#unfacetious

[cacaitos]

like Boy Parents don't shut up about why they prefer boys and would skin themselves before having a girl and whatever, it's not difficult to guess. but i dont really know what girl parents like, want out of having a girl, like outside wanting them just over very stereotypical things, as in for genuine reasons. daughter moms can go idk, so they can be better than me or so we can do X and Y together or something (also applies to son fathers) but like i still haven't heard out loud why dudes obsessed with their daughter all but stated prefer daughters bc they idk don't seem to say why.

[taylorappalachia]

the carpet was beige. at the time it was a sophisticated aesthetic improvement from hunter green. white walls, "a blank canvas", my new room (my old one was marine blue). one wall was eventually painted maroon with a peel-n-stick mural of galloping horses. there was one window that faced the quiet woods where he hunted, but not the two deer we befriended. it was dark. and it was dark the day i found him lying on my bed, legs curled, facing the lone window. when i addressed him he shocked me by exposing he'd found the bag of chips i'd taken from the kitchen and unfacetiously forgotten by my bedside. he was malicious, he frightened me, and he delighted in this. he kept away from both of us in the same silent secrecy in which he stalked the game we would eat for every meal. deer sausage for breakfast, catfish for lunch, rabbit stew for dinner. he knew how to be quiet. he knew how to kill, how to string coyotes from the skinning hook that hung from the tree, the four-wheeler parked on the other side of the narrow trail. deer and turkey carcasses, rabbits. a man hidden inside cruelty, yet not for his hunting.

i awoke on sunday mornings to sit in the recliner and watch as many episodes as time allowed of haunted america, the travel channel's most mysterious destinations. it comforted me to find that there is magic in the world. "there are places that aren't here." people in the past lived extraordinary lives. people in the past sat on stone and conjured spirits. i lived in the woods.

[restekova]

[ketamie]

im just sitting in this bar like. and i cross my legs and smoke a cigarette unfacetiously

[broodmotherdearest]

(Okay real talk I actually wrote out a fairly unfacetious thing expanding from that jokey thing that may actually be too long for an ask but first) 👀 are you an angel? I’ve heard the deep space pilots talk about them. They’re the most beautiful creatures in the universe. They live on the moons of Iego, I think.

As the stranger continues on, Mother's head tilts to the side. She has precisely no idea what they're talking about. Another poor soul stoned out of their mind on mother's milk, no doubt. Humans had long since proven they were unable to handle the chemical makeup of the Brood food source.

"I am not. I am a creature of flesh and blood and bone."

[dustedmagazine]

Brian Harnetty — Shawnee, Ohio (Karl)

Photo by Jennifer Harnetty

Shawnee, Ohio by BRIAN HARNETTY

[Ed. note: This review is a mini-Listening Post, encapsulating a dialogue between Peter Taber and Justin Cober-Lake on the album.]

Peter Taber: Brian Harnetty’s Shawnee, Ohio offers 13 tracks of archival interview and other recordings mostly made in the 1980s in a small northern Appalachian mining town, each paired with contemporary acoustic instrumentation composed by the artist. The album is presented as both a musical and a folkloristic project.  On the latter front, it enters complex ground, as Appalachia was important for the development of the field in the U.S. That work filtered out of the academy and into popular ways of regarding the region. Here, for example, the track “Boy” presents a recording of a child inquiring into the experiences of one of his elders.  The recording was made in the 1980s, but in the context of an Appalachian folklore project one senses the imprint of turn-of-the-century field research on the style of interview the boy’s been assigned to conduct (and the fact that he’s been assigned the task in the first place). His questions are overlain with contemporary, deliberately-paced chamber music, dramatizing the interaction. Across multiple temporal frames, then, we glimpse the processes by which communities inquire into, memorialize and nostalgize themselves. This is the most striking feature of the project for me. Justin, what were your initial thoughts?  

Justin Cober-Lake: My first thoughts were to try to figure out exactly what Shawnee, Ohio is. The more I feel unable to figure it out, the more I like the work. It's not a typical folklore project by any means. Harnetty's compositions make up the bulk of the music, and they're not typical Appalachian sounds, despite his interest in the region’s music. Some of it comes more from a chamber music tradition, and some of it connects more to modern indie-folk (I hear some Sufjan Stevens in the sparer moments). The work is also a memory of memory, retrieving decades-old interviews about events that happened decades before that. Some of it is self-aware, as when Jack Wright turns a song from a century ago into an anti-fracking singalong. Memory, anthropology, and music start to blend into a work of art that both encapsulates a town and stands at a remove from it, a pretty meditation on a challenged region. One of the strangest moments for me is the appearance of the saxophone on “John,” which could almost pass as Harnetty's cinematic accompaniment, but which actually comes from a street recording. The whole work becomes something more unified than pastiche, and more complicated than a snapshot, but also something that sits outside its subject more than I expected. I like your point about glimpsing “the processes by which communities...,” but I also wonder about the layer of Harnetty doing something new (memorializing?) with that communal memory. It's moving and revealing, and I imagine we could fill this space just following one of many possible themes, such as anthropology, modern composition, traditional music, or regional political history.  

Peter Taber: You highlighted two of the moments that really struck me, as well.  Like you, the saxophone on “John” caused me to do a double-take, as I attempted to figure out what temporal layer the music came from. The moment also stands out for its spontaneity on an album in which the predominant feeling is deliberative, whether in terms of musical composition or folkloristic inquiry. Finally, some of my confusion about “John” came from the way it had nothing to do with my own narrow vision of what Appalachia is. I was chastened to remember that if someone plays a saxophone in Appalachia, it is, in a very meaningful and unfacetious way, Appalachian music. So “John” is a useful track for me, in which Shawnee is made briefly strange to outsiders like myself by way of this ordinary moment in which no one performs any particular version of Appalachian-ness, but people simply go about living, jubilantly in this case.  “Jack”’s folk song referencing fracking similarly reminds us that struggles over how communities in the U.S., as well as the country overall, relate to fossil fuel extraction are very much ongoing, and that Shawnee is actually at the front lines of that battle. The piece thus pushes back on the fly-in-amber-in-amber quality that a project like this risks, though the textual framing of the work by Harnetty could have gone a little further in this regard for my taste. 

Justin Cober-Lake: I agree that he could have gone further with the framing, although I'm reacting in part to my own interest in understanding a more complicated version of Appalachia than the standard narrative. Harnetty hasn't presented a sociological report, but he's created modern art out of regional history. I don't mean that he's done it disrespectfully. I think just the opposite, in fact; he sees something worth presenting in a novel way to make sure that we listen, an approach that sets it apart from a set of field recordings. The oddity of the project keeps it engaging – I'm never quite sure what I'm mining for in any given listen (pun intended) – but it also delineates the challenges of creating a work like this one. You can get a taste of it online at Harnetty’s website, but I'd be interested to see this work performed as part of a multimedia presentation. I don't know that I'd take anything different away from it, but I'm curious. I'm also curious what audiences would take away. A nice night at a concert? An interest in exploring the area? A raised awareness about fracking? Fortunately the piece isn't so pristine as to be stuck on that first answer.  

Justin Cober-Lake and Peter Taber

[microlite1]

unfacetiously loves old cold black coffee

[washwashgalaxy]

unFACEtious – By William Warigon unFACEtiousThe face of wisdomCould be flippant like an open bookBut seriously mien rulesEvery wrinkle is earned…

[mizjoely]

14 and 15 for the fic meme for A Question of Honor, please!

From this list:

14. Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?

That historical AUs can be fun to read, and that it is possible to take your established characters and plonk them down in an alternate timeline and still have them remain true to themselves (at least, I hope that comes across!).

15. What did you learn from writing this fic?

That there will always be one person happy to lecture you (politely, at least in this case) on the historical inaccuracies in your story, so always take the time to google when the Brits were in MA and when they weren’t. Unfacetiously, it’s always a good idea to check things online when doing a historical fic, and it’s sooo much easier now than it was back in Ye Olden Tymes(TM) of handwritten first drafts, typed final drafts, mailing the story to be included in a zine, etc. 

[lemizzhaphephobia-blog]

A friend of mine was rather viciously dissing me ungiftedly concerning my presentation, so obviously I had to retort unfacetiously with an infantry.. a vocabulary I've been gifted with since infancy, so in this instance she experienced consternation intimately. Imminently, admittedly my rejoinder was riddled with self adulation and immaturity, but stick with me... I said I had this gift since Sesame Street, but it isn't the only facet I've kept since infancy, see... words are my assets, but since I'm rhyming the same words twice... explicitly, I also took immaturity. Thinking purity was the apex... the pinnacle of life... Christianity. But I was cynical, so I asked which would be better... to maintain ones purity, evade jury duty, or effectively murder three. I'm getting side tracked purposely. Sometimes my presentation is shit, but I'm solely... only... totally just eating for me. But the food... I devoured hastily because it might look off, but I literally and symbolically made it tastefully. Blessèd be.