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reflective-blog-ablearmonthughes · 1 year

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Dialogues-Bluecoat Liverpool

I would have to say this exhibition at the Bluecoat called Dialogues by Alevtina Kakhidze and Ellie Hoskins, was definitely my favourite out of all the ones I had visited due to its political and meaningful story behind it. It is also a portrayal of the current events happening between Ukraine and Russia so it’s extremely informative as well. This is a perfect example of how contemporary art can be used in such a beneficial way.

Both artists had used the gallery as their studio having created paintings, a sculpture and audio work. In one of the gallery rooms Alevtina haz displayed paintings along with an audio installation called here even red lights are polite with an alternative map of Liverpool and two speakers playing her voice. She talks about Scouse sensibilities whilst making witty observations about Liverpool and goes into detail about how she enjoys life around her however deeply misses Ukraine. As I sat there peacefully listening to this audio letting out a few giggles in response to her jokingly talking about Scouse sensibilities, I was also at the same time moved by her talking about how is she is always drawn back to Ukraine and miss’s it. I thought her adding in an audio of her speaking was a lovely addition to the exhibition as it felt rather like she was talking to me and telling me about Ukraine, making it feel very personal. I thought it was particularly touching hearing this from an actual Ukrainian with the knowledge of how difficult it must be for her with the current events occurring between Russia and Ukraine. I’ve always loved audio is being added into contemporary art exhibitions as you’re not only using your eyes but ears to experience the works, making you feel more involved and intimate. However, for this one in particular I found lovely as I could hear the genuine emotion in her voice and I admired how she utilises humour to comprehend a challenging reality that has affected her and her family. In the same room two walls had an assortment of paintings that focused on Ukraine. All the paintings in the entire exhibition were painted directly on the wall and one of these painting series featured an invasive type of plant Ukraine homes, and Alevtina interestingly combined botanical definitions with political commentary. The plant is being used as a metaphor for conflict and invasion and the intention of this is to allow us to consider how we feel about the military occupation of Ukraine. I found it really clever how she projected this topic through paintings of a plant and correlating this invasive type of plant with the invasion of Ukraine. This definitely sparked my interest. The plant was also meant to partially represent Russia invading and she mentioned on the wall how are other plants meant to survive with such an invasive plant near them so essentially in other words Ukraine is in a very vulnerable position. A tardigrade was also painted on the wall alongside the invasive plant. This is a micro organism that’s capable of withstanding all kinds of hostile environments and we are informed from the writing on the Wall that it can survive nuclear radiation 1000 times more than what is humanly possible! I felt like this conveyed a sense of heroic resilience against a nuclear war but at the same time I felt rather sad as humans will never be able to obtain this level of resilience. I felt these paintings on the wall or an excellent example of how contemporary art doesn’t need to be neat and pretty as his paintings were very simple put the story behind them is so moving and complex. What I also found interesting about these paintings what’s that they were not only interesting but I actually left the gallery with more knowledge about details of a nuclear war. I was actually learning, and I admired how the artist went about to do this.

When I first walked into the exhibition I actually started laughing as I was greeted with a giant tardigrade sculpture which humorously resembles a giant pink blob-like figure. This sculpture was created by Ellie Hoskins and is meant to be a giant tardigrade. Both artists incorporate a sense of humour in their work and this sculpture was a prime example of Ellie conveying this, in the hopes of maintaining optimism in such sinister times in regards to Ukraine and Russia. This unusual yet intriguing sculpture had a rather menacing face with the intent of being humorous, and featured four arms and four legs whilst being positioned on all fours. Safe to say it was certainly the most interesting introduction I’ve had to an exhibition before that’s for sure! Hoskins had a particular interest in the tardigrade due to what is referred to as a ‘tun state’, an extreme form of hibernation the tardigrade settles into. The tardigrade is supposed to be between life and death whilst in this state. She wanted to show this in her work, so she too drew along the walls on the other side of the exhibition space. She conveyed this state in individual images of the tardigrade going to different low emotions in the attempt of portraying fluctuations in human emotions. I found this enlightening and rather relatable as feeling low and sad and not worthy is an emotion that can get the better of all of us, so I actually felt rather overwhelmed with empathy. Even though the paintings were rather simple, the figures Hoskins drew still accurately conveyed a true sense of sadness desperation, almost waiting for light at the end of the tunnel. These paintings were also meant to show how Ukraine is experiencing lack of hope. Yet again another moving example of how such simple pieces of contemporary artwork can have such a deep and important story behind them. They didn’t need to be detailed or complex in order for me to understand exactly what story was being told. This whole exhibition was the perfect combination of humour, informative and eye-opening. Contemporary art can be quite basic whilst having the most amazing meaning behind it and this exhibition displayed exactly that.

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stitch1830 · 3 years

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I’m always down for some Toph Loving Hours lol. 😍 Here’s something I think about a lot: what do you think is the most misunderstood thing about Toph? 👀

Hey G! Thank you for the ask! I'm glad I'm not the only one that loves to chat about Toph. She's the best! :D Also, wow. What a question. Hit me in the feels haha.

I'm not the most eloquent in describing what I think is misunderstood about Toph, and it kind of depends on the situation on what I think people get wrong about Toph. But! I'll try my best to put it into actual sentences instead of just jumbles of odd phrases and exclamation points LOL.

So what I think almost everyone loves about Toph Beifong is that she's a powerful earthbender, a badass, and funny. She's got great lines throughout the show, and she's a pivotal part of the Gaang almost immediately with her talent.

And while it makes me so happy that people love Toph for this, they reduce her to just those three things, and often in the fandom, she's just cracking jokes or throwing rocks at people (which is like, in character, but there's more to explore).

What I love about Toph and what most people ignore is that she's extremely thoughtful and perceptive.

Despite the fact that she's never interacted with people outside her family or the Earth Rumble ring, Toph is able to fit into this ragtag group of teens and offer them advice throughout their journey. She makes deep connections with all the members of the Gaang and adjusts how she reacts to everyone's issues because she understands her friends and who they are as people. How she helped Aang and talked to him was different from how she interacted with Katara. Same with Sokka and Zuko!

Toph has meaningful conversations with tons of characters from the show, and the way those conversations are brought up aren't done by brute force or answered with only sarcastic quips, but she actually waits and listens to what the person has to say, and then responds accordingly based on how the person feels in that moment.

And the fact that she can do this at the age of 12 and without basically any human interaction prior to this is pretty amazing, especially when you consider the trauma and hurt she's probably feeling. She ignores (whether that's a good thing or a bad thing you decide haha) her own feelings to help her friends and gives them answers they need to hear in a positive manner. Toph does this without saying that much on the matter, either. It's not really like her to go on a monologue about what her friends did right or wrong, she just states the facts, reassures, and gives a loving punch to the shoulder. Simple and extremely effective.

So when it comes to her characterization in fics, it's really easy to fall into the pattern of just funny jokes and sarcasm and ignoring the fact that she's extremely smart and clever. I should know! I'm pretty sure I'm guilty of doing this in my stories because it's super easy to fall into banter with characters with her. But she has feelings, she is capable of saying and thinking about more than just blind jokes and rocks, and her thoughts are (likely) constantly moving and extremely perceptive.

That's what sometimes bothers me about reading her character in stories, that she isn't capable or given the chance to say or do more than make jokes. I think this would be fine if we dive deeper into inner thoughts, because I actually love the idea that Toph thinks more about she wants than saying it, instead going for the easy defense mechanism of sarcasm. Or just the idea that the reader makes that thought discovery with her or through other characters, if that makes sense. There's so much she's probably thinking about at once but would never say out loud, or if she does, it's because she's reached a boiling point where all she can do is confess to her close friends. A lot of times we go from snarky comment to serious talk after a few lines, and I suppose I prefer knowing what made her reach this point where she felt the need to tell her friends something that's been eating away at her. Because she wouldn't just cough up that information randomly, even to her friends. Facades and barriers are hard to break, especially when that person is stubborn. But sometimes, and with the right people, walls and barricades can slowly fall.

So, this was a long winded way of saying I think that Toph Beifong is extremely thoughtful and perceptive and smart, and I wish we saw more of that represented in the fandom. (I hope this made sense lmao). I know you mentioned what you thought people misunderstood about Toph, so I would love to hear your thoughts if you have a moment to spare!

Thanks again for the ask, and I hope you have a fantastic day! :D

......

Send me asks about Toph! It's Toph Beifong Loving Hours :)

#toph #toph beifong #atla #analyze that ish #kind of #headcanons #perhaps?#my asks #thanks for the ask!#sineaden #i think a couple of !!!!!!!!! or AHHHHHs probably could've made my point just as well #but instead y'all get a wall of text haha #i just think she's really neat that's all #the coolest character ever :D #and I actually feel like most atla characters are reduced to one to two traits #which kind of stinks because all the main characters have so many different layers to them

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amelia-pinches · 4 years

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a very long rant about Patricia Williamson

I also have something written about the overall thematic themes for each season and their significance that I was gonna post first, but I can’t finish it because my mind keeps going back to this.

Before I begin with all the negatives I have to say about what the writers did to her, I would like to state that she is my favorite character. Patricia was the first character that I truly resonated with as a kid, and I still do to this day. However, I can’t ignore how her character development was cut for plots sake, and how so much of her personal story is so incomplete. I feel like the writers used her as a leg to lean on whenever they needed drama, or a simple fix. Granted, she has more backstory than other characters like Fabian or Amber. Nonetheless, for Patricia, something about her personal story feels off to me. Maybe it's because I see myself so much in her that I have a personal bias for her closure, but I like to think I am so invested because I feel as if she had so much unused potential.

Starting off with S3, we see a new Patricia compared to the previous seasons. Her hair has changed, and her style seemingly has matured HOA has used a style change to symbolize a personality shift. In S2, Alfie acknowledged his style change representing a personality change, as he stated it was a new year for a new Alfie. Granted, he said he changed his style for Amber, but I think he changed it to feel better about himself. Getting Amber gave him the confidence he didn’t necessarily have before, and in S2 we see him standing up for himself more often than he did in S1, and he was more assertive in S2 compared to S1. In season 3, Joy said the reason for her style change was for the same reason: to find a new Joy. In fact, Joy’s style change was an important part of her arc in S3. She was letting go of her old self, and really letting go of the past she desperately tried to recreate in S2. She updated her style -”its Joy, but a new Joy”- and her style was a reflection of her personality shift; Joy, but matured.

Yet, with Patricia, we didn’t see that change that should have happened. If anything, her personality regressed to S1. I personally don’t think that Patricia at the end of S2 would have treated KT with such cruelty that she did; I definitely think that she would have not liked her and her jealousy could have caused some rude comments. It is S1 Patricia that would have had no issue treating KT how she did, but S2 Patricia would have held back. S1 Patricia was angry, and in S2, we see her less angry and more reserved. I like to think that after the events of S1 and throughout S2, she rethought her beliefs and morals. In S3, we should have seen her act on these new found morals, but instead she resorted back to that anger from S1. I remember watching S3 and waiting for that moment where everything clicks, yet that never happened. We never got an explanation to her any of her behavior in S3. We know she is extremely jealous, but why? Jealousy has its roots with deep seated issues. I don’t believe her jealousy is caused by not trusting Eddie, but rather something internal. I’m pretty sure that its been accepted due to her feeling inadequate in her family life which transfers to every other part in her life. Only problem is we never get any actual confirmation to this. We don’t get much confirmation about her character in the show actually. We know what we can assume, but it's still up for debate. Patricia’s character fluctuates so greatly that it's so hard to pinpoint who she is, or what she wants.

Throughout the show, Patricia is disconnected from everyone else around her. Even when she does connect, it's not really a full connection. The only time where I think where she had a true vulnerable connection with someone is Alfie in S1. Other than that, all of the other instants where she is supposedly connecting with someone, she is still holding back. There is always a wall between her and everyone else. While Eddie does break a majority of those walls, he still hasn’t broken all of them. They never have a point where they talk about all of their problems and resolve them. I would like to note that I am a huge Peddie fan, and it is my OTP, however it does a lot of issues that I can’t ignore. Communication is Peddie’s weakest area, but there was no shown effort in resolving it. They don’t sit down and try to listen to each other or just say what's wrong, despite how hard it is. They have a couple of cute one-liners, but that still doesn’t fix the root of the problem. Then with Joy, their relationship starts to slowly drift apart in S2. Joy is trying to overcompensate for the previous year, and Patricia doesn’t know how to comfort her in a way that was needed. Consequently, red flags were ignored, and their friendship began to dissolve. Thus in S3, it is so obvious that they are no longer best friends, and they are just friends. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that even before the start of the show, Patricia didn’t 100% connect with Joy. Yes, they had great chemistry (and probably were gay for each other on some level), but Patricia held back. After all, Joy didn’t know Eddie was Patricia’s first kiss, which tells me that Patricia never talked about personal things like relationships. Joy knows Patricia very well, but that wall is still there.

We also never really get to see Patricia shine, per se. Yes, she had some important moments, but those were all in support of the plot. Even with Eddie, her part felt more like aid to his character development than hers. I really wish we got to see a moment where she was the main focus, even if it was a small moment. The show has all this buildup for her own moment, and it never happens. With the moments that are supposed to be “hers”, they fall flat or are so lackluster that they are barely anything. All of her moments are for support of other characters. She mainly stays in the back, hidden unless she is needed. I think the best example of this is her relationship with Piper. It was resolved so quickly without going into detail about anything. (I’ll go into how the Piper-Patricia story-line was so undeserving and unimpressive later.) I feel like the drama with Piper was merely there so it could transition to Eddie’s secret being exposed. Basically, the parts where it should be about her and her character are misused in order to fulfill a plot line, rather than to fulfill herself.

I want to address the whole Patricia-Piper thing. I don’t know what to call it to be honest.. Aside from the fact how their relationship dynamic would have been great for Patricia’s character, their relationship dynamic should have been in the show simply because it would have been something people could have looked up or related to. I don’t have siblings, so sibling relationships confuse me to death. Still, they intrigue me tremendously. Youtuber, Ladyknightthebrave, talked about Hollywood's depiction of siblings in her video essay about Fleabag (I strongly recommend watching this if you have seen Fleabag because honestly it's so great). In it she describes how Hollywood loves brother-brother or brother-sister relationships, but sister-sister relationships are rarely shown in a light that is meaningful. I can’t help but agree with her, even though I don’t have siblings of my own. There are plenty of examples of brother-brother or brother-sister relationships in the media that are done so well and are so familiar to people, despite having a brother or not. I personally feel like that sister-sister relationships are done in a manner that's so simplified. With that said, Poppy-Jerome’s relationship goes into great detail; we can really see the dynamic and issues of their relationship. We see how they need each other as brother and sister and how they support each other. Yet, Patricia and Piper’s relationship was so downplayed. Their “big moment” where they try to connect with one another and try to understand each other was “‘I’m jealous of you because ___.’ ‘Well I’m jealous of you because___.’”, and that's it. It was abrupt and crude. There was no depth to their conversation, and if given the necessary depth, I truly think almost everyone could have related to their relationship. I just feel the audience, as well as Patricia, deserved that connection. Like, Patricia didn’t evolve from this. She remained the same as before. It didn’t affect her facade at all. After it was over, it was like it barely happened.

In the entirety of the show, we see Patricia through her facade. Sometimes, we can see cracks in it, but in the end, we never see her drop her act completely. When she seemingly does, it is practically nulled later on. Patricia’s words go against all of her actions constantly. Despite the fact that she has all the ideals of rebellion, unless you count Joy’s search as an act of rebellion, we never see her actually rebel for her own purpose. When she rebels or speaks out, it's for sibuna’s agenda, not her own. She told Piper to “dare to fail” even though we have never seen her do this. In fact, we have never seen her succeed either. We see what she wants us to see. HOA really should have had at least one point where her facade breaks, and the audience gets see what she is really thinking and what she really wants. It is not like they couldn’t fit it in because I could think of plenty of times where that moment would have fit in perfectly or even better than what was given.

I really don’t think the HOA writers and producers put much thought into the overall effect and really used her a way to make the plot continue in an easy way. I do understand why they did it - to a certain extent. The show is made for kids, and kids usually don’t really care about character development or arc. However, I think Patricia’s character could have been such a significant character for kids. Like I said, I relate to Patricia a lot, and I think others do as well. I also think if she had some sort of defining character arc, her character could have spoken to many people, young and old. There’s something so relatable about her, even with the lack of a defining arc. I feel like her character had so much potential, and HOA really missed a chance at creating a character so iconic. But in the end, there was no fluent character development. This leads her to feel like a more relatable side character at times viruses a main character.

#patricia williamson #rant #hoa #house of anubis #i don't know if this makes much sense #but i had to express it

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kumulonimbus · 5 years

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MXX Erron or MK 11 Erron?

Oh, whereto begin? If we’re talking about the cowboy’s physical appearance, I’m cooleither way, I think he looks hella fine in both MKX and MX 11. If we’re talkingabout his kit, I think I liked MKX better, the whole TNT toss thing seems kind of anuisance, especially for the AI… but since I’m a fanfic writer I think thisquestion is more related to Erron as a character so this might get a littlelonger than expected - if this wasn’t your idea, and you were only asking abouthis skins or abilities then sorry in advance for the long answer you’re aboutto read.

What Inoticed in MK 11 Erron is the same shallowness that first appeared in MKX –back then, Erron’s character was fresh and new, (having been introduced firstin the MKX comics) he had some distinctive qualities of his own but still, whenthe game was released, his characterization felt poor. It’s like in both games,his entire drive can be described with just one word: back in MKX, it was greedand now, in MK 11, it seems to be thrill. If you think it over, hisentire character description could have been Rain’s: violent, greedy and vain.

There’s along way from greed to thrill but, if you ask me, his new drivefeels just as shallow as his old one. How could he still be so greedy afterbeing a gun for hire for so long? Perhaps the cowboy is not really good withmoney but in all the years he’s lived, I’m sure he has learned a thing or twoabout savings. Now, how can he still be moved by thrill and thrill only afterso many years of doing basically the same things, over and over again? Hasn’the realized by now that, perhaps, the thrill he seeks can come from doingsomething other than being a gun for hire? How is it that he can still get thesame thrill for doing the same things he’s been doing for over 150 years now?Isn’t he tired? Hasn’t he matured?

His ending is the most reasonable one, though. He has spent so much time livingin the margins of time and then, he has spent so much time living inside timeitself that time doesn’t necessarily represent something meaningful to himanymore. This man doesn’t need a ticking clock anymore, he doesn’t have tomeasure time anymore – he’s seasoned, his longevity has provided him with a personalhourglass that has nothing to do with the notion of time that the Erron beforeShang Tsung understood. I believe that’s why he discards the hourglass sononchalantly – it’s more than a personal choice: not because of this thrillhe’s craving but because time, as we understand it, doesn’t mean a thing to himanymore. The time that others (Humans? Mortals? Conditions that are slowlyreceding for him) consider worthy or valuable doesn’t mean a single thing tohim, it represents no treasure, no bounty and, ultimately, no thrill. For agreedy man, the substance of time is no longer worth the effort since, for him,it doesn’t translate to a valuable currency anymore. And while others choose togo back and fix and save and rescue the ones they love from the intangiblegrasp of time; Black chooses not to. As the notion of time fades fromhis dictionary, the notion of every man for himself appears on the horizon:it’s been that way for a very long time now, it’s been so long he understandsthat looking into that hourglass and toying with history can resurrect aversion of himself he definitely wants to remain dead: the Erron Black beforeShang Tsung’s deal. The one that still had people to care about, the one whocared about time, the one that still had things and faces and places to lose.

Thatoriginal Erron Black has been discarded from the pages of history by the otherErron Black – the one we know.

When Erronchooses not to keep the hourglass, he chooses not to see the what if.What if he had never struck a deal with the sorcerer? What if he had stayed onthe other side of the portal? What if he had lived the original life thatshould have been his? What if he had aged? That man could have been a husband,a father, a grandfather… that man cannot resurface. That man is powerful enoughto make the cowboy question the meaning of his entire existence: what have youdone with all this extra time? Who have you become? What is keeping you alive?

Greed andthrill suddenly don’t look like much anymore, right?

In fact,some time ago someone asked me why I had chosen Arroya instead of Wickett whenI began rewriting Debris, even when NRS had chosen Wickett as canonicallycorrect. I explained back then that Arroya was, in fact, Wickett’s originalname; the name used during Erron’s youth, according to the timeframe of thestory. I didn’t quite understand back then why Erron himself would use the nameWickett instead of Arroya, I thought that maybe he used that name because thename Arroya hadn’t been used in a while and people could understand faster if he used the name Wickett instead but now I’m inclined to believe that maybe NRS’stown-and-name choice was more deliberate than I thought: it makes sense thatthey’d choose a town whose existence is divided in two, past and present, justlike Erron’s existence. If we think it over, Erron speaks about Wickett because he hasalready left Arroya behind. He can talk about this city (that doesn’t really represent him because it was never genuinely his) from a certain,comfortable distance and chooses not to dwell on the past because Arroya doesn’texist anymore, pretty much like the original Erron, the one before Shang Tsung.

Going backto the hourglass, and Erron’s ending, there’s something else on my mind: hediscards the hourglass, and the chance to rewrite history (his own history) ina rather despondent fashion. And while he chooses to do so, there’s something almostautomatic about that choice. It’s like, after being around for so long, he hasnow this extremely internalized notion of what he wants and what he doesn’twant. Going back and revisit his own past is first on the list of things hedoesn’t want. When he throws away the hourglass, he rejects the man that he wasbefore becoming almost eternal. He doesn’t need to dwell on this for too long,he doesn’t seem interested enough to even consider the chance. He’s alwayslooking forward now, he doesn’t stop anymore. And that perpetual motion resemblesthat of a clock, or an hourglass or time itself. When he throws away thehourglass, he throws away the simple human that existed long ago, in a town (Arroya)that has now become a different town. The parallelism is just exquisite.

When hethrows away the hourglass and lets time run freely onwards, he replicates themoment when Shang Tsung offered him unlimited youth – and he replicates it overand over again. He discards who he really is, the one he should have been, in order toembrace the existence of this other man, the one he has become.

I don’tknow if I prefer this rendition of Erron Black or his predecessor back in MKX. Bothversions seem equally vague, especially considering that the character couldhave been fleshed out and explored more thoroughly. The excessively exaggeratedtime gap that MKX introduced (what happened during those 150 years since Erronaccepted what Shang Tsung had to offer?) opened up the gates for a millionquestions and stories to take form but I still think MK 11 hasn’t exactlydelivered. Granted, we have now learned some things about the man, but it doesn’tseem to be enough in the long run. His story remains a mystery, for the mostpart, his personality still lacks depth. In fact, the most meaningful thingsabout him we’ve learned in MK 11 can be traced back to fanfiction. This gap of150 years allowed writers to explore the events of those fifteen decades whilefleshing out the character. The facts that he killed his own father, hated hismom, grew up around strong women, has a thing for the color red (especiallyred-haired women) and that basically he’s a man who has nothing to lose can allbe traced back to both Desperado and Debris in some way or another and while Ihaven’t talked about this to the wonderfully talented @hell-on-training-wheels (author of Desperado) I’mpositive she must have felt the same joy I felt when I heard those lines forthe first time. Of course, this could be a coincidence, but maybe they know the gap of time they’ve created has not beenquite explored yet and this is a way for them to allow writers to create andexplore on their own, providing the character with more than adjectives thatare nothing but vague conceptualizations, just like greed and thrill.

Last butnot least, there’s another thing I’ve been thinking of for quite some time now,and even though I’m merely going to introduce the idea (it could take an evenlonger post) I think it’s worth mentioning, especially considering Erron’sdecision to throw away the hourglass. This perpetual dichotomy we see in him - he’salways looking forward, he doesn’t seem to stop – pretty much like time itself –versus the existence and the presence of every one of the iconic elements that givelife to his character and pretty much mold this cowboy (he discards his past,perhaps he even despises the original man he was before the pact but at thesame time he clings to the morals, the mannerisms and even the fashion of hisown era) make me think that maybe he discards everything that can be consideredpersonal, but chooses to stay loyal to things that can be perceived aseverlasting. All this makes me think that, perhaps, Erron is afraid of dying. He’snot a coward, he’s not looking for redemption, he’s clearly not trying to makeamends with his own past and I wonder if that’s because the man from his pastwasn’t infinite. His youth wasn’t evergreen, his life wasn’t everlasting. And whilehe’s always looking for this thrill; and while he even tells Skarlet that he likesto live dangerously, I wonder if, maybe, he’s afraid to even consider his own finitude.

Thanks forthe ask!

#ask #mortal kombat #mkx #mk 11 #mortal kombat x #mortal kombat 11 #erron black #mk erron black #shang tsung #fanfiction #mortal kombat fanfiction #erron black fanfiction #mk headcanon #mk headcanons

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vroenis · 4 years

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The Internet Is Not Remarkable | Which Is Why It’s Remarkable

Oddly I’ve not ever felt the need to unplug. I don’t have a sense of separation between life happening away from the Wire and life happening on the Wire or the Wire not being life. It was never a distinct thing I ever had to decide was or wasn’t life or became life, either. Being born in the early 80′s, I guess means the Wire wasn’t always there as a salient presence, integrated into the fabric of life. Heyo I had a Nokia 3210. That doesn’t mean anything, by the way, it just places me on a timeline. Nostalgia sucks and is literally valueless. Let’s make art you can steal.

Anecdotally it means I saw the internet happen as a Thing. It’s less important than it sounds. Also the internet going from not being a Thing to being in our pockets. OK. But honestly it’s not very important. As in the transition isn’t important. There were a lot of people there when it happened and I think a lot of us if and when we’re honest will tell you now, in retrospect, it’s not a big deal. People older than I am and some my age and younger who have an ignorant and uninformed understanding of life and experience will go on about life being better or significantly more meaningful before or without the Wire but honestly they’re wrong. I’ll come out and say it’s flat better. Sure it makes misinformation easier as much as it makes all the good things better but wow media control and information mass-dissemination before the Wire? Are you kidding me?

On the topic of unplugging and digitally detoxing and I realise The 1975 just made a video all about it that was overly cute, yes, but still pretty fucken’ great. Let’s link it because honestly, it’s a wonderful snapshot of its time that they’re unquestionably aware will date immensely and that is a big part of the point. The 1975 hardly need any more promo but what can I say, I’ve no problem being part of an adoring fanbase and adore them we do. Let us adore.

youtube

That it’s so on-the-nose and that it’s a big part of the point is going to anger and frustrate people so much, moreso that exactly that reaction is a part of being caught-up in the inevitable participation in what the song and indeed, what Matty as an individual and what the band as a commercial and cultural entity are. The too cool thing to do is say you didn’t know anything about it, you didn’t watch it, you don’t care for it, you’re immune to it and continue to be ignorant of it - sure, I used to be cool like you. The thing is I both care less and more about being cool.

I love this song, I love what it’s doing and what it means. I love being a fan of and loving things. I love that other people love things I love. I still love loving things no-one knows about but I always love other people finding and loving my things, even if and when some of them behave badly because as an adult and an individual, I understand that participating in one cultural activity doesn’t mean I’m fully represented as a whole cultural entity.

Coming back to unplugging and that not being necessary for me, it connects to not being overwhelmed by it, which connects again, to the Wire not being separate and distinct from what I see as my experience of life. If the Wire is a mundane aspect of life then it’s unnecessary to disconnect from it. I engage with it as much as I engage with other things, that is to say I’m fascinated by, obsess over, and grow bored with things on it as much as all subjects, objects and activities in life equally. I don’t think this is unique to me at all, I suspect it’s quite common.

As it happens, I got into Instagram in a big way around the same time I got into contemporary board games. Both of these things I’ve almost wholly discarded. Almost, but not quite. I still maintain my Instagram account because I’ve made some valuable and enduring connections on it and as a platform I seem to have nurtured some semblance of an audience for a sprinkling of subjects and visual motifs. As for board games, I’m actually still quite interested in them but there’s so much about them as an industry and culture I actively dislike and have also grown bored of that I’ve consciously disengaged from them.

Facebook as a culture has always been weird to me, I can’t say I’ve ever understood it as a platform. Primarily it seemed to function as a space to connect with people you already know - OK. So then we’re encouraged to engage with one-another on... topics we may or may not already be engaging with either in our physical time together in which case, it’s redundant? Or we post articles we expect others to read which mostly they don’t unless aaaaaah - they’re short, reductive and in simple language and now the exercise is hazardous. The platform then actively co-opts strangers into discussions by facilitating cross-posting intra-sharing articles, which to be frank is about eyes on ads and ad-revenue, here we get to the ultimate objective of Facebook as a platform which I guess is why none of it makes any sense. Engagement at all costs. Of-course Facebook doesn’t care about racist groups and the real violence it precipitates, why on earth would that matter to them? The only thing that matters is capitalist gains. As long as it doesn’t directly cost them and as long as there are no economic consequences for them, they will proceed, and this is pervasive and transparent in the way all actions are facilitated and encouraged on the platform as a utility.

There’s more to discuss about Facebook but you’ve had those discussions before and they’re boring. Facebook is boring. The way people use Facebook is boring. Many of my peers ported to Instagram because as many of them said “It’s like Facebook but just pictures” and something along the lines of “It’s just pure” and there’s a high degree of truth in that. The sense of purity comes from the feeling of positivity in that thumbs becomes hearts - the likes an image gets. Engagement is fairly low-level. People express their endorsement of an image or do nothing at all. Occasionally there’s discussion, predominantly positive and for the most part I’d agree it’s wholesome. You can find toxicity easily enough and all of it is bad, but there are whole spaces on Instagram where you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a platform free of it altogether.

I guess it’s worth mention when I was peak Instagram, I was producing a super lo-fi but passionate board games podcast I recorded with R and we were also running several public and private board games groups around Melbourne. There was a lot of good about that sense of community and some of those people are still in our lives now. Platforms like Instagram are great for celebrating many of those aspects, I’d still say better than Facebook. Instagram is more approachable and simpler for just showing a thing and liking it - the engagement is direct and the commitment level (sign-up, visual clutter, privacy concerns, settings digest etc.) is minimal.

There are some Instagram Stories (read: Snapchat clones) there listed under This Account that briefly go thru the effective mothballing of my account. To have a different discussion here, I know how much and what kind of work it takes to build and maintain and audience on Instagram and it’s not interesting to me any more. It’s boring. I don’t mean to disrespect the audience I have there, all audiences are made up of people. Their behaviour on the platform is indicative of the cultural space that Instagram is, not their respective characters and that’s fine. That I’m bored is indicative of my feelings towards the platform and the culture it fosters, not how I feel about the people themselves. I still really like most of the people I’ve made connections with on Instagram and ping them DMs about beer, Lego and art once in a while. Instagram is about keeping it light - or lite is perhaps more appropriate - and I’m happy to keep my engagement level likewise.

That makes it extremely strange that I chose tumblr as a cultural space for my long-format writing, then, hey. Sure does. I did write about tumblr as a cultural space and honestly I still feel the same way about it - I absolutely love it here. Even tho I don’t engage in tumblr at all in the way the culture here utilises it, oddly I still feel right at home, fitting that one of the titles of the entry is Hiding In Plain Sight.

I don’t effectively have an audience for my writing here, tho, and that certainly is different. There’s a certain buzz missing from seeing a post light up with hearts, but then I think - a post gets a tally of hearts, of likes, so the people around me - my audience - likes an image and/or the accompanying text I’ve written tho that’s unlikely as the ratio of viewers to readers is likely to be extremely low. So if I think about how meaningful the text is to me versus the image, sometimes it’s split down the middle, but often the writing is far more important or at least there’s massive intent for gravitas to the image. Without the text, the image would be pleasant at best, and I realise that’s what people are engaging with and throwing a heart at, and I’m not interesting in doing that. I’m interesting in writing and expressing because I’m doing that anyway. I’m talking to and for myself regardless which I’m very happy to do, so if I’m going to do that, I’m happy to do it on the assumption of no audience and just express freely without restraint on subjects that interest me the most.

I either will or won’t develop that audience, but it will have to be with people who are dedicated enough to read and that might be a thing just yet, but who knows, there may be coming a time when people realise it’s not the Wire they need to unplug from. I’m not spinning up theories because it’s less complicated than that. I still operate a Facebook account. There’s a lot to hate about Facebook but of itself it’s mostly banal. Sure its UI and UX both are horrors that precipitate actual nightmares (unrelated but recent: none worse that iTunes MY GOD WHY WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY) but from a utility perspective it can be useful in the least. I have connections with a handful of people and communities which are useful to me for the moment so until they’re not, I’ll use the platform - but my weekly usage would be measured in minutes, I’m not sure I’d make cumulative hours in seven days.

When I moved away from Twitter and Instagram, I wanted a more considered approach to everything including images. I did once take long walks in Melbourne and photograph things that I found aesthetically interesting and under the circumstances that isn’t possible. I did stop doing that much earlier than Covid19 tho but that’s due to family circumstances alluded to in other posts. I still think if I ever take up photographing things with the same regularity, those images will end up here, simply because if I want to cut in with text, I can with better control. But also because it’s more meaningful if I don’t, and also as an artefact, a html page is something that invites a more static approach to the scrolling endless feeds of Instagram and Facebook. That design is absolutely intentional to promote short engagement and continued dismissal and that’s not something I want to encourage, with mine or anyone else’s art, thoughts, responses and engagement.

I don’t think I’ve addressed how The Internet Is Remarkable, but it’s pervasive in much of what I do on and with the Wire. I think accessibility is one of the most powerful things we do as humans. I’m sure there are folks who are sick of Margaret Mead’s healed femur anecdote or at least people quoting it. I fucking love that quote. I might not like people not fully comprehending it but I sure love what it truly represents. I think something people may be surprised to hear from me is that I will never say that I don’t like people. I really don’t like the quips and memes about hell being other people or I don’t mind going outside, it’s the other people ad infinitum. It’s easy to look at a large representation of behaviour and say “People are stupid” but it’s much more difficult to sit in a room of people you know and tell them they’re stupid. I might find it increasingly difficult to find other adults with which I can engage, on subjects I and they both can and enjoy engaging on, but I both have the willingness to and the optimism that it will and should happen. A part of that is the exercise - the practice of considered expression, of thinking, language and performance. Some of that for me is writing here, some of it is in the musical instruments I play, some of it is in the oral auditory words I speak.

Fucking around is good fun, we don’t always take life too seriously - sure, but we also don’t just fuck around. If that’s all you end up being able to do, there’s so much you end up not doing, not seeing and experiencing. Imagine the only form of expression you have is to tap a heart. That’s not to diminish the power of tapping that heart - mate, smash that shit - did you see that last picture of the beers we bought? DID YOU SEE MY BEERS? Those are some champion fucken’ beers, follow my Instagram.

Look you might need to unplug occasionally or partially or permanently or whatever. This isn’t a sermon, I’m not talking at you, I’m talking to you or rather I’m talking to myself. I’m telling you about myself because like everything I do and typically will always mention, it’s a provocation but also an invitation to talk about yourself. We share with one another to learn about other experiences and grow perspective on our own - you get all of that. That’s why the Wire is a good thing. Accessibility to broader experiences is a good thing.

This mass documentation we’re doing? Even if no-one reads it, even if only a tiny shred of it is shared... do you realise how immense that tiny shred is? Of a billion billion billion terabytes of unread, unseen, unknown data, the tiniest fraction that gets shared between humans is still huge were it to remain hidden and secret - all the wonderful art, the ugly horror, the juvenile silliness, the unending pain and sorrow, the saccharine sweetness, the lilting playfulness, the nonsensical vagary, the bare minimalism, the overbearing eloquence, everything subjective and argued and agreed and ignored.

The internet is an ordinary book of everything made of electricity and you carry a copy of it in your pocket.

I’ll echo similar sentiments to those in the feature on Jeremy Blake. You can be an arsehole, or you be awesome and kind and we can do amazing things together.

#internet #chrono #2020 #nostalgia #nostalgia is pointless #no really nostalgia has no value #steal this art #The 1975 #The 1975 The Birthday Party #NOACF #Facebook #Instagram

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buzzdixonwriter · 4 years

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Hoo Noo Shmoo?

Never let it be said that this blog is flagging in its enthusiasm for flogging horses so dead they’re found in the glue bin at Office Max.

To whit, the Scorsese vs MCU brouhaha.

Bottom line: Scorsese is right. As well made as MCU movies are, they ain’t cinema, they’re glorified commercials to sell MCU product.

Full disclosure: I should know, since I wrote for G.I. Joe, Transformers, and a host of other toy-based syndicated animation shows. I’m happy with the work I did, I can point proudly to specific episodes I wrote that aspire to be more than mere half-hour commercials…

…but they ain’t art.

They ain’t art, despite our aspirations to do the best job we could, because ultimately we creators were not allowed to create what we felt best for our stories, but what Hasbro deemed vital to their sales.

(The closest we got to art was when Hasbro cancelled The Inhumanoids toy line in mid-production of the TV series, and said we could finish our broadcast commitment however we saw fit so long as it didn’t result in an FCC complaint. As a result, we went nuts.)

My Hasbro / Sunbow experience remains a highpoint of my creative life, so I’m not denigrating the talent, skill, ability, spirit, and enthusiasm of those making MCU movies.

…but they ain’t art.

Now, those who love MCU movies think Scorsese’s comments are a slam against them.

Welllll…no, not directly.

But they do underscore how popularity -- especially of media designed to push product -- is a faulty measuring stick for artistic merit.

Case in point: The Shmoo.

Wuzza shmoo, you ask (and thus proving my point)?

Shmoos were extremely popular in the late 1940s. Part of the wonderfully wacky world cartoonist Al Capp created for his hit Li’l Abner comic strip, shmoos represented a parable on American consumerism, modern day geese laying not mere golden eggs but birthday cakes with candles a’blazin’.

As Capp described them:

They reproduce asexually and are incredibly prolific, multiplying faster than rabbits. They require no sustenance other than air.

Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself -- either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.

They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter -- no churning required. Their pelts make perfect boot leather or house timbers, depending on how thick one slices them.

They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.

Naturally gentle, they require minimal care and are ideal playmates for young children. The frolicking of shmoos is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.

Some of the more tasty varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch, however. Usually shmoo hunters, now a sport in some parts of the country, use a paper bag, flashlight, and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they may be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

Of course, in the original strip continuity, the shmoos were quickly eradicated, driven to extinction by food packagers who feared bankruptcy.

It was a sharp, biting message, and one that looked critically at both insatiable consumerism and capitalism’s claims of superiority.

Capp, of course, was too savvy a marketeer himself to eliminate the shmoos entirely, and so he provided for one breeding pair to survive…and for the shmoos to make repeated appearances for the rest of Li’l Abner’s run.

Shmoo mania ran rampant with shmoo dolls, shmoo clocks, shmoo games, shmoo candy, shmoo snacks, and shmoo apparel.

The money truck basically backed up to Capp’s front door and dumped its load on his porch. Shmoos proved insanely popular and it seemed the mania would never end…

…except it did.

To mangle metaphors, you can only take so many trips to the same well before your audience starts asking “What? Beans again?”

And then, in a fickle flash, it’s over.

I’d be hard pressed today to find anyone younger than the boomer cohort who ever heard of Al Capp or Li’l Abner unless their school or community theatre presented the Broadway musical adaptation of the strip (the show remains popular with amateur theatrical troupes such as high schools and colleges because the huge cast of Dogpatch citizens guarantees everybody who tries out for the show will land some part in it).

For all their popularity and merchandise and media impact -- songs on the radio, big spreads in weekly news magazines -- the shmoos left virtually no cultural footprint.

(Full disclosure yet again: I wrote for a Scooby-doo knock-off by Hanna-Barbera called The New Shmoo and it was a piece of crap, abandoning the whole consumerism point of the original shmoos and making them -- or just “it” in our case -- a pseudo-funny dog sidekick for a squad of mystery solving kids. And it wasn’t a piece of crap because we didn’t try our best, it was a piece of crap because the shmoo was treated as ubiquitous “product” under the misconception that of course everybody younger than Joe Barbera would recognize the name and love the character so deeply that they’d simultaneously develop amnesia about what made the original character so appealing.)

Product.

That’s what one of the most brilliant, most poignant, most spot-on commentaries on rampant consumerism and ruthless capitalism ironically reduced down to. Product.

There’s a line in Jurassic Park that resonates here: ”Life will find a way.”

Let’s paraphrase that to “Art will find a way” because like life, art is an expression of the creative urge.

Right now, by and large, it’s trapped in the giant all encompassing condom of corporate consumerism, providing fun and pleasure and excitement, but not really creating anything new, to be wadded up and thrown away when the suits are done screwing us.

But every now and then there’s a tiny pinprick in the sheath, and when that happens there’s the chance of something wonderful, something meaningful, something of lasting value emerging.

It is possible for art to emerge from a corporate context, but only if the corporate intent is to produce a work of art for its own purposes. Michelangelo carved David as a work for hire, the local doge commissioning the sculpture because he wanted to impress peers and peasants by donating the biggest statue ever made by the hottest artist of the era (and even then Michelangelo needed to resort to subterfuge to keep the doge from “improving” on his work with “suggestions” [read “commands”].)

The very first Rocky movie was a work of art because the producers focused on telling a simple, singular story about a loser who could only win by going the distance, not by defeating his opponent but by refusing to be beaten by him.

It’s a great cinematic moment that rings true and it’s going to last forever…unlike sequels Rocky II - V where Rocky fights supervillains like Mr. T and a robot (hey, that was the movie playing in my head when I watched Rocky IV and it was a helluva lot more entertaining than what I actually saw onscreen).

The suits castrated Rocky, reducing him from a unique universal cultural touchstone down to…well…product.

The MCU movies are product; rather, they are two-hour+ commercials to sell product in the form of videogames, action figures, T-shirts, and Underoos.

The real art occurred almost 60 years ago when Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko knocked out page after page as fast as they could, drawing deep from the wellsprings of their own interests, experiences, and passions.

(“What about Stan?” I hear you ask. Look, we all love Stan, but truth be told his great contribution to the MCU came in his service as drum major for the Merry Marvel marching Society. God bless him for firing up the fan base’s enthusiasm for the Marvel bullpen’s work, but compare what his artists did before and after their collaboration with him to what he did before and after his editorial tenure at Marvel and it’s clear upon whose shoulders the muses rested.)

As much fun as MCU movies are (I’ve seen about 1/3 of ‘em and enjoyed most of what I saw), I also recognize in them the harm they do.

They are promoted heavily to sell product to raise the fortunes of one of the biggest corporations on the planet, a corporation that holds control over five of the largest, most popular entertainment brands on the market.

To protect their cash cows, Disney chokes potential rivals in their cribs.

Think there’s going to be another Alien or Predator movie now that Disney owns them and Star Wars? Why create rivals to a mega-successful property you already own? (I will be genuinely surprised if we see another Guardians Of The Galaxy movie in light of the faltering popularity of Star Wars in Disney’s eyes; they’re going to want to shore up their billion dollar investment rather than call it a day and let some upstart -- even an upstart they own 100% -- rob them of revenue.)

Disney’s battle plan to choke out all potential rivals leaves no room in the DEU (Disney Expanded Universe) for independent minded creators.

They want competent hired pens who can churn out the product they desire in order to bolster sales of other products derived from those.

(Even more full disclosure: I wrote for Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers as well as some Aladdin and Scrooge McDuck comic book stories.)

Disney’s MCU, for all its expertly executed whiz-bang, is a bloated, soulless zombie, a giant gaudy inflated parade balloon blocking the vision of others.

There’s a scene in the movie The Founder -- a genuine cinematic work of art that comments ironically on the selling of a product -- that applies here.

Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) relentlessly browbeats the McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) into letting him replace their real milkshakes with what will come to be known as the McShake, an ersatz product that at best reminds one of what a real milkshake should taste like.

The McDonald Brothers are horrified. Not only does it not taste like a real milkshake, but it goes against the very grain of what they desire as restauranteurs: To provide quality food quickly for their customers, trading value for value.

Kroc will have none of this. To him the customers are simply one more obstacle between him and their money.

He doesn’t see them as the source of his revenue, but as impediments to same.

What benefits them, what nurtures their diets, what gives them pleasure, what trades value for value is completely unimportant to him.

They exist only to make him rich and powerful.

By the end of the film, Kroc has effectively declared war on his own partners, his own employees, his own customers. He recognizes he is not in the business his customers and employees and partners think he’s in (i.e., fast food) but rather in the real estate business, buying land that McDonald’s franchises must lease from him in order to operate.

By the end, he’s not concerned with how well his customers eat, or how well his employees are treated, or how financially secure his franchise managers feel.

By the end, all he wants is the money, and he doesn’t care how his franchises make it so long as they pass it along to him.

As a result, McDonald’s contributes heavily to America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics, advising their employees to take second jobs so they can afford to continue working for them at substandard wages.

Disney’s MCU is a super-sized Happy Meal™ that’s ruining the cultural health of its consumers.

#Marvel #Disn #Jack Kirby #Stan Lee #Steve Ditko #Star Wars #MCU #Rocky #Martin Scorsese #media #movies #superheroes

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pearlinthemaking · 4 years

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01 The Moment of Lift

The Moment of Lift

How Empowering Women Changes the World

Introduction

I recently came across the phrase “moment of lift” in a book by Mark Nepo, one of my favorite spiritual writers. He uses the words to capture a moment of grace. Something was “lifted like a scarf on the wind,” he writes, and his grief went silent and he felt whole. (2)

Mark’s image of lift is filled with wonder. And wonder has two meanings for me. It can mean awe, and it can mean curiosity. I have loads of awe - but just as much curiosity. I want to know how lift happens!

How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings — and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. And how can we create a moment of lift in human hearts so that we all want to lift up women? Because sometimes all that’s needed to lift women up is to stop pulling them down. (2-3)

They have shown me the difference it makes when women are lifted up, and I want everyone to see it They have shown me what people can do to make an impact, and I want everyone to know it. …No one should be left out. Everyone should be brought in. OUr call is lift women up — and when we come together in this cause, we are the lift. (4)

The Lift of a great idea

Frankly, I think it is great if women want to stay home. But it should be a choice, not something we do because we think we have no choice. I don’t regret my decision. I would make it again. At the time, though, i just assumed that is what women do. (7)

22 years later, I am an ardent feminist. To me, it is very simple. Being a feminist means that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back. (7)

And my own mother had a powerful influence on my choice, though she might not have known it. She always said to me as I was growing up. “If you don’t see your own agenda, somebody esle will.” If I didn’t fill my schedule with things I felt were important, other people would fill my schedule with things they felt were important. (21)

I was seeing women lifting each other up. And I saw that it all begins when women start talking to each other. (25)

“What do you know now in a deeper way than you know before?” I love this question because it honors how we learn and grow. Wisdom is not about accumulating more facts; it is about understanding big truths in a deeper way. Year by year, with the support and insight of freidns and partners and people who have gone before me, I see more clearly that the primary causes of poverty and illness are the culture, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do — and think they can do for themselves and their children. (27)

We can look at each of these issues as a wall or a door. I think I already know which way we see it. In the hearts and minds of empowered women today, “every wall is a door.” (28)

Empowering Mothers

Often in life, it is the older males who get credit for the work that young people and women do. It isn’t right, but that is how it works.” (27)

You don’t get behavior change unless a new practice is transparent, works well, and gets people talking — and Ruchi’s revival of this one-day-old-baby had everybody talking. (42)

“Their cup is not empty: you can’t just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup.” If you don’t understand the meaning and beliefs behind a community’s practice, you won’t represent your idea in the context of their values and concerns, and people won’t hear you. (43)

But the way you deliver the science is just as important as the science itself. (44)

This underscores the value of Hans Rosling’s stories about extreme poverty: When you begin to understand the daily lives of the poor, it does more than give you the desire to help it; it can often show you how. (49)

It is unglamorous from a technological standpoint, but deeply satisfying from a human viewpoint — innovation driven by the feeling that science should serve everyone. No one should be excluded. (49)

All of us have seen something like this. And we had a role in it. Either we were bullies, or we were victims, or we saw bullying and didn’t stop it. … As I grew up, I thought abuse like that would happen less and less. But I was wrong. Adults try to create outsiders, too. In fact, we get better at it. And most of us fall into one of the same three groups : the people who try to create outsiders, the people who were made to feel like outsiders, and the people who stand by and don’t stop it. Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It is up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it is on the basis of race. (51)

Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick an dpoor people on the margins of the society. We tend to push out the people who have the qualities we are most afraid we will find in ourselves — and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominating groups to push different racial and religious group s to the margins. (52)

And we are often not honest about what is happening. If we are one the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I am not in that situation because I am different.” But that is just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it is too humbling. It suggest that maybe success and failures aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I am no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it is about merit or tradition when it is really just protecting our privilege and pride. (52)

We have to wake up to the ways we exclude. We have to open our arms and heats to the people we have pushed to the margins. It is not enough to help outsider fights their way in - the real triumph will come when we no longer push anyone out. (53)

Lifting Their Eyes

Education is a vital step on the path to empowerment for women — a path that starts with good health, nutrition, and family an organization, ….and lead.

The Moment of Lift

Agents of Development

Some of the best ideas in development are simple ideas - after you have heard them. But it takes a visionary to dream them up, and make them work. (103)

Kakenya had the courage to defy tradition, but she also had the wisdom to make it work in her favor. (107)

I don’t have any idea how people find the guts to speak up against waves of tradition, but when they do, they always end up with followers who have the same conviction but not quite the same courage. That is how leaders are born. They say what others want to say, and the others then join them. That’s how a young woman can change not only her life, but her culture. (108)

That is the secret of an empowering education ; A girl learns she is not who she’s been told she is. She is the equal of anyone, and she has rights she needs to assert and defend. This is how the great movements of social change get traction : when outsiders reject the low self-image society has imposed on them and begin to author a self-image of their own. (108)

Defending yourself is not just an abstract action. (111)

A low elf-image and oppressive social customs are inner and outer versions of the same force. But the link between the two gives outsiders the key to change. If a girl can lift up her view of herself, she can start to change the culture that keeps her down. But this is n’t something most girls can do on their own. They need support. The first defense against a culture that hates you is a person who loves you. (112)

Love is the most powerful and underused force for change in the world. You don’t hear about in policy discussions or political debates. ..all did hard headed, tough-minded work for social justice and they all put the emphasis on love. (113)

It is a mark of our culture’s uneasiness with love that political candidates never talk about it as a qualification for holding public office. In my view, love is one of the highest qualifications one can have. “Only love can safely handle power.” For me, love is the effort to help others flourish — and it often begins with lifting up a person’s self-image.

If I had not been surrounded by people who lifted me up I might have taken her advice and sold myself short. Instead I stormed out of that talk furious with her and twice as determined to reach my goals. That was not my power ; it was the power of people who had shown me my gifts and wanted to me to flourish. That is why I am so passionate about teachers who can embrace girls and lift them up — they change the course of their students’ lives.

A girl who is given love and support can start to break the self-image that keeps her down. As she gains self-confidence, she sees she can learn. As she learns, she sees her own gifts. As she develops her gifts, she sees her own power; she can defend her own rights. That is what happens when you offer girls love, not hate. You lift up their gaze. They gain their voice. (113)

The Silent Inequality

Every family has its own way of coping, and all families can use help managing the tasks of raising kids and running the home. (126)

The way the researchers talked about their work was very moving to me. To care is human — and caring for children or aging parents should be an expression of love. It can offer us some of the most meaningful moments of our lives. But if it is assumed that women will do all these tasks, then caring that should be joyful becomes a burden, and work that should be shared becomes isolating. (127)

Balancing Unpaid Work: balancing Relationships

Breaking that hierarchy actually leads to men’s empowerment, because it allows to discover the power of partnership them develop their caring side. (130-131)

This dynamic is what allows some partners to ignore things that they actually do care about, because they know their partner will do the work for both of them. But leaving to your partner something that you also care about leads to separation. When one partner leaves the care of the children to the other, or one partner leaves the role of earning income to the other, they are cutting themselves off from their children. Perhaps the biggest cost is that the two are cutting themselves from each other. (131)

There is a much better approach. Instead of one partner ignoring a need and the other emphasizing it, we share it. We don’t insist that the time spent on the work is mathematically equal, but we acknowledge what the family needs, and we make plans to take care of it. It is not longer “this is my job, that is yours.” It becomes ours. (131)

You develop a partnership that is whole and complementary with a natural hierarchy based on

talent and experience, where each other can learn, lead and follow, and two can become one. ..”It is the heat and friction of two people’s differences that propel them to explore new ways of being.” (132)

The gender imbalance in unpaid work is such a compelling subject form e in part because it is a common burden that binds many women together, but also because the causes of the imbalance run so deep that you cannot solve them with a technical fix. You have to renegotiate the relationship. To me, no question is more important than this one: Does your primary relationship have love and respect and reciprocity and a sense of teamwork and belonging and mutual growth? I believe all of us ask ourselves this question in one way or another — because I think it is one of the greatest longings of our life. (132)

(Working in separate worlds) might have been equal, but it wounldn’t have been an equal partnership. It would have been more like a parallel play: I won’t mess with your stuff and you don’t mess with mine. This was another decision that supported our move towards an equal partnership. (136)

The moral of the story to me was that a man can call another man and share advice about how to improve their marriages — that men can play a role as guardians and supporters of the union. (137)

When two people challenge each other and learn from each other, it has an equalizing effect. (139)

Early in our work together, we realized that there was an underlying ethos to our philanthropy: the premise that all lives have equal value. It animates everything. And one of the things that has made this principle real to me — not as an abstract idea but as an honest mark of the way we see the world — has been seeing how the suffering of others can bring Bill to tears. (140)

Great wealth can be very confusing. It can inflate and distort your sense of self — especially if you believe that money measures merit. Yet Bill is one of the most grounded people I know, and it comes from a clear perspective about how he came to be where he is. (140)

Bill has a sense of humility. Not all the time — I can give you counterexamples. But this is the path of his growth. When he reflects on life and connects with his deepest self, he knows he is not special : he knows his circumstances were special — and a man who can see through hierarchy, honor equality and express his tender heart. (141)

You can’t dedicate your life to the principle that all lives have equal value if you think you are better than others. Bill, at his core, doesn’t think that way at all, and that is one of the qualities I love most in him. (141)

We try to hare roles, especially the disagreeable ones. We try to make sure we don’t make one person do the dirty work. One of the defining features of hierarchy is that you take the powerful and exciting jobs for yourself and impose the crummy tasks on others. That’s a purpose of hierarchy.

I take it personally

First I believe that women gain equality not couple by couple but by changing the culture, and we can change the culture by sharing our stories. That is why I’m sharing mine. (148)

“To be known without being loved is terrifying. To be loved without being known has no power to change us. But to be deeply known and deeply loved transforms us.” ..Trying to help others while keeping them at a safe distance cannot truly help them or heal us. We have to open up to others. We have to give up the need to be separate and superior. Then we can help. Working on ourselves while working for others is the inner and outer work — where the effort to change the world and the effort to change ourselves come together. (149)

When a culture of dominance is broken, it activates power in all of us.So the goal for me is not the rise of women and the fall of man. It is the rise of both women and men from a struggle for dominance to a state of partnership. (149)

Change comes when men see the benefits of women’s power — not just what women can do that men cannot, but a quality of relationship that comes in an equal partnership that cannot come in a hierarchical relationship : a sense of bonding, of belonging, of community, solidarity and wholeness born of a promise that I will help you when your burdens are high, and you will help me when your burdens are low. These forces create the most rewarding feelings in life — and experience of love and union that is not possible or available to partners who struggle alone. It can turn a hierarchical relationship into an equal one, and it comes from women asserting themselves. (150)

Seeing Gender Bias

Empowerment never confines itself to categories. (191)

The way the women carried themselves. … It’s not easdy to unlearn a lifetime of being meek. The posture of these women was different. They stood tall. They spoke up. They were not afraid to ask questions, to tell me what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted. They were activists. They had that look. They had been lifted up (191)

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schraubd · 5 years

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"Navigating Intersectional Landscapes" for Jews: Half Bad, Half Good, Sadly Incoherent

The Reut Group, in partnership with the JCPA, has written a new set of guidelines for Jewish community professionals seeking to deal with the "challenge of intersectionality" to Jewish engagement on Israel. It's a fascinating piece, in that I disagree with much of the diagnosis but agree almost entirely with the prescriptions. Normally one sees the opposite -- agreeing with the problem but disagreeing on how to solve it. Here, I think the guidelines do an exceedingly poor job in identifying the issues but -- miraculously -- ends up urging action-items that are very close to what I'd propose anyway. It creates a whiplash document which is myopic in the first half and insightful in the second half. It's a 43-page document that should be started at page 23. Start with the positive. The guidelines decisively reject uncompromising approaches that effectively write-off huge swaths of the Israel-critical Jewish community unless they agree to become Bibi-cheerleaders. It says that communal "redlines" and definitions of Israel "delegitimization" should be drawn narrowly and with an eye toward a big tent, and suggests that this tent should include even harsh Israel critics (the "wedge" point, the guidelines suggest, should be peeling off "harsh critics" from outright radical anti-Zionists -- the former kosher, the latter not). It notes that many Jewish youth express feelings of "betrayal" when their only pre-collegiate education on Israel consists of simplistic cheerleader narratives, and thus insists we'll need to prepare them for tough conversations. It speaks out against the propensity of some Jewish writers and organizations to effectively carpet bomb the slightest whisper of "anti-Israel" activity from progressive writers and political figures, especially from racial minorities, and says that we should be more willing to unite around issues of common concern even when there are sharp disagreements over Israel. Critics of Israel should be encouraged to structure their concerns in ways that manifest continued engagement (e.g., BLM-sympathizers should aid Ethiopian Jews protesting police violence; immigration activists should work on behalf of Eritrean asylum-seekers, all in ways that try to shore up and bolster humanitarian and liberal institutions currently operating in Israel). Overall, the document preaches a message of engagement and putting in the work, and understands that overreaction can be as damaging as the initial blow. Finally, while framed around the "challenge of intersectionality", the article doesn't present intersectionality as solely an enemy to be destroyed but rather a resource to be harnessed -- you beat bad intersectionality with better intersectionality (though I might suggest here that part of that project is starting to wean ourselves off the reflexive treatment of intersectionality as a "challenge"). All of these are things that I like. But it's weirdly difficult to see how they got to this fabulous destination given the route that they took in identifying the problems they purport to tackle. The first, diagnostic half of the document almost entirely fails to recognize the fact that Jewish anxiety around Israel stems from tensions emanating from two sides, not one. Yes, there's the problem of people on the far-left demanding Jews "check their Zionism at the door", or submit to humiliating ideological litmus tests before being acknowledged as one of the good Jews. But there's the equal problem of people in the pro-Israel community demanding Jews "check their progressivism at the door", insisting that they are traitors to the Jewish people if they insist on applying progressive values to issues surrounding Israel or even, sometimes, just for being progressives generally. Both sides of this are troublesome, and both sides contribute to the problem. I suppose the authors might argue that the goal of this document is simply to focus on the "intersectional" aspect of the challenge, and grappling with the challenge of rigid and uncompromising pro-Israel fanaticism is best given its own treatment. One problem with this apologia is that I've never seen a document of this sort written by a body like the JCPA which takes as its "challenge" the way rigid and uncompromising pro-Israel fanaticism prompts American Jewish disengagement. You can't argue for division of labor if you never actually assign anyone to cover the other half of the work. Moreover, the very topography of the document seems to make this problem incognizable: its taxonomy of "American Jewish tribes" re: Israel -- "aligners", "moderate critics", "harsh critics", and "radicals" -- is presented as a continuum from most safe to most threatening. "Aligners" -- those who "consider Israel to be an integral part of their Jewish identity and generally support the State of Israel" -- lock down one side of the spectrum and are presented as wholly unproblematic and uncomplicated figures, as against the "critics" who, though not portrayed as "enemies", are viewed as at-risk. Yet pretty much any of us in the "moderate" or "harsh critic" camp have a lot of experience with an unnamed and unmarked fifth tribe -- the "zealots". These are the people who radically identify not just with "Israel" but with its most extreme, irredentist settler right, and who actively seek to sabotage or demolish any Israel discourse -- in the Jewish community or outside -- that is viewed as a threat to the Greater Israel project. It is a problem, and an increasingly unforgivable problem, that we refuse to call this group out or treat it as if it isn't a meaningful player. Is it representative of the majority of "pro-Israel" Jews? No. Is it at least as prominent, toxic, and destructive as the anti-Zionist "radicals" that are the "bad guy" focus of documents like this? Yes. For many Jews, then, the forces which end up yielding disengagement from Israel aren't (just) looming pressures from the far-left, which they may be closer to or more distant from as they traverse from "aligner" to "moderate critic" to "harsh critic". Rather, it's bidirectional -- the left-radicals tug us from one side and the zealots from the other, and (pinching towards the center of the continuum, if not necessarily the political spectrum) we see ambivalence or apathy from the "aligners" or the "harsh critics" who seem unwilling to challenge the bad behavior of their neighboring extremists. The result is a feeling of being "pulled apart" on the issue of Israel -- "engaging" with Israel means choosing between two equally unappealing forms of zealotry. This was a major theme of the "safe and on the sidelines" study on Jewish student disengagement that came out of Stanford a few years ago: simply put, students felt like Jewish life on campus meant enlisting in a war. Go to the various social justice groups, and they were asked to join a war on Israel. Go to Hillel, and they're called to join a war for Israel. But these students didn't come to college to fight a war, they came take some classes, have some beers, make some friends, and get their psychology degree. They aren't averse to Israel being part of their Jewish lives per se, but they are averse to becoming ideological soldiers in a brutal trench war, and they felt that both "sides" of the fight refused to leave room for anything but fanaticism. So they disengage. If you want to write about why some Jews are disengaging from Israel, approximately half the story hence has to target overly zealous and uncompromising efforts by putative "Israel supporters" to impose a "my way or the highway" approach that should be and will be flatly unacceptable to huge swaths of contemporary American Jews. The prescription section gestures at this by insisting that "red lines" and "Israel delegitimization" be drawn narrowly. But the failure to explicitly grapple with the far side of the problem comes at cost -- the document is notably vague in actually laying out what is and isn't a legitimate operating case of "delegitimization", and offers virtually no guidance as to how to respond to those forces in the Jewish community which have recklessly and harmfully expanded the in a bid to exclude giant swaths of the Jewish community (consider the mostly successful efforts to bar J Street from the "communal circle" at the institutional level). Likewise, the document commits one of my cardinal sins in that it does not even acknowledge, much less explore, the possibility that there ought to be right-ward "redlines" -- positions associated with the "pro-Israel" right that, if taken, preclude them from being considered members-in-good-standing of the Jewish communal world. It's not an accident that our redlines are only applied to JVP and not ZOA. If you only read the diagnostic part of document, you'd come away with the impression that the only reason Jews (and non-Jews) are drifting from Israel engagement is because of unreasonable haranguing from an ideological left that thinks Israel can do no right. The idea that the right side of the political spectrum bears any responsibility for the problem -- including the erosion of Israel as a "bipartisan" issue -- is scarcely even gestured at. The simple reality that a deeply conservative government imposing deeply conservative policies and which has deeply entrenched itself as the dominant force in Israeli politics is going to eventually become deeply unpopular with progressives is not even acknowledged. At some point, asking progressives "why don't you like Israel?" is like asking them "why don't you like Mississippi?" It's not some mysterious-cum-mystical antagonism -- it's because they're both conservative places enacting conservative policies which progressives aren't going to like! There's no strategy for arresting that trend that doesn't entail, at least in part, trying to insist on more progressive policies in those locales. The astounding lack of attention to the way right-wing forces have their share of responsibility for undermining American Jewish engagement with Israel is only underlined by perhaps its only exception. Buried in footnote 21 (in approximately 3 point font) we see this doozy: "Israel’s lack of a credible and persistent commitment to the two state-solution has become a significant stumbling block in Israel’s relations with World Jewry. Any form of annexation in the West Bank would dramatically and potentially irreversibly accelerate that trend." Yeah, no kidding! Talk about hiding elephants in mouseholes! But taking that seriously means that, if your goal is reversing the disengagement of world Jewry from Israel, you need in part to tackle "Israel's lack of a credible and persistent commitment to the two-state solution" -- and that includes taking on the members of the pro-Israel community who outright oppose a two-state solution and are seeking to affirmatively undermine it at every turn. Yet even as one-stateism has become Republican Party dogma, it gets virtually no attention in favor of an entire section on the "Corbynization" of progressive politics -- a serious problem in the UK, but utterly marginal as a feature of American politics. This sort of abject failure of perspective has long since passed the point of indefensibility. In essence, prescriptively the document seems to tacitly acknowledge that there are a host of bad practices, most of which generate from overzealous efforts to defend a "pro-Israel" position, which end up backfiring and driving Jews and non-Jews away from even a complicated respect for Israel as a state. But it refuses to actually come out and name the problem in the diagnostic section, instead presenting the challenges as emanating almost univocally from the intersectional left. The result is a document that is functionally incoherent -- and I fear that the generally salutary actions it recommends will end up being corrupted and perverted because of an inability to honestly reckon with the full scope of the problem. At the meta-level, one of the biggest challenges facing Jewish communal cohesion, unity, and engagement -- on Israel or anything else -- is our ongoing practice of giving destructive right-wing forces free passes. We dedicate pages upon pages of agonizing over every fringe-left march or protest or chant, but when the time comes to apply that same discerning analysis to our right-ward colleagues, we clam up. As many good ideas are contained in the prescriptive sections of this guideline, for me it stands out as embodying that trend, and it's one we just can't tolerate anymore. This doesn't mean suddenly letting bad behavior on the left go unchallenged. But it does mean we need to start developing principles and guidelines that clearly and unambiguously dictate what sort of behavior from the Jewish right crosses the line, just as we already do with the Jewish left. And when the Jewish right does go past its red lines, we need to simply get over our sniveling fear of calling it out by name. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2G3ZM6Q

#Israel #Jews

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kingofthewilderwest · 7 years

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Finally watching season 4, is it just me or is it suddenly obvious that they’re being very specific about Gendering Pidge as a girl? It definitely wasn’t this obvious in previous seasons. (I’m only on episode 3)

First, before I start this conversation: for people who may not know or may not be as familiar with me personally, I am non-binary myself. For about the first twenty-two or so years of my life I was referred to exclusively by “she/her/hers” pronouns. So the whole concept of Pidge and her headcanoned non-binariness is something that touches pretty close to my personal life experiences. I just want to make this clear so that people don’t try to dismiss me as trying to wash away non-binary representation… I’m not, I relate hugely to Pidge, I want non-binary characters like none other in fiction, and I’m just saying what I think the writers have intended with Pidge’s character.

So the writers have always typed Pidge as a woman. At least, that’s how she canonically considers herself gender-wise now in the story. I think the reason why it feels that Pidge is suddenly feeling more gender-typed as female is because the moments in which we see her doing more societally female-coded things is in her past when she’s with her family. We didn’t get many family moments in S1-3. The fact we have more flashback scenes with her in S4, and the fact that she reunites with her brother in S4, means we’re going to get more of these female-coded incidences more frequently shown on screen.

Since the first season we’ve seen Pidge demonstrate some things that are coded in our society as female gender expression. One of the prime ways in which she shows female-coded behavior is through fashion. Consider the photograph she carries with her. While Matt is in his uniform, Pidge is dressed with long hair, a headband, and an adorable pink and white dress. Just a year ago, she was voluntarily wearing a pretty darned cute outfit that is societally associated with girls and women.

The flashbacks in S1E5 “Tears of the Balmera” do just show Pidge in her standard green shirt (how many of us don’t own simple unisex shirts though?). It’s to note she wears her hair in a side-ponytail, which isn’t exactly a societally prototypical male fashion. She’s also upset to cut her hair, muscles in her face notably tightening before she closes the scissors the first time. Pidge is attached to her long, female-coded hair.

But overall we don’t tend to see Pidge as markedly gender-coded female throughout the first three seasons because she’s not in the environment where the codes she relates to get brought up. Pidge starts VLD disguising as male to avoid suspicion when she enrolls in the Garrison. She wears clothes that she already owns, but intentionally picks the ones that are most gender-neutral and least revealing to her identity. And once we get on the Castle Ship, Pidge isn’t going to wear a lot of cute, girlie clothes when she’s only got that one pair of clothes she was wearing at the Garrison… and some awesome Paladin armor.

Because while it seems that Pidge enjoys wearing some feminine fashions from time-to-time, it’s not like she’s ever been a markedly “girly” personality in most of her interests, be it either here or in the flashbacks. Most of her personal passions are not societally coded as feminine… technology, video games, mathematics. So she doesn’t ring out as very gendery-wendery-feminine to us - we grow up in a societal culture where we might expect a female character to display a few more female coded things. So she gets translated to audiences as feeling more ambiguous…

…even though she herself makes it explicitly clear to the other Paladins: “I’m a girl.” Those are the words she uses. She thinks of herself as female, she tells the Paladins that, and it’s a pressing matter to her - she feels uncomfortable prior to the reveal, uncomfortable that she’s been disguising herself and being dishonest to them. She’s uncomfortable enough that even a common English figure of speech “man up” bothers her when it’s applied to her. Because it’s not who she is!

Pidge in the Castle of Lions just doesn’t have the proper context whereby we see the moments where she acts the most societally feminine, because the areas in which we see her act the most feminine are things like fashion, which she doesn’t have access to millions of lightyears from Earth.

But yes, even though we haven’t had as much context by which to highlight Pidge’s more feminine coded personal facets, she’s always had those codings in her character, down from the first episode in the first season.

Now S4 has rolled around. We see more flashbacks of Pidge, and with it, new outfits that also read as “feminine” to us. I absolutely love this little number with the leggings… she looks adorable:

And on top of that, in this very same scene with Matt, she tells him to call her “Katie,” not Pidge. She’s explicitly preferring a name that is for girls and women.

Of course we also get the pink dress again, giving audiences yet again more feelings of feminine coding.

Then there’s Matt parading around, calling Pidge “sister” constantly, so we get that “rubbed in” more.

This is all family stuff.

I believe that S4 is also one of the first seasons to use “she” pronouns in the actual script. Lots of times, characters have been speaking directly to Pidge, thus calling her “you,” which isn’t gendered, or mentioning her gender-neutral nickname, “Pidge,” instead of a pronoun. BUT. Even then… in the first comic book… which takes place during S1 times… Pidge is called “she” and “her” by her Paladin buddies:

This means in S1 material alone, Pidge has been called “she,” Pidge has called herself a “girl,” and Pidge has demonstrated some female-coded fashion sense. That’s the exact same material, in fact, as what we get in S4.

S4 just has that material happen a little more often. It feels Pidge is being more gendered as a woman this season mostly because we’re seeing her in the contexts where she’s the most feminine-coded. The flashback scenes with her clothing. The interactions with her brother, who is going to call her “she” and “sister.” It’s not that the writers are pulling out a harder “Pidge is a woman” card… there’s nothing new that they’ve introduced this season than they have shown in the past. Nothing new at all. We’re just in the context where we see the feminine side of Pidge a bit more frequently in 4.

I’ve personally never read Pidge as canonically non-binary. I’ve read her as “she has the potential to develop and realize she’s non-binary later” and “she is pleasantly easy to headcanon as non-binary.” But I do think that throughout the franchise, there has been nothing explicit to target her as non-binary. Please continue to read her how you read her, but this is my respectful perspective.

It’s sort of ironic in that people headcanon Pidge as non-binary largely in part because they use the same societal expectations of gender-coding that so many people across the same community are trying to destroy. Many people talk about how X shouldn’t be exclusive to women, but should be acceptable to all humans… but I do suspect lots of the reason so many people attach to Pidge as a potential non-binary representative is because she doesn’t scream those X gender-coded things. Gender expression isn’t the same as gender identity, so just because Pidge expresses herself in a certain way doesn’t mean she is one type of gender or another. I dress extremely feminine at times. Doesn’t make me a woman. Pidge has what society feels are gender-neutral interests. Doesn’t mean she’s not a woman.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a non-binary gender headcanon, and in fact those non-binary headcanons make me smile because it’s the feeling of people recognizing my own gender, my own identity. The headcanons resonate with me, too. I like them. Please, feel free to keep with your headcanons! There’s nothing wrong with them!

And there’s nothing saying the writers couldn’t develop Pidge canonically to reveal herself as non-binary! It’s totally feasible. Just because she liked long hair doesn’t mean anything about her actual identity, etc. etc. etc. Furthermore, I didn’t fully understand what it was to be non-binary until adulthood, where I discovered an identity that was always what I had felt about myself on the inside. Pidge could find that, too. This is something that often occurs later in life, so there’s certainly still time for that development to happen in a fifteen-year-old.

And if the writers ever did announce Pidge as canonically non-binary, you would bet I would stop the video, pump my fists in the air, and start screaming wildly “YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!!!” Because non-binary representation is beautiful and important and meaningful! I would love for Pidge to be non-binary, let’s be real!

But at the moment, we’ve gotten four seasons of Pidge demonstrating societally-aligned female coding. We’ve gotten Pidge referring to herself as a girl - which is much more importantly indicative. Pidge not having many feminine gender-coded interests, and being confused at alien bathroom signs, isn’t enough to be a foreshadowing of her announcing a non-binary identity. I don’t suspect that Pidge will come out as non-binary personally. I’m completely fine with that.

Anyway. TL;DR. Pidge is showing the same sorts of female-coded things in S4 as she has in previous seasons. S4 just might feel as though the writers are gendering her more apparently because Pidge is being shown in the contexts where this is the most noticeable about her.

#foxflightly #long post #vld spoilers #non-dragons #vld #Voltron: Legendary Defender #Voltron Legendary Defender #Voltron #Pidge #Pidge Gunderson #Katie Holt #analysis #my analysis #ask #ask meme

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Reclaiming Indian Food from the White Gaze

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The same food I was teased for as a kid has become gentrified and endorsed by Goop. Now, I’m using my cookbook to change the narrative.

This is Eater Voices, where chefs, restaurateurs, writers, and industry insiders share their perspectives about the food world, tackling a range of topics through the lens of personal experience. First-time writer? Don’t worry, we’ll pair you with an editor to make sure your piece hits the mark. If you want to write an Eater Voices essay, please send us a couple paragraphs explaining what you want to write about and why you are the person to write it to [email protected].

Once we’d been at home for three months, I finally gave in — not to sourdough, but to starting a quarantine cookbook. At first, it seemed like a fun and lighthearted activity, a way to connect with friends over what we were making. But it turned out to be more emotional than I expected. As an Indian woman working to love my culture in a world that has stolen it from me, food gets very personal.

I was never taught how to cook as a child. My parents don’t cook very often; their specialty is chili cheese toast, and I don’t know any passed-down family recipes. Instead, I learned the basics from Chitra Agrawal’s Vibrant India when I was 21. But even though I was brought up on Indian food, I learned about it through the white gaze.

For many people of color, food can be a source of pride and shame. Growing up, I was mocked for how Indian food affected white people’s digestion. Whenever I went to a British friend’s house for playdates, her mom proudly told me when they ordered Indian food (always curry) and how she was so relieved that this particular restaurant didn’t give her stomach problems. She wanted a pat on the back for bravely ordering ethnic food, but by othering my culture and expecting my validation, she made me uncomfortable.

Slowly, I started absorbing the stigma that others attached to my culture. In fifth grade, my mom submitted a chicken tikka masala recipe to our class cookbook even though we are vegetarians, because it’s always been easier to give the people what they want than to try to educate them. In 10th grade, eating bhindi stained my braces green. In college, my favorite snack was papad, but when my friends started to sniff the air after I made it, I learned to be self-conscious about its smell. As an adult, even my own home could make me feel judged: Whenever I made tadka in my Brooklyn kitchen, the mustard seeds tempering in ghee set off the smoke detector.

But the same recipes I was teased for eventually became chic, gentrified, and endorsed by Goop. Their popularity in the hands of white tastemakers made me realize that people didn’t want to see a brown face behind brown food. I met people who were hesitant to try my homemade nimbu pani, but would happily pay $6 for South Indian filter coffee made by a white woman at Smorgasburg. It’s never been an equal playing field: Brown chefs are expected to cook their own food, but white chefs can cook whatever they want.

I’ve also seen the effects of colonialism in how people explain my own culture back to me, with no awareness of the power dynamics. This happens a lot at restaurants. At Manhattan’s Bombay Bread Bar, a white server felt compelled to explain kulcha to me; farther downtown at Janam Tea, my Pakistani friend and I received a lecture from a white woman who proudly told us how she was bringing Indian tea to the West, without any humility around claiming expertise of a culture that is not her own.

For years, I’ve been working to address culinary imperialism and reclaim my love of Indian food from the white gaze. But while I have been enjoying teaching myself traditional recipes, I often get stuck when none of the options online are written by brown people. It’s become so trendy to remove Indian food from its cultural context — the New York Times’ masoor dal recipe includes sweet potatoes, which would alarm any auntie — that it’s hard to know what’s authentic as someone who’s still learning.

It doesn’t help that in the West, people view Indian food through the lens of takeout, which shortchanges the craft behind it. Many recipes are extremely intricate, with over 10 ingredients and hours of prep and stove time. Even a simple meal requires a quick sequence of actions, serious focus, and lots of multitasking (cue the smoke detector). And yet that effort is often erased by what is familiar: My roommates are cautious about tasting new recipes that I make, and instead keep ordering their usual garlic naan and vindaloo. For all of the parts of my culture that people love, it’s sad to see how much fear still exists.

It’s also jarring to see how the language around Indian food has changed over time, with new recipes branded as ayurvedic, vegan, and cleansing in order to seem more approachable. Ghee, which I grew up thinking was an indulgence, is now a superfood. Khichdi, one of my childhood comfort foods, has been co-opted as kitchari, the latest detox cleanse.

This kind of language belongs to modern wellness culture, which has also made me distance myself from Indian traditions. I would love to learn yoga or meditation, but don’t feel like I have access to them anymore: It’s too painful to learn about my culture from people who can’t pronounce “namaste” (nuh-mus-teh) or “mantra” (mun-tra). “Namaste” is a word that no longer even belongs to us: I cringe when I hear it used in all sorts of inappropriate situations, like as a catchphrase to “namastay in bed.” Its loss echoes the one I felt my first year in New York, when I attended a Diwali puja (prayer service) only to feel sick to my stomach when I realized that I was the only brown person in the room. It’s traumatic to see your culture taken from you.

The same recipes I was teased for eventually became chic, gentrified, and endorsed by Goop. Their popularity in the hands of white tastemakers made me realize that people didn’t want to see a brown face behind brown food.

Still, I’m working to not let my baggage stop me. Three years ago, I went to Patel Brothers, the iconic store in Jackson Heights, to start my spice collection and happily buy katoris that remind me of home. As I learned to cook, I sent my parents photos of pongal, puchka, and pakoras on WhatsApp, hoping that one day I could cook for them. I joined a dinner club, which became my testing ground for new recipes (I was the only person of color), and shared leftovers with my South Asian coworkers for the real verdict. Over Thanksgiving, I observed my aunt’s chai-making process to figure out why my chai tasted like a mouthful of ginger (crushing instead of grating was the trick). I even started improvising with spices, adding chaat masala to popcorn, cucumber, and scrambled eggs.

After going through this journey to reclaim my culture, every decision for my quarantine cookbook feels critical: Each is a chance to change the narrative, even if it’s just for myself. For weeks, I’ve been compiling global recipes from my community, finding ways to bring out personal stories and enjoying the opportunity to learn more about my friends. All of them submitted one or two recipes, mostly ones that are meaningful to them and have been passed down in their families. As the cookbook’s curator, I knew that my recipe would say something about me, and felt a familiar existential crisis coming. If I chose Indian food, I would feel a responsibility to dispel myths, provide regional nuances, and compensate for whitewashed food descriptions (I refuse to call a dosa a sourdough crepe). But if I chose a recipe from a different culture, I would feel like a sellout.

This dilemma reflected a larger one: Representing my culture always feels somewhat performative. In many ways, I’m happy to educate. It’s incredibly important to learn about food from people who come from its culture. But the pantomime required to cheerfully explain the basics and provide emotional reassurance so that other people can get over their fears and assumptions is exhausting.

For this reason, I’ve never felt fully comfortable going to Indian restaurants with non-South Asians. I know that, in some way, I will be responsible for translating the menu, affirming people’s choices, advising on spice levels, teaching them how to eat with their hands, and commenting on whether the food is authentic — a temporary tour guide. But it feels strange to be considered an authority when I don’t always recognize what’s on the menu. There are dozens of regional cuisines within India, but in the U.S., only a handful of North Indian dishes are mainstream, and many of us didn’t grow up eating them. People are always shocked when I tell them that I don’t eat curry, but they don’t understand that there’s so much more to Indian food that I’ve never felt like I was missing out.

This emotional labor is why, without realizing it, I left writing my own cookbook recipe to the last minute. I was delaying the carefully calculated decisions of how to translate ingredients, whether to pick a familiar or niche recipe, and how much to educate. Ultimately I picked chana masala, partly because it’s one of my favorite easy dishes and partly because I wanted it to serve as a wake-up call for people who don’t know the cultural roots of The Stew.

For the introduction, I wrote about how my dad calls me luchi, the Bengali word for puri, a puffy round flatbread that is served with chana masala to make one of my favorite dishes, chole bhature. I explained how, when I was young, I would get excited to order it at restaurants and poke the puri so it would deflate. Now, it’s really special to realize that I can make the chana myself. In writing about this, I found a way to speak about Indian food in a way that felt genuine to me.

Now I’m back in India, and it feels like a dream to not have to carry around the armor. I finally feel like I can learn without judgment, and have already warned various aunties that I’m coming over to cook after quarantine ends. I’m working to sink my feet into the spaces my ancestors created, to unconditionally love where I come from and give myself permission to explore it. It’s always going to be a process, but I want to decolonize my mind and take my power back.

Nayantara Dutta is a writer, strategist, and third culture kid. You can find her @nayantaradutta.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3gpntXd https://ift.tt/2Zn7Ok5

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The same food I was teased for as a kid has become gentrified and endorsed by Goop. Now, I’m using my cookbook to change the narrative.

Nayantara Dutta is a writer, strategist, and third culture kid. You can find her @nayantaradutta.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3gpntXd via Blogger https://ift.tt/31vIbQT

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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tysmiha-witchnotes · 6 years

Text

Tarot Exercise 2.1

The Fool’s Journey - this exercise doesn’t actually require me to do anything except read, but for me it’s easier to retain stuff if i read and then retell it. The Fool’s Journey is essentially the story of the major arcana, and it’s a good way to remember what each card represents. This is based on a Rider-Waite deck, but can be generally applied to any tarot deck.

0) The Fool - The beginning of the Fool’s Journey finds The Fool ready for anything, feeling happy and adventurous but also showing a certain amount of naivety and obliviousness as he unknowingly approaches the edge of a cliff. Because The Fool sits at the number 0, he represents a certain sort of balance between positive and negative, knowing and not knowing. He’s something of a blank slate, but he’s ready to learn and experience.

1) The Magician and 2) The High Priestess - The Fool’s first encounter is with the Magician and the High Priestess, who also represent a type of balance on a grander scale. In a way, together they are the embodiment of polarity. The Magician is the positive side, representing masculine energy, creative ideas and conscious awareness. The High Priestess is the negative side, representing the unconscious mind, unrealized potential and the space for the creative ideas to manifest. The Magician and the High Priestess are the foundations upon which the rest of the world is built.

3) The Empress - Through his travels, the Fool learns to become more aware of his surroundings. The Empress is a mother figure, and the same way a baby recognizes their mother first, so does the Fool. She is warm and loving, caring and nurturing. The Empress represents nature and the senses, and through her the Fool learns about happiness derived from simplicity.

4) The Emperor - After the mother, the Fool meets the father: the Emperor. The Fool learns about structure, patterns and order, and realizes that some rules are necessary for his own well-being. At first, the Fool might be frustrated at the restrictions he encounters, but through The Emperor’s direction he begins to understand why they exist

5) The Hierophant (in some decks referred to as the Grand Master) - When the Fool leaves his parental home and goes out into the rest of the world, he’s exposed to traditions and culture, and his teacher in these things is the Hierophant. The Fool learns about social norms and how to interact with others in society, in a way, learning his place.

6) The Lovers - As he grows, the Fool enters a sort of puberty, experiencing strong desires for sexual union and a relationship. Up until this point, the Fool had not thought much of anyone else, but now he’s interested in sharing his life with someone else and caring for them as he cares for himself. At the same time, sharing his life with another requires him to have a strong foundation of values in order to stay true to himself.

7) The Chariot - In his adulthood, the Fool has developed his own identity and attained self-control. He feels confident and assertive, having accomplished so much so far in his journey. The Chariot card shows the Fool riding high on his self-satisfaction, and the pride he feels is well deserved.

8) Strength - As his journey continues, naturally the Fool will also encounter challenges and hardship that will make him question whether or not it’s worth it to keep going. This is when he must draw on his own Strength in order to develop courage and the motivation to continue. It’s also during these times of challenge that the Fool realizes that the command he wields while riding the Chariot is often best tempered with a softer sort of confidence founded in patience and kindness. This in itself is its own sort of Strength.

9) The Hermit - With the ups and downs of life, the Fool inevitably comes to ask himself what the point of all of this is -- why are we here, and what’s our purpose? The Hermit helps the Fool with some introspection and his search for answers. He teaches the Fool to seek solitude occasionally, to give himself time to reach his own conclusions.

10) The Wheel of Fortune - After spending the necessary time to do some soul searching, the Fool begins to realize that everything is connected, and that the world is an elaborate weave of cycles and patterns -- somewhere in there he may discover his own destiny. Having been alone for so much time, he can look back on his path so far and see everything that led him to this point, and now he is ready to move again.

11) Justice - Now that he has an idea of his place in the universe and what that means to him, the Fool must also learn to take responsibility for the actions he has taken that brought him this far. Only by owning up to his mistakes can he get a fresh start and walk down a more honest path. Justice offers the Fool a simple, yet difficult decision: will he try to make the necessary changes, however hard they may be? Or will he take the path of least resistance and carry on as is, stagnating any possible further growth?

12) The Hanged Man - Whatever decision the Fool makes, he does carry on with a determination to accomplish whatever goals he’s set his sights on. But it doesn’t always work out as planned, and sometimes the struggles that come with perseverance can seem impossible to endure and it will seem like the best option is to quit. At this stage, the Fool becomes the Hanged Man, seemingly tortured and helpless. But a surprising thing happens -- in forfeiting control, somehow things begin to work exactly the way they should. From this, the Fool learns to surrender to the twists and turns of life, and that there is joy to be found in simply experiencing.

13) Death - Having learned this valuable lesson, the Fool makes some major readjustments in his life. He cuts out any old and no longer useful habits and possessions. Things that once brought him happiness no longer hold the import they once did, and while getting rid of these things might be painful, the Fool knows now that this is an essential part of growth. By paring back, he makes room for new, more beautiful things.

14) Temperance - The Fool’s path so far has been a tumultuous one, sometimes joyous and other times unbearably painful, and through these experiences he has learned the value of balance and stability. Through all of his adventures in life, he has finally found the parts that truly matter and combined them to be the best version of himself. He is healthy physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

15) The Devil - Despite his newfound peace, the Fool’s search for knowledge and adventure has not been entirely quenched. In his pursuit, the Fool meets the Devil, and finds himself bound up in material desires. He feels stuck in a rut that he can’t see his way out of, so much so that he may feel like he shouldn’t even bother trying.

16) The Tower - At this point, the only way out of the Devil’s clutches is with some extreme, earth-shattering change. The Tower represents the Fool’s ego, built to protect any inner vulnerabilities but inadvertently acting as a prison, keeping the best parts of himself locked up. As painful and unwanted as it may be, the Tower must come down in order for the Fool to be free.

17) The Star - Having freed himself, and recovering from the changes he’s endured, the Fool is overcome with a sense of tranquility. His soul is unbound and he is full of new potential that overpowers any negativity he felt in the Devil’s captivity. This is the calm after the storm, and the Fool’s heart is wide open.

18) The Moon - In his euphoria, the Fool thinks with his heart more than his mind, and he lacks mental clarity. The Moon reveals the Fool’s innermost dreams -- beautiful fantasies, weird ideas, and deep seated fears alike. Facing all of this is daunting, and the Fool feels suddenly lost in the dark, unsure of what is real.

19) The Sun - As the Fool wanders hopelessly, the Sun rises and offers him the clarity he needs to find his way. It removes any confusion and fear and replaces it with enlightenment and understanding. He is imbued with a new energy and enthusiasm for life, having remembered his purpose and everything he’s capable of.

20) Judgement - The Fool is no longer a fool. He’s traveled so far, experienced victories and been brought down to ashes, his ego destroyed and his innermost self free and limitless in its love and passion for life. He knows now that happiness is at the center of everything good and worthwhile, and with that in mind, he is able to forgive himself and others for mistakes made out of ignorance. And now, Judgement calls on him to evaluate himself as he truly is, and decide what in life is most important to him. Once he has done this, he will be ready to pursue his true destiny.

21) The World - With this card, the Fool returns to his beginnings -- this time, with a more complete understanding of the World. Now that he is at peace with himself and his place, he can interact with the World in a more meaningful and productive way, using his unique abilities to help others and improve his surroundings. Because his motivations are selfless, the World sees to it that all of his efforts are rewarded and that he is successful.

The Fool’s Journey is a never-ending one, though, and soon he will begin again to reach even greater enlightenment.

#personal #tarot

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thefinalcinderella · 7 years

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DIVE!! Book 3 Chapter 2-ARE YOU OK?

No, book, I’m not okay. I have too many assignments and too little time.

This chapter took a ridiculously long time (again) but I have a one-week break soon so next chapter should be a bit quicker.

Full list of translations here

Previously on DIVE!!: Youichi sticks it to the man.

The aforementioned meeting was supposed to be held at the Mizuki Sports Club at 6:00 P.M. Youichi parted from his father, who went straight to the club in Shinjuku, returned home temporarily, and got a little sweaty from jogging and muscle training in his free time until six o’clock. He might as well had gone to the club earlier to do dryland training, but he still felt depressed about seeing Tomoki and the others after they were told about the representative decision. It might have been because of this melancholy that Youichi, who always jumped onto his bike at the last possible moment, was about five minutes late on this day.

It was 6:05. When the unusually meek-looking Youichi opened the door to the AV room, the three coaches and his three clubmates were already there, facing each other in the small room that was as silent as the bottom of a deep hole.

The six faces on the folding chairs all turned towards the doorway at once, and Youichi looked away without enduring it.

He was here to hear the reason for why he won, and Tomoki and the others were here to hear the reason for why they lost. He keenly felt the difference in Tomoki’s eyes, which seemed redder than usual, and Reiji’s stiffened lips.

Then, a huge applause came right at that moment.

“Congrats on the Olympics decision. Hug a koala for me, will you?”

When he looked, he saw Shibuki, who had just come back from Tsugaru yesterday, reclining on a folding chair and clapping his hands. He didn’t know how he was feeling about this rapid development, but he didn’t have that agonized expression he had when they met in Tsugaru.

Youichi felt strangely relieved, and smiled at Shibuki. He sat down on an empty chair on the right side of the room.

Keisuke, seemingly taking that moment as a signal, began speaking.

“I expect you all already heard this, but yesterday, the diving representatives for the next Olympics were chosen. It is still confidential, but as the facts were conveyed to you, I believe that it is my duty to give a satisfying explanation. That is why I gathered you all here.”

It seemed that Keisuke, with a stiffer expression than usual, might be in a sense intentionally trying to go forward with this meeting, which was cruel against the losers, in a business-like manner.

“First of all, relating to the JASF’s Olympic Representative Selection Committee choosing representatives earlier than usual…”

Tomoki and Reiji twitched their faces up.

“That is what all of you were wondering about the most. Usually, the qualifying trials are held in the spring of the year of the Olympics, so why is it this time, the representatives were chosen so early at a meeting? It certainly is a story that could not be understood, but there are circumstances on the JASF’s side as well.”

“Circumstances?” Youichi raised an eyebrow.

“You all must know that the JASF president Maebara, who took his office in May, has an uncommonly strong desire to acquire medals. There are pros and cons for his way of doing that, but it is true that medals do not roll in while waiting. Especially since matches of scored competitions like diving start before the actual performance.”

The matches of scored competitions. What Keisuke said was the common sense, as well as the fate of diving competitions. For diving, similar to synchronized swimming, the results were decided to some extent before the start of the competition. The ability to sell the diver’s name beforehand many times to appeal to the judges was the true key to winning the competition. Even if a newcomer suddenly appeared at the Olympics, the judges would never give them high scores. No matter how much the newcomer displayed their outstanding performance.

In other words, in order to get good results at the Olympics, it was necessary to be active in well-known international meets before that.

“That is why the JASF chose the representatives earlier than usual this time. Two large international meets will be held next year before the Olympics. The first is the FINA World Cup held in New Zealand in January, and the second is the FINA World Series held in Florida in May. Following Coach Sun’s advice, JASF has decided to send their Olympic representatives to those two competitions. That is why it was necessary to select the Olympic representatives within the year.”

Saying all of that in one breath, Keisuke wiped the sweat on his forehead with his sweatshirt sleeve. Although it was only early autumn, the humidity was still high, and the airtight AV room was clammy. Nobody had the simple solution to just open a window.

“We only wanted to go to the Olympics, but the JASF is obsessed about the results after going there. That’s all it is, isn’t it.”

It was Reiji who broke the stifling silence.

“But, if they want medals that bad, why did the JASF only have two representatives? With three people, there should be a higher chance of winning medals.”

“The chances of winning medals would not necessarily increase if the number of athletes are increased. In fact, in order for Japan to win a medal, it would be best to reduce the representatives to just Teramoto.”

“Just Teramoto-san?”

“Teramoto is a diver who is already well-known to the world. If it’s kept like that, then medals will never be just a dream. But, as I said earlier, diving is a competition where the impression made on the judges is an important key to grasp. If an unskilled countryman participates and fails, it will give a bad impression that the Japanese are all like that, which can be painful for even Teramoto.”

“…”

Reiji closed his mouth before this harsh truth. “That was just terrible.” Shibuki grumbled from the side.

“Who said that participating in the Olympics would be meaningful?”

“That wasn’t just limited to the Olympics, and it’s not something that just began recently.”

Youichi replied immediately.

“The JASF had been barring athletes from international competitions, with the exception of some strong contenders, for quite some time. Even if athletes arranged their own expenses, unless they are recommended by JASF, they cannot go to them. Because they’re worried about holding back Japanese athletes who have a chance of winning, they don’t recommend anyone who isn’t an outstanding athlete to large competitions. They’re sacrificing others to protect just some strong people. That’s the way they do things.”

The reason why Youchi sounded angry was because he himself was on the receiving end of that way of doing things. In the past, while nurturing an awareness for the wider world when he was at the American training camp, he wished countlessly that he could participate in an international competition. However, the JASF had persistently replied every time that he should “get stronger at domestic competitions for a little longer.” Even though the strength to compete on the world stage could only be gained by gaining experience on the world stage, Youichi hadn’t been given the opportunity to do that for a long time.

“Even for these upcoming Olympics, it’s clear that the JASF is trying to protect Teramoto-san. They know that him going alone to Sydney is a shortcut to medals. But…why didn’t they do that? Why did they add me to the delegation?”

“It seems that the JASF had wavered that much.”

Keisuke mumbled in response to Youichi, who rarely showed his emotions.

“They are certainly wanting to gather rare talents like Teramoto Kenichirou. However, there are some who say that it might become a burden for him instead. Teramoto is a first-rate diver, but he has a mental weakness that is peculiar to Japanese athletes. Whether or not he will be able to go on the enormous stage of the Olympics alone and win with that heavy pressure…I’m guessing that the JASF decided to play it safe in the end and select two representatives. If Teramoto is given a teammate, they can cheer each other on and create synergy, and in the unlikely event that he falls, that person will become a safety blanket.”

Safety blanket.

When those extremely blunt words came out of his father’s mouth, Youichi threw his head back and laughed. He had no choice but to laugh. The excitement from the moment when he found out that he was an Olympic representative, the euphoric feeling he felt while running at night, all withered away miserably.

“So I’m a safety blanket? So I’m like an attendant to help Teramoto-san relax?”

“No, that’s not…”

“You were chosen as a representative because you have been recognized as being second-best in all of Japan.”

Kayoko spoke on behalf of Keisuke, who was at a loss for words from being stupidly honest.

“In the current Japanese diving world, the women are in an absolute slump, while for the men there are no worthy contenders who are a match for Teramoto Kenichirou. Did you know that Kaneda, who was resigned to being in second-place for a million years, retired at Nationals this summer? And Kurauchi, who was chasing after Kaneda, is currently resting because of a shoulder injury. So now, your name has hastily come up. Everyone recognized your stable performance and career. Plus, through last month’s joint training camp, the name of Fujitani Youichi was also made known to Asia. If it’s him, then we can compete even at Sydney. And Coach Sun had put his seal of approval on all of the representative decisions as well.”

“But…”

“Everything else is outsider talk that has nothing to do with you. Just ignore those half-witted adults and stay detached, and you should be fine.”

Don’t worry about the reasons you were chosen, athletes should be free from adults’ ulterior motives—that might be right, as now all their efforts for the qualifying trials dissolved into bubbles. Because Kayoko should had been just as shocked as Tomoki and the others, he felt the weight and persuasive power of those words, which held no superficiality. But…

Something was caught in his chest. When Youichi was trying to figure out what that was, Takada’s face from that morning suddenly appeared in his mind.

“Commercial…” His fists that were clutching his knees quickly grew cold. “That talk about the commercial…there’s no way that’s related to the Olympic selection, right?”

Though Youichi’s complexion suddenly changed, Keisuke promptly dismissed him.

“That’s certainly not it. Don’t speak nonsense.”

“But it’s odd, isn’t it? Even though it was only yesterday that my offer was decided on, they had already decided on the outline of the commercial.”

“They probably came up with the story beforehand.”

“But, they told us that the drink sold will be linked to the Summer Olympics, didn’t they? If that’s just a coincidence, isn’t the timing too good?”

Keisuke kept silent, as the creases between his eyebrows deepened. He seemed embarrassed to acknowledge that there is some ground for Youichi’s suspicions.

It was Ooshima who cut in, unable to just watch.

“Well, Youichi, since the Olympics generate huge amounts of revenue for big business, there must be many different kinds of things going on behind the scenes. But, those kinds of things surprisingly don’t reach the ears of people like us who live on the surface. Even for your offer, that commercial might have connected to it, or it might not have been. To be honest, I think it’s okay either way. As Coach Asaki said earlier, the only thing that’s important is that only you have the ability of being second-best in Japan. Isn’t that enough?”

Was that really true?

Was that enough?

He wasn’t convinced. Nevertheless, Youichi dropped it because Tomoki, Shibuki and Reiji were watching. He, who was chosen, was criticizing the Olympic selections in front of them, who weren’t chosen. Depending on one’s viewpoint, it seemed like a terribly arrogant act.

But, was Tomoki okay?

Was Shibuki okay?

Was Reiji okay?

Youichi looked around to search their faces. They were all staring at the ground like they were putting up with something, but they never voiced what that was. By protesting the selections, he also nitpicking his own offer.

“It is true that the decisions this time were abrupt, and that there are aspects of it that are not satisfactory.”

Taking Youichi’s silence as understanding, Keisuke spoke again.

“But, that isn’t just limited to diving. Sports have always been influenced by having good luck at the right time. Many of your seniors had to choke back their tears until now because of that. It might be unfair to all of you who weren’t chosen, but one thing that might change your moods is the fact that we must aim for Athens in five years. Five years from now might seem like a distant future…”

“But,” Keisuke said, as though he was forced to let down their hopes. “As Youichi grabbed the ticket to Sydney, it is also true that he gave you all that future. Today, the president of Mizuki had promised the MDC will continue to operate from now on. The MDC survives. You will all still have to do your best. Now is the time to show your willpower.”

He murmured the last part, like a prayer.

Youichi being chosen to go to Sydney was linked to the survival of the MDC. Of course, everyone knew that, so everyone who wasn’t chosen had too many complicated feelings.

They couldn’t be pleased from the bottom of their hearts about his representative offer.

But they were also unable to truly feel bitter.

“I don’t know anything about what’s going to happen five years later.”

Reiji’s low voice echoed in the room that had fallen silent.

“I don’t even know what’s going to happen next year, or even tomorrow…”

It sounded like the voices of the hearts of all the members who weren’t chosen.

“Hey, wait a sec.”

The meeting ended without anything being cleared up, and they were released silently.

Youichi called out to Reiji’s back in front of him when he passed by the reception desk on the first floor.

“Are you, going to quit diving?”

He was worried about what Reiji had said last.

“Are you not going to come to practice tomorrow, like Ryou?”

Reiji stared at Youichi’s face through his bangs that hung down to his nose.

“It doesn’t seem so.”

“Huh?”

“It doesn’t seem like you, Youichi-kun, to care about something like that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. If you’re worried about me quitting because you were the one chosen as the Olympic representative, then you can stop worrying.”

“That’s…”

Not it, Youichi was about to say that, but fell silent. There was definitely something that he couldn’t say to the very end in his chest.

“I’m fine,” Reiji said with a laugh, like he was the one encouraging Youichi instead of the other way around. “It’s true that this was a shock, and I was frustrated, but I knew my limits were different from people like Tomo. That’s why I was just about ready to give up on the Olympics when I missed the chance to go to the training camp. Don’t worry about anything, Youichi-kun, and please do your best at Sydney. Me, I want you to race to the top in that usual cool way of yours.”

His junior, who was always running around the poolside like a puppy. The time where their age difference of three years felt like the gap between humans and monkeys had passed now, and before he knew it, Reiji had a terribly grown-up look in his eyes.

“And more than that,” Reiji said to Youichi, who was standing stock-still from feeling confounded. “You should be more worried about Tomo than me. Ever since he heard about the whole representative decision thing from Coach Asaki during the day, he’s been acting a bit weird.”

“Weird?”

“He’s acting kind of out of it, like his soul is gone. He didn’t even say anything in the briefing.”

Now that he said it, that was true. Tomoki’s presence was so weak that he couldn’t even remember that he was there.

“Got it. If I find Tomo, I’ll say something to him.”

Although he easily promised that, when Youichi returned to the AV room after parting from Reiji, Tomoki was already gone. He thought about paying a visit to his house on his way home, but he changed his mind when he thought that Tomoki wouldn’t want to see his face right now, and so Youichi rode his bike home by himself.

Every time he won, he became alone.

That was the usual thing.

He knew that was what victory was, but too many things happened today.

While gripping his handlebars tightly and slipping through the night at breakneck speed, Youichi had the delusion that he desperately trying to escape from a gigantic snowman.

Next time on DIVE!!: We finally get a scene of Youichi and Shibuki in school!!!

#DIVE!!#dive novel translation

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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Reclaiming Indian Food from the White Gaze added to Google Docs

Reclaiming Indian Food from the White Gaze

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The same food I was teased for as a kid has become gentrified and endorsed by Goop. Now, I’m using my cookbook to change the narrative.

I was never taught how to cook as a child. My parents aren’t enthusiastic cooks; their specialty is chili cheese toast, and I don’t know any passed-down family recipes. Instead, I learned the basics from Chitra Agrawal’s Vibrant India when I was 21. But even though I was brought up on Indian food, I learned about it through the white gaze.

Nayantara Dutta is a writer, strategist, and third culture kid. You can find her @nayantaradutta.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/2020/6/30/21307238/taking-back-indian-food-from-the-white-gaze-cookbook-recipes

Created July 1, 2020 at 12:26AM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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drennalynspast · 4 years

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[ Searching within Myself ]

Tuesday, Jun. 24, 2014

"Kneel to your own self. Honor and worship your own being. God dwells within you as You."

" You don't have to 'do' anything to be God-realized or Self-realized, it is already your true and natural state." Just drop all seeking, turn your attention inward, and sacrifice your mind to the One Self radiating in the Heart of your very being. For this to be your own presently lived experience, Self-Inquiry is the one direct and immediate way." I had my first trip experience. The location was a room that happened to be a brother of my ex. His brother and I have gotten along just talking to each other and have been cool with just being friends. Apparently it is taboo to be friends with your ex's brother. But despite what other people think, I chose and did what I wanted to. I expressed interest in trying shrooms. I am in no way, a drug user of any sort. I don't believe in relying on a chemical to sustain myself on a frequent periodic time. I hear stories about shrooms however and how it is an experience like no other. That trip. It is able to alter your mind and body a different way and present you a different or changed outlook in life. That is what I read anyway. Sometimes it can alter or change a person's personality. It may be little and not permanent, but it depends on the person and how they will take what they learn and remember the trip and apply It to their daily life. As we know, I think and worry too much.-- Too much where it causes me stress, fear, anxiety, reluctance, guilt, sadness. It is as if I am holding back and repressing something of myself for an attempt others. I think to much, in my head, I tell myself to stop. But no matter how I try to talk to myself, I just can't get rid of that feeling of something denying my true wants and feelings.

My friend said I need to learn to calm down and not worry so much, relax. And maybe this is something that would help me see things clearer. I don't proclaim this to be a life solver or wonder drug, but in my personal experience, it is definitely worth the experience to try. I don't know if I will permanently change for the better, but at least I have a memory burned in my head of what state I was in, the images I saw and how I felt. Maybe I can go back and just think about that moment and remember that this is how I was and I felt: safe, calm, content. The actual hallucination and haziness lasted for about 4 and half hours. After that was just this lightheaded, tired, and lazy feeling that lingered for a while. I was still calm afterwards. I wanted to do my trip in the daytime so I could have time to sleep for the night and not disrupt my pattern. We made sure to have plenty of food around as well as drinks for us. I made sure to have a small amount for my first time. I have a small body, so I wanted to play it safe. My goal of the trip was to just try to experience some form of self discussion or self realization. I didn't really care about trying to see different weird hallucinations. I also didn't want to have a bad trip where I felt terrible or scared for my first time.After about 20-30 minutes of chewing the shroom and swallowing it, I began my trip. I had this weird feeling in my stomach. It was nauseated and I felt panicky or irritable, like any small thing would bother me. I felt lightheaded and weightless. My heart felt like it was pounding fast, but it wasn't really pumping a lot. My friend pointed out a picture on the wall, it was a black and white picture of a skyline bridge. He said he was moving. I could not see it move. I later looked at my surroundings; there were stenciled shadows along the walls. Some of them looked like ripple patterns. I looked at this rolling work chair with a red polka dotted blanket over it. I stared at it, and I could see the chair breathing and pulsating. It was like it was a still object emanating life. Some objects began to be blurry and hazy. My friend would ask me something like, "are you okay? Do you need anything? Do you want to talk about what you see?" and I said I was fine. I didn't like talking about it. I felt like talking about things out loud made me snap back to a more reality state of mind. I would lose that hallucinated vision for a second when I would have to focus talking to him, and I just wanted to continue experiencing my experience for myself. I looked at the top of this hallway entrance and wall corridor. I could see the top of the wood edge frame glowing. It was a emitting a hazy blue smoke. There were other colors around that glowed around it, making it look more interesting. Another moment I felt like I had some tunnel vision or hazy vision where I was seeing double. I looked at the right side of the room, and the objects started to have a mirror image of itself. I was seeing two of each object. The objects looked very bright, vibrant, also had a jelly/gummy/gelatinous texture to it. I looked at his bicycle next to the wall. I could see the shadows around the wheel spokes move and sway about. I could see the bicycle frame bend and move, the pedal also moved. It was interesting, and I kept staring at it. I closed my eyes, and I immediately saw shapes and colors in my mind. They were free flowing about. I had no control of what I wanted to see. My mind drifted off and I carried along with it. That feeling of closing my eyes and seeing images and listening to the Voice was more interesting to me than looking at the real life items with my eyes open. I felt like I was transcended on a different level, and I wanted to go deeper and explore my thoughts. As I was starting to just enjoy or think about my closed visions, my friend stopped me and asked if I was sleeping, and I said no. I didn't want to worry him. I was concerned that he wanted to talk about things, but the Voice was telling me not worry about what he thinks. I should focus on myself and do this for myself. Experience this trip for yourself and not talk about it right now. Just focus on feeling. I was glad that he didn't try to bother me too much or talk to me. He was just making sure I was okay. He sat on the opposite side of the couch to observe me. While I was in my closed eyes state, I kept asking things, "what about, why am I, who is this, ?" The Voice told me not to ask questions. The questions would complicate things, interfere with my feelings. The Voice was a neutral tone. It was calm, not scary. It did not judge or criticize. It only guided me , I felt. I still had reluctance and doubt on things. The Voice firmly told me, "Don't fight". And so I tried not to fight. I let go. Throughout my discussion with the Voice, I had visions in my mind of colors and shapes, lights, all shifting and changing its form. It is like a kaleidoscope or a trippy screen saver you would see on a computer. But some of these visions were more ethereal in a way, not of a solid nature. It was like a liquid freeflowing feeling where you just bathe it. It wasn't heavy or light. It felt neutral, safe, calm. I could see shapes and objects being deconstructed and reconstructed into new shapes/images.I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I asked the Voice why am I crying. The Voice told me to not question it. It told me I didn't have to be sad or happy, I was just crying. I did not feel sad in anyway. IT wasn't extreme bliss either I don't think. And the Voice continued to guide me about my life, who am I am, why I do it, what I should work towards, what the reality of it is. The Voice told me I have too many boundaries. But those boundaries are fake and unnecessary. It inhibits what I truly feel and want to think. But I forget to establish my own true healthy boundaries. I try to be something or someone that other people want me to be. I haven't been happy, because I was never who I truly was. But I try to make other people happy. My mind was just showing me to forget what they think and do what I should do for myself. Choose yourself. Learn to be yourself. The Voice talked about time, past, present, and future. The past, when I think about it, it hurts. But during this trip, I thought about the concept of the idea of a past and the word, and I didn't feel hurt. I felt nothing, just calmness. It was okay. The past doesn't have to mean anything as much as I make it seem like. I thought about the future, and the Voice told me, "the future is empty." I see an image of a tall scaffold right next to a building skyscraper window side. The scaffold represented the idea of the future contained in a space. It was next to the window. The window had a reflection of the cityscape building around it.

I could see the sunlight glowing around, the shapes of the buildings, the colors and highlights of the edges. The scaffold was tall, high, an object. It wasn't filled up with anything. It had a metal frame. It was empty, weightless. But that scene was able to project its own majestic beauty in its own way by having a window that showed a reflection of a breathtaking view. It was simple, but it was still able to hold meaning in its way. And that is what the Voice was trying to tell /show me. When I think of the future, I think of this ominous heavy weight. There is fear, doubt, uncertainty. I have to fill up that future with something, but it could feel unpleasant. I might have a to work on a status, title, and if I fail, my future would be nothing and meaningless. I thought of an object like a black heavy ball to relate to my concept of the future. Seeing the scaffold as the future made me feel inspired, calm, happy. We all work to a future where we try to be happy, where we think we have to work or do something to make it meaningful. But the future is already meaningful and beautiful as it is -- empty. I don't have to be scared or worry. What I need to do is just enjoy my life now. Make the most of it. Because if I can't be happy now and know what joy is now, then the future will mean nothing. It will just be the same as the present. The future is empty and it is waiting to be filled. But we already try to make a plan where it must be filled now with our actions and behavior. The future is always changing and unpredictable. We can't fight or struggle. Sometimes we just need to appreciate things as they simply are and slowly build things up as time progresses. The Voice told me about time. How it can be a thing that causes stress with just the name and concept of itself. We are a slave to time. It creates barriers and restrictions by limiting things. Time dictates what we must do or have complete. And that adds stress. It is important to be mindful of time. We cannot control how it flows and cannot stop it. It controls us. But what we can do is to learn to make use of how we exist in time. I learned about confidence and labels. The Voice asked me if I was confident. I said I don't have a lot. And then the Voice asked me, "do you trust yourself?" and then I started to think about myself, but my mind would drift off to the thought of "others". The Voice told me I need to learn to trust myself more. Even if I am wrong or offend others, that feeling of having a trust in yourself is what makes you feel stronger. It isn't about right or wrong. Eliminate all barriers of right/wrong, good/bad. There is no terms -- Just feeling and feelings are Truth. Trust is confidence. Trust is what I need to gain, it isn't confidence. I overcomplicate things by associating a term to automatically label how I should feel based on how other people use it. People say confidence is a good thing. But confidence is something that is hard to obtain for people and it can be seen as weak if you don't exhibit it. But trust is something that is a core, important component. It is hard to describe, it was like trust was a better label for me that didn't intimidate what I needed to learn. If you learn to trust and love yourself more, you will be strong. The ability to love yourself no matter what you do, right or wrong, able to forgive yourself and still carry on is what is important. Words have such a profound impact in how I think and feel. They can be like knives stabbing into me. I started thinking about the people I've had interactions with and what they would think and feel of me. The Voice told me to stop fighting, stop thinking. They are all the same when it comes to the core concept of just words. Words are just words. They can hurt. It hurts to hear hurtful words for someone you know and care about than from someone with a stranger. But my trip helped show and make me realize that a stranger and loved one can say the same hurtful thing. It hurts less to hear it from the stranger. There was an image that was trying to erase a picture of a person in my mind. They were being dissipated. Words, are just words. They can be said from anyone. The person who says it doesn't have to matter. Don't think about one person. Anyone can say it. But other people don't matter. My mind helped me just erase things and just focus on myself more, appreciate myself. It is okay to be myself.

It kept reminding me that when I eliminate labels, it makes everything better. They are just simple feelings. And feelings don't have to have a label. These feelings are your own. No one can control or take away from you. You choose to have these feelings when people say things to you. They might not have ill intentions or trying to hurt me, but I perceive myself feeling hurt in some way based on what or how they said it. I can just let the words, concrete concept of words, not bother me. Don't worry. Don't care so much about it. Throughout the trip experience my friend and I changed the location to go to his room. I looked at the curtains and bed. I saw that there were so many defined wrinkles. It was very surreal, 3d prominent, floating. The curtain looked like it was breathing. There was a black and white picture of a different cityscape bridge on his night stand. I could see the colors and shapes in the image swirl, bleed, glow, and twinkle in a way. It was like the picture was depicting its night life in real time. He told me not to look at myself in the bathroom mirror because it tends to freak people out if they see themselves in a trip. I went with what he said and didn't look at it. When I was in the bathroom, I asked myself if I should look in the mirror. The Voice said, "no don't look in the mirror. You will be scared, trust me". I replied to the Voice, "okay, I won't look". I laid on his bed. My friend asked if it was okay if he could lay down too on it. I said it was okay. He asked if he could cuddle with me, and I was in this relaxed and "whatever, don't care mode". He laid his arm around me. I didn't feel anything. I felt comfort, but it didn't have to have a meaning and I for once, didn't try to find a meaning in it. The whole thing made me question the Voice about physical touch and intimacy. Sex and relationships seem to be sticky thing for me as well. When I have sex or even if I hug or touch someone, it feels emotional. Like I want a connection with the person or I am expecting the person to have a connection with me -- like they have to be with me longer and be committed. But I just learn to enjoy the moment now, don't worry about if it turns into something, if it means something. Touching is just a touch -- no feelings, no thinking. I thought about myself and how, even with my friend and roommate, how I preferred to have moments where I just am by myself. Like I just want to be in this room by myself or just close my eyes and think only by myself and for myself. I find comfort and peace with this solaced solitude. The Voice was telling me, "see you like being alone. You are happy alone. You are okay being alone. This is what peace and comfort is like. Yet you try to invite other people or seek other people into your life that disrupts what peace and comfort you feel. Why do you need to do that? Is it necessary? You already are able to find happiness within yourself and you don't have to seek other people as a way to provide or show you happiness." I eventually got to a feeling where things were less freeflowing. I wasn't swimming around as much in my mind. Hallucinations in the present were diminished. The Voice that was present in my mind was slowly fading. I was fighting to keep it in. The Voice told me that it is okay. I am ready to let go and remember the ideas and concepts of what I saw today. Focus on feeling, not thinking so much. Don't fight. Focus on loving and trusting myself. Don't worry so much. Doesn't care as much as you think you should, but it is unhealthy that sometimes I don't care about things that I should be concerned about. Like having an opinion for myself or doing things for myself that is in my better interest. I told myself I had to pee. The Voice told me that it is okay to look in the mirror. It told me that I was ready to look at it now. And when I do look at it, I need tell myself that, "I am ready. It starts with Me today. I need to love myself". I think about the quote, "God dwells within you, as You", People may say that they have been having conversations with God in their trip. But the Voice that I experienced -- it was My voice. It was like an ancient repressed side of me that was suddenly channeled and awakened. It was all knowing. It never judged or condemned me. It wasn't worried about me or scared about me. It was loving me, caressing me, saying that it is okay to have thoughts about things, but it was there to help explain and show things in a different way. I told myself that I was weak and scared, worried. But my voice was trying to calm me saying that I wasn't weak. "You are strong and a good person." It didn't say that to just try to make me feel better. When I heard it tell me it, I felt comforted. I didn't question it or deny it. I just accepted it and believed it at the time. It told me it was okay to cry and to just let things go. Like all this balled up stress, crush it and let it go. So I was laying in bed shaking and tears were rolling down my cheeks. I didn't feel scared though. I felt fine. I felt safe and okay. Like that feeling of understanding that I do have strength. I am not weak. I felt like there is a part of me that is true, honest, real that is hibernating deep within me. It cares about me. It loves about me. It trusts me and watches over me. And I need to protect and honor that being --- Myself.

#shrooms #trip experience #first trip #tripping #meditation #searching within myself #searching #self reflection #mushrooms #honor yourself

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lefilmdujour · 4 years

Text

Another 500th movie celebration

My Tumblr just reached the 1000 movies mark, so I figured it’s time I write something about my last 2 and a half years of movie viewings and recommend 50 more movies out of the ones I’ve seen since the last 500th movie celebration.

Times have been strange in the last couple of years, and my movie habits have reflected it. There have been times when watching films was all I would do, but there have also been moments of complete disconnection from the medium. I went from watching several movies every day to spending months avoiding anything to do with sitting through a movie.

Part of it had to do with the space I share with my demons, but mostly there has been a change of pace. My laptop died, it took me months to get another one only to also die on me. On the other hand, an enormous chunk of my viewings have been in cinemas or squats, which is a very positive change but led me to watch more recent films in detriment of classics or ancient underappreciated gems. I also got my first TV in over a decade this month, and my very first Netflix account last week, so I may be exploring streaming a bit more, although so far I am not finding the experience at all satisfying. All pointless excuses since I went through 500+ movies in a little over two years, which is not bad at all.

It was hard to pick only 50 movies this time, and the list would have probably looked a little different if I did it tomorrow. Regardless, here are 50 movies I recommend, and why. Random order, all deserving of love and attention.

Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff) - This movie is unfairly ignored in the best comic book adaptation lists out there on the internet. The opening scene is memorable, the soundtrack is a lesson in early Blues, and the characters are quirky and well written.

Hate (Mathieu Kassovitz) - An absolute classic about the class system in France and its tendency to end up in riots. Beautiful shot and highly quotable. Saw it a few times, the last of them with a live score from Asian Dub Foundation. One of the greats.

Audition (Takashi Miike) - Whenever I’m asked about my favorite horror movie, I tend to fall back on this one. Audition is very slow, starting out soft but with an underlying tension that builds until the absolutely gut-wrenching finale that makes us question our own sanity. Brilliant subversion of the “hear, don’t see” rule, just the though of some of the sounds used in the most graphic scenes still send shivers down my spine.

Kedi (Ceyda Torun) - A Turkish documentary about street cats, what’s there not to like?

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook) - The third in the loosely-connected Vengeance trilogy by Park Chan-wook, and my favorite of the bunch, especially the Fade to Black and White edition, in which the movie very gradually loses color as the violence grows. A visual masterpiece.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch) - The poetry of routine. Adam Driver is one hell of an actor.

Love Me If You Dare (Yann Samuell) - Two people that obviously love each other but are not mature enough to follow it through. Frustrating. Beautiful. Made me sob.

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel) - I am realizing that a good part of this list deals with frustration. A group of people finds themselves unable to leave a party for no apparent reason. Buñuel is a genious in surrealism, I have yet to watch most of his Mexican period.

The Mutants (Teresa Villaverde) - Kids on the run from themselves. Strong visuals, very moving interactions at times. A hard but very rewarding watch. Teresa Villaverde’s entire filmography also gets a seal of approval.

Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar) - A movie about sexuality and problematic relationships, taken to unbelievable extremes.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu) - The adventures of Mr. Lazarescu as he struggles to find help for the sudden pain he feels and ends up being passed on from hospital to hospital. Felt very real. Sold as a comedy, but I found it terrifying.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) - A classic greek tragedy brought to the modern age. My favorite Lanthimos film, ranking slightly below Dogtooth. The deadpan acting and the unnerving sound serves as wonderful misdirection.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt) - Three shorts stitched together to create a confusing, philosophical, absurd, funny and deep masterpiece. The animation skills of Don Hertzfeldt needs more recognition.

Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu) - A movie so good it didn’t even had an English name. Three tales of love, violence and loss, all linked by a dog.

Endless Poetry (Alejandro Jodorowsky) - Jodorowsky’s romanticized auto-biography, played by his own sons.Bohemian and poetic.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer) - Show this movie to someone who refuses to watch silent movies. The acting is so impactful and emotional, and the use of close ups was highly unusual for the time. A 90-plus years old masterpiece.

Everything is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber) - Sunflowers.

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan) - I have a soft spot for war movies, as to remind myself how brutal people can be to their fellow man and how meaningless the concept of nations truly is. This movie in particular achieves greatness due to its usage of sound, the best I’ve heard in recent memory.

Vagabond (Agnès Varda) - Be careful of what you wish for yourself, you may end up frozen and miserable in a ditch (spoilers for literally the first few seconds of the film).

Stroszek (Werner Herzog) - I know Herzog mostly through his documentaries. His voice brings me the feeling of a deranged grandpa sharing stories of a reality tainted by dementia. I have yet to explore his fiction work in-depth, and this has been my starting point. Stroszek is bleak and desperate but humor still shines through it at times. Ian Curtis allegedly hung himself after watching it. Not sure if this story is real, but it once more feeds into the Herzog myth.

HyperNormalization (Adam Curtis) - Put together through found footage and newscasts, HyperNormalization is an unforgiving study on how we got to where we currently are. Fake becomes real. Trust is an abandoned concept. “They've undermined our confidence in the news that we are reading/And they make us fight each other with our faces buried deep inside our phones”, as AJJ sings in Normalization Blues. Which you should also check out.

Chicken with Plums (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud) - A man decides to die, so he goes to bed and waits. An apparent simple plot that uncovers a world of beauty and poetry, as life passes slowly through the man’s eyes.

The Florida Project (Sam Baker) - William Dafoe was born to play the role of a motel manager. He is so natural in his role that I think he would actually be great in that job. The rest of the movie is great too, but his performance is the highlight for me.

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch) - Speaking of great performances, Lucky is Harry Dean Stanton’s final movie and a great send off. IMDB describes it best: “The spiritual journey of a ninety-year-old atheist.“

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders) - More Harry Dean Stanton. The desert plays a more than decorative role in this wonderful movie, representing the emptiness that comes from estrangement. A story about reunion and all that can come from it.

On Chesil Beach (Dominic Cooke) - I sometimes cry in movies, but this one shook me to the core. A play on expectations and reactions and their devastating impact on relationships. We all fuck up sometimes. Try not to fuck up like these characters did, not on that level, you will never be able to make up for it.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson) - An absolute classic. A movie about the concept of family.

No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers) - Murder mysteries and bad haircuts.

Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison) - I highly recommend this documentary for anyone who professes their love for cinema. The story of how hundreds of lost silent movies were preserved though sheer luck and human stupidity. Seeing these damaged frames coming back to life is truly magical.

Mandy (Panos Cosmatos) - Some films turn into cult experiences through the years, some selected few are already born that way. Mandy is a psychedelic freak-out and Nicholas Cage fits like a glove in its weirdness. If you didn’t catch it while in cinemas, you’re already missing out on the full experience. Mandy is filled with film grain, which adds to the hallucinogenic experience with its continuous movement, a feature that does not translate when transferred to a digital medium.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund) - A masterpiece of Brazilian cinema, very meaningful and relatable if you grew up in a similar environment. One of the most quotable films in my memory, something that gets lost in translation if you don’t speak Portuguese. My Tumblr is mostly pictures because I “só sei lê só as figura”.

Loro (Paolo Sorrentino) - On the topic of languages, I watched this Italian movie with Dutch subtitles, by mistake. It is actually an interesting exercise, watching something without fully grasping every word and letting your mind patch the pieces together to make a coherent narrative. Impressive cinematography, amazing script. I learned a lot about corruption, not everyone has a price. I also learned I can speak Italian now.

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón) - Beautiful shot, every frame of it can be turned into a picture. Roma is about the meaning of family, seen from the eyes of someone who will never be part of it. A lot of people considered this movie boring and pointless. These people probably have maids at home.

Bad Times at the El Royale (Drew Goddard) - Engaging heist movie, well developed characters, amazing soundtrack.

Melancholia (Lars von Trier) - The World is coming to an end and the date and time has been announced. How would you react to these news? Would it matter?

Climax (Gaspar Noé) - A very scary experience, equal parts trippy and evil like all Gaspar Noé’s movies. A dark ballet that that shocks and confuses the senses. Dante’s Inferno.

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold) - A strong story about ambitions, neglect and survival. Katie Jarvis is very realistic in her performance, a little too much judging by her history after the movie.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour) - An Iranian feminist movie about vampirism and records. Watched it with live score from The Black Heart Rebellion for extra cool points.

Another Day of Life (Raul de la Fuente & Damian Nenow) - Based on Ryszard Kapuściński‘s autobiography, Another Day of Life consists of rotoscopic animation sprinkled with interviews. A look at the Cold War in the African continent, and an important watch for everyone, especially Portuguese and Angolan nationals.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino) - Rich in dialogues and paced very slowly until the insane climax, this is probably the best Tarantino film after Pulp Fiction. Filled to the brim with cinematic references, it’s a delight to all film nerds. Looking forward for an Bud Spencer/Terrence Hill film adaption with Leonardo Dicaprio and Brad Pitt after this.

The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine) - Google’s top voted tags: Boring. Mindless. Cringe-Worthy. Forgettable. Slow. Illogical. Looks like this movie didn’t resonate well with the audiences, but then again Harmony Korine’s stuff is not for the masses. I personally think this is one of his best movies, a true exercise on nihilism. The main character is lovable and detestable in equal parts, and every action is pointless. Such is life, the only meaning it has is attributed by yourself.

The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky) - A man reflects on his life. Memories tend to get fuzzy, conflicting and confusing. More like a poem than a narrative. A dreamy masterpiece.

The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice) - The most charming child of this list, she couldn’t memorize the names of the characters she interacted with so they were changed to the names of the actual actors. The innocence of childhood in dark times.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson) - A series of absurd vignettes connected by a pair of novelty items salesmen and their struggle to bring a smile to a grey World. Slow, but humorous and delightful. An unconventional and memorable ride.

Man Bites Dog (Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel & Benoît Poelvoorde) - Fake documentary about a serial killer. Heavy, gruesome and hard to watch, despite the false sense of humor in some scenes.A glimpse at the darkness of human nature.

Tangerine (Sean Baker) - Shot with cell phones. A story about love, gender and friendship. Funny, sad, touching.

The Guilty (Gustav Möller) - Focused on a shift of an emergency dispatcher, the camera focuses only on his face and phone interactions with the callers.A very effective thriller, its setting leads us to create our own narratives just to subvert them at the most unexpected times.

Cold War (Paweł Pawlikowski) - Loosely inspired in Pawlikowski’s parents, Cold War is a beautiful love story set against impossible odds. Powerful and heartbreaking.

Parasite (Bong Joon-ho) - Poor family scams rich family. Rich family takes advantage of poor family. Everybody feeds off of everyone. Drama/Comedy/Thriller/Horror/Romance about control, delivered in a masterclass on cinematic rhythm. Best film of its year for me.

The Straight Story (David Lynch) - More than the fact that this movie is radically different than the remaining Lynch work, The Straight Story is a wonderful exercise in pacing and storytelling. Mr. Straight’s stories allow us to fill in the blanks with our imagination, and their impact in him is also felt in us. An underappreciated gem in its apparent simplicity.

Thank you very much for reading.

#yay me #Movie Recommendation

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