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#a new teaser means a new claudia drawing i guess #iwtv #amc iwtv #interview with the vampire #claudia iwtv #my art #iwtv fanart #illustration #art

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#guess whom i'm drawing

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"We are a family?"

#iwtv #interview with the vampire #amc iwtv #claudia iwtv #lestat #lestat de lioncourt #iwtv fanart #i almost died #not my style tho #illustration #my art #i wanted it to look like #an ink drawing #or a linocut #i failed

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“I clung to your hands so that something human might exist in the chaos.”

— Hélène Cixous, from “Olivier De Serres- A Single Passion Two Witnesses,” Love Itself: In the Letter Box (Polity Press, 2008)

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#when drawing this #i was thinking about that interview with #assad zaman #but honestly #i just love this outfit #though he has no glasses in my drawing #you know #red on red #(i love his glasses :( ) #iwtv #interview with the vampire #amc iwtv #iwtv fanart #armand #illustration #art

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spark in the dark.

#iwtv #interview with the vampire #iwtv fanart #amc iwtv #claudia iwtv #my art #illustration #art #she's THE character.

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#the truth finally #iwtv #interview with the vampire #amc iwtv #such comments on youtube were made for this

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i had been playing with the effects until i found myself amused by the way Louis' eyes direction changed depending on the brightness of the colours applied.

here he is looking at nothing; his gaze is averted, it's relaxed yet not soft. it's determined and as vampiric as never before.

but here he is Louis again. a subtle change of brightness, and the eyes appear more human, more emphatic, hiding profound sadness and grief. it's all red, with a glimpse of non-existing tears.

add a little more light, and it's something else.

"Who are you, Louis?"

"I'm the reticent vampire of the 9th arrondissement. I walk the night, capturing disappointment and regret. "

#well for obvious reasons i left the first one but #iwtv #louis de pointe du lac

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"Who are you, Louis?"

"I'm the reticent vampire of the 9th arrondissement. I walk the night, capturing disappointment and regret. "

#iwtv #interview with the vampire #louis de pointe du lac #he and claudia are like 99% of the reason why im so excited about s2 #i love them #well who doesn't #art #illustration

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rewind the tape ep 2 question: Why do you think it's important for Louis to maintain the thread of his humanity, specifically by doing so through having a human meal he can't taste?

i had to answer this question bc i'm obsessed w it and what it reveals about louis narratively. i think it's important for louis to keep up the motions of humanity in a way that mimics connection. louis is desperate for authenticity but only if the gesture carries symbolism but the moment one imbues ritual into an action, the action is now a performance even if the audience is just the performer. i've talked about the usage of the golden spoon in this scene before but it adds an extra layer of performatism (in the post-postmodern sense) to the whole scene.

but on top of that performative aspect, i think it's interesting that the gesture of humanity louis chooses to preserve is eating food. this whole ep prominently features louis' struggles w hunting and how his vampiric hunger almost drove him to kill his nephew and further alienated him from his family, his human connections. the interview is also placed entirely in a dining room. daniel eats human food but these meals are more aesthetic than satiating w the presentation of an experimental fine dining establishment while louis drinks blood from a mysterious farm, eats a live fox, and then drinks from a human man all on the other side of the table. the way eating is presented in this ep feels almost hostile. daniel comments that louis "missed" several endangered species in what he chose to serve daniel, ultimately leading daniel to participate in predatory, unethical consumption alongside louis. and i think that's the point. serving daniel these meals attempts to force a reluctant empathy (one that daniel rejects and instead voices his disgust). and then he asks daniel this:

louis does. it's all he contemplates. what he eats and how he eats it symbolizes his separation from humanity. so in this mode of thinking, louis decides to make his tenuous tether to humanity by eating human food once a week. and the dish he chooses in this scene is taken from an emotionally significant moment from daniel's memoir, another act of proposed empathy between him and daniel. and while this moment is softer than the scene w the fox or damek, it still ends in this shot:

louis and daniel are sharing this meal and this moment but they're so far from each other. to me this demonstrates the futility of the gesture. they're physically performing the same action but their experience is so fundamentally different. louis is performing human actions but he is at this point so far removed from the concept

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Cannot stop thinking about Anne magill paintings. Maybe my new favorite painter. She just captures this ..,,,,,, dreamy feeling...,,, a certain tenderness..... a fleeting moment of contentedness..... like nothing else I’ve seen

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"I felt like the script understood something about me that I was still trying to understand about myself..."

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GO WATCH BLACK SAILS PLEASE

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interview with the vampire (2022)

marina tsvetaeva / frank bidart / isabel allende // martin hallett & barbara karasek / clementine von radics / julio cortazar / olivia gatwood / gregory maguire / john irving // jodi picoult / jose luis peixoto // margaret atwood / walter benjamin // alan moore / salman rushdie // joyce carol oates / alejandra pizarnik / donte collins / tennessee williams // mark lawrence / alan moore.

[transcript below cut]

Memory is mist: Memory is punishment. memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.

memory is a fickle instrument memory is a rope around the neck. Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies. memory is a story / told so well, it becomes / a part of the body. Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work too: it keeps us who we are. memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory, but it has you!

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture. Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.

Memory is not in the head only. Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

MEMORY'S SO TREACHEROUS. Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also: but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

Memory blurs, memory opens and closes like a door in the wind memory taps a gun to your inner skull & demands you bring back the dead Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you. MEMORIES CAN BE VILE, REPULSIVE LITTLE BRUTES.

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louis is going down as one of the characters of all time btw. there's something about characters who are so deeply repressed in every facet of their lives continuously fighting for happiness, yet ultimately unable to achieve that happiness because they've denied themselves for so long that they no longer know what they actually want vs what they've convinced themselves to chase.

and it's fascinating, because that's so clear in the way that louis conceptualizes happiness by fighting for the things previously denied to him; the spectre of his perceived failures as a human haunt him and preclude the possibility at any new lease on happiness in the future. he wants to buy the fairplay because he links success with respect, and respect with fulfillment: the idea that as soon as his (white) peers are forced to admit he's a better businessman than them, he'll be happy. except he isn't happy, because there is no goal post at which point they'll accept he's smarter or more capable than them, and so instead he's forced back into a game that will never fulfill him, no matter how powerful or capable he becomes.

and then he tries to build a family, tries to surround himself with people who he can care for and who he can have a positive impact on, building connections for himself and bringing meaning to his life. which also doesn't work, because he's simultaneously haunting and haunted by his human family, and there's no way for him to reconcile what he's lost with what he's gained. he wants grace, and he could have grace, but he's spent his entire life knowing that every facet of himself is unacceptable to society, that he can't admit what he is without also being condemned for it. and it doesn't matter that grace isn't society, that grace would accept him - he is, to his own mind, an unacceptable thing. to admit what he is out loud could only lead to catastrophe, because to think anything less is dangerous to the very principles that allow him to exist.

and so instead of having grace in his life, he has claudia. and he can love claudia and he can adore claudia, but he can not find a connection to humanity in her, because she isn't and doesn't want to be human. he has, in his quest to find meaning and connection with humanity, surrounded himself with monsters.

and then he has lestat. lestat who, for all his grandiosity and hedonism and theatricality, is just as festering a pool of repression as louis is. he's a person who can be anyone, so long as anyone is someone who is seen and adored and wanted, because to be wanted is to be happy.

and so you have louis, a man who can't admit what he wants, because admittance is vulnerability, and vulnerability is death; and you have lestat, a man who needs to be wanted, because if you aren't wanted you're abandoned, and abandonment is a fate worse than death.

and then they both try to get happy.

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I always thought he saved me from something. Always been so fucking grateful. Now I wonder… maybe Jack took me from something I was supposed to figure my own way out of. Maybe he took away the chance to get strong enough to save myself. To grow up. Instead, I went with him, did what he did, did what the others did. Thought I’d become one of them. If I’m not what I was when I was born, and I ain’t what I’ve become instead… what the fuck am I?

- Black Sails, XV

insp by @brownbicon​

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A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe… those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born? It’s found truth in its maturity, which if a virtue in man ought to be no less so for the things men create. - Black Sails, XXXVIII