.)

Point is, a tired Kael’thas is not a pleasant experience for anyone concerned. But it’s usually because he gets irritable, and it is a dangerous trait to find in an already volatile mage whose sleeping habit have only worsened his temper. It’s not a problem unless you actively seek him out, which is a hard task in and on itself for reasons previously mentioned.

It’s not the worst experience one can have with Kael’thas, or rather as an innocent and unfortunate bystander to him.

As a sidenote, it is often said that, whereas most people eventually reach a point where they learn a modicum of self-preservation, mages usually bypass that stage of their life. It takes a special kind of suicidal tendencies to learn magic, after all. But it’s not quite true. Indeed, there is no one in the Kirin Tor who hasn’t met Kael’thas’ ringed eyes from across the room, seen the deep, burning rage in them, and subsequently found in themselves the capacity to love and cherish life enough to develop a survival instinct and vacate the premise as fast as possible while wearing robes.

That is because, of the people who have lingered in the presence of a Kael’thas who was both sleep-deprived and deeply irritated, few have survived to tell the tale and then agreed to remain at a distance under a few dozen miles from him. What happened to them is not discussed; it is not mentioned; it is not thought of. Everyone knows enough to fear it. More importantly, everyone knows better than to stay around the prince when he is on the warpath.

Because a tired Kael’thas might seek the silence and darkness of isolation, but that is nothing more than a byproduct of too many pre-finals weeks-long cramming sessions where the slightest sound in the library is answered by the unhinged hissing of terrified, stressed out mages. A pissed-off Kael’thas, on the other hand, seeks out confrontation, actively searches for social interaction, usually with one (and only one) goal in mind.

Murder. Or, this failing, severe bodily arm; any kind of maiming, really, be it physical or psychological.

(And maybe this has been blown out of proportions by years’ worth of new students learning in hushed whisper of the hair-trigger temper of their professor, but even Rommath avoids him in that state and that should tell you all you need to know about it, really.)

Here is a recipe for a disaster:

Kael’thas likes to think he is a patient man. In reality, he is everything but.

There is nothing in this world or whichever other one they are portal-traveling to lately that calls for more patience than peace summits and the stubborn, dim-witted, narrow-minded leaders that they gather. The same debates and arguments go in endless circles, no progress is ever made, and there is no surer way to rile him up faster than pointless, boring discussions.

And, apart from the mages and blood elves in the vicinity, no one else is aware of the danger of riling Kael’thas up.

(In all honesty it’s not their fault they didn’t think to bring it up. To them it is obvious, a fact learned early out of necessity: for all his genius and leniency, it is neither hard nor safe to irritate Kael’thas. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be aware of that?)

(Well to be fair one of them has willingly withheld this information: Rommath, who has bet on Kael’thas being the first to actually, physically snap and plans to makes himself very rich. It’s about time the Alliance realizes why they have nicknamed their king the phoenix.)

Now, it’s only a matter of who will make him snap.

In hindsight it’s obvious that it would be Genn who would do them the honor.

After a particularly difficult bout of negotiations which ended up leading nowhere but took hours out of everyone’s time, you would be hard pressed to find anyone present who wasn’t on edge. Lor’themar, who has reluctantly agreed to sit at his king’s side for those summits to offer him his more level-headed output, is honestly too tired to be angry at the waste of time. But a glance at the faces of those surrounding him tells him his case is more of an exception than a rule. Kael’thas’ expression is especially drawn, taunt in a way that speaks of grinding teeth and jaws locked around a snarl. His lips are twisted in the tense approximation of a smile, and when he absentmindedly licks his teeth it’s more a discrete display of barely-restrained aggressiveness than the thoughtful reflex it usually is.

Lor’themar glances around a second time and, deciding they are no longer needed — at this point they are only stuck here because of the small talk that ends each meeting, and it’s not out of character for Kael’thas to cut those short — he ushers his king out of the room, taking care not to touch him.

“I’ll be on the training grounds,” he tells Lor’themar, voice devoid of emotion in what is a frankly impressive show of restraint.

“Do you want me to send for Rommath?”

A pause as Kael’thas, agitated, curls his hands into fists and then forcefully relaxes them. “… No.”

“Very well, my lord.”

He watches his king stride off and can’t help a relieved sigh. That’s one crisis averted. He’s impressed Kael’thas managed to hold it together for so long. He really is growing into his role of king, becoming more and more like his father each day.

He winces as, down the corridor, a large door is wrenched open and, shortly after, slammed shut with so much force it makes the walls shake.

There’s still a long way to go.

-

If there is one advantage to the peace summits taking place in Silvermoon — the closest thing Azeroth has to a neutral city, the blood elves having enough history with both factions to agree to have every racial leader in their capital city and enough space to house the Forsaken delegation far away from everyone else — it is that, if the training grounds of the palace weren’t empty before, they definitely are by the time Kael’thas settles in the center of one with his sword in hand.

Blood elves have already learned this lesson the hard way and it doesn’t take much for the foreigners present to imitate them when they run away at the sight of their king.

Kael’thas unceremoniously drops his parade armor to the side, keeping nothing on but his pants and boots. Felo’melorn hums in his hand as he lifts it above his head, shifting into the position of his first fallah ishnu — battle dance, the choreographed training exercises that are at the basis of most sin’dorei martial arts.

He works through the familiar steps as slowly as he can, focusing on the burn in his muscles from the strain of the tightly controlled movements rather than the anger that burns equally hot in his guts. It’s a welcome distraction, the frustration fueling his exercise until every gesture is as fluid and as precise as those of a prowling predator.

Sweat covers his bare skin, rolling down his face as he breathes in slowly, holds it in, and then release the air in synchronization with the downward curve of his blade.

It freezes in place with the rest of his body at the sound of the voice.

"In the mood for a friendly spar, lord Kael'thas?"

The particular emphasis on the one word only means something if he cares to attribute a meaning to it. Unfortunately, Kael'thas is pissed, and all too happy to have it mean something unpleasant that will fuel his anger.

"Of course, lord Greymane," he replies, saccharine-sweet. "Do you need a moment to get ready?"

The human lets his coat and shirt drops, takes his own sword and rolls his shoulders, grinning ruefully. It's as much of an answer as Kael'thas needs.

Genn might have expected him to play on the defensive, but Kael'thas' character does not belong among the few things the mutt knows. Kael'thas throws himself at him sword first, embers trailing in his wake as he brings down Felo'melorn in a wide arc. Genn blocks it but his eyes widen in slight surprise before narrowing, feral glee briefly glinting in his golden irises.

It is soon to disappear, however. Kael'thas doesn't allow him a second of respite, not the slightest opening to counter-attack, not a single breath to gather his wit. He attacks relentlessly, alternating between quick, precise strikes and brute strength to drive him back. Genn's foot slides on the dusty ground and Kael'thas dives forward, swiping his feet from under him; Genn falls in a side roll as he hits the ground, narrowly avoiding a blow that might have landed right next to his neck or right through it, depending on how merciful Kael’thas is feeling towards his diplomats today.

Kael'thas might appear similar to any of the young mages sent by the Kirin Tor, but he is older than Genn by decades and all this time has given him the opportunity to master swordsmanship in a way human can only manage in a lifetime. By his people's standards he is already good; if he were human, he'd be a prodigy. Moreover, elves are predators by nature, their trollish ancestry still visible in the sharpness of their teeth and the uncanny strength of their lithe forms. Human stereotypes of frail spellcasters don't apply to them, who have built their culture on magic and death.

(There is a reason so many sin'dorei dances involve swords.)

But Genn might be dumber than he wants you to believe, he still has a beast's instinct, and in that second of near-death it overtakes him, and by the time he stands to his feet again he has shifted into his wolf form, white fur bristling as he growls.

The fight is more even after that, the worgen's inhuman strength allowing him to go toe-to-toe with Kael'thas' own. They trade blows back and forth, sparks flying when their swords collide. Kael'thas finds himself smiling, although it is less for pleasure of the fight and more at the pleasant thought of Genn's face when he’ll win.

And then the wolf decides to fight dirty, and throws a fistful of sand in his face.

It's not enough to blind him, barely enough to distract him, but it gives Genn a bare second of opening which he takes full advantage of. Kael'thas dodges a swipe of his claws nimbly and misses the other hand, which lets go of the sword to catch him by the shoulder and throw him backward. Genn's foot trips him, and he goes down before he realizes it.

Dust flies when his back hits the ground, knocking the wind out of him. The full weight of the wolfed-out worgen dropping on his stomach doesn't help, nor does the claws curling around his throat, digging threateningly against the soft flesh of his neck.

"Do you yield?" Genn growls, voice distorted by a too-long muzzle and too-sharp fangs.

He should — the other king won fair and square, after all. And, were it any other time, he would: Kael'thas might be proud, but he doesn't hold victory in such trivial matters so high that he would refuse a fair defeat.

But this is not any other time. Kael'thas is angry, and tired, frustrated deep to his bones, blood burning with fury that has been building up for weeks now.

Everybody should know it is not a good idea to approach him when he is angry.

His eyes flash bright gold for a brief second, barely the span of a blink. He snarls, feral like a cornered animal, and he digs his nails in Genn's side.

"Never," he grits out before fire engulfs them.

The spell — more of an explosion than a true fireball, really — throws the worgen king far from him, rolling in the dirt with the impact. He is singed, not badly wounded but hurt enough that he stays sprawled there a moment.

"You never said I could not use magic," Kael'thas says breezily, walking to his abandoned clothes as if nothing had happened. "But I thought I would go easy on you."

With that he puts his shirt back on, throws the rest over his arm and walks off. With some chance, this would prove to be a teaching moment to the man, and their little talks will maybe get somewhere next time.

(Off to the side, Rommath leans toward Khadgar and says, "You owe me fifty gold."

On Khadgar’s other side Illidan stands silent, staring at Kael'thas' retreating back with a strange expression on his face. There is a hint of dark purple on his cheeks, a blush that would go unnoticed by anyone else, and Rommath grins.

Kael'thas is far from being a patient man, but Illidan doesn't seem to mind.)

[arcanalogue]

Music For Diviners - ‘The End of Time’

Thusfar, these Music For Diviners posts have explored soundscapes that aren’t merely inspirational, but may have some kind of practical utility. (To the extent that one considers divination “practical,” but why not just humor me?)

This is the history of music itself; for as long as humans have been making it, we’ve used it as the gateway to other realms of existence, other parts of the self. Our ancestors used it to elicit and express feelings there weren’t words yet to describe. Even now, language often fails us in these areas. That’s how I feel every time I sit down to write about music. 

Living in New York City is what drove me to incorporate music into my practice; no matter where I lived, silence was never an option. Like so many of you, I find it much easier to relax with a controlled background layer of noise —otherwise everything in the goddamn world distracts you by making its own tiny noise, including our own goddamned bodies. 

*duodenal gurgle*

Music is also an enticing mode of creative expression for any magician. Look, I have almost no musical talent whatsoever, and artistically I tend to stay in my lane, but tinkering with unique tracks to accompany certain experiments allows me to bypass that self-censor. Because I’m the only person it has to be good enough for, right? 

This is a neurotic preamble to explain why I’m posting some of my own homespun little music bits alongside others made by ACTUAL MUSICIANS. Because you might actually find them useful? Or perhaps they’ll help you feel permission to create some of your own. 

CASEFILE: TITANOBOA

I won’t bore you with too many of the details, but I spent a couple of years harboring a magical fascination pre-human life forms. It began with researching humankind’s most recent common ancestor with birds, as a way of retracing our evolutionary steps to the point where, had things gone one way instead of another, you might be flying and singing and laying eggs today instead of reading these words. (By all means, don’t let me stop you!)

In case you’re curious, here’s how close scientists have it pegged: 

• Archaeothyris (on the mammal side) - 306M years ago during the late Carboniferous Period (Protoclepsydrops is possibly older, but fossils are too fragmentary to be certain.)

• Hylonomus (on the bird side) - 312M years ago during the late Carboniferous Period

So at some point predating both of these species, there existed some kind of weird, ratty little lizard creature whose descendants ended up reaching VERY different conclusions about, for example, what to do about breakfast.

But I digress! Already! 

In 2012, I happened to catch the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary “Titanoboa: Monster Snake.” The gist is that 60 million years ago, an area of Colombia was dominated by the largest snake that ever lived, now known by the name Titanoboa cerrejonensis. 

Look, I don’t know what kind of serpent-y magick-y stuff you’re into... Hecate? Quetzalcoatl? Kundalini? Cthundalini? Whatever it is, I can only assume it could stand to benefit from associations with the largest ding-dang snake our planet ever produced... that we know of! 

On a lark, or perhaps as a gesture of blatant self-disregard, I attempted a couple of rituals geared toward making contact with Titanoboa across the eons and applying its symbolic potency toward certain magickal aims.

Hi mom, if you happen to be reading: sorry I’m like this! 

I shouldn’t have to point out how many of our feelings and desires are tethered in complicated ways to the experiences of our non-human forebearers. The needs which have historically compelled our species to “magical” solutions run deep, deep! We tend to forget about that since our own feelings are so painfully immediate, and our consciousness tends to remain very rooted in the present tense, to the point where we have to strain to see beyond it. Once upon a time our very survival hinged on this, but our needs have gradually evolved to the point where we crave far more than mere safety. In fact, a lot of what we crave runs completely counter to our survival instinct. It’s complicated, ya know?

Musing over all this, I decided my Titanoboa work demanded a sonic backdrop blessed by Our Lady of Poor Self-Preservation Instincts. That’s right, I’m talking about Lana Del Rey, whose “Born To Die” album happened to be released the same year as that Titanoboa doc. Coincidence? Gosh, I sure hope so!

I would only be slightly full of shit if I described this album as a fantasia of proto-human desire, expressed in the most cold-blooded ways through the idiom of American capitalism. 

To Lana (in that stage of her songwriting, anyway), love itself is an expression of darwinism. Nearly every song is about survival and sacrifice, eating and being eaten, thanatos bleeding over into eros. 

“I sing the National Anthem While I'm standing over your body, hold you like a python...”

I could go on, but you’re probably better off just going back and listening to the album.

This doesn’t even count as a digression though, since my Titanoboa devotional track — embedded up at the top of this post! — ended up consisting of just one line from the song “Blue Jeans,” the part where Lana sings: “I will love you till the end of time.”

The song is about a woman left to eternally rehash the details leading up to her gangster beau’s disappearance. You may recall, the music video (embedded below) featured LDR lounging with her love in a pool that turns out to be full of alligators — Titanoboa’s snack of choice! What a potent visual metaphor for attempting love in a world teeming with danger, recognizing one’s role at the bottom of the food chain and then wading in anyway. What do we have to fear from any mega-reptile, when our own desires are enough to cut us off at the knees? Might as well at least go ahead and pick out a nice one-piece and get our legs wet before we lose them.

The author Lawrence Durrell meditated on this at length in his Alexandria Quartet novels, and nothing would surprise me less than finding them on Lana’s nightstand. He writes:

“I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit. But she herself — austere and merciless Aphrodite — is a pagan. It is not our brains or instincts which she picks, but our very bones.”

And later:

“By one of those paradoxes in which love delights I found myself more jealous of him in his dying than I had ever been during his life. These were horrible thoughts for one who had been so long a patient and attentive student of love, but I recognized once more in them the austere mindless primitive face of Aphrodite.“

 This may end up being a LOT of setup for what’s ultimately just a simple ten-minute chunk of “music,” which was achieved by plucking out that one lyric and sloooooowing it down, then layering it, slooooowing it down again, blending into a chunky primordial soup. The result is a many-layered hymn of cthonic moaning, with no words clearly expressed: just a slurry of proto-mammalian melancholia: austere, mindless, primitive, coiling and uncoiling in warm pools of black water. 

The warmth of it is actually what surprised me; I imagined it might turn out to be too bleak and desolate to use for any real length of time, and the last thing I need is to work even harder at depressing myself. But I’ve played it on a loop for hours at a time while I was working on... stuff, without feeling oppressed by it. I don’t really fux with Titanoboa anymore, but this bit of “music” has remained a useful tool in my magickal arsenal.

I tested the track on an unsuspecting friend recently, who detected a “strong generative energy” in it and said they’d love to use it for goddess work. Incorporate this into your appeals to Hekate, or to Venus, or your preferred source of succor in all matters primally personal. As a backdrop for divination, it’s the sonic equivalent of black candles on a black tablecloth, with things squirming in the shadows. 

So there you have it! I’ve opened up to you about my creative process and certain absurd inspirations, standing bare before you in the full splendor of my nerdiness, “blurring the lines between real and the fake,” as a certain living snake goddess avatar might put it. 

Like I said, the ultimate goal in sharing this is to remind you to take these same deep dives yourself. Follow your obsessions to their (un)natural conclusions! Risk making terrible art in pursuit of articulating the uncanny! You never know what might end up taking on a life of its own. The end of time could prove to be just the beginning!

This has been yet another installment of Music For Diviners. Thanks for tuning in!

[vkstar-cornman]

Contexts

Lately I’m still feeling very reluctant about blogging and write reflections from time to time, especially the weather had made me quite ill and unproductive. The book art responding to 24/7 started off brightly, but now I am experiencing the phase I would had the same in every other project, which I start being very skeptical on whether if this is a good idea to keep developing on.

 So for clarity, for my own reference, I’ll try to explain what I will be doing to myself through inscription to boost my own confidence on this one.

 Basically, we all started from the same point, which is to go to 24/7 in Somerset House and see the works being curated together in there. ‘Sleep’ and ‘Surveillance’ were some of the strong concepts being emphasized throughout the exhibition, but I had enough of explaining what I’ve seen there because I’m pretty sure I have done it multiple times already. I will directly skip to the inspiration part. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Synthetic Orchestration gave me an idea of doing a book with birds as the major appearance in book, her work displayed the restlessness from urban life had extended, and disrupted biosphere as well, causing birds to sing earlier and loud, a change in their communicating mechanisms.

 Birds are such fragile yet agile animals that we spot commonly in a lot of places. They have co-existed and dwell in the city with humans for long ages, and I do believe the 24/7 culture shapes their life different in many ways, emerging the traits from a sleepless routine into their nature. Besides light and sound pollution coming from either rapid industrialization or for the needs of working class, there are more physical environmental pollutions than we could imagine that are forcing birds and the other part of nature to adapt such an anxious living mode, which is almost incompatible to most of our natures, not just as human, but as a moral living creature.

 What I always found fascinating about birds, is how their life cycle works. Depending on larger or smaller breeds, there’s quite a range in life span, but what matter the most is the stages in life to them are pretty much the same. They go from eggs to hatchlings, nestlings to juvenile and lastly, subadult to fully mature. For smaller breeds, their dead bodies are usually hard to find, as instead of natural causes, they mainly died from predation due to their position in food chain. I don’t actually think there’s any part seems so magical about the life of birds, but I’m just genuinely interested in where do they go before and after at the stage where they still require parental care. Just like the type of things we face in our lives, I study it to try to find associations, because associations always makes good metaphors in communication.

  Cutting to the chase, so how is the contextualization working in this project? Some of the people look into how 24/7 culture and late capitalism keep infecting birds, or just genuinely urban wildlife in future, and the unpredictability of impact on the nature just remind me the fact that many people are yet to be delivered to this world, until the age of much more uncertainties comes. For some other family-related certain issues, I decide to dedicate this book art project to the next generation, the generation alpha, a generation fully immersed into the bestest technologies we are seeing nowadays. Some may argue that millennials and generation Zs were already those people of era that lacked the witness of how technology shifted rapidly. What separate us apart from generation alpha, is they will face contract to social media in a much younger age and also a larger extend then we did. It is good or bad? As always, for generally any topics, there are always the good side and the bad side, but only to find out which will outweigh which.

 For example, from a video I watched recently that explains a marketing strategy labelled as a creation under ‘late capitalism’, which companies like fast food chain restaurants would take their online presence onto a personification, creating a less formal and official link with netizens, which in contrast boosted their ‘relatability’ and proximity to the public, a friend-like approachable figure with certain unique personalities which could summon an entire ‘fandom’, instead of just a platform grouped with admins that give you really polite but autogenerated replies. The publication and use of hugely popularized substances in millennials and gen Zs like ‘memes’ are largely used to gather a fan base. The idea is no longer to make professional promotions and advertisements in order to attract customers, but to immerse some kind of virtual character into your life, an online presence that you actually think of as a mortal person or even an acquaintance you know from online, that marketers found best apply to the newer generations people.

 This kind of techniques start appearing in about mid 2010s, which is the age where generation alpha could either just born, already been born, or starting to explore the world and gotten exposed to internet. Saying this also mean that most of these kids will not be able to witness how these marketing strategies were used and a world before such things existed, and what happens is that it could be very difficult for them to be aware of not constantly getting instilled with such ideas and ‘advertisements’. It sounds like its merely, remotely related to how late capitalism brings 24/7 culture, sleeplessness, blablabla…. But the idea is, there will be people out there, trying to be your friend and mostly their only purpose is to make themselves hard to be gotten rid out of your heads. The world is spinning at hot speed, and each day there are people coming up with multiple ideas about advertisements or other idea-instilling mechanisms, that seems very harmless on surface, but also doesn’t make an antipathic psychological effect on general public. The true negative effects are very subconscious and unpredictable, and that’s what makes it scarier, it will probably make the next generation even less independent with a mobile device or social medias, even we together will bring more advancements in the foreseeable future.

 The questions I kept asking myself, is what will happen to them? How will they cope with many upcoming challenges? Will we altogether, be able to solve the problems together? With medical advancements, the latest two generations of people (0-20) are currently treated with the best medical welfare and medication, who are believed to potentially live until 22nd Century. With that being said, generation z and alpha’s timeline of life will be quite similar and will be sharing a lot of time working and collaborating together. What are the things we as a previous generation, a multitude of people who have slightly witnessed a bit more than the alphas do, can remind them of? What are the things generally everyone out there can advise these hatchlings who haven’t seen the world yet? Even though myself is still in an early stage of exploring how this world work under the current system, what are the things we need to fight against? What are they thing we should believe in or not?

 I guess these could be counted as my responses to the exhibition, not initially though. I will never be able to find the most fully-covered or precise answers to these questions, but I will try to explore them, and find the keys to the doors after another one. For the book, I focused mainly on the message and with my limitations on accurate measurements, I was a bit uncomfortable in trying to create a distinct format or an original prototype to the book itself. What I want to do, is illustrate the life of birds with multiple medias. What I have already done is screenprinting, drawings with unorthodox ways and digital amendments, the main idea is to create digitally configurated images with natural techniques (sunography in replacement of x-ray? Handdrawing instead of computer-generated image) . During the growing up process for the birds, they don’t face terrorisms or wars, but they face the terror of being exposed to technology and medias in an early age, which effects are quite inmost as I have mentioned.

[orbularborbular]

My Thoughts on The Last Jedi

Spoilers below the cut! Do not read this review if you have not seen The Last Jedi! You have been warned!

[And please, kindly remember that I'm just another idiot on the internet with an opinion. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind with this review…I'm just sharing my reaction, because none of my friends are online while I’m writing this and I need to mouth off to somebody.]

Okay, so – analysis time. The way I see it, there are two main narratives in The Last Jedi. I loved one of them, and I hated the other.

Narrative #1 deals with The Force™ . Naturally, it contains the classic Star Wars themes of tragedy, forgiveness, and redemption, but it adds depth and nuance to these ideas in a couple of ways. It explores the importance of human connection, and it underscores the power that each individual possesses to determine their own self identity, and with it, their fate. The writers made the inspired decision to take the struggle between Light and Dark and externalize it – make it into an actual, literal conversation between two people: Rey and Kylo Ren, with Luke acting as the tormented mediator. Mark Hamill just knocked it out of the fucking park with his performance too – what an amazing conclusion to Luke's story.

Narrative #1 acknowledges the flaws of Jedi doctrine and provides a simple, brilliant explanation for one the biggest questions left over from The Force Awakens: why did Ben Solo turn to the Dark side? The revelation that Luke drew his lightsaber on Ben in a moment of weakness, only to recoil in horror at his own impulse, casts Kylo Ren in an entirely different light. Ben truly believed that Luke meant to kill him – and what troubled teenage boy wouldn't develop emotional issues if he thought his uncle were trying to murder him in the dead of night, especially when he was already under the influence of an evil CGI freak? (On another note, can someone explain to me why Snoke was wearing like, a gold bathrobe? What the hell kind of aesthetic is that?) Luke's culpability, however minor, heightens the tension in the conversation between Rey and Kylo Ren, because it makes him a more sympathetic villain. Suddenly, his rage and hatred make sense. Luke's shame and self-imposed exile make sense. Everything makes sense. The relationship that emerges between the three characters is believable and emotionally satisfying, even if Kylo Ren does make the decision to be a punk bitch in the end. But man, that fight scene where he and Rey are fighting as a team? Top fucking notch.

Narrative #1 works because it establishes cause-and-effect, and because it gives each character a complete arc. Past trauma motivates all three of the central figures: Kylo Ren, Luke, and Rey each have to contend with their own personal demons and choose whether to rise above them, or succumb to them. Their parallel struggles give the movie a sense of cohesion and suspense. Their decisions matter, and those decisions aren't necessarily foregone conclusions, because all three characters have the power to influence one another. Luke chooses to accept his past mistakes and to reconnect with his old comrades; in doing so, he is finally able to achieve the absolution and peace that have eluded him for so long. Rey refuses to give in to her feelings of loneliness and abandonment; instead, she uses the empathy derived from those painful experiences to try and reach out to Ben Solo. Kylo Ren rejects Rey's attempt to connect with him because he is either unwilling or unable to deal with his own trauma. He stubbornly pulls away, and ends up more miserable and broken than ever.

I simply cannot gush enough about how much I loved this whole storyline. Writers take note: this is how you create compelling character drama. The stakes were personal and emotional, but they also had larger ramifications. The imagery and cinematography perfectly complemented what was going on in the narrative, too. Like that scene where Rey saw herself cascaded out, row upon row upon row? Holy crap was that an insightful visual metaphor for the concept of self-identity. And can we talk about the red salt on the snow during the final showdown? How it smeared when stepped in, like blood? That shit was amazing. Luke's confrontation with his nephew was the perfect conclusion to their relationship, and the best possible send-off for Luke. He went out on his own terms, as the ultimate Jedi master: cunning, heroic, and self-controlled, able to own up to his mistakes without being destroyed by them.

Now, on to the part of the film I hated. :(

Narrative #2 is The Little Guys vs. Big Evil™. The themes of this narrative are courage in the face of impossible odds, and the wisdom to know when to make sacrifices. Unfortunately, there are two major problems with this half of the plot that weaken the impact of these themes. The first problem is that there is ZERO world-building in these new movies. None. Zilch. In the original trilogy, the lack of backstory was not a problem because we were thrown directly into a reality where an oppressive autocratic regime was already in power. The audience could accept that these fuckers were genocidal and that a ragtag group of rebels was fighting them, because Episode IV was a blank slate. The conflict was straightforward enough that we could just run with it once it was introduced. But the new trilogy is NOT A BLANK SLATE. The film needed to explain how we got from the events of Return of the Jedi (where the Rebels had just won a major victory, the Empire was reduced to a shadow of its former self, and the threat of pan-galactic annihilation was no more), to “oh yeah, everything is a shitshow again”. What the hell happened during the intervening 30 years? How did the New Republic fail so catastrophically that the First Order was able become such a threat? How did the Imperial Remnant get its hands on that much firepower and manpower without like…anyone noticing, or stepping in during the nascent stages? Where the fuck did this Snoke guy come from, and why is his name so stupid? The movie fails to explain the chain of events that led to this new status quo. It doesn't even hint at it. We get no new information about the conflict at all; instead, we spend over an hour stalling while Finn and Rose do their thing.

Speaking of which... The second big issue with Narrative #2 is that it does not utilize its protagonists correctly. Poe gets some development, but Leia, Finn, and Rose Tico do not get character arcs. They do not change in any meaningful way as a result of what they go through. Leia in particular is static throughout the film. Sure, she spouts a lot of platitudes about hope, but we never get any real insight into what's going on in her head. Is she frustrated that she has to fight the exact same war she already fought in her youth? Does she feel guilty for failing to foresee and prevent the rise of the First Order? How has she been damaged by her personal losses, most notably the murder of her husband at the hands of her own son? The script just gives her nothing to work with. No pathos, no pain. She spends half of the movie in a coma, and the only time she gets to use her Force powers is when she's like...magically levitating through the vacuum of space (I call bullshit on that, by the way). Her only real moment of depth is her reunion with Luke. I think maybe the writers intended to put her character arc in the third movie, but uh...that's not gonna happen now, since Carrie Fisher drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

Finn, meanwhile, spends the entire movie on a wild goose chase. Sure, the casino planet was cool, but you could cut out that entire subplot and its absence would have no effect on the rest of the movie. The writing here frustrates me SO much because the character problem is SO EASY TO FIX. Here's how you make it work: from the get-go, the movie sets up an ideological conflict between Poe and Leia. Poe wants to blow shit up, while Leia favors a more cautious, big-picture approach. However, instead of following through on this conflict and forcing them to hash it out, the film fridges Leia and sets up purple-haired Laura Dern as Poe's foil. This decision baffles me. Leia is Poe's hero; he admires and respects her. Imagine how much more compelling it would've been if he had to make the gut-wrenching decision to pursue his own approach behind her back instead. Leia vs. Poe is a conflict with higher stakes. We care about both of these characters, and we can see both of their perspectives. Pitting the two against each other ideologically (but with no malicious intent), creates the opportunity for both of them to grow and change.

Here's how you fix Finn's subplot. Make his expertise on the First Order matter by allowing him to be the one who realizes how the flagship is tracking the Resistance through hyperspace. Have Finn reveal this information to Poe (it would make sense for him to approach Poe, because of all the people on board, Poe is the closest thing Finn has to a friend). The two of them decide that an infiltration job is in order. Poe calls Maz for guidance, and she recommends a slicer for the job. Because Poe is currently in conflict with Leia and the rest of the leadership, he sends Finn on a mission to retrieve the slicer in secret. Finn is thrown into a completely alien environment, and it proves to be a real learning experience for him. He sees the stark contrast between the ostentatious elite and the impoverished downtrodden, and his innate love and compassion begin to expand beyond just Rey (I still don’t understand how the First Order is responsible for the mistreatment of the children on casino planet, though. Isn’t the real oppressor like...late stage capitalism? lol).

Of course, he parks like an idiot, so he ends up getting thrown in jail before he can make contact with Maz's slicer. It's here that he meets Rose Tico for the first time. In this version, SHE is the chaotic neutral slicer with the longcoat and the air of charismatic unpredictability. Finn, desperate to escape, strikes a bargain with her. Initially, she only agrees to help him for the money, but as the film unfolds, we learn more about Rose. We discover that her sister died fighting the First Order some months or years before, leaving Rose jaded, aimless, and self-centered. Over the course of the third act, however, Rose sees something in Finn or in the Resistance that makes her reconsider her outlook. Perhaps Finn's fight with Phasma plays a role. She ultimately decides to honor her sister's legacy by taking up her mantle, and she joins the fight against the First Order. By condensing Rose Tico and the hobo-slicer dude into a single person, you create a character with a complete arc, and you create a subplot that matters. When Finn's attempt to infiltrate the enemy ship ultimately fails, it doesn't feel like a complete waste of time, because at least the Resistance gains a badass swaggering scoundrel of a slicer. A character that fucking cool should not be wasted.

A couple other quick fixes. You know the scene where purple-haired whatserface uses a hyper-speed jump to slice clean through Snoke's ship? It's one of the most visually arresting and memorable scenes in the film, but on an emotional level it's underwhelming because we literally just met the woman. Why not keep Admiral Ackbar alive a bit longer so he can be the one to make the iconic sacrifice? The audience already cares about him, so when he goes out in a blaze of glory, it packs a much greater emotional punch (plus, can we give an alien character a chance to shine for once? I'm so sick of all the humans). Back to Finn and Rose. For the love of God, please get rid of the awkward romance shoehorned in at the last minute. What you mean you “love” him, woman? You've known the dude for like two days! I mean, criminy. Rose Tico's character arc needs to be about coming to terms with her sister's death. Poe should be the one to save Finn by bashing his ship aside, because Poe is the one who's supposed to be learning when to sacrifice lives, and when to save them.

Anyway. As you may have guessed from this review, my feelings about this movie are super complicated. The humor was great, the visuals were atmospheric and creative, and the majority of the acting was fantastic. Every time Luke, Rey, or Kylo Ren were on screen, I was on the edge of my fucking seat. I was completely invested in their narrative and could not have been more satisfied with its conclusion. I was, however, sorely disappointed with the way the writers handled the conflict between the Resistance and the First Order. It could have been so, so much better. It deserved to be better, in a script this good. And honestly, maybe the reason I was so disappointed is because that's my favorite part of Star Wars: a ragtag bunch of miscreants scraping by on the strength of their camaraderie. The jump cut from Return of the Jedi to "everything is shit again" makes me feel like the initial Rebellion accomplished nothing. Like it was all for naught. I'm sure I could go digging for the full story in the supplemental materials and fill myself in, but like...it should've been in the movie. There's no reason why you can't devote five minutes to a little explanation.

Maaaaan. I get WAY too worked up about these things.

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

Just finished rereading Max Gladstone's ‘Four Roads Cross’, which was an excellent capstone to the series thus far. I want to heap some praise on my favorite scene of the book, for being such a perfect statement of theme for this series. In the middle of the book, in the quiet before the storm, Tara meets for coffee with a woman, who asks for help her abusive father. Tara offers her two options, and a metaphor: use her magic, the Craft, to enforce a solution; or talk to him. Craft would be a swift, certain solution, to spell out bonds of duty and responsibility... and destroy any remaining familial ties. Talking would be uncertain and unsettling... and would let them help each other as people, not dispassionate concerns.

The whole scene is maybe three paragraphs, but also the heart of every dilemma in the book (and series, really) ---- the choice between hope and trust, and the certainty of power. And every victory comes when characters let go of that certainty, and trust in someone else to help them, and help others in turn. There's a pointed critique of late-stage capitalism in this, but also the heart of an excellent adventure story. We never see how she decides, by the way. The point is that it's a choice to be made, in a world that craves certainty.

So I don’t usually redo books when I reread them, but I had a good bit to say about this read over on Twitter, and thought it was a good time to explore a bit of different design space with it. This is a card that would be really interesting in multi-player games, by moving gameplay into a completely different social dynamic (especially since the only way to benefit yourself from it is by convincing _another_ player to include it in their deck via some sort of prior agreement)... At that point, I’m not sure what the game turns into, but it’d certainly be a shake-up.

[oselatra]

The magic of curry paste

Or: How lawyer-turned-Thai food evangelist Richard Glasgow learned to stop worrying and cook Thai food.

One of Little Rock's best restaurants serves authentic Thai food made by a white guy from North Louisiana who's spent the majority of his professional career practicing law. There's no sign in front of kBird to announce itself to passersby — not that anyone would pass by an otherwise residential stretch of western Hillcrest in search of a restaurant. The building once housed a general store and several other eateries, but with clapboard siding and a fenced-in backyard, it still looks more like a house than a restaurant. Look closely and you might see an open sign — if it's lunchtime on a weekday or a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday evening — and a painting of a flock of chickens on the front door.

Inside, you'll find mismatched tables and chairs, a parquet floor that, like many of the homes in Hillcrest, tilts noticeably and is held together by duct tape in spots. On one wall, someone has handwritten a Mark Twain quote in marker — "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" — under a map of Thailand with a hand-drawn rendering of the Malay Peninsula taped to the bottom of it. A handful of people work in an open kitchen — chopping, grinding out curry paste with a giant mortar and pestle, or working the stockpots and woks on the stove. The lanky guy — a flurry of motion — with glasses and tattoo of a large black bird (a Mississippi kite) peeking out from under his T-shirt is Richard Glasgow, the corporate lawyer turned Thai cultural evangelist.

Glasgow treats Thai food with reverence. He's assiduous in his devotion to making it like they do in Thailand. That means always finding the best and correct ingredients — never substituting onions for shallots, brown sugar for palm sugar or ginger for galangal. It means finding flavoring agents like dok ngiew, the dried flower stamens of the red cotton tree. It means pad Thai with Chinese broccoli, longbeans and kabocha squash and no sweet peanut sauce. It means curries with enough layers of flavor to suggest mystical powers.

Some of that deliciousness might owe to the fact that kBird's curry paste gets made every day with all the ingredients mashed together with a mortar and pestle, which takes about an hour and a half. There are no electrical appliances, aside from a fridge and deep freeze, to be found in the restaurant, even though a food processor could knock out the paste in seconds.

Brandon Brown, who owned the late, beloved Hillcrest Artisan Meats and is a longtime friend of Glasgow's, has worked in the kBird kitchen for the past eight months. He said he's spent time working in nice places that made a lot of things by hand over the course of his more than 30 years in the restaurant business, but never to the extent on which Glasgow insists. "Every day I tell him to get a fucking Cuisinart and a spice grinder," Brown said. But Glasgow refuses to take shortcuts. Doing so, "for a white person making Thai food, would be disrespectful," he said. Besides, he says, a food processor slices ingredients into tiny pieces; using a mortar and pestle to pulverize ingredients causes them to bind together to create more flavor. "It's very incrementally better, but better," he said. "Hard fucking work and paying attention" is one of his mottos. (That's a Guy Clark quote about legendary Texas singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt's genius: "Everybody thought it was magic. That's bullshit. It was hard fucking work and paying attention.")

Before he started kBird, which began as a food trailer, Glasgow worked as a lawyer for Dillard's. It was a dark time for him. He bottomed out, to the point that leaving the corporate world to sling Thai food out of a trailer hidden in an alley in Hillcrest seemed perfectly reasonable. That was 2012.

Glasgow said he initially hid for two reasons: 1. As a white guy endeavoring to cook Thai standards like a grandma might in Thailand, he wanted to make sure that people came to him because they'd heard good things about the food, not because they'd seen a sign or seen a social media post. 2. He was scared he'd get overwhelmed and freak out and run away if too many people came. That plan worked out. He turned customers into evangelists themselves. The food truck now gathers cobwebs behind the restaurant, which opened in late 2014 at the corner of Tyler and Woodlawn streets. It's not unusual to drive by kBird a little after 1 p.m. and see a "sold out" sign in the window.

In 2015, Glasgow hosted his first khantoke, a reservation-only dinner featuring more than a dozen Northern Thai dishes that aren't on the menu. Each year since, he's increased the number of khantokes he hosts. In 2016, he hosted six, then nine in 2017 and he plans to do 10 in 2018. Each dinner accommodates 30-40 people. Glasgow takes reservations for three khantokes at a time. In an effort to be as fair as he can in the process, he requires people to make their reservations at 2 p.m. on a designated day. In May, on the day reservations were due for the three khantokes scheduled for the first half of the summer, the nearly 100 spaces were filled by 2:07 p.m. 'How I'm Learning to Stop Worrying and Cook Thai Food'

Glasgow grew up in Ruston and Oak Ridge, La. (he says he claims "dual citizenship"), among a family of farmers and cooks. He got an economics degree from Louisiana State University, spent nearly a decade working for a title company in Washington, D.C., and then got a law degree from Catholic University in D.C. In 2001, he and his wife, Aimée, who he met in D.C. but who is from Monroe (or "Mun-row," as Glasgow says), La., saved up enough money to travel around the world. They spent two months in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia and fell in love with the region.

"It's like a bizarro-world American South," Glasgow said of Thailand. "The same veneer of civilization exists. You wave at everyone; they wave back. You smile at someone; they smile at you. You're constantly rewarded for being nice. You say 'ma'am' and 'sir' and 'please' and 'thank you,' and let older people out in front of you. If you try to speak Thai and you're horrible at it, people will tell you you're great. It's the same small-town kind of stuff, but just a different world. ... You ever been somewhere where you felt like you belonged, but you didn't really belong, but you were treated like you belong? It's like that."

Glasgow sees a deep connection between Thailand and his native Louisiana. He calls it his unified theory. There are distinctive regions in Thailand, just like Louisiana. Northern Thailand is just like North Louisiana, he said. It's full of rednecks, which Glasgow identifies as. "They're pork, pork, pork. They fry in lard and eat pork rinds in sauces." The people in Northeastern Thailand are "ethnically Lao, they speak Lao, but live in Thailand. They eat the hottest food. They're the poorest. They eat bugs, snakes, crickets. They have the most fun and are great partiers. They're the Cajuns." Central Thailand, the broad alluvial plain of the Chao Phraya River, where the Siamese Ayutthaya Kingdom was based for thousands of years, produces two rice crops every year. It's Baton Rouge in Glasgow's telling. Bangkok, the country's capital, sits mostly on former swampland. The Chao Phraya River runs through the city before emptying into the Gulf of Thailand. It's, of course, New Orleans. Southern Thailand on the narrow Kra Isthmus is like Grand Isle, La., the narrow barrier island in South Louisiana.

When the Glasgows started thinking about having kids, they picked Little Rock, a place about which they knew little, because it was closer to home, but not too close. They had a daughter, who's now 11. Her nickname is kBird.

After working for a couple of years in private practice, Glasgow spent five years at Dillard's. That company is "as much to thank for the existence of kBird than just about anybody," Glasgow said. After spending that much time in the business world, the idea of kBird was a thumb of the nose toward the corporate and restaurant establishment and conventional notions on how one starts and runs a restaurant: "You've got to have a bunch of money to open a restaurant. You gotta have a wait staff. You need to advertise. Those are all reasonable things, but," Glasgow said, that route "wouldn't have been me."

Instead, if fine dining is arena rock, a genre associated with bands in the '70s, '80s and '90s that brought big stage shows to large arenas, kBird is punk rock, Glasgow said. In his metaphor, with arena rock (fine dining), "you gotta have a big ol' band and have a loud sound, and it's gotta look good from a long way away." That all costs a lot, and means, among other things, expensive rent and a large staff, which translates into higher prices for the concertgoer or diner. "Punk came as a reaction" to that, Glasgow said. D. Boon from the punk band Minutemen said, "Our band could be your life." "They said, 'Start your own band,' " Glasgow said. "That's what I did. It just wasn't a band; it was a restaurant."

Glasgow describes kBird as "egalitarian — everybody gets the same plate of food. It's reasonably priced. It's a lot of food. Ingredients are way better than what you'd expect they are. Some audience participation is required." That means customers order at the counter that divides the dining room from the open kitchen. Though Glasgow and his staff are humping it, sometimes it takes a bit for your order to come up. The hours — 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. on weekdays and 5 p.m. until 8 p.m. Monday through Wednesday — aren't designed for peak dining-out times; they're what Glasgow can do while still spending time with his family and not working himself to the ground. Though he concedes he's "a control freak," the idea of delegating to others to run the restaurant when he's not there doesn't appeal to him. "I didn't quit a pretty well-paying job to start something out of absolute nothing to bring it where it is to not be here."

The other unique thing about kBird is that it closes for about a month from mid-January to mid-February for Glasgow to travel to Thailand. He's been seven times since 2001. He visits the Naan province in Northern Thailand, where he's made a number of friends over the years. His itinerary is to "not walk fast, talk to little old ladies and laugh," he said. He also cooks a lot and watches people cook. Last year, Glasgow got to be one of the first farang (white people) to stay overnight in a remote Northern Thailand village thanks to a Thai friend who works in tourism. Several years back, during one of his trips, Glasgow went to the market one morning to buy supplies for breakfast. He's somewhat conversant in Thai. When he was paying, he said he told a woman selling groceries at a booth, " 'Today, I'm making rice curry.' She said, 'No pay.' It was like, 'You understand this; you can have it.' That's why I'm so excited and excitable [about Thai food and culture], and also why I'm so very worried about not being respectful. I want to do right by these people. It's not a question of my integrity. These people changed my life. I've learned so much about myself and my life in this adventure." If his life were a movie, in a nod to "Dr. Strangelove," Glasgow joked it might be called "How I'm Learning to Stop Worrying and Make Thai Food."

"All of this is an effort to become integrated into Thai culture, so I'll begin to understand their mindset and somehow it will rub off on me."

On his left arm, Glasgow has the phrase "baaw bpen yang" tattooed in Thai letters. It's a country dialect version of a common Thai phrase, mai bpen rai. "In Thailand, it means everything from 'you're welcome' to 'I forgive you for your actions.' It goes all the way across the board. If you're in an embarrassing situation or you've fucked up, more often than not, the Thai person will look at you and say, 'mai bpen rai.' It means it doesn't matter, what are we going to do about it now? A car wreck? Spilling some lady's stuff? Mai bpen rai. It doesn't matter. I grew up in a house where everything mattered. To have a group of people say, don't worry about it — for me, excited and anxious all the time — when another person tells you that, it means a lot." Glasgow says baaw bpen yang identifies him with the country people of Northern Thailand. "It's the 'it's all good, y'all' version."

That's not to say that philosophy has fully taken root. "Fear and anxiety" have always fueled kBird. Though he concedes that, based on the restaurant's growth, "an objective person would say, 'You're probably going to be able to continue to do business,' " he says he's still "scared to say something like that out loud." Every Monday, he remains a nervous wreck, fretting that no one will darken his door that week.

He knows he could do more business being open even for lunch on Saturday, but that would get in the way of one of the highlights of his week: shopping at Sam's Oriental Store every Saturday morning. The venerable Asian grocery on South University Avenue is teeming with essential items for all sorts of far-flung cultures that make the market, especially on Saturdays, when a new shipment of produce arrives from Dallas, as diverse of a gathering place as you'll find in Little Rock. On a Saturday in early June, Glasgow talked to or stood in line with Hmong, Viet, Korean and Filipino people. An African priest had traveled several hours for fufu powder. The owner of La Bodeguita in Hot Springs was there, making his weekly stop to buy mangoes. Jose, a longtime Salvadoran employee, greeted Glasgow: "Hey, Rich-ee."

Glasgow's list was long and different from usual because the second khantoke of the year was happening later that day. Among the items on his list that you're probably not going to find at Kroger: galangal (in the ginger family), banana leaves, Chinese broccoli, Kaffir lime leaves, kombucha squash (aka Japanese pumpkin), water spinach, quail eggs and pig's blood. Amid his shopping, Glasgow stopped to show the owner, Sam Choi, a picture on his phone of a maeng da, a giant water bug that's commonly used as a flavoring agent in nam phrik sauces. It's sold around the world packaged in plastic. Choi was sure he could get them.

The khantoke dinners give Glasgow a chance to cook Northern Thai dishes that otherwise would not appear on the menu, aside from a special here and there. For this dinner, Glasgow and Co. started preparing almost a week earlier, boiling and scraping fat off pig skin and dehydrating it to get it ready to be turned into pork rinds and crackling. Sour pork (naem heung) spent days fermenting in the sun; it's tasty and safe enough to eat that Glasgow and a reporter take bites after it's finished fermenting, but hours before the dinner, it gets steamed in banana leaves on the grill to make doubly sure it's ready. Brown doesn't work on weekends, but the other full-time staff, Chris and Jessica Shippey, come in around midday to help with prep. So does Joe Sithong, a friend with a catering background who volunteers his services. His father was Lao, but he died when Sithong was young. "I have all the cravings, but none of the culture," he said. Cooking and eating Thai food "is almost like church," he said. "It's satisfying and makes you feel better about yourself."

He mashed roasted green chili peppers, shallots and garlic in a mortar and pestle to make nahm phrik noom, a popular Northern Thailand dip that pairs with pork rinds and other meats. Meanwhile, Glasgow chopped up 12 pounds of river catfish Sithong picked up from Love's Fish Market on John Barrow Road. "I grew up trotlining," Glasgow said. "I've been knowing about this a lot longer than I've been knowing about Thai food." The fish goes outside into a giant gas cooker filled with oil — "way more than anyone would ever tell you to put in at one time." There's so much water in the fish that has to evaporate, and the frying takes almost an hour.

Five hours later, the feast is prepared and plated and the lucky dozens start filing in with bottles of wine in tow (it's B.Y.O.B; kBird's zoning prevents it from selling alcohol). Glasgow offers some quick greetings in Thai and explains what all the food is before retreating to the kitchen for beer. He'll need one and a half and prodding from Sithong before he can go mingle and answer questions.

The diners consider the feast with big eyes and big smiles. Glasgow encourages everyone to pull out their phones when the full spread is on the table and then it all gets passed family-style. There's the equivalent of about three meal-sized portions per person on the table: Sticky rice, which is steamed in woven baskets, rather than boiled. A vegetable plate with steamed pumpkin, bok choy and chayote squash and fresh cabbage, Chinese broccoli, chives, long bean, cucumber and water spinach. A meat plate with the steamed and fermented pork, the pork rinds and cracklings, fried chicken wings and muu thaawt makhwaen, fried strips of pork loin seasoned with makhwaen seeds from the prickly ash tree. Two chili dips, the green chili dip Sithong made and nahm phrik ong, a pork, tomato and chili combination that Thai folks often eat with vegetables. Two salads — one a smoky grilled eggplant topped with steamed quail eggs and the other fried catfish topped with fried basil and lime leaves. Then there's a bowl of hanglae pork curry with ginger and peanuts and a pork rib curry made with pork blood and dok ngiew, the dried flower stamens of the red cotton tree. A tower of steamed rice with pork and pork blood tastes a lot like rice with boudin rouge, Glasgow tells the crowd in case anyone knows about the Cajun delicacy. For dessert, there's coconut milk custard cooked in a tiny Asian pumpkin and a sticky rice cake topped with palm sugar caramel.

Glasgow has regulars from Thailand. One invited friends from Northern Thailand who live in the U.S. to fly in for a khantoke. Glasgow overheard someone ask her if the food was like what she got at home. "She said, 'Sort of, but with all this stuff, it's like a double birthday!" He took that as a high compliment.

But he's quick to deflect praise for the food. "I didn't make any of this up. This ain't mine. To the extent I can take what people make in Thailand and make it here, I'm good at that. I'm not a chef." If he has a skill, it's as a "food Xerox," he said. "I have a really good taste memory. I'm able to eat something and fix it in my mind and replicate it."

Going from the corporate world to opening and running kBird has been a journey, he said. Does he feel like he's arrived? "No, but I feel like I'm a lot closer than I was. I'm now in a position to get there. There's a lot of self-doubt that takes years to build up. There's an episode of 'The Simpsons,' where at some point Homer does something really great and nice and makes himself look good. And Bart looks at Lisa and goes, 'I've got this really strange feeling.' And she goes, 'Pride?' I'm still at that point. I don't ever want to be there. I don't think you're ever going to be there. That's a metaphysical question. I don't think you're ever going to be there. That's the answer to the Big Question. But you can set yourself up to make yourself happier."

The magic of curry paste

[getseriouser]

20 THOUGHTS: Nic Nat Tackle Whacked

DONALD Glover, aka Childish Gambino, has released a very provocative music video for his latest hit This is America. Why mention that here? That’s a song and subsequently a film clip too that is about gun violence, American politics, race-based atrocities. This column is about none of those things, most weeks anyway.

But one theme that Glover touches on with the way the video is choreographed is about where your eyes focus. In it you naturally take notice of him, centre of shot, dancing, smiling, making faces. The subtext explored is that because the viewer does this, they miss all the more important stuff happening in the background, which is natural but undesirable human behaviour – a metaphor the for the political landscape in the United States on a number of sensitive but highly pertinent issues.

So what’s the link?

Whether it’s state of the game, suspicious tribunal reports or the reasons we immediately think in diagnosing why Essendon’s bad, or the Brisbane-Collingwood game is good, our proclamations might not necessarily be accurate. What’s happening in the background, what’s the root cause of what we’re seeing and sensing. Are we just being lazy in our judgement?

Not here we ain’t. We proclaim we get serious here. And we do. On that note…

  1.    So we start with tonight’s tribunal sittings. Firstly, Tom Hawkins, touching the umpire. The precedent on this is Heath Shaw, who was dismissive in his physicality without being overly demonstrative. Hawkins was similar. But we say Shaw was a good ‘precedent’ but in reality, that will be relevant in predicting the punishment as how good a mood the sitting Tribunal members are in tonight. How good was their day, did they have a good lunch, did their Uber run late which really got their goat, did their Foxtel not record Masterchef last night and they can’t get the Tenplay website to work as well? For me, it’s a week. Not because he is playing Collingwood but because any sort of fine doesn’t say much. If umpire contact is a big deal, when deliberate, then it’s a week.

2.    Now, young Nic Naitanui. Tackles a bloke strongly and he has a date with the tribunal. But as per the Ryan Burton-Shaun Higgins incident of a few weeks back, the theme in 2018 is that if your actions are good, ok, legal, but the injury is purely accidental, you’re ok. So in that case, from a technique standpoint, other than a push in the back free Naitanui did not do anything to warrant a suspension. So he should get off, not even any sort of minimal fiscal sanction either. Watch him get two weeks down to one or something and we’re back for an appeal on Thursday but he should not get anything.

3.    Quick divert to other sports before back to the Footy – first, Ice Hockey. Yep, you saw that coming. Shout out to Nathan Walker. Who? Yep, fair call, but he is someone you should know about. He is the first Australian to play in the National Hockey League, he has played only nine games, seven of which for the Washington Capitals. But today he was the first Aussie to take part in a playoff game. And he scored a point too, an assist. Bloody good on the bloke.

4.    And then also in the US, Ben Simmons. Haven’t touched on the fella in this column yet but oh my. His 76ers are only a game away from having their season come to an end, still a pretty good performance even if they don’t get the chance to play for a title. But no question now that he is this country’s biggest star. The fact he plays just like Magic Johnson, someone we’ve all heard of, and just maybe could be just as talented as Magic too, is phenomenal. Sure, he will go to the Olympics and help the Boomers finish with a Bronze, maybe, one day, perhaps, but what he’ll do in his NBA career on a global stage will amaze. He won’t just amaze us patriotic few back here, he’ll amaze the natives over there, which is quite something.

5.    Quick couple on the A-League, and we have to touch on the Grand Final. Yes, it was a pulsating finals series, the standard on show was reasonable and Victory deserve all the plaudits. Now the bad stuff. Adelaide vs. Carlton on free-to-air  Saturday night rated 415,000, 170,000 of that in Melbourne. Only 183,000 people watched the A-League on ONE, 64,000 of those in Melbourne. Both NRL games out rated the game on Foxtel, and the Swans-Roos game matched it as well. So it’s a good thing no-one was watching to see the horrendous attempt at a pre-match obviously choreographed by sugar-high local kindergarten students. Or the missed offside goal…

6.    How does that happen? We acknowledge the score review in the AFL is poor, but compared to the stuff up in Newcastle Saturday night it’s as perfect as Baby John Burgess hosting a TV game show. The fact that the television referee, known as the VAR, lost his feed to do his job correctly 20 seconds before the only goal in the game, a goal that was clearly offside, that the assistant referee missed it too or believed that his mate upstairs would see it anyway so not to worry, that the game continued without any pause or review – disastrous. Then, the audacity with the statement on Sunday morning to not just admit the stuff up but adjoin it with an apology, that they “understand the disappointment and frustration of the Newcastle Jets”. The FFA is as good as running the A-League as Steve Harvey announcing the winner of Miss Universe. Oh my hat!

 7.    Ok, so some Footy again. Where to start. Let’s close off this ‘state of the game’ nonsense. Firstly, the Brisbane-Collingwood game wasn’t the saving grace, which I’ll touch on shortly, but it was decent we concede. But clearly what we could do to ensure that all games can be attractive, not just one or two a weekend, is twofold – remove the ruck nominations and be far more stringent with incorrect disposal. Remove the need for ruckmen to nominate, it means a quicker stoppage, no time to set up, and as long as only two go up, we’re good. The third man up was the issue, why we need to outline who the rucks are beforehand is redundant.

 8.    And then incorrect disposal – how many times do we see play on when the ball spills out, or is dropped, or someone attempts to kick but misses, but gets let off because he had a crack? Bin it. If you take possession, you must get rid of it legally unless your tackler knocks it free, then we are cool for that to be play on. You’ll get a lot more free kicks and less ball-ups. But no-one will be put off because everyone knows if you had prior and you don’t get rid of it properly you’re in danger. So there’s two good moves, no need for zones, which is laughable given it will do precisely zero to congestion. Malcolm Blight, you’re a legend, but on this you’re drunk, or old, or both. Sorry mate. You think it sounds legit but practically it does nothing.

 9.    Now as for that Lions-Pies game, oh, the ecstasy afterwards, the number of children that will be born in nine months’ time off the back of it. It only gets the love because it was a high-scoring thriller. It was high-scoring firstly because both teams uncharacteristically kicked straight, it even broke some league accuracy records. If they kicked at league average it would be 14 goals to 13, or similar, and just a ‘good game’ then. The game in Sydney on Saturday was arguably closer, and if anything more akin to a finals game standard, but everyone got swept up in Sunday twilight. Spare me. The Lions were gallant, the Pies were good enough, move along. Rub your eyes a bit and then look again perhaps? It was decent but not orgasmic.

 10. As for the Swans-Roos result, that’s a far more relevant game to look at, so let’s. Firstly, the home team. That’s the third loss at home, which is strange. Yes, no Franklin, but they didn’t have the Budweiser down at Geelong and got away with it. The forward line, or forward of the ball play, is hit and miss right now for the Bloods. They are so Buddy-focused that without him they are so unpredictable it can mean on-the-road success to a off-guard Geelong, or equally make them ripe for the taking at home to North. A reliable plan B is necessary, may mean they don’t win that Cats game, but it assures them of the home win instead, which is probably a better outcome going forward when he misses.

 11. So how about those Roos? A big scalp. Needed it, so far their wins were not massively persuasive. But ahead of the ledger, playing some good football, the combo of Brown, Ziebell and the return of Mason Wood inside 50 is very dangerous. Reliable down back too but I fear that when it comes to big games, much like the Melbourne loss they a month ago, up against a class, top-8 midfield they’ll be found wanting more often than not. But, great signs for the rebuild, this isn’t about 2017 for the Shinboners, so it’s all good stuff.

 12. Hmm, Essendon. Not good at the moment. Brendan Goddard continues to add to his portfolio of ‘really bad high possession count games’ and the whole ball movement is just ordinary. Certainly putting talent on the park each week but they’re not able to do enough when they have it for long enough, but worse still are not defending anywhere near enough cohesively as a unit when they haven’t got it. Clearly looks a confidence thing, couple bad losses have set them back, a good game or two can turn this around pretty quick; momentum is pretty powerful when you have it (West Coast) but gee, when you haven’t, it’s horrible – hard to stop, hard to turn around.

 13. Joe Daniher is copping plenty around the traps, out of form, a bit of a poster boy for their performance as a team in one sense. Now this is an All-Australian centre-half forward only 12 months ago, so he deserves a little more credit. And mind you, yes, he might not be playing his best, but I don’t think the team setup is helping him too much. For mine sharing the 50 with James Stewart and Jake Stringer is hindering Daniher. Yes, Daniher meshed ok with Stewart last year, but now with Stringer spending a lot of time inside 50, Stewart is now in Daniher’s way. This team does not look good with all three, and its main impact is being felt with the form of their key man. Either Stringer has to get on the ball more, or despite how well he has played in his role Stewart’s spot needs to be looked at. Harsh, yet Daniher can play a lot better but a shuffle of the magnets is required first.

 14. A tick to this column, pardon the forthcoming narcissism. This time last week we whacked Jon Patton, he then had another off night Friday (did a lot rucking though, granted) and the football media then jumped on. Remember where you read it first. They all either read my column or are just massively behind. Either way, stick with this column each week first and foremost.

 15. Freo are just not bringing the effort this last little bit and it’s very concerning. Lots to like about their 2018 prospects as this column outlines but the stats that measure effort and want are looking a little wanting. Has the club been distracted by the Ross Lyon stuff? Do they need a good old-fashioned week of training where mouthguards are required? This team is good enough for September, if they miss it’s a lost opportunity. Still only early May, they remain a ‘Hold’.

 16. Nat Fyfe though, playing beautifully. Best on ground for sure on the weekend, with the reigning Brownlow medallist sharing the same field. They didn’t really play on one another for comparison but as we speak, if you had to do the old-school lunchtime picking teams, Fyfe goes before Martin. Don’t let any Victorian bias let you down, Fyfe is just better.

 17. Um, St Kilda. It’s all a bit scratchy isn’t it? And the real shame is you ask Carlton fans, is there anything to be positive about, winless from seven, worst start in their club’s history, a club that’s properly old, not GWS old? And they respond no, sure, Curnow, Cripps, but no, not really. It’s a very sulky and sad kind of response. But if you ask them to choose between their list and the Saints’, then there’s a pause, followed by a wry smile. They answer theirs, and wonder off with the slightest pep in their step. And I agree with them, the Saints list might just be league’s worst right now. I’d rather Brisbane’s list a well. Trouble at Moorabbin.

 18. Couple on Hawthorn. Think Fox Footy’s Tom Morris might be on good oil here, the Hawks right now would be favourites for Tom Lynch. They will offer more money than Richmond off the top, and whilst I still believe Collingwood won’t be outbid for salary or term, just feel Lynch would chose Dingley over the Holden Centre. As a Roughead replacement it’s perfect. And to be coached by Clarkson, the man who was coach of the last 100-goal season, it makes too much sense.

 19. And on Clarkson too, he might be the biggest threat to Richmond right now. This column doesn’t massively rate his Hawks, but is besotted by his ability to get results, make things happen, strategically and tactically get his team towards the top. And Clarko knows this year’s yardstick, it’s the mob from Punt Road, and can now over the course of three months analyse and break down and plot a method that his less-talented team can deploy should they meet in September. If I’m Damien Hardwick, I’m almost somehow preparing for that already in readiness, Clarko is that good, and dangerous.

 20. And lastly this week, Bomber Thompson. Bad week for him last week, and then curiously this week those especially grubby journos thought it public interest to run a column exposing his long-term love interest who just happens to be Thai citizen. What’s curious is what is the point in doing so? She has nothing to do with anything related to the two-time premiership coach getting into hot water with the law, she’s got very little if anything to do with his social spiralling away from football. The only reason you run that story is, and we’ll be careful here even though we know we don’t need to, is because of … how to be delicate here… her interesting backstory. Or should we say his interesting backstory. Now that’s no-one’s business, nor really that interesting. But clearly that’s the only reason you run that story, yet they didn’t mention it. Bizarre times.

(originally published May 8)

[stormyrecords-blog]

new arrivals 3-30-17

in TODAY!! (thursday) NARDINI, NINOMusique Pour Le Futur LP  $29.99We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want Records present a reissue of Nino Nardini's e Musique Pour Le Futur, originally released in 1970. An experimental, musique concrete, sci-fi masterpiece, available for the first time since 1970. Originally recorded for Crea Sound Ltd., a sub-label of Louis Delacour's Neuilly imprint, Musique Pour Le Futur finds the French composer, arranger, producer, possible time-traveler, and all around music library legend Nino Nardini experimenting with synthesizers, percussions, prepared piano, echo, and special effects. Fans of electronic oddities, eerie cinematic audio-landscapes, Piero Umiliani, or Bernard Parmegiani, will rejoice at this full-length musical adventure that could very well be the soundtrack for a film in which characters from a '70s Italian horror movie visit a distant (forbidden) planet from a '50s sci-movie. It's bizarre, hypnotizing, slightly spooky, always out-of-this-world, and goddamn brilliant. Nino Nardini, also known as Georges Teperino, had a very fruitful career in library music, much like longtime collaborator Roger Roger. He composed a very large amount of works for French and British libraries which continues to be featured in numerous programs (radio, TV, films) all around the world. His passion for electronic music experimentations began in the late '60s and kept going until the '80s. Housed in a phosphorescent glow-in-the-dark, heavy cardboard sleeve. ALBERICH/LUSSURIABorgia LP   $19.99Following on from that hugely sought-after Green Graves issue by Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (2016), Hospital Productions re-examine a longstanding tradition of industrial ambient music on this exceptional collaboration between two of the label's most consistently innovative, highly absorbing producers. Originally released in a private press run of handmade tapes in 2016, the collaboration was made in person with both Alberich and Lussuria making use of digital synths in homage to that distinctly European scene of the mid '90s that combined hardcore industrial textures with ambient pulses. It's a sound you'll be familiar with if you've immersed yourself in the most unnervingly quiet sections of the last few Prurient albums, building a kind of futuristic soundscape situated somewhere between David Lynch, Kevin Drumm, and a more dystopian variant of Brad Fiedel's distinctive soundtrack to The Terminator (1984). Alberich's instinct for harsh propulsive rhythms is tempered here by Lussuria's weird topography, the digital rendering adding a kind of artificial foundation quite removed from the throbbing earthiness you'd find on a hardware session. Instead, the more linear trajectory of so many dark ambient excursions is replaced with a constantly shifting landscape, veering from an oddly displaced vocal narrative into pounded, crumbling rhythms at some points, while those sinking sub bass sands keep things resolutely atmospheric for the duration. There are no concessions to that blackened aesthetic here, if you were into Green Graves or want to immerse yourself in one of the most brutally atmospheric albums you'll hear this year, check this out. Edition of 500. AFRO SUPER-FEELINGS LED BY SEGUN OKEJII Like Woman LP  $25.99Soul Patrol Records present a reissue of I Like Woman. This is an album comprised of two super-rare Afro-beat disco/funk tracks from Lagos by the band Afro Super-Feelings, led the by artist/musician Segun Okeji. Segun Okeji was the tenor sax player in Fela Kuti's Koola Lobitos band in Nigeria in the late 1960s before changing their name to Africa 70, and this record, originally released in the late 1970s, uses that first-hand experience and influence to maximum effect with a pair of devastating sidelong saxophone-led jams. Up-tempo, chugging drums and a crack horn section, bass, guitar, organ, and backing vocals coordinate to achieve the hypnotic call/refrain/chant crescendo that was Fela's hallmark in his peak years. Players include Tunde Daudu on drums (The Benders), E. Ngomalloh on organ (Fela Kuti), Tutu Shoronmu on guitar (Fela Kuti), and others that played on releases by the C.S. Crew, Sonny Okosun, Orlando Julius, and Tony Allen. Edition of 500. ORPHXArchive 93-94 2LP  $25.99Mannequin Records present an archival collection from the genesis of Orphx's sound. Inspired by early industrial music and new waves of noise from Japan and Europe, the compilation is gathering together some of the best material from their first two cassette releases, released in 1993 and 1994, along with previously unreleased tracks recovered from the original four-track tapes. Mastered by Rude 66; Graphic design by Alessandro Adriani. Edition of 500. DIAFRAMMASiberia LP  $23.99Mannequin Records celebrate their nine year anniversary with a reissue of Diaframma's Siberia, originally released in 1984. A masterpiece of '80s Italian new wave, and a cornerstone of Italian rock. At the end of the '70s Federico Fiumani, together with two classmates, gave life to CFS. The acronym is formed by the initials of the members: Gianni Cicchi (drummer), Fiumani (guitar and voice), and Salvatore Susini (bass). Later, Susini was replaced by Cicchi's brother, Leandro. The new incarnation of Diaframma was born, with the singer now replaced with Nicola Vannini. From their earliest moments, they shared the same stages as Neon, Pankow, and Litfiba, who all contributed transforming the Tuscan capital into the epicenter of post-punk in Italy. After their first single Pioggia / Illusione Ottica (1982), a split with Pankow (1982), and the mini-album Altrove (1983), the beautiful lyrics of the guitar player and leader Federico Fiumani exposed the band as one of the most popular in the Italian scene. In 1984, Diaframma signed onto IRA Records and Nicola Vannini was replaced by the painter and sculpturist Miro Sassolini. With Miro on board, Diaframma recorded Siberia, 3 Volte Lacrime (1986), and Boxe (1988), unwittingly laying the blueprint for the future generation of Italian alternative music scene. Siberia is one of the most successful attempts to combine derivative Anglo-Saxon musical styles and songs written in Italian. Siberia's title track is a masterpiece that highlights Fiumani's skills, drawing trajectories with his guitar in line with the metaphorical descriptions of a "big chill", reflecting the mood and social climate of Italy in the early '80s. Epoch-making is actually an adjective suitable for the album, filtered through the sensibility of memorable songs like "Neongrigio", "Amsterdam", "De Lorenzo", and "Specchi D'Acqua". An Italian breath, where the lyrics of Fiumani are totally lost in the symbolist poetry, represents a perfect model of harmony between the Italian metrics and the sound and rhythm of English post-punk. Siberia pictures Italy's first attempt to emerge from the exciting comfort zone of the "underground" to deal finally with the real market (IRA sold approximately 50,000 copies at the time), where the tradition of the Italian song-writing was merging with the musical forefather, such as Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Television. In February 2012, Rolling Stone placed Siberia as #7 on their poll of the 100 most beautiful Italian records of all time. Edition of 600. BYRON & GERALDUnity LP  $34.99Eremite present Byron And Gerald's Unity, a private press free jazz album recorded in 1969 at Howard University and the first release on Byron Morris's EPI label. It is the only hardcore free jazz record out of 1960s DC, and a viscerally powerful cultural dispatch on the sociopolitical upheavals of its time. From Byron's 2017 liner notes: "In the early spring of 1969, several months before moving to Poughkeepsie, NY, Gerald Wise and I, along with the recording engineer Len Jones, conceived of the idea to gather a group of musicians who were like-minded concerning 'The New Thing' (Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little). Most of the musicians we asked to be part of this experiment we knew from jam sessions or were already part of Unit Five. Eric Gravatt suggested we invite two of his musician friends from Philadelphia, Byard Lancaster and Keno Speller. I wrote a musical composition for the date dedicated to my father, 'JWM+53.' My friend Earl Snead wrote the other composition, 'Black Awareness.' Earl passed shortly after the session. The recording session took place at the studio of an experimental TV channel that leased space on the campus of Howard University. Gerry and I welcomed all the musicians and thanked them for being part of the session. The scene immediately took on a magical atmosphere, with everyone going about their tasks as if they had cue sheets. In the center of the room we laid out our instruments on two 4x8 tables. That way we could just pick up any instrument and play when the spirit hit us. I had two altos (one plastic) and a curved soprano. Jerry Wise had his trumpet and some hand rhythm instruments. Byard Lancaster had an alto sax, flute, trumpet, and some hand rhythm instruments. Vins Johnson had a tenor and a baritone sax. Keno Speller had a bell tree, tambourines, claves, drum sticks, felt-headed mallets, and a set of amplified conga drums. Inside the tables our two drummers, Eric Gravatt and Abu Sharrieff, sat face to face with two full drum kits and microphones all around them. Next to them were our two bassists, Fred Williams and a young man named Chris (whose last name, sadly, I cannot remember). To this day, I wish the proceedings had been filmed. The energy level was so high that Byard Lancaster did push-ups when not playing (I believe I remember Vins Johnson and Keno Speller also doing some). In spite of all of the excitement, everyone wanted to make a serious musical statement and cooperated in taking directions from Len Jones, Gerry, and me. It was orderly excitement, the collective 'We' caught-up in the moment. Ornette's Free Jazz (1961) and Trane's Ascension (1965) address much of what we were attempting in the studio that day in 1969. . . . In point of fact, most if not all of us had witnessed firsthand the physical excitement and, in some moments, pure terror of the urban riots set off in the spring of 1968 by the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Washington, DC, exploded with anger and the looting and burning of businesses throughout the city. U.S. Army troops, along with Air Force and Navy/Marine elements, were sent in to quell these massive urban disturbances. During the recording of Unity our collective emotions were still raw, to say the least. Here and now, nearly a half of a century later, I can still smell the tear gas and the burning tires. I get chills just thinking about it. But the music got us through that time... and the music gets us through now!" NACE/CHRIS CORSANO/PAUL FLAHERTY, BILLThese LP  $25.99" 'Wherein we come upon three visceralists who have been collaborating for years - innumerable instances in a roulette wheel of settings -- finally shacking up in a studio and fashioning a proper trio record. Glory be. Let's listen in-- 'These.' It's a phrase that never gets started, and an apt title for this record, which right off bolts from the barn and burns so brightly it nearly gets away from you by the time you're done twisting your head around looking for whoever it was that left the door open. 'He asked me when I planned to come back. Always, I said.' Nace's guitar mines savage depths, egging on the propulsive swing of Flaherty and Corsano. The results are as beastly as the heart itself. Swing. Bounce. Joust. Jab. Uppercut. Flutter. Wink. Sneer. They all play with anguish and ecstatic rupture -- the frustrating joy of pushing an instrument to its limits, fashioning a necessary and brutal needlepoint. They move with all the otherworldly elegance and mania of moths at a lamp show. The music asks no specific questions, but wrenches open a space for all manner of questions -- this is one of art's most vital functions! It deals in shades, no matter how sharp the apparent angle. Check out the second track on the first side: the solemn bells of Bill's guitar signal not so much a funeral, but a new dawn after a tragedy. Flaherty's saxophone sounds innocent, almost tentative at first, but as Chris' drums chime in, Paul starts to wrench the fabric loose. The track builds into a fierce and alien vista, charting a territory all its own -- a simmering judgement. It becomes hard to talk about. Didn't you ever try to eat your own tail in the midday sun? No? These three, whose veins are coursing straight through with a nuanced emotional lexicon and the smarts to harness it, have given us a record that expands potential with each listen." --Matt Krefting, Holyoke, MA 2017 WEISS, KLAUSTime Signals LP  $29.99Trunk Records present a reissue of Klaus Weiss's Time Signals, originally released on Selected Sound in 1978. This hectic mix of dark drums with plugged-in, way-out, funked-up studio gear has been high on library geeks' want-lists for years. Made by Niagara drummer/library overlord Klaus Weiss, and including the monster that is "Survivor", originals are super rare, going for up to $300 if you can ever get near one. Standard black vinyl comes in a varnished bronze sleeve - a replica of the original LP. Jonny Trunk on Time Signals: "It was way back in the mid-1990s when fellow record collector and library music head Gareth Godard (AKA Cherrystones) first played me Selected Sound library LP 67, Time Signals. At the time -- and I think it's still the case -- Gareth was into Klaus Weiss. Weiss was the drummer for Munich supergroup Niagara, he could be found on library LPs we were digging up on the Conroy and Golden Ring labels, and his name would appear across early 1960s jazz LPs from Germany. His drumming sound was mechanical, peculiar, unpredictable and distinctive. But nothing he'd done that I'd heard sounded quite like Time Signals. It was more manic and experimental, and the sounds and slightly offensive rhythms burrowed into my brain almost instantly. It probably took about another three years to recover and find myself a copy, and even then I'd found the sounds completely at odds to anything else I knew about. A few years later Gareth also pointed out to me that this LP was all over Rockin' With Seka, a jet set hardcore movie from 1980 starring Swedish sensation Seka and Big John Holmes. Obviously the sound department on the film got busy with Selected Sound as another cue from the LP Nymphe (1979) is also on the soundtrack. But that is exactly what library music is for; Selected Sound produced these amazing library LPs, all beautifully recorded, sent them out in their shiny bronze sleeves around the world with rough guides to what they might be good for and waited for the royalties to roll in. Time Signals is probably the most desirable LP in the 9000 series catalogue. It sounds like nothing else and there are many high points, certainly something for everyone. And as musical tastes change and develop, Time Signals just seems to move along and fit. What seemed like otherworldly music to me two decades ago now seems like the norm. So here is Time Signals in all its odd glory, offering you a futuristic musical trip like no other." BROTHER AH Divine Music 3 cd set   $34.99"Following the reissues of Brother Ah's three studio albums in 2016, Manufactured Recordings is proud to present Divine Music, a collection of three unreleased albums from this jazz visionary: The Sea (1978), Mediation (1981), and Searching (1985). Moving from rich spiritual jazz to more meditative ambience, Divine Music further explores Brother Ah's unique sound and musical vision. Released a 3xCD package, Divine Music includes an extensive interview with Brother Ah by Pitchfork and Resident Advisor contributor Andy Beta. Recommended for fans of Laraaji, Alice Coltrane, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Popul Vuh, and the recent new age renaissance. The renowned French horn player known as Brother Ah (aka Robert Northern) is one of the most prolific and respected musicians in the history of jazz music, with a recorded output spanning more than 40 years. Born in 1934 and raised in the south Bronx, Brother Ah was playing jazz trumpet as early as fifteen years of age. Following a classical French horn education at Austria's Vienna State Academy, he emerged in the late '50s and established himself as a skilled and consistent session musician, playing with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, and numerous Broadway theater orchestras. Brother Ah recorded well into the '60s with some of the most illustrious names in the genre, including Donald Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Gil Evans and, perhaps most influentially, Sun Ra. In 1969, Ah formed his own group, The Musical Sound Awareness Ensemble, and released several works under his own name from 1974 onward. In the late '60s, his interest in non-western music developed, and his '70s and '80s recordings, incorporated elements of Eastern and 'Third World' music, fusing them with jazz structures." HOSONO, SHIGERU SUZUKI & TATSURO YAMASHITA, HARUOMIPacific  LP  $25.99Victory present a reissue of Pacific, originally released in 1978. Reuniting the best session musicians Japan had to offer to make an album that would evoke the atmospheres of the South Pacific islands, the kind of places Japanese people spend their vacations. Pacific is a treat to the ears; its theme of the southern Pacific ocean and its warm cerulean waters relax its listeners with a fusion of city pop, soft jazz, and that good old 1970s funk while remaining surprisingly fully instrumental throughout all contributions from artists Haruomi Hosono, Shigeru Suzuki, and Tatsuro Yamashita. A true cult LP and an inspiration for a lot of so called "vaporware" music. LP includes insert. GREENBERGER/GLENN JONES/CHRIS CORSANO, DAVIDAn Idea In Everything  $15.99CDWhen David Greenberger first embarked on what has become a life-long journey, drummer Chris Corsano was not yet five years old! In 1979, after graduating from art school in Boston, Greenberger took the job of activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home, an all-male elder care facility in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and began collecting the stories, poems and music reviews of its aged patients for what became his Duplex Planet project, an undertaking that would eventually encompass nearly 200 issues of a digest-sized magazine, a series of CDs, books, comics, and performance art. Eventually the nursing home closed, but David has remained engaged in what has become the central art form of his life: the "art of conversation." Three decades later, Chris Corsano set in motion the project present here. With guitarist and banjo player Glenn Jones, a longtime friend of both Greenberger and Corsano, the three began recording in Greenberger's living room in upstate New York. In just three days, with no advance preparation, they recorded the 28 tracks that make up An Idea In Everything. Corsano improvised, Jones invented new tunings for his banjo and guitar on the fly, and Greenberger selected and read stories in direct response to the music. Everything was spontaneous and live. Despite the dark and sad feeling of some of the texts (dealing with aging, memory loss, etc.), there is also humor, joy and grit. The resulting is a rollercoaster of emotions, a glittering patchwork of sonic atmospheres and an oral encyclopedia on dozens of subjects. David Greenberger on the release: "When newcomers hear that I have regular conversations and interviews with elderly people, they assume I collect oral history. What that assumption implies is that when one grows old we become solely a repository of our past. From the start, my mission has been to offer a range of characters who are already old, so that we can get to know them as they are in the present, without celebrating or mourning the loss of who they were before." Recorded by Chris Corsano in Greenwich, NY, February 2013; Mixed by Matthew Azevedo and Glenn Jones in Jamaica Plain, MA; Mastered by Matthew Azevedo at Endless Audio, Providence, RI. Illustration by Gwénola Carrère. Co-released with David Greenberger's Pel Pel label. PARRISH, THEOParallel Dimensions2LP on SOUND SIGNATURE   $29.992017 reissue with new artwork. Originally released in 2000. "If you're keen to track down some truly creative house music that sounds like it indeed could be the soundtrack for a parallel dimension, look no further. This is it. That said, Parrish's style of house isn't just abstract for the sake of being abstract. It's actually quite musical and brilliantly crafted." --Jason Birchmeier, AllMusic

[you-sayyouwantarevolution]

Blog Post 5: Madness and Magic

I love the way The Hearing Trumpet deals with groups of people organizing a revolution who are extremely unexpected and underappreciated. Reading the novel today, in 2017, is especially interesting given the usual political importance placed on younger generations to take action to address political and social problems (and rightly so, I believe, but still) and I like this model that Carrington shows us of a marginalized group of people organizing something important and impactful. Though Carrington herself was interested in alchemy and the occult topically, I think that for those of us reading now who are not particularly interested in studying these topics at length, they can certainly serve as literary metaphors within the book.

These uncommon, or perhaps “invisible” knowledges in the book could be read as a metaphor for the seemingly elusive ways in which people, or groups of people, might find ways to come together and create revolutions. It could be that lately I’m cynical about the potential for this; but I’m interested in these potentials. Recently (a few weeks ago) I went to a guest lecture given by Dr. Daniel T. Rodgers on his concept called “Fracture,” also part of the title of his book re-released in 2011. According to Rodgers, post 1970’s, we as a human culture have lost the public forums for democratic discourse we used to have, due to a multitude of factors including post-cold war political climate, and the rise of late capitalism and neoliberalism. The argument he presents is much more complex than I am able to explain here, but I have been thinking about this concept ever since I heard the lecture. That being said, I am interested in how much Carrington’s work still resonates today. Interestingly enough the book was first published in 1974, right around the time that Rodgers claims public discourse began to fundamentally change. Is the knowledge pertaining to how to connect and form collectives and create activism in 2017 “occult knowledge” to an extent? I can’t help but think of various social media platforms etc. and the ways in which people seem to participate in activist causes on these platforms, but what “good” they actually do, and if they indeed do anything at all. Are these platforms too obvious, too clear-cut, too corporate? The magical transformations in Carrington’s books of the earth, and even of the women themselves, is obviously meant to be fantastical. How does such a fantastic narrative work today?

Indeed, Carrington’s novel does seem to mark a shift regarding the locus of power regarding individuals within the broader social structure. Rodger’s work could serve as a fascinating framework for looking at this shift. In the prologue to Age of Fracture he writes:

“Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstances, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture” (3).  

Given the history of Surrealists and their emergence from the inter-war period, it is extremely interesting to look at Carrington, who lived through this era and who was still actively making work at the time when this “fracture” occurred, according to Rodgers. Carrington seems to be getting at issues of who is able to perpetuate revolutionary politics, and why. This brings me again to questions of visibility and invisibility, but also conceptions of time and continuity. Some of the most poignant comments I took away from The Hearing Trumpet were about time, the way we experience it, and its importance (or unimportance). When Anna welcomes Marian to the institution, she says, “Personally I think that time is unimportant and when I think of the autumn leaves and the snow, the spring and the summer, the birds and the bees I realize that time is unimportant, yet people attach so much importance to clocks” (Carrington 33). Issues of time and the commodification of time are a key component in the conversation regarding the age of fracture. Time as unimportant is perhaps paradoxically crucial to political consciousness. The continuity of time beyond oneself matters greatly if one is to give attention to issues of injustice that have existed and will exist beyond an individual’s life. Though it is maybe a subtle point, or I might even be forcing this point, at this stage of reading the novel and given recent other theories I’ve learned and read about, this seems to be an important component of the conversation of shifting power and overarching structural changes that affect social consciousness and democracy.

 Sources:

Carrington, Leonora. The Hearing Trumpet. Cambridge: Exact Change. 1996. Print.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Age of Fracture, edited by Daniel T. Rodgers, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uwm/detail.action?docID=3300914.