#questions and query

[qnpc1]

what if cucurucho and the mimic fell in love

truuuueee

[venusinmyrrh]

You said you love a good fashion doc- do you have any more to recommend?

Designers and tastemakers

Very Ralph (2019). The preeminent American designer of our time, one of the very few who can stand toe to toe with the titans of Paris and Milan. To call Ralph Lauren's work "sportswear" is to call the Sistine Chapel "kind of a big painting".

Halston (2019). Speaking of going head to head with Paris, Halston did it first. Skip Ultrasuede-- this is a much better doc about the king of American 70s disco glam.

McQueen (2018). When people talk about fashion as an art form, chances are they're thinking of Alexander McQueen. Worth watching for the pulse-pounding runway shows alone.

Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (2018). Obviously you already know about this one, but it's gotta go on any comprehensive list. Without Vivienne Westwood, punk would have been nothing but a handful of noisy assholes.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011). My icon, my north star, my personal hero. The empress of taste and high priestess of personal style. Watch this doc whenever you need encouragement to do and wear whatever the hell you want.

The Gospel According to André (2017). Diana Vreeland's protegé and a godfather of style in his own right. If it happened in fashion in the last fifty years, André Leon Talley was there for it.

Lagerfeld Confidential (2007). I have a high tolerance for difficult and unpleasant people as long as I like their work. Your mileage may vary, but Karl Lagerfeld's immaculate, relentless taste cannot be denied.

Institutions and events

The First Monday in May (2016). Witness all the hustle, bustle, savvy, and stress that goes into planning the Met gala!

The September Issue (2009). Same as the above, but for the famous September issue of Vogue. Watch this to learn who Grace Coddington is.

Dior and I (2014). How do haute couture collections get made? In 8 weeks from start to finish, I guess, if you're Raf Simons during his first season at the House of Dior. A documentary and a thriller.

Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's (2013). No matter what other retailers might want you to think, Bergdorf Goodman is the last great department store. A portrait, already halfway to a time capsule, of what luxury shopping used to be.

Peripheral, but may be of interest

Nose (2021). The passionate, delicate art of perfume creation for the House of Dior. The French landscapes where they source their materials will make you swoon.

Larger Than Life: The Kevyn Aucoin Story (2017). As the makeup artist to pretty much every single icon of the 80s and 90s, Kevyn Aucoin invented the image of that era as much as any designer.

Fabergé: A Life of Its Own (2014). Come for the dazzling jewels and sumptuous objets d'art; stay to find out how this illustrious name ended up on hair care products in the 70s.

Crazy About Tiffany's (2016). Another luxury jeweler whose name alone is the stuff dreams are made on.

Bill Cunningham New York (2010). The original street style photographer, since before "street style" was even a thing. A love letter to curiosity, and a testament to the power of taking an interest in the world around us.

Still on my watchlist

Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams (2020). Directed by Luca Guadagnino, which is enough to put this Ferragamo doc at the top of my list.

Advanced Style (2014). Portraits of seven women aged 62-95 with truly fab personal style. Top Letterboxd review is seething about how out of touch they are with the real world, which means I am probably gonna love it.

Suited (2016). A study of gender through clothing in modern culture.

Dries (2017). A year-- and four collections-- in the life of Dries Van Noten, who, interestingly, doesn't see the point of clothes that people can't buy to wear, and so does not do couture.

Yellow is Forbidden (2018). This doc about Guo Pei appears to use her career as a framework to understand the gatekeeping of global culture by the West. Dope as hell, if it can pull it off.

American Style (2019). The political, social, and economic history of America through its fashion. Another one that could be really awesome if done with insight and panache.

Quant (2021). She may share the credit for inventing the miniskirt with two other people, but it cannot be argued that Mary Quant invented 1960s Swinging London. And for that we say thank you Dame Mary.

[jesncin]

"Ethan Rivera in his inevitable Crimson Flame Red Lantern costume" for @dcforgaza! When asked by a noted comic artist "how cunty can I design this costume" esteemed donor @thrakaboom replied "go wild", and so cunty drag king Ethan Rivera is born. And surely, somewhere out there I am blacklisted from DC comics.

Would you like to send a DC art/fic/vid edit prompt of varying cunt levels? Send it through this donor form before June 21st!

[nixotinix]

had a... day at work and am hoping that i don't have another tomorrow, but i bestow upon my loyal flock;

the nixverse relationship chart! (the nixverse is what i call my DCAU- it's the world that Dementophobia takes place in)

this was made with my finger on my phone because idk if yall know this. making relationship charts on paper is!! hard!! so enjoy the little phone doodles

if you want to provide me enrichment, or see more of these fellows, or just be plain nice to lil' ol me, feel free to drop questions or comments about them and/or their relationships in my inbox!! mayhaps i'll even respond with a little doodle :3

[transcendragon]

So, now I’m querying a couple different works, which is a process that involves a surprisingly large amount of editing. Here’s an editing bingo to celebrate! Do you get any bingos from your editing experiences?

My edit made in Canvas, image description in alt.

[kin-queries]

I dare you to try and summarise each of your kins (or just your highest if you have a lot) in one sentence (that isn't really long! No cheating!)

[aritany]

just finalized the query package for my novel and i start querying again on monday??? who is ready to get absolutely Brutalized by the publishing industry with me this summer

[rains-inky-mind]

I am once again asking for very specific, explicit, step by step directions on how to write a query letter to a literary agent and/or publisher.

@sleepyowlwrites @ren-c-leyn @ anyone else who can tag someone who can explain this in a way that my autistic brain can grasp.

[bloodbathfortwo]

Nigel and Alex have their rare moments of intimacy behind closed doors. Lingering touches, and blazing warmth.

[qnpc1]

tried to apply for isla quesedilla but it said applications are closed?? :(

oh my god i actually JUST hit the button to close applications like 2 seconds ago, ill open them again for you reallly quick because you were SECONDS off

[venusinmyrrh]

Care to effuse about The Menu?

Yes. Yes I would.

The Menu is underrated because of its incredible specificity. It's gained a reputation as an "eat the rich" movie, but it's not that at all! It's about the ways that rich people literally consume people's work with blithe entitlement— after all, they're the one's paying for it, aren't they? What does it matter that they don't even remember what they ate? What's it to the cooks, who poured all that time and effort and art into it? Why should they care? They're getting paid for it, aren't they?

The Menu is specifically about the experience of creating art for a living, especially for a wealthy clientele who have no taste of their own and just want whatever's hot at the moment. It's about the soul-crushing grind of keeping the forge going long after the fire's burned out, because they're still hungry, and you've got a living to make.

And they'll never be satisfied, because the wealthy lead lives of consumption without appreciation. They will take your work that you sweated over, that took years to perfect, and they will swallow it whole without even savoring it on the way down, and then they will demand something new to amuse them, something fresh for their Instagram stories, more content to feed the machine. Eventually, it just starts to suck. You become more and more divorced from what you love about your art, and the things you make become brittle and lifeless.

(And the kicker is, can the customers even tell your work sucks? Can you tell that it sucks? Do you even care? No! Because you're burnt out and they have no taste. It's not an accident that all the best metaphors for the characters and themes in this restaurant movie have to do with eating.)

Nowhere is this more clear than in the guests' actual interactions with Chef Julian. You will notice that as much as the diners in The Menu may or may not be impressed by him, they treat him with very little respect: they flout the house rules by taking pictures of the food, they nitpick flaws in dishes they could never make themselves, and they cannot name a single thing he has ever made for them. His sole job, in their eyes, is to provide them with a status boost, something they can brag about when they get back to their friends; the actual experience is negligible.

Is that not maddening? Especially to a man like Chef Julian, who is so detail-oriented that he precisely calculated each portion size based on digestion? That fish, the one his repeat customers don't even remember eating, must have been specifically chosen, even had the dish built around it, so no other would do. Chef Julian is right when he says that these people represent the ruin of his art— why bother putting love and care into your work when it gets horked down some greedy asshole's throat just the same?

The joy of watching Ralph Fiennes' performance as Chef Julian is watching him assert his power as, essentially, the god-king of Hawthorn. The guests came to his restaurant full of their own importance: food critic, actor, repeat patron, major investor, etc. They have given him the money and influence to get where he is, and they think that means he owes them... but he is the chef. They are at the mercy of what he gives them. They will jump when he claps; they will run and hide when he tells them to; they will take what they're given and they will like it. He is the one whose work, whose vision, whose reputation Hawthorn is built on, and he spends the entire night demonstrating that he cannot be owned (and drowning at least one person who tried).

It's ironic that Hawthorn's cuisine is so specifically tied to the island the place is built on— everything local, everything grown on-site or fished out of the ocean. It allows the clientele to feel eco-friendly, aligned with and respectful of nature, when in fact they treat Chef Julian and his staff the way they treat their assistants and their escorts and the subjects of their reviews: like an oil well, to be used and drilled and extracted and exhausted until completely empty.

It's significant that this final menu is not just a Chef Julian project; it's a collaboration among everyone in the kitchen. Multiple other cooks have contributed courses, so we know he's not making them do this— they've all been put through the same professional meat grinder, and they've all come out with their spirits and their sanity hacked to bits. Those rich assholes, through their commodification and entitlement and cruelty and disrespect, have drained the passion from this entire team... and it is so satisfying to watch them gasp and squirm and rage, only to realize that all the money and influence in the world won't save them when the thing they've been consuming decides to bite back.

TL;DR: The Menu is not about eating the rich. The rich are the ones doing the eating: of people's energy, labor, hopes, dreams, blood, sweat, and tears. The Menu is about making them choke on it.

[fallensxvior]

"Yeshua? Chasing people with a whip?" Xaos was holding back a laugh. "I think if I see that it'd be the third best day of my life."

"Actually, Xaos..."

Yeshua began to clear his throat, trying to shake off the embarrassment. "I.. well..."

[thegracefulroyaltownofthesaint]

Does anyone know where i can learn stuff about horoscopes?

or like, stuff about astrology in general.

Or where i can learn to read tarot?

It all seems so interesting but idk where to start.

[fanficfanattic]

Did Nate figure out that Rebecca was sabotaging Richmond before others found out?

I was responding to a post asking when people realized Nate was going to the dark side. And my answer started as “I saw darkness in him long before it became obvious in the show. But I think I clued in more solidly in S1 when he called Rebecca a shrew. Hiring/firing a kit man is probably incredibly low on her priority list but he immediately assumed she-”

I deleted that last sentence, sent my reply off, and came here. Because it only just occurred to me.

Why would he think she had anything to do with firing him? Unless he realized she had more to do with people other than the manager coming and going?

He IS a good strategist.

And he probably hears more than people think cause of the whole kit man of it all.

[bookwyrminspiration]

how do you accidentally steal a baby 😭😭

There's some very specific laws and situations at play here.

In this world parents can legally leave their newborns on others doorsteps, and so long as they don't get caught, that baby is legally that household's (it's called "storking"). This is this world's solution to having an unwanted child, as abortion is illegal.

Also, these three teenagers are on the run from the law because they've been signed up to be disassembled into parts to be used as organ donors (very common).

For reasons yet unknown, one of the three (who's not good at thinking in emergencies, and there was a cop nearby--remember, fugitives), saw a storked baby and ran to it. There's repeated reference to some sort of incident with a storked baby in his history, but it's not elaborated on.

The mother of the house the baby was left at then saw this, and presumed the two of them were teen parents trying to stork the baby, and went ah ah ah, I've caught you, that means you keep legal responsibility >:) <3

And so now they have a random ass baby, are on a school bus to some random school with said baby, and are pretending to be its teen parents. Also these people met like yesterday.

[opxningtears]

Someone called Lizzie a monster? Here comes Xaos to dropkick them.

"OHMYGOD-"

And there goes the harasser, flying off the edge of a bridge at mach fuck...

"Xaos, you- you didn't have to kill the man!"