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whatsthepointofphilosophy · 5 years

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Zeitgeist Disease

Something a bit different today. Paul Graham describes himself as “a programmer, writer, and investor”, although he studied philosophy in university. In January of 2004 he wrote a blog post, and I’m posting the entire thing here. Again, I didn’t write any of it, apart from this opening bit, and it’s fifteen years old.

It’s fundamentally a vigorous defence of philosophy and it’s more relevant now than ever before. I’ve called this post Zeitgeist Disease, but he calls it What You Can’t Say.

What You Can’t Say

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves.

Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.

It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.

The Conformist Test

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.

Trouble

What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for.

Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.

Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely.

To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?

Heresy

This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?

Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.

The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.

So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?

Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.

In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

Time and Space

If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.

Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.

We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.

So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?

You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.)

You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one.

I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones that are universal, or nearly so. Murder for example. But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about.

For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. So odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.

Prigs

Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads.

Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think.

You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot of my friends are starting to have children now, and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent.

Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?

I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself. The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete collection of all our taboos-- and in mint condition, because they're untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head.

How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter-- just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say.

Mechanism

I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.

Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.

The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.

I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently defeated opponent. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin.

Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out.

So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?

This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas.

Why

Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?

I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.

Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them.

Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.

In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories come from.

A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks.

Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.)

Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.

It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands-- something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem.

Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.

Pensieri Stretti

When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.

When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.

I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.

The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

Viso Sciolto?

I don't think we need the viso sciolto so much as the pensieri stretti. Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither".

Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests." A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.

If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance.

One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.

Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."

Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved."

ABQ

A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the place to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry (which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize). Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland.

And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say?

Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee. Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or "destructive".)

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.

Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.

To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of 1984.

Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.

Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.

You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.

How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?

#philiosophy #heresy #morality #fashion

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chiseler · 5 years

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Little Devils: 50 Years of Killer Kid Movies

Face it, children are just plain creepy—especially the really cute ones.

Historically—and I’m talking about going back thousands of years—we’ve always been scared to death of the children we’ve spawned. Before they’re born we worry they might be physically deformed or just a little off in the head somehow. And after they’re born and as they start to grow and think and talk, hoo boy, that’s when things really start getting scary, as you start to glean a little something about what’s going on behind those cold, staring eyes. I’m not a parent myself, but having been a kid once I fully understand the panic and fear that can grip parents as they come to better understand their kids. What if they’re no good at sports? What if they start hanging out with a bad crowd and using drugs? What if they get bullied by the other kids and take revenge by shooting up the school? Worse still, what if they decide to bludgeon us to death with a crowbar in our sleep one night? What if they turn out to be the bona fide offspring of Satan himself? What the hell do we do then? Sure, we all pretend to be shocked and dismayed when we hear news stories about some eight-year-old in Kansas or Oregon stabbing the little neighbor girl twenty times for no apparent reason, but let’s be honest—we all know what these pint-sized miscreants are capable of doing, and have simply come to expect it.

As with a few of those other fundamental adult fears, like asteroids, nuclear war, clowns and deadly plagues, over the years our fear of children has led to its own unheralded cinematic subgenre of Killer Kid movies.

While countless slasher films from Halloween onwards feature tykes with butcher knives who grow up to become adults with butcher knives, I’m focusing here on those films in which the snot-nosed killers remain snot-nosed throughout. While I could have included those rambunctious hobo youths from William Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road (1933), those little back-to-nature wastrels from Lord of the Flies (1963) and the matricidal zombie girl with the trowel from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), I, um, didn’t. So sue me.

Here’s a quick chronological list of a double handful of notable features about murderous children. It’s interesting to note that as the years pass, the films themselves seem to grow less clever, endearing, original and interesting. Just like kids!

The Bad Seed (1956)

I’ve long been a big fan of that Mervyn LeRoy. As a director, he always understood the darker side of human nature, and had a sly sense of humor about it. In 1931 he directed my two favorite (and two of the bleakest) Edward G. Robinson pictures, Five-Star Final and Two Seconds. Then eight years later he directed The Wizard of Oz. I always like to think (though I’m undoubtedly wrong about this) he intended his 1956 creeper The Bad Seed as a kind of bonk on the head to those audience members who hadn’t recognized the darkness that lay at the heart of The Wizard of Oz.

Okay, Nancy Kelly plays Christine, the nightmare-plagued mother of the world’s most perfect little girl. Not only is blonde, pigtailed and always immaculately dressed Rhoda (Patty McCormack) perfect, the ten-year old knows she’s perfect. As a perfect child, she also knows what she deserves out of life and those around her, and lord help anyone who doesn’t cough it up. As time goes on, Christine begins to suspect Rhoda may somehow be responsible for the tragic drowning of a classmate who’d recently won an award Rhoda felt she rightly deserved. And if she was responsible for that, maybe she was responsible for all those other weird deaths that have been happening all over town, too. And what the hell’s the deal with that recurring nightmare, anyway?

Although based on a stage play that was itself based on a novel, it was LeRoy’s film that would become the standard reference point and template for so many of the Killer Kid movies down the line, though few would come close to matching it.

Village of the Damned 1960

John Wyndham was a reasonably popular pulp writer in the 1930s. While his crime stories gained him the most attention at the time, these days he’s best remembered for his occasional forays into sci-fi and horror. Day of the Triffids, his end-of-the-world masterpiece about killer plants (a personal phobia) was a major hit when adapted for the big screen, but his cautionary evil kid tale Village of the Damned had a much longer reach after director Wolf Rilla got ahold of it.

Yes, we all know the story: one day everyone living in a small English village falls asleep at the same time for some unknown reason. When they awaken several hours later, all the women of child-bearing age (even the virgins!) find they’re pregnant. Weirder still, they all go into labor at exactly the same time.

Ten years later, all the kids born that day have turned out to be extremely intelligent, blond, beautiful, and emotionless. Snappy dressers though they may be, they’re also arrogant little snots who have no time for adults or other kids, and only hang out with one another all the time. They also seem to share a psychic connection, and there are hints they have some larger purpose in mind. Anyone who tries to interfere with them gets the creepy glowing eyes treatment shortly before unexpectedly committing suicide. George Sanders at the top of his game plays a rational sort who tries to get to the Bottom of what all the hell,

It remains a starkly eerie and atmospheric picture that to this day can still make you want to punch blond British pre-teens right in the face.

The film went on to spawn one lesser sequel (1964’s Children of the Damned), one superior sort-of sequel (Joseph Losey’s 1962 These Are the Damned), a 1995 remake directed by Jon Carpenter, and a Simpsons parody. My favorite bit of cultural impact, however, is that some of your more out-there paranoids have worked Village of the Damned into the Montauk Project conspiracy, claiming beautiful, blond alien/human hybrids were created in the secret government labs in the caves beneath Montauk, Long Island. These Montauk Children, as they’re called, were set out into the world as sleeper agents (though most settled in Denver for some reason), and to this day are awaiting their secret orders from above.

The Twilight Zone: “It’s a Good Life” (1961)

It was included as one of the segments in Twilight Zone: The Movie, but good as that was, there’s just no topping the original. And there’s no topping the original because back in the early Sixties Billy Mumy was the creepiest kid on the planet. Rod Serling clearly recognized this, which is why he kept casting him.

Little Anthony Freemont (Mumy) lives in a pleasant small town where everyone knows him and everyone’s really nice to him. I mean really, really, REALLY nice to him,. And they’re really nice because over time they’ve come to realize that even if he doesn’t opt to simply blink them out of existence if they don’t do what he says, he has the power to make incredibly awful things happen to them. Even thinking bad things about Anthony isn’t such a hot idea. Things aren’t any better in the Freemont household, where his terrified parents (John Larch and Cloris Leachman) have to walk on eggshells out of fear he might do something else to his siblings, or them. )“It’s a…very GOOD thing that you did that…”)

It remains one of the most delightfully wicked and true portraits of just how terrified adults are of kids, and just how sinister kids can be.

Interestingly, Mumy apparently also had this power in real life, later going on to have a big hit with the novelty song, “Fish Heads.”

The Other (1972)

Kids alone are creepy enough, but you get twins to boot, you know you’re in for some bad news. And you get twin boys in a rural town in the 1930s? Holy mackerel, you might as well just pack it in right there and go home. Nothing good is going to come of it.

I don’t know how many times I watched Robert Mulligan’s film (based on the Thomas Tryon novel) on TV in the early Seventies, but it was a lot. Enough that to this day I still remember every shot and every line of dialog., but it still gets under my skin as one of the most effective of the lot.

Real twins Martin and Chris Udvarnoky play Holland and Niles Perry. As with most twins, one is mostly nice and sweet and innocent, while the other, Holland in this case, is the dominant, wickedly mischievous one.. Also like most twins, Niles and Holland share a weird psychic link. But in their case, and under the guidance of their Russian grandmother Eda (Uta Hagen), they can use a special ring to take things one step further. They call it The Game. As in Being John Malkovich, they can actually enter the consciousness of anyone they choose, from a magician in a traveling carnival, to a passing crow, to a corpse.

It’s a Northern Gothic tale complete with dark family secrets, farm accidents, dead babies, emotionally shattered mothers and real freaks. And an evil twin. It unfolds very slowly and quietly, and even though we get the Big Revelation at the halfway point, it doesn’t matter because the story rolls on with a few more twists and surprises left. It’s not shocking or terribly bloody, but extremely unnerving. Featuring an early turn by John Ritter and a Jerry Goldsmith score.

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Nicholas Roeg’s brilliantly shattered, hallucinatory narrative with the shock ending might be a loose fit here, but it had such an influence on other sort of Killer Kid movies (like David Cronenberg’s The Brood) it deserves mention.

The great Donald Sutherland was rarely better than he was here as John, an architect whose young daughter recently drowned near the family home in England. He takes a job in Venice, thinking a few months away from home might be just the thing to help him and his wife cope. Shortly after they arrive, however, they encounter a blind psychic in a restaurant who tells them their daughter’s spirit is around, and seems happy. Being the slide Rule sort, John is less willing than his wife to accept this at face value. At least until he starts having recurring visions of what seems to be his daughter all over Venice. Dresses like her, anyway. He becomes a little obsessed with that little girl in the red cloak who may or may not be his daughter. Who cares if she might have something to do with that whole nasty string of brutal stabbings around the city?

The less said about it at this point, the better (and easier, to be honest). Almost 45 years on now, it still works, that ending still gets me, and there’s nothing else like it.

It’s Alive! (1974)

People might cite Rosemary’s Baby as the be-all and end-all of films about pre-natal anxiety, but think about it. Sure, she gave birth to the Antichrist, but she has a good support network right there in the building, and if she treats him right, she’s set for life. No, for my money Larry Cohen’s breakthrough monstrous infant hint trumps them all, beginning with one of the most unsettling ad campaigns of the Seventies.

Funny thing is, though it’s remembered as a film about a baby with fangs and claws who slaughters all the doctors in the delivery room before escaping to go on a killing spree around town, if you go look at it again now you realize that’s only a minor subplot. It’s also a conspiracy film about government scientists using unwitting citizens as guinea pigs. Above all else, though, it’s an indictment of the mass media, which has the power to destroy the lives and reputations of innocent people on a whim, in this case the Davis family. And damn but that John P. Ryan is great as the horrified and disbelieving father who finds himself and his wife being publicly blamed (as is So often the case) for giving birth to a kid who isn’t quite right.

Much smarter and more subtle than most would give it credit for, It’s Alive ! Is loaded with Frankenstein references, and went on to spawn two equally good (and very different) sequels. To this day I will not put my face or fingers anywhere near a baby’s mouth.

Devil Times Five (1974)

The early to mid Seventies were mighty good years for Leif Garret. Not only was his picture plastered all over every teeny-bopper magazine in the country month after month, he was also scoring supporting roles in huge drive-in hits like Macon County Line and Walking Tall. Let’s just say considering his squeaky-clean image, Devil Times Five (aka Peopletoys) was a departure.

Garret plays one of five kids traveling on a bus which crashes in the mountains during a snowstorm. With the driver dead and not knowing what else to do, the five youngsters take refuge in a nearby resort.

It eventually comes out the bus was actually delivering the kids to an institution for the criminally insane, as they’re all kookoo bananas and extremely violent. There were hints of this beforehand, as per the standard asylum movie cliche, each nutty kid has a telltale tic—this one thinks she’s a nun, the black kid thinks he’s in the military. etc. But it’s all just mild comic relief until they pick up the knives.

Well, before you can say “Mr. Green Jeans,” they begin slaughtering everyone at the resort in a variety of hilarious ways, and occasionally in slow motion.

Unlike other Killer Kid movies which try to explain away antisocial behavior by blaming it on assorted external forces (government scientists, radiation, aliens, Satan, or an eclipse), these kids are just plain old evil by nature, and that’s all there is to it.

It wasn’t a big hit, it didn’t do much to propel Garret into leading roles, but today it’s earned itself solid cult status as a pre-slasher grind house number. And what’s not to love about the ol’ “piranhas in the bathtub” gag?

The Omen (1976)

In the Seventies and Eighties, a number of once-huge stars—Ray Milland, Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Rory Calhoun, Ida Lupino, George C. Scott and, in this case Gregory Peck—found themselves making genre pictures simply because that was all that was available to them. Granted, The Omen was a few cuts above The Devil’s Rain and Tentacles, but still.

Okay, regardless what the producers and screenwriter David Seltzer may claim about the franchise’s origins, the original trilogy of Omen films was lifted wholesale from “The Devil’s Platform” episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Be that as it may, when you get a cast like this, a smart director like Richard Donner, a simply astonishing score by Jerry Goldsmith, some diabolical camera trickery and editing, wonderful practical effects (Lee Remick’s fall from the balcony kept me going for years), and a story about a smiling, (mostly cheerful 3-year-old Son of Satan wandering around England leaving a trail of beheadings, impaled priests, seriously pissed off baboons and hanged nannies in his wake, how can you go wrong? Even if the script itself is absurdly silly.

In an interesting postscript, like so many other child actors deeply associated with high-profile horror films of the era—think Danny Lloyd from The Shining—Harvey Stephens (who as Damien spoke, what, five words onscreen?) would not appear in another film for the next four decades. And even then he hasn’t been in much, though he did have a cameo as a reporter in the remake of, yes, The Omen a few years back.

Alice Sweet Alice (1976)

I dare you to show me one worthwhile horror film about Presbyterians. No, as far as religious sects go, Catholics have it all over everyone when it comes to horror. You got your robes, your chanting, your weird rituals, your transmutation, your Inquisition, your fetishism, your magic relics, your ghostly visions, oh, it just goes on and on. The Catholic Church is just one big horror show, top to bottom. As a result, Catholicism lay at the heart of countless horror films, and Alice, Sweet Alice is among the best.

The tagline read, “If you survive this night, nothing will ever scare you again,” which may or may not have been a reference to the fact this was Brooke Shields’ film debut. Shields plays 10-year—old Karen, the cute, quiet, polite and well-dressed younger sister of that moody, smart-mouthed and generally ornery Alice (Paula Sheppard), who likes to pull nasty pranks and doesn’t dress nearly as well as her sister. Everyone from the neighbors to their own parents to the local priest adores Karen and showers her with gifts, while they just wish Alice would go away. She clearly needs to see a shrink or something. So when Karen is brutally stabbed to death outside the church on the morning of her first communion and Alice is found with Karen’s veil in her pocket, well, there you go. And then when a whole bunch of other people around town somehow connected with Alice end up all stabbed to death as well, well, there you go again. I mean, she just looks like someone who could do something like that, right?

Alice, Sweet Alice is an American Giallo, so the less said about the story the better. For having such a tiny budget, the visuals are rich and gorgeous, filled with Catholic imagery and ritual throughout, featuring a cast of wholly unlikable characters you honestly don’t mind seeing stabbed to death (especially that Little Miss Perfect Karen). The one standout is Alphonso DeNoble as the crass, sleazy, filthy and morbidly obese landlord Mr. Alphonso. DeNoble has a terrifying charisma, which may have come from being a bouncer at a gay nightclub in Jersey in real life.

Yes, the film owes quite a bit, and blatantly so, to Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but aimed at a more lowbrow mainstream audience. It’s a bloody, nasty little shocker still held dear by thousands of disaffected girls who survived Catholic school.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

1976 was not only a busy year for Killer Kid films, it was also the busiest year of Jodie Foster’s career, during which she appeared in half a dozen films ranging from Taxi Driver to, well, this, a film she and other cast and crew members would bad mouth down the line. In retrospect, it’s not really as bad as all that.

A 13-year-old Foster plays 13-year-old Rynn Jacobs, a precocious girl who may or may not be living alone in a rented house in a secluded section of a small, affluent seaside town. Her rich, nosy and suspicious landlady keeps barging in uninvited to ask too many questions, the landlady’s perv of a son (Martin Sheen) keeps putting the moves on her, a local cop is endlessly curious but nice enough, and a gimpy teenage magician from the area knows the score. But Rynn is self-sufficient and smart beyond her years. Enough so anyway to dispatch with all those nosy yokels who’d try and pry into her business.

It’s less a horror film than an atmospheric mystery that ties up all the loose ends by the three-quarters mark. Based on a 1974 novel, the claustrophobic stagebound film is mostly forgotten today, but back in ’76 the poster creeped the hell out of me. Certainly more than the film did.

The Children (1980)

Although “creepy bloodthirsty children” seems to be a simple, straightforward notion just bursting with possible storylines, 1980 marked the point at which screenwriters and filmmakers everywhere seemed to run out of ideas, so simply began rehashing those earlier, better films. Case in point is this slight variation on Village of the Damned.

This time around, instead of mysterious alien impregnation, a school bus full of perfectly normal kids drives through a cloud of yellow radioactive fog released from a nearby nuclear power plant. The radiation, it seems, turns all the tykes into shambling, emotionless and murderous zombies. Instead of glowing eyes, the infected kids have black fingernails (which was easier on the fx budget), and instead of psychically driving adults to kill themselves, the mere touch of these evil zombie children can fry any adult to a crisp. With little else to do, the radioactive zombie kids lay siege to their small town as the adults try to figure out just how to handle this. I mean, it was already hard enough trying to get them to go to bed on time.

Oh, derivative as it is, the film does have it’s moments. In fact it includes one scene I must admit I’ve never seen repeated in any other Killer Kid film, in which a group of well-armed adults barricaded inside a house open fire on the army of evil radioactive curtain climbers massing in the front yard. And when the adults finally do figure out how to dispatch the little monsters, well, let’s just say it was unexpectedly gruesome.

The Godsend (1980)

Given the year had already provided a Village of the Damned knockoff, it was apparently time for a Bad Seed knockoff, and an obvious one at that.

A pleasant and kindly British couple, the Marlowes (Malcolm Stoddard and Cyd Hayman) decide to take in a young unmarried pregnant woman even though they already have six kids of their own, telling her she can stay with them until she has the baby. What nice people those Marlowes are! But wouldn’t you know it? As soon as the ungrateful wench spits out the baby she vanishes without a word, leaving them with a seventh mouth to feed.

Being pleasant people they don’t complain too much, and over time the child grows into a polite and lovely little girl named Bonnie (Wilhelmina Green).

Well, sure enough before you know it all the other Marlowe kids start dropping like flies, and the parents take their own sweet time connecting the dots. I mean, come now people! We all know what happens to the youngest kid in a large family.

Itself based on a less-than-original novel, director Gabrielle Beaumont’s low-budget film plays like a TV movie, and lacks pretty much everything that made The Bad Seed so effective.

Bloody Birthday (1981)

On June 9th, 1970, three women in a small California town give birth during a total solar eclipse (uh-oh!). The resulting three kids—Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy), Curtis (Billy Jacoby) and Steven (Andy Freeman)—understandably share a tight bond, and as their tenth birthday approaches in 1980, plans are underway for a big bash pretty much everyone in town is expected to attend.

In the week before the party, maybe just to trim that guest list down a bit, the trio of little scamps undertakes a killing spree. They bludgeon and strangle a couple of stereotypical slasher film teens making out in a graveyard, beat Debbie’s dad (the local sheriff) to death with a baseball bat, shoot a teacher, and attempt to lock a classmate in a refrigerator in a junkyard. No one suspects them, of course, because they’re freaking nine years old. Nowadays we know better. While you’d expect the big party to be the film’s climactic scene, it just comes and goes without much happening, and those darn kids keep killing.

Around the halfway point, a teenaged amateur astrologer offers up the closest thing we get to an explanation for such naughty behavior. During that eclipse, see, both the sun and moon were blocking Saturn. Since Saturn controls the emotions, these kids were born with no conscience. Okay, so you come to accept a lot on faith in these things. Ultimately, though there are hits of both Village of the Damned and Bad Seed here, the picture owes much more to Devil Times Five.

Director Ed Hunt had made a handful of genre cheapies prior to this, but today Bloody Birthday remains his most memorable film. The dialogue is often painful, the soundtrack is comprised of library music from TV movies, and it’s not nearly as gory as would become standard for slasher films, but his three little killers all exude a believable David Berkowitz vibe, and the film contains enough boobs to earn an R rating. In an irrelevant sidenote, it remains one of the very few entries here in which the kids use guns, and, I think, the only one in which they use a bow and arrow.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Writer/director Robert Hiltzik’s weirdie is a delightfully oddball number not only within the Killer Kid subgenre, but also among slasher films, which is doubly surprising considering when it was released.

Although the film at the outset has all the standard earmarks of a cookie-cutter post-friday the 13th slasher film (a bunch of youngsters at summer camp, and endless supply of sharp implements, a fast-rising body count), careful viewers will note a few unsettling details. First, apart from the counselors, most of the campers (and victims) are pre-adolescent, and all the males, young and old alike, wear shorts that are just a little too short and a little too snug. Hmm.

Anyway, Angela (Felissa Rose), has been sent to summer camp against her will with her older brother. She’s pretty and nice and shy, but has clearly been damaged in some way. She adamantly refuses to go swimming or play games ore shower wit the other kids, despite repeated (and usually understanding) pleas from the counselors. She prefers to be alone, and isn’t much interested in making new friends. I know the feeling. I was sent to summer camp once, and after a lummox named Trent got to go home because he got a fish hook in the eye, I considered bribing those kids with the fishing poles to do the same to me.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, the less said the better. Let’s just say it fits the category, but with a notorious twist, and remains near the top of the lists of many slasher film fanatics I know. I do wonder, though, given the age we’re living in, how this one would go over today. It also leaves me wondering what the deal is with that Robert Hiltzik.

Children of the Corn (1984)

Yes, it’s a stinker, but remains a memorable touchstone within the then exploding subgenre of Stephen King stinkers. I always find it funny that King continues to bitch about Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, but never has a word to say about this, or The Mangler, or Silver Bullet, or Maximum Overdrive or…

But that’s beside the point. Given the subject at hand, both the original short story and Fritz Kiersch’s film adaptation are interesting in that they represent a genre-blending crossover between Killer Kid movies and Religious Zealot horror.

AS much as there is to chuckle at here—my goodness what an awful bit of filmmaking, from the script to the performances to the camera set-ups and fx—dammit I keep going back to it. I do enjoy that flashback in the diner, as well as the fact the initial slaughter of the adults is never clearly explained. Not really, anyway. And I do dig the amateurish overacting on the part of John Franklin as the crazy young preacher Isaac and Courtney Gains as his True Believer henchman Malachai. And I’ll watch that R.G. Armstrong in anything. Mostly, though, I think I keep going back time and again just to hear the line “He wants you, too…Malachai!,” which has been a catchphrase of mine for years now.

Firestarter (1984)

Amid the mid-‘80s flood of Stephen King quickies, at least director Mark L. Lester had a few more chops than most. He also had a much larger budget, which allowed him to sign a cast that included George C. Scott, Art Carney, Louise Fletcher, Martin Sheen and Heather Locklear (!).

So a young couple who met in college while volunteering as research guinea pigs in a secret government drug test later get married and have a daughter. As these things happen (see Blue Sunshine or Jacob’s Ladder), those secret government drug tests have a way of hanging around awhile, with some mighty unexpected side effects. In this case, their new daughter Charlie (Drew Barrymore, who was in a few King adaptations) was born with pyrokinetic powers, meaning she can set anyone or anything she doesn’t like ablaze, the lucky brat.

Well, a few years later when the secret government agency that ran the secret government drug test catches wind of what little Charlie can do, they decide they’d like to have a little chat with her, and maybe her dad too (the briefly popular David Keith), who himself might have psychic powers. Or maybe they’d like to have something more than a chat.

Less a horror movie than conspiracy thriller and chase picture, Firestarter remains an oddity here, as it’s one of the few Killer Kid films in which we’re asked to root for the Killer Kid, actually hoping the wee pyro in question, even though she’s cute and blond, will set a few of those icky, mean adults on fire.

It’s hardly on a par with The Shining, Carrie, or The Dead Zone, but at least it’s better than Night Shift, Sometimes They Come Back, Children of the Corn IV, Cat’s Eye, Maximum Overdrive…

The Omen IV: The Awakening (1991)

As would become standard for plenty of other franchises that had seemingly run their course, some bright TV executives thought there was still some money to be made with that whole Omen thing. A decade after the last and supposedly final entry came out, why not give it the TV movie treatment? And while we’re at it, why not give it a fresh twist by doing a little gender switcheroo, right? So this time around, why not make Damien a girl? That’d throw viewers for a loop, wouldn’t it?

(An Omen IV novel had actually been released shortly after The Final Conflict came out, but it had nothing to do with this.)

The events of the previous three films have long been forgotten by the time we get underway here, I mean, don’t we see the Second Coming of Christ at the end of Final Conflict? Okay, so I guess Jesus had gone on vacation or something by the time two young smug and wealthy lawyers (Michael Woods and Faye Grant) adopt a new daughter without asking too many questions.

Their daughter Delia (Asia Vieira) grows into a pretty, dark-haired young girl who is extremely unpleasant. Oooon, but she’s a bratty little smartass who could use a spanking. I always thought the Antichrist was supposed to be charming and charismatic, but I’ll let it slide. In any case her New Age hippie nanny starts to suspect something far more sinister than smug parents might be at the heart of Delia’s bad attitude. When all her magic crystals turn black in the little girl’s presence, she starts making frantic calls to her other New Agey friends.

I’m going to stop there. Hilariously awful film, save for one scene, And that one scene alone is reason enough to forgive the film’s countless other unforgivable flaws.

The nanny drags Delia to a New Age fair in a park in hopes of getting a snapshot of her aura, and let’s just say things don’t go well for much of anyone. In simple slapstick terms, it’s on a par with Final Conflict’s montage of baby murders.

The Good Son (1993)

As he transitioned from the “dorky, buggy-eyed but still weirdly cute” kid in the Home Alone pictures into a “dorky, buggy-eyed and much less cute” adolescent, Macaulay Culkin decided to prove his range as an actor by playing against type in still another take on The Bad Seed.

Instead of telling the story through the mother’s eyes, in Joseph Ruben’s film we see things through the eyes of a nice, wholesome kid named Mark (a young Elijah Wood). After his mother dies, he’s sent to live with an aunt and uncle and two cousins. Not yet knowing he should avoid anyone named “Henry,” Mark and his cousin Henry (Culkin) become good friends. But after Henry is clearly delighted when one of his silly boyhood pranks triggers a deadly multi-car pileup, and after he shows off his homemade gun to Mark, and furthermore hints he once tried to kill his own brother, Mark starts to get the idea Henry might well be a psychopath with bigger diabolical schemes in mind.

Ruben’s picture is a slight cut above the likes of, say, The Godsend thanks to that change in perspective. Although Culkin makes for a believable psycho kid, it didn’t really do much to revamp his career and set him on that road to an Oscar. Thinking about it, though, Henry’s use of improvised and homemade weaponry wasn’t that big a step away from his Home Alone character, but with more fatalities and fewer cartoon sound effects..

Home Movie (2008)

The found footage/hand held video/POV horror film was pretty well dead and buried as a style by 2008, but that sure didn’t stop anyone. It was a cheap way to make a movie, after all. In this case, though, the story would have worked much better as a straight narrative, as the POV gimmick just gets in the way, leaving viewers (or maybe just me) repeatedly asking, “Why would anyone be filming this?”

Why, for instance, would an alcoholic Lutheran minister (Adrian Pasdar) choose to film an intimate argument with his psychiatrist wife (Cady McClain)? And why would a psychiatrist use the family video camera to record private patient notes, leaving them mixed in there with the Christmas and Easter home movies? Maybe writer/director Christopher Denham was trying to make a point about people so obsessed with living through screens that they can easily ignore the obvious and increasing threat posed by their clearly disturbed twin children, who mostly just lurk in the background as the parents focus on themselves. I doubt it though.

The creepy ten-year-olds Jack (Austin Williams) and Emily (Amber Joy Williams) were born on Halloween. While their parents try to desperately prove just how fun and cool and hip they are by setting up haunted houses in the basement and teaching their kids how to pick locks, Jack and Emily spend the first half of the film staring sullenly at the floor. Soon enough though, they begin killing goldfish, crushing toads in vices, crucifying the family cat, and attacking schoolmates, working their way up the evolutionary chain toward You Know Who.

Oh, I’m not giving a goddamn thing away here—the goddamn tagline gave it away! And even without the tagline if you couldn’t see exactly where this was headed with the first scene, maybe you need a nap or something.

To it’s credit, like Devil Times Five, Home Movie offers no explanation for why the kids are funny in the head. If you wanted to push it you could make something out of that Halloween birthday or the fact the family name is “Poe.” Myself, I just tend to accept that any kid unlucky enough to have a preacher or a shrink as a parent is fucked from the start.

Case 39 (2009)

Renee Zelwegger stars as a young sincere and overworked case worker at Children and Family Services. After the seemingly unbalanced parents of a shy, sweet and neglected girl on her case list try to cram the pre-adolescent into the oven (repeatedly!) one night, the parents are institutionalized and the social worker adopts the girl.

Okay, same as with Home Movie, if you can’t see where this one was headed ten minutes in, theres something wrong with you. Funny twist is, while I initially took it to be simply yet another Bad Seed knockoff (which it is) before deciding it was simply another Omen knockoff (which it is), by the half way point it finally became clear: what I was watching was in fact a knockoff of Omen IV: The Awakening. And that’s pretty bad. To make it all even sadder and more pointless, Case 39 is capped by a climax that makes absolutely no sense, if you think about it even for a little bit. Even the Omen IV had a better ending, and that’s saying something.

Considering all the above, the ultimate lesson to take away here is that, talk as we might about The Terrible Twos, it’s when the little monsters turn ten that you really need to watch out.

by Jim Knipfel

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adriennescomingbacktolife · 4 years

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Diners, Drive ins, and Tope Suicidas

WRITTEN WITH JESS, KNOX, AND MIA

The Silver Moon diner was a different animal in the daytime. Free of neon lights, it was just a block of reflective chrome and baby blue. The sunlight would be glimmering from its surface, had it not been blotted out by the gray Baltimore skies. The parking lot itself was empty, save for a rather conspicuous black 1972 Jaguar XJ12 with California plates. Inside the place was empty. Behind the counter an older gentleman was counting a stack of bills for what would have been the dozenth time. The large man had come in and paid a full day’s worth of sales for him to close up, except for a short guest list during the lunch rush. And he meant pre-pandemic sales. At a booth, Matthew Knox sat with his eyes half closed, contemplative and quiet. In front of him, a glass of iced tea and a half devoured reuben sandwich. Mia had never been one for fancy cars. In fact, if she had always had a knack for picking out old Subaru station wagons and making them her own. Her current incarnation, a midnight blue, four door, comes to a stop in one of the corners of the diner’s parking lot. She eyed the Jaguar curiously, but disregarded it, it wasn’t anything that she wanted to contend with. The fancier the car, the more that could go wrong with it. She stays seated, puffing on her e-cig and blowing the air out, watching it disperse within the confines of her car. She felt her heart beating through her chest, it wasn’t everyday that you met people to try and befriend, half of which didn’t have the best of pasts with. Getting out Mia takes another hit, pacing for several seconds before exhaling. Marching to the front of the building, Mia glances sidelong through the glass and only sees Matt Knox waiting patiently by himself. Breathing a sigh of relief that she didn’t have to go in and be on her heels already, Mia takes one last deep breath off her e-cig and savors it before exhaling and entering the building after putting her mask on. Upon entering, Mia is met with the smells and sounds associated with a small hole in the wall diner. The sights, sounds, and smells that always carries the promise of amazing home cooked food and amazing pie to follow. Nostalgia takes hold of Mia briefly but she shakes it away with a shudder. Now wasn’t the time to go down those particular rabbit holes. Walking silently up to Knox’s table, she slides quietly opposite him, taking the same paper bag out and putting it on the table next to the window. Eyeing Knox, she nods in greeting before saying, “Was going to apologize for running late, but it looks like I’m right on time.” Matthew responds with a small smile, and nod. He rubs his face, which upon closer inspection shows all the telltale signs of having not slept. His right arm is in a cast which has been heavily doodled upon, and his hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail. “They’ll get here soon, i’m sure of it. Unless Adrienne has tripped and fallen down a manhole somewhere.” He pays his own joke a small chuckle, and Mia smiles slightly, awkwardly. She realizes in that moment that up until now, she had never really reached out to get to know people outside of The Forsaken. What exactly was she doing? She blinks at Knox, unsure how to proceed but then realizes the effects of her THC pen were starting to take hold and her stomach grumbles unhappily. Oh yeah, it had been a little bit before she ate. “So… What’s good here?” “The Key Lime pie is like a sexual experience. Everything else is wonderfully greasy, and unhealthy. I’d go with whatever your trainer told you never to eat again.” He smiles friendlily at this, leaning back into the booth and taking a drink of his iced tea, “I’d like to come here after smoking a bit of California green, but then I'd never fit back into my ring pants.” Hearing the mention of the green stuff, Mia relaxes a bit. Former smoker or not, it has been Mia’s experience that anyone who smoked pot was a person that could be trusted. Looking over at a nearby menu, Mia orders some hash browns, covered in cheese, onion, and ham, with a grilled cheese with dill pickles on it. A vanilla shake with a glass of water completes the order, but her eye never leaves the case filled with various pies. Presently, a sleek, jet black Dodge Challenger pulled into the Silver Moon’s parking lot. It was pristine, the sun glinting off the curves. It also had a small green sticker with a stylized white ‘E’ affixed to the back. The bell on the door rang as Mitch Heart strode in, shooting off a text as he walked before flopping unceremoniously into the booth. “Hey, Knox. Hey, A--” His gaze shot up, eyeing the unfamiliar- to him, anyway- woman across the table, his head swivelling to the older man with a raised brow. His body seemed to tense somewhat, losing the relaxed demeanor it had before. “...Knox? Thought it was just gonna be you, me, and Ade.” Obviously this was the Mitch Heart Knox had been talking about. Mia looks him up and down while taking a drink, setting down her glass and washing it down with a swig from her milkshake. She smiles politely after wiping her mouth off and stands, offering her hand to Mitch in the process. “The name is Mia. I uhm… Come in peace?” “She’s good people, Mitch. Comes in peace, bearing gifts,” He waves a hand “I wouldn’t have brought her here if I thought it was shady. Had to be semi secretive because..well. Ade DDT’d her last time they saw each other. But after she says her piece, it’ll just be the three of us. Swear.” Mia takes her seat again and pulls her shake close to her, taking another swig and savoring the sweetness. “Speaking of… Where’s the last member of this wonderful party of ours?” A hooded figure on a beat up 10 speed cruised by slowly. That person had taken a few moments trying to secure a chain around the frame and a nearby light pole. That person was Adrienne. She stuck out like a sore thumb with knock off Jackie O’s, hoodie, and leggings. Entering the diner, she had seemed to come right into some tense standoff with the expected company and someone she had only met in a tense and physical encounter a few months back. Keeping her hands in her hoodie pockets, Adrienne stepped towards the occupied table. “Hello?” “Hey.” Mitch looked relieved to be in mostly familiar company, and yet, despite that and Knox’s vouching, he still seemed on edge, his hands gripping the sleeves of his red and white Anthony Mantha jersey, occasionally picking up his phone and checking it before putting it back down again. “So… what’s going on?” Taking a sip of his iced tea, Matt motioned with his hand before speaking “Mia, I believe this is your cue. And Hi Ade. Nice hoodie!” he remarks, before settling in. He felt like he’d need to smooth this over after, but hopefully Mia would make his job a little easier. Adrienne took a seat next across from Mia and Mitch. She took off her shades as it would have been rude to have them with company. “Right. So…” Mia puts her the shake she was working on down. “Don’t know how closely anyone has paid attention, but several weeks ago, our kind and benevolent DICKtator, C$J put a bounty on my head; or Amelia’s to be precise.” She pauses and shifts her weight, uncomfortable with all eyes on her but soldiers forward, “So when I took hold of my own contract from C$J, I also went back and claimed the bounty on myself.” She pushes the paper bag into the middle of the table and waits dramatically, working on her shake as she does so and finally finishing it up. “Ten thousand dollars right there gentlemen and lady. C$J gave me quite the contract and I’m sure he’s regretting that decision now. I don’t need the money and I want to make sure at least a little bit goes to the people on the roster that actually DESERVE to have good things happen to them every once in a while.” She shrugs, “So I went to Knox since I’ve only met him and asked him about who deserves this kind of payday. Lo and behold the two of you were the names he said without hesitation. So, I’m here to gift you both with the contents of that very bag.” She sits back and casts another glance at the pie case, wondering exactly what kinds there were, but decides to wait until after her food shows up. She eyes Mitch; deciding to get it in a “to go” container seems to be the best bet. Adrienne broke the silence. While that last encounter had been violent, a lot of things had happened recently. And maybe it would be worth just hearing her out. “...a bounty? Like to hurt you?” Mia’s eyes snap back to the woman in front of her and shrugs her shoulders. “Yeah, I guess. ‘Take me out’ as it were. It’s not the first time something like this has happened and probably won’t be the last. But…?” She raises her arms and smiles at the trio, “Each of them have failed and I am still alive and healthy in front of you.” “...I don’t want any of it.” Mitch’s words were practically a mumble, his gaze flicking from the tabletop to the bag of cash and back. Part of him did. Part of him really did. But he could practically see the strings attached. Nobody gives away that kind of scratch for free, least his logic said so. “I can take care of myself. Thanks.” “Maybe Mitch means,” Adrienne interjected, “Is someone going to be looking for this? I haven’t really met this guy but he’s out there putting bounties on his own employees and it's rumored that the Stan guy who was stalking me was hired just for those sort of purposes.” Mia’s face turns sour at the mention of Stan’s name, “Inspector Stan is no mas. Turns out he wasn’t cut out for in ring work and hasn’t been seen since he was in the ring with Amelia and that other chick whose name escapes me.” Mia thinks on it for a second and shrugs, “Don’t really care at the moment. In terms of people looking for that bag of money? You have nothing to worry about. In the state of Maryland, permission is required to place a bounty on anyone, let alone a current employee. C$J had no such thing and was all talk. I’m sure the punishment for doing such a thing, ESPECIALLY had anything happen to me, would be steep and all it took was a little prodding with that info for him to drop the bounty and give me the money. What happens to it from here? Not his concern.” Matthew, through all this has remained silent and taken to rolling a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, listening intently. He does eventually speak, not long after Mia finishes, “Okay, but Christopher isn’t an idiot. Much as he plays one on TV. He probably didn’t give a shit about legality before, and now? I imagine he just wants to hurt people,” Matt adjusts in his seat, a frown taking over his features “The money, you two take it if you want it but Mia if anyone asks either you say you kept it, burned it, or hell. You gave it to me.” He shakes his head, disgusted, “Sorry Mitch, Ade. Didn’t know there was this much attached to it.” Adrienne considered all of this. Every time she tried to drop a line about her contract situation, it was summarily ignored. Maybe she wasn’t being aggressive enough. Despite being in a fortunate situation, her wallet still was coughing mothballs. Her fingers apprehensively touched the bag. “Mia. I’m thankful that you considered us. I can’t understand what you’re going through with this but perhaps Mitch and I will talk about this privately. It’s a big decision.” She paused, looking at Mia directly. Adrienne didn’t have the best knowledge of what had been going on. However what she saw was a conscious effort to reach out. To just have someone to talk to possibly. “In the meantime, don’t be a stranger.” Mia nods and stands to leave. “Just… I didn’t come here to get anyone in trouble, I didn’t come here to set anyone up for a downfall. I’m not walking out of here with that bag. For all I care, you can leave it there, you can toss it to the next panhandler you see, hell you can even leave it for the next lucky patron. I promise each of you…” She looks at each one, her gaze lingering on Adrienne perhaps a second longer, “I wasn’t lying when I said that I come in peace.” She winks and proceeds to head up the the register, cashing out for her food and ordering a slice of the peanut butter pie to go. Matthew watches Mia depart, before turning his attention to Ade and Mitch “Sorry I sprung that on you two. Didn’t know if you’d have heard her out otherwise.” he explains, shifting in his seat. “Would’ve been nice to know. But it’s cool.” He exhales, the iron curtain around him seeming to lift, his posture relaxing as he flags down a waitress for some coconut cake and coffee. “Sorry about the phone, and me being late, I was just getting set up at the hotel, making sure Pen’s settling in okay. Kid’s having a ball, you’d think we were at Disneyland. Gotta bring her back some of that sugar-free cherry pie though.” Sighing, he poked at the bag of cash. “So yeah. I guess we have to think of something to do with this fu-- this thing.” "Well, you got options. None of which is her taking it back, though," he sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose "How are you two holding up, anyway? Feel like it's been ages." “Okay. Like I said, you shoulda seen Pen on the way here. Had her cute lil’ nose pressed to the window the whole time, even the real boring parts. She can’t wait to meet all of you- ‘specially you, Ade- but I thought it’d be best she just rest up after all that excitement.” Mitch chuckled fondly in spite of himself, thanking the waitress for the cake and coffee before setting to filling the mug the rest of the way with cream. Adrienne smiled at that. She had exchanged a few brief calls with Mitch’s little sister. The first was her thanking Ade for the signed chair. Others were just brief small talk. Adrienne would listen, answer her questions, tell her a little bit about herself and they’d be right as rain. Looking to Matt, she replied honestly, “I haven’t slept well recently but maybe it's just nerves. I talked to Axton recently. I don’t expect you two to understand but,” she paused, twirling a lock of her hair around her finger, “things will be okay eventually.” "I try not to think of Gunn. But your optimism is refreshing" his gaze shifts to Mitch, "She ever traveled this far? Even that boring shit was new awesome to us, the first few times at least." “No, never.” Mitch shook his head, plucking the vibrant red cherry off the top of his cake with two fingers and popping it into his mouth. “Never really had the means to take much of a vacation. Did scrape together enough to take her to Michigan’s Adventure once. She rode every ride she wasn’t too short for and couldn’t have been happier if she’d been a millionaire’s kid.” He seemed happy, speaking this way. As if merely mentioning happy memories with his kid sister briefly was enough to cut through dozens of hardened layers of cynicism and strife. It seemed to slide back into place as he changed subjects, though. “Anyway. I try not to think of Axton a ton either, but if he was cool to you? Maybe there’s hope for the kid yet. Or maybe you’re just good at bringing out people’s chill. It’s a nice quality to have.” “I’m personally going to be putting my confidence in the latter,” Matt spoke with the bluntness that either endeared him, or made him one of the more infuriating people on the roster “But, on to happier stuff. Not as happy as Pen and her world travels, I confess,” he paused, paying Mitch a smile. Knox enjoyed seeing The Broken so...together? Talking about his kid sister was like a whole new person. Made him almost as bubbly as Ade could be, “Divorce should be final, and after a lot...a lot of liquidation, and dealing with lawyers and bankers and people who make C$J look like the paragon of virtue and ethics...I am officially homeless, and looking to move to Baltimore, as keeping with the trend Ade has set.” “To be fair, I sort of ran away.” Adrienne knew how ridiculous that sounded but she wasn’t too sure how to put it. “It was the only way.” She cleared her throat before continuing, “But, this is good, right? Closure?” “Yeah. And, lets face it. If I haven’t tanned by now, it’s never gonna happen. No, I think the drear suits me much better.” He said thoughtfully, staring out the window and not-so-subtly dodging the deeper question posed, “Come on, lets eat up. If neither of you two take that, we’ll call it a tip.” Adrienne eyed the bag. Then Mitch. Then back to the bag. “Some of it could help, Mitch.” Mitch gave a glance to his left, then his right. Out the window. Mia was long gone. The bag was just sitting there. Nobody was offering it directly now. She wouldn’t know. As surreptitiously as possible, Mitch snagged a few stacks of bills from the back, jamming them in his hoodie pocket, going back to cake and conversation as if nothing had happened. Matthew took a beat to watch Ade and Mitch talk, a smile creeping onto his face as he lifts the reuben to take a bite. Yeah.. This was home.

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coppolafrancis · 5 years

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Which Watch Brands Are Most Likely to Increase in Value?

It’s a question watch collectors — especially new ones — always want answered, and one we at Fratellowatches have heard often: What brands offer watches that tend to increase in value over time? I’ll attempt to provide guidance on this, not so much from facts and figures but based on experience, and on opinions that I have heard through the years.

There are two answers here, of course, the short version and the long version. The short version is simple: Rolex and Patek Philippe.

The longer version is a bit more complicated, as there are a number of aspects that play an important role. I am not talking about the annual price increases that many brands are carrying through with, using all sorts of lame excuses. Aspects such as brand recognition, heritage, exclusivity, availability, and – perhaps the most influential of all – demand are important when it comes to the development of a watch’s value over time.

Rolex is, of course, one of those brands that is highly in demand (by both watch enthusiasts and non-watch enthusiasts); has a wonderful heritage, including an impressive list of celebrities and VIPs that wear and have worn Rolex watches; has a high level of recognition; and is widely available. It seems that the right mixture of these ingredients make most Rolex watches increase in value over time. The same is more or less true of Patek Philippe, although the accessibility of new Patek Philippe watches is more restrained due to their higher price tags compared to Rolexes. Exclusivity is the ingredient that weighs more with Patek collectors than some of the other aspects.

Aside from Rolex and Patek Philippe, luxury watch brands with a high demand (in the United States) include Breitling, Omega, Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Panerai, Jaeger-LeCoultre and IWC (in no particular order). This doesn’t mean that every watch these brands produce will automatically increase in value. We would have to look more closely into which specific models from such brands are most in demand. This is not rocket science, fortunately. Such watch models include popular classics like (for example) the Rolex Submariner, Rolex Daytona, Patek Philippe Calatrava, Omega Speedmaster, Breitling Navitimer, Panerai Luminor Marina, TAG Heuer Carrera, Patek Philippe Nautilus, Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, and so on — what a watch enthusiasts would call the usual suspects.

However, not even all examples of these watch models will keep, or increase, their value over time. What I’ve experienced is that those that are closest to the initial model at the time it was introduced, and those pieces that are as ‘clean’ as possible, are most likely to keep their value or even increase in value.

If we take a look at the Royal Oak from Audemars Piguet, for example, the models that gained most in value are the original ones — the so-called “Jumbo” watches, later dubbed “Extra-Thin.” The original models, with the reference number 5402, have become insanely expensive. Does this mean that if you buy the existing model of that watch (reference 15202), it will increase in value as well? No, it is not that simple. Especially if you paid list price, you are going to take a severe hit if you want to sell it soon after you bought it. However, if you would have bought a pre-owned model (also reference 15202) five years ago, when it was already a few years old (let’s say 2002-2006), you probably paid a bit less then $10,000. The cheapest pre-owned Royal Oak 15202 with charcoal dial that I could find with a simple search was a 2004 model for $16,000. That is more “interest” than you would have gotten on your savings account in the past five years.

So, it is also a matter of buying watches at the right moment for the right price. Paying full list price for a new watch and still expecting to make a buck is difficult these days, even with a stainless-steel sports Rolex.

If you take that into account, there are a number of watch brands that will give you a decent chance on increasing your watch’s value over time. Now let’s do a rundown on a few brands that you need to keep an eye on for the long term.

The basic question is: “What brands offer watches that tend to increase in value over time?” As I wrote before, there are two answers here, a short version and a long version. The short answer is simple: Rolex and Patek Philippe. The long answer is what I try to cover in the following part of this article.

There are a number of watches and watch brands that are likely to increase in value, or at least keep value, over time. To start with the last one, it seems that the all-time classics (or “iconic” watches, if you wish) are the ones that keep their value to a certain extent. Even though some of them can be bought at a bit of a discount, or do not have waiting lists as long as some others do, they have proven to be a stable “investment,” so to speak. I did some coverage on these all-time classics in part one.

The real question is, which mens watches under 100 that you can buy now (that is, new watches) will become the classics or highly sought-after timepieces of tomorrow. In order to do that with a high level of certainty, you will probably — as one of our readers commented — need another 10 years to follow these watches on the market.

I always thought that the Rolex Sea-Dweller 16600 would become a classic, especially since it was followed-up by the Rolex Deepsea Sea-Dweller, a watch that had little to do with its predecessor. Now that Rolex introduced the new Sea-Dweller 116600, the true successor of their Reference 16600 Sea-Dweller watches, I am now fairly convinced that it will negatively influence the growth in value of previous Sea-Dwellers. But let’s keep Rolex (and Patek) out of this discussion, as these brands seem to be quite unique in terms of keeping value.

Another watch to keep an eye on is the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak “Jumbo,” Reference 15202, and its predecessor, Ref. 14802. In 2012, the Royal Oak “Jumbo” (or “Extra-Thin”) received an update in which the dial was changed to be closer to the original one from 1972. However, Audemars Piguet also changed the bracelet, making it a bit thicker and giving it a different clasp. While the demand for the very old Reference 5402 Royal Oak “Jumbo” remains quite high, I now notice that the pre-2012 Ref. 15202 has gotten a lot of interest since the upgrade. It can be bought for approximately 55-60% of its list price if you look carefully. Within the last five years, the market price of this particular model has increased quite a bit and my feeling is that it still has not reached its peak.

With a bit of guesswork, and some knowledge about previous events that caused watches to go up in value, I’d suggest keeping an eye on brands that suddenly change or have recently grown in popularity. And this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a fat wallet. Look at Sinn, for example. When the Lemania 5100 movement went out of production, we could all see that the Sinn 142 model was bound to be discontinued (as it was, more than 10 years ago). When these watches went out production, they had a price of about $1,600. Now, if you can find a nice one, you’ll have to pay just under $3,000 to get it on the the pre-owned market. The same was happening for one of its other interesting models, the Sinn EZM 1.

If a brand changes its strategy a bit — like, for example, the relatively new brand Linde Werdelin did over the last few years — you might be betting on some of the models that the brand started out with. Models such as the One, Two-Timer and 3-Timer watches can be very interesting to acquire, as they are now still relatively easy to find. Linde Werdelin is still growing quite a bit, doing an amazing job in a higher segment than the one in which it started. It might be the case that some people will go after those early models when the brand starts really taking off. This also goes for other brands that are in a similar flow, of course, i.e., brands that are still in their early days.

High-end watches from independent watchmakers like the very first stainless steel One Hertz from Dutch brand Grönefeld (patriotism alert here) might have also been a good investment, but the truth is that there are only a few people on Earth that play in this niche of expensive, high-end haute horlogerie brands. In case you did obtain one for its original price, be aware that your market will be quite small when you want to re-sell it.

It’s worth keeping an eye on some brands that go through interesting phases, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be one of these smaller, independent brands I just mentioned. What to think of Zenith, for example? Will the brand grow further and reach new heights? if so, it might be very interesting to take a look at some of the models in its current lineup that are collectible yet might not fit into the direction the company might be heading.

I didn’t say it would be easy.

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epacer · 5 years

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Classmates

10 Questions with Author Melissa Abramovitz

Today I’m happy to welcome author Melissa Abramovitz to my blog and to answer “10 Questions.”

Melissa is a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction for children and teens. She’s also published a “How To” book for writers.

Melissa Abramovitz, Class of 1972

Linda Covella: Hello, Melissa. So glad you could join us today.

When and why did you decide to become a writer?

Melissa Abramovitz: I decided to start writing professionally in 1985, when my children were little and I was a stay-at-home mom and homemaker. Much as I loved being a full-time mom, I wanted to do something just for me, and I had always loved to write. I even had some poetry published when I was in high school, and I liked to write so much that I loved writing term papers in high school and college! Weird, and so nerdy, huh! And maybe a foreshadowing of my later enjoyment of professionally writing nonfiction.

Back to 1985… I had never thought about making a career as a writer – my college degree is in psychology, and I thought I would do something related to that – but when I saw an advertisement for a correspondence course offered by the Institute of Children’s Literature on how to write for children, I decided to sign up. I loved the class, and it was perfect for me because I could fit working on my classwork around my other responsibilities. My instructor recommended that I submit a nonfiction article I wrote as a course assignment to a children’s magazine, and I did and was amazed when the magazine accepted it for publication. I had heard that many aspiring authors spent years piling up rejections before selling anything, and I thought – wow! This won’t be as difficult as I thought. Well, I was so wrong. After that initial success, I accumulated (and still do receive) more rejections than I thought possible. But I persisted, and gradually started selling more and more nonfiction articles and short stories to magazines for children, teenagers, and adults. Then I got into writing educational books, and to this day, that is still the type of work I do most often. My writing was very part-time until my kids grew up, but it is now my full-time job. And I still love it as much as ever.

Linda Covella: Congratulations on your success and hard work. Writing for publication does take persistence, doesn’t it!

What is your writing process: where do you write, how often do you write, are you a full-time or part-time writer, do you outline or do you plot as you go, etc.?

Melissa Abramovitz: I write almost every day, usually in my home office, and as I previously mentioned, writing is my full-time job. Some days I work for 6 to 8 hours; other days 10 to 14 hours, depending on how many projects and deadlines I’ve got going. I mostly write nonfiction books on assignment for educational publishers and nonfiction magazine articles (for all age groups) on assignment or independently to submit to specific magazines, with occasional fiction thrown into the mix. In addition, when I have time I write children’s picture books (fiction and nonfiction) and market them to trade publishers. Unfortunately, I have not sold three of these manuscripts, and with so many publishers no longer accepting unagented submissions, I have been trying to find an agent to represent me. But so far, this has not happened. I also recently completed my first novel (after working on it off and on for more than 20 years), and hopefully an agent will be able to help me market it as well.

I usually make a detailed outline before I start writing a manuscript; the only exception is when I write very short stories for young children. In fact, an outline is even more important for nonfiction than for fiction, and I find that having an outline helps me stay on track as far as where and when to introduce certain concepts and facts in my manuscripts. I know that some writers shudder when they hear the word outline, and some do excellent work writing “by the seat of the pants.” But I benefit from outlines, so I use them.

Linda Covella: With all your publications, I imagine you’ll find the right agent. Best of luck on that!

Where do you find your inspiration for your stories? Do you draw from your own experiences?

Melissa Abramovitz: Most of the educational publishers with whom I work regularly develop their series and individual title ideas in-house and then ask me which titles I would like to write. So in those cases, I am not responsible for generating ideas. For other types of stories, books etc. I find inspiration everywhere, by simply keeping what I call my writers’ antennae alert. In fact, when writers tell me they have trouble coming up with story ideas, I tell them that story ideas are all around them, and they just need to train themselves to notice and build on those ideas. For example, I’ve gotten many ideas and have been inspired to write many stories/articles based on something my children or grandchildren said. One such question that spurred me to write a fun poem came from my then-three-year-old son, who asked, “Mommy, where does the sun go at night?” I also derive inspiration for stories from news reports, from watching TV, from reading books and magazines, and from noticing interesting things when I travel. But I don’t have to be doing something different or exciting to find story ideas, since I’ve trained myself to be on the lookout for these ideas wherever I am, whether it’s taking a walk in my neighborhood, shopping for groceries, or spending time with family and friends. For instance, one day while I was walking my Labrador retriever, his ears perked up and his body snapped to attention as he stared at something that turned out to be a squirrel crossing the street a couple of blocks away. That got me thinking about what I had learned about animal vision in my neuroscience classes in college, and I realized that writing a children’s nonfiction article about how different animals see the same thing would be fun and interesting (for me and for readers). The article was published in Sierra Magazine (this was years ago when the magazine contained a monthly section for children). Another time, I was doing something really mundane – I was looking through my desk calendar. I noticed that it contained no pre-printed mention of holidays in August. Every other month had at least one listed holiday, and I wondered if other calendars listed any August holidays. I began my “research” by hurrying to a store and perusing a variety of desk, wall, and other types of calendars. None mentioned any holidays in August. By that time, my writer’s antennae were on full alert, and I decided to do other types of research, such as consulting books about celebrations in various cultures, so I could write a children’s article on the topic. It turns out that even though there are no major American holidays in August, there are plenty of August holidays in other countries, and there are even some “commemorative” or “honorary” days like National Ice Cream Day and Women’s Equality Day in the US. In my article, which I titled “Are There Any Holidays In August?”, I took readers on my journey to answer the question raised in the title and shared information about some of the international August holidays and commemorative days. It sold to the first magazine to which I submitted it; most probably, I believe, because most writers do not turn mundane pastimes like looking at a desk calendar into fun and interesting articles.

Linda Covella: LOL You certainly do know how to find inspiration in unusual places.

Who is one of your favorite characters from your story(ies), one that you enjoyed creating and writing about, and why?

Melissa Abramovitz: That would be Herbie Hedgehog, the clueless anthropomorphized hedgehog who stars in my interactive picture book, Helping Herbie Hedgehog (Guardian Angel Publishing, 2015). I love using humor to help kids learn about various concepts, and I created Herbie to be a lovable but clueless guy who needs the reader’s help making everyday decisions. Such as, should he ride a bicycle or embark on a boat when he decides to visit his cousin who lives across an ocean? Should he visit a policeman or a doctor when he feels sick? Kids love it because they’re laughing while yelling out the correct answers and learning at the same time.

Linda Covella: Do you incorporate (or inadvertently find) any of your own personality traits into your characters?

Melissa Abramovitz: In the novel I recently finished, I noticed that the main character had some of my personality traits and even spoke the way I speak in several instances, even though she is a “Southern belle” and I am not. I changed these aspects of the story, mostly because I don’t want people who know me to think that the (fictional) story is in any way autobiographical. That’s because the main character is a psychopath who is obsessed with achieving revenge by harming a particular individual. I did not consciously intend for this character to be anything like me, but somehow the similar traits/dialogue snuck into her personality and behavior. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have a field day analyzing how and why I subconsciously allowed this to happen, but I think the important thing is that I found and changed these things.

Another character I created, in this case for a short story I wrote titled “A Hannukah Miracle,” (published in Girls’ World magazine, 2018) has a couple of my traits because the story is based on a question about miracles I asked many years ago when I was a child. The main character, Jenny, asks a similar question about what miracles are and who creates them. However, even though Jenny’s question and concerns were similar to mine, I never came up with a plan to nudge a miracle to transpire like she did, nor did I answer the question by putting this plan into action like she did. Jenny therefore became a unique character who was loosely based on my personal concerns and experience at one point in time. Indeed, this is how many fictional stories and characters are inspired by true events, but are then given a life of their own that builds on this spark.

Linda Covella: Do you find your stories are more plot driven or character driven? Please explain.

Melissa Abramovitz: I’d say more plot-driven, mostly because I tend to think of a plot first and then create characters to fit into the plot. Even though I do not write a lot of fiction, I would like to make the stories I do write more character driven because I find that I usually enjoy reading these types of stories more than those which are plot driven. As with any other aspect of writing, this takes lots of practice, so I continue to work on it.

Linda Covella: Did you read much as a child?

Melissa Abramovitz: Yes! My favorite book was Heidi. I read it hundreds of times. I also loved reading Dr. Seuss and mysteries. Until I read a couple of the really scary Sherlock Holmes mysteries (like The Hound of the Baskervilles). After that, I was too petrified to read another mystery written for adults for many years, and I stuck to reading children’s mystery series like the Nancy Drew books (fun and well-written, but not scary)!

Linda Covella: I loved Heidi and Nancy Drew. But Edgar Allan Poe was also one of my favorites.

How important do you think reading is for writers?

Melissa Abramovitz: I think it’s essential. It’s important to read books by other authors because it really helps writers analyze what these authors do, and don’t do, to make these books interesting, readable, and desirable (or not). This helps writers pinpoint what they want and do not want in their own books. Plus, it’s important for writers who want to publish their stories to know what else is available in different genres and for different age groups. So people who want to write and publish picture books should read dozens, if not hundreds, of picture books.

Linda Covella: Good advice for aspiring writers.

Who are some of your favorite authors and/or books? What draws you to them?

Melissa Abramovitz: I’ve always loved Dr. Seuss because of his fun characters and because of the fact that his books carry important messages as well as being fun. As far as novels I read, I love books by Mary Higgins Clark, Belva Plain, Robin Cook, Nicolas Sparks, and sometimes David Baldacci. Many people who know me notice that I stay away from trendy stuff like 50 Shades of Gray because I despise pornography and books that contain a lot of profanity. One thing I admire about Mary Higgins Clark, Nicolas Sparks, and Belva Plain, in particular, is that their books are exciting, interesting, emotionally compelling, and very well-written, without profanity or explicit, gratuitous sexual content that many authors include, presumably because they are either obsessed with these matters or simply think including them is necessary to sell books. I am certainly not averse to story characters (in adult material) using somewhat profane language and/or thinking/acting in ways that are sexually provocative, but these behaviors should arise from situations and personality traits that are integral to the plot, rather than being there because the author likes using bad language and sharing sexual fantasies with the public.

Linda Covella: Anything new in the works?

Melissa Abramovitz: I am always working on assignments for educational books for children/teenagers, and after I finish writing the books I’ve committed to writing this year, I plan to work on a fun picture book I started a few months ago. I also have several magazine article ideas about which I want to query some editors. And I keep promising myself I will work harder to find an agent to market my novel and the picture books I mentioned earlier, but this gets pushed to the side when I must meet deadlines on other material. Adding about ten more hours to each day would be helpful…

Linda Covella: Bonus question! Do you have anything you’d like to add?

Melissa Abramovitz: I just want to thank you for featuring me in this interview and for doing author interviews on your blog. I love reading about other authors, so I look forward to seeing the other interviews you post.

Linda Covella: Thanks so much for sharing your writing life with us, Melissa! *Reposted Word blog interview from 10 Questions with Author Wendy Dunn of January 23, 2019

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glknight · 7 years

Text

Axiom: Star Mullaney’s Team Composition Reports

I’m still working on Axiom (finalizing notes here, adding world building details there, trying to find the funds to hire an artist so that I can make sure they’re taken care of before work even begins ANYWHERE), but I think I’ve FINALLY got the details for the initial cast of characters down. I guess, without further ado, I present to you OUR HEROES, Ladies and Gentlemen (and all other points between, I guess, it’s getting more and more confusing by the hour if you ask me but I’ll try my best)!

But FIRST! Here’s the actual location setting! “WELCOME TO NEXUS! A dazzling city with many enterprising opportunities! Founded in 1923 by Marshall “Nexus” Tristiani, one of the Great Heroes of the pre-Powers age, Nexus serves as the “Great Way Point” between commerce, science and social values. From Thought University, founded by the greatest Mentalist of his Age, the Thought, and home to many great collegiate achievements (GO FIGHTING THINKERS!) to Theros’ Industries MANY branches of production and commerce (found on Millionaire Mile lining Millionaire Avenue), our City is RIFE with potential! Whether looking for your big break or just looking for your own slice of Heaven, Nexus is where you must go to go where you want or need to go!

Nexus: The World Goes Through Here, First!”

That sounds like a huge, spiraling place, huh? One part Astro City. One part fraction of the city scale of the one city world of One Punch Man (jeez, if I wrote “one” one more time, it’d be one too many for one lonely writer). Well, it’s definitely meant to be. The city’s home to many, MANY different types of people, after all. Heroes, criminals, ordinary people, weirdos. All races and creeds of all stripes and types. Some are able to take care of themselves. Others... are not so lucky.

For those heroes that need help, they are in luck. Because the city has an incredibly unique social service at their disposal: the SOCIAL HEROES SERVICES. The SHS is a system put into place by iconic 60′s hero the Revolutionary after being elected to office in 1972 a year after winning a landmark Civil case guaranteeing the security of all heroes in terms of protection from discrimination from all facets of daily life corresponding to their Personae, meaning they could be classified by either their public Persona or their private identity. Using that momentum, the Revolutionary used that protection to run for Mayor under his Persona, and introduce sweeping favorable changes just a scant 3 years before being assassinated at a Founder’s Day dedicated to Tristani’s wife, Maria, by the Triggerman. And the Social Heroes Services is arguably one of his legacies.

In many regards, it’s very similar to the Social Services program we have now. But with the added detail of involving superheroes, there’s another side that it provides: providing heroic work opportunities in tiers and groupings. In most instances, heroes are usually lumped into two headings: Solo and Team. It’s common for heroes to be registered for either Solo work or Team work. But with enough time and exemplary effort, it’s possible for an individual to be registered for both. Solo work is simple: your name is called for specialized cases where your talents can be applied, and every effort earns recompense. Team work, however, is slightly different: you earn recompense, like with Solo work, but there are two differing details.

The first difference is that you have the option of either being grouped with members of your collective choosing, granting the members the opportunity to appoint an affiliation name, or letting the SHS group you together at their discretion, which removes the group naming option, but places you higher on the recommendation list for future cases.

The second difference is that if you choose the group option, there are far more stringent evaluations and examinations to properly calculate your team’s efficiency and power levels, as well as a greater emphasis on overall mental well-being and health evaluations. Essentially, anyone on a team is kept under close monitoring for both their benefit and better management. This means psychological evaluations, doctor visits and physicals, and rather strict categorization in the SHS Database.

With enough time and effort to gain enough recognition, it is possible for an individual or team to be successful enough to no longer NEED registration. But then again, those are SUCCESS cases. Many heroes have decent records, but not enough to classify them as fully “Independent”. Of course, there are those lucky few that get their big break without needing to be in the system for very long, if at all...

Into this system are our three Registered heroes, their support, and their Handler. In the SHS Registry, you can be labeled under three specific types of hero work: Physique class, which are those heroes whose powers or abilities fall in line with their bodies or biological manipulations; Scholar class, which are those heroes whose skills are more focused on psychological manipulation or mental powers, such as telepaths and some vigilantes; And Source class, which are those whose skills involve manipulating the fundamental elements of the universe in some way, such as energy wielders and magic users. For those non-powered individuals who wish to ASSIST, they can be categorized under the SUPPORT class, with skills and knowledge that are available to ALL heroes and organizations that wish to use their abilities. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon for known non-powered heroes to offer their services to heroes in the SHS registry.

And it’s in this registry we have our three (well, four if you count Support, and five if you count their social worker) heroes.

______________________________________________________________

TEAM STRUCTURE REPORTS:

CODE NAME: STALKER REAL NAME: ZHOU, LIAN HERO CLASS: PHYSIQUE, MUTATE (SCIENTIFIC)

PERSONA DETAILS: PUBLIC

PERSONA UNIFORM: MILITARY STYLED BLACK TACTICAL GEAR, COMPRESSION AND FILTRATION MASK

HAIR: BLACK EYES: BROWN WEIGHT: 7′3 WEIGHT: 523 ETHNICITY: ASIAN BLOOD TYPE: O- BIRTH DATE: MARCH 23rd

SHS WORKER: Star Mullaney

EMERGENCY CONTACT: William Campbell

FILE DATE: January 26th

KNOWN POWERS: Enhanced strength (CURRENT LIMIT: 12 TONS), enhanced agility, enhanced endurance [NOTE: LOW TO MODERATE LEVELS OF REGENERATION ABILITIES TO COMPENSATE FOR DAMAGE RECEIVED], enhanced senses (COMPLETE SENSORY ENHANCEMENT, CURRENT RANGE: 1.3 Mi. MAXIMUM)

HISTORY: Ms. Zhou is an oddity in the Registry. The unfortunate victim of an egregious criminal strike, she was introduced to an experimental solution created by her currently missing sister, Dr. Deeana Zhou, to treat severe muscular dystrophy, incorporating an unknown mineral found in a meteorite harvested for the experiment. The formula transformed Ms. Zhou from a slight, short woman to a gigantic, hulking figure, with the unknown side effect of blurring the lines of gender appearance to the point of almost complete masculinization.

Despite the appearances of gender transition, she recognizes her gender identity as female, and all medical testing has shown that all her reproductive faculties remain unchanged. Attempts to help correct her gender through scientific techniques have been proven to be ineffective, as her genetic structure rapidly negates any form of hormonal or advanced scientific manipulation. Extraterrestrial means has been proven to have little to no effect, with any positive effects rapidly returning to current appearances. Magical means, sadly, are currently beyond availability, as there are so few magical support systems in place, as well as available magic Source heroes that are Active in our system. Despite having a strong will, conflict of identity over her visage has caused mental issues, including gender dysphoria and depression. Currently prescribed a variation of an 5-HT1A receptor antagonist, which is the closest her system can handle without cycling out with little to no effect, as well as having bi-monthly therapy sessions with a councilor.

NOTE: Has confirmed sexual problems due to medication. But in an interesting development, Ms. Zhou has admitted that her sexual activity has actively INCREASED since being put on current antidepressant. She has stated that though there may be days where congress with her current significant other can tire him out or distract her slightly, it’s manageable with practically no effect on her efforts while registered in the Social Heroes Services.

In spite of all that she has endured, Stalker has a fantastic record of 238 successes and only one failure in 4 months time as an Independent Hero. Usually minor collateral damage on a more personal level, with an increased propensity for vehicular damage in particular. Her style of heroics, as she calls it, is “planned recklessness”, with a somewhat calculated cavalier attitude focused on doing “as much good as possible before I can’t do more”. Is one of the fewer known heroes who actively tries to pull any villainous action away from any sort of crowds, actively throwing herself between bystanders should the need arise.

It is my opinion that Ms. Zhou aka STALKER be allowed to operate as both an INDEPENDENT Hero, as well as have access to her own TEAM. She’s been proven to be resourceful, focused, and most of all reliable in almost every singe task she has been presented. I just wish the matters with the Weeping Willow incident hadn’t happen as to give her a perfect record.

______________________________________________________________

CODE NAME: DESPAIR

REAL NAME: POE, MITCHELL ALLAN

HERO CLASS: SCHOLAR, BASELINE

PERSONA DETAILS: PRIVATE

PERSONA UNIFORM: TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED AND MODERNIZED PLAGUE DOCTOR

HAIR: BROWN EYES: HAZEL HEIGHT: 5′11 WEIGHT: 166 LBS. ETHNICITY: CAUCASIAN BLOOD TYPE: B+ BIRTH DATE: FEBRUARY 12th

SHS WORKER: Star Mullaney

EMERGENCY CONTACT: Mitchell Allan Poe

FILE DATE: April 18

KNOWN SKILLS: 146 I.Q., highly proficient in many different forms of combat, incredibly analytical mind, speaks 13 different languages, Graduate School level knowledge in Computer Science, Criminology, Sociology and several other categories of academia, self-described “tinkerer”, has been noted by Psychic Support staff as having an “unknowingly strong mental shield which can cause psychic rebuff/static as an automatic defense mechanism” (NOTE: Schedule testing on potential psychic abilities, possible recategorization from Baseline), Olympic caliber physique with peak human reaction time, licensing to handle many different forms of vehicular craft, including Extraterrestrial modular craft. HISTORY: Where do I even BEGIN with Despair...

Well, the best place to start would probably be with Mr. Poe’s current record under the SHS. In the year and a half he has been registered, our resident Plague Doctor garbed Scholar class Persona has become the most prolific Hero we have on call, BY FAR. 743 attributed arrests and crimes stopped the 5 months before he registered, and a mind boggling 2562 since. He has solved decades old mysteries, found missing people in the most perplexing cases, discovered patterns no other Hero has found, and many more to show. His effort and output is STAGGERING, to say the least. Common comments from reports say that other Heroes find him charming, but also a bit of a “try hard“, “overachiever”, or in some cases a “cheat, liar or charlatan” (as evidenced by the well known and at-length loquaciousness of Mr. Foolproof). It also needs to be stated that he is the most versatile Hero on registry, able to functionally conceive scientific concepts with some of our greatest scientific minds, yet also able to rationalize and believe in precepts of magical thought and practice. In all consideration, he is probably our closest asset in comparison to either the Smithee, the current #1 rated tech-based Hero in Nexus, or Cerberus, the #1 non-enhancement Vigilante.

Despite his record and somewhat conflicting effect on fellow heroes, his bird like appearance is rather appropriate given his problematic neuroses. First and foremost is Mr. Poe’s rather persistent Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, making him obsessed with order and cleanliness in the highest order. Although finding great success in utilizing his disorder towards case studies and investigations, it has led to some rather straining situations involving his ability to interact with others, as his obsession has led him to wearing his costume almost all of the time. Another issue with Mr. Poe is a rather strong case of Illeism, which means he consistently refers to himself as his Persona in the third person rather than any personage or even his real name. Many have gone on record as saying it’s “annoying or weird”, but in all honesty, I believe that he’s isolated himself so thoroughly into his Persona as some form of protective wall. Said protection might also be a corollary to his OCD, as it’s somewhat common for people with traumatic pasts to become obsessive as a coping mechanism.

Given Mr. Poe’s track record, it must firmly be stated that he would be a critical asset on any team he is placed in. He has worked with many other heroes in the past, but in the 15 cases he has colluded with Stalker, their public favorability rating is an impressive 97% (even rating higher than the current power couple of Paragon and Goddess’ rating of 94%). These two cut an impressive image, and with the addition of Stalker’s Support class member, Camp, they meet most of the criteria for full team recognition status.

If meeting qualifications, I must ask that Stalker and Despair officially be listed as pending for team approval until I can find a suitable hero to fill in the final missing detail. They are critical assets that have been shown to work well together and are recognized publicly for their efforts. In all, a great boon for both the individuals, as well as the SHS.

______________________________________________________________

CODE NAME: BARBIE

REAL NAME: BARBARA JONES

HERO CLASS: SOURCE, AVATAR

PERSONA DETAILS: PRIVATE

PERSONA UNIFORM: ...BARELY WITHIN LEGAL LIMITS

HAIR: AUBURN/GOLDEN WITH ELEMENTS OF RED EYES: GREEN HEIGHT: 5′4/6′4 WEIGHT: 114 lbs./uncategorizable ETHNICITY: CAUCASIAN BLOOD TYPE: AB- BIRTH DATE: NOVEMBER 9th

SHS WORKER: Star Mullaney

EMERGENCY CONTACT: Mrs. Lorraine Macintosh, Thinker University

FILE DATE: August 23rd KNOWN POWERS: [See, HISTORY]

HISTORY: I believe it’s best I introduce you to Barbara Jones, first.

Barbara Jones is an Australian student currently enrolled at Thinker University with the explicit purpose of a major in Library Sciences, with a specific focus on Digital Archiving. She is a smart lady, reserved, dedicated, whose friends and associates have stated that if she “put a little effort in, she could definitely get whichever partner catches her fancy”.

Barbie, on the other hand, is practically a walking wet dream. The magnification of desire, she has features most would be willing to kill themselves over, and the rest would say are impossible to get or maintain. Tall, beautiful, flirtatious, with nary a concern except her own interests and actions. She’s unafraid of her body, and likes to see people responding to her brazen appearance. Thank Heaven she’s a Hero.

And if you haven’t guessed it already, they’re one in the same being...

In connected reports by multiple Source class heroes both within the SHS and without, Barbara’s level of power is on a frightening scale. In all the gathered data on her, she has a connection to no less than THIRTY GODDESSES, a specific majority of them connected to Light and Fire in some purview. As Destiny Darque put it in her summary, “It’s not the number of goddesses we know of that is most frightening, but in the fact that SO MANY are willing to work together to empower an individual to such a degree. The addition that there’s only one vessel that’s capable of successfully controlling all that power is the true cause of my concern to the point of asking: WHY BARBARA JONES?” And in my own personal opinion, I’m right there with Ms. Darque.

Ms. Jones is an IMMENSELY POWERFUL asset, with such a vast array of abilities at her disposal that it’s kind of maddening. For the most part, she keeps it to some basics (Flight, strength, invulnerability, energy manipulation), but from every report we’ve seen, Barbie is a somewhat ditzy Persona, consistently revealing previously unknown powers and abilities whenever she feels like it (as evidenced in the Rigor Morty case, when she HEALED 15 FRESH ZOMBIES BACK TO LIFE, with the reasoning of “fresh healthy skin looking SO much better”). In conjunction, every case report has cited conflicting incidents of Persona temperament, with some having her doing random actions that some would find foolhardy at best, and others being as focused and considerate as any veteran would take. And the reason for such a dichotomy is listed in the Psychic evaluations as two completely separate identities. As one report put it, “It’s not really a sense of a psychological schism like you would find in Dissociative Identity Disorder, but more of a Secondary Soul that grew from the Host’s. In as short a way to put it as possible, it’s like her soul gave birth to its own twin when she received her gifts, and they randomly switch whoever is in the driver’s seat at that moment .”

Thankfully, we have two other heroes on registry that have issues with dichotomy on record. I’m sure if they were put on the same team and given regular counseling, all three would find improvements in their daily lives and create a cohesive team. And most importantly, give our resources more time to collect further data on what Barbie is TRULY capable of.

#Axiom #webcomic notes #webcomic #heroes #social welfare for superheroes #backstory #character details

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fyeahjamesandlily · 7 years

Text

on the seventh day of christmas

an: this fic is for @chelseaapproved. hi, chelsea! merry christmas!! sorry i broke some of the rules in your prompt. i hope you like it anyway! it’s been a while since i wrote any pre-dating!hogwarts!jily, and getting back in that stage of their relationship made me feel super nostalgic. i hope you have as happy a christmas as james had in the last part of this fic. and may 2017 be kind and generous to you as well! ♡

1971. The box of chocolate frogs hits her in the back of the head. In James’s defense, he’s in a hurry. He has to strategically sort and un-tag his pile of presents, because he got up at godawful o'clock to Sirius Black’s really pathetic pile (just one gift, if you’d believe it, a badly wrapped lump from some bloke named “Reg”), and he has to make the piles look more or less innocently even before his favourite dorm mate (so far) wakes up.

He’s pretty sure it’s going to work. The chocolate frogs, that is. Never mind that he hit her and everything. He’s seen her try to trade her Merlin card for a Bowman Wright with a Hufflepuff fourth year (like anyone’s going to trade Wright for Merlin), and the cards in the box are, like, really limited edition.

Surely that’d stop her crying, right?

Who cries on Christmas Day anyway?

The culprit is already dashing back up to the boys’ dorms in a flurry of baggy pajamas, but there is no mistaking that hair. Lily scowls. But that’s it. She takes three deep breaths to recompose herself, which isn’t easy, ‘cause there wasn’t much composure around before to begin with. Still, she’s long decided that that boy isn’t worth anything from her.

She returns her eyes to her sister’s letter, but gets distracted.

On the floor is a six-box pack of chocolate frog cards. In spite of herself, she picks it up, and her eleven-year old heart skips at the list of cards included in the pack.

Bowman Wright.

She stares at the spot where she last saw him—him, James Potter—and lets herself willingly name him in her head for once.

1972. Sirius is pretty sure James is pissed about something. With a dramatic sigh he rotates the plate between them, the bigger slice of the treacle tart moving in turn back to James’s side. “Fine, you can have it.”

James looks up. He tries to smooth his face out, but it’s like trying to fix a badly crumpled essay without a wand. “Huh?”

“What’s wrong?” He feels weird asking, of course. But if he doesn’t say anything, then James is going to stay cranky, which will make him, Sirius, also cranky. And no one’s supposed to be cranky on Christmas. Not even Sirius Black.

James takes his fork and digs in without preamble. Sirius would feel offended at this lack of hesitation, but it’s the least of his concerns at the moment.

“So what is it?” he prods.

“Nothing,” says James with food in his mouth.

Sirius starts tugging at the edge of the plate.

“Hey,” protests James.

“Just tell me.”

“It’s weird.”

“You’re weirder.”

James drops his gaze, pulls the plate gruffly back to him, and stabs at another spoonful. “Promise me you won’t laugh.”

There’s a ninety per cent chance he would, just based on how James is acting, but Sirius perseveres to keep a straight face and nods all the same.

“It’s weird…”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned,” mutters Sirius.

“—and embarrassing, and completely unreasonable.”

“Got it.” Sirius tentatively scrapes a piece of the tart with his own fork, and it’s a testament to James’s level of vexation that he doesn’t even comment on this.

“But I just… thought…” (Sirius could have eaten the whole thing in the time James took to finish this sentence.) “…She’d be staying.”

Sirius blinks. “What?”

“I saw her name on the list.”

“You what whose what on the what?”

James rolls his eyes. Seemingly roused from whatever bizarre mood he was in, he bats Sirius’s fork away with his. “Pay attention, will you?”

“I am paying attention, and I’m not understanding anything.”

James leans in. Dropping his voice, he says, “Evans, of course.”

Sirius stares at him. After some time, he inclines his head, incredulous. “As in Lily Evans?”

“Keep it down!”

“James, we’re the only ones here.”

“Someone could be listening!”

“I barely understand what you’re saying, and I’m… me. I doubt this information would be of any importance to anyone.” He pauses. “And that counts me, by the way. This isn’t—this doesn’t make sense to me.”

“I just thought it would be fun, s'all.”

Sirius frowns. “She barely talks to you.”

“She did last week!”

“Yeah, to tell you your hair sucked.”

“It didn’t suck.”

Sirius nods loyally. “I know, mate, I know.”

“I don’t know…” His face is half-red now. “I just kind of…”

Sirius doesn’t want to say it. Ask it. He keeps quiet.

To his relief, James starts shaking his head. He returns to his treacle tart more resolutely. “I’m taking it back. I don’t want her around.”

Sirius holds on to that for dear life. “Okay.”

“I don’t know what got to me.”

“It’s okay. It’s fine.”

“Hmm.”

Sirius lets the conversation properly die out by saying nothing for a whole minute, and then he digs in on James’s treacle tart. The other grumbles, Sirius persists, and they end up fork-sparring over the dessert.

Later, while they’re hiding behind the statue of the humpback witch while Filch ran the other way screaming miscreants, miscreants, Christmas MISCREAAAANNNTTSSS!—Sirius remembers the ninety per cent chance of laughter from earlier, and wonders where all of it went.

1973. He’s so sure he’s going to get caught. Not that that’s a big deal. He’s had detentions before. Countless. He just didn’t want to spend Christmas Day scrubbing trophies in Filch’s stinky office for something he did. Not. Do. Solemnly swear.

He stumbles as he tries to halt at the last minute to turn around the corner, trainers skidding over the floor in an echoing screech—and then straight up slams against someone. They topple to the floor in a heap of groans, and Lily says (for that’s who it is, and this is how lucky he is), “What the hell, Potter.”

She’s the first to stand. Before she can take the first step away, Filch roars from a nearby corridor: “I’ll get you this time, you—”

Lily’s gaze drops on James. She arches one eyebrow.

“What?” asks James, getting to his feet as well. He dusts off his robes. “That wasn’t me.”

Filch again: “I can hear you—”

“Oh, hell,” mutters James. He starts backing away from her. His hands also start that weird gesture-dance thing that they do when she’s around. “Well, I gotta go, nice running into you—well, not nice, I mean—oh.” He stills his hands. “Are you hurt?”

Lily rolls her eyes.

And then she steps forward and takes his wrist, and James is like what, and then they’re running.

“Evans—”

“Shush.”

“It was you?”

She practically shoves him inside a broom cupboard that James is so sure should not be on this floor. Tonight is indeed full of magic. Thank you, God. Thank you, Hogwarts. Happy Christmas, universe.

The small, dusty door thuds close. Lily fishes out her wand and Lumoses the scant room. Outside, Filch is still yelling, but his growls are muffled and getting more distant by the second.

James starts laughing.

“Stop,” groans Lily, sitting down on a nearby crate.

“You turned Mrs. Norris into a gecko?”

Pause. And then, quietly, “A chameleon, idiot.”

He laughs again. When he’s exhausted his mirth, he considers sitting on the crate next to her, but decides against it. He’s been lucky, yes, but he can’t push it. He slumps on the floor.

“Thanks for saving my life,” he says, grinning at her.

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“It’s true. He’d have flayed me alive.”

“And you’d have deserved it.”

He holds a hand to his chest, scandalized. “No one deserves to be flayed, Evans.”

She narrows her eyes at his theatrics, but ultimately bends. “You’re right. Sorry.”

“Some just deserve to be turned into geckos.”

He might be imagining it, but he thinks her lips upturn a bit. “Chameleon.”

“Whatever.” He’s still grinning. “See, you do have a soft spot for me.”

Lily looks straight at him. “Last week Filch gave Sev a week of detentions for something he clearly did not do.”

James’s grin basically keels over and dies. “So?”

“So I turned his cat into a chameleon.”

“Charming.” He examines his nails, but there are too many shadows in the cramped room. “I suppose it was something we did.”

“What?”

“The thing he got in trouble with.”

“I thought so, yeah.”

It wasn’t, whatever it was, honest to god. But she wouldn’t believe that, would she? “Why’re we here then?”

She crosses her arms, the light from her wand shifting. “Why’re you mad?”

He shrugs. “Not mad.”

“Okay.”

“It wasn’t me.” He can’t help it. “It wasn’t any of us.”

She bites her lip. “I know that now.”

Oh. Oh. “You feel guilty? You’re making it up to me?”

“I’m avenging my best friend.”

“And saying sorry to me.”

“Don’t be delusional. No one’s saying sorry.”

But she is. And he’s grinning again, in spite of himself. “It’s fine, by the way.”

“Shut up.” Even in the dim lighting, he can see her cheeks flush.

Filch has stopped trailing them now, or else he’s so far they can’t hear him anymore. She doesn’t seem to have plans to leave yet. James stays put. Hell, he can stay put here forever.

“I can’t believe you turned Mrs. Norris into a gecko,” he says, and he dips the last words in bubbling laughter once more.

This time, after a few seconds of futile mouth-pursing, Lily finally indulges him a chuckle.

1974. "Come to visit me, Evans?“

She passes by with her chin up and properly haughty.

“Come on, it’s Christmas,” he says before she vanishes from view. Totally in jest on the outside, but… right, he just wants a Happy Christmas from her, maybe. That’s a damn fair wish after getting whacked with two bludgers, isn’t it?

“Not quite yet,” she counters.

“We’re both going home this year.”

“I just returned some potion practice sets to Madame Pomfrey,” she says, stopping at the foot of his bed.

“Ahuh,” he says. He has that stupid, cocky grin that she hates.

“Still haven’t learned your lesson then?”

“Slytherins are filthy cheaters? Etched in my heart forever.”

“Showing off gets you two bludgers,” she says, gesturing at the bandages around his head, his arm.

That doesn’t deter him in the slightest. “We won, didn’t we?”

“You’re here injured, aren’t you?”

“Worth it.”

She frowns at him. She takes two steps forward, grips the metal frame at the foot of his bed. “I’m so glad I talked to you,” she says. He knows better now than to expect something good from introductions like that. Besides, she looks more bewildered than glad. “I was worried. Like, this much—” She holds up a comically minuscule distance between her thumb and index finger, “—but now I’m okay.”

(Third bludger. This.) “Glad to help.”

“Well, I’m going now,” she says. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” Fourth.

She’s gone.

Fifth.

Sixth, seventh, eighth…

He sinks further down his bed, thoroughly put out. With effort, he takes the two-way mirror out from under his pillow. How long does it take to nick stuff from the kitchens?

“Pad—”

“Are you talking to yourself?”

It’s Lily. She’s back.

He lowers the mirror down slowly. “Yes.”

She seems to deem that unworthy of any comment. She just comes closer, fingers around the frame again. “It was a good game,” she says, everything about her softer now. “You’re a fantastic player, everyone knows it. But—but never do that again.”

He stares. “Oh… ‘kay…?”

“You nearly gave Professor McGonagall a heart attack, that’s all.”

“Gotcha.”

She nods. She starts backing away. “And—er, well—get well soon. Happy Christmas.”

She’s already gone when he gets his bearings back. “Happy Christmas!” he yells after her, but he’s not sure if she’s still there to hear.

All the bludgers have long gone by the time Sirius, Remus, and Peter get back from the kitchens.

1975. There’s not much to say about this one. Just that her lips are so unbelievably soft, and that it does kind of feel like flying. When she guides his hands to, um, places, his heart skips to his throat, and maybe he flinches, because she leans back just enough to smile at him.

He’s fifteen, mistletoe is a muggle miracle, and the light from the grate makes her monochromatic. Her eyes could be green. Her hair could be red. She could be fifteen like him, she could be Gryffindor like him. She could be anyone.

(Anyone. Who’s he kidding?)

“All right?” Jeanne asks him. Her voice sounds wrong.

He nods. She smiles and kisses him again.

1976. The general mood these days is that he doesn’t feel like talking to anyone. Not Dumbledore, not McGonagall, not even Sirius. Lily’s out of the question, of course; it’s not like she’d ever talk to him anyway after the whole post-OWL fiasco last summer.

So when she approaches him after a Quidditch win that he thought would finally cheer him up (it didn’t), his brain doesn’t know what to do with itself.

He watches as she slumps down the cold floor beside him. The corridor is long, dark, and deserted. Her shoulder is touching his.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, keeping absolutely still.

She takes her time to answer. “I honestly don’t know.”

So they sit there for what feels like hours. Later, neither of them would know just for exactly how long did they stay like that there. Doesn’t matter.

“Talk, James,” she says after a time. She didn’t say it like an order—it was quiet, a bit exasperated even—but she seems determined as hell. “Not even to me. To your dad. To Sirius. The house elves. Madam Rosmerta. Peeves.”

“What’s the point?”

“You gotta give the universe a chance to patch you up.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

“Why do you care?”

He expected her to bristle, but she just sighs. She shifts to get something from her pocket. When she holds it up, it takes him a few seconds to realize what it is.

“Take it,” she says, offering him the chocolate frog card.

He does. One of the edges has a slight fold-mark, but other than that it’s good as new.

“I don’t know if… we’re okay,” she says, staring at the card. “I don’t know if I’m not mad anymore because I simply am not anymore, or just because I’ve stopped thinking about it altogether.”

“Evans, I’m really sorry about—”

“I know,” she says. It’s not I forgive you, or It’s okay, but this is the first time she’s talked to him like this, and about it, and he’s going to bloody take what he can get. “It’s not even about that. It’s about… you. Now. I owe you a happy Christmas.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

She reaches out to flick the card in his hand. “Bowman Wright. Don’t you remember?”

He only does now.

“It’s the same one,” she points out when he doesn’t say anything. "It’s stupid but that card did wonders for me back then. I mean, it would probably not have the same effect, but I just want to remind you that sometimes… sometimes the world can surprise you, James. You just have to be out there. Let it.“ She nudges him. "Yeah?”

He nods. There’s a lump in his throat and a sting in his eyes and if he speaks he’s going to lose to all of them.

Lily senses this, and gets to her feet. “No one deserves to be flayed.”

“No one was flayed,” he says really quietly, staring at the card. “People lose people all the time.”

“You’d take getting flayed over losing your mum.”

He doesn’t answer.

“No one deserves both,” she says. A slight contemplative pause, and then, a little sheepishly, “Some just deserve to be turned into geckos.”

He looks up. God, this girl… “Chameleon,” he corrects her.

The smirk she throws his way is accompanied by a relieved sigh.

When even the echoes of her footsteps have gone and the torches are less flagrant, he finds himself smiling (for the first time in a while) at Bowman Wright.

1977.

Potter,

I tried. Really. Dear Potter, Dear James, James, You Bloody Universal Git. Everything sounded awkward as all hell.

I don’t know how to write the body of this either. Or why I just said “body of this letter”. Merlin, are you crumpling this up now? Wouldn’t blame you.

A couple of things:

1. Actually, I don’t know 2. Have I confused you enough yet? 3. This is probably the hardest letter I ever had to write 4. And the weirdest you ever had to read 5. The thing is 6. That’s not even a whole sentence, so I don’t know why that counts as a whole number 7. Or whatever I just said in number 6 8. …And 7 9. And 8 10. This is not going to end 11. Do you hate me? 12. I don’t hate you 13. I think I 14. Might 15. MIGHT 16. Like you 17. And this is an invitation??? 18. No, a question 19. And I need an answer 20. Meet me at the Heads’ office, midnight 21. I’m here and I have your Christmas gift

The clock says 11:57, and he stumbles twice in his haste to get to the portrait hole. Five times more on his way to the office.

He runs like the wind. The Hogwarts fairy lights are a blur of memories; of mistletoe and chocolate frog cards and piles of presents and blazing red hair. Somewhere, someone is bellowing what sounds like Jingle Bells, except it’s hardly recognizable with its terrible off-keyness and the lewd lyrics.

Still. He laughs like he’s got everyone’s happiest Christmases swirling inside of him.

- fin -

#chelseaapproved #jily #jily fanfiction #jss 16

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letterboxd · 4 years

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Touching the Void.

Searching for cinema that soothes? Ella Kemp suggests it could be as simple as looking for a film poster with a white background.

How many weeks has it been? When did any of us last go blindly into a cinema and take a chance on something new? Film-watching in the time of Covid-19 has changed. The immediate and never-ending news of the world is frightening. Is it still, and more than ever, okay for me to sink into movies to alleviate my mood, just for a bit? How is that even possible when the world has come to a standstill?

We are forced to adapt, and it has taken some time for my attention span and emotional capacity to adjust. But I think I might have found a solution, and I have the meticulous list-makers of Letterboxd to thank. It was Izzy’s list of comfort movies that first lit the fuse. Specifically, the second, third and fourth row; films including Billy Elliot, Clueless, School of Rock.

Fifteen stark posters, speaking one truth: We are vulnerable and nervous. What we need is a film poster with a white background to assure us the movie exists entirely to serve and soothe us.

Part of Izzy’s ‘comfort movies’ list.

List-making on Letterboxd has never been more prolific. Pandemic movies, overdue filmography catch-ups, comfort movies galore. Everyone categorizes and logs their watches differently, but Izzy’s pattern speaks to me with an epiphanic answer. I’ve always admired successful color-coding, but now I see its crucial function.

As I scroll for distraction, for something guaranteed to be good (because I cannot and will not be subject to any uncertainty I can avoid), I see the rainbow. The pale blues of Studio Ghibli, Wong Kar-wai’s passionate reds, the pastels of Netflix Original breezy romances. Like some kind of cinematic ikebana, countless Letterboxd members have mastered the art of arranging film posters. There are standouts: the staggering oeuvre that is Gordon’s chromatic roundup of favorite posters; the comprehensive color-graded history of women directors via their best posters, courtesy of Vanessa; and the penchant for beige in the year 2015, as spotted by Letterboxd co-founder Matthew Buchanan.

A selection of Gordon’s favorite movie posters.

But when I see these 300 examples, color-coded by typography and accents by Sera Ash, I recognize that white movie posters are the ones most likely, in this very strange time, to take care of me. I see it in three distinct filmmaking periods: Disney animations from the 1940s and 50s, the video marketing for cult comedies of the 1980s and 90s, and the alternative marketing materials of my favorite films of the 2010s. Each poster is straightforward and inoffensive. It captures the story, but never dares to impress or intimidate beyond basic description.

A 1975 re-release poster for ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937).

In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs announced the birth of Walt Disney’s feature-length empire. While its original theatrical poster is also mostly white, it is represented on Letterboxd by a 1975 re-release poster depicting a peek through the keyhole: a curved triangle framing Snow White, the dwarves, and the two sides of the jealous queen, against a vivid green forest. In the bottom corner, a castle. To the left, the title—her name in red cursive, theirs in black. These simple images come together to present an elementary summary of the ingredients within. The white frame showcases the seminal animation craft without suggesting the viewer diverts their eye anywhere else.

This technique was common across other animated titles, collected in lists like dantebk’s Disney animated classics. Pinocchio toys with the hyperreal relationships between characters alive and wooden, human and animal—but does so on a plain canvas, so that the magic remains within reach. Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Peter Pan—each follows suit. Whether with the mustard yellow of a circus tent, the faint sketches of grass tufts, the gold dust of an enchanted fairy godmother or the ink blue of a midnight starry sky, these colors (indicative of each defining scene-setter or mood-maker) only pepper a blank background, and so make their significance ever greater with the most sporadic touches.

A selection from dantebk’s list of Disney animated classics.

Live-action knockouts from these decades—films like The Shop Around The Corner and The Red Shoes—embrace painted recreations of their protagonists (Margaret Sullivan and James Stewart as festive lovers in the former, Moira Shearer as a tortured ballerina in the latter) and use the color red as a signifier of romance, against a plain white page, to set the mood. Slashes and splashes of red have been used to create a vibe in genre cinema for many decades—a trend deftly chronicled in this list by Rocks.

As far as we know, the underpinnings of digital photography began in the 1950s, and the first published color digital photograph dates back to 1972, when Michael Francis Tompsett shot a photo of his wife Margaret for the cover of Electronics magazine. Consumers got their hands on the gear in the late 1990s, but movie studios really started to make the most of sharp digital photography and stark white backgrounds for their striking posters from the late 1980s onwards. Because, never mind the multiplex, the video store is where you wanted your comfort fare to stand out in the 1980s and 90s.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Say Anything… (1989) form a handsome, trend-setting 1980s pair. While the theatrical poster for Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything… deigned to include John Cusack’s co-star, Ione Skye, by the time of the film’s video release, the focus is clearly on pre-High Fidelity Cusack, as proud underachiever Lloyd Dobler, smouldering lopsidedly under the weight of a boombox. It’s the singular image of the film to this day.

Meanwhile, Matthew Broderick as Ferris-slacking-Bueller is making the most of his title activity, arms behind his head, a proud smirk on his face. Nothing else matters except that these charismatic young stars are stepping up to leading-man status. The white background accentuates the star power of these new boys in town, embracing the limelight in one fell swoop.

Star power is everything: beautiful people doing simple things against empty backdrops, because what could be more important than the regularity of symmetrical bone structure, of familiar charm? The trend boomed in the 1990s and 2000s, in films widely embraced by casual moviegoers. The sort who list “watching Netflix” as a Sunday activity on dating profiles and use the Christmas holidays to rewatch comedies they have memorized over dozens of half-attentive viewings (absolutely zero judgement here!).

The vast majority of these films have white posters. Who is your soothing cup of charm: Tom Hanks on a bench, nothing more nothing less, from 1994’s Forrest Gump? Or Heath Ledger, effortlessly cool, leaning on the brown corduroy armchair Julia Stiles sits in for the 10 Things I Hate About You poster from 1999? (The 90s harnessed the increased appeal of having two lookers just sitting and posing against a plain background, as demonstrated in this chilling list by Ashley.)

Ashley’s list of couples posing in front of a white background.

Will Ferrell had been earning his stripes as an actor for years, but he changed the movie comedy game as Buddy the Elf in 2003. There’s plenty of visual humour in Elf, but Ferrell’s coat-stand posture bedecked in festive green velvet and those tights is… enough. A white background lets the ridicule slide, just.

How many Disney series really deserve a whole movie—and one that stands the test of time? Lizzie McGuire, resting on her tiptoes with a swinging suitcase in hand, sells The Lizzie McGuire Movie like no idyllic views of Rome ever could. It’s reaching out to an audience loyal to the character, one who will follow her to the ends of the Earth, or at least to another continent. Hilary Duff could be doing almost anything on this poster and it would achieve the same effect—so long as the white background remains plain enough to keep eagle-eyed fans on the main event at all times.

It’s surprising that the star-making system only let Meryl Streep appear in a tiny box, one of four character tiles, on the poster for The Devil Wears Prada in 2006. But the design here taps into 1940s animated sensibilities, giving prominence to a devilish red Macguffin larger than the humans. It still achieves the same function—a glossy, glamorous design with the accessible sell of a quotable, star-fuelled comedy.

Red may be the color of romance and the devil; it’s also the color of comedy. Exhibit A: the 2007 gross-out comedy Superbad, whose star power—marking the emergence of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera—is used to an opposite and impressive effect on its poster. The awkwardness of these teen boys—lanky, unkempt, insecure—is what cinches the comedy. The simplicity of the poster design, with their uncomfortable posture against, well, nothing at all, further anchors their incapability of facing the world in any confident way, shape or form.

There are countless more examples, like Marley & Me, Bridesmaids, 27 Dresses (notice how the red type is replaced by pink when the film’s plot veers toward the altar). But to understand the curious and timeless appeal of the white movie poster, what happened to it in the 2010s cements its adaptable strength.

As the art of graphic design has continued to bloom, the aesthetic argument for the colorless color-block movie poster has shifted to embrace a film’s context. Consider Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, the enjoyable 2015 drama that provided Michael Fassbender one of the most under-celebrated roles of his career, playing the late Apple co-founder. The poster turns the canvas into a blank screen: the title is typed, the text insertion point poised, waiting for the next key press. As Jobs, Fassbender occupies the bottom right corner, in profile, thinking.

This starkness makes sense: what’s next, Steve? It offers a rare example of a poster from the past decade that fully leans into the monochrome aesthetic entirely on purpose—to serve the restrained and unequivocal need for white. (And it’s interesting to compare with the marketing narrative for an earlier film about another tech leader: observe how Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg eyeballs us from The Social Network’s dark-mode poster.)

Comfort movies don’t own the white poster, of course. Jordan Peele’s Get Out toys, both in its marketing and its delivery, with the binaries of black and white. It’s deployed on-screen with sophisticated horror, and this extends to its two most graphic poster variants.

While one poster sees Daniel Kaluuya’s character, Chris, sat on a chair split vertically between black and white, the all-white poster allows only a center-frame letterbox to reveal Chris’s enormous eyes, accompanied by an all-caps type treatment. The vast expanse of white only makes the image more menacing, framing the claustrophobia so effectively. The landscape crop is a device that defines stern dramas as much as arthouse comedies, as documented by Haji Abdul Karim in their expansive list.

Haji Abdul Karim’s list of white-with-landscape-image posters.

But back in the ‘comfort’ realm, we’re seeing more and more that the marketing wants to have it both ways—the negative with the positive; the art house audience and the multiplex crowd. As genres blend, demographics collapse and audiences become more fluid, a film’s advertising needs to speak more languages.

Two ultra-comfort films from last year demonstrate this idea well. The poster for Judy sees a backlit Renée Zellweger finding her light, receiving her applause. Black is the key color, right down to the classic little black dress; the eye is drawn to the title, spelled out in red sequins. It’s showbiz, it’s drama. Though the film itself fudges a few of the more uncomfortable facts of the star’s story, it’s still honest about her addictions.

In the white-background version, which was more widely distributed, Zellweger, in a floral dress, turns away from the light. The name still sparkles, but in softened gold. There’s no less glamor, the stakes in the film are just as high, but she’s perhaps more accessible like this. The focus, as it was in the 90s, 80s, 40s, returns to the main event.

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, too, played with dark and light. The indie queen released her previous film, Lady Bird, via design-conscious distributor A24, and Gerwig’s singular aesthetics promised that her Little Women remake would be worlds away from all the others. But when the first images for the film were released, the marketing campaign was questioned by die-hard Gerwig fans.

Both of the group posters are curiously stripped back, freezing Louisa May Alcott’s beloved March sisters in a moment. In the darker image, they gaze out a window, secure in their festive domestic bubble, but set on what’s beyond. There’s more to life, and the film, than this room. It feels more lush, painterly, certainly more dramatic.

Whereas the white poster, at first, seemed like a mistake. It took one of the first images teased from the film and just... dropped it onto a poster. The March sisters look as if solidified by clay, entirely undynamic and at odds with the fluidity and warm soul Gerwig had made herself known for in her filmmaking.

And yet, nothing matters more than these characters. Beth, Jo, Meg and Amy are holding each other, happy, each in their own favourite color, and there is nothing more to fight over. The white-poster alternative lets the 2010s viewer stay attached to the most important part of the film.

The lessons here? A white poster is a vital sign that you’re safe here. You’ve made the correct choice. Attention spans are dwindling, options are expanding, focus is difficult. The promise of a white frame tells me what matters, what is good, where I should place my time and my value. For now.

#movie poster art #poster design #film poster #film poster design #movie marketing #movie design #white posters #comfort movies #comfort films #letterboxd lists #Letterboxd #little women #judy #ferris bueller #disney #graphic design

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xwwaqdyd-blog · 5 years

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Def Leppard's Joe Elliott On The Rock Hall Nomination, Roxy Music, Elvis, And Much More

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Def Leppard's Joe Elliott On The Rock Hall Nomination, Roxy Music, Elvis, And Much More

BOSTON, MA – AUGUST 11: Joe Elliott performs with Def Leppard at Fenway Park in Boston on Aug. 11, 2018. (Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Thirteen years after becoming eligible, Def Leppard are nominated for the first time for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2019. Joining a stellar and diverse list of nominees that ranges from Roxy Music, the Cure and Kraftwerk to Radiohead, Rage Against The Machine and Stevie Nicks, Def Leppard can, as frontman Joe Elliott, add another notch to a resume that includes over 100 millions albums sold, two diamond albums (Pyromania and Hysteria) and a million concert tickets sold just on this recently completed tour with Journey.

Elliott fully credits the fans and the addition of a fan vote for finally getting Leppard their long overdue spot in this conversation. And for Elliott, as he explains in this very fun and fascinating conversation, that ranges from Roxy Music to discussing soccer with Robert Plant, the greatest thing about the Rock Hall honor to him would be sharing it with the Leppard fans.

Steve Baltin: What takes you to Hawaii?

Joe Elliott: We’ve been rehearsing for two days. After we finished this massive tour with Journey in the States we kind of hit the reset button and we’re starting here tonight. We’ve got two shows at the Blaisdell Arena, which is where Elvis did his Aloha From Hawaii comeback in ’73. We played here 35 years ago actually, but we’re doing the whole Hysteria album in sequence in the middle part of the show. So we’ve been here rehearsing for three days.

Baltin: So what one Elvis song from that special would you cover?

Elliott: I have no idea what he played. My Elvis is pre-army Elvis, before I was born. The stuff that I like of Elvis is the black and white Elvis if you like, “Jailhouse Rock.” But I am quite partial to “In The Ghetto,” that was a fantastic song. In fairness we were just in Memphis three months ago and we had a day off there so I did the honorable thing and we went to Graceland again, which has totally changed. I went there in ’83. Without Elvis there wouldn’t have been a plethora of other bands that were more of an influence on us. So we all think of him as the daddy of everything — with Jerry Lee [Lewis], Roy Orbison. They’re important, even if we don’t own a ton of their records we’re very aware of their value and it’s just interesting we’re here and there’s a big statue outside the venue and all that kind of stuff. It reminds you we’re a cog in a huge machine and it’s a good thing to be in.

Baltin: You’re part of a long lineage and in a few months you could be in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame with them.

Elliott: We weren’t looking for accolades when we got together as kids. We just wanted to be part of everything we grew up listening to. It was like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could jump on this mad crazy train and have our own carriage?” The station we get on and get off at is kind of irrelevant as long as the ride is fun. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the better part of 40 years. And when you’ve been around this long you do tend to ricochet off different artists of your past and connect with them, whether it be [Pete] Townshend and [Roger] Daltrey last October, when we played with them in Brazil, to knowing Brian May from Queen for 35 years now. And there are a million others in between, It’s not like you feel like you belong, you just feel like you don’t not belong.

Baltin: Have you thought about the Rock Hall over the years you have been eligible?

Elliott: When we were made aware of that we kind of pushed it to one side and plowed on with our career cause the only thing we were really bothered about was making records, playing live, making more records, playing live more often in front of more people. That’s what we do. And then all of a sudden the fans get involved and then we become interested because it literally is about the important people in our lives, which is our audience. And even though, as we all know, the fan voting is one vote our of a thousand votes or whatever it’s the one vote the other 999 can’t help but take notice of because it’s all over the world. It’s in every magazine, on every website, every radio station.

Baltin: I know you are a big Roxy Music fan and it’d be fitting for you and Bryan Ferry to be inducted together. Is there anybody on this year’s list that would make it extra special for you to be inducted with if you get in?

Elliott: It’s funny you should mention that cause I said earlier we’ve been eligible for 13 years and it’s the first time we’ve been nominated. What I find astonishing is it’s the first time Roxy have been nominated and they’ve been eligible for 21. I find that absolutely bizarre because I suppose their argument is how influential were they. Say on a band like Duran Duran 100 percent. Between them and David Bowie’s Ziggy [Stardust] period they pretty much invented alien rock or whatever you want to call it. It was beyond glam. It wasn’t bricklayers in drag. They were actually punching the boundaries of music, especially when [Brian] Eno was on the first two records. The way things were you had this mad scientist with black feathers coming out of his back and this crooner guy dressed either as an army recruit or on his solo records as Frank Sinatra. It was a really bizarre image, but it was so striking and the music was so different. It was drum and bass, guitars, keyboards, but it didn’t sound like anybody else. Maybe this committee that I would imagine are 99 percent based in New York, or at least America, don’t really recognize the value of when “Virginia Plain” hit the airwaves in 1972. But the whole of Great Britain that was between the age of 12 and 16 stopped in their tracks and said, “What the f**k is that?” I don’t think they see that or are even aware that happened. T. Rex were huge.

Baltin: Have you thought about who would induct you?

Elliott: We haven’t even thought about it. You’re the first person who’s brought it up. It’s the first time I’ve actually thought about who we would have induct us because we’ve been nominated, we’re not in. If and when that thing comes in, whatever day you hear in December, that’s when we’ll sit down and go, “Alright, who do we hope we could get to do it.” Because at the end of the day we’ll put a wish list together and they might all say, “I can’t make it, I don’t want to do it” or, “I don’t think I’m appropriate, I don’t like doing that kind of thing, I’m nervous talking in front of people.” It’s gotta be a compromise I imagine. But I will say this much, I would take great pleasure in inducting Ian Hunter should he ever ask me to do it and he gets nominated and accepted because there’s one guy I do totally connect with. If he did get in I’m sure I’d be the first person he’d ask because we’ve now had a history and gone back since I first met him in ’77. But he didn’t know that because I burst into his dressing room as a 17-year-old kid to get his autograph and then I met him briefly in 1980. Then we got to know each other ’87 and ever since…I got onstage with Mott The Hoople when they reformed in 2014. I opened for them on the first tour, Ian’s been onstage with us. I’ve been onstage with him a million times. There’s a connection. I would do that. But I can’t see me getting the nod from Roxy. I genuinely hope they get in because I understand the respect factor of they could go, “Well done, guys, I love it when British bands do as well as you did, but it’s not my cup of tea.” I don’t have a problem with that at all because I can still sit down and talk to Phil Manzanera about coffee, Indian restaurants. I talk to people like Robert Plant all the time and we never discuss music, ever. It’s always soccer. So you can be on a different level with people that understand your success. They give you the thumb’s up and respect you, but they don’t have to be part of it.

Baltin: How do the soccer conversations with Robert Plant go?

Elliott: With Robert we talk soccer. We played the Garden in New York, he was playing the same night so we ended up talking the next day on his way to Toronto and all we discussed was soccer. That’s fine. I’m a realist when it comes to that. They always say, “Never meet your heroes.” That’s never been a problem for me because I don’t expect them to necessarily get what I do cause the kind of music Def Leppard makes doesn’t really have that much of a connection to a lot of the music I grew up listening to. It does to a point, You can hear little bits of other people’s stuff in our music. So much so that when we did the Yeah! album one of the reasons we did it was we actually wanted to show people where we mixed from. So when we did things like “He’s Gonna Step On You Again,” by John Kongos with the tribal drumming, it was a nod to the fact, “Yeah, I was listening to that kind of rhythm stuff when we came up with ‘Rocket.'” We cut “Street Life,” by Roxy Music on that record, because we were huge fans of the band and it was one of those songs we could Leppard-ize that. We could Leppard-ize David Essex, we kind of did a straight-forward cover of “Rock On.” We just wanted to show people where our musical influences laid. And they were Blondie and T. Rex and Bowie and Roxy Music cause we spent 25 years trying to tell the world we weren’t specifically influenced by Zeppelin, Sabbath and Deep Purple and all that kind of stuff. Everybody was trying to shove us in that thing. I said, “Look, they don’t listen when we talk, they’re gonna listen when we sing and dance.” So we recorded songs instead of doing interviews. “These are our influences.” So Roxy Music are part of that, but I’ve got a feeling they’ll probably get someone like Loudon Wainwright to do it (laughs).

Baltin: What bands in the Rock Hall already would you want to do a package tour with a la the Heart, Cheap Trick and Joan Jett “All For The Hall” tour?

Elliott: You name me any bands that we haven’t already toured with. We’ve toured with Journey, with Cheap Trick, with Joan Jett, with Poison, Heart, Foreigner. The last time we went out with a band that weren’t like minded, if you like, was Tripping Daisy in 1996. Trust me, it didn’t work. Lovely guys, very interesting band, but our audience went, “What?” There aren’t that many left.

Baltin: Have you ever done a full tour with Aerosmith?

Elliott: We’ve done festivals with Aerosmith, we’ve done a tour with KISS. Aerosmith would be great, we love Aerosmith. There’s enormous mutual respect from us to them and vice versa. So that’s one band where we get their music. Aerosmith are fantastic, they really are. They’re America’s band. They’ve been through, everybody up and down anything anybody could ever go through or should ever go through and somehow managed to survive it and it’s the original five piece, give or take a few years with Jimmy Crespo, they’ve been the same guys since 1969 or something. That’s kind of mental, it’s really crazy. And you’ve got to have a respect for anybody who hangs in like that, whether it be somebody a generation or two later like U2, Duran Duran to a point, Iron Maiden are all basically the classic lineup to the best of their ability.

Baltin: Are there moments that you can look at as having brought you to the brink of the Rock Hall?

Elliott: When we went out with Poison and Cheap Trick in 2009 that tour was huge. It was one of the tours I can look back at and go it’s part of the trampoline effect of where we’ve arrived at. We’ve had our wilderness years, don’t get me wrong. But even then we were still selling out 10 to 12,000 seaters. But when we went out with Cheap Trick and Poison and a year later I think we went out with Heart we were doing up to 20,000 people because they’re events. And we love being part of event. You’ve got to remember when we were kids growing up and looking at the adverts on the back of Melody Maker or whatever there were so many gigs where it was the Who with special guest Steve Marriott and the Moog. It wasn’t just special guests or plus support, they were like mini-Woodstock’s. And since day one, when we went out in the States we were the special guests for Pat Travers, Judas Priest and Ted Nugent. When we went out in ’83 we had Uriah Heap and had Krokus. Then in ’88 we had Tesla and L.A. Guns in Europe. We’ve never shied away from a band that is visible. We don’t see them as a threat, we see them as an addition. It’s just a better ticket.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2018/10/29/def-leppards-joe-elliott-on-the-rock-hall-nomination-roxy-music-elvis-and-much-more/

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