#was indicative of the rest. but if there's one thing to know about the wannabe-rich middle classman it's that his money allocation is

[actually-eldritch]

we want to resume our studying so. so so badly but the eating has to not just be good but consistent over a long period of time and i wish to scream. my brain is full of paywalls nobody warned me could happen. nobody warned me I could become too poor to think at all on a physical level because whilst my faMILY was abusive as shit growing up the conditions were still of a higher class so i developed a brain that had high demands and then started fueling it with not just poor but povertty resources . like im at high risk of being homeless in the next 6 months and i have a brain that puts me in saw traps and basically says "if you don't eat at an average of least 5 meals a day, approximately 3 hours apart, and keep this up for weeks at a time, you will not be awarded access to any of your incomplete but grandiose thought constructs, good fucking luck having a single useful thought because it's not built for your resources"

Nobody fucking warned me about how painful the class drop was. I suppose a lot of that was because they were completely inconsiderate about what the experience of children in higher classes might be. They'll remember that their daddy's are heartless monsters peddaling slavery, and then for some reasojn think that they'll give their riches to their kid no questions asked. What do you think happens when the money loving man has a child with undesireable identities and interests? they torture them and wipe them off the face of the fucking planet. you don't know about it because they don't fucking want you to know about it. have some godamned nuance.

[nicoinverona]

Questions || Nic x Jim

Who: @jim-ofalltrades-montague and @nicoinverona

When: Early December, 2018

What: After a conversation with the Commander, Nic calls Jim Montague in for questioning, trying to find some answers to the rash of fires. If anything, Jim furthers Nic’s belief that he had nothing to do with the fires, and that this is an act against the Montague’s.  Although the why still remains a mystery.

A part of Nic expected Jim to not show up at their agreed upon meeting time.  So much so that he'd already pre-emptively filled out paperwork for a warrant just in case.  He still wasn't convinced the man was explicitly involved in the fires, but the similarities to the man's past irked Nic and left him with some doubts.  And he didn't put it past the Montague's or at the very least, Lord Montague, to set fire to his own businesses to further his agenda.  Nic just wasn't sure what exactly that agenda would be at the moment.  But he also didn't expect Jim Montague to give him too many answers today, at least not about the current fires.  So that wasn't going to be where Nic went with his questions today.

Jim hated this whole thing. He should have expected it really, but part of him had hoped that for once the Montagues would be treated like the damn victims they were instead of the criminals. He'd had too many bad experiences with the Law in the past to even begin to hope this was a casual follow up questioning. Just to please himself, he showed up late to the agreed upon time, knowing that he had grease stains on his shirt from the motor repair he'd done earlier. He just hoped no one called him James. That was too much weirdness on top of the rest of the day. Stalking in, he tossed out his name to the receptionist, figuring they'd already have a nice padded interrogation room ready for him.

Nic was sitting at his desk when Jim arrived, late, but he supposed it was better than not showing up at all.  Hearing the other man's name, Nic stood up and waved him over.  "This way, Mr. Montague," he said showing the other man into a small office.  "Have a seat and we can get started."

Just being an office like this made Jim feel more unsure and angrier, as if the last decade hadn't happened. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he trudged along behind the officer before flopping unceremoniously in the chair indicated. "I'm surprised you didn't have the cuffs already out. Seems to be the usual method with Montagues these days."

"I recall mentioning that we were not charging you so, no, handcuffs are not necessary,"  Nic replied.  "If you need them to feel more comfortable, I'm sure arrangements can be made."  He raised an eyebrow at the other then.  "I'm willing to go a different route than the 'usual method with the Montagues these days' if you're willing to do the same.  By that I mean an attempt at a real conversation involving questions."

Jim just shrugged at the question, leaning back so the chair was tilted off the ground just slightly as he watched the man. Officer Ricci. There was a vague sense of familiarity about him - besides the whole seeing each other in the middle of a smoking building getting people out. The reminder of which had the healing burn on Jim's back itching and he shifted slightly to try and ease the sensation. "Fire away Ritchie."

Nic couldn’t help but laugh.  “Please, we both know in general the Montagues are far more we’ll off than a typical city employee; even a member of the Watch.”  He opened the file and looked at his notes.  “You were at the Halloween event.  I remember seeing you.  Were you at Ms. Lovell’s event prior to the fire as well?”  Nic was pretty sure he’d seen the other Dominant there too.

Jim had to admit, the fact that the man had laughed off the (albeit shitty) pun on his own name instead of getting mad had him raising slightly in Jim's estimation. The ones without the quick temper usually were actually trying to do their job rather than getting off on the power trip. But he'd wait and see. "Yeah." He'd put an order in at the event, they could get that information easily enough so there was no point prevaricating.

“After the fire on Halloween were you asked to or did you take it upon yourself to look into any other Montague holdings?”  Nic asked.  “And if so, did you find anything?”

Jim felt himself tensing again. It was the kind of question that should be simple but he felt like it was leading towards something in particular. "It's my job. Nothing out of the ordinary," he replied shortly.

“I know it’s your job,” Nic replied.  “I just wanted to confirm that and that it was done.  Although with this second fire, there is a shift in the investigation.”  He looked down to his notes.  “This isn’t the first fire you’ve been involved with either is it?”

Jim knew what he was referring to. Honestly, he'd known it was coming as soon as the man had called because of course they'd go back and pul that up - but that didn't mean he was going to make it easy. "Did you lose all your notes from the Apothecary fire? Yeah, I was still there too."

"No.  Just not making any assumptions here," Nic replied.  "And since I'm relying on someone else's notes from Sicily, I have a couple of questions for you.  You were there, correct and helped get people out like at the Apothecary?  And according to the report I see here, the cause was determined to be area kids getting into trouble?  Did you know those kids?"

Of course he'd known them. They'd been proving a point to him by attacking the inn at all, and his mother had been the one to deal with the worst of the consequences. "Area kids. Nice phrase for that."

"Would you care to elaborate on what you'd call them?" Nic asked.  "And how you knew them?"

"Firebugs. Assholes. Mafia wannabes. Rich kids with too much time on their hands and no conscience. I'm sure one of those will appeal to you." He was almost tempted to deny that he'd known them at all, but that wouldn't have worked a decade ago, and with what was in the report, there was no point being stupid. "As you mentioned, area kids. Kids run into each other. School happens. We weren't holding tea parties or any shit like that."

"I would think legitimate firebugs and I would find much, much more about them connected to other fires," Nic surmised.  However the other descriptors were hardly surprising.   Especially the mafia wannabes.  "You're a rare birth Montague aren't you?"

Jim had a lot of tender places in his past, and despite what it appeared, he'd been trying to stay on the civil line of difficult. But the surprise change in tack had his expression darkening as he stared at the Watch Officer. "What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

"You're the one that mentioned mafia wannabes," Nic said.  "It's not so unusual to think that perhaps the Montagues have made some enemies with the Mafia.  Either then or now.  I'm just looking at possible connections, and suspects for these latest two fires."  The Officer folded his arms over his chest.  "Like you said, perhaps it's not standard opperating procedure around here these days, especially with the new Mayor, but even with the last name Montague, and perhaps the obvious access you would have, I don't like you for the culprit.  But with this other fire, and some similarities, I'm just making sure there isn't a connection to you, that we're not overlooking."

Jim slowly clenched his fist as he listened to the other man talk. He knew he should be relieved to hear that the officer didn't think he was a likely candidate, but he knew better than to trust any statement given that easily. "The shit that happened back there wasn't about being a damn Montague and they've had plenty of time to cause problems since. And if they did, they would have made damn sure /I/ knew what it was about. I don't. If I did, that would've been fucking dealt with after the first fire."

"What was it about then?" Nic asked.  "You've got opinions, or ideas, I'd like to hear them.  Make me see that the fire then, and the fires now are different, despite the similarities of you being connected to them, and in the case of the Apocathary, saving people."  He looked down at the old file.  "Do you remember names?  Because the other thing we're looking at is these names at the Apocathary and the Adonis.  We are looking at connections to each other and to the Montague's to explain why their busineses, but it's a lot of really thin straws at the moment."

"They are fucking different. They're a decade apart and a country away, and considering the sheer number of fires that happen annually, that's pretty statistically important. But also, these two happened weeks apart from each other. Whatever started this, it's started now and it's not stopping. Each fire had literal fucking calling cards this time around I'd say that's a damn thick straw to connect them. But also, come on, look at the way those fires were set. Neither were actually designed to hurt anyone. The Apothecary had people in it, but the fire was in the basement and kept away from all the alcohol. That could have easily become an inferno, but it was a scare tactic. Second time around they literally waited until it was all empty. This is all flash and attention grabbing, it's someone trying to make a point. My guess is someone who feels the Watch hasn't done enough to clear the Montagues out of the city so they're trying to lead you by the nose. Which means looking outside the family is probably your best bet."

"Looking at how those fires were set are the main thing keeping the Montagues as suspect," Nic replied cooly.  "Set a fire that could have been a whole lot worse, and have Montague's in the building. " The Dominant left off the fact that Megan, who had been one of the injured was also no longer going to be a Montague as it turned out.  "Then one with no one around, but letting it go all the way down, and meanwhile it disrupts a service for the citizens of the city, puting people on edge and making them vulnerable. "  Not to mention the Adonis would be rebuilt undboutedly in some capacity.  Possibly bigger and better, which could have been needed with business booming.  It's unfortunate, but could be a good thing.   "The names link them for sure, apart from the locations themselves. But it's not clear why the names, and if they're just meant to throw us off.  If as you said it's just about getting the Montague's out of the city, which to be fucking clear,  isn't anyone's but the Princess purview, there is no need for the names.   Even our Mayor knows HE can't just get your crew out of here.  Which is why I'm sure he's cracking down on crime,  and chasing any involvement by your family.  Make Verona a less than hospitable environment."   He raised an eyebrow at Jim.  "Katerina died 5 years ago.  About half way between when that fire did and the more recent ones. So don't throw time at me like it's some magic clear all."

Jim let out a disgusted sound, rolling his eyes. "Right. Because it's so hard to believe that Montagues could actually be the fucking victims for once. It's our businesses getting burned down, our revenue we're losing, our customers, and now that there are two fires it's going to make people question pretty damn hard if it's worth it to go to anything run by Montagues in case there's yet another fire. We're just always the fucking villains to you aren't we?" He understood the man's point about time, but he wasn't sure how to explain it any better than he already had without going into way more detail than he had ever shared. "Look, if this was anything to do with those kids from Sicily, you can be fucking sure they wouldn't give a damn about whether or not people were inside those buildings. They didn't 10 years ago, and they sure as hell wouldn't care now. And if it was about me, there would be something recognizable in it. My name. My mother's name. Hell, even a name or a symbol that I'd recognize from high school. But there isn't. And this is a huge waste of time."

Nic scoffed.  "Honestly, yeah it is kind of difficult to see /some/ Montague's as victims at all.  Almost as difficult it is for me watch /some/ Capulets in a similar position."  He had enough reasons personal and professional alike to not see either as victims no matter the situation.  The Montague's wouldn't be the first to attempt insurance fraud afterall and some short term pain like Jim just described would easily be covered by new, better buildings, possibly bigger, and in a way increasing their business and revenues long term.   Instead he listened to the other go on about how there would be a sign or s sumbol that he'd recognize from high school if the two were connected, which was a fair enough point, but it wasn't also one Nic or any other of the Watch would know.  But something about the outburst made Nic give it some merit.  Still, it was something he'd look into himself as well, possible signs or symbols and look for them in connection with either fire.  But his gut still said, as it had when the Captain had him pull in the Montague Repairman, that this wouldn't result in a lead.  "A waste of your time, but you just knocked down two areas of suspicion we were pursuing.*  Nic jotted down a couple of more notes, crossing out a couple of things and then looked at Jim.  "Thank you for your time."

Jim sneered at the confirmation of what he'd said. But as soon as the officer said that he was finished he pushed himself to his feet and stalked off, not bothering to say anything else. What he wanted was to get out of this Watch station more than anything. Before he did something even stupider which got him arrested yet again. All he knew now was that he needed to get back home.

[ratherhavetheblues]

INGMAR   BERGMAN’S ‘SUMMER INTERLUDE’ “Get the lead out, little lady!”

© 2020 by James Clark

     Way back, when Ingmar Bergman was a hack by necessity, he found himself (being an acute student of Hollywood flutter) ready at last (around 1950) to speak his piece. The vehicle he chose for this debut, namely, Summer Interlude (1951), involves all the treachery and emotional violence mowing us down for the next forty years. Although his portfolio would include marvelous instances transcending destruction, those marvels would be hedged in a way that protracted evil would seem to triumph on planet Earth. But what is planet Earth but a sick puppy in face of the infinite potential of the cosmos? In the days of Summer Interlude, however, we should not neglect the singularity of heartiness putting in a dynamic (perhaps) never to be seen from him again. This singularity is the special gift and the special task of our film today.

Whereas, at the outset of a saga like Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972), there is a piercingly beautiful rendition of the grounds of a large estate in early morning light, only to become promptly swallowed up by vicious interaction and horrific physical decline and death, the tyro matter goes to sheep-dog persistence to show us that an agency of uncanny love is very much in the mix. Not being able to deploy (as with the film of 1972) remarkable chromatic effects, our preamble reveals an estate of some opulence, rich foliage including daisies in bright sunlight and gentle breezes, benign white clouds and, particularly, a body of dancing water with a rocky shore to be displaced with the sea looking back toward the now distant structure, touched by a carefree flute motif. (The last detail to note here, is three chevron-form windows at the mansion’s upper floor. That they resemble jaws as well as a formation of dialectics indicates how early Bergman’s instincts for synthesis were in play.)

  Plunging right through that whimsy, only to engage more whimsy, there is the harbor of Stockholm and its flotilla of tour boats and ferries to be supplanted by a bicycle parked at a curb while leaves dance along the sidewalk. Promptly we enter a ballet theatre and its hubbub, which could have shattered the intuitive dance. That it doesn’t, has to do with the two ancient, long-term office functionaries, first seen receiving a package for the prima ballerina, Marie, and shooing off a reporter claiming, “She’s [Marie’s]  expecting me.” With this mundane buzz, there emerges, by way of the courier/ messenger, a surprise: “What’s that smell?” Though the more assertive sentry claims that there is no smell, there is the delivery boy pressing the case, “You’ve lost your sense of smell, friend.” (With that, the discoverer pushes his hat into a rakish angle. This action tends to confirm that the reporter—his tabloid called, “The Year Round,” being about the usual—is dressed to resemble a whimsical and eccentric Hollywood detective with his trench coat and rakish fedora.) The smaller of the two sentries comes to life with, “Something does smell funny!”—something in the air we should take seriously. The rotund top-cop loses his temper about that volatility and yells out, “That may well be, but no outside brat’s gonna be telling me that! I’ve worked at this theatre for 40 years…” An in-crowd shaping up, disinclined for change. The delivery to “Miss Marie,” by the second-in-command, becomes another rakish motion, this time not so tacky as the poses of American tough guys. The boss-sentry rips open the curtain behind which he directs traffic and instantly there is the little old flunkey ripping open Marie’s dressing room and presenting her with the package. The shock of that gusto links to the mysterious “smell,” invading the ordinary with a type of acrobatics. (Here we have the comedic outset of what will become, in The Seventh Seal [1957], a blue-chip uprising against arrogant insiders.) In support of noticing that a dance is in force, somewhat supplanting the rigid activity of the ballet, we have a number of dancers in tutu costumes, seen from below on a rather precipitous catwalk down flights of narrow stairs. Almost simultaneously with that rush to a dress rehearsal, we hear a loud, grinding noise filling the hall. This also coincides with Marie’s opening her package to be jolted by the diary of a former lover who died while she watched him carelessly dive into a rocky seaside, along a trajectory of compromising distraction and superficiality which he—not she—could have averted. This unexpected arrival eclipses the work in progress. With everyone in place except her, many of the bemused run to the sense that Marie is losing her grip. We hear, “Something’s going on with Marie. Everyone says so!” (A cut to the stage curtain, and it strikes us as dark and fussy with frills.) Marie is induced to return to be a team artist, but her escort, one of the many support staff needed to satisfy a pedantic culture, worries, “There’s something strange in the air today! I told the missus so when I woke up. The weather and all, and I had a strange dream… Something’s going to happen, I feel it coming…” After a short passage with the premiere (the dancers performing the ballet, Swan Lake) and during an expectant musical thrust, the lights go out.

The on-again, off-again lighting is “some king of glitch,” necessitating an evening dress rehearsal. But the “glitches” we’ve just experienced speak to an agency—always there but seldom noticed. Surely the arrogant ballet master alerting Marie that there is to be a lull in the workplace that day and going on to be viciously rude toward an elderly woman helper of the dressing room, would be missing in action regarding that agency. (He tells the ballerina, “I’m cool.” But no one’s fooled about that, since cool is the medium of disinterestedness, also known as acrobatics.)

We’ll follow how Marie spends that rest, and whether she amounts to anything better than the laughable wannabe. She goes out, but before that she stops at the phone booth at the doorway, to connect with the man from “The Year Round” [the everyday, the common]. She can’t reach him. But can she reach the pattern of meteor-passes on the phone booth glass? On hearing from the decades-long bouncer that he had bounced her date, she spits out, “They should send you packing!” That being exactly the register of the “cool” one. The hapless doorman remarks, “There’s something hard about her.” Marie bumps into the person of interest while yawning, and meandering along a sidewalk. She complains to him, “I’m tired because you won’t let me sleep at night.” Thus, ensues a bitter row about preoccupation with career, culminating with him telling her, “I can’t stand old sourpusses!” She has carried along the diary, and when, at the docks, passing a tour boat ready for an excursion, she is rallied by a crewman calling, “Get the lead out, little lady! Are you coming or not?” She can’t resist a bid to shake things up, to recapture what she imagines to have been the heights of love. A sprightly harp motif joins her windfall along with the sunny sky and lovely seas, in addition to a white wake and white smoke from the chimney, conspiring with the white clouds. She enters a precinct of thrilling space, serenity and its brave instincts. Pensive, while the boat skirts a forest, she could be seen to be an artist of vast promise.

   On reaching her destination, she finds the key to a small and decrepit cabin, where she sits on a dusty cot. She closes her eyes and recalls a summer day 13 years before, when she graduated into the corps de ballet, by way of a celebratory performance. “A day like no other day of the year!” But she had to include, within this treasure of skill, the complaint, to one of the trainers, “That was awful! The orchestra played too slow…” Her listener replies, “Don’t try that one…” [to cover errors by blaming others, resorting to place others at a disadvantage]. She then shifts the advantage game to the form of, “It didn’t go well…” [I’m a perfectionist without peers]. The more mature correspondent here covers the cut-throat’s vanity with, “No, but you were brilliant…” All he gets in reply is, “I’m going home to have a good cry.” Frustrated, his retort is, “You do that.”

Marie may have been in the spotlight here. But her account includes another male backstage, smitten by her sensuous presence and early authority. He’s quickly disposed of by the larger sentry, before being introduced. But we should know right now (before succumbing to overkill from the measure of wholesomeness this movie packs) that Marie, for all her impressive resolve, is locked, as is most of the population, into life-long superficiality, with occasional faint hope being to no avail. And yet, this Bergman standby will in fact be tempered—not simply, as with the usual drama over the years, a demolished gem—by a perpetual vector of efficacy (a glitch), notwithstanding having been virtually never taken out on the road. Whereas the young admirer, far more capable of real artistry and power than she, will die in the course of taking her too seriously, he will have deposited, in his diary, the wherewithal (and he is not alone in this challenge) to shut down a gigantic farce. We do need to notice and celebrate the many upbeat moments, because their sunniness is quite unique in the works of Bergman. And thereby we are enmeshed in a critique: on the order of loosening up (somewhat) the good stuff.

   Out she goes (in her reverie), on the same boat she would use after the quarrel with the reporter, for her summer holiday, and who should be seated next to her but Henrik, the finder of celestial apparitions. She remarks (not exactly a calling card), “It’s cold.” His shy and awkward reply is, “Are your legs cold, miss? I mean, since you’re a dancer…” He goes on to declare, “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” After sorting out each of their positions on the Stockholm Archipelago, the impressiveness of Marie’s home takes precedence. He jokes, “Yeah, the Manor. Gruffman [his large poodle] and I used to raid the orchard there.” This brings out more coldness in the ballerina: “Perhaps our paths will cross, if only if you come to raid the orchard,” she stakes out a far from equitable intercourse.

Now that we’ve floated the crisis (a much lower key than that of, say, The Passion of Anna (1969), we’re treated to Marie’s susceptibility to cogency when alone and heeding “glitches.” She wakes up on the cot to be welcomed by a foursome of intense squares of light upon the wall. (The makings of a twosome without attitude?) She hums a happy tune while putting on her bathing suit, and then she opens wide her arms to the sun. She carries a long fishing pole to her rowboat at the dock, and we regard her smoothly rowing from a seagull’s perspective, which is also the perspective of disinterestedness. Who knew? We’re treated here to a play of rallies, the likes of which are very rare in the Bergman catchment. She drops anchor, puts a worm on her hook and falls asleep in the molten sun. A cuckoo sings. (No matter that her endeavor here comes to naught. This film has opened up a very long-term payoff.) The splash of Henrik’s diving into the waters nearby wakens her to a divided result. She is amused by his whimsy; but also displeased to feel exposed that she can’t handle the rigors. “Hello, again,” she takes up a form of pecking order. “Swim, miss?” he invites, perhaps having taken umbrage with her seeing him as a thief. “Too cold,” she maintains. “Try,” he argues, all smiles. And therewith Marie finds a way to put him at a disadvantage. “Think we could drop the formalities?” the modernist tweaks the old-fashioned. She takes further control by asking, “Do you like wild strawberries?” And away they go, with a harp fanfare, to her place. “No one knows about it.” While they are enjoying the treats, a bird calls so furiously that she becomes confused. He shrugs it off with, “I usually call it the summer vacation bird.” (One other aspect of the wild things in this skirmish is Gruffman, the dog, in the process of losing his special fluency with the boy.)

   As the summer goes very wrong, Marie makes a point of having nothing to do with Gruffman’s equilibrium. On hearing from the college boy of his having been shunted off by his divorced father to a rich and hateful aunt, Marie tries to bring to bear her vision of soaring virtue. “I love blind kittens, don’t you? And babies… And people that other people think are ugly. And mice, of course.” (How close to Anna, the martinet of “Security,” in the film, The Passion of Anna, is Marie?) As an afterthought formality, she adds, “and poodles.” How much did she care about Gruffman? After Henrik’s death, she demands having the deep creature put done, with the slimy concern, “The poor thing shouldn’t have to live” [in malaise].

Henrick’s not feeling that his concerns are getting across to her—“It’s just that people don’t take me seriously…”/ “Oh dear,” she chuckles, “is it really as tragic as that?”—prompts him to declare, “No one cares about me but Gruffman…”/ “Really,” she mocks./ “No,” he insists, “only Gruffman!” The conversation continues to fall short of serious connection. “What about me? Do you care about me? Would I have brought you here if I didn’t?” is her infantile rationale./ Even a freshman could smell that glitch. He politely replies, “I’ll have to give that some serious thought.” Serious thought, about a gulf, crashes into him immediately, by her happy face, “I’m never going to die.” Not content with pushing around the population, Marie has no qualms about pushing around the cosmos. And before leaping to the conclusion that she’s a dancer, period, we should be alert to the possibility that her moments of vision at the beginning of the morning might just touch upon an agency—far from about forever alive—which could move a headstrong dancer-laborer to recognize that powers do surpass and sustain mere human physiology right up to a right death. “I may get really, really old, but I’ll never die.” Henrik, after fielding this matter of incredible self-concern, shares his very different sense of “serious thought.” “While, I’m scared… Scared that I, Henrik, will suddenly fall over the edge into something dark and unknown.”/ “Why do you talk like that?” she complains. He explains, “The feeling just comes over me [a glitch], clear as can be…” He smiles, having in fact reached the same territory of Marie’s gratitude; but from another, more visceral angle. “But it’s interesting, don’t you think?” Henrik looks for a link. She smiles uncommittedly. But she does manage to maintain, “Hey, Henrik, I think we’re going to be friends.”/ “I think so too,” he hopes. (Here, we should delight in the helmsman’s great craft in theatrical dialogue, casting light where darkness has prevailed.)

   This high ground proves to lack traction. Here she is, back to her default zone at the estate, receiving, from a rich uncle who hopes to bed her one day, an expensive bracelet. This Uncle Erland, an amateur classical pianist of some finesse, grows his hair patrician-long; and, in the midst of it, he installs two strands of white curls which set the table for the kind of synthesis Marie and Henrik struggle to master. Erland, teased by Marie that he lusted for her now-deceased mother, trains his rationale toward a supposed supernal gift which Marie’s actress-mother possessed. Marie, in her most sustained register, teases and triumphs, “And is the bracelet a token of my artistry?” Her uncle, frequently drunk, advises, “We’d run away, you and I… and live life to the fullest… seize the moment and hold it tight…” In reply, she maintains, “I already seize the moment and hold it tight.” Her patron dismisses that arrogance, telling her, and laughing, “You think so, poor dear? Lucky the man who will teach you. There’s so much to life…” The lunch dissolves with her coquetry, seen often, no doubt, at many affairs. But rushing to the traction involving Henrik, , she finds that he had been once again trespassing and overhearing the minor cynicism. (Erland’s wife, regarding with him her racing off, states, “She’s run off, dear Erland, and you can’t catch her.” Sometime after the death of Henrik, he will reel her in, for a while.) A frosty new friend greets her, and Gruffman doesn’t even look her flighty way. She uses the dog as a ventriloquist’s doll: “Gruffman, why’s he mad?” Clearing the air, she refers to the gift-giver as merely “an old codger,” and adds, once again, “Is it as tragic as all that?” She cuddles up, and then pushes him into the nearby waters. “I got you!” she adds. A cut reveals the three returning in his canoe. Her voice-over, covering the scene as Henrik wrote in his diary, emphasizes, “One night, after a scorching summer day of blazing sunlight, there was an immense silence that reached all the way up to the starless vault of heaven… The silence between us was immense as a well…” Hopping gracefully from one small purchase of the treacherous surface to another, she induces Henrik to follow suit, which he does. (Two forms of poetry.) The friends lie on their bellies upon the flat rocks. She adds, “The rocks are still warm. His contribution—“Everything seems unreal tonight, don’t you think?”—elicits from her, “It’s beautiful” [beautiful as a bracelet?]. A small “glitch” having come to concentration for her, brings to her: “We’re inside the same bubble… It’s so beautiful I could burst, break into pieces and disappear without a trace [“I’ll never die” a poor fit for this understanding]… You know, kissing must be fun…” His response, “Must be, since everybody’s doing it” [in sexy Sweden], once again doesn’t find them on the same page. He thinks out loud, “Everything’s so difficult, and all connected somehow… Marie, I like you. I’m in love with you, and all that… I mean… You must think I’m stupid. I’m just a damned fool. A damned coward!” And once again she drops the ball. “How does it feel?” she asks. (Not the big picture; but, “How am I doing to brighten your melancholy?”) “What?” he wonders, is she talking about. She clarifies, “You said you’re in love with me.” He, wanting to drop the subject going nowhere that could work for him in her context, puts out a slap-dash cliché, “You feel it in your chest and stomach.” This brings her to the failing of poetry, and she laughs at him. Having a miserable time expressing the subject by duress, he struggles with a quicksand of language. “You’re knees feel like they’re full of applesauce, and your toes curl up. But it’s mostly in the chest.” (Bergman’s ironic bite here involving a possibility to make amends, given long enough time to live. She, facile most of the time, amends, “In the heart.”) “I don’t know what,” he puts an end to the revealing farce. But he politely asks, “What about you?” She, having been accorded all her life the license to duck out of conundrums, rudely shoots back, “Who said I was in love with you?”/ “You’re right,” he acknowledges—and this would have been his cue to do something else during his vacation. But from her perspective there was nothing more interesting here than toying with reflection. She comes up and puts his arm  around her shoulders. “I think it’s in my skin,” she gets around to replying to his asking about the subject. “I want you to touch me and stroke my skin with your hands…” As he moves to kiss her, she rushes away, whips out a cigarette, hands it to him and they proceed to toss flat stones into the inlet. Far from the creative acrobatics stalking this film, the rippling of the waters doesn’t catch fire. Then they canoe, and their return is bemusing. She marches straight on to the dock, leaving the more evolved two to bring the awkward craft to steadiness. Their land route passes cherry blossoms and a peacock, but they meet the beauty with less than incisiveness. (Traction missing.)

   Now both of them needing a new outlook on life, they visit the salon of the estate of Erland. “He’s probably a bit drunk, but don’t worry about,” are the opening notes by her aunt. They sit on a polar bear rug, and listen to Erland tell of, “Your mother, Marie, used to dance for me on evenings  like this… when it was quiet and still, and moonlight filled the room …” (Less than celestial? Or once celestial?) He moves on to, “Now all the clocks in the house have stopped… We were alive in those days…” Marie escorts Henrik to the garret room where she is supposed to work out every day, during the closure of the ballet. Here Marie, in voice-over, reads Henrik’s read of the moment. “It was the ship’s horn tooting in the distance, and other things echoing too. The silence and the anticipation… The blood whispering in our ears. A strange mood set in… almost like a melody [a musical progression]. A new room opened up in our minds…” Then she resumes the jist of her leaden factuality. “Two crows talk in the trees every day at 4 a.m. They’re quite sweet… Then your “summer vacation bird” appears…” Henrik is recalled as responding to this introduction, “You sound like a museum guide…” She responds with, “I think we should kiss each other…” The choreography of her gleaming eyes, his soldiering forth, and his ending on top of her on the carpet is indelible, not requiring any additions. Henrik gently touches her cheek. Then a deep kiss and a pan to Gruffman with his own saga of alienation. A cut to the morning, discloses only their arms and hands reaching upward and touching, as if a primer were found to be a better bet. Marie, as if to disarm any notion  of her being not so bad, becomes a radio soap opera ingénue. “Now you have a lover… How does it feel? Exciting? I’m sure you’ll tell your friends. Will you boast about us?” Properly miffed by this violence, he says, “I can’t give any guarantees. But we will get married.” She commands, “But now! How do you feel right now? Haven’t you longed for this?” He once again admits having had fears. “And you’re not now,” she probes, being almost a selfie about making a splash. On hearing that he’s no longer afraid, she has to brag, “I’m never afraid of anything!”

That gross overestimation becomes the mantra of her dark solution to form a happy ending (for her) within their deadly reconnaissance. She covers his mouth as he adds, “I am” [afraid]. That cover will launch her woodland theatrical regime, going lickety-split to shed an unsupportable endeavor. (Gruffman’s being a steady source of love becomes almost totally lost in the shuffle.) And they race to the shore—Hollywood-intensity-style—early rebels without a (viable) cause. A piccolo motif applying a whip, we see them on the lake, she in her stolid rowboat, they in their lyrical canoe. Then to the vicinity of their cabin-castle, where he lifts her over his head as if on the ballet stage, the Romantic-era fantasy so wrong in this world of very hard acrobatics, and only then deploying juggling which might catch fire. A rain shower leads to them hunkering down on the cabin cot. Marie reads the unwelcome passage, “Days like pears, round and lustrous, threaded on a golden string [onscreen, a stormy sky… a church]. Days filled with fun and caresses, nights of waking dreams. When did we sleep? We had no time for sleep…”

Pan to Marie in real time. She finds Erland in his kitchen. He tells her, “Nothing’s ever surprised me in my life.” Boarding the boat back to the rehearsal, the sway of a lamp lights up more reverie, the reverie of her putting her foot down. It begins with her on pointe, working out in the garret. The arrival of Henrik and Gruffman is nothing but an annoyance. “So, it’s you two…” The two visitors sit on the floor feeling hated. After a while, Henrik says, “You don’t care about me. I’m always waiting for you.”/ “I’ve got a job to do… Fine… Just say the word…” She reasons, “We’ve been together night and day for two months… Good lord, you’re a pain today! Here I am groveling and apologizing… Just go. I’m fed up with your moods…” [moods being their real “job to do”]. She does engineer a truce upon this shaken basis, telling us, “I spent the whole day looking for him…” She finds him at his hostel/ mansion, where an influential aunt and a clergyman with a big hat, remind us of the trials of Alice in Wonderland. (This being another instance of lazy mood headed for LA.) Their being addicted to chess opens the door to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. As if a marvel of paradox, the grandee claims, “I like living. That’s why I’ll outlive the bunch of you! Nevertheless, I still feel like a ghost.” Marie passes on the invitation to enjoy the “port.” Also, part of the awkward standoff, the divine states, “This may seem ridiculous, but I have the strange feeling I’m rubbing elbows with Death himself” [a reprise of the frissons at the outset].

As if now the Red Queen must rule, they encounter a fizzling fireworks display, move on to the cabin and play dubious razzmatazz vinyl discs,  which bleed over to early Disney animation (by her) drawn on a paper sleeve. The show (while they drink their diminished milk) features them: Gruffman, made to sit down, while the lovers flirt; Gruffman becoming the fat sentry; and the old lady’s chest of money coming their way. The last vignette has the chest of money, the preacher and a wedding not happening. The chest changes to the big sentry, the ballerina becomes morose, and all that is left is Henrik’s sailor hat and a ballerina being the dying swan of the ballet, Swan Lake. From there, she declares, melodramatically, “Listen, it’s so quiet. Suddenly, everything went quiet.”/ “Maybe we’ve landed on another planet,” is how Henrik now unhappily reveals his capitulating to Disney. “An alien planet,” Marie piles on [about to claim a victim]. They crawl out of the little doorway, bathed in moonlight (doing its best). The one never afraid of anything becomes uneasy about a crying wind. His attempt to calm her, while having bought into her bathos, slides along to, “Such fine breasts you have, miss!” That jag of witlessness culminates with her, “As for me, I’ll be faithful as long as I feel like it. And since I always feel like it, I’ll be faithful till doomsday.” (The register here is just to the left of pre-Code-Hollywood.) There is a loud bird call. “What an ominous sound!” she shudders. (One person’s shudder being another person’s glitch. Both of them miles from their personal best, while personal becomes a disease.) He, dragged along by her cripplement, says, at this point of worn-down traction, “Don’t you recognize the eagle owl?” Oblivious to the puerility they have contracted, there she is, “I don’t know. I just feel like crying tonight. It’s like a toothache in my soul.” Hollywood forever, she emotes, “Hold me so I don’t break into pieces!” He, never realizing embracing a crash, replies, “My little darling. My love. My dearest darling and beloved friend. Hold me tight. Tighter. Let’s stay up all night until the sun rises, and the trolls burst…”

It’s the morning of the supposed Olympian love cake, and he’s ready to keep the so-called magic alive. He scampers to the top of a picturesque ridge overlooking the pretty waters, and takes flight. The rock face he rocks leaves him close to death. Gruffman comes to his struggle to right the ship that might have resolved to something she’d never become. By the time she arrives at the hard facts, he tells her—all poetry lost—“My back!” (His “back,” his second front of deadly and ravishing truth, if only he could have steadied it, becomes a fitting epitaph to a young adventurer.

The conclusion of Henrik’s life is not quite the conclusion of Henrik’s being a player in Marie’s life. The saga’s last moments comprise the lovers, in a Stockholm hospital room, where he regains consciousness for a few seconds before dying. Her strongest emotion is horror, not love. She had arrived wearing a chic, shiny black leather coat, giving her continuity with the American melodramas she had burrowed into at the end of the summer. (Similarly, she suggests here an oil slick.) Her retreat from the hospital, with no further concern toward any sequel, is as stagey as it is incipiently uncanny. Piling on the pushy “mystery,” she and Erland (he having secured the diary) create a film noire parade along a corridor while exiting the mishap. First there is Marie, enclosed by shadows resembling prison bars. Following her, like a gumshoe, there is the silhouette of Erland pulling on his European habit like a cape. From out of that delirium, she condemns Gruffman to death and allows Erland to confirm her sense of being cheated by life, resentful nihilism. “I’d spit in his [God’s] face!” The uncle/ paramour, holds forth with, “Protect yourself, build a wall around yourself, so the misery can’t get to you.” She tells us—the diary segueing to the career of a prima ballerina of questionable quality—“That’s how I forgot Henrik… In the end, I wasn’t just protected but locked inside…”

   That trace of self-criticism needs thirteen years to yield a pitiful “recovery,” as problematic-heavy as noir is problematic-light. The evening rehearsal proceeds nicely; but Marie’s concentration remains divided. The sentry informs her that the “hack” with the trench coat had been at the door again, “but he left.” She assures those ancients that she saw him. This surprises them inasmuch as, “it didn’t make her happy either…” In her inner sanctum she’s visited with eerie features of décor; but “it didn’t make her happy, either.” A visit from one of the leaders of the company, trying out his disguise for the figure of Dr. Coppelius—wherein the latter attempts to bring to life a puppet—has the same haplessness, concerning lightening up, as the décor did. “You don’t dare leave, yet you don’t dare stay… You see your life clearly just once… when all your protective walls come tumbling down. You stand there naked and cold… seeing yourself as you really are… I can see it in your eyes” [that you have had such a brush]… Then the hack obtrudes; and a hack interplay, from both “lovers,” ensues. She asks, “What do you think of the two of us, really? We’re nothing to write home about.” She comes to a point of veering. She blurts out, “So now, Henrik…” The voice of the street pounces on this, “Is my name Henrik?” She replies by handing him the diary and telling him to read it overnight. (What would come of it, she has no idea; but she would be forming some possibilities trailing out to others.) In a voice-over, this time not manufactured by Henrik, she tells us, “I feel like crying all this week and next… Crying away all my shabbiness… and all this wasted time… [But] Do I want to cry at all? If I really look deep inside, I’m actually happy!” (She puts out her tongue to the mirror she has been subjecting herself to. The Hollywood soundtrack only approximates her mood.)

All we pretty much see of the next day is a bit of the performance of Swan Lake. One twist shows the noire lover backstage during the bittersweet saga. Did he read the diary carefully? Probably not. Marie, in a lull where she’s not onstage, brings him to a place of rendezvous and she touches his cheek. Then she’s back onstage where her steps bring her to a rather awkward pyramid of less than sublime acrobatics.

Does the oracle in the Dr. Coppelius disguise speak truth about, “You see your life clearly just once?” How about three or four times? Would that be a life? How far could Henrik (a very early version of the Dr. Borg, in Wild Strawberries [1957]) have gone, were he never foolishly became in awe of Marie? From here on in, we must ponder the vast subtleties of this neglected open door of a film by Bergman, having slammed  perhaps a bit too forcefully his clowns. It is well and good to measure the horrors of “virtuousness.” But interludes of magic there bring to bear a second front, and its acrobatics and juggling.

[frazzledsoul]

So on the subject of plot holes the size of a very angry meteor that were opened up in the Gilmore Girls revival, I thought I would focus on one in particular . . . the brief discussion Luke and Lorelai have about April’s post graduation trip to Germany.

The reason I bring this up is that the majority opinion seems to be that this is just another sign of Luke’s possessiveness over April and continued willingness to shut Lorelai out. However, I do not exactly see it that way. I think this little discussion was put in place deliberately to bring up the fact that these two are not quite as committed as they seem and that this is an issue in their relationship that will come up later in the hour. However, I also think that this a totally normal parent/stepparent discussion that show no real ill will on Luke’s part.

First of all, this is a relatively minor matter compared to the detente that arose between Luke and Lorelai over April in the original series. Luke initially didn’t want Lorelai to speak to or spend any time with his daughter, and downplayed the existence of his relationship in front of her. We don’t see anything like that in the finale. Luke isn’t saying that Lorelai can’t speak to April or spend time with her or try to figure out what is going on in her life. They just sat down to a family dinner together: Lorelai has literally just done all of those things just moments before. April is a grown woman: whether her quasi stepmom helps pay for this trip is not going to make an iota of difference in her life. I don’t think Luke not wanting to take Lorelai’s money for something she is not that enthusiastic about in the first place of is that big of a deal and when they do fight later on in the episode, it has nothing to do with the kids at all.

I do see a few other things going on with that scene, and they have very little to do with Luke being possessive. Lorelai brings up that Luke has paid for a significant amount of April’s tuition at MIT (which in reality costs almost as much as Yale) and is also paying for grad school. She suggests that April should get a job to pay for the trip instead. Luke says that he can “swing” the trip, which seems to imply that the days when he had literally thousands of dollars to lavish on Lorelai as a single man are long in the past.

The implication seems to be that April is somewhat spoiled, and that Luke is tapped out after paying for her education.

Does Lorelai have a point here? Maybe. We aren’t given enough information about the situation to say either way. Why isn’t April’s terrible mother paying for any of this? Did April go to private school or rack up any other expenses as a teenager that Luke was responsible for? Did she too have the equivalent of a yacht-stealing phase?

We don’t know. You see what I mean about plot holes. Maybe we could have cut the fat-shaming or the endless musical to get slightly more information on this topic.

What we do know is that Rory has just moved home (at the age of 32) with no prospects or job of her own or even any definite plans to get one or ever move out. The Palladinos are all over the place as far as Rory’s financial situation goes. However, the fact that this episode seems to settle on Rory planning to obtain a two-bedroom apartment in Queens when she has spent months not looking for a job seems to indicate that she does have a trust fund, and is not exactly as destitute as she claims.

So I can see Luke looking at the situation with Rory, and not wanting to push things because he considers her his daughter, too, but also wondering how serious the situation is and if she has any plans to ever move out. I can see him getting more than a little irked at Lorelai’s hypocrisy about this situation. I can see him thinking he should be the one asking if the other kid should get a job. I can see him honestly wanting to do something nice for his daughter all by himself and being stubborn about it. I can see him thinking this is part of the deal Lorelai laid out for them a long time ago, and things have seemed to be working out fine until recently, so he wants to honor it. I can see him thinking if he does let her help out, since she also doesn’t approve of it, he will have to hear about it for the rest of the summer. I can see him getting a little angry about the implication that April is spoiled, since everything he has paid for comes out of his own sacrifices and hard work. He didn’t have rich parents who could help out, and he didn’t contribute anything for the first twelve years, and maybe he still feels guilty about that.

And he could bring some of this up, but the kids are literally feet away and there’s no way he’s going to start a fight in front of them. This isn’t the time or place, and he probably shouldn’t.

So it’s a lot easier for him to just say no, and in many ways it is a wise decision since Lorelai doesn’t approve, anyway. But I didn’t read any evil intent behind it. 

Luke and Lorelai may be married now and fully committed to each other, but this type of discussion is likely to come up a lot in the future. My parents are both married to their second spouses* and I have four stepsiblings: I have watched these types of discussions take place on both sides for years. When I or one of my stepsiblings have a problem or a favor to ask, we tend to go to our biological parent first, not the stepparent. Sometimes there are differences of opinion, and the stepparent has to sometimes decide to just let things go. And all of that is okay, and not necessarily a bad thing. 

(And when the stepparent is my mother, it means I am the one who has to hear about it for weeks or months or years on end, but that’s another topic).

*Okay, my parents were technically not married, but can I be blamed if they were retrograde wannabe hippies? Not the point here. Oh, my crazy kin.

[jemkook-blog]

the reason why

word count: 5318 pairing: yoonmin playlist: the reason why by halcyosu (me)

warning! mentions of alcohol

the first time that yoongi meets jimin, it’s more like a dream than a conversation, colors whirling brightly as jungkook tugs on his hand and insists that it can’t just be the two of them and namjoon, that yoongi needs someone to talk to in case namjoon and jungkook get too caught up in each other.

“are you setting me up on a double date?” yoongi asks dryly, but he can’t find it in himself to even be a little angry when there are cheers and laughter and when the amusement park all around them is filled with life. besides, he knows that his best friend doesn’t mean anything by it. yoongi, jungkook, and namjoon had always been the power trio, but things had been a little off since two of them fell in love. it was nice to have them looking out for him as they always did, and he secretly hoped that whoever this person was, they would be relaxed enough to join their group.

he wasn’t expecting someone whose height is equal to his own with a face that looks as though it’s been touched by an angel. he’s all smiles as he introduces himself, and yoongi relies on his usual quiet demeanor to cover up the fact that he’s astounded by the galaxies that seemed to reside within park jimin.

love at first sight might be a stretch, but there’s an immediate attraction that he can feel tugging deep in the pit of his stomach.

the day passes all too soon, even though it’s been eight hours since jungkook had dragged yoongi into the park, but yoongi spends all of it trying not to betray the new feeling that he feels blossoming in his chest and spreading pink petals across his cheeks. when namjoon asks, a hint of wry knowing in his voice, he blames it on the cheap bottle of soju that they had picked up after dinner.

“i didn’t take you for a lightweight,” jimin says, his tone teasing, and yoongi reassures him that he’s anything but - he had picked up another bottle on the sly and had it all to himself. this isn’t a lie; the desperate, vaguely panicked look that he had spent so much of the day had come out when talking to the cashier, and she kindly offered him another bottle half off.

“is it the one with the sunrise hair?” she asked curiously, and she took the bitter curve of his grin as assent. she gave him a genuine smile of her own. “the two of you would look cute together, i think. if you have any more friends, though, please bring them my way. all of you are gorgeous.”

startled, he let out a bark of laughter, and the cashier looked pleased, as though that had been her intention the entire time. she passed him the two bottles and watched with vague amusement as he slipped one into the inside pocket of his loose black hoodie.

“damn selfish bastard,” namjoon says, and they dissolve into tipsy laughter. “i hate it when you pull this kind of shit on us.” he turns to jimin. “don’t be friends with him. he’s a fucking piece of shit, and i would know. i’ve known him since we were young.”

jimin flashes a smile that could outshine the sun, and it causes yoongi’s heart to pound in his chest erratically. “i think you’re selling him a little short, don’t you think? he’s quiet on roller coasters, unlike your bitch ass.”

and yoongi falls into something that tastes like love and a bottle of soju with one small comment. he’s not sure he even wants to get out.

the second time that yoongi meets jimin finally feels like reality. he’s had his morning cup of coffee, and seeing jimin in his recording studio is startling, but he doesn’t wonder if his drink had been laced with adderall like he might have if he had been seven cups deeper into his creative process.

“hi,” jimin says, looking nervous but somehow still holding himself with an alluring natural confidence. “jungkookie said that you run this studio with namjoon, and since he’s sick today, i was wondering if you would listen to a kind of impromptu audition?”

if your singing is half as angelic as your expression, i’ll beg you to join. this is what yoongi might have said in another life in which his hair is dyed mint green and he could make a girl faint with a smile, but instead he is a ceo of an unknown recording studio and he’s up to his ears in bullshit and he could really use another cup of coffee right about now. instead, he says, “what the hell do you think we are? a fucking straight to tv movie?”

jimin’s face falls and yoongi instantly begins to retract what he said, heart squeezing in undesired sympathy. if he’s looking for a studio, then he probably isn’t used to the way people bicker in this business. if he had been talking to someone else, a singer and wannabe rapper by the name of kim taehyung, he would have spat an insult right back, but this is jimin and he might not be used to this. he’s a fucking idiot.

“shit, sorry,” yoongi apologizes. “yeah, go ahead and let me hear what you have, kid. i’m excited. just know that in this business, most of us are running on minutes of sleep and gallons of stimulants. we’re asses to relieve the stress.”

and just like that, jimin is smiling brightly again, and it unconsciously brings an upward tilt to yoongi’s lips. he’s cute, he decides. he doesn’t go for cute, though, especially not when it wants to be in his studio. cute can find another cutie to date and fall in love with. he doesn’t have the time or patience for the picture perfect lifestyle that cute deserves.

the panda memory stick that he plugs into his computer makes him want to bark out a laugh, as if to reinforce the conclusion that he had just come to. “which file?” he asks, and as the younger man leans over to point it out to him, he can practically taste the scent of iris and wood. bois d’argent smells a hell of a lot better on jimin than it did on tuesday’s one night stand.

ridding himself of those thoughts, he clicks on the file entitled lie and finds it amusing that the first twenty seconds are mostly just the sound of deep breathing accompanied by a foot tapping on a wooden surface. the rosy burn on jimin’s face also indicates that he hadn’t checked the file closely beforehand. it’s unprofessional, but then the singing begins, and yoongi finds himself shaken.

jimin’s voice is so rich that it could practically be a sonata, a clarinet piece accompanied by the melodic beat that he’s unconsciously drumming out next to the microphone. in an instant, yoongi picks out the timbre of his voice, matching it and comparing it to the assortment of instruments he has on file. a full symphony blooms into existence within the confines of his information, a thrilling opera that barely has time to finish before the curtains close unsatisfyingly.

“where’s the rest of the song?” he asks, disgruntled after being thrown from his thoughts.

jimin has the decency to look embarrassed as he explains, saying, “today was the only day that i would be able to come to the studio for a week or so, and i really wanted to show it to you before i lost my nerve. i know that it’s not great, or even finished, but i thought that you might be able to salvage it.”

a frown curves across yoongi’s face. “not good? fuck, if that’s not good, then half the singers we have in this shithole are worse than dirt.” he softens as he looks at the boy (that’s really what he is in this moment, a boy with his heart and his dreams on the line and hadn’t that been yoongi once?) and, unable to resist the urge, claps his hand against the other’s back reassuringly. “you did well, jimin. i’d love to have you with us. we’re not exactly big or formal, but we’re like a family. i hope you like it with us.”

“i have a punch card to the coffee shop across the street. i was practically a member anyway.” the joke comes out easily, but there’s relief in the crescent moons of his eyes and joy lifting his features and yoongi wonders how an honest opinion can mean so much to someone brimming with talent.

but because he is min yoongi, full time ceo and full time trainwreck, he doesn’t voice those thoughts. instead, he says, with a smile bordering on fondness, “well, i’m glad we made it official.”

the fifth time that yoongi meets jimin is more like a hallucination than any of the pleasantness that had been evident in their previous visits. jimin had come to the studio twice since the initial meeting, and each time, yoongi had been more and more tired. he covered it well with coffee and five hour energy, however, so an unsuspecting jimin hadn’t noticed the massive bags under his eyes.

today, though, he’s running on six hours of sleep in the last two weeks and about seven cups of coffee today alone, and he feels certain that if a cop were to pull him over, they’d arrest him for drunk driving.

he stumbles into a convenience store at one in the morning, and the cashier makes no assumptions, because she’s seen enough of his early morning runs to know that he doesn’t overindulge in drink; work is his vice. she moves away from the counter and begins gathering things that she knows he’ll be looking for. he has a slight suspicion that she has a crush on him, and it causes a distant laugh to echo from a mouth that doesn’t feel like his. how anyone could harbor feelings for a man that walks around like a half-dead scavenger is beyond him.

he rounds the corner, looking for some ramyun, and collides with someone who smells like faded myrrh and crushed iris.

“yoongi? it’s one in the morning. what are you doing?”

and with pupils blown wide and a manic smile on his face, he supposes that he does look a little crazed, especially to someone who is as unfamiliar with his habits as jimin is. “i could ask the same of you, sunshine.”

the cashier brushes against him as she passes him, the choking scent of vanilla and honey replacing jimin’s for a moment as she grabs his usual relaxing tea from the shelf. she flashes him a ruby red smile, and yoongi wonders why she’s so dressed up to sell to drunkards. the moment she’s not looking, he wrinkles his nose.

jimin giggles, and it’s only then that yoongi can make out the smudge of eyeliner around his eyes and the tight leather of his pants. his heart seizes, and it’s all he can do to take a deep breath and resist the urge to push past the other man and rush the cashier into checking him out. “sometimes i go out and have fun, but something tells me you don’t have time for that.”

“don’t give me that fucking sass,” he responds, but the way that he sways from side to side and the listless tone of his voice drains all the bite from his words. “i used to club when i had the time. namjoon and i go when we aren’t swamped, although that’s practically never. where do you think i built up my alcohol tolerance?”

“drinking yourself into a stupor so you can sleep?” but the flirtatious (flirtatious?) tilt of jimin’s mouth and the teasing lilt to his voice says that he doesn’t mean it, or, at least, he doesn’t mean it enough to hurt. yoongi decides that he likes the night version of jimin just as much as he likes the day version. the harsh convenience store lights turn his hair into fire, and there’s a hunger to him that’s concealed in the daytime.

it’s a familiar hunger. he too longs for greatness, proof that he is better than anyone could have imagined. occasionally, it’s nice to have a reminder that he’s not alone.

maybe that’s what compels him to invite jimin to his apartment, or maybe it’s the lack of sleep convincing him that this could be a good idea, but either way, their stuff is bought together, with small bickering about who should pay for what (yoongi wanted to pay for all of his stuff, and jimin wanted to split it in half.).  in the end, they both stumble into the shithole that’s yoongi’s apartment laughing about something that he can’t remember.

“eat your ramyun before it gets cold,” jimin says, and it sounds so caring and so concerned that he shoots the other boy a glare.

he does eats the ramyun, though, because it would be stupid to let it go to waste just to prove a point to the younger man.

he’s halfway through the tteokbokki when he begins to feel tired, the food combination finally lulling him to a more restful state. jimin is in the middle of a story, though, and he finds that he likes the sound of the other’s voice. it’s lively in a way that he’s not used to, and he discovers that he wants to hear it more and more with each syllable that his sunrise boy utters.

but since when did he become his sunrise boy, instead of the boy at the carnival with the pretty smile and the bright laughter?

and then his head is resting on jimin’s lap, and this is not what friends do, especially not a friend he’s only known for a month, tops, but does it matter? not to yoongi, who feels like heaven is somewhere between sleep and wakefulness and the hand that strokes through his hair. not to jimin, who has such a look of serenity on his face that the black haired man feels as though if he breathes too deeply, the whole thing will shatter. not to anyone else in this world, because this is a moment made for the two of them and the only thing that’s real is the warmth that surrounds him.

“good night, yoongi,” jimin says, and he shifts yoongi’s head so that he can lie down beside him. he curls into the other’s side, and it’s the most restful night yoongi has had in ages.

the sixth meeting comes the following morning, when yoongi opens his eyes languidly and finds pink hair tucked under his chin and resting against his chin. jimin’s voice is muffled against the shirt that yoongi was wearing yesterday, but yoongi can still hear his cheerful, sleep laced good morning.

“you stayed over? what a fucking idiot.”

“i’ll make breakfast while you shower.”

“that’s what the gamdongran is for,” yoongi grumbles, but he disentangles himself from jimin and shuffles over to the bathroom and showers in what, for him, is record time. fifteen minutes later, he’s pulling on a black sweater to complement his ripped jeans as he enters the kitchen, marginally more awake than he had been. five hours of sleep feels good, and he smugly tallies his hours of sleep to eleven in two weeks. almost an hour per night; namjoon will be jealous.

“the way you live is unhealthy,” jimin chastises, as though he’s known yoongi for long enough to tell him how to live his life. “i could barely find a vegetable in your refrigerator. how do you expect to live a full life when you have no nutrients and no restorative sleep?”

“as a wise man once said, live fast, die young, bad girls do it well.” the tone of yoongi’s voice is flat as he repeats the lyrics, and something about the absurdity of the situation, of this whole morning, causes them both to laugh uncontrollably. yoongi is starting his morning with the sunrise, and the colors are so pretty that he can’t do anything but laugh and laugh.

when they sober, jimin barely saves the bacon he had cooked from burning and grabs the gamdongran. it’s a more nutritious breakfast than yoongi has had in a month, and he finds himself devouring it hungrily.

“you should come finish the song today,” he says through a mouthful of egg, and chokes on laughter as jimin wrinkles his nose. “we can finish it if we work hard.”

“and by hard, you mean until three in the morning.”

the corner of his mouth twitches. “hey, hard work takes time. don’t be such a bitch about it, or you’ll never get anywhere even if your voice sounds like sunlight.”

“i found you playing online go fish last time i came in.” but there’s something softer about his demeanor now, and yoongi realizes that his compliment had sent jimin reeling.

so he smiles and smiles and smiles, wider than he ever has before, because jimin deserves to know that he is incredible. “fuck off. i was taking a break, and anyway, taehyung bet that i couldn’t beat him, so i had to put him in his place.”

“is go fish even a skill based game?”

“you have to smell the scent of a four of a kind, jimin. any pro go fish player knows that.”

the ridiculousness of this statement sets them off again, and this time, jimin laughs so hard that he has to rest his forehead on the cool countertop, shoulders heaving wildly as he tries to contain himself. “you’re-” he’s cut off by another burst of laughter, tears streaming down his face. “you’re so fucking dumb.”

only for you, he wants to say, or maybe it would be what he would say in a different timeline, an alternate universe, but instead, he sticks to what he knows. “get your ass into my closet and pick out something to wear, you little shit. we’re going to the studio whether you like it or not.” there’s still a trace of a smile on his face.

he doesn’t expect to be so incredibly affected by seeing jimin in one of his sweatshirts, a cute kumamon piece that he had found in some thrift store. it looks good on him, but it looks positively angelic with jimin’s bright smile. there are still leftover smudges of eyeliner around his eyes, but he looks better with it than anyone had any right to.

but, of course, he doesn’t vocalize any of that. “are those my jordans you’re wearing, you bastard?”

jimin shrugs, causing yoongi to stick out his tongue childishly, and it’s in this manner that they begin the walk toward the studio. birds call around them, and a child they walk past idly wonders if it’s a starling. yoongi almost tells him that there’s no way it could be one, as they prefer the open countryside. it’s more likely a carrion crow, but the day is nice, and he doesn’t feel like ruining it for someone.

jimin stops at a flower shop that yoongi has passed a thousand times, but never bothered going into. “what’s your favorite flower?” he asks, and yoongi struggles for a moment before claiming iris as his favorite.

”mine too,” jimin says, and yoongi feels as though some secret that he wasn’t even aware of has been revealed.

his sunrise boy goes into the flower shop, seokjin’s sprouts, and comes out a minute later with a bouquet of irises. “for you,” he says, and yoongi takes them with cautious gratitude. jimin turns around and begins walking again, and, shaking himself out of his stupor, yoongi hurries his stride until he’s caught up.

he steals glances at the other as they walk, often timed when the breeze lifted the scent of the flowers to his nose. it’s driving him batshit, all of this waiting and wishing and wanting for someone he doesn’t even know, but somehow, this morning feels like a release of the tension that’s been building in him.

“tell him,” namjoon had said without even being informed of the situation. he had a way of knowing more about yoongi than he himself did, but he supposes that those are the perks of knowing someone for so long. what he hadn’t told namjoon was that it didn’t feel like a casual thing, something where he could ignore the sting of rejection and go about his daily life as per usual. he hadn’t said that because he knew how it sounded, and how it sounds even now. six meetings is not a lifetime, not a true indicator of what forever could be, yet yoongi wants tomorrow with jimin.

he’s a fucking idiot, and he would willingly admit that to just about anyone.

“she’s cute.” these words snap yoongi out of his reverie, and he follows jimin’s gaze to an attractive woman exiting the tea and coffee shop across from the studio. she has long brown hair that cascades to her waist, and even from this distance, he can tell that she looks quite stylish. once upon a time, yoongi might have asked her for a drink and his approximation of a dance.

he makes a noncommittal noise instead and brushes by the younger man into the studio, feeling a deep breath swell his abdomen as he loosens the fist that’s clenched around the iris stems.

he doesn’t check to see if jimin is behind him. he slams the door to his shared office with namjoon open and finds the other sitting at his desk.

“bad morning?” namjoon asks, eyeing the flowers pointedly.

“it was a great morning,” yoongi spits bitterly. “and the newbie bought me these flowers while we walked here, so you can stop looking scandalized.”

“he doesn’t live in your direction. what was he doing by you?”

“he stayed the night.” namjoon starts wiggling his eyebrows, and it’s his turn to look affronted. “christ, not like that, and even if it were, i don’t inquire about you and kook’s probably disgusting sex life, so you can stay out of mine.”

“at least i have a sex life.”

“real fucking mature, joonie.” yoongi rolls his eyes, but the familiar banter has him back on level ground. “so glad to know that i run this shithole with an eleven year old.”

jimin enters, then, a pout on his face as he looks at the two of them. “you left me outside, yoongi.”

“you’re inside now, aren’t you? i thought i would do you a favor and let you look at that girl a little longer. did you get her number? creep her out?” too late, yoongi realizes that namjoon has directed a smug gaze his way. he curses himself for letting the reason for his irritation slip.

namjoon spins in his chair, a satisfied smile stretching the corners of his mouth. “i told you that he’s a piece of shit, jiminie. you should have listened to me.”

yoongi waves him off with a disgruntled look, but the others can tell that he doesn’t mean it. “shut that goddamn mouth of yours unless you’re going to do something productive with it.”

“sorry, yoongi, but i’m not sucking you off. i’m dedicated to jungkook and jungkook only.”

this time, he doesn’t bother to respond to namjoon, instead logging into his computer to access the variations of lie that he had crafted on days when jimin hadn’t been there to give his opinion or add to it. he reaches his hand out, and, like a practiced routine, jimin places the panda memory stick in his hand so he can add the files and then move into a different room where they can focus.

he downloads them quickly, and as he gets up to leave, namjoon clears his throat. “you have taehyung at two thirty today. he wants to ask about spoken lines on stigma.”

“can’t you help him?”

“he wants you. he says i’m too by the book, or some shit like that.”

“well shit, i guess he’s not wrong.”

but this is counter to what his plans are for the day, and he finds that he’s irritated by the disruption of his schedule. today would not be the day after all.

it is not the next meeting that’s memorable to yoongi, but rather what happens in between, seven shots of vodka warming his cheeks and the lingering beat of music thrumming in his veins. this time, yoongi wears the leather pants and the thick rings of eyeliner, and his head lies in jungkook’s lap, the younger boy’s hand brushing across his sweaty forehead.

clubbing with namjoon, jungkook, and taehyung usually meant complete exhaustion, and this time had been no exception. it had been nice to forget about jimin for a few hours, even if the overly bright guy on the dance floor swung his hips like jimin does sometimes, when he’s really feeling the beat of the music and is lost in the melody. even if he saw jimin around every corner and between every couple.

taehyung, world’s most social butterfly, sent people his way all night in the hopes of providing even a small distraction, but yoongi lost interest in each one quickly. it wasn’t their fault; he was too distant from the start, and, at any rate, they were more of tae’s type anyway.

by the fifth shot and second beer, he had already been off balance, so by the seventh shot, he was supported by taehyung as they exited the bar.

a tear slips out of his eye before he even realizes what’s happening, and jungkook swipes it away with one finger, almost as if it didn’t happen. namjoon won’t let him off that easily, however, and he sits down next to his boyfriend and leans over to meet yoongi’s vacant gaze.

“min yoongi,” he begins, and yoongi has to laugh at that, because his friend is so serious and nothing in his life is serious, nothing is permanent except for this room and the people in it.

so he responds with a giggle and a response of “kim namjoon”, and namjoon glares at him, and yoongi really wishes that he was a lot more drunk than he already was, because he knows what’s coming now,

“fucking say something, man. you never back down. you never give up on anything. a bystander could tell that you’re head over heels for park jimin, and yet you won’t say anything.”

“does it even matter if he turns you down?” but taehyung has said the wrong thing, and namjoon practically burns a hole in him from the aggressive stare he gives.

yoongi smiles, but it’s beyond bitter, the mixture of the vodka and the self induced stress causing him to dig his nails into his palms. “yes, it does, in fact, matter very much, asshole, so i would appreciate it if you could fuck off.”

he stands up, wobbling on his feet as the alcohol hits him, and stumbles to his room, crashing onto his full twin bed petulantly.

it’s jungkook who comes after him, and though it should be namjoon, his oldest friend, he finds himself soothed by the younger man’s presence.

because it’s jungkook, there’s no snarky comment or making light of the situation. there is only the honest truth, and that’s something that yoongi appreciates more than anything else.

“if he’s messing with you this badly, i think you’d be stupid to not explore the possibility of being with him, yoongi. it’s not like you can even look at anyone else.”

“we work together, jungkook.”

“and you’re supposed to be a mature, responsible adult. if you can’t continue to work with him despite personal matters, then i’ll say that jimin would be right to reject your sorry ass. this is not who you are. you are min fucking yoongi, and you’ve faced a lifetime of mistakes and mess ups. you are ready for anything, so do yourself a damn favor and just tell him how you feel.”

“i know,” he says, and he cringes at how pathetic it sounds. “i know, and i’m really trying. i’m tired of hiding my feelings over uncertainty and fear.”

“and that, more than anything, is the reason why you are worth so much.”

lucky number seven feels like a mistake, but it’s something that’s become unavoidable, and yoongi has decided that he’s sick of dodging feelings and making a game out of things. he is min yoongi, and he doesn’t run from things, no matter how much he might want to. he settles into a table at a cute coffee shop and begs his stomach to stop churning.

it’s just jimin, he thinks, but that doesn’t help at all, so he gives up on that train of thought. he looks more professional than he ever has in the studio, and he nervously adjusts his glasses, wondering if it’s too much. his turtleneck is too warm, and everything feels as though it’s spinning around him. he’s not ready for this; he has to be ready.

“yoongi!” the voice alone sends a shock through his body, and he finds himself tensing. jimin is a vision, cotton candy hair messy and a rumpled, oversized dress shirt tugging at his heartstrings.

he’s whipped, and they aren’t even dating.

but they have to keep up some pretense of normalcy, or yoongi does, at the very least, so he waves at the boy and notes the appreciative glances being shot toward jimin.

“it’s good to see you too, jimin,” he says, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, desperate to be released.

there’s a lingering air of awkwardness between the two of them, and yoongi knows that it’s entirely his own fault. beneath the table, his nails carve little crescent moons into the skin of his palms.

“i’m glad you invited me here,” jimin says, and yoongi silently thanks him for covering up for his complete lack of social skills. “it’s a nice place to be on a pretty day, and i like my company.”

unbidden, a gentle warmth spreads across yoongi’s face, and he has to look away in order to steel himself.

“there’s actually a reason that i wanted you to eat with me today.”

“dodging exes?”

before he can think about it, he throws jimin a baleful glare. it’s relaxing, the normalcy of the response, and it soothes him a little.

“no, dumbass.” he ducks his head and curses under his breath. what a charmer he is. “i just-”

“yes.”

yoongi’s head snaps up. “what- are you sure you know what i was going to ask?”

jimin looks so innocent, lips turned up in an excited smile. “you’re asking me to stay full time at the studio, aren’t you?”

and because this is not what he was planning to say at all, he snaps. his hand pushes roughly through his hair and his foot taps harshly against the tile floor.

it’s now or never. “jimin, i like you, dammit.”

the look on the sunset boy’s face is a lot more devilish now, and he rises out of his seat. yoongi watches with widened eyes as he sits down on the black haired boy’s lap and pulls himself closer.

“i know,” jimin says, and presses his lips against yoongi’s.

the world has fucking exploded around yoongi, and he can’t handle it, so he crushes jimin against him. faintly, he can hear mocking cheers from the group of frat boys at the table by the door, so he kisses him harder. someone coos over how adorable they are, so yoongi kisses him harder.

then they have to part for air, and jimin is more beautiful than he ever could have imagined, and he knows the reason why.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Police state, corporate state, denuded duncery state — a blistery bunch of 80 percenters lost in a carnival of debt, malignant food, maladjusted education and the folly of a full-throttle powerfully propagandist media like a proverbial copper girdle wire around our collective consciousness. That So Called Liberal (sic) Press (sic) playing triple dirges for the death of any emaciated version of democracy with a capital D for dollar. Feeding frenzy of the old and new rich class, and a lot of wannabe’s lusting after lotto, You Tube fame, anything from the comfort of plasma 72 inch Big Brother. Isaac Asimov’s I Robot, going on 70 years soon, and that’s the way of the Zionist drone hucksters, those lovely glassy-eyed Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dell types, and the entire class of probiotic Kombucha libertarians who have no interest in climate change, clean oceans, the growth in poverty, wars, pestilence, resource theft, toxins, on-the-spectrum child birth rates skyrocketing, art, revolution, real human to human relationships, nature, other species, blue skies, discourse, food sanity, clean water, education. Read this from NewsSpeak, err, Newsweek rag: The world’s top tech companies are in a race to build the best AI and capture that massive market, which means the technology will get better fast—and come at us as fast. IBM is investing $1 billion in its Watson; Amazon is banking on Alexa; Apple has Siri. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are devoting their research labs to AI and robotics. In September, Salesforce.com announced it’s adding AI, called Einstein, to its business software. Its value, CEO Marc Benioff said at the launch, will be in ‘helping people do the things that people are good at and turning more things over to machines.’ AI will lead us into the mother of all tech revolutions. The last time anything came close was around 1900, when the automobile, telecommunications, the airplane and mass electrification all came together at once, radically changing the world from the late 1800s to the 1920s. Such times are particularly frightening. ‘A society that had established countless routines and habits, norms and regulations, to fit the conditions of the previous revolution, does not find it easy to assimilate the new one,’ wrote economist Carlota Perez in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, her classic book. ‘A sense of impotence and frustration accumulates and a growing incongruence is experienced between the new and the old paradigm.’ Amazingly, these people are many cards missing from a full deck of humanity. Shelter, baby, sane sanity, and calm, less frenetic anxiety, less is more, and more is monstrous — obvious necessitates in any hierarchy of needs paradigm. More time for humanity to do what, is the question about these libertarians who think robotics and computers will turn us all into Athenians? More reading and schooling and community-it-takes-a-village action? Right! To help thy neighbor in endless bouts of humanitarian sharing? Right! To bring distribution of health, education, nourishment, and sanity to the rest of the world? Right! So, the goal of AI and robotics is, drum roll, to grease the palms of the millionaire and billionaire class and their classless middle managers and technocrats. More: The danger of artificial intelligence is in its behavior, and whether it is conscious or possesses other attributes of human thought is irrelevant. Computers that can drive cars and fly airplanes certainly pose dangers to humans and in fact Google has gone to great efforts to design safety into their self-driving cars. Computers that can run the entire world economy and provide constant companionship to all humans will pose great danger to humans. Malicious motivation is irrelevant to many of the dangers posed by super-intelligent machines. There are two forms of ‘wireheading’ to guard against: computers that delude themselves about their observations of the environment and computers that modify the source of approval for their actions, for example modifying humans. There are also dangers from what Omohundro described as ‘Basic AI Drives.’ Super-intelligent machines may be tools of competition among humans, who will be careless about these dangers because they are caught up in the heat of competition. And, Bill Hibbard, academic and AI tinkerer, is many times quoted as someone questioning AI, but let’s look at this, from James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era: That’s the cornerstone of an idea called the ‘intelligence explosion,’ developed in the 1960s by English mathematician I.J. Good. At the time, Good was studying early artificial neural networks, the basis for ‘deep learning’ techniques that are creating a buzz today, some 50 years later. He anticipated that self-improving machines would become as intelligent, then exponentially more intelligent, than humans. They’d save mankind by solving intractable problems, including famine, disease and war. Near the end of his life, as I report in my book Our Final Invention, Good changed his mind. He feared global competition would push nations to develop superintelligence without safeguards. And like Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, Good feared it would annihilate us. ‘They’ll become self-protective and seek resources to better achieve their goals. They’ll fight us to survive, and they won’t want to be turned off.’ The crux of the problem is that we don’t know how to control superintelligent machines. Many assume they will be harmless or even grateful. But important research conducted by A.I. scientist Steve Omohundro indicates that they will develop basic drives. Whether their job is to mine asteroids, pick stocks or manage our critical infrastructure of energy and water, they’ll become self-protective and seek resources to better achieve their goals. They’ll fight us to survive, and they won’t want to be turned off. Omohundro’s research concludes that the drives of superintelligent machines will be on a collision course with our own, unless we design them very carefully. We are right to ask, as Stephen Hawking did, ‘So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right?’ These conversations intrigue the controllers and their minions, especially in our institutions of higher learning where a scant few are also the controllers of the narrative and worse, the curriculum. Imagine the dialogues around poverty, resource theft, cultural immolation with farmers, activists, revolutionaries, the parents of 11 million babies dying a year from treatable (mostly caused by malnutrition) disease. Imagine the former prisoners talking about reform and the enslavement of their lives and families’ lives by the punishment society, largely ramped up by the very inventions of the robotics-AI-Big Data yahoos, espousing their idiocy at conferences in the Rockies and at the foot of their superconductors. Imagine the millions of lost human lives caused by the financialization schemes dreamed up by computer whizzes. The model of terror for New Orleans, Detroit, Flint, across the land and globe, the Bhopal-driven corporations utilizing the best and the brightest and their inventions of creative human destruction. The political classless sucking on the crack pipe of power and money. Imagine, these conferences and interviews INTERSECTING with the age old problem of the rich and haves and the majority, poor and haves not, never in the same room. From that mush-making propaganda and infotainment and dirty entertainment, to the daily dehumanizing life cycle of drive-thru’s, Amazon Fresh deliveries, tellerless banking, on-line K12 and college, and the endless Windows and Screens of mush that sucks any agency and verve out of the average person as they navigate the endless bureaucracy of the modern 21st Century/Beyond Kafka Road Show of Stiff Arm Saluting to the Digital Gods. Can anyone see the efficacy of actually calling upon us, the masses, the ones stuck on the hamster wheel of generational poverty, generational indebtedness, generational running from the repo man (now some cyber security systems embedded into all the tools of democratic life – DMV, Labor, Medicine, Insurance, Credit Bureaus, Background Agencies, Drug Screeners, Fact Checkers). I have spasms of the old Molotov way, when I hear these supposed eggheads, and our superficial lust for another Turning or Watson. Oh, these billionaires and their underlings, the geniuses, sure, driving this absurdity of technology, colonizing Mars and Uranus, endless projects of tinkering, while coral reefs melt, farms dry up, millions perish yearly, while these captains of industry fly their AI-captained drones into the orifices of the dying while sending out gigatons of meaningless junk into both the ether and on our highways and byways. Food, Shelter, Safety, Education, Health? Shit no, if you are not part of the White Jewish-Christo-Emirate Class – Big questions derailed in this punishment society scrambling to make sense of 100 years of robber barons and elitists running the show, the neo-con, neo-liberal, neo-fascist, neo-libertarian, neo-gulag show: Where do I live, social worker? Portland, Oregon, where rubber and spewing diesels rule the day and night, 24/7? At least 10 states (California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Texas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Arizona, Florida and Colorado) offer less than 30 affordable rental units for every 100 potential renters. Will Mexico pay to build a wall to stem the American exodus south? You think those mental tinkerers give a shit about people, of the soil, pushed away from the lands – rivers, beaches, islands, mountains, deltas, steppes, savannas, fjords, ice-fields, hills, canyons, forests, deserts, jungles, cloud islands, plains — to solder the shit of their digital orgasm, and to glue, hammer, weld, galvanize, ionize, nanosize, titrate, liquefy, saw, mill, percolate, mine, harvest, spray, tap, refine, package, burn, acidify, synthesize, denature, distill, stitch, sew, de-ionize, plow, scrape, smelt, sluice, pulverize, butcher, hoe, excavate, fertilize, fumigate, decapitate, denigrate, assemble all the other supplies, junk, consumer items, raw goods, commodities, toys, weapons, propaganda tools for the vaunted minority in the First World. The digital creeps love inventing and marketing the toys of lobotomy and anti-social thought control – one giant replicator for Call of Duty and variations on a theme . . . and all the crap that pits people against people, race against race, religion against religions, class against class, gender against gender, nation against nation in this clawing and shooting and pummeling cultural slipstream that teaches each next generation the devaluing of ”the other.” The controllers this side of the next Kool-aide batch coursing through each and every home’s tap water spigot are having a hay day, as Americans are floundering now more than ever, waiting for the next 3.0 iPhone, pining over the next Ridley Scott movie of salvation, at the ready to stump the Trump in meaningless spasms of attacking just his side of fascism, leaving the rot-gut democrats and libertarians to continue their giant tapeworm of destruction to grow and grow. Now, especially, this abomination out of the closet (Familia Trump) — reflective of the stupidity and tough-guy-in-the-mirror/on-Twitter-Kardashian-wanna-be but never really able to back machismo that is America the Red-White-Blue of the continuous hematoma in the pericardium — IS holding the sputtering heart of America, and Trump and Company, LLC, Kosher Certified, are drawing the ire and bombastic support of the leveling Americans with a little “a” for abomination. All these spasms, or even silent nightly sweats, after this last shit-hole election, when all along, the blackness of Capitalism has been the rancid pustule smothering each next generation – Baby-Boomer, Yuppie, Millennial, Gen X,Y, Gen Zed, Zombie. Always with us, days of genocidal floodgate openings, first nations the real genocide purloined by all manner of cultures, religions, shit-bag people — always here in the place called Turtle Island: those robber barons, slave holders, financiers from over the pond, Rothschilds, the 1.3 percenters called the Chosen People, shifting massive trillions through their sluices of pain, collective punishment gulags, legal gymnastics and technological Kendo moves their forte now. Colluding Talmud-citing, Bible-Thumping, Manifest Destiny-humping peoples from another womb. As I lay Dying, William Faulkner  – And the next morning they found him in his shirt-tail laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger broke off in the last one. When they taken the lid off her they found that two of them had bored on into her face. Soylent Green is people, you’re goddamned right. Money, derivatives, the billionaires’ four-timing shuffle, the perversions of debt and credit, the heavy sack of coagulated blood hanging like a dowager hump on every family’s next and next generation. Now daily the liberals, the so-denatured Americans of the little-to-the-left-of- center adherents of the continuous never tell a lie Georgy Porgy Washington, they cluck and claw and turn pink about this Mafioso President, the one on TV, paid for and delivered by the American people-Nielsen Ratings-Arbitron-$50,000 a second commercial satisfaction. They all tune in, now don’t they, happy Capital Americans. The un-Holy Publishers print his vile, art of the deal, publish the vile of every one of them – traitor, general, politico, POTUS, and shyster peddling invented history and deafening feats of pseudo psychology and mainstream entertainment. We are all the rump and laughing stock in his apprentice way of raping entire classes of people, this POTUS Numero Four-Five. Like a .45 stuck in the craw of every American and Third Worlder! In the mix, though, the controllers, they keep ladling pap or pabulum, pushing the spine loosening pacification into each bronchial of our lives — respect for all peoples, bring in the consensus crew, respect all opinions, all people while they kill us with their smiles. Imagine, we should be teaching who to hate, how to hate and in all the meaningful ways, how to utilize hate into action. Imagine, we teach these toddlers and the college ones and all of us in these sappy companies to do the opposite of what should be – thou shalt hate and seek justice for crimes perpetrated by the elite onto humankind. WTF! So, we unteach anger, unteach retribution, unteach action, unteach revolution, unteach how to spot a precipitant. Every minute we should be auguring that ability to fight back, and rebuff, not only the fascism of the Holy Republican Party and a Trump or Netanyahu, but to hate the entire sociopathic nature of corporations-militaries-punishers-bankers-investors-renters-technologists. Instead, we get pundits and middling folk attacking anyone who might go out and march and scream and shout and dervish in the streets when the police state comes down hard like Gestapo, their weapons of Zionism glimmer in the sweat of the mace and industrial tear gas. I see them go to Costco, see them find more days off lifting false dreams in their Disneyland world, their American evil seeding of cultures with the poison of travelers checks and exceptionalism . . . . like resistant tuberculous, the Americans hit those beaches and slum-poverty tours, cruises, enclaves in Costa Rica, anywhere on earth, the westerners end up like leeches looking for more soft flesh. Americans . . . Germans . . . Canadians . . . Brits . . . Australians . . . . From sea to shining oil slick sea! Interestingly, I go back to Andre Vltchek, on one of his American book and film tours, “In the USA – “I Cannot Write!”: I was shocked by the state in which I found the United States. I left many years ago. I left New York, which was, for more than a decade, my home. I never returned, except to launch my books and films, and to see my friends. I never stayed for long time. Two weeks, this time, was the longest in years. This visit broke me. It exhausted me. It thoroughly depressed me. I saw clearly how grotesque pseudo-morality, disgusting religious concepts and hypocrisy influenced and ruined entire nations, client states, worldwide, especially in Asia and Africa. Yes, I believe in collective guilt. Holding US citizenship, I share the guilt. And therefore, I work non-stop, not to wash my hands, but to stop the madness. I am convinced that the West, the white race and its lackeys abroad, have no right to rule over this Planet. I saw enough to back my conviction. The West is finished, its culture dead. What is left is unattractive, even horrifying. There is no heart, no compassion, and no creativity. And those billions of people beyond the Western realm should not be dying, while forced to support the aggressive individualism of the post-Christian, post-Crusade colonialism and fascism of Europe and the United States. Ahh, living the dream, daily, watching people running around in tights and redneck t-shirts, everyone looking like they are in a Walmart clothing competition. Or the fake ones. All the inside jokes, the memes, from Facebook to the next recipe for spicy hot wings, these Americans lavish in the trash of the airwaves, Netflix, and the entire Madison Avenue tripe fed to this country of ennui, NASCAR, polluting football, and endless buffets. I easily find how much I drown daily – my comeuppance —  the fruity intercourse-interchanges with the people I work with, those neighbors, the frightened ones, and the idiots running the streets with their lifted-up pick-ups with six-foot by eight-foot USA and Trump Makes America Great flags streaming like swastikas ablaze. So many corners turned, USA, the world of half-assed thinking and doing, until we come to today, POLICE STATE USA, thanks largely to the colluding Press, and my daily reminder, how one of my professions ended up in the sewage pit. From Robert Parry, Consortium News: It was on Dec. 9, 2004, when the mean-spirited mainstream media’s treatment of investigative journalist Gary Webb led him his career devastated, his family broken, his money gone and his life seemingly hopeless to commit suicide. It was a moment that should have shamed all the big-shot journalists who had a hand in Webb’s destruction, but it mostly didn’t. Oh these precious decades like Rip Van Winkle narcolepsy of the collective soul, until we are all soiled by this lazy, anxiety-filled hibernation: As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. — Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas It’s easy to go on and on about this police state, and the policing by the corporations – swabs on cheeks, background checks, no time off, work 24-7, black out those holidays, no excuses for terminal gridlock, wage thieves. This is the mortician on duty and manning the radio and air ways – you are guilty until pronounced dead. You are suspect until you’ve given pound of flesh and left kidney for the cause of Capitalism. You are shit out of luck because we have the backing of the Sixth Fleet, a million marching SWAT teams, endless surveillance of every waking blink and snoring seizure. It all comes down to basic rights, right? In a blistering dissent in Utah v. Strieff, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court for holding ‘that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.’ Sotomayor continued: ‘This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact. That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, but it may factor in your ethnicity, where you live, what you were wearing, and how you behaved. The officer does not even need to know which law you might have broken so long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous. The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal. The officer may next ask for your consent to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised. If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then frisk you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’ If you still can’t read the writing on the wall, Sotomayor breaks it down further: ‘This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong… So long as the target is one of the many millions of people in this country with an outstanding arrest warrant, anything the officer finds in a search is fair game for use in a criminal prosecution. The officer’s incentive to violate the Constitution thus increases…’ Need any lessons on spread eagle poses, downward facing dog body cavity assists, frog march locomotion tips, and upside facing black boot gymnastics? God, the American Psychological Association, here, mealy-mouthing: While much was known about psychologist involvement in detainee abuse prior to the PENS (Psychological Ethics and National Security) report, what has become progressively clearer is that the methods used by interrogators, guided by Behavioral Science Consultant Teams (BSCTs), have been intentionally shaped by psychologists. Many of the most objectionable interrogation strategies had been re-designed by psychologists from U.S. military programs, primarily the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, originally intended to protect U.S. soldiers from undesirable thought reform. According to international definitions, and the understanding of the SERE program itself, SERE-based interrogation procedures constitute torture. Official reports and numerous journalists over the last several years have provided extensive documentation depicting how these SERE techniques were used in U.S. interrogation practices by SERE-trained psychologists, both in DOD and CIA detention facilities. Yet, however despicable, psychology should never let these ‘enhanced techniques’ cause us to ignore the only somewhat more subtle techniques prescribed in the Army Field Manual, the common guide for all U.S. military interrogations. In the Army Field Manual, allowable interrogation tactics include deception, fear escalation, ego harm, isolation, and psychological disorientation. Regardless of whether these techniques are ethical for professional interrogators, they are morally problematic for psychologists, given the clearly circumscribed ethical underpinnings of the profession. http://clubof.info/

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Fact Check: is education spending at the highest level on record

Prime Minister Theresa May additionally in an interview with Andrew Marr at the BBC on April 30, 2017.

As she hit the campaign path, Theresa Can also repeat a claim she has made several instances earlier than, such as at some point of Top Minister’s Questions in April, that schooling spending is at its maximum ever level.

Her declare is every day tally every day on Department of training figures, which come from a Countrywide Audit Office record in day-to-day the financial sustainability of faculties. This record references the authorities’ general core faculties price range, which is said every day be at the highest ever level.

A Branch of schooling blog on faculty funding additionally info how faculty funding is:

At its highest on file at greater than £forty billion in 2016 every day 2017 and is set every day upward push day-to-day £forty two billion in 2019 every day 2020, with increasing pupil numbers. While Theresa Might also make the claim, she becomes speaking mainly approximately schooling in England, and she or he is regarding the “devoted schools supply”. This is the whole block of cash going daily faculties in England every 12 months – which currently stands at £forty billion.

However while the £forty billion wide variety is ready accurate and it is real that This is higher than in preceding years, it is not the whole story.

This is because, in terms of schooling spending, it’s miles the “according to pupil expenditure” – literally the amount spent on every scholar – this is applicable and no longer the entire amount of the “devoted faculties supply”.

Recent research on the challenge has shown that or present day spending per student in England changed into in large part frozen in actual terms between 2010 and 2011 and 2015 and 2016.

Furthermore, from 2015 every day 2016 onwards school spending has been frozen in coins phrases, that probably daily translates right into a real terms discount of around 6.five% between 2015 every day 2016 and 2019 everyday 2020.

Cultural Education Via Cultural Symbols for Interior and Exterior Decorations of Public Buildings

The cultures of people have excellent potentials in inculcating values and norms into its contributors. Those values and norms disseminated via cultural schooling assist in fostering properly living relations among society members. In most cultures of the sector, special cultural symbols are generally used for teaching the norms and values of one’s way of life. exact behavioral traits together with humility, hospitality, honesty, difficult work, and recognize are extolled in the symbolic and philosophical meanings enshrined in These cultural symbols. As an example, in Ghana, the Adinkra symbols are culturally charged designs that illustrate the ordinary values and norms inside the Ghanaian network. These tradition-oriented symbols should be used for decorating the interiors and exteriors of public homes like community centers, libraries, banks, accommodations, eating places and so on. This will heighten the cultural training avenues in Ghana.

The subculture-orientated symbols like Adinkra symbols offer powerful counsel and practical insight into lifestyles

IT  affords ethical training to the humans. As an example, the Gye-Nyame (Except God) image educates us at the pivotal role of God within the existence of guy. Hence, dwelling in harmony along with his virtues effects in a hit existence. Additionally, the Nkyinkyim (curves) symbol indicates that life is not a smooth route. It’s far full of u.S.and downs, hopes, and disappointments. Thus, it offers the practical recommendation that one desires to be flexible in life, in addition, to adapt to changing situations and occasions. Those and plenty of different cultural symbols impart realistic know-how to challenging conditions in existence and Consequently, should be made quite simply available in public buildings as kinds of decorations.

Many people go to diverse public systems to attend to their numerous wishes.

For instance, many students visit diverse public libraries to read and adopt diverse studies sports. Numerous households and buddies visit eating places and accommodations for rest and leisure functions. An important have a look at the designs that are discovered inside the interiors and exteriors of public buildings, in particular in Ghana show designs which might be favored handiest for their aesthetic enchantment. Those are normally interaction of factors of a design consisting of traces, shapes, colors and lots of others that do not hold any symbolic importance. Additionally, they do not impart any cultural training to the Severa those who troop in and out of the public homes.

In the Lapse of Luxury: When the Rich Stop Spending

Two years in the past, it gave the look of a slam dunk of an enterprise idea…

Neiman Marcus, one of the global’s pre-eminent luxurious retail manufacturers, become equipped to go public amid close to each day headlines about the sector’s rich, the now not-so-wealthy and the wannabe wealthy paying ever better fees for, well, you call it…

Bigger houses within the Hamptons. The priciest paintings. The “blingiest” of diamonds. The haughtiest of haute couture.

But something passed off among 2015 and now.

It is now not just Neiman Marcus, which ultimate month killed its plans for an IPO (after reporting five instantly quarters of declining income). Or domestic prices within the Hamptons, which currently fell 17% compared to 12 months ago tiers. Or art market charges, which crashed remaining 12 months as nicely. Or maybe stupid earrings income, with Tiffany’s reporting vastly disappointing numbers. (How determined does it appearance while a “luxurious emblem” like Tiffany’s spends $10 million to enchantment to the unwashed, overindebted hundreds for its first-ever Notable Bowl industrial?) Pretty in reality, “The Best of The entirety” doesn’t seem to work anymore as an investment approach.

And amid an inventory marketplace that keeps marching higher and higher, it’s a hassle.

luxurious spending, widely speaks, is a leading financial indicator. this is particularly so in an economy like ours it is leveraged so closely with the u.S.and downs of the inventory and property markets.

If the wealthy sense assured approximately the future, they spend. But in case you step again and have a look at the bigger image – luxury spending appears not anything like the “satisfied days are here once more” picture painted by way of the S&P 500 Index right now.

For example, the parents at Fashionable & Terrible’s keep a Global luxurious Index that tracks 30 of the most important publicly traded companies in the global purchase discretionary quarter.

We are talking the likes of Tesla, LVMH Moët Vuitton, Diageo, Daimler AG, BMW,

Pernod Ricard or even Nike. Yet S&P’s Global luxurious Index peaked nearly 3 years in the past in July 2014. For the reason that then, It is down about thirteen%.

Themed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) of the identical type, including the SPDR Global patron Discretionary zone ETF, offer comparable consequences.

So what is this movement on the luxurious spending front announcing? One could think that the world has to be racing beforehand, awaiting an inflow of recent discretionary spending amid a promised Trumpian tax cut and a resurgent weather for domestic capital investment with decrease regulatory hurdles.

Or we are able to parse it in sections and say It’s all approximately China’s corruption crackdown and that its wealthy aren’t spending so freely anymore… That the U.S. Hedge fund titans of years past are not huge spenders now both, On the grounds that they’re underperforming the broader marketplace and their investors are leaving in droves… That, possibly, this is one market this is just taking a breather.

Off The Record With Binary Options

Human beings need to realize off the document if you can, in reality, make money trading binary options. Depending on the sort of reviews you stumble upon on this league, don’t be short responsible the alternative, if preparations have been not made earlier than you lost everything. That usually starts with studying the basics of the enterprise. This may range from knowing a way to place a name option to understanding which oscillators paintings pleasant for you. It may additionally suggest you took the time to examine the terminology of the industry so that you recognize what you’re doing while putting a trade. Every other crucial aspect whilst you are buying and selling binary options, is that where there may be high praise, there is also a high threat. Willing to take danger is some thing to by no means play with however put together your self to a minimal in which you still earnings.

1. Preparing Your Mind.

Most significantly when buying and selling binary alternatives, is being inside the right attitude. Feelings want to no longer be involved. while your Emotions upward push after losing four trades in a row, your heart has a tendency to sense like it is pounding out of your chest. Controlling your Emotions can start with having a blueprint whilst you are trading. in no way veer from it. This reduces your risk. If you treat your buying and selling like gambling, you’ll lose ever time. A success buyers don’t look at a chart and vicinity a change without studying the information they collect earlier than making the trade. Like stated before, you practice this for your demo account.

2. learn The Terminology.

If you are aiming to be a Successful dealer, it is nice to analyze the terminology of the enterprise. There may be plenty of assets to acquire information from and examine the lingo of buying and selling binary alternatives. It does not take lengthy to analyze, but you do should recognize what a name choice is and what’s a placed option. If you are the use of a candle stick chart, realize what it method when you see a protracted wick on the top of a candle stick. Do you recognize what a hammerhead is? Matters of this nature are a few simple situations to understand.

    Originally posted 2016-08-28 04:36:37.