#I find Lawrence and Adam so interesting because it’s specifically the idea that these are two men who barely know each other. Adam know more | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

angeltrapz · 3 years

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I watched the last key just to read ur fic first off, second off, tell me about the Intricate Rituals tm of lawrence and adam

CRIES??? YOU WHAT??? anon pls that is literally so sweet omg... I've never had someone tell me that b4 but I'm sitting here beaming. I hope you liked it/it helped things make more sense!!!!! <3

Okay so. Intricate Rituals™️. They actually have a few. (Touch is a VERY big part of Adam's love language in particular, so you know... intricate rituals that allow you to touch the skin of other men...)

On the mornings that Lawrence has to go to work, he will always kiss Adam's forehead before he leaves, no matter what. Even if Adam's not even awake yet (and let's be real, he probably isn't... not a morning person whatsoever). Does he need to, technically speaking? No. Does he feel uncomfortable if he doesn't + will it bother him for the rest of the day? Yes. I've touched on this before but in any scenario where Lawrence ends up with Adam, he is much more open with his love and, in turn, with his affection. He tells Adam he loves him often, shows that he loves him often; beyond that, I like the idea that he's just a hopeless romantic at heart, and having the life he's always wanted deep down, even if the circumstances were far less than ideal, well... Adam brings it out of him, what can he say? So he always makes sure he kisses his boyfriend's forehead before he goes to work. (And he lets Adam call him/he'll call Adam sometimes on his lunch break just to talk... not every day, but often enough <3)

On the mornings where neither of them have anywhere to be/anything to do, though, Lawrence can often be convinced to stay in bed for little while after they both wake up because, as he's long since learned, sleepy just-woke-up Adam is very, very cuddly. Literally all he has to do is just be like "Please?" and kiss at Lawrence's jaw a little bit and every single time, without fail, Lawrence will just sigh and be like "I suppose..." But make no mistake, he loves it just as much. I think both of them are very like... unused to touch? Especially like this - cuddling purely for the sake of cuddling, no emotional distress to be spoken of, it's purely just to hold each other because they can... this extends to more than just the morning, too; Lawrence's hand on Adam's lower back or his shoulder or his knee when they're close, Adam keeping an arm around Lawrence's middle or leaning against his shoulder or resting his head against Lawrence's back from behind. Adam is definitely more inexperienced with this kind of affection than Lawrence is, but they're both starving for it and if the opportunity presents itself, neither of them will turn it down. Shameless plug but I've written a fic abt this particular concept!

Anyway! Once they get out of bed, though, Lawrence will start a fresh pot of coffee for Adam + Adam will get Lawrence's morning cup of tea ready (it's so funny bc Larry can't stand coffee and Adam has yet to try a flavour of tea he likes... the things they do for love). Lawrence typically makes breakfast for them on these days, because Adam isn't at full capacity yet and because Larry honestly doesn't mind doing so; he kind of likes being able to do that for Adam honestly? Adam has issues with eating (i.e. doesn't eat many meals, doesn't eat with regularity, often feels nauseous + unable to eat, usually eats the same foods... part of that is, naturally, that he's autistic, but also because he's gone so long eating so little that it takes him a while to adjust to the fact that Hey, I Don't Have To Do That Anymore), and Lawrence is very familiar with those issues, so to see Adam eating like three blueberry pancakes and enjoying them makes Lawrence just 🥰 bc he knows it's hard for Adam.

So Lawrence will be at the stove, watching to make sure he knows when to flip the pancakes, and then Adam will walk up behind him and wrap his arms around his waist and lay his head against his back. Sometimes he just rests there, sometimes he leans up a little so he can leave kisses on the back of Lawrence's neck, but the motive is always the same: touch. Lawrence might not say anything in acknowledgement, but he'll always lean back a little bit in Adam's arms to just be like hi, I know you're there, I love you. And they'll stay that way for a while, because why not? They've earned this gentleness, this tenderness, have they not? Eventually they know they'll have to separate so that they can get plates out and silverware and such, but while Lawrence is cooking, they're content to stand and sway a little together.

Another example of Lawrence's romantic tendencies is he'll pull Adam's chair out for him. I firmly think Adam wouldn't care for this if it were Anyone else, but he'll just smile at Lawrence and thank him and sit down because the fact that Lawrence wants to do things like that for him, something so simple but that speaks volumes... he really, really appreciates it. When they sit down he'll knock his ankle against Lawrence's under the table just because he can and Lawrence will do it back and they'll be sitting there grinning like fools bc!! It's so silly but it makes them so happy? And I think they deserve to be silly sometimes. Again, they've earned it.

Um!! Another big one is what they do before bed every night. So when Lawrence gets home from work, after he's had a little bit of time to relax, Adam will herd him into the bathroom and help him to sit on the edge of the bathtub, help unstrap his prosthetic, and he'll get out the special basin + soft washcloths they have specifically for this reason and he'll help Lawrence wash his stump. It's something that Lawrence used to hold so much shame over it, refused to accept any sort of help + made things harder for himself (which I've touched on in my reply to an ask frm @1ceblock), but at one point Adam found him struggling with it and was just like. "I've got this, it's okay. I want to help you. Will you let me help you?" and that's how this little ritual came to be. Once he's done and he's made sure the stump is properly dry, he'll press a kiss or two there and it will always make Lawrence sigh and smile because Adam doesn't have to do that. He does it because he wants to. That means a whole lot to Lawrence, and he always makes sure to let Adam know by kissing him before they leave the bathroom.

After that, once they've changed into their pajamas and are comfortable, Lawrence will get out whatever novel he's been reading lately and settle back against the pillows, and Adam will rest his head on his shoulder and sling an arm over his waist and just. Let out the biggest sigh. He always does, and he does it because he's warm and comfortable and happy and because he loves Lawrence, and Lawrence will rest his cheek against Adam's head and they just lay like that for a while. Sometimes if Adam's interested, Lawrence will read out loud so Adam can hear too, because he's often too tired to read along. They can stay like this for a good hour and a half, honestly. Sometimes Adam falls asleep like this, feeling safe and contented, and it always warms Lawrence's heart. It makes him so happy to see Adam so relaxed just because they're close.

Eventually though, when Lawrence is finally done reading for the night, one of them will pull the other's back to his chest (they act as big/little spoon interchangeably) and whoever it is being big spoon will also put his arm around the other's middle. Of course they stay as they are if Adam's already asleep, because Lawrence doesn't want to wake him up if he's sleeping well, but if not, it depends on who wants to be held more. It took Lawrence a Long time to admit he wanted Adam to do that sometimes, but once he got the hang of it, he's completely unashamed about it; Adam doesn't mind at all + honestly finds it kinda sweet, actually. Again, that kind of thing wasn't exactly smth Lawrence allowed himself before Adam, so it's unfamiliar territory for a good while, but he finds himself quite at ease with it with time <33

Other than those particular tendencies it's the little things; sitting hip-to-hip on the couch despite having plenty of room Not to do that, one resting his head on the other's thigh while they're watching TV/a movie, bumping hips while doing the dishes, stuff like that. They're both a level of touch-starved (Adam more so than Lawrence, I think), so they're kind of navigating this together and are more than happy to indulge in it whenever the opportunity arises.

#im. literally yelling tht my fic got you to watch the last key dude!!!!!!!#am I projecting w adams eating issues? yeah probably but thats fine. I feel it in my heart #anyway! thank you so much this genuinely made me feel better... free serotonin #'you create intricate rituals that allow you to touch the skin of other men' hits hard honestly #saw #adam #lawrence #they. deserve to be happy and soft. I feel it with my whole heart

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Boy Meets World’s Slasher Episode Was Scarier Than it Had Any Right To Be

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Blood-curdling screams. Taunting phone calls from a psycho killer. Creepy, ominous music with lyrics like “Here’s a knife. Here’s a gun. There’ll be fun for everyone. Death is on the menu tonight!” Elements of a forgotten ‘90s slasher classic? Nope. Just some highlights from the most memorable episode of ABC’s family sitcom Boy Meets World.

With the launch of Disney+ and ample time to get nostalgic and revisit old movies and TV shows due to the pandemic, many older millennials are diving back into Boy Meets World, which ran for seven seasons from 1993 through 2000 as a staple of ABC’s TGIF lineup. The show centered on Philadelphia teenager Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) navigating life with his best friend Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong), his love interest Topanga Lawrence (Danielle Fishel), and brother Eric (Will Friedle), while perpetually receiving life lessons from longtime teacher and eventual principal Mr. Feeny (William Daniels).

Boy Meets World had no shortage of standout moments and episodes, like WWE wrestler Vader appearing as the father of a misunderstood school bully, a young Linda Cardellini being the girl who almost destroyed the Cory and Topanga love story for good, and Peter Tork (who briefly played Topanga’s father), Micky Dolenz, and Davy Jones staging an impromptu Monkees reunion. And who could forget when Ben Savage’s famous brother Fred guest starred as a creepy college professor and was shoved through a glass door?

But perhaps no other Boy Meets World episode made a bigger impact to impressionable young minds than the fifth season highlight “And Then There Was Shawn,” a format-breaking homage to the popular slasher films of the moment, like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer (the latter of which hit theaters just four months earlier). Serving as a metaphor for the fear and uncertainty Shawn feels over the recent breakup of Cory and Topanga, the episode is a mini-horror movie that operates in dream logic and features shocking cast deaths, zeitgeisty jokes, and a big ‘90s teen idol cameo. Many young fans were genuinely frightened by the scares conjured up in the episode, while older fans loved the campy, winking references and the change of pace storytelling.

“And Then There Was Shawn” writer Jeff Menell was typically happy to do what was asked of him on the series, but he jumped at the chance to write a horror-influenced episode. “I’m a diehard movie fan. I have been my entire life. But as a writer on set, I just did whatever I was told,” Menell said in a phone interview with Den of Geek. “I never went after anything. But I begged to write this one because I just knew I could do it.”

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The episode finds the high school-aged cast members serving detention with Mr. Feeny after a fight, springing from Cory and Topanga’s recent breakup, disrupts the class. Things quickly take a turn when the kids see a message in blood written on the chalkboard that reads “No One Gets Out Alive!” and hear a discomforting jingle with menacing lyrics playing over the high school’s PA system. Initially, the kids believe that Mr. Feeny is playing a prank on them, but things take a turn for the serious — and scary – when classmate Kenny is murdered in the dark by the masked killer wielding a pencil (prompting a very timely “You Killed Kenny!” reference). None other than Mr. Feeny himself bites the dust shortly thereafter via scissors to the back.

“You know, usually you go off for two weeks and you go write this draft and you bring it back, and then the room rewrites it. That always was the process. I wrote this one like in two days, and I had to pretend that it took longer because if you’ve written the script in two days, they assume it sucks, or that you didn’t really care or make an effort,” Menell says.

When Menell brought the initial draft to the writer’s room, however, there were minimal changes to his script. The episode’s director, Jeff McCracken, was impressed.

“Jeff (Menell) went out and wrote his episode and when it came in it was perfect. It was an absolutely perfect flow of the script. He just nailed it.”

Emulating classic slasher film elements, McCracken had to approach the filming of “And Then There Was Shawn” differently than a typical episode.

“It was so much fun,” McCracken says. “Because it had all these special sequences, we really had to shoot it like a film. We rehearsed for two days, then shot it for three, and then we showed it before a live audience. The film style is generally single style or two cameras, but I shot a lot of it with three to four cameras so that we wouldn’t have to do multiple retakes. You couldn’t have done the whole thing in front of a live audience because it would have taken too much time to set everything up and run through a show with an audience sitting there.”

The pencil kill is the most memorable moment from the episode, but McCracken nor Menell can take credit for it. “I remember the one gag that was not in the script, the one gag that Michael Jacobs (creator/executive producer) came up with, which was genius, was the pencil dynamic,” McCracken recalls. After classmate Kenny is shown impaled through the head with a pencil, his body slumps down the wall, leaving a lead pencil mark behind him. Cory quips, “We’ll always remember he was this tall.”

Kenny and Feeny’s deaths are bloodless, but they leave a mighty impression for a network family-friendly series. Both writer and director knew that they’d have to tread lightly if they were going to be faithful to the slasher genre (“I’m surprised they let us have Feeny with (scissors) in his back, to tell you the truth,” Menell says) but they both made a concerted effort to surround the kills with humor.

“We had to make it funny,” McCracken says.” I mean, you put (scissors) in someone’s back, it can be very disturbing for a young audience. You can’t traumatize them. We did it with some sense of humor and it wasn’t so graphic.”

Part of the humor was derived from the very specific references made in the episode. Like Scream standout character Randy, Shawn makes meta references to the rules of the horror genre, telling his friends that virgins are the only ones who are safe. Eric says, “I’m dead,” Jack says, “I’m dead,” and Shawn says, “I’ll get as sick as you can without dying.”

This slightly scandalous joke wasn’t anything new for the series, but the violent nature of the episode led to “And Then There Was Shawn” receiving the show’s first TV-PG-V rating. According to Menell, Michael Jacobs had a way of pushing the boundaries with network executives. “He got away with a lot more stuff than most people because he could really browbeat some network executives at times to get what he wanted.”

One major addition to the cast for “And Then There Was Shawn” probably helped Jacobs catch the network in the right mood. Jennifer Love Hewitt, coming off Party of Five and at the height of her scream queen powers, guest stars as new John Adams High student Jennifer Love Fefferman. Hewitt at the time was dating Will Friedle and it’s believed their relationship inspired her cameo.

“We maybe asked him to ask her, because obviously she was in I Know What You Did Last Summer, so having her there just adds horror film credibility to it,” Menell says. “She was great. She was such a great sport, and it was fun having her on.”

McCracken concurs: “It was such a pleasure. It was one of those things that you don’t know how a major star walking in on your set, how they’re going to be, what their demands are going to be, what their personality is going to be like, what their disposition for the script’s going to be like, and she just came in full guns blazing and just had a blast and that made everything just wonderful. She was game for anything.”

One thing that Hewitt was game for was a big makeout scene with Friedle’s Eric, that may or may not have been improvised. “I don’t think we wrote that in, I think they just wanted to do it and we let it,” Menell laughs.

Amongst all of the horror homage fun, the episode ends with Shawn removing the killer’s mask to find himself starring back, having gone through this whole slasher bit just to get his friends back together. It’s quite the philosophical ending for a show primarily aimed at tweens and teens.

“When it did get serious with Shawn at the end, it was more poignant than it was scary and it was also a great reveal that it was him,” McCracken says. “It was metaphorical in the sense that that component of Shawn is in us all and it’s always lurking and it’s always out there. And so, be vigilant.”

The Jeffs knew that they had a special episode on their hands with “And Then There Was Shawn,” but who could have guessed the episode would have this sort of longevity 22 years later?

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“We got a few letters from people that were so scared, couldn’t believe we would kill Feeny. And we got some people that were upset,” Menell says. “But we had no idea until years later when the internet came on how popular that episode became. We did some crossovers, some time flashbacks, and some other really cool episodes, but this was a show that was nothing like any other episode we had aired or would air. It was probably the most fun … it’s certainly the most scary.”

The post Boy Meets World’s Slasher Episode Was Scarier Than it Had Any Right To Be appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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liberons · 5 years

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* 〢 ✕ YOUR CHARACTER / IN 5 QUOTES.

TAGGED BY : @blutkrone thanks 4 enabling me i owe you my Life TAGGING : @humanwrath, @vengeborne, @plaguecrowned, @aemiliiu, @aquasent, @snowinabottle, @delicaterot—tho listen i went overboard it’s just supposed to be the quotes not the whole fucking metas but JHVJH go off if you want.

( i. ) ❝ the palms of his two black hands are red, / inflamed with binding up the sheaves of dead / hours that were once all glory ❞ —D.H. LAWRENCE, firelight & nightfall.

so this poem draws this sort of parallel between a man who sees darkness / night in himself, in contrast to the memory of the ‘queen’; in all her light and glory. and i feel like that’s pretty redundantly a damn good parallel to him & historia, and the end of uprising as a whole. there’s this queen of sunlight and hyacinths ( a flower with symbolical meaning often attributed to being given for remorse / regret, which is not only a common theme for levi, but also, i’m sure, a nice nod to the apology he never clearly gave historia for pushing her into this role ) . then of course there’s the nightfall side of the poem. the narrator goes on after describing the beauty of the queens to talk of how ‘he’ instead faces a grimmer atmosphere. a grey churchyard to symbolize the many lives already lost, and describes his sunsets as torn & red. so this all fits levi very nicely—but this particular line, before all of the reminiscing takes place, hits best of all. his hands are very much tainted beyond repair / covered in blood and swollen from reaping so many of his comrades. whenever he has a moment to spare, he sees them and recalls how they may symbolize moments of ‘glory and queens’, but in the end, he will always go back to remembering the darkness that looms with it.

and a lot of d.h. lawrence verses fall into my portrayal; but especially notable poems you can look at for any particular interest in levi are “ giorno dei morti ”, touching on him & death again, & “ the revolutionary ” , as well as this line from my old blog; which—while the poem in its entirely is worth a look for mood alone—isn’t quite as reminiscent of levi’s inner turmoil as the previous two; which i couldn’t even nitpick from because they were so applicable in their entirety.

( ii. ) ❝ my body is both weapon and wound, predator and prey. i will self-destruct without any help. ❞ —MEG HASTON, paperweight.

oof yeah just some good ol’ emphasis on levi’s strength being both the best & worst of him. he’s incredibly useful for humanity; it gives him a motive & raison d’être unlike any other—but at the same time, it leads him to his vicious tendencies. it drives his common resort to violence over other options of expression. he’s nothing but a weapon at this point. an object for the survey corps to use, and he’s more than aware of it. it slides into every aspect of his life: from his mentality to just keep moving forwards to his inability to imagine himself in a world where this isn’t the case anymore. it isn’t entirely translated that clearly here, but from what i remember of my friend telling me when the smartpass first came out, he essentially insinuates he had literally never thought about what he would do if humanity wins, and doesn’t take the time to think of that at all.

( iii. ) ❝ turn on the dark, / I’m afraid of the light. ❞ —SHEL SILVERSTEIN, batty.

this is actually such a cute fucking poem lmao but this line really resounds with levi. it fits a lot with the narrative i mentioned above on his inability to see the world / himself as anything but what it is in actuality. he’s always been dragged down to one dire fate or another, and the mere concept of things going smoothly just doesn’t resonate. he holds no dreams of marriage, settlement, friendship, love, etc. because that just isn’t how his world has ever been, neither by observation or experience. and when he’s exposed to it, i feel like it would genuinely shake him. while we see him being rather invasive of personal space and otherwise seemingly unaffected by physical affairs, levi still fails to hold any valuable, clear bonds to those around him.

( iv. ) ❝ will you coalesce / of dust and light and broken glass / who has to sweep / who has to patch the empty frame / who is going to fly back / to blue? ❞ —KAZIM ALI, ornithography.

the poem leads with the fabrication of the scene; detail of the softness in day’s light hitting the room, and how the scene outside can reflect the essence of the narrator in question, asking if [they] “are blue”, like as blue, as the sky. this hits particularly well with the line i have reblogged on my blog here, where the essence of the light from the window being brought in through tattered frames, that despite the glass’ wear & tear, isn’t broken. and thus begs the question of whether “you” are worthy of comparing yourself to this beauty, even if age has broken you otherwise. this poem specifically speaks to my view of levi in terms of impressionism, with a lot of aesthetic references through “filtered beauty”, for lack of a better term. he’s a sensual bastard, who literally comments on the prime of the world being the beauty outside the walls, seeing that past the titans and everything he’s faced there. the idea that he can see so much of it, but only through corrupted lens. and as the poem title implies, the references of birds—wings flying through twists and turns, trying to maneuver both themselves and others—evidently matches so much of the survey corps in general. hopefully that was enough to grasp why this final line really hits home. this idea of working alongside his “other birds” / the soldiers, past the shards & dust of their being, to keep themselves together and see who’s truly going to attain freedom in finding “blue”, or freely facing the beauty of the world in its sky.

( v. ) ❝ … make death proud to take us. ❞ —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, antony & cleopatra.

this quote just really reflects levi’s way of encouraging his soldiers; and just really makes me think of the final moments in return to shiganshina. it’s really just a beautiful line to reflect everything he went through to get to that final point of accepting erwin’s death; from when he was adamant in telling erwin he’ll defeat the beast titan alone because the mission won’t be a complete failure so long as “he & eren return alive”. at this point, he’s still holding that disappointment in erwin for what he perceives as some form of deception from erwin’s original words of doing it for humanity vs the revelation of prioritizing his own dream with the basement. in shiganshina, he hears erwin speak bluntly again of his “deceit” while discussing his plan, though now he reveals that he actually plans on sacrificing himself, with the narrative point meant to focus on how this means he won’t be seeing the basement, shocking levi. and you see that deadpan disappointment again as erwin retells of how this dream clutches at him, but as he goes on to describe how he feels nothing but the eyes of his dead comrades watching him, it sinks in that all this talk some manifestation of his guilt, and we see a change in levi’s expression again as he finally realizes what exactly is going on here.

this back and forth disappointment that finishes with utter confidence in his perception of erwin and their partnership is incredibly reflective of this moment in shakespeare’s play to me. and as opposed to his earlier view of needing to keep erwin alive, even moments prior, levi’s quick to agree on his plan. this seeps into a lot of serumbowl back-and-forth, but the most prominent bit is giving erwin what levi now sees he deserves: a good, clean death. similar to cleo, he’s quick to get over his mourning and set off on his own possible call to hell; setting all their lives at risk such that, if they’re all going to die, they’ll make death proud to take them. in the end, he doesn’t simply tell erwin he’ll “do whatever”, or just parrot that he’ll kill the beast titan and simply “trust his judgement”. he makes it a point to command erwin to give up on his dream and die [honorably], alongside every recruit, rather than just sitting there and taking it. and i do think this lack of argument, this final understanding, plays into erwin’s final smile that i just have to point out because i already saved the screenshot i love one (1) bastard man.

#❛ ⍀ 𝟎 𝟎 𝟕 ．» ʷʳⁱᵗᵗᵉⁿ ᵇʸ ᵗʰᵉ ᵍᵘⁱˡᵗʸ ∕ hcs ．#long post /#and once again mar realizes she can't listen to instructions #i haven't written a single meta in months let me LIVE #im DEPRIVED #what do you MEAN i have to sit through 3 hours of human behaviour classes #and NOT go back to psychoanalyze my faves like any of this truly matters #and i had a bunch of quotes that i couldn't reblog but then i was like wow ?? expansion ??? on the ones i Could find ????? damn right

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tinymixtapes · 6 years

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Interview: Oliver Coates

Composer, producer, and cellist Oliver Coates recently released Shelley’s on Zenn-La, his third solo full-length and first on RVNG Intl. The album relies on a peculiar splicing of IDM, distilled pop, and faint folk that manifests a multicolored, amaranthine microcosm. Located on the fictional planet Zenn-La, it is home to an apocryphal amalgam of Shelley’s Laserdome, the fabled Stoke-on-Trent nightclub from the late 80s/early 90s, and a futuristic dance floor whose inhabitants are possessed by a perpetual, time-displaced dance to the sounds of early rave, electronica, and minimalism. Shelley’s on Zenn-La is both a synthesis of previous works and a departure in Coates’s diverse and fruitful career, his projects and collaborations almost too many to mention. In the realm of classical music, he is the primary cellist for the London Contemporary Orchestra and has worked with the likes of Laurie Spiegel and John Luther Adams. Outside of it, he has collaborated with Mica Levi on 2016 album Remain Calm and with Laurie Tompkins on 2018’s Ample Profanity; contributed to Radiohead, Laurel Halo, and Mark Fell records; and performed with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Dean Blunt, Actress, and Genesis P-Orridge. He has also participated in the making of several film scores, including those for the masterful Under the Skin with Mica Levi and The Master and Phantom Thread with Jonny Greenwood. But on Shelley’s on Zenn-La, Coates is alone, acting as both a playful tinkerer and a studious composer. Coates builds the record’s song structures by challenging himself, looking for noises that sound gorgeous and meticulously incorporating curious segments into wider narratives. Tinkling FM synthesis and drum sequences composed in Renoise are contrasted and augmented by processed and transformed cello lines. Here, his trademark cello becomes another source of samples, equipotent with all other effects he employs. In a way, Coates creates his own all-encompassing instrumentarium of sounds, as idiosyncratic as the fictional world he explores and one that is only occasionally visited by Kathryn Williams’s enveloping flute, Chrysanthemum Bear’s ethereal vocal lines, and Malibu’s spoken word. We caught up with Coates to talk about Shelley’s on Zenn-La, among other things. --- Shelley’s on Zenn-La emanates a warm and welcoming feeling, a certain sense of optimism. Thanks! At the mastering stage, I asked for it not to be squeezed like commercial electronic music, so that we might preserve the internal dynamic balances as much as possible. I think coldness perceived in electronic music may partly be connected to listening fatigue, where pounding transients are all peaking at the same level and eliminate dynamic relationships between instrument groupings. I’m anti music feeling as if everything is brick wall limited. I don’t need the kick drum to shake anything. It connects back to the music: I have this background playing Bach cello suites where some of the best bass notes are imagined or implied rather than heard because there’s not so much scope for polyphony on a monophonic instrument. I sometimes like skeletal textures, where the listener is coaxed into imagining parts of the music image. More room for fantasy that way. The album and its title evoke a sort of British retrofuturism. It sounds bittersweet and melancholy, but ultimately optimistic. Like something that Sun Ra would have made had he been clubbing and raving in the late 80s and early 90s. Were you guided by a concept while working on the record? There was no concept, just having fun making tracks for RVNG. Towards the end, that title came to me. The tracks were describing the environment of this impossible space. I edited the album down into something tighter against that image, depicting a series of buildings, public pleasure activities like in Brave New World, and the topography of the outlying countryside and nature. The music also seems to be a personal reflection, a soundtrack devoted to certain places, London chiefly. Is this something you’ve consciously tried to achieve — using the music to capture and channel subjective impressions of certain areas, neighborhoods, and cities? Is it at all nostalgic? Perhaps. London is not that important to me culturally. It’s fun to be with your friends or singing in a choir or something. I see failure and friction and busy-ness for its own sake. The terror of being still. I wasn’t consciously describing anything when I was coming up with the music, more listening and seeing what happens. Shelley's on Zenn-La by Oliver Coates I sometimes like skeletal textures, where the listener is coaxed into imagining parts of the music image. More room for fantasy that way. Has your work with Lawrence Lek, which must have been impressionistic on some level, provided you with any guidance while constructing Shelley’s? I think Lawrence and I have always shared a similar fondness for the adoption of real spaces and transforming them into fantasy. In that context, does any of the day-to-day sociopolitical stuff seep into your work? Making a music LP, I hope to constitute an experience more than a takeaway message. My nature seems averse to tribal or ideological thinking. I’m more interested in friendship and family and effecting change through relationships. More interested in chatting about Beckett than Br_x_t. Shelley’s often reminds me of a contemporary (re)interpretation of the IDM/techno/dance scenes of the late 80s/early 90s. Were you chasing that particular sound? Nah, none of that first part rings true. I wasn’t reinterpreting or interpreting anything. I was guided by pleasure, which sounds a bit dodgy, but also giving myself mini-technical challenges such as two simultaneous bass lines (“A Church”), two imaginary drummers in different acoustics going crazy to one click track (“Cello Renoise”), wonky scales, and fake Gaelic folk music (“Charlev”). The album has a very distinct flow that feels quite deliberate. Yet, given some of your previous work, I can’t help but wonder whether any of its parts were improvised? Improvising is there, for sure. I have just enjoyed this twix bar a great deal. On this release, I edited it quite heavily. The residual ghosts of improvisation are sometimes what fascinate you; they somehow have higher authority over your conscious self. I might edit over and over, then go back 10 stages to find a set of performance actions you made when you weren’t remotely aware of what you were doing or what the shape was going to be — these always seem to be more compelling. Many of the tracks were much longer, and I was heading for double-album territory. I had a good chat with Matt [from RVNG] and decided to cut it into a manageable form. Eight hours of ambient cello patterns bouncing around in Pure Data can come later. Do you prefer working within improvised contexts like Remain Calm with Mica Levi or fully composed and premeditated? Changes all the time. I feel comfortable with certain people around, being in a room with certain people gives me a good amount of ideas that seem fresh. Sometimes I like the hard and fast decisions that have gone into composition, because they’ve been made painstakingly. Looking at your solo releases, there appears to be a progression in your approach to the cello. You use its unaltered sound on Towards the Blessed Islands and subvert it to produce unexpected sounds on Upstepping, while on Shelley’s you rely more on sound synthesis and electronic effects with the cello pushed back. That first solo record is an album of performances of music written by other people (David F/Hennessy, Laurence Crane, Larry Goves, Max de Wardener, Iannis X). I think the answer to this question lies in live performances that are centered around live cello performance. I play a New Age melodic sound with ambient synths, Romantic cello lines juxtaposed with aspects of digital music which I trigger and manipulate with my foot controller. I hope I can make more music for records in the future that is actually closer to my live stuff and more about nuanced live cello playing and computer music juxtaposed. More interested in chatting about Beckett than Br_x_t. In that sense, “Prairie” is somewhat of an outlier, with the cello its sole actor. Is there some kind of story behind this specific joyful cut? Years ago, I was approached to make music for an app about the Apollo 11 moon landings. The project got shelved, and I was left with some music I really liked, so I used this one. It was what this record needed. With your focus shifting to electronic music, do you still enjoy the performative aspects of interpreting someone else’s work as a cellist? Yes. Working with Larry Goves, Alexia Sloane, Laurel Halo — there are so many good composers out there. Has your background in classical music influenced your musical journey outside that specific realm? Realms, moving outside, journeys; I like all these connotations of physical play set against music. Classical Music functions a bit more like an industry. I don’t think it’s a type of music, for sure. There’s 800 years of notated music. I turn up on time because of my background in orchestral structures. As both a performer within LCO and someone who creates music using computers, how do these two aspects of your art relate? They both feel like second nature. My relationship with LCO has never been formalized; it’s nice and chill. Editing sound on the computer is about taste ultimately, same goes for how you play the cello. Your music appears in a constant state of flux, yet I wonder if there’s some other overarching theme in your work? There is, actually, but I’m holding it back for the time being — you can’t control things so much on the surface — but yes, there’s a backbone to the progression of each release. Tell me a bit about Ample Profanity with Laurie Tompkins. I’m aware that Tompkins has a very intense and unique creative process. As far as I know, this is the first time you’ve sung on a record, and your playing seems to be pushed even further than usual. We’re old friends, and Laurie T is a fine composer. His music is more extreme than mine (hence the shouting and so on at the start and the arrhythmia), but it’s fantastic to play in a live duo with him. He’s a subversive kind of performer, nuts skills he has, and I honestly don’t know where it comes from. By the way, I sang on track 1 of the first album, Towards the Blessed Islands, “The room is the resonator.” You’ve collaborated with a multitude of musicians from different scenes in different contexts. Do these collaborations affect your solo music? For example, certain elements of Shelley’s on Zenn-La’s sound seem to be hiding in pupal stage on cuts from Remain Calm. No overlap between RC and SOZ-L. Cello playing is there in both, but RC was a quick, fun, lo-fi thing. I can’t accurately say what has been transformative for me — meeting Genesis P-Orridge and improvising/underscoring her reading out Burroughs at Sophia Brous’s Dream Machine event in NYC taught me a lot, just on the unconscious level. Having moved to a fairly remote part of Scotland, are we going to hear more folk influences in your work? Perhaps for the first part. Scottish Gaelic music is very beautiful to me. http://j.mp/2CCRVNn

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starwarsnonsense · 7 years

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Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’ as a feminist fable

* Spoilers for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! follow *

I must begin by apologising for what can only be a digression on a Star Wars blog, since mother! (beyond the inclusion of Domhnall Gleeson in a tiny role) has absolutely nothing to do with everyone’s favourite space opera series. However, I can’t feel too bad about it since I really, really need to talk about mother!. Excuse my indulgence, and I hope that those of you who do read these find my thoughts interesting.

I watched mother! for the first time at the weekend and it truly blew me away. I left the theatre with a deranged grin in my face, amazed and overjoyed that Aronofsky had convinced Paramount to fund, promote and distribute something this batshit crazy (amusingly, they actually felt the need to explain themselves in a statement). However insane you expect mother! to be, nothing can surpass the actual experience of watching it in a theatre and hearing the disquieted murmurs of an unprepared and steadily more agitated crowd.

mother! is any and all of the following, depending on how you choose to approach it - a black comedy, a parable, a pretentious pile of nonsense, an allegory, a muddle of metaphors, a home invasion film, an affront to all reasonable standards of good sense and decency, etc., etc. But what I’m going to focus on here is how mother! is also a rather shattering feminist fable. Just allow me a few paragraphs of scene-setting to get there.

To get right into the thick of it, it has been well established by many others (not least Aronofsky himself) that mother! is a biblical allegory - Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother (upper case mine, out of principle) is Mother Nature, Javier Bardem’s Him (note that all-important, end credits-sanctioned upper case!) is the Judaeo-Christian God, Ed Harris’s ‘man’ is Adam, Michelle Pfeiffer’s ‘woman’ is Eve, and so on and so on. mother! is, in essence, a microcosm of the entire Christian Bible - it is even neatly divided into discrete halves that correspond to the greatest hits of the Old and New Testaments. The characters here are not individuals so much as representations of concepts - they are forces of nature and qualities of man. The film bends time to breaking point, compressing thousands of years of progress, conflict and bloodshed into two hours and reducing the entire Earth to an increasingly dilapidated house.

By borrowing its structure from the Bible, mother! is, by default, a portrait of humanity and its capacity for harm - and it is upsetting people precisely because Aronofsky’s view of man is extremely bleak. Humanity is framed as an ever-swelling deluge of insatiable, greedy and thoughtless brutes, with only the barest glimmers of kindness and compassion visible amidst the chaos. At the film’s end, the only acceptable solution for Mother Nature - her heart black and withered, her love all-but extinguished by her suffering - is to burn them all to ashes.

mother! is a condemnation of humankind, but it is also a condemnation of the baser qualities of God Himself: His demand for worship, His indifference towards the natural world, and His insistence on the continuation of man even in the face of its violence and destructiveness. Him is portrayed as more akin to the curious, selfish, playful gods of the Ancient Greek pantheon than the bearded, stoic sky-father that the Christian God is now usually framed as - he has a short memory for the horrors wrought by mankind, and demonstrates inexplicable and senseless investment in perpetuating them, even as Mother Earth rages against their existence. The film takes the idea of the six days of creation and, rather brilliantly, makes it look as if God created man out of idle curiosity once he’d become discontented with the tranquil perfection of his creation.

One of the richest and most fascinating interpretations of mother!, as far as I’m concerned, is the one that approaches it as an allegory for the diminishment and sidelining of the divine feminine. This is conveyed through something as basic and obvious as capitalisation - while the exclamation mark in the film’s title has got all of the attention, the lower case ‘m’ means more than you’d first think. It is a very well-established convention that God is always referred to with upper case pronouns (His, Him, He) - this is done to distinguish Him from the petty, fading gods from other religions, and from all those lower creatures with no claim to divinity (or, as it turns out, upper case pronouns). By introducing mother! with lower case in the title of the film, the disadvantage of Mother Earth is being established from the outset.

To venture briefly into theology, the feminine divine is now usually considered inferior to the masculine one - it has been this way for many centuries, with the ancient goddesses of wisdom, fertility, love and creation being sidelined in favour of warlike, dominating male deities. As Bettany Hughes observes in The Guardian:

At the birth of society and civilisation I find a religious landscape littered with feisty female deities who make wisdom their business. There's Nisaba the Babylonian goddess who looks after the stores of both grain and knowledge in Mesopotamia; the Hindu goddess Saraswati; the Zoroastrian Anahita; the ancient Greek Athena; and the Shinto Omoikane (a fine goddess of holistic thought and multitasking).

But come the end of the bronze age and many of these deities have been demoted. Here we witness a precursor of the Judaeo-Christian scenario. Up until 1400BC, citadel settlements are stable. Goddesses – notably in charge of fertility and learning – have a crucial role to play. But as civilisation gets greedy and society more militaristic, these wise women are edged to the sidelines in favour of a thundering, male warrior god.

It is my feeling that we see this dynamic - with the divine female creative force being forced to the margins by an overbearing figure of male authority - played out in the marital relationship between Him and Mother in the film. Mother is the central creative actor - she is the one who makes the house at the centre of the film (which is analogous to the Earth) beautiful and vibrant following its destruction in a fire. Without her, it is impossible for Him to create. But her efforts are constantly overlooked, scorned and belittled - the guests in her house destroy her belongings, invade her sanctuaries, and show outright disdain for her wishes. Her attempts to resist them are perceived as comical, with her will only being enacted on those rare occasions that Him deigns to support her. Mother is clearly expected to be a passive source of inspiration for Him, an ornament whose attempts to assert herself or share her opinion are swiftly shut down. Just as history has erased goddesses and female deities as patriarchal structures have become more and more entrenched, the characters surrounding Mother in the film seek to trample her down and ignore her role in creation.

A big point is made in the film of the generational divide between Him and Mother - Him is middle-aged, his face lined and weathered, whereas Mother is a beautiful young woman with immaculate skin and an abundance of golden hair. This distinction drives home the imbalance between them - it is a divide designed to unsettle and disquiet from the moment you first see them together, the kind of union that makes your skin crawl from an instinctual sense that something is profoundly wrong with it.

As the film unwinds, this suspicion becomes fully realised - the film is cyclical in that it begins and ends with a mother setting herself and the house aflame, her heart transforming into a shimmering crystal that Him places on a stand in his study as a new mother forms from the ashes of the marital bed. In this way, He is revealed as the collector of countless women’s hearts - He is essentially a Bluebeard figure (with the study functioning as his forbidden bloody chamber), and the central tragedy of mother! is that the heroine is offered no escape from him. In keeping with Aronofsky’s dim view of existence, the relationship between Mother and Him is destined to repeat itself in an unending cycle of destruction and rebirth. We are all doomed to repeat the same mistakes, being nothing more than the playthings of a capricious God.

There is no sense of lessons learned or mistakes avoided here, and one of the greatest injustices on display is the sheer contempt with which Mother is treated. Aronofsky has been open about the fact that mother! is an environmentalist film, and the vitriol that Lawrence’s character is dealt with is, of course, a statement on how we treat the Earth. But it is also effective precisely because it frames this contempt towards Mother Earth as a very specific kind of contempt - misogyny. The misogyny is most overt in how the avatars of humanity treat Mother, with their subtle disapproval, judgement and objectification building and building until they overflow into a riot of violence and verbal abuse at the film’s climax. The allegory is three-fold - we are witnessing contempt for women generally, contempt for women as a force for creation (in everything from the mundane sense to the divine one), and contempt for nature as a maternal force.

Some commentators have misconstrued the film’s depiction of misogyny as evidence that the film itself is sexist, but I could not disagree more strongly - Aronofsky’s film is a pin-sharp deconstruction of how society treats women, and it is uncomfortable because it is meant to be. Misogyny is real and it is ugly, and by depicting its evolution across a spectrum ranging from a disapproving look to seething violence we are being forced to confront it. The film is entirely told from Mother’s perspective, which makes the brutality and cruelty of her treatment inescapable - she is the only character we can truly feel empathy for, with her suffering registering on an acutely visceral level because it is portrayed so intimately.

While the film offers its characters no escape from a cycle, I like to think that Aronofsky designed mother! to be as shocking as it is in order to confront us with some of the hardest truths - the truth of how we treat the Earth and the truth of how we treat women. Too much cinema is the audiovisual equivalent of junk food, encouraging passive and unthinking consumption. The very fact that mother! has inspired such emotional responses - from passionate hatred to profound admiration - is testament to the fact that it did exactly what it set out to do by jolting people from their complacency.

#mother!#darren aronofsky #not star wars #not sw #film #cinema #film analysis #essay

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secondsofhappiness · 7 years

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I don't think you've ever said if you think the baby is roberts or not? What are your thoughts about twists happening around or after Xmas?

Aw anon! I’ve avoided this question because it’s such a difficult one to answer for me. I’ve learned NOT to try to guess the storylining of Iain flipping McLeod. He is a law unto himself as show runner but here’s my own set of opinions seeing as you asked for them!!

There are so many theories and possibilities (god bless this creative insightful fandom) and, so far, the theory that Rob isn’t the dad hasn’t been disproven or nothing has happened that makes it very unlikely… it’s still very much a possibility.

I also LOVE the Adam theory. I don’t believe it’s true but it still hasn’t been disproven which is bloody great. Now THAT would be a twist and a half and only fandoms write genius stuff like that no matter what show you look at. It would fit perfectly with their scenes Adam and Rebecca randomly had together, the fact Adam told Rebecca to go find Robert that night, that there was huge focus on Adam’s ability to have kids, that he found the pregnancy test etc. I’d LOVE it to be true but I personally don’t think it is. In an IDEAL world it’d be an ingenious turn of events.

My personal opinion is that Rob is the father. That is just my opinion though. We know the Whites are sodding off (🎈🎈🎈) and clearly one of them will die. We don’t know if Rebecca is dying (insert my already stated feelings on this possibility!) but it’s pretty likely she’s also leaving so that reality, to me, leaves the option of the baby remaining with Rob (and then eventually Aaron too) or leaving with a White. I think these are the likely outcomes…

All factors considered though, there is so much contradiction that it’s difficult to predict the end of the storyline. I’ve tried to make a summary below because there are so many factors that suggest this isn’t a clean cut situation but there are polarising factors that mean it’s confusing… all going under a cut for spoilers!

I mean there’s all of the following…

a) The handling of the ONS fallout. It was a collection of the weirdest scenes that still haven’t been explained or made sense of… you know how, I won’t go into them all. It was about unconventional a one night stand if every I’ve seen one… and on a Soap too. Soaps are never subtle. Maybe it’s more of Iain and his weirdness.

b) The early pregnancy stuff. It was an utter shit show. It was a depressingly bad depiction of a young healthy female and her control over her own sexual health and her handle on her body. It was so bad that it was a slippery slope to not caring in the slightest about Rebecca White. That’s entirely not the point when portraying a newly pregnant woman…

c) No DNA test. Still the strangest factor in all of this. Why even have her shack up with Ross numerous times but have only her assurances that it is Robert’s as the confirmation of his fatherhood….! Jesus.

d) The baby is the major issue between Aaron and Rob. It has continuously been framed as such even specifically stated as such and so any development on that front would have to be enormous and there are suggestions that Aaron is still very uncomfortable around the kid after it’s born. This is very important. Aaron has a heart the size of Leeds but the show has framed this kid as “the issue” from day one so hard work would be needed to ever solve that. That said, I don’t believe Aaron would ever hold anything against an innocent little being. He knows the realities of a poor childhood.

e) Most of the interviews given by Danny or Ryan or Iain barely mention the baby. Emily has done one interview and as far as I can remember it didn’t talk about the parentage much or the eventual future of the kid. A baby is a pretty huge addition to a character’s life and future storylines and you’d think it’d be mentioned more especially where Aaron is concerned

f) The Whites are upping and going. If Rebecca leaves or dies then, to me, that’s an indicator that THAT is the big end to the story rather than a parenting reveal. Her dying is still gross to me but if that’s what happens then it feels odd to have the added “oh and by the way the kid isn’t yours”

g) I get the point that Rob is heading for an epic fall from grace to further snap him out of his ways and prompt a life change and perspective shift but I have this sneaking suspicion that the kid IS the major factor in this. Obviously it is going to be A factor (and should be) but I have a feeling it’s going to be the major one as it doesn’t seem like Rob reverts to his old ways in any big way post Sebastian entering the world. As much as I’m not a fan of kids magically changing a person because it DOESN’T, not entirely, not someone whose actions are extreme and deeply ingrained as Rob! I’ll say it till I’m blue in the face but kids don’t cure people. People’s faults and foibles and issues do not disappear. Children are life changes but they are not magical. I am a product of this as a person and I HATE the idea that kid’s cure a person’s personality. I think based on Iain’s recent interview and the spoilers, Sebastian is going to play a huge part in Rob’s redemption and there’s a high chance that the stuff in December will be the fall out from the Lawrence stuff, Lachlan wanting to ultimately get revenge and I think there’s a high chance the theory that Rob nearly dies saving Liv and or Aaron is going to happen. All of that would have Rob basically banned from his kid’s life, near death etc. I don’t know, I’ve started to wonder if Rob’s life will be made hell by Lachlan and that his life is threatened or Seb’s life and that’s was takes him to rock bottom.

h) I think Thursday’s scenes with Rob and Sebastian (as I’m lead to believe) will revolutionise his character. I am not a massive baby fan but I AM a fan of character development and character based story telling and I’ve THOROUGHLY enjoyed this Rob storyline. It has been hella weird and done in such a damned quirky way that I’ve loved it. We’ve seen him at his worst and I have a feeling we’ll also see him at his best and I think Aaron and Sebastian and Liv will be the things that facilitate his best, his emotional, his human side. I think those scenes may change my opinion on how the storyline will play out as I’m told that they’re highly emotional and show Rob’s character in a whole new light, in that he actively recognises his major faults and that there’s a huge connection there with the kid already that appears revolutionary for him. That’s what I’m told and I’m really looking forward to that tbh. If that’s the case, I don’t think I’d want the baby removed. I don’t think I’d like Sebastian taken from his life if that’s how those scenes play out because if Sebastian is going to be THAT important to Rob or THAT overwhelming for him then I’d like him to keep that. As long as he doesn’t become about bloody nappies or night time feeds I’ll be ok with the baby sticking around and as long as there is further realisation for him that isn’t just Seb related. If Seb turns out NOT to Rob’s in this circumstance then I think I would be devastated too. It’s like the thought of removing Liv from Aaron. Nope. It would be gut wrenching if this is what Seb is to him and perhaps that makes the possibility of him not being the father likely? That’d be an epic kick in the gut if Seb is shown as vital to Rob so quickly and then he’s removed from him… it’s all based on those scenes and I’d love to make a post afterwards as I think they’ll be really revealing.

i) Having Rob think he’s the father then removing that from him is pretty much a repeat of the Adam storyline. Would they do that so soon? (This is what makes the Adam Theory so brilliant to me, he’d be getting the opposite treatment this time! If only we could have this!!)

j) There’s also this major repetition of Aaron and Rob and kids aka having their own. It’s so heavy handed that I wonder if this is all being set up to have Rob realise he needs to be better and as a way to have him realise he does want to be a father but with Aaron. I’d ADORE an adoption storyline with them. For m/m rep it’d be wonderful and these two are nightmares so seeing them parent further down the line would be hilarious but now…? I still feel it’s too soon for both of their characters. Yes their ages are normal for having kids but… well, they’re NIGHTMARES. They’re still growing and learning and doing insane things.

k) For Rob to not be the father it’d mean that Rebecca didn’t know and was a grade A class idiot for not realising that having sex with another bloke in the same week could also mean pregnancy and that condoms break… or that she has been manipulating Rob all this time. I think the latter is unlikely, for me. Rebecca used to be feisty and her whole “nobody uses me” stance at one point has been so brutally buried and killed that, at this point, she’s such a wet drip and so plain and lacking in oomph that I’d struggle to accept she’s been so clever and sharp for months… plus she’s had solo scenes where she’s cried or shown a personal reaction. Granted, there have been few, but like her call to the clinic, they were scenes with no witness or purpose in any manipulation. That said, there are MANY scenes that make no sense in terms of her reactions aka Liv or Aaron and that “don’t hurt me and my baby” stomach shielding (ugh god that was terrible). I can never work out if it’s the acting, the inconsistent writing of her character and Rebecca’s motivations or if it’s actually a THING and that Rebecca will have been interesting all this time without us knowing. I’d LOVE it to be true but the show seems set on portraying her at this hard done by sweetheart who does no wrong, who should be pardoned for all she does, who hasn’t a clue but is so cute about it all that it doesn’t matter… Christ what an awful attempt at writing a bold young female. She could have been so much more. I’d love her to prove us wrong but sadly I don’t feel the show will divert from the current Rebecca.

l) This is a horrible and uninspired way to provide a young m/m couple with a child. It’s just old hat, boring, crass and just yuck tbh.

There are so many other factors that all contradict each other and I don’t know… I guess that’s what I’m saying! I’m quite torn…!

I don’t think I mind either way if I’m honest. I’ve never had an issue with the baby sticking around except for having my personal conditions for it haha :) I have always kind of wanted Rob to show his human side in all this and to show he didn’t hate the kid and did recognise it was an innocent being in all of this.

I think I’m weird because although I don’t like babies, I like kids on the show because they’re often great additions. Look at Arthur or Jacob or Liv or Gabby or April. ED does kid’s well, they just do babies and toddlers badly, imo.

ALSO, I’m also weird because part of me REALLY likes the idea of Rob having something that’s his. A little person who is entirely new and a blank slate to try with and love. Sebastian, if he is Rob’s son, would be Rob’s own little person that wouldn’t leave him, that would look up to Rob, that would see Rob as a hero, that would rely on Rob and I really LIKE that idea. I reckon if Rob stopped being an A class weirdo, expert manipulator and actually thought what he was doing before he did it, I think he could be a great dad, for a soap! Hahaha. I like what it could do for his character. I don’t connect Sebastian to the Whites, though. It’s probably awful but I have zero connection with any of them (except Chrissie a tiny bit) and I couldn’t care less in the grand scheme of things what happens with them. They’re off eventually and so I find it VERY easy to remove them from the equation now. Also, even if they were sticking around, I feel like Rob would always hate them, would always resent them and would never ever feel any connection with them even after having a kid with Rebecca… so, to me, I can separate the two very easily. Shows how bad the writing of Rebecca as a mum has been and how shoddy The Whites are in general!! Adios Amigos!

So anon, what a rant. Who bloody knows! I have really convoluted feelings on the matter and I’m REALLY looking forward to tomorrow’s scenes especially with Rob and Sebastian. I am so excited for them because a friend who has seen them has assured me it’s entirely not like they’re going down the boring stereotypical route, the scenes sound so brilliant for Rob’s character. THAT, I’m here for, even if I don’t find babies cute haha

We shall see soon and whether it’ll all make sense in the grand scheme of things is to be determined but I don’t know about you… if the Whites are buggering off then that’s half the battle for me!!!!! I’m willing to be proven wrong. Do it show, I dare you. Now, as long as Aaron’s character is cared for in this storyline as it progresses then I’ll be pretty happy whatever the outcome. I’m so chill nowadays hahaha. It’s not the Rob centric storyline we wanted but it’s the one we’ve got and in some ways it has been EXCELLENT and so HIM but yeah, there have also been some significant missteps and bloody stupid ideas so who knows at this point… I’m just determined to enjoy it. He’s my nightmare Human. Any centric storyline was going to have him doing nightmare things and learning to be a human so I’m down for that. Hope that answered a bit! ❤️

#this is huge #sorry I'm late responding I wanted to write a proper post #spoilers #emmerdale #the robert sugden white family goodbye tour of nightmares #Sebastian sugden #robs slow train to insanity #Robert sugden

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encephalonfatigue · 5 years

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to turn the mills day & night? art thou not newton's pantocrator?

i actually wrote this as a goodreads review of Friedrich Engels’ “The Conditions of the Working Class in England”. i use that website more as a place to post reflections on books i read, and being as self-indulgent as i am, i wrote too much and it can’t fit within the allotted space goodreads provides, so i’m just posting the thing here. a lot of half-baked thoughts in here, but it is a further elaboration on mills, which i have been thinking a lot about for the past couple years.

At it again with those mills. I'm really into the history of mills. Sorry, but mills are a thing for me. I want to do an STS dissertation on mills so if any of y'all know professors who want grad students to write stuff on mills -- I'm right here, hmu. Ok, Engels (of Communist Manifesto fame, but he didn't really write any of it): he's from a rich and austere Calvinist family, in Germany. They owned a bunch of mills -- one in Manchester. Engels was a naughty boy with radical ideas, so his father sends him out to Manchester to straighten him out. Get him to smarten up about those silly ideas of his. He sees the workers of Manchester living in total squalor. He falls in love with one of them, an Irish working class woman, Mary Burns, who he remains with for the rest of her life. He sees how the industrial mills of Manchester have laid waste to the rivers, the air, and the people.

An Engels mill in Germany is still around and is part of an industrial museum now. By the time Engels was 17, his father had secured water rights along the Agger River to power a water mill for the production of cotton yarn. He was able to do so from capital he had accumulated from his Manchester operations. When Engels was 22, he was sent by his father to their Manchester mill on the River Irwell. It was here that Engels collected his materials that would become this book. Engels writes about these rivers framing the areas of Manchester he explored while there:

“Manchester proper lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two smaller ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell. On the right bank of the Irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river, lies Salford, and farther westward Pendleton; northward from the Irwell lie Upper and Lower Broughton; northward of the Irk, Cheetham Hill; south of the Medlock lies Hulme; farther east Chorlton on Medlock”

Early on in this book Engels starts spewing out numbers galore. It’s breathtaking to see the magnitude of these 19th-century statistics, and the horsepower figures are really interesting too:

“In 1834 England exported 556,000,000 yards of woven cotton goods, 76,500,000 pounds of cotton yarn, and cotton hosiery of the value of £1,200,000. In the same year over 8,000,000 mule spindles were at work, 110,000 power and 250,000 hand-looms, throstle spindles not included, in the service of the cotton industry; and, according to MacCulloch’s reckoning, nearly a million and a half human beings were supported by this branch, of whom but 220,000 worked in the mills; the power used in these mills was steam, equivalent to 33,000 horse-power, and water, equivalent to 11,000 horse-power. At present these figures are far from adequate, and it may be safely assumed that, in the year 1845, the power and number of the machines and the number of the workers is greater by one-half than it was in 1834.”

With these large numbers in mind, I think it’s worth noting that when Engels was writing this book, the American Civil War was still two decades off. By 1860, two-thirds of the global cotton supply was from the US, much of it cultivated by slaves. Sven Beckert, Harvard history professor known for his book “Empire of Cotton”, writes in The Atlantic:

“On the eve of the Civil War, raw cotton constituted 61 percent of the value of all U.S. products shipped abroad… Now, in 1861, the flagship of global capitalism, Great Britain, found itself dangerously dependent on the white gold shipped out of New York, New Orleans, Charleston, and other American ports. By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain. It also accounted for 90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the Zollverein, and 92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia.”

Though cotton production was fairly small in Canada at the time, the proportion sourced from the U.S. was of course much higher, due to the obvious reason of proximity. M.N.A. Hinton and T. Barbiero (2012) in a paper write that:

“Canadian cotton mills, of course, were totally dependent on foreign sources of supply to obtain raw cotton. Before Confederation 95 percent of it was imported from the U.S. South; after Confederation 99 percent was imported from the South.”

Marx in “The Poverty of Philosophy” (his denunciation of Proudhon) wrote:

“Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”

In no small measure because of his acquaintance with Engels, Marx actually mentions cotton right through his first volume of Capital, which was published shortly after the close of the American Civil War. I first realized that Marx and Lincoln were alive at the same time when I read this in Marilynne Robinson’s “Death of Adam”:

“Americans are astonished to realize that Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln were contemporaries, let alone that Lincoln and much of literate America would have read Marx, who published articles on European affairs for years in Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune, and that Marx wrote about Lincoln. They are amazed that Marx also wrote a contemporary account of the Civil War, passionately taking the side of the North. This is only one illustration of the great fact that we have little sense of American history in the context of world history.”

About 600 articles written by Marx were published in the New York Daily Tribune according to Robin Blackburn. While the description of Blackburn’s book “The Unfinished Revolution” inflates the issue somewhat, saying: “Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War,” Marx did write to Lincoln a number of times and Lincoln (or more specifically his ambassador) responded to an address of the International Workingmen’s Association, drafted and signed by Marx, with a brief acknowledgement. What undoubtedly was the case was that the American Civil War was deeply influential in Marx’s writings. This was at a time where a radical wing existed within the Republican Party. Horace Greeley who edited the paper Marx wrote for was one of the founders of the Republican Party and was himself a Fourier socialist — among a number of other Republican Party founders.

Anyways, Engels quotes a number of reports of the environmental conditions and health hazards faced by workers daily in these mill towns. In one of these long excerpts, Engels interrupts to say:

“...it must be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture, flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse”

This is not unlike what you find in Toronto later in the century. Based on an interview with Jennifer Bonnell who wrote “Reclaiming the Don” (published by University of Toronto Press), Katie Daubs in a Toronto Star article writes:

“By 1860, there were more than 50 mills in the watershed, supplying paper, flour, wool and wood, and pollution… By the 1880s, the price of Toronto’s growth was told in the river. Industrial runoff, deforestation and sewage had turned the meandering lower Don into a festering flow of pollution.”

Photo: The Wonscotonach flowing under Highway 401 in 2019.

The Wonscotonach took on the name Don River because the imperialist Simcoe thought it reminded him of the River Don in Yorkshire, another industrial hub mentioned a number of times in this book by Engels.

Photos: Evergreen Brick Works (Don Valley Brick Works)

Close by what is now Don Valley Brick Works Park is Todmorden Mills, now a museum and art centre. It was once a paper mill that supplied paper for William Lyon Mackenzie’s sheet “The Colonial Advocate”. Mackenzie was actually integral to the genesis of this mill. He was worried about the cost of paper for the Colonial Advocate and lobbied the government to award anyone who would establish the first paper mill in Upper Canada. A gristmill known as Don Mills was converted into Todmorden Mills, and Mackenzie had a new supply of affordable paper.

Mackenzie came to Canada in the same boat as James Lesslie — a book publisher and Owenite socialist. They would open and run a bookstore for a number of years together across the road from St. James’ Church (now a beautiful cathedral) around the St. Lawrence Market area.

He and Mackenzie were responsible for union organizing and the setting up of Mechanics Institutes — something Engels talks glowingly about in this book, saying:

“Here the children receive a purely proletarian education, free from all the influences of the bourgeoisie; and, in the reading-rooms, proletarian journals and books alone, or almost alone, are to be found. These arrangements are very dangerous for the bourgeoisie, which has succeeded in withdrawing several such institutes,”Mechanics’ Institutes,” from proletarian influences, and making them organs for the dissemination of the sciences useful to the bourgeoisie. Here the natural sciences are now taught, which may draw the working-men away from the opposition to the bourgeoisie, and perhaps place in their hands the means of making inventions which bring in money for the bourgeoisie; while for the working-man the acquaintance with the natural sciences is utterly useless now when it too often happens that he never gets the slightest glimpse of Nature in his large town with his long working-hours.”

A lot of socialists, communists, and Marxists admire William Lyon Mackenzie. Some examples include — an excerpt from a Young Socialist League leaflet

“For we are required, nothing more nor less, than to carry forward the revolutionary struggle that William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau launched in 1837. That revolution exhausted itself so that as Mackenzie, commenting on its fate in the U.S., saw: ‘the power of the community pass from democracy of numbers into the hands of an aristocracy — not of noble ancestry and ancient lineage, but of monied monopolists and jobbers and heartless politicians.’”

The Communist Party of Canada website states:

“We honour those who led many of these struggles — Louis-Joseph Papineau in Quebec, William Lyon MacKenzie in Ontario, Louis Riel on the Prairies, and Amor de Cosmos in British Columbia.”

And in a rather long article by Julien Arseneau, , William Lyon Mackenzie’s importance to Canadian history is exposited on a Marxist website.

Photos: Silverthorn Mill ruins at Meadowvale Village, operated by Gooderham & Worts for a period of time. Sketched by the likes of A.J. Casson.

My interest in the mills of the Greater Toronto Area originates in Meadowvale Village, and there is a William Lyon Mackenzie connection here also. This is the area from which my neighbourhood of Meadowvale got its name. ‘Vale’ is the type of word for valley you might find in the romanticist verse of Shelley, a poet both Karl and Eleanor Marx were very fond of. So there was a certain poetic cachet that developers could draw on by co-opting the name ‘Meadowvale’ for their subdivisions father out west in the 1960s.

Anyways, back in Mackenzie’s time, the area I now live around was known as Switzer’s Corners, named after the Switzer family — Irish settlers who had garnered somewhat of a reputation as being seditious agitators and friends of Mackenzie. They would host him at their home when he was campaigning in the area, and one of the sons of the family, Martin Switzer, once rounded up a bunch of peace-loving Quakers (around Elgin, south of London) to go join the armed insurrection that had been launched from Montgomery’s Tavern. Charles Switzer (related to Martin Switzer) eventually ran what became known as the Gooderham store for some time, and was a fixture within the Meadowvale Village community.

Photo: The Gooderham store no longer exists, but the Gooderham mansion still stands. Now a private school. How fitting.

At the mouth of the Wonscotonach (Don River), as it empties into Lake Ontario, was the main industrial operation of Gooderham & Worts. This site is now a tourist destination known as the Distillery District, and the name Gooderham & Worts is still plastered throughout the Victorian industrial buildings there.

This company owned a number of other mill sites around the area, including a couple along the Credit River. One was a textile mill, although it was spinning flax (linen) and not slave-grown cotton. Gooderham & Worts, however, owned another major mill site in Meadowvale Village, and owned a department store there comparable with the T. Eaton’s store in Toronto (the one Charles Switzer ran for a period), with lavish and fashionable offerings for the wealthier folks of the area.

As with the ecological destruction of the Wonscotonach (Don River), similar results were manifesting in Mississauga’s Missinihe (Credit River). Donald Smith in his book “Mississauga Portraits” writes what Chief Peter Jones would have seen before and after the mills:

“The great trees stood so closely together that they formed a canopy shutting out the sunshine and most of the daylight leaving the ground free of undergrowth. He remembered the salmon-rich streams and rivers that flowed from the forested interior down to the harbour. Now the area was extensively deforested. The building of dams for gristmills and sawmills now prevented Ontario salmon reaching their upper spawning grounds. Released sawdust blanketed the bottoms of streams and rivers. By the mid-1850s, the salmon runs had declined to the point of extinction.”

The Anishinaabe ethnobotanist and Dalhousie professor Jonathan Ferrier referred to the clearcutting of forests around Lake Ontario as a “genocide by sawmills”.

I’ve mentioned in a previous review the child labour Mother Jones experienced in American textile mills. I wasn’t able to find evidence of similar stuff in Toronto at the time of writing that interview, but I have found some stuff since then. Firstly, Jean Barman in the Canadian Encyclopedia writes:

“The first wave of provincial legislation regulating child labour in factories and mines began to pass in the 1870s and 1880s. But the prohibition of child labour did not come until the 20th century.”

Secondly I found in a republished version of Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, 1889 where James Brown a Toronto factory inspector is being interviewed about, among other things, child labour:

“Q. Did you notice […] any large percentage of children?

A. Yes; in some of them — in the cotton mills and some woolen mills, in cigar factories and knitting works, and some others.

Q. Were there many of those children below the age designated by the Act?

A. Well, I found about 40 girls under 14. Girls are not allowed under 14 nor boys under 12. I found six boys altogether nine years of age, and some ten or eleven.”

Mother Jones was from a working-class Irish family, and Engels spends quite a long time discussing how the Irish were an underclass in the industrial towns throughout England, and suffered extreme exploitation at the bottom of the industrial hierarchy.

I think it’s important to see a lot of the things happening in this century (the dispossession of land from and genocide of indigenous peoples, the global trade and Naval Operations those colonially sourced commodities went into, and the cotton plantations powered by American slavery) as deeply connected to the horrors of environmental destruction, child labour, and the extremely filthy and diseased living and working conditions of the English proletariat — as all connected together in the matrices of the capitalist economy. Capitalism cannot be blamed for all the ills in the world, but it certainly sustains and shelters many of them for the benefit of a small elite class of people.

It is hilarious that billionaires like Nick Hanauer are growing extremely anxious, feeling as if a revolution is going to break out any day. Rich people are not oblivious to the incomprehensibly enormous inequality that persists in the world. Hanauer has tried to gather other really rich people like him to lobby the government to implement some sort of ‘wealth tax’, which does not exist now. They can only extract wealth from the rich by way of income taxes right now. You might have heard this covered in a recent episode on NPR Planet Money. Starbucks piece of shit Howard Shultz is absolutely disdainful of this proposal put forward by the likes of Elizabeth Warren. It’s hilarious to see some rich people talk about their generosity in a self-congratulatory way when what they are really worried about is that thing Rousseau warned about: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich". This is at the core of Hanauer’s ‘Pitchfork Economics’. He outright said, at the end of the NPR Planet Money Episode that he’s fine with a wealth tax that ‘slows’ the growth of his wealth, which is the moderate proposal made by people like Elizabeth Warren. This is already rare among the extremely rich. Hanauer mentioned that he can’t be on board as soon as this wealth tax ‘stops’ the growth of his wealth or even farther, reduces it. Laughable really. Engels had something to say about people like this:

“The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: “If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!” It is infamous, this charity of a Christian bourgeois!

…What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.”

Nick Hanauer is worried about some pending insurrection of violence on the horizon. What many people do not realize is that this is precisely the concern Engels had, except he obviously didn’t believe a ‘heterodox’ reformation of capitalism was the answer. Often times ‘communism’ has taken on a reputation of encouraging brutal and violent revolution, but Engels saw communism in a very different way — a way to prevent the cruel striking out of the poor in a unproductive way that accomplished little except the carrying out of individual revenge (think Atwood’s “Alias Grace”). Engels writes:

“Besides, it does not occur to any Communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under existing circumstances, than he does act. English Socialism, i.e., Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. Thus the more the English workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty. If, indeed, it were possible to make the whole proletariat communistic before the war breaks out, the end would be very peaceful; but that is no longer possible, the time has gone by. Meanwhile, I think that before the outbreak of open, declared war of the poor against the rich, there will be enough intelligent comprehension of the social question among the proletariat, to enable the communistic party, with the help of events, to conquer the brutal element of the revolution and prevent a “Ninth Thermidor”.”

Engels however is not rejecting the ‘ressentiment’ and its related ‘slave morality’ that people like Nietzsche were so disdainful of (a narrative that people like Jordan Peterson have leveraged for very particular ends). Anyways, Engels writes:

“English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustice toward the proletariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat… They understand, it is true, why the working-man is resentful against the bourgeois, but regard as unfruitful this class hatred, which is, after all, the only moral incentive by which the worker can be brought nearer the goal. They preach instead, a philanthropy and universal love far more unfruitful for the present state of England.”

Ayn Rand once called Christianity the best kindergarten of communism possible, and verses like Mark 3:27 always remind me of this ‘slave morality’ that Nietzsche talked about. In the verse Jesus says:

“But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.”

This verse is also mentioned in one form or another in the other two synoptic gospels. Craig Keener supposes it is an allusion to Isaiah 49:24-26 (the context being oppression under Babylonian imperialism), which I think is a good point of resonance:

“Can plunder be taken from warriors, or captives be rescued from the fierce?

But this is what the Lord says:

“Yes, captives will be taken from warriors, and plunder retrieved from the fierce; I will contend with those who contend with you, and your children I will save.

I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh; they will be drunk on their own blood, as with wine.”

Second Isaiah maybe one-upped the revolutionary Rousseau here. That’s some pretty gruesome stuff. This sort of radical rhetoric within faith communities was not unknown in Upper Canada’s more revolutionary moments. In the neighbourhood where I live there was a Methodist church on Switzer’s Corners known as Switzer’s Church. It eventually became known as Eden Methodist Church, and today is Eden United Church (where I visit not infrequently — though it’s no longer a hotbed of revolutionary fervour). It is fascinating to learn how Methodism was caught up with Owenite socialism in Upper Canada at the time. More broadly both Owenite socialism and Chartism were spread under the umbrella of the Reform Movement in Upper Canada. Engels speaks of both Robert Owen and his brand of socialism (critically) and Chartism (more approvingly) in his book on the working class in England. He also quotes a radical Methodist preacher named Rayner Stephens. Engels writes:

“The people were called upon to arm themselves, were frequently urged to revolt; pikes were got ready, as in the French Revolution, and in 1838, one Stephens, a Methodist parson, said to the assembled working- people of Manchester:

‘You have no need to fear the power of Government, the soldiers, bayonets, and cannon that are at the disposal of your oppressors; you have a weapon that is far mightier than all these, a weapon against which bayonets and cannon are powerless, and a child of ten years can wield it. You have only to take a couple of matches and a bundle of straw dipped in pitch, and I will see what the Government and its hundreds of thousands of soldiers will do against this one weapon if it is used boldly.’”

Haha, wow, this is like an episode of Damnation. Mackenzie himself is probably best known as a failed revolutionary, who led the feeble 1837 insurrection from Montgomery’s Tavern that was easily thwarted by Jarvis. (Peter Matthews, one of the two men hanged as a result of this insurrection, was encouraged to join the uprising by a Baptist preacher from Markham Township called George Barclay.) Mackenzie would go on to occupy Navy Island, just upstream from Niagara Falls and declare it to be the Republic of Canada, before eventually escaping to the U.S. — later returning to Canada in 1849 to take back a place in the legislature. The 1837 uprising was also an important theme in Margaret Atwood’s book Alias Grace (my favourite Atwood novel I’ve read so far), and the role of certain sorts of Methodists and Quakers is thematic in the novel as well.

For all the fear-mongering over atheism that Christians have expressed against Marx and Engels, I think Engels was very well-read in religion. And he knew the working classes generally weren’t, though he didn’t necessarily see that as a problem. Engels inserts a very large and humorous excerpt from the “Children’s Employment Commission’s Report” of working class children being asked about their faith:

“One child had ‘attended a Sunday school regularly for five years; does not know who Jesus Christ was, but has heard the name. Never heard of the twelve apostles. Never heard of Samson, nor of Moses, nor Aaron, etc.’ Another ‘attended a Sunday school regularly six years. Knows who Jesus Christ was, he died on the cross to shed his blood, to save our Saviour.’”

Engels however felt that education was focused on very unproductive sectarian theology and no proper moral teaching:

“The consequence is that religion, and precisely the most unprofitable side of religion, polemical discussion, is made the principal subject of instruction, and the memory of the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early as possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected.”

Engels goes onto elaborate the general indifference to religion felt by much of the working classes as a result of this pedagogical failure:

“All the writers of the bourgeoisie are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious, and do not attend church… among the masses there prevails almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost, some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. The clergy of all sects is in very bad odour with the working-men…”

Engels likely thought this outcome to have a fairly bright side, considering the theological convictions of the bourgeoisie which he described in this way:

“It is all very pretty and very agreeable to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the “sacredness of property” asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of itself. Money is the God of this world; the bourgeois takes the proletarian’s money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No wonder, then, if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer respects the sacredness and power of the earthly God…

…The English bourgeoisie is violently scandalised at the extravagant living of the workers when wages are high; yet it is not only very natural but very sensible of them to enjoy life when they can, instead of laying up treasures which are of no lasting use to them, and which in the end moth and rust (i.e., the bourgeoisie) get possession of.

…the humanity of the workers is constantly manifesting itself pleasantly. They have experienced hard times themselves, and can therefore feel for those in trouble, whence they are more approachable, friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more than the property-holding class. For them money is worth only what it will buy, whereas for the bourgeois it has an especial inherent value, the value of a god, and makes the bourgeois the mean, low money-grubber that he is.

…It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money. All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh.

During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. …many have died of starvation, where long-continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The English working-men call this “social murder”, and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?”

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isaac-robinson · 7 years

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Mother! Review

Before you read know that if you do not agree, that is fine I do not hate or dislike you, nor do I think that my opinion is the sole truth. That is what is so great about cinema...it is subjective.

Mother! Depending on what you know about this movie going into it, I think depends on how you feel towards it. If you look at it from the perspective of global warming and Earth and its pain. Then there is so much within this film that you can appreciate that immerses you and you understand. However, if you look at it from the angle that is primarily religion and biblical…then the outlook looks bleak. Through doing more research in this film, it is clear a lot of the powerful imagery within this film is open to the interpretation of the audience, in interviews both director, set designer and Producer tended to have different perspectives/opinions to what certain things meant but that it wasn’t certain or concrete. I love that because each person can take away something different each time.

“This movie comes from Darren’s mind, but he really wanted the people around him to interpret it and give their opinions about it,”

One thing that is definite is there is a huge ton of imagery in the film, from start to finish you are bombarded with so many metaphors, at times this can become suffocating, but then at the same time if you think of it in terms of humans suffocating earth it is justified.

I will first primarily focus on the global warming/ Earth’s pain imagery. Straight away when we are introduced to Jennifer Lawrence’s character you see that she takes a lot of pride and care in the house as well as sharing a special bond with the house itself. She is barefoot throughout the entire film because she is grounded and connected to the house. The pain of the house is represented by her (her pain) but also visually (when she does the connecting moments with the house throughout the film- the house’s heart).

“Both Lawrence and Aronofsky have spoken about one major breakthrough about Mother’s character being the idea that the house she built from the ground up is an extension of her.” (found this after I wrote this so I was right.)

Going back to how she cares for the house. She is constantly working on the house, trying to make it look its best by building on it or cleaning up after people. This represents Earth. Earth is constantly reproducing, providing for humans on earth (nature, fruit/veg, resources) but the other characters that are within the house take advantage of this, they use everything the house has to offer but doesn’t put it back where it belongs nor do they appreciate or nurture. The fact that this film is from Lawrence character’s perspective makes you grow more and more disgusted and negativity towards these characters because they are just using (they being human race)

If you think about how unique and magical Earth is, everything can work so perfectly slot into place, I find it fascinating how intricate and special it is. And yet as for human beings, there is always an element of greed and lust, an urge for more to keep going and going because nothing is ever good enough. There are many ways that the extra characters that barge into the house can be interpreted. I am going to focus on two. The first, elements of human psychology that emphasis on the destruction they cause to earth. The second being biblical, Ed Harris’ being Adam in relation to Adam and Eve.

One thing that I find interesting is when you look up the cast, the characters are not specific, Ed Harris’ character is known as Him and it goes on. Their description is bleak, it is open to the audience themselves to decide who they are and their main purpose within the film. That is what I really liked about the film you choose which path you take, what journey you follow within the film. The main representation of Harris’ character to me was that he was toxicity, smog. All the pollution and poison that humans have bought to this earth is represented in him. For example, he was a heavy smoker, and multiple times within the film, Mother (Lawrence’s character) had to remind him to smoke outside, and even then after asking he still did it against Mother’s (Earth’s wishes). She enters the room he is staying in and sees cigarette butts, and because of this she slides his lighter down the back of the cupboard, so he no longer able to smoke. The lighter does hold major power because it is the same lighter that Mother claws to find when she destroys herself and her creation (Earth).

The wife of Harris’ character, plays the role as Eve in some cases, but also greed/lust. For example, she is strong piece evidence of taking the resources of the house but also not giving back nor cleaning up the mess she created. To add to that what she creates is lemonade, that is rather bitter and not healthy (suggestion of alcohol potentially) therefore there can be the interpretation that she is using the Earth’s resources to create something that is bad. This character that is named as ‘Woman’ ( the meaning character is open to interpretation) is a very pushy and confident character, encouraging the mother to have a child, to ‘let loose’ on numerous occasions, an all-around mischievous character. This links in not only with human but also Eve, biting Adam’s apple.

In terms of the biblical imagery within this film, Lawrence goes on to say, “it is important that they know I represent Mother Earth; Javier, whose character is a poet, represents a form of God, a creator; Michelle Pfeiffer)) is an Eve to Ed Harris’s Adam; there are Cain and Abel; and the setting sometimes resembles the Garden of Eden.” Yes, it is there and is evident, but only at times, which is something that should be focused on, the characters are not solely biblical nor are they anything else they fluctuate throughout. I also think Javier’s character is important as he is seen as a form of God and not solely, meaning that he can also be seen as devilish, manipulative and also a leader in other retrospects.

“To me, the tincture was something that grounded her, brought her back. As humanity starts coming in the door, you start to see the harm they’re doing to her world, her house. The sort of blackness that happens, the degradation, the little bits of pieces of destruction that start happening. And the tincture, in some ways, I think, was a self-medication.”

The medication that Mother takes I think is very important because of it not only ‘grounds’ her, it also brings in colour and an attempt of some normality. When you search the definition of tincture you get, ‘ extract of plant or animal material’ meaning it is something produced from the Earth. This led me to believe that it was Mother’s way of making herself better by using remedies that are more natural and less harmful to the environment as opposed to painkillers that the ‘Woman’ asks for at one point. (painkillers being more harmful due to mass production and also its contents). She is using the natural resources around her to fix the situation to try and cause as little pain to Earth as possible.

“It was fun, and about giving audiences a little gift in the middle of the film.”

Now, this was my informal moment of the film, this quote refers to the appearance of Kristen Wiig in the film around half way. Now on a personal level, Wiig is one of my favourite actors and the longtime dream was to have Lawrence and Wiig within the same film. Something I did not think would ever happen just because they tend to work on such different genres. But low and behold they crossed paths. And I will be the first to admit I did ‘fangirl’ slightly because it was another familiar face during this traumatic film which was comforting, but also just made my expectations of this film exceed even more.

“one of my best accomplishments, just because it’s a nightmare. It just builds and builds on top of documenting the horrors of our world, and throws a pregnant woman into it.”

The final 25-30 minutes of this film was a rollercoaster. It was a combination of the entire world all within the walls of the house. It broke me, It confused me, it fascinated me, it angered me, it ultimately immersed me on a whole other level. You have the police brutality, war, famine, disease, manipulation, destruction…so much! All whilst a heavily pregnant woman claws her way through, traumatic. It is so wrong which is what makes it so right. The way I see it, the baby Jen is pregnant with is her attempt on making the greatest thing she possibly can to please her husband (God) and yet there is all this destruction, lack of care and hate. Ultimately showing that her husband loved the idea that his wife loved her so much and not that he actually loved her for who she is. It is difficult to get your head around but powerful. And even after she gives birth to the baby (in the ‘garden of Eden’ and also the baby can be perceived as Jesus) It is not enough for her husband, he takes it and has to show it to the rest of the human race, who in turn abuse and destroy this new thing (the baby) and kill and leech every last thing from it.

Another factor that I think stands out to me is that religion plays a part in the destruction of earth. Its obsession and mass scale cause harm. And that is why it is such a big factor because a lot of war stems from strong beliefs or some even linking to religions. It shows how harmful things are that humans do to the planet.

In a nod to Hindu religion—which states that God created and destroyed the universe infinite times—the cycle begins again: ashes, crystal, a new home, a new Mother!

Yes, I can see why some people are triggered by the graphicness, the inclusion of a newborn baby dying etc. But at the same time, I feel it is justified, we are slowly killing this planet as human beings whether we like to admit it or not. And although it is horrifying to see something so innocent so graphically harmed, sometimes in life people only really open their eyes and react to something if it hits a bit closer to home to them. Yes, this film is bloody intense, all this harm and sadness happening in one house, but at the end of the day, we are one planet lucky beautiful unique planet in a huge universe that is being suffocated and killed more and more. Maybe this brutality of this film might make some people think.

Gemma Robinson 18/09/2017

are taken from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/09/mother-movie-meaning-explained

#film #film review #review #movie #jennifer lawrence #darren aronofsky #cinema #opinion #director

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aviewfromtheclouds25 · 7 years

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Hi any therioes about how Robron can come out the other side of this stronger? I feel we need theory's to help us through next week, I always love reading yours! 😊

Hi, anon! Sorry it’s taken so long for me to reply, but bless you and thank you for this. I’m glad you enjoy reading the random notions that pop into my head haha! I wish I had a definitive theory, anon, but right now all I’ve got is about a dozen different theories and a whole load of confusion. There’s a couple of things I’m hoping to post about soon but they’re really just more connections and patterns I’ve noticed which may or may not mean anything, so for now all I have to offer is a messy combination of all the various theories and some wild speculation haha.

In terms of next week, I’ve always been Team No Break-up and to be honest, I’m still not sure I see it happening. Personally I feel like next week’s events are more likely heading towards one of their 24-hour “we’re done” rows because frankly they’re overdue one. I mean, even the reveal saw them apart for only, what, a few hours? So technically speaking, the last occurrence of this type of argument was The Incident itself… So theoretically, it could totally come full circle with whatever this whole “We’re done, get out of my house” drama is. At the most, I could only see it being a mutually agreed temporary separation in which Robert would potentially stay in the second flat while they both spend the time (sort of) apart working out exactly how they feel about the situation individually and how they want to face it. But I can only see this happening if the show are really planning on having Robron confront all of their issues, because the one that’s still very much lingering alongside the issues with trust and communication they’re now facing is the aspect of their relationship I’ve been describing as the one constant and indisputable fact throughout this whole storyline - their overwhelming dependency on each other. It’s something which has been referenced in the scripts themselves numerous times and I actually think it could be quite an interesting angle - for Aaron and Robert to not break up and give up on their marriage, but instead to take some time apart to try to better stand on their own two feet and become slightly less reliant on each other, because this whole storyline stemmed from the fact that they are so dependent on each other that they literally couldn’t cope with being apart. And Aaron even referenced that in the reveal. However, I don’t see this happening because this aspect of Robron is one of the things which sets them apart from all the other couples, it plays into this idea of soulmates, and it opens up a whole magnitude of plot potential. And the last thing the show wants to do is limit the freedom of plotlines for Robert and Aaron right now, which is one of the many reasons I still fully believe they won’t end up with a baby.

I think the events of next week really are just yet another catalyst to get Robron to actually communicate with each other and stop pretending they don’t have to deal with this in some way. If you think about it, that was how this whole storyline came about. They weren’t communicating, they were ignoring their problems and just hoping they’d disappear before the other found out. But this ultimately ended with them each hitting self-destruct. Aaron ended up choosing a dark path first while he was in prison, because Robert couldn’t hit breaking point with The Incident until Aaron had hit breaking point. But then the baby happened. And while I don’t believe it’s Robert’s, Robert does. He’s been left facing the consequences of his destructive actions, but he’s actually refusing to face them right now. It’s constantly there but, as per, he’s trying his hardest to ignore it and hope it will disappear. Which isn’t going to happen. So it makes sense to me that Aaron will get caught up in this dark path again, that he will face the consequences of his own destructive actions just like Robert has his. So for me, this part of the storyline is where they stop ignoring the problems they need to face, where they accept that there are problems there and they’ll deal with them together. What was it Danny said in the interviews around the wedding? Something about learning you can’t just do what you want and not expect consequences? This is where that comes into play for both Aaron and Robert, I feel. I always come back to the episode of Aaron’s prison release - and no, for once I’m not talking about that hug - and specifically the scene of them entering the party. Because for me, that was the setup then for how this story would progress. The way they took each other’s hands wasn’t simply to give the fandom a cute little scene we’d never had before - it was to show that they were a unit, bound together, and unbreakable. They were entering a situation neither of them wanted (the party) but they were doing so as this unit. This, for me, was acknowledgement that no matter what lies ahead of them, no matter what they’re facing, or what situation - however undesirable - they’re having to walk into, they will do so together, side-by-side, as a unit. I’m still very much thinking (and hoping) that this is all just leading to Aaron getting some proper help and Robert coming to terms with being a dad, with Aaron committed to standing by him. And that’s how they grow and become stronger. I keep saying that ultimately what this storyline has been doing from the start is holding a massive mirror up to Robert and Aaron and their relationship, forcing them to acknowledge the issues they’ve consistently just been sweeping under the carpet. This is the point where we finally reach that acknowledgement and the mirror will have served its purpose, finally. (I hope haha.)

And I’d still like to think there’s the potential for a Robert breakdown with Aaron supporting him through it. But I think this will most likely come when he finds out the baby isn’t his (assuming it happens at all). Which kind of saddens me somewhat to be honest, because they’d set it up perfectly for one now. Because they’d completely isolated him - they’ve taken Vic’s support system away from him obviously, they’d sent Diane on a cruise, and Bernice is only remembered as family when Diane’s around, so the only person Robert had was Aaron, who just so happens to be his everything. So imagine Robert leaving the Mill and Aaron when he’s at his most isolated and vulnerable. Perfect breakdown potential. But alas, Diane’s back now so it doesn’t seem like isolating Robert was intentional for this purpose after all.

Now, here is the total wild speculation that’s somehow combined all the various theories I’ve been harping on about over the weeks haha. This is all entirely dependent on when Rebecca’s baby is due, and how/when the Lachlan drama plays out…

I remember when this whole mess first started, I joked about the idea that Robert could end up being framed for Lachlan’s crimes which could bring us full circle from SSW with Lachlan threatening to make up lies about Robert and Aaron worrying about losing him to prison, and the fact that basically Andy being framed for Lachlan’s crime was foreshadowing of what would happen to Robert all along and Robert being so determined to clear his brother’s name - which was the catalyst for his role in SSW and this whole Rebecca mess - was really just a very dark ironic twist. Now, I didn’t think anything of this again - until all the drama around Chrissie’s biological father and how much of what they’re saying about him feels like foreshadowing for the Lachlan drama to come. So, we all know I’ve theorised about how I think this could end with Rebecca dying and leaving some paternity/Vadam bringing up the baby drama in her wake. So imagine if she does die after having the baby, Robert has been assumed the dad and his name will be on the birth certificate. Depending how the Lachlan drama plays out, Rebecca may well be set to inherit everything. If she dies, the baby will inherit. Which consequently means the father of the baby would most likely have control of the assets until the child is older. Until proven otherwise, Robert is that man. In this scenario, he gets control of the Whites’ money and Home Farm (which I actually really would not object to, because the idea that the White family’s final act is to inadvertently give Robert everything he’d thought he’d always wanted is hilarious to me haha). But now remember the scene where Lawrence told Lachlan the truth about what happened to Chrissie’s father - “I didn’t want him to get custody, so I framed him…” Lawrence doesn’t want Robert to be any part of his family’s life, let alone the father of his only biological grandchild, so there’s definitely the potential they could set stuff up for Robert to be facing prison… If the show wanted to go there and give me a reason for everything all along and complete the SSW Theory, that is haha. But this could so easily tie in with my Adam Theory, too - say Vadam are left bringing up the baby but he can’t handle it, or it turns out it’s Ross’s, and Vadam’s marriage breaks down again so Adam feels like he has nothing to stay in the village for anymore so he takes the rap for Robert to stop him facing prison and promptly goes on the run himself like Aaron did for him!? (I told you this was wild! Maybe he’ll meet up with Andy? Haha.)

But I’m also wondering if this is all heading towards a Christmas wedding. Which I’m kind of in two minds about if it is because on the one hand, a cliché I’ve never wanted (but then I never wanted cheating/ONS/baby clichés either!) but on the other hand, CHRISTMAS IS THE ULTIMATE FLUFFY TIME FOR ROBRON! Because just imagine any of my wild speculation actually has some basis, and they plan an official wedding before Robert’s trial to parallel their first… Imagine Maxine’s writing it and just like Christmas 2014, we have a scene to parallel the swaying outside the pub… Imagine the rings are actually engraved this time… Imagine they have the perfect wedding, followed by the perfect reception, and then they go home to the Mill to spend their wedding night alone… And they sit on the sofa, playing footsie while wearing their Christmas jumpers and drinking Snowballs, while listening to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s The Power of Love (because it’s Christmas and no one can tell me this song doesn’t say Robron)… And then it just ends with a montage of all this drama for all these different characters while the music plays, but closes in on Robron as official husbands… Content, at peace, and blissfully happy… And yeah, I’m dreaming but I’m staying here haha.

I don’t know if this even counts as theorising exactly? I’m so sorry, anon, haha. Hopefully it kind of makes some vague sense even if it isn’t the kind of response you were hoping for haha! :)

#I don't know what this is anon I'm so sorry haha #and this got...much longer than intended oops #SSW Theory #the realms of neverending theories and overanalysis

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hogwartselementumrp · 7 years

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Hyacinth, congratulations, you have been accepted for your OC Rhys Llewellyn. In finding a lone wolf Logan Lerman FC with a “tragic backstory” in one’s inbox, an admin must brace themselves--if you’ll forgive the frankness and not find the joke rude--but we honestly found your writing style so engaging and your passion for the character so ready to shine through with a bio that felt not at all rushed despite knowing you were racing the clock, and shone through with promise of what you would be like to RP with. Admin Beth may have offered to physically fight Admin Lily (we’re tired, stressed people and these things happen), though in the end there was no need for such measures and we agree together to accept you. We can’t wait to see you develop him into a character that shines as an individual and grows a three dimensional life of his own that continues the potential set in the application. Get him on the dash because I am eager to interact with him.

Side Note: We already have a character named Rhys that has been a part of the RP for over three years. Now, people share names in real life and even in this RP Lily once wrote two vastly different Lawrences, Lawrence Yeaun and Lawrence Frisk. Both are played and played marvelously and seldom is there confusion, but if sharing a name makes you uncomfortable or you are worried about the confusion of players, we want to give you the chance to change the name or to have him go by Llewellyn. You are in no way obligated, but it might help everyone out.

Now, I have written a longer acceptance note than Lily. Welcome to the RP!

NAME/ALIAS: Hyacinth

PREFERRED PRONOUN: She/her

AGE: 19

TIMEZONE: GMT-4

ACTIVITY LEVEL: Around an 8-9 out of 10.

HOW DID YOU FIND THE RP (NEW MEMBERS): through a google search

ORIGINAL CHARACTER INFORMATION:

Desired Character: Rhys River Llewellyn

Face Claim: Logan Lerman

Now, please check our dorm page! To see which house is needing a character and in which year!

School Functions (check Quidditch availability’s): Healer Program

Why do you believe this will be a good character in this specific roleplay?

Just a few months prior to the roleplay, Rhys experienced a very drastic, devastating tragedy in his life. It will be really interesting exploring his headspace after that occurrence, and the relationships he will create because of what happened to him. Rhys is at a very delicate, confusing point in his life. His previous religious faith, which was fairly constant, is now gone. He is now estranged from his father, attending a new school, and discovering his own sexuality. I believe he will be able to discover who he truly is, or at least begin to, and in turn, help others do so as well.

RHYS LLEWELLYN is 18 years old, in his FIRST year HOGWARTS UNIVERSITY and was in the house of RAVENCLAW.

❝The weight of the world / is love / Under the burden / of solitude, / under the burden / of dissatisfaction / the weight, / the weight we carry / is love

↳ MAGIC

Rhys was gifted with a very sharp mind and wisdom far beyond his years. This didn’t translate very perfectly into magic, as even the mere thought of it had never entered his mind, but he studied extremely hard in his years at Hogwarts. Naturally, he wasn’t particularly gifted, but his hard work and determination put him at the top of his class. His instinctive curiosity and eagerness to learn things also gave him an extra edge over his classmates. As for his elemental magic, he far preferred spells and charms. They were easier to master through studying and practice, easier to control. Even so, Rhys saw his elemental magic as a challenge he had yet conquer, and devoted his time to improving it. Rhys was almost predestined to be a healer. His selflessness and instinctive compassion for others led him to apply for the Healer Program, which he was confident he would excel in.

↳ BACKSTORY

Rhys Llewellyn and his twin sister, Eve, were born on the first day of June in a small town of Wales, with the sun shining brightly overhead and not a single cloud in the blue sky. They’d been born a full month early, after hours and hours of painful labor. And when their mother, Adelaide, held her two pink, squalling babies in her arms, she placed a kiss on the tops of their heads and whispered an apology. For she could not stay, and two days after the two babies had entered this world, Adelaide hurried away into the night, leaving her children with nothing but a broken father and a long-forgotten memory of a gentle kiss that would be the only one they would ever receive from their first home.

It is surprising that Rhys and Eve grew up fairly undamaged. Their father, Jonathan, was a fierce, Evangelical pastor, forever trying to find an explanation for his loss in a higher power. Jonathan had only two loves in his life: His wife, who’d left him, and God. And after she left him, it seemed like he needed to fill up that empty hole with all the love he could ever contain into God, leaving nothing for his two children.

Rhys and Eve grew up relying on only each other for the necessities of life that went further than food and shelter. It is no wonder the two siblings grew very close. But despite the fact that they spent nearly all of their time together, they could not be more different. Eve was loud and outgoing, intent in her beliefs and unafraid to voice them to the world. There was an overly-flamboyant, almost frantic way about her, as if she started up an act of someone she was not long ago and now had to over exaggerate herself or risk being found out. Yet around Rhys, she could be the loud, confident self she was in public but also the more sensitive side that she typically kept hidden for fear of getting herself hurt. The two twins were like day and night. Rhys was mellower, far preferring anonymity and his own company over others. He was very intelligent and introspective and preferred to mull things over before doing anything, unlike Eve, who rarely planned for anything and preferred to live life spontaneously. But when they were with each other, they were better versions of themselves.

With Eve, Rhys felt like he could do anything and not be afraid.

When Rhys was accepted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he was anything but delighted. How was he to face a school, a magic school, without his twin sister? But Eve was adamant he should go; she knew Rhys was something special. There were times when certain things happened around Rhys, odd things, and in her opinion the idea that he was a wizard was not something particularly far-fetched. She, like many others, had the overwhelming sense sometimes that Rhys was different. Otherworldly. Perhaps it was his intelligence, or his compassion for others, or the way his eyes lit up when he spoke about the poetry he loved so much. So, to be perfectly honest, Eve was not very surprised at all. She would have been more shocked if it turned out Rhys was just ordinary.

His father, of course, was furious at the mere thought of his son going to learn witchcraft. It was a terrible sin, something one would be condemned to hell for, a type of satanic worship.

But Rhys, who rarely objected anything his father said, went anyway, and when he came back from his first year at Hogwarts, he was met with a stony silence from his father and a tight-lipped smile from Eve, her voice the one she used with other people, not him. And, year after year, Rhys found that he heard her real voice less and less, until it disappeared entirely.

Over his seven years at Hogwarts, Rhys didn’t exactly feel the automatic acceptance he’d assumed he would. In turns out, even at a magical school, he was odd and out of place. Preferring to study and read and write poetry than attend quidditch matches and explore Hogsmeade, he never really made any lasting friendships. But it was no real issue for him, as he often preferred his own company over others.

The summer before he was to attend his first year at Hogwarts University, Rhys’ life fell completely apart. Ten days after their shared birthday, Rhys found his sister dead in her closet. She’d hung herself, leaving no other explanation except for an ‘I’m sorry’ scrawled on a torn piece of notebook paper.

In the aftermath, Rhys could not stay. Guilt and fear and anger and blame and all-consuming grief was everywhere in the house, everywhere in his father, everywhere in his own heart. It was heavy with a blackness he was unused to. He could not stay. So, like his mother, like his sister, he left.

And in leaving the house, he left his father, and in leaving his father, he left everything he had ever known, and in doing so, he freed himself.

↳ PERSONALITY TRAITS

» {+ positives} creative, selfless, insightful

» {- negatives} shy, anxious/worrisome, distracted

↳ BASICS

» BLOOD STATUS: half-blood

» ELEMENTAL POWER: air

» AFFINITY LEVEL: average affinity | very studious

» DATE OF BIRTH: July 1st

» WAND: willow, dragon heartstring, 10 inches, supple flexibility

» FACECLAIM: Logan Lerman

RHYS LLEWLLYN IS PLAYED BY HYACINTH

It wasn’t like his father preached all the time about how Rhys was an abomination that would be sent straight to hell. But it happened often enough that he decided it would be safest if he just kept silent about the whole being-attracted-to-boys debacle. Keeping it from his father was second nature - it wasn’t like Rhys actually told him anything. But with Eve, it was practically impossible. In fact, he wasn’t really sure why he wasn’t telling her about this part of him. Maybe it was because he barely understood it himself.

Or maybe it was because he wished it weren’t true. Rhys wished he could say that he wasn’t at all ashamed with who he was. It it were Eve, she would be attending pride parades everyday and kissing whomever she wanted in front of their father, one eyebrow raised as if daring him to say anything. If it were Eve, she wouldn’t be ashamed at all because she knew there was nothing to be ashamed about.

Rhys knew, too. But he wasn’t as brave as she was. He was scared. Of his father, of a God he barely believed in, of himself and the truth.

Because there was this boy at Hogwarts, a boy with a sunshine grin and endless jokes, a boy that Rhys kissed, but would have liked it much better if his mind wasn’t screaming sin sin sin sin sin.

He wanted to kiss him again, but shame swallowed him like an ocean for weeks after he did it the first time, and Rhys didn’t particularly enjoy drowning.

He kissed a girl, too, once. Before he’d kissed the boy, back when he was still unsure. In the Hogwarts Library, his back against the hard wood of the bookcase marking the Legal Section. Their lips smashed together, too urgent and unsynchronized. Rhys hated the way their faces fit together, the lack of strong jaw and vague stubble to ground him. There was too much hair to wade through, too much peony filling his nostrils. His mind wasn’t telling him he was sinning, but instead pounded a crescendoing chorus of this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong.

Rhys had home come from his Sixth Year at Hogwarts, having kissed two people that were both sins in his mind. The boy because the Bible said so and the girl because it’d felt inherently wrong when it happened. And his father had looked down at him, his head tilted and eyes narrowed as if he’d sensed something on Rhys that was even dirtier than witchcraft. But nothing had been said, and he breathed a desperate sigh of relief.

He was hiding, and that was bad, and that did not make him happy. He knew all these things. But he was also scared. And he also loved his father, despite everything. In the end, the only thing that counted was love, was it not?

#accepted

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aestheticsharry · 4 years

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Illinois Bid Bonds

The listed below article is a good introduction to bid bonds. Bid bonds, as you understand, are bonds used in the building and construction market. These bonds guarantee that if someone quotes on a project, and is awarded the contract, then they will move forward with performing under the regards to the contract.

See the below post for more good info. You can see the initial post here: https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/illinois-2/

Illinois Bid Bonds

What is a Bid Bond in Illinois?

A bid bond is one of the types of surety bonds, which guarantees that the bidder will enter into the agreement and complete the contract according to its terms. It provides assurance to the project owner that the bidder has the expertise and ability to complete the job once the bidder is selected after winning the bid. The simple reason is that you need one in order to get the work. But the larger question is why are more owners/developers requiring a surety bid bond? The answer is risk. Given the uncertainty of the marketplace, which includes long-time contractors going out of business, to municipalities filing bankruptcy (or just slow paying), has led to owners being afraid that their contractors will be unable finish the job. So, they require a some protection.

Just fill out our bond application here and email it to [email protected] – click here to get our Illinois Bid Bond Application

A bid bond is issued as part of a bid by a surety bond company to the project owner. The owner is then assures that the winning bidder will take on the contract under the terms at which they bid.

Most bid bonds contain a bid percentage (usually 5% or 10%, is forfeited if you don’t accept the job).

How much does a Bid Bond Cost in Illinois?

Swiftbonds does not charge for a surety bid bond (with two exceptions, see below). The reason that we don’t charge for a bid bond is that we will charge for the surety bond if you win the contract. The cost of a P&P bond can vary widely depending on the amount of coverage that is required (see below).

Two exceptions for bid bond charges: 1) We do charge for Overnight fees 2) We will charge you if there is NOT going to be a bond on the contract.

How much do bonds cost in IL?

Bond prices fluctuate based on the job size (that is, it’s based on the cost of the underlying contract). The cost of a bond is estimated through a couple of back-of-the-envelope calculations. In general, the cost is approximately three percent (3%) for jobs under $800,000 and then the percentage is lower as the contract amount increases. We work diligently to find the lowest premiums possible in the state of Illinois. Please call us today at (913) 286-6501. We’ll find you the very best rate possible for your maintenance bond or completion bond. Things that can affect this pricing are the perceived risk of the job, the financial position of the entity being bonded, plus other factors.

Bond Amount Needed Fee 2-3% >$800,000 1.5-3% >$1.500,000 1-3%

These rates are for Merit clients, Standard rates are higher

How do I get a Bid Bond in Illinois?

We make it easy to get a contract bid bond. Just click here to get our Illinois Bid Bond Application. Fill it out and then email it and the Illinois bid specs/contract documents to [email protected] or fax to 855-433-4192.

You can also call us at (913) 286-6501. We fully review all application for surety bid bonds and then submit it to the surety that we believe will provide the best surety bid bond for your job. We have a very high success rate in getting our clients bid bonds at the very best rates possible.

What is a Illinois Bid Bond?

A bid bond is a bond that provides assurance that you will accept the work if you win the contract. The bid fee (usually 5% or 10%) is a forfeiture that is paid when you win the bid, but then decide not to take the work.

Find a Bid Bond near Me

Typically, a bid bond and performance/payment bond are done together in the same contract by the surety. This way, the owner of the project is assured that the project can be completed pursuant to the terms of the contract and that it will not be liened by any contractor. The bond is security risk coverage for the benefit of the owner.

Who Gets the Bond?

The general contractor is the corporation that obtains the bond. It is for the benefit of the owner (or in the case of government contract work, the governmental entity). However, it’s the general contractor that has to apply for the bond and be underwritten before the bid bond is written by the surety. This is also known as bonding a business.

We provide bid bonds in each of the following counties:

Adams Alexander Bond Boone Brown Bureau Calhoun Carroll Cass Champaign Christian Clark Clay Clinton Coles Cook Crawford Cumberland DeKalb De Witt Douglas DuPage Edgar Edwards Effingham Fayette Ford Franklin Fulton Gallatin Greene Grundy Hamilton Hancock Hardin Henderson Henry Iroquois Jackson Jasper Jefferson Jersey Jo Daviess Johnson Kane Kankakee Kendall Knox La Salle Lake Lawrence Lee Livingston Logan McDonough McHenry McLean Macon Macoupin Madison Marion Marshall Mason Massac Menard Mercer Monroe Montgomery Morgan Moultrie Ogle Peoria Perry Piatt Pike Pope Pulaski Putnam Randolph Richland Rock Island Saline Sangamon Schuyler Scott Shelby St. Clair Stark Stephenson Tazewell Union Vermilion Wabash Warren Washington Wayne White Whiteside Will Williamson Winnebago Woodford

And Cities: Chicago Peoria Rockford Champaign Naperville Joliet Elgin Schaumburg Evanston Belleville Arlington Heights

See our Indiana Bid Bond page here.

More on Surety Bid Bonds https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/.

Learning More About Finding a Bid Bond

Bid Bonds can be complicated, specifically if you do not have an idea how they work. Most folks think about this as insurance, but this is a kind of guarantee that the principal will do their work effectively. Although insurance providers usually offer a Surety Bid Bond, you can’t really call it insurance because it has a different function. Most will require you to get a Surety Bid Bond before they consider your services because it is a type of guarantee to them.

If you’d like to get a bid bond and more, you should know how they work. We will provide some info on the importance of Bid Bonds and the ins and outs of them.

What Is A Surety Bid Bond?

Bid Bonds are created to secure the public because they are a kind of guarantee that the obligation will be satisfied. You must get a license or commercial bond to guarantee that your company will stick to the laws and you get a contract bond to guarantee that a public construction project will be completed.

These are some examples that are used to describe what Bid Bonds are and how they work. It will also benefit you since the consumers will put their trust in you when they will be protected by bond.

There are thousands of bonds which exist right now and the type of bond that you need depends on your situation.

The Work Of A Surety Bid Bond

Bid Bonds are a three-party agreement between the principal, the obliged and the surety company. The obliged is the project owner and the principal is the employer or company that will perform the work. Construction businesses will be asked by law to acquire Bid Bonds if they’re chosen for a public project. The government will require a construction company to secure a host of bonds before they’re permitted to work on a certain project. The bond will guarantee that the subcontractors and the other workers can be paid even if the contractor will default. The contractor will be covering the losses, but when they reach their limit, the duty will fall to the surety company.

Applying For A Surety Bid Bond

Insurance businesses usually provide Bid Bonds, but there are some stand alone surety businesses that specialize in these products. Surety businesses will always be licensed by a state Department of Insurance so ensure that you check first before you avail. It will not be simple to apply for a bond because the applications will go through very thorough checking before it is approved. The bond underwriters will first review the financial history of the applicant, credit profile and other important aspects.

It means that there is a possibility that you won’t be approved for a Surety Bid Bond, specifically if your credit history is bad.

How Much Do You Need To Spend?

You cannot state an exact price for a Surety Bid Bond because its cost is always impacted by various factors like bond type, bond amount, where it will likely be issued, contractual risk, credit rating of the applicant and more. There are thousands of different bonds available right now and the cost will depend upon the bond that you want to get. The amount of bond that you may avail may also be a big factor because you can select a $10,000 bond or a $25,000 bond or higher.

If you have a credit score of 700 and above or very near this number, you may qualify for the standard bonding market and you only need to pay 1 to 4 percent of the Surety Bid Bond amount. This means that if you may get a $10,000 bond, you only need to pay $100 to $400 for the interest.

Is There A Chance To Be Refused?

There is a possibility that your bid bond request will be declined by the insurance providers and it’ll depend upon the background check that they carry out. Once they feel that giving you a bond is a huge risk, they won’t release a bid bond for you.

Credit score is also a factor because in case you have a bad credit score, it would be very hard for you to get a bid bond as the businesses consider you as a risk. In case you have a bad credit history and you were approved for the bond, you usually have to pay an interest rate of 10 to 20 percent.

There is a chance that your application will be refused so you have to look into the requirements before you apply.

If you wish to apply for a bid bond, you need to be sure that you understand the process so you won’t make a mistake. It won’t be easy to apply, but if your requirements are complete and you are eligible, you can obtain a bid bond.

A Much Deeper Take A Look At Quote Bonds in Construction If granted, a Bid Bond is a type of surety bond utilized to guarantee that a specialist bidding on a task or task will get in into the agreement with the obligee.

A Bid Bond is released in the quantity of the agreement bid, with the identical requirements as that of an Efficiency Bond.

Everything About Bid Bonds in Building The origins of our service was closely linked with the arrangement of efficiency bonds to the contracting market. It found that the personal professional normally was insolvent when the task was granted, or grew to end up being insolvent earlier than the obstacle was completed.

The standing of your surety company is necessary, due to the fact that it ensures you that when you have problems or if even worse involves worst you'll have a reputable partner to rely on and receive help from. We work only with A-rated and T-listed companies, probably the most reputable corporations in the industry.

Usually no, they are different. However, bid bonds mechanically turn into efficiency bonds in case you are awarded the agreement.

What Is A Building Surety Bond? The origins of our organisation was thoroughly connected with the provision of performance bonds to the contracting market. Even if some jobs do not require cost and performance bonds, you will need to get bonded lastly due to the fact that the bulk of public initiatives do need the bonds. The longer a little contractor waits to get bonded, the more long lasting it will be given that there will not be a observe report of meeting the compulsory requirements for bonding and performing bonded work.

The only limit is the biggest bond you may get for one particular task. The aggregate limitation is the whole quantity of bonded work offered you potentially can have without hold-up.

The Value Of Quote Bonds near You Arms, generators, radio towers, tree elimination, computers, softward, smoke alarm, decorative work, scaffolding, water towers, lighting, and resurfacing of current roads/paved locations. Bid bonds in addition operate an extra guarantee for job owners that a bidding specialist or subcontractor is qualified to carry out the job they're bidding on. There are 2 causes for this.

https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/illinois-2/

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uhhhcool · 4 years

Text

Illinois Bid Bonds

See the below post for more good info. You can see the initial post here: https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/illinois-2/

Illinois Bid Bonds

What is a Bid Bond in Illinois?

Just fill out our bond application here and email it to [email protected] – click here to get our Illinois Bid Bond Application

A bid bond is issued as part of a bid by a surety bond company to the project owner. The owner is then assures that the winning bidder will take on the contract under the terms at which they bid.

Most bid bonds contain a bid percentage (usually 5% or 10%, is forfeited if you don’t accept the job).

How much does a Bid Bond Cost in Illinois?

Two exceptions for bid bond charges: 1) We do charge for Overnight fees 2) We will charge you if there is NOT going to be a bond on the contract.

How much do bonds cost in IL?

Bond Amount Needed Fee 2-3% >$800,000 1.5-3% >$1.500,000 1-3%

These rates are for Merit clients, Standard rates are higher

How do I get a Bid Bond in Illinois?

What is a Illinois Bid Bond?

Find a Bid Bond near Me

Who Gets the Bond?

We provide bid bonds in each of the following counties:

And Cities: Chicago Peoria Rockford Champaign Naperville Joliet Elgin Schaumburg Evanston Belleville Arlington Heights

See our Indiana Bid Bond page here.

More on Surety Bid Bonds https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/.

Learning More About Finding a Bid Bond

If you’d like to get a bid bond and more, you should know how they work. We will provide some info on the importance of Bid Bonds and the ins and outs of them.

What Is A Surety Bid Bond?

These are some examples that are used to describe what Bid Bonds are and how they work. It will also benefit you since the consumers will put their trust in you when they will be protected by bond.

There are thousands of bonds which exist right now and the type of bond that you need depends on your situation.

The Work Of A Surety Bid Bond

Applying For A Surety Bid Bond

It means that there is a possibility that you won’t be approved for a Surety Bid Bond, specifically if your credit history is bad.

How Much Do You Need To Spend?

Is There A Chance To Be Refused?

There is a chance that your application will be refused so you have to look into the requirements before you apply.

A Bid Bond is released in the quantity of the agreement bid, with the identical requirements as that of an Efficiency Bond.

Usually no, they are different. However, bid bonds mechanically turn into efficiency bonds in case you are awarded the agreement.

The only limit is the biggest bond you may get for one particular task. The aggregate limitation is the whole quantity of bonded work offered you potentially can have without hold-up.

https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/illinois-2/

0 notes

tomorowlandword · 4 years

Text

Illinois Bid Bonds

See the below post for more good info. You can see the initial post here: https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/illinois-2/

Illinois Bid Bonds

What is a Bid Bond in Illinois?

Just fill out our bond application here and email it to [email protected] – click here to get our Illinois Bid Bond Application

A bid bond is issued as part of a bid by a surety bond company to the project owner. The owner is then assures that the winning bidder will take on the contract under the terms at which they bid.

Most bid bonds contain a bid percentage (usually 5% or 10%, is forfeited if you don’t accept the job).

How much does a Bid Bond Cost in Illinois?

Two exceptions for bid bond charges: 1) We do charge for Overnight fees 2) We will charge you if there is NOT going to be a bond on the contract.

How much do bonds cost in IL?

Bond Amount Needed Fee 2-3% >$800,000 1.5-3% >$1.500,000 1-3%

These rates are for Merit clients, Standard rates are higher

How do I get a Bid Bond in Illinois?

What is a Illinois Bid Bond?

Find a Bid Bond near Me

Who Gets the Bond?

We provide bid bonds in each of the following counties:

And Cities: Chicago Peoria Rockford Champaign Naperville Joliet Elgin Schaumburg Evanston Belleville Arlington Heights

See our Indiana Bid Bond page here.

More on Surety Bid Bonds https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/.

Learning More About Finding a Bid Bond

If you’d like to get a bid bond and more, you should know how they work. We will provide some info on the importance of Bid Bonds and the ins and outs of them.

What Is A Surety Bid Bond?

These are some examples that are used to describe what Bid Bonds are and how they work. It will also benefit you since the consumers will put their trust in you when they will be protected by bond.

There are thousands of bonds which exist right now and the type of bond that you need depends on your situation.

The Work Of A Surety Bid Bond

Applying For A Surety Bid Bond

It means that there is a possibility that you won’t be approved for a Surety Bid Bond, specifically if your credit history is bad.

How Much Do You Need To Spend?

Is There A Chance To Be Refused?

There is a chance that your application will be refused so you have to look into the requirements before you apply.

A Bid Bond is released in the quantity of the agreement bid, with the identical requirements as that of an Efficiency Bond.

Usually no, they are different. However, bid bonds mechanically turn into efficiency bonds in case you are awarded the agreement.

The only limit is the biggest bond you may get for one particular task. The aggregate limitation is the whole quantity of bonded work offered you potentially can have without hold-up.

https://swiftbonds.com/bid-bond/illinois-2/

0 notes

ds4design · 7 years

Text

When the trolls come at you over birth control coverage, here's what to say

If you're a woman who, on the internet, has tried to defend widely accessible and affordable birth control, you probably know all the counterarguments by heart: "Why should my tax dollars make it easy for you to have sex?" "I don't want to pay for what you do in the bedroom". "Don't have sex if you can't afford to get pregnant".

Such comments conveniently gloss over the complexities of real life. But it's also easy to trot out similarly simplistic responses when arguing for birth control. Women and their allies are tired of having to defend something that seems basic, but the important thing to remember is that you're not trying to convince the troll. Instead you want to sway the social media audience watching your exchange. You're playing to the crowd.

"Most of these claims or moral arguments don’t take women’s interests very seriously."

That matters because informed public debate of birth control is critical right now. The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, requires insurers to provide federally-approved methods of contraception without a copay. Republicans, who plan to repeal Obamacare but haven't introduced a replacement yet, have indicated their bill won't have the same requirement. Millions of women could lose access to affordable contraception as a result.

Public polling shows that a majority of Americans support full birth control coverage, but Republicans aren't in that camp, and trolling comments on social media can amplify a much different narrative. Some critics will never be convinced, but if you choose to take on their talking points for all to see, here are six things to keep in mind:

1. It's not "free" birth control.

First, the government doesn't send bureaucrats out to roam the streets with bags of free pills and IUDs, tossing them to the nearest random woman. Instead, insurance companies and clinics work with doctors and pharmacies to provide them to patients at no additional cost.

People who receive copay-free contraception typically put their own money into the health care system by paying taxes and private-market premiums. Last year, people with employer-sponsored health insurance paid on average $5,277 toward their family coverage. Low-income Medicaid recipients may also pay premiums for their insurance.

It’s not FREE birth control. We’re asking for coverage by the health insurance we ALREADY pay for.

— Not My President (@missmayn) February 7, 2017

While eliminating the birth control copay saved women a lot of money, they continue to finance their own health care while also subsidizing services for fellow Americans.

2. Birth control is for planning pregnancy.

People who oppose copay-free contraception often associate it with promiscuity or irresponsible sexual behavior. The simple truth is that birth control helps women prevent and plan pregnancy. (It can also alleviate symptoms of medical conditions like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.) That's pretty thoughtful decision-making, and yet, critics get stuck on sex, a nearly universal expression of human desire and intimacy.

We tend to talk about BC being used in 2 ways: pregnancy prevention or a health issue. But preventing pregnancy is a health issue!

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) January 14, 2017

Arguing about why people are having sex, or under what circumstances, is ultimately a distraction from legitimate practical concerns about not getting pregnant. Demanding that people wait to have sex until they’re ready to conceive just isn’t realistic, says Lawrence Nelson, an associate professor of philosophy at Santa Clara University. That logic would make even the most committed married couples chaste.

"Most of these claims or moral arguments don’t take women’s interests very seriously," Nelson says.

3. Preventing unplanned pregnancy is good for women, families and taxpayers.

Under Obamacare, birth control is considered preventive health care, just like vaccinations, routine checkups and breast pumps for new mothers. That may seem odd but making it easy for women to prevent a medical condition — pregnancy in this case — saves the government and taxpayers a lot of money.

In 2010, the federal government spent $21 billion on births, abortions and miscarriages related to pregnancies that weren't planned. Studies suggest that unintended pregnancy leads to worse economic, health and academic outcomes among children. When women avoid getting pregnant at the wrong time, research indicates they're able to get more education and increase their earnings.

Not much of a fiscal conservative if you're unaware that every $1 spent on contraception saves the government $7+ on preg, delivery, & care. https://t.co/qJH5UxFxe9

— Chelsea Polis, PhD (@cbpolis) January 13, 2017

Adam Thomas, an associate teaching professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, says that increased spending on family-planning services like expanded access to contraception is a wise investment. His research shows that for every dollar the government spends, it saves nearly $6. Another study indicated that savings could be as high as $7.

"Unintended pregnancy is a major public health problem," says Thomas. "Expanding access can address that problem."

4. Birth control can be too expensive with a copay.

Some people love to insist that every woman can afford contraceptive copays if she tries hard enough. But before Obamacare birth control frequently cost women hundreds of dollars a year, depending on the method.

The most effective forms, like the IUD and hormonal implants, had an upfront cost of several hundred dollars. As a result, some low-income women, constantly making hard choices about which basic need to prioritize on a limited budget, used less effective but relatively cheap contraception (i.e. condoms).

"We already know who’s going to suffer the most if and when they roll this back."

Understanding that dynamic is key to tackling the problem of unplanned pregnancy, but there’s almost no point in arguing further with someone who refuses to believe birth control with a copay is out of reach for many women. If they're not willing to believe and trust women's personal experiences, they won't defer to you. And if that person starts mocking a hypothetical woman’s grocery store purchases or cell phone bill, for example, in order to attack her reproductive health choices, the conversation has lost its perspective — and arguably its sense of decency.

"We already know who’s going to suffer the most if and when they roll this back," says Alexis Cole, policy manager for the reproductive justice organization Urge. "It’s those that had the hardest time affording birth control before — young people, immigrants, women of color and low-income families."

5. Yes, some sexually active women don't use birth control. Talk about why.

One stereotype tends to throw the birth control debate into chaos, and it's the notion that many women gleefully have sex without protection, consequences be damned. The opposition to affordable birth control is then built around the idea that women can't be trusted with their own sexuality, so why give them a means to prevent pregnancy. In other words, they just shouldn't have sex.

While it is true that some sexually active women don't use contraception, they make up less than one-fifth of women at risk for unintended pregnancies. That's a small group, but instead of pretending they don't exist, people who support birth control access should talk about the bigger picture.

Studies suggest that disadvantaged women, in particular, are ambivalent about unwed motherhood. The possibility of an accidental pregnancy doesn't constrain their risky behavior because they don't feel like they have much to lose, says Thomas.

Ensuring they have access to sex education and affordable birth control is important, but it might actually be more effective to improve their economic prospects. To hold those women up as a rationale for denying everyone affordable birth control fundamentally misunderstands their predicament.

6. Beware the slippery slope of refusing to "pay" for someone else's medical intervention.

If someone refuses to subsidize no-copay birth control on principle, do others then have the right to withhold their taxpayer dollars from financing medical interventions they find objectionable? The natural birthing mom might insist that her premium doesn't go toward medically unnecessary cesarean sections. Or Scientologists could demand their money never pay for psychiatric services because it violates their belief system.

Nelson says people can't plead a special exemption for their objections to birth control. Everyone who pays into the private or public health care system might have very specific wishes for how that money is spent, but that's not the bargain we've made to ensure people are healthy and have access to preventive care and essential medical treatment.

"To say this is different strikes me as not taking women’s lives as they’re really lived seriously, and what it means to a woman to get pregnant when she doesn’t want to get pregnant," says Nelson.

What it comes down to, he adds, is making birth control accessible and affordable so women are tied to the future they create for themselves, not their fertility.

"For women to really be able to live in the world as equals to men," Nelson says, "they need control over their sexual reproductive lives."

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