#you earn respect you cannot just swan in and demand it

[knowlesian]

the thing that really gets me about both the bear and ofmd is the way they ask: did The System and doing things The Way They’ve Always Been Done create your success, or did you succeed in spite of those things?

if you did your best work under a boss who treated you like garbage and made you genuinely afraid to fuck up, was that what did it? do you owe them for ‘toughening you up’? did it ‘make you better’?

or did you just manage to survive it, and along the way you convinced yourself perpetuating those systems so others have to survive the same exact bullshit was right and good, too?

[alexanderwrites]

Thoughts Roundup - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 16

“No knock, No doorbell”

There are moments in pop culture history that I always feel envious about - envious because I wish i’d been there to experience it them as they happened. I wish I could’ve seen Talking Heads perform live, I wish I could have seen The Shining in cinemas when it was first released, and I wish I could have watched the original run of Twin Peaks when it first aired. The thing about the desire to have experienced these things as they happened is directly tied to the environment they’re released into, and the effect they had on the public at the time. You can get the blu ray of Stop Making Sense, you can find The Shining screenings in independent cinemas, and you can buy the Twin Peaks boxset. But what I really want is to know what it felt like to see Twin Peaks every week, at a time when Dynasty and L.A Law were as exciting as TV got. I want to have been a part of those conversations that people had about the show. I want to know how people like my Mum felt when she watched it back in 1990 (for the record, she hated it. She’s got great taste, but Twin Peaks was decidedly too weird, according to her). 

I came along to Twin Peaks ten years ago, when the show had vanished from the conversation and was yet to have a second life thanks to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. David Lynch’s work was alien and exciting to me - I remember seeing a Fire Walk With Me VHS in HMV years before and asking my Mum just what it was. I remember seeing clips of Blue Velvet late at night and being terrified of it. And finally, I remember seeing clips from Twin Peaks’ last episode being featured on a countdown of the 100 Scariest Moments on Channel 4. That’s when I knew I had to find out just what the fuck it was all about. And I have such fond memories from 2007 & 2008, of obsessing over the show, watching episodes on summer evenings in my room, excited about waking up the next day so I could tell my Mum and Brother about it. The thing that the experience missed is a feeling of communality. The moments in the show that rocked my world and made me feel a way i’d never felt before were experienced solely by me, in a tiny bedroom, on a portable DVD player. The moments that, when they first aired had people all over the world talking now felt like they were being seen in 2007 only by me. But now, ten years on, as Twin Peaks: The Return heads towards the finish line and its biggest moments reverberate from it with electric power, I finally get to have what I never had before: the experience of watching it with the world. The only other show I experienced that with was Lost, a show I watched religiously and passionately. But The Return feels different - it feels bigger. 

You can feel that there are fans who’ve waited 10, 20, 25, years for it, and it carries the extra weight of knowing that this really might be David Lynch’s last filmic or televisual outing. Think about that for a second. This week might be the last time we can say that we have David Lynch’s work to look forward to. He’s spoken about how he’s moving away from films and towards visual arts, and at 71, going back to the world that forever cemented his name in the Pop Culture canon could be the most perfect swan song of his career. As a result, every episode feels loaded and essential, and with the events of tonight’s episode, it feels like we’re seeing something iconic take place. We are reacting together. We are experiencing it together. I’ve had conversations about it with my girlfriend, a bunch of friends, family members, and some randomers online for good measure. These are those shared experiences i’d longed for. 14 year old me, watching monumental television unfold and wishing he had someone to share it with is being rewarded every week, and I’ve never felt more rewarded than I felt with part 16 and its own monumental developments.

Dale Cooper is awake. Finally. Whether you’ve waited a season, or 27 years, nobody can deny the immense satisfaction that this development delivers. It feels huge. It feels iconic. It feels like something truly good and pure occurring in a bleak world. I got tearful, I laughed, I smiled so wide my face hurt. I didn’t realise how badly I needed Dale back. How badly the world needs Dale back. “People are under a lot of stress” notes Rodney Mitchum tonight. They certainly are. Whether they’re residents of Twin Peaks or Las Vegas, the characters throughout this return have resided in a world of hurt. It feels sharply current, and a reflection of an America that feels broken. Out of the pain, through the pain - through a violent electric shock that is - returns to us Dale Cooper, the hero we both need and deserve. He is Lynch and Frost’s testament to goodness, their monument to the power of kindness. The electrical power that has given him new life like some kind of benevolent Frankenstein’s monster is finally used for goodness, a reminder that a thing which can contain evil is not entirely comprised of that evil. There is room for goodness - the Mitchum brothers have hearts of gold, as Dale (it feels SO FUCKING GOOD to finally be able to write “Dale”) tells them. Janey-E and Sonny Jim are good people caught up in someone else’s awful web. Dale is a good man who promises that he will one day walk through that red door and come home for good. For now, he’s walked through that red curtain and is back home with us. Whether he himself comes back to Janey-E and Sonny Jim, or whether a copy of him (he tells Mike to make another) takes his place, I adore the humanity and warmth his family is written with. They are dearly cared about by Lynch and Frost.

Dale remembers every moment with the Joneses. It meant something. It filled his heart up, and kept him going, and Dale’s poignant sincerity - god, i’ve missed it - tells her this honest truth. The miraculous and thrilling thing about his awakening is there is no need to stop and explain everything to Dale. There is no catchup. He is awake, dressed in his sharp black suit within moments, and is on the way to Twin Peaks while the main theme chimes in cathartically, and here he proclaims: “I am the FBI”. I cannot think of a greater, more exciting and meaningful moment in TV. I have goosebumps just thinking of it. If The Return has all been about trying to return to something that once was and the difficulties surrounding that, then this episode seems to posit the optimistic and moving idea that some things will always be. Like Laura Palmer and the Log Lady, Dale Cooper always will be, and it is hard not to take great comfort in that fact. Like the river running through the town, or the moon overhead each night, the forces of good will always exist, even if they are reborn. It needed to take 16 episodes. It needed to feel earned. And it needed to make its point, which it has with powerful brilliance. 

The comfort of Dale’s return is contrasted by Doppelcoop’s pretty un-fatherly sacrificing of Richard Horne, who it’s revealed through a casually mumbled line, is (or was) Doppelcoop’s son. Doppelcoop’s headlights are still probing the road in front of him, still pushing onwards into that darkest of night, and there is a feeling of dread every time we see these headlights, waiting for them to illuminate the iconic “Welcome to Twin Peaks” sign. It is just a matter of time. Richard is destroyed by an electric light that engulfs him, and possibly whisks him away to the black lodge. The question is open of who sent Doppelcoop here, exactly? It seems to have been a trap designed to wipe him out, and it seemingly came from either Jeffries or Diane. His coldness and his manipulative ease is frightening here - he has known all along that Richard is his son, and feels nothing upon seeing his son killed. And Richard follows his father’s orders in a perverse mirror image of the people who follow Dale’s orders. He marches happily into the darkness where he is killed because that is Doppelcoop’s power: if he tells you to do something, you do it. With Dale, you listen to him similarly, but not from fear - instead from respect and love. Dale has always been a delightfully bossy person, but because Doppelcoop has twisted Dale’s goodness into evil, he has taken that friendly bossiness and turned it into a dictatorship of demands. If you don’t listen to Doppelcoop, you die. If you do listen to him, you’ll probably die anyway. 

Diane, we hardly knew ye. Well, maybe that should be DoppelDiane. We knew something was wrong - every moment she was on screen, Laura Dern masterfully sold Diane’s trembling dread with a wild intensity that was both all-knowing and untouchably distant. She was full of secrets, and Doppelcoop’s text to her (nice to see that lodge spirits use emoticons!) seems to have triggered something inside Diane which sent those secrets pouring out of her. The revelation that she is not the real Diane but instead a manufactured Diane sounds crazy, but suddenly everything about her makes sense. A real tortured Diane is in there somewhere, or at least her memories are, and perhaps if she is in the same place as Laura there is a distant hope that she is safe, or can be brought back. Doppelcoop has throughout the years been playing god. He has manufactured people, he has manipulated people, he has bent everything to his will, and Diane is an example of what that does to a person. She disappears after being shot in a wildly intense sequence, and her body is viciously flung, disappears, and then winds up in the red room. Here, She is destroyed. So, where is the real Diane? Where is her soul? What happens to people like her and Laura? It is heartbreaking to find out that all along, she was just a pawn, and her story of what Doppelcoop did is even more heartbreaking. It’s a sad end - but is it the end? I’m certain I heard her say “i’m in the sheriff’s station” in this scene, which seems to be where all the story threads are heading towards. I can’t help but think of Judy. Whoever she is, she’s got a LOT of explaining to do.

Gary and Chantal, we hardly knew ye, either. Their end is hilariously overblown. A fender bender turns into the most ludicrously violent uzi-led shootout, and it really is down to their own stupidity. They were vocal supporters of violence, and they died fittingly violent deaths - deaths which echo Bonne & Clyde, except Gary and Chantal aren’t really so romantic. They’re just two dumdums who eat a lot of crisps and mess up simple tasks. 

Audrey’s scenes tonight gave us the double rug pull. The first was “Surprise! She is in the real world”, and the second was a bigger “Surprise! Of course she’s fucking not!”. There was something so uncanny and strange happening with her throughout the last episodes, and Diane’s claim that she’s not herself tonight called back to Audrey’s similar claim in a previous episode. Her appearance at the Roadhouse feels realistic enough, until the MC announces Audrey’s Dance, the song she danced to all those years ago, and the crowd moves off the stage so that she can dance dreamily once again. The moment is inexplicable and as hypnotic now as it was then. However, where it once felt otherworldly in a wonderful sense, it now feels laced with menace and literal dreaminess - a violent altercation in the Roadhouse wakes Audrey up, and suddenly she is in a bright white room staring at herself in a mirror in confusion. The beautiful dream, the gorgeous music, the perfect concoction that sent nostalgic goosebumps up our arms is coldly revealed to be quite literally unreal. She is somewhere else now, where the lush purple lighting of the Roadhouse has been replaced with a blinding clinical whiteness. Her dance - so joyous and soulful - is snatched away from us and replaced with uncertainty once again. Is she somewhere with Laura and Diane, or someplace else entirely? I think we will find out, but what matters is that she is not here, she is not herself, and the dream has ended. 

It is incredible the range of emotions that an episode of Twin Peaks can stir. The questions I want answered most are clinging to me tightly - who is Judy and what does Doppelcoop want? - but the overall feeling I get from The Return and from this episode is not of confusion, but overwhelmed emotion. An episode where Dale speaks would in itself be enough to knock you out, but with everything else that happens, the episode is a behemoth - yet it is carefully written and plotted. Despite the questions, I didn’t get lost in the weeds, and the return of Dale feels like a moment of shining clarity to help you through. There is a feeling of togetherness and unity now that Dale is awake again, and a sense of safety that wasn’t present before. And so, we head into the final week of Twin Peaks maybe ever. And like the millions that we are sharing this experience with, tonight’s episode is about sharing our experiences with others - be it Diane sharing her experiences with the FBI, Dale sharing his life with Janey-E and Sonny Jim, or the Mitchum Brothers sharing their generosity with the Jones family. It’s about the power of sharing, of not living alone. And while it may be painful (Diane), or beautiful (Dale and Janey-E), it is essential that we share the experience. It’s the source of goodness, and the goodness is now wide awake in Twin Peaks. 

[the-original-angry-bird]

All You Need to Know || Donald Duncan

All you need to know about Donald Duncan and his life

Basic Info

Name: Donald Duncan Age: 16 Birthday: July 10th Sign: Cancer sun, Taurus moon. Gender: Male Sexuality: Unknown (basically decided by who he bonds with) Relationship Status: Single (but has been in entanglements before) House: Slytherin - 6th year Height: 5 foot 9 inches Patronus: Black Swan  If your patronus is the black Swan then it is likely you are a highly emotional individual. Your passion allows you to devote yourself to your interests and become an expert in your chosen field. The downside to your passionate existence is that you can sometimes struggle to understand your own emotions. If this is your patronus you will thrive in a warm and friendly atmosphere, you feed off positive energy and give it out just as freely.Only a person of a true kind nature with an amazing depth of emotion could conjure the black Swan patronus. Boggart:The person who keeps killing him.  They take on a few different forms, often starting with the present one. Most of the time the person who killed him was a human, and since those are the most recognizable faces he has in this present life, those are the flickering forms the boggart takes. However it has been known to swap to an animal here and there, giving Donald the appearance of being a coward and afraid of many things and people.

Secret: Donald has the rare “gift” to remember his past lives. While that isn’t strange enough to tell people--usually drawing looks of disbelief or scorn--Donald is loathe to admit what his true goals are in this one. Never has he had the opportunity to be a human before now, and on top of that he’s a wizard. It’s a dark burden, but Donald prays to one day get the chance to finally return the favor to that single person. He just has to work up the courage to actually do it.

Goal: Donald wants to seek his revenge upon the person who constantly kills him. Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite have the stomach to be able to kill someone after dying so many times himself.

Items of Interest - Precious Items

Wand:  English Oak, Phoenix, 13″, Supple

This is the rarest core type. Phoenix feathers are capable of the greatest range of magic, though they may take longer than either unicorn or dragon cores to reveal this. They show the most initiative, sometimes acting of their own accord, a quality that many witches and wizards dislike.Phoenix feather wands are always the pickiest when it comes to potential owners, for the creature from which they are taken is one of the most independent and detached in the world. These wands are the hardest to tame and to personalise, and their allegiance is usually hard won. A wand for good times and bad, this is a friend as loyal as the wizard who deserves it. Wands of English oak demand partners of strength, courage and fidelity. Less well-known is the propensity for owners of English oak wands to have powerful intuition, and, often, an affinity with the magic of the natural world, with the creatures and plants that are necessary to wizardkind for both magic and pleasure. The oak tree is called King of the Forest from the winter solstice up until the summer solstice, and its wood should only be collected during that time (holly becomes King as the days begin to shorten again, and so holly should only be gathered as the year wanes. This divide is believed to be the origin of the old superstition, “when his wand’s oak and hers is holly, then to marry would be folly,” a superstition that I have found baseless). It is said that Merlin’s wand was of English oak (though his grave has never been found, so this cannot be proven).

Yashica Mat 124G, Nikon F2, Polaroid: Donald loves photography now that he’s a human. He adores taking photos and is almost glued to some sort of camera or device that can record things. Part of the reasoning behind it is that he wants to be a photographer and publish a book at some point. That way, when he reincarnates perhaps he can seek out his book and have proof that his memories of past lives are real.

Scolla Stone: While not the biggest fan of technology, Donald is more accustomed to it’s existance than most other wizards. He attended Hogwarts finding himself always frustrated with the slow owls and the lack of his digital cameras to work. Then, the Scolla came out and he’s been using it as his backup quick-shot camera for a while now, as well as a great way to contact his parents while in the halls of Hogwarts.

Personality

Donald is a confusing person to most people looking in. He’s emotionally driven and quick to jump to a response based upon said emotions, so much so that people wonder why he isn’t in Gryffindor sometimes. They tend to run on high and are quick to rise to the surface when he’s under pressure or distressed and they run especially high for one particular person no matter the situation. However to those who know him and have earned his trust Donald is a calm, quiet, and go-with-the-flow sort of guy, which is where the confusion lies.

Mostly his cool and calm comes from a strong appreciation of life and its inner workings. With so many different memories of his past lives, Donald has developed an understanding that all things feel and that they all will cycle back around to live again. It causes a great deal of peace in many aspects of his life, but anxiety in others when he thinks about what pattern lies in his own cycle. He can be perfectly content being alone out in nature.

Despite his mix of rapid personality shifts, Donald is generally a friendly sort of guy who’s slow to trust others outside of his immediate circle. But for those who have earned his loyalty a good and helpful friend is always on hand. Donald may not be the best at listening to problems or dealing with crying people, but he is good at helping those in a pinch through practical means.

Of course, like most Slytherins he has a devious side that rears its head when he’s looking for some fun and encouraged by his housemates. Though never malicious in intent, Donald loves a good prank… so long as it’s not aimed at him. It’s all fun and games until it gets dished back out, and then it can quickly devolve into fits of rage and injustice.

Home Life

Donald’s home life is a simple one at heart, and he likes it that way. His parents are both loving people, content with their lot in life, and his sister is... well he manages to somewhat get along. 

His mother is a medical herbalist with a knack for potion-making and crafts brews for medicinal use and based upon an order from clients. She also grows herbs for her own experimentation or to sell later. Donald’s father is a boat captain of a fishing vessel that makes port in Mevagissey, near their home. He’s a rough sort of man, but calm and composed most of the time with a very practical outlook on life and friends. He is devoted to his family, but often the more magical nature of his his wife and son eludes his grasp.

Donald’s twin sister is another story, however. Della was not graced with magic like Donald and is forever a bit bitter about it. She has developed a strong sense of distaste for it and distaste for the family’s simple lifestyle, unlike her brother. Often she’ll ask to get whisked away to London or even beg to take weekend trips to visit her brother with the intention of running off to somewhere more populated than their small town where she lives. While Della might be a bit of a restless spirit, Donald still loves her and tries to do the right thing by her, even if it means dragging her to London every now and again.

Growing up within a more muggle-centered life, Donald is more at home with their lifestyle and accustomed to solving his problems without resorting to his wand. From a young age he’d been out on the boat with his father or in the dirt with his mother and learned to appreciate their devotion to their crafts, even if it wasn’t always as glamorous as the jobs some of his friend’s parents had. He appreciates hard work and is keen to spot it in others around the school.

Donald’s friends back home are all typically muggles with only a few exceptions, namely his uncle. For the most part he’s been isolated from them, except in the summers, due to his absence from their lives as he goes off to school. It’s caused his summers to be a bit more boring, but with magic and a working fireplace he’s managed to take trips whenever invited by his magical companions. Donald’s uncle, however, is another story. Being one of the few other wizards he’d known growing up, there is a sense of respect there, but it’s a far cry from the same sort shown to his parents.

Quick / Random  Facts!

>  Della is Donald’s twin sister, and the far more restless sibling, even considering Donald’s temper. >  Easily stressed by large crowds and prone to outbursts of anger then. >  Donald has a great affinity for water and loves swimming whenever he gets the chance. >  Is better at Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, and Herbology over the more wand-waving forms of magic. >  Holds a very simple and practical outlook on life and his interactions. >  Likes peace and quiet over large gatherings, but he often shows up at parties after being dragged by his fellow dorm-mates.

Tattoos / Markings

>  A scar on his arm where he accidentally had a fishhook lodged in it >  A scar on his knee when he jokingly attempted to kick a door with some friends and kicked through the glass. He cried, a lot. He was 8.