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thequibblah · 3 years

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⭐️ would love some commentary on that dancing scene (or really any commentary on the various parties thrown by the marauders) from the party happening next to the Potions Club party ⭐️

WELL WELL WELL

"This is...a lot of trouble to go to." "It's the Marauders. They love trouble."

i love writing party scenes (as i'm sure you all know lol) and one of the best/worst things w the marauders parties is striking a balance between their, uh, audacious plans, and what's realistically possible at hogwarts without getting caught. (aka literally why i made up the dodgy lodgings). i went back and forth so long on whether or not they could plausibly have managed that with slughorn's dinner next door, but then was like ah whatever the party has to happen for plot reasons so.... plot ex machina??

anyway, i love using parties to establish character — what a brilliant stage of teenage performance they provide. i love contrasting the hogwarts parties to, say, evan wronecki's — for instance, how lily and co. are more at ease in the former, as seventh years, with their classmates hosting, than they were at evan's nye bash

i also love that it gives me space to establish who is and isn't popular, so to speak, but also who acts or doesn't act the way we presume popular kids will act

doe, for instance, who is by all accounts a level-headed and non-wild person, has a more exciting time on net at marauders' parties than mary (drinking game, kissing remus), though she's not a big drinker and isn't really into parties. but she's comfortable in her own little social circle at a bigger event (like with michael at evan's) and so isn't bothered at all by the marauders' do, because...

She did, in fact, trust the Marauders. Her general belief in the inherent goodness of people notwithstanding, she didn't think they would do anything to harm their friends. Intentionally.

this bit always makes me laugh

as with many things, i feel very saddened that i didn't get to make more out of the fools' olympics (although one could argue that The Dance was a pro) — as in, i wish i'd been able to squeeze more of it into the story itself. i could probably come up with a list of tasks and who completed them LOL

WAIT OH MY GOD I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THIS it just might be my favourite part of this chapter

"How did you do that?" Gillian said, glancing between the other two girls. "Just — drink it without a second thought?" "Practice," said Mary. "Scottish — constitution," David said hoarsely. "I once drank some of Mrs. Skower's All-Purpose Magical Mass Remover," said Priya.

priya is all i aspire to be

can i say, too, it's hilarious to me how many people worried niamh would be a james love interest? i feel like you will not rest easy on that count until he and lily are together... but that is not where the danger lies babes

circling back to popularity/unpopularity, another fun outlier. gillian is first established, in 33, as someone with friends (we see her around sara and in the seventh-year ravenclaws' compartment) but she's not exactly at ease at the party either — recall how she hesitates when mary invites her. only later, in 38, do we realise that our opinion of her has been skewed by the narration (from doe, who naturally assumes any friendly, nice person must have a wealth of friends and be floating through life; and mary, who naturally assumes anyone she isn't bored by must have the social skills of a medieval noblewoman at court), and she's a bit of a pariah in her own house

david, on the other hand, is just flat-out not in his element. and not because of the drinking or the, er, general revelry (see: summer with mary!), even though he doesn't partake much in either. unlike doe, the company breaks rather than makes his enjoyment — he's acutely aware, the whole time, that his cooler, more liked brother is around:

"Not your scene?" "What gave it away?" said David drily. As one they looked at Chris...

...and mary has intuited as much too, even though she has a lot more in common, superficially speaking, with chris than david

so, i think while i was writing this chapter i made a post complaining about how, as much as i love juggling the constraints of historical fiction, i hate that music from the 70s limits me in terms of tracklists. i.e., when i say a certain record is playing i can't just hit shuffle and go somewhere entirely different to set the mood shortly thereafter

this problem was because i wanted, NAY, NEEDED, to have "martha my dear" playing in the aftermath of that mary and david interaction. of course, time passes in that section break, but since "come and get it," which they talk about it, is a sirius song (though it could be a mary song), and i feel too strongly about needle drops to let that conversation go without a soundtrack. germaine even correctly guesses the white album is on because of mary:

Apparently Mary got fonder of the White Album the drunker she was.

...and of course the song itself makes me squeal with how very mary it is — not that it is something she would listen to, necessarily, or identify with (it would hold up too close of a mirror, ha), but it sounds like it could've been written about her ("hold your head up, you silly girl/look what you've done/when you find yourself in the thick of it/help yourself to a bit of what is all around you," which really sums up the entirety of her portree holiday, lol)

BUT! if "martha my dear" is to play here, then i have some Serious Chronology Concerns. i knew germeline had to kiss and jily had to dance and ideally in that order. but what would those scenes be soundtracked by!!!! i was limited to side two of the white album!!!

so i did the healthy thing and panic-listened to the white album. "don't pass me by" was, right away, an easy lock for the dance, because it's danceable, but not in a way that would've scared lily off. lyrically, it feels GREAT for jily in this moment, on the cusp of lily's realisation ("waiting for your knock, dear [...] i don't hear it, does it mean you don't love me anymore?" vs OF COURSE "don't pass me by [...] 'cause you know darling, i love only you"). i feel about "don't pass me by" the same way as NYT critic nik cohn: it's "straight ahead and clumsy and greatly enjoyable, backed by a beautiful hurdy-gurdy organ," which, if that isn't everything i wanted to evoke with the dance itself!!!!!!

ok we'll circle back to this, but onward with the musical discussion

thus i had four songs to choose from, between "martha my dear" and "don't pass me by," for the germeline scene — "piggies," "blackbird," "i'm so tired," and "rocky raccoon." the latter is on my sirius playlist, so auto-no; "piggies" is, well, like that, so also a no. "blackbird" is a certified germaine classic that was written personally by paul mccartney for germaine, but it seemed too introspective for the moment. i don't think i'd ever listened to "i'm so tired" before this panicked searching, and honestly it must be some wild luck that it is. just SO RIGHT!!!! it's so lethargic and tortured and angsty and, well, a bit of a stoner song, so.... it's THERE

AND NOW for the dance! true story, i initially wanted jily to have a real conversation, after the party. i had the dance in there and then james would catch up with lily after to be like, "hey i was wrong actually, you should write to petunia." but then i realised i wanted james and sirius to have a conversation about the bike/money, and i wanted it to strike a different chord, tonally, than the jily conversation. then i realised it would be too much to have both and i'd need to condense that conversation into the dance. VERY nearly cut the dance in favour of the conversation but wow i am glad i didn't

The tinkling piano signalled the start of the next song; she extended a hand, very matter-of-factly, to James, "Come on, this is a good one."

not pictured: james having a fucking breakdown

obviously, i could have gone the route of a genuine dramatic dance, but as previously mentioned lily would have chickened out, and i wanted to have this be an experience she could look back on and pine about because of how fun it was and james totally doesn't like her back

Loath as she was to admit it, this most indelicate of waltzes suited the plodding chords of "Don't Pass Me By." And worst of all, once they had stopped stepping on each other's feet James started to sing, in the poorest possible Ringo imitation she had ever heard in her life.

by the way, attentive readers of blink three times will recall:

He finally starts to lead — thank goodness, because she’s not the one who was forced into formal dance lessons as a child...

so in 36, this is james being drunk, but it is also james being silly on purpose because not only is he JAMES and so he must take the mick, he also knows it will put lily at ease

okay, and this bit:

"Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue," they both shouted rather than sang, "'Cause you know darling—" Lily broke off, laughing, dimly aware that she had done so to avoid saying I love only you while staring right at him.

from the FIRST MOMENT i picked out "don't pass me by," i knew i knew I KNEW that lily would have thoughts about this line. at this point in the story if someone questioned her about it she would probably have a full-scale breakdown about her male friends vs her female friends ("but no... i suppose i wouldn't mind saying it to remus.... but that's different!" how is it different, lily? "it's different!")

anyway, the bottom line is she could NOT abide saying it. i enjoyed writing that because 1. same girl and 2. it felt like a nice bit of close foreshadowing for her realisation, which i knew was coming soon. so that's a really circular way of saying, i knew what it meant but ideally to readers it was just oh this will mean something far-off in the future!!! which is usually true for me but SURPRISE babey it was just two chapters away!!!

note btw that lily "falls for james"

Lily spun faster than she’d intended to. The room was a brief, kaleidoscope blur. Then there was James. “Jesus, Evans,” he said, steadying her as the next track began.

>:)

and after i thought tracklists would fuck me up, i turned them into my WEAPON!!

Huffing, she stepped out of his arms. (There were some songs you could sing along to with your mates, and “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” was not one of them.)

(so, you know, keep in mind that for the rest of this conversation, paul is in the background howling "no one will be watching us/why don't we do it in the road?")

also:

"...I’m not drinking tonight, but I’d better get the royal treatment after we win on Saturday."

and then what happened <3

wait jesus oh my god i really went hard on this huh

She only saw its result: the easy grin had given way to an expression so serious it was almost sweet.

LILY??????

and hey, remember when:

...because in chapter 26:

Dex’s measured opinions about the wizarding world seemed more the result of upbringing and inexperience than ill will, but Lily had not expected a radical change of heart.

...but then in 36:

He was right, damn it. And a part of her had known all along, had sought him out expressly so that he would say the opposite thing to her. He’d gone and proven her wrong. She broke the staring match first [...] “What brought on the change of heart?” “It’s a long story, and I expect it’ll have an unsatisfying end if I told it to you.” Lily scoffed, but James had on that maddening grin that meant he would not budge. “Oh, all right.” Softer, she added, “Thank you.” He began to back away, towards the bar. “It’s give and take, Evans.”

in conclusion, i never forget, besties

#i literally had to retype this entire fucking response #i hate tumblr #but anyway #be warned i talk about the beatles :/// in here #ask me #anon #director's cuts #36

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bluewatsons · 3 years

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Claudia Roth Pierpont, A Raised Voice: How Nina Simone turned the movement into music, The New Yorker (August 4, 2014)

Simone with James Baldwin in the early sixties. Her intelligence and restless force attracted African-American culture’s finest minds. Photograph courtesy New York Public Library

“My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd. “And one of the women’s hair,” she instructed, brushing her hand lightly across her own woolly Afro, “is like mine.” Every performance of “Four Women” caught on film (as here) or disk is different. Sometimes Simone coolly chants the first three women’s parts—the effect is of resigned weariness—and at other times, as on this particular night, she gives each woman an individual, sharply dramatized voice. All four have names. Aunt Sarah is old, and her strong back has allowed her only “to take the pain inflicted again and again.” Sephronia’s yellow skin and long hair are the result of her rich white father having raped her mother—“Between two worlds I do belong”—and Sweet Thing, a prostitute, has tan skin and a smiling bravado that seduced at least some of the eager Dutch listeners into the mistake of smiling, too. And then Simone hit them with the last and most resolutely up to date of the women, improbably named Peaches. “My skin is brown,” she growled ferociously, “my manner is tough. I’ll kill the first mother I see. ’Cause my life has been rough.” (One has to wonder what the Dutch made of killing that “mother.”) If Simone’s song suggests a history of black women in America, it is also a history of long-suppressed and finally uncontainable anger.

A lot of black women have been openly angry these days over a new movie about Simone’s life, and it hasn’t even been released. The issue is color, and what it meant to Simone to be not only categorically African-American but specifically African in her features and her very dark skin. Is it possible to separate Simone’s physical characteristics, and what they cost her in this country, from the woman she became? Can she be played by an actress with less distinctively African features, or a lighter skin tone? Should she be played by such an actress? The casting of Zoe Saldana, a movie star of Dominican descent and a light-skinned beauty along European lines, has caused these questions—rarely phrased as questions—to dog the production of “Nina,” from the moment Saldana’s casting was announced to the completed film’s début, at Cannes, in May, at a screening confined to possible distributors. No reviewers have seen it. The film’s director, Cynthia Mort, has been stalwart in her defense of Saldana’s rightness for the role, citing not only the obvious relevance of acting skills but Simone’s inclusion of a range of colors among her own “Four Women”—which is a fair point. None of the women in Simone’s most personal and searing song escape the damage and degradation accorded to their race.

Ironically, “Four Women” was charged with being insulting to black women and was banned on a couple of radio stations in New York and Philadelphia soon after the recording was released, in 1966. The ban was lifted, however, when it produced more outrage than the song. Simone’s husband, Andrew Stroud, who was also her manager, worried about the dangers that the controversy might have for her career, although this was hardly a new problem. Simone had been singing out loud and clear about civil rights since 1963—well after the heroic stand of figures like Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr., but still at a time when many black performers felt trapped between the rules of commercial success and the increasing pressure for racial confrontation. At Motown, in the early sixties, the wildly popular performers of a stream of crossover hits became models of black achievement but had virtually no contact with the movement at all.

Simone herself had been hesitant at first. Known for her sophisticated pianism, her imperious attitude, and her velvety rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” (which, like Billie Holiday before her, she sang without the demeaningly ungrammatical “s” on “loves”), she had arrived in New York in late 1958, establishing her reputation not in Harlem but in the clubs of hip and relatively interracial Greenwich Village. Her repertoire of jazz and folk and show tunes, often played with a classical touch, made her impossible to classify. In these early years, she performed African songs but also Hebrew songs, and wove a Bach fugue through a rapid-fire version of “Love Me or Leave Me.” She tossed off the thirties bauble “My Baby Just Cares for Me” with airy insouciance, and wrung the heart out of the lullaby “Brown Baby”—newly written by Oscar Brown, Jr., about a family’s hopes for a child born into a better racial order—erupting in a hair-raising wail on the word “freedom,” as though registering all the pain over all the years during which it was denied. For a while, “Brown Baby” was as close to a protest song as Simone got. She believed it was enough.

And then her friend Lorraine Hansberry set her straight. It speaks to Simone’s intelligence and restless force that, in her twenties, she attracted some of African-American culture’s finest minds. Both Langston Hughes and James Baldwin elected themselves mentors: Simone, appearing on the scene just as Holiday died, seemed to evoke their most exuberant hopes and most protective instincts. But Hansberry offered her a special bond. A young woman also dealing with a startling early success—Hansberry was twenty-eight when “A Raisin in the Sun” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, in 1959—she had a strongly cultivated black pride and a pedagogical bent. “We never talked about men or clothes,” Simone wrote in her memoir, decades later. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.” A milestone in Simone’s career was a solo concert at Carnegie Hall—a happy chance to show off her pianism—on April 12, 1963, which happened also to be the day that Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested with other protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, and locked up in the local jail. The discrepancy between the events was pointed out by Hansberry, who telephoned Simone after the concert, although not to offer praise.

Two months later, Simone played a benefit for the N.A.A.C.P. In early August, she sang “Brown Baby” before a crowd gathered in the football stadium of a black college outside Birmingham—the first integrated concert ever given in the area—while guards with guns and dogs prowled the field. But Hansberry only started a process that events in America quickly accelerated. Simone watched the March on Washington, later that August, on television, while she was preparing for a club date. She was still rehearsing when, on September 15th, news came of the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young African-American girls who had just got out of Bible class. Simone’s first impulsive act, she recalled, was to try to make a zip gun with tools from her garage. “I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone,” she wrote. “I didn’t yet know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people.”

This urge to violence was not a wholly aberrant impulse but something that had been brewing on a national scale, however tamped down by cooler heads and political pragmatists. At the Washington march, John Lewis, then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was forced to cut the word “revolution” from his speech and to omit the threat that, absent immediate progress, the marchers would go through the South “the way Sherman did” and “burn Jim Crow to the ground.” James Baldwin, in a televised discussion after the bombing, noted that, throughout American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.” But the center held. Simone’s husband, a smart businessman, told her to forget the gun and put her rage into her music.

It took her an hour to write “Mississippi Goddam.” A freewheeling cri de coeur based on the place names of oppression, the song has a jaunty tune that makes an ironic contrast with words—“Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee made me lose my rest”—that arose from injustices so familiar they hardly needed to be stated: “And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” Still, Simone spelled them out. She mocked stereotypical insults (“Too damn lazy!”), government promises (“Desegregation / Mass participation”), and, above all, the continuing admonition of public leaders to “Go slow,” a line that prompted her backup musicians to call out repeatedly, as punctuation, “Too slow!” It wasn’t “We Shall Overcome” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Simone had little feeling for the Biblically inflected uplift that defined the anthems of the era. It’s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the American future: “Oh but this whole country is full of lies,” she sang. “You’re all gonna die and die like flies.”

She introduced the song in a set at the Village Gate a few days later. And she sang it at a very different concert at Carnegie Hall, in March, 1964—brazenly flinging “You’re all gonna die” at a mostly white audience—along with other protest songs she had taken a hand in writing, including the defiantly jazzy ditty “Old Jim Crow.” She also performed a quietly haunting song titled “Images,” about a black woman’s inability to see her own beauty (“She thinks her brown body has no glory”)—a wistful predecessor to “Four Women” that she had composed to words by the Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney. At the time, Simone herself was still wearing her hair in a harshly straightened fifties-style bob—sometimes the small personal freedoms are harder to speak up for than the larger political ones—and, clearly, it wasn’t time yet for such specifically female injuries to take their place in the racial picture. “Mississippi Goddam” was the song of the moment: bold and urgent and easy to sing, it was adopted by embattled protesters in the cursed state itself just months after Simone’s concert, during what they called the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, and what President Johnson called “the summer of our discontent.”

There was no looking back by the time she performed the song outside Montgomery, Alabama, in March, 1965, when some three thousand marchers were making their way along the fifty-four-mile route from Selma; two weeks earlier, protesters making the same attempt had been driven back by state troopers with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The triumphant concert, on the fourth night of the march, was organized by the indefatigable Belafonte, at the request of King, and took place on a makeshift stage built atop stacks of empty coffins lent by local funeral homes, and in front of an audience that had swelled with twenty-five thousand additional people, drawn either by the cause or by a lineup of stars that ranged from Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis to Joan Baez. Simone, accompanied only by her longtime guitarist, Al Schackman, drew cheers on the interpolated line “Selma made me lose my rest.” In the course of events that night, she was introduced to King, and Schackman remembered that she stuck her hand out and warned him, “I’m not nonviolent!” It was only when King replied, gently, “Not to worry, sister,” that she calmed down.

Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone never put many records on the charts, but people flocked to her shows. In 1966, the critic for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American newspaper, explained that to hear Simone sing “is to be brought into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat there.” She was proclaimed the voice of the movement not by Martin Luther King but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose Black Power philosophy answered to her own experience and inclinations. As the sixties progressed, the feelings she displayed—pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge—made her seem at times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.

She recalled that racial anger first arose in her when she was eleven. Born Eunice Waymon, in 1933, she was the sixth of eight children of John and Kate Waymon, who were descendants of slaves and pillars of the small black community of Tryon, North Carolina. Her mother was a Methodist preacher, a severely religious woman who made extra money by cleaning house for a white Tryon family; her father, who had started off as an entertainer, worked at whatever the circumstances required. Even during the Depression, the Waymons made a good home. Simone’s earliest memories were of her mother singing hymns, and both the house and the church were so filled with music that no one noticed little Eunice climbing up to the organ bench until, at the age of two and a half, she played “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” straight through.

Yet as rare as the little girl’s musical gifts is the way that, in that time and place, those gifts were encouraged. She began playing for her mother’s sermons before her feet could reach the pedals, and was soon accompanying the church choir and Sunday services. She especially enjoyed playing for visiting revivalists, because of the raptures she discovered that she could loose in an audience with music. At the other end of the spectrum, she was five years old when the woman for whom her mother cleaned house offered to pay for lessons with a local piano teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich. The British-born Miz Mazzy, as Eunice called her—and also, later on, “my white momma”—inspired her love of Bach and her plans to become a great and famous classical pianist. Giving a recital in the local library, at eleven, Eunice saw her parents being removed from their front-row seats to make room for a white couple. She had been schooled by Miz Mazzy in proper deportment, but she nevertheless stood up and announced that if people wanted to hear her play they’d better let her parents sit back down in the front row. There were some laughs, but her parents were returned to their seats. The next day, she remembered, she felt “as if I had been flayed, and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But, the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.”

Her skin was very black, and she was made fully aware of that, along with the fact that her nose was too large. The aesthetics of race—and the loathing and self-loathing inflicted on those who vary from accepted standards of beauty—is one of the most pervasive aspects of racism, yet it is not often discussed. The standards have been enforced by blacks as well as by whites. Even Harry Belafonte wrote, in his memoir, about his mother’s well-intentioned counsel to “marry a woman with good hair,” and he added, in unnecessary clarification, “Good hair meant straight hair.” (Reader, he married her.) But Nina Simone, strong and fierce and proud Nina Simone? “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” she wrote in a note to herself, not during her adolescence but in the years when she was already a successful performer. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.”

Countering the charge of physical inferiority, in her youth, was the talent that her mother assured her was God-given. Music was her salvation, her identity. Thanks to a fund established by a pair of generous white patrons in Tryon, she was sent to board at a private high school—she practiced piano five hours a day, and graduated valedictorian—and then to a summer program at Juilliard, all with the unwavering aim of getting into the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, where admission was terrifically competitive but tuition was free. Her destiny seemed so assured that her parents moved to Philadelphia before she took the Curtis exam. The fact that she was rejected, and believed that this was because of her race, was a source of unending bitterness. It was also a turning point. In the summer of 1954, in need of money, Eunice Waymon took a job playing cocktail piano in an Atlantic City dive—the owner demanded that she also sing—and, hoping to keep the news of this unholy employment from her mother, turned herself into Nina Simone, feeling every right to the anger that Nina Simone displayed forever after.

At times, it seemed that she could outdistance her feelings. In 1961, after a brief marriage to a white hanger-on at the Atlantic City club, she married Stroud, a tough police detective on the Harlem beat whom she initially sized up as “a light-skinned man,” “well built,” and “very sure of himself.” The following year, she gave birth to a daughter, Lisa Celeste, and Stroud left his job to manage Simone’s career; they lived in a large house in the leafy Westchester suburb of Mount Vernon, complete with a gardener and a maid. Although she complained of working too hard and touring too much—of being desperately exhausted—her life was not the stuff of the blues. And then, before a concert in early 1967, Stroud found her in her dressing room putting makeup in her hair. She didn’t know who he was; she didn’t quite know who she was. She later remembered that she had been trying to get her hair to match her skin: “I had visions of laser beams and heaven, with skin—always skin—involved in there somewhere.”

The full medical facts of Simone’s mental illness became public only after her death, in 2003, thanks to two British fan-club founders and friends of Simone’s, Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan, whose account of the singer’s career was aptly titled, after one of Simone’s songs, “Nina Simone: Break Down & Let It All Out” (2004). Subsequent biographies—the warmly overdramatizing “Nina Simone,” by David Brun-Lambert (2009), and the coolly meticulous “Princess Noire,” by Nadine Cohodas (2010)—have filled in terrible details of depression and violence and long-sought but uncertain diagnoses: “bipolar disorder” appears to be the best contemporary explanation. Excerpts from Simone’s diaries and letters of the nineteen-sixties, published by Joe Hagan (who got them from Andrew Stroud) in The Believer, in 2010, added the news that Simone’s personal hell was compounded by regular beatings from Stroud. The marriage dissolved in 1970, but it was many more years before she received any helpful medication.

All the more remarkable, then, the strength that Simone projected through the sixties. As the decade wore on, she began to favor bright African gowns and toweringly braided African hair styles; she became the High Priestess of Soul, and though the title was no more than a record company’s P.R. gambit—Aretha Franklin was soon crowned the Queen of Soul—she bore it with conviction. It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that her songs were mostly about civil rights. Stroud, with his eye on the bottom line, was always there to keep her from going too far in that direction. In concert, she even pulled back on “Mississippi Goddam,” singing “We’re all gonna die, and die like flies” in place of the gleefully threatening “You’re all gonna die . . .” Although she did record the classic anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” in 1965, and she could give the most unexpected songs an edge of racial protest (listen to her harrowing version of the Brecht-Weill “Pirate Jenny”), she had a vast and often surprising musical appetite. By the late sixties, she was so afraid of falling behind the times that she expanded her repertory to include Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, and, covering all bases, the Bee Gees. One of her biggest hits of the era was the joyously innocuous “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life,” from the musical “Hair”—which, in her hands, became a classic freedom song.

But womanly strength was in everything she sang: in the cavernous depths of her voice—some people think Simone sounds like a man—in her intensity, her drama, her determination. It’s there in the crazy love song “I Put a Spell on You,” in which she recasts the crippling needs of love (“Because you’re mine!”) into an undeniable command. It’s there in the ten-minute gospel tour de force “Sinnerman,” when she cries out “Power!” like a Southern preacher and her musicians shout back “Power to the Lord!,” and especially when she takes the disapproving voice of the Lord upon herself: “Where were you, when you oughta been praying?” If you’d never before thought of the Lord as a black woman, you did now.

The civil-rights songs were nevertheless what she called “the important ones.” And the movement is where she gained her strength. It’s also where her private anger took on public dimensions, in the years when patience gave way entirely and the anger in many black communities could no longer be tamped down. Onstage in Detroit, on August 13, 1967—two weeks after a five-day riot had left forty-three people dead, hundreds injured, and the city in ruins—Simone, singing “Just in Time,” added a message to the crowd: “Detroit, you did it. . . . I love you, Detroit—you did it!” She was met with roars of approval, which one Detroit critic said he presumed had come from “the arsonists, looters and snipers in the audience.” Another critic, however, wrote that her show let white people know what they had to learn, and learn fast. Was she the voice of national tragedy or of the next American revolution?

And then King was shot, on April 4, 1968. Sections of Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and more than a hundred smaller cities went berserk. Despite her rhetoric, Simone was profoundly shaken, and her views of what might be accomplished in this country only grew more bleak. At an outdoor concert in Harlem, the following summer—it’s available on YouTube—she went for broke.

Majestically bedecked à l’africaine, she opened with “Four Women,” singing now before a crowd where an Afro was the norm. After several other stirring, politically focussed songs—“Revolution,” “Backlash Blues”—she closed with something so new that she had not had time to learn it, a poem by David Nelson, who was then part of a group called the Last Poets and is now among the revered begetters of rap. She read the words from a sheet of paper, moving across the stage and repeatedly exhorting the crowd to answer the question “Are you ready, black people? . . . Are you ready to do what is necessary?” The crowd responded to this rather vague injunction with a mild cheer, prompted by the bongos behind her and the demand in her voice. And then: “Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” Now a bigger, if somewhat incongruous, cheer rose from the smiling crowd filled with little kids dancing to the rhythm on a sunny afternoon. It had been five years since the Harlem riot of 1964, the granddaddy of sixties riots; New York had largely escaped the ruinations of both 1967 and 1968. “Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?” she cried. “Are you ready to build black things?”

Despite her best efforts, Simone failed to incite a riot in Harlem that day in 1969. The crowd received the poem as it had received her songs: with noisy affirmation, but merely as part of a performance. People applauded and went on their way. There are many possible reasons: no brutal incident of the kind that frequently set off riots, massive weariness, the knowledge of people elsewhere trapped in riot-devastated cities, maybe even hope. Simone had her unlikeliest hit that year with a simple hymn of promise, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” based on the title of a play that had been put together from Lorraine Hansberry’s uncollected writings. Hansberry, who died in 1965, had used the phrase in a speech to a group of prize-winning black students, and Simone asked a fellow-musician, Weldon Irvine, to come up with lyrics that “will make black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever.” Indeed, it is a children’s song (or it was, until Aretha took it over). Simone’s most moving performance may have been on “Sesame Street,” where she sat on the set’s tenement steps wearing an African gown and lip-synched her recording to four enchanting if slightly mystified black children, who raised their arms in victory toward the end.

It was not a victory she could believe in or a mood she could sustain. By the end of the sixties, both Simone’s career and her marriage were in serious trouble. Pop-rock did not really suit her, and the jazz and folk markets had radically shrunk; the concert stage still assured her income and her stature. And if the collapse of her marriage was in some ways a liberation she was also now without the person who had managed her finances and her schedule, and who had kept her calm before she went onstage (by forbidding her alcohol, among other means), and got her offstage quickly when the calm failed. She was left to govern herself in a world that suddenly had no rules and, just as frightening, was emptied of its larger, steadying purpose. “Andy was gone and the movement had walked out on me too,” she wrote, “leaving me like a seduced schoolgirl, lost.”

Looking back on the historic protests and legislative victories of the sixties, one may find it easy to assume a course of inevitable if often halting racial progress, yet this was anything but apparent as the decade closed. When, in 1970, James Baldwin set out to write about “the life and death of what we call the Civil Rights movement,” its failure seemed to him beyond contention. As for the black leaders who had “walked out” on Simone, they were in cemeteries (Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, King, Fred Hampton), in jail (Huey Newton, Bobby Seale), or in Africa (Stokely Carmichael), or else had “run for cover,” as she put it, “in community or academic programmes.” White liberals had diverted their efforts to Vietnam; this was now the war being fought on televisions in living rooms every night. According to Simone, “The days when revolution really had seemed possible were gone forever.”

She left the country in 1974. Travelling to Liberia with her twelve-year-old daughter, she stayed for two years, during which she performed hardly at all. She left Liberia for Switzerland in order to put her daughter in school there. Eventually, she moved to France, alone. It seems to have been only the recurrent need for money that spurred her to perform again in the United States, although she took great pride in an honorary doctorate that she received from Amherst, in 1977, and insisted ever after on being called “Doctor Nina Simone.” Meanwhile, her concerts tended increasingly toward disaster. As she now sang in “Mississippi Goddam,” “the whole damn world’s made me lose my rest.”

The remainder of her life, some twenty-five years, is a tale of escalating misery. At the worst, she was found wandering naked in a hotel corridor brandishing a knife; she set her house in France on fire, and once, also in France, she shot a teen-age boy (in the leg, but that may have been poor aim) in a neighbor’s back yard for making too much noise—and for answering her complaints with what she understood as racial insults. Yet the ups of her life could be almost as vertiginous as the downs. In 1987, just a year after she was sent to a hospital in a straitjacket, her charmingly upbeat 1959 recording of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was chosen by Chanel for its international television ad campaign. Rereleased, the record went gold in France and platinum in England. In 1991, she sold out the Olympia, in Paris, for almost a week.

She toured widely during her final years. In Seattle, in the summer of 2001, she worked a tirade against George W. Bush into “Mississippi Goddam,” and encouraged the audience to “go and do something about that man.” She was already suffering from breast cancer, but it wasn’t the worst illness she had known. She was seen as a relic of the civil-rights era, and on occasion she even led the audience in a wistful sing-along of “We Shall Overcome,” although she did not believe her country had overcome nearly enough. Once she became too sick to perform, she did not return to what she called “the United Snakes of America.” She died in France, in April, 2003; her ashes were scattered in several African countries. The most indelible image of her near the end is as a stooped old lady reacting to the enthusiastic cheers that greeted her with a raised, closed-fisted Black Power salute.

Thirty-four years after Simone released “Young, Gifted and Black,” Jay Z reused the title for a song that describes the fate of many of those gifted children—“Hear all the screams from the ghetto all the teens ducking metal”—in twenty-first-century America. The rap connection with Simone is hardly surprising, since rap is where black anger now openly resides. Simone disliked the rap she knew, however, in part for displacing so much anger onto women—or, as she put it, for “letting people believe that women are second class, and calling them bitches and stuff like that.” Back in 1996, Lauryn Hill rapped an anything-you-can-do retort to a male counterpart, “So while you imitatin’ Al Capone / I be Nina Simone / And defecatin’ on your microphone,” but no one has really taken up the challenge of Simone’s example. There was a minor uproar last year over Kanye West’s sampling of phrases from Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit” (with her voice speeded up to an unrecognizable tinniness) in “Blood on the Leaves,” in which Simone’s evocation of lynched black bodies is juxtaposed with West’s personal concerns about “second string bitches,” cocaine, and the cost of paying off a baby mama versus a new Mercedes. Some people have seen a social statement here, but one can’t help recalling Simone’s broader reaction to rap: “Hell, Martin and Malcolm would turn in their graves if they heard some of this crazy shit.”

As for jazz, Simone was largely excluded from the history books for decades. Will Friedwald’s seminal “Jazz Singing,” of 1990, mentioned her only in passing, as “off-putting and uncommunicative” and as the center of a cult “that only her faithful understand.” But Simone’s eclecticism has slowly widened the very definition of jazz singing. And, ever since Presidential candidate Obama listed her version of “Sinnerman” as one of his ten favorite songs of all time, in 2008, the cult has gone mainstream. There’s now a burgeoning field of what may be called Simone studies—Ruth Feldstein’s “How It Feels to Be Free” and Richard Elliott’s “Nina Simone” offer two highly intelligent examples—and Friedwald’s even more authoritative volume of 2010, “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,” includes a lengthy entry on Simone that pronounces her “more important than anyone” in her influence on twenty-first-century jazz singing.

Last year, two Broadway shows depicted Simone as an inspiration for a couple of unexpected figures: in “A Night with Janis Joplin,” she helped to provide her white soul sister with the gift of fire, and, even stranger, in the crude but enthusiastic “Soul Doctor”—which reopens Off Broadway this winter—she was the force behind the “rock-and-roll rabbi” Shlomo Carlebach. Nutty as it seemed onstage, Simone’s acquaintance with the rabbi appears to have some basis in fact, and helps to explain the Hebrew songs she performed at the Village Gate (where he also performed) in the early sixties. While it may be a show-biz exaggeration to suggest that the rabbi and the jazz singer had an affair—the show featured an Act I curtain clinch that, on the night I saw it, had its largely Orthodox audience literally gasping—the point was the universality of Simone’s message about persecution, the search for justice, and the power of music.

Back in 1979, at a concert in Philadelphia, Simone followed a performance of “Four Women” by scolding the black women in the audience about their changes in style: “You used to be talking about being natural and wearing natural hair styles. Now you’re straightening your hair, rouging your cheeks and dressing out of Vogue.” In 2009, the comedian Chris Rock made a documentary titled “Good Hair” because, he explained, his young daughter had come to him with the question “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” For an African-American child, nothing had changed since Harry Belafonte’s mother’s advice, more than half a century earlier. (According to one contented businessman in Rock’s film, African-Americans—twelve per cent of the population—buy eighty per cent of the hair products in this country.) As for skin tone, the cosmetic companies have been expanding their range ever since Iman established a line of darker foundations, in 1994, although in March, 2014, a former beauty director of Essence, Aretha Busby, complained to the Times,“The companies tend to stop at Kerry Washington. I’d love to see brands go two or three shades darker.”

The question of skin tone and hair and their meaning for African-American women exploded on the Internet with the announcement of the casting of Saldana in the Hollywood bio-pic about Simone. When the idea for such a film was initially floated, in the early nineties, Simone herself gave the nod to being played by Whoopi Goldberg. When, in 2010, the present film was announced in the Hollywood Reporter, Mary J. Blige—the reigning Queen of Hip-Hop Soul—was announced for the lead. Once Blige was replaced with Saldana, however, a woman whose skin tone is more than two or three shades lighter than Simone’s, the cries for boycotting the film on the basis of misrepresentation—on the basis of insult—were instantaneous. Why not cast Viola Davis? Or Jennifer Hudson? Production photographs showing Saldana on the set with an artificially broadened nose, an Afro wig, and—inevitably, but most unfortunately—dark makeup that is all too easily confoundable with blackface rendered any hope of calm discussion futile. It’s been suggested that the filmmakers might as well have cast Tyler Perry in full “Madea” drag.

Simone’s daughter has come out against the film because its story focusses on an invented love affair as much as for the casting of Saldana, although she is quick to point out how much her mother’s appearance shaped her life. (Lisa once told an interviewer that her mother would sometimes “traumatize” her because she is light-skinned—“and I’d remind her that she had chosen my father, I didn’t.”) The fight over the film ultimately extended to a lawsuit filed by the director, Cynthia Mort, against the British production company, Ealing Studios Enterprises, on the very eve of the screening at Cannes. Since then, though, the suit has been dismissed, so “Nina” may yet show up in a theatre near you. And Saldana may give a compelling performance—may well prove that she can play not only women who are sci-fi blue (as in “Avatar”) or green (as in “Guardians of the Galaxy”) but real-life black. Still, there is no escaping the fact that her casting represents exactly the sort of prejudice that Simone was always up against. “I was never on the cover of Ebony or Jet,” Simone told an interviewer, in 1980. “They want white-looking women like Diana Ross—light and bright.” Or, as Marc Lamont Hill writes in Ebony today, “There is no greater evidence of how tragic things are for dark-skinned women in Hollywood than the fact that they can’t even get hired to play dark-skinned women.” Well beyond Hollywood, these outworn habits of taste reverberate down the generations, infecting all of us.

Simone’s favorite performer in her later years was Michael Jackson. She brought cassettes of his albums with her everywhere, and recalled having met him on a plane when he was a little boy, and telling him, “Don’t let them change you. You’re black and you’re beautiful.” She anguished over his evident failure to believe what she’d said: the facial surgeries, the mysterious lightening of his skin, the fatality of believing, instead, what the culture had told him, and wanting to be white. Simone appeared onstage with him just once, amid a huge cast of performers gathered for Nelson Mandela’s eightieth birthday, in Johannesburg, in the summer of 1998. She was sixty-five years old, and photographs of the event show her standing between Mandela and Jackson, overweight yet glamorously done up, her hair piled in braids and her strapless white blouse a contrast to the African costumes of the chorus all around. But she was also very frail. In one photograph, Jackson—in his glittering trademark military-style jacket, hat, and shades—holds her left hand in both his hands, in a gesture of affection. But in another shot he has put one steadying arm around her, and she is grasping his hand for support. Few people seem aware of what is happening. The stage remains a swirl of laughter and song, a joyous African celebration. And at its center the two Americans stand with hands clasped tight—one hand notably dark, the other notably fair—as though trying to help each other along a hard and endless road.

#nina simone #greats #performing artists #civil rights #embodiment #culture #the black experience #art #music #self-expression #self-image #civil rights movement

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friisans · 5 years

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Ok, so this question might take some thinking if you havent already planned it out, though odds are you have, but what magical abilities to each of the kids in AlterTale have?

I did when I posted the kiddos for the first time, but it was pretty brief so… *activates Tangent Mode™*

Berlin

Orange fire: He’s phenomenally gifted at wielding it. From heatwaves, to fireballs, to fire-nados, to fire manipulation (as in, being able to control fire that he didn’t create), to being partially fire-resistant (as in, he doesn’t burn easily), to just about anything else that has to do with fire.

Blue Fire: His blue flames have the same capabilities as his orange flames, but they’re 3x more destructive because his blue flames are linked to the powerful blue magic he inherited from his dad, a bossmonster. However, it requires a lot more energy to summon than his orange flames, so Berlin prefers not to wield them as to avoid straining himself.

Bones: He’s fairly good at wielding his bones, but gets abit jealous when his old man, although in good fun, one-ups him every now and then.

Blue Mode: Allows him to manipulate gravity and levitate objects. Can also use the Special Attack.

Orange Mode: Allows him to move at extremely high speeds, as well as being able to force others to do the same.

Teleportation: He has the ability to teleport just about anywhere, but could use abit more practice to avoid getting lost (true story).

Dreemurr Beamers: Can only summon up to 3 at one time. Will increase as he becomes older.

STATE: Berlin reaches Critical Mass™. As in, both his blue flames and bone abilities reach Maximum Power™ and is also able to summon up to 10 or more Beamers at once. This level of power Berlin’s able to reach has something to do with Asriel. I’m not sure how (yet), but it does. However, as soon as he exits STATE, his body will go into a ‘forced shutdown’ and will enter an extremely deep slumber for up to 24 hours, depending on how long he was withing STATE. He cannot be woken up during this time, so in the event this happens, he must be kept someplace safe to sleep.

Dayne

Spears: His orange spears are strong, fast, and if he lands a direct hit, chances are you won't be getting back up. He can summon them to be anywhere from 3ft-8ft long, and they’re virtually unbreakable. He can throw them directly using his hands, or just send them flying without any assistance.

Orange Fire: He can wield it, but he’s not as skilled as Berlin. Additionally, his orange flames are weaker than his cousin’s and really only uses his flames to compliment his spears.

Green Fire: They’re similar to his orange fire, but is approximately 3x more destructive than his orange flames and require more energy to wield. But because Dayne is substantially more durable and physically capable than Berlin, wielding his Green Flames is hardly an issue for him. However, the strength of his green flames are equivalent to that of Berlin’s standard orange flames. These flames are also linked to his mother's soul color, which is green.

Orange Mode: Allows him to move at extremely high speeds, as well as being able to force others to do the same.

Physical Strength: Highly abnormal for someone his size and age, and it’ll only increase as he gets older. He can shatter large objects as dense as boulders, cinderblocks, and concrete walls with little effort, but only if he’s exerting the power necessary to do so. During practice or boxing matches, he suppresses this side of his brute strength and relies solely on pure skill and normal strength to win.

Semi-Aquatic: He’s a fantastic swimmer. Fast, sleek, and can breathe underwater for an unlimited amount of time (due to the gills he inherited from his mother).

Dreemurr Beamers: Unknown.

Eras

Bones: She’s highly competent with her bone powers, so much so that Berlin’s sometimes asking her for pointers on how to perform some of her bone tricks because her skills are truly impressive. Though sometimes, you’ll find her using her powers to scare him and Dayne into not acting like fools half the time.

Blue Mode: Allows her to manipulate gravity and levitate objects. Can also use the Special Attack.

Weaponry: She can wield swords, knives, and other sharp objects. She sort of gained an attraction towards them after strangely being drawn to the toy knives in her toy kitchens and tea party sets when she was a toddler. And then really became interested when she watched her mother practicing with her sword one day (as leisure and a means to keep in shape, nothing more). And eventually, this sweet little daddy’s girl became a sweet little daddy’s girl that could put an armed, 10ft intruder in the hospital (in critical condition) with a pocket knife.

Dissociation: Because she’s half-ghost she can separate from her corporeal body, but only for up to 48hrs. She must return to her physical body (or any suitable, unused vessel she can find) before that time runs out, otherwise, she’ll disappear.

Fame and Fortune

Spider Control: Can control spiders of all kinds via invisible brainwaves they emit throughout their surroundings. However, these waves can only reach a radius of 500ft.

Purple Mode: Forces others to move only in a horizontal direction (either left or right).

Dissociation: The twins are also half-ghost, so they can separate from their corporal bodies and become ghosts, but only for up to 48hrs. They must return to their physical bodies (or any suitable, unused vessel they can find) before that time runs out, otherwise, they’ll disappear.

Retractable Limbs: Because they carry their mother’s gene for multiple limbs, they can grow or retract an extra set of 2 arms (left and right) underneath their first set. Think of Stitch from Lilo&Stitch.

Firearms: Since reaching the surface, their dad found little use for the boxier version of himself and had it (and all the explosive firearms built for it) safely stored away in a place on the farthest end of the mansion, well secluded and needing a passcode to enter. However, the twins one day discovered the lonely door while playing hide and seek. But since they had no clue how to open it, they thought nothing of it and it was eventually forgotten. Fastfoward a couple years later and they realized it needed a password, and after days of sneaking over to the door to try out passcodes, they finally guessed it: the date their parents got married. Since then, they’ve been sneaking inside to familiarize themselves with all their dad’s cool (and potentially dangerous) gadgets while managing to not blow a whole in the wall. And with their newly peaked interest, they decided to buy books on how to use and assemble various kinds of guns and other firearms (they’d love to have the real deal simply for show, but even spoiled children like them know not go anywhere near that subject).

Spider Pets:

Muffet’s monsterpet (their name is Cinnamon in AT) had twins of their own (Sugar & Spice) who were introduced to Fame and Fortune on their 3rd birthdays, and the pairs bonded instantly. They were no bigger than the twins at the time, but grew as time went on. They’re very sweet and tame and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless the twins ask them to. Then they’ll hurt lots of flies. The twins can also summon them at anytime and from anywhere.

Sugar: Fortune’s monsterpet.

Spice: Fame’s monsterpet.

Purrla

She may not have any magical abilities like her best friends do, but is a natural born gymnast (which is magical in and of itself tbh). She’s impressive, and all those flips and tricks you see gymnasts doing during the Olympics is what Purrla’s all about. Additionally, she has dangerously sharp claws that she’ll slip out if she feels threatened or is catching herself after a slip or fall.

Abilities: She can perform all kinds of flips, can leap/pounce high and far, has acute nimbleness, and she’s great at making parkour look easy.

#at:ng!chat #every single one of them could kill a man if they wanted to #even Purrla #and i love them #also a lot of this is extremely offtopic so read at your risk my dudes

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firmanep · 6 years

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28/28 Vision: Retrace

28/28 vision, life’s been hit me with precision. I’ve seen both ways, mourn and defeat at the bottom in one side, glory and prosper in the other. I choose to live on and keep 27 years back on my head. At 28 I begin to realize that everyone walk their own path, with their own pace. All of sudden, the meaning of success, settle, stand-on-your-feet, etc dissolve into thin air.

Nor, this doesn’t mean those words and its meaning is nothing but perception. Yet it’s a word of progress, everything in life is on process not an unchanged or fix terms. To make it clearer, I simply put it on my case. I wouldn’t say that I’m a success or failure person if I see this on my own perspective not others. What I trying to do is put those terms not in binary opposition. But in a life line terms. Life line is a sum of all variable in life. They are time, space, body, mind, money, social, career, relationship, sex, etc. So let’s put it in practice, I using “age” as metric. In example, at 27 YO I get a job promotion, start a mortgage, not in a relationship, feeling numb, stretching my financial belt, 58.000 hours listening music, etc.

Looking back farther than a year, I see myself rolling in a rollercoaster adventurous life. At 5 my parents enroll me to primary school in assume I “a slight smarter” than my counterparts. So I’m 1-2 year younger than my primary school friend age average. Yet instead accelerated in academics, my passion in football is stronger. So, it swiped the whole 6 years in primary. I won several trophy, even my profile been written on local newspaper as “bintang cilik”.

My career in football stop when I get into junior HS. Some shit happened at that time, my sister passed, family breakup, I move to my granny house, join a motorcycle gang, and drunk for the first time. That’s all more than enough to put a stamp in my face as “a broken home little shit”. But fortunately I found another passion, music. I start collecting cassette since at class 5 primary school. For local act i listened to Sheila on 7 generation band. Then I start a band, which then I ditched by because my “musical taste”.

Fuck, thanks to MTV After School Rock, so I bit move from locals and see global. At JHS I listened to hipmetal acts like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park for a brief of time. Till I really struck on Warped Tour bands like Blink 182, Sum 41, New Found Glory, etc. Because of the rarity of the cassette, I start digging music at 2nd hand cassette dweller. From which I got more recommendation, so I begin listen to more “edgy” bands like MXPX, NOFX, No Use For a Name, and local indie bands like Nudist Island and Buckskin Bugle. So almost all my “pocket money” at JHS went off to buy cassette. Oh wait! I get my first and second girlfriends on JHS. LMAO.

So, half of my JHS I spent as a member of “packed gang” (in motorcycle gang and in a band), and the last half I spent by myself, walking around finding cassette. My last year in JHS been so frustrating, I don’t have much friends because they left me/or in opposite, so i don’t see any reason to took a same school with them. Then I get into HS, speaking spatially, it’s really far from my JHS. But it’s a “throwing stone” away from my granny house. Surprisingly it’s really easy to make friends then.

Though, talking about “cultural taste”, they’re a level under my JHS friends. But I see a genuine quality in them. Like most of HS kiddos allover Bandung, we’re maniacally love occupy a Warung and make it our base camp. I can say that “nongkrong” is in par with curriculum. Everyday, after school we ambush that Warung, then we called “TeronX”(wtf!). Playing cards, or in my case I watching people playing cards then getting drunk. While in the other time I still digging music, it’s easier then because the CD & MP3 era came. And I start come to indie gigs twice a week, and I make friends from a fuckin pit! there. Local bands growth fast then, gigs and indie music start to intervere the mainstream. Their music starts play at MTV and Radio.

In HS, i live in 2 social spheres, at school and at gigs. They feed my certain personal dimension. School friends give me a kind of family-ish feeling, we eat together, we talking about life and girl together, we’re wasted together (6 hours before final exam we’re still wasted as fuck!). While gigs friends gave me a cultural experience and influence. It constructs my cultural taste, ie: I decide to being an Emo Kid as fuck. I listened to Emo bands, I dress like Emo bands, I scream at every Alone At Last shows, heartbreak like Emo kid, I writing devastated poems like Emo kid, and I start an Emo band. Yet, the most important is the 2 social spheres successfully distracting me from home, which I no longer knew with.

After finish HS I decided to take a moment to think about my future, so I not in hurry get into college. Like most of school-bonded HS alumni I pretty often still come to school. Thanks to our occupied Warung, so I always know where I should take shelter. 2 life changing things happened then. First, I met my first long last girlfriend. Second, I join a look-kinda-gonnabe-rockstar band. Not at once the two different interest got head-to-head!. Yet they’re still got along hand by hand. The girl is a freshman in my HS. So we’re separated generation. I met her at the first time when I have a meeting with my band near school. It’s a cliché that I have bigger guts as fuckin alumni to come to her, greeting and ask her phone number. Since then, a full week I spend my time with her and ask her to be my GF, and voila she accepted me. Soon I knew the reason she want to be my GF is because of the spreading news about me and my band. Our band is like HS hero then. Again, it’s a fuckin cliché. But, in fact even a cheesy reason could lead into a 7 years relationship. Strange huh!.

The band is another story. Lovely Lolita, we’re named it after a single of local shoegaze band The Milo, although our music is not a dot like them. So it all starts when I invited to featuring with one of my HS band at one single, which then listed into an indie compilation. Me and one of its guitar player thought we’re should making Emo project together. So we’re looking for another player, then we’re met a drummer who still a HS kiddos in my HS then. Then our band started with only 3 players. I took a role as Vocal and Bass then. We’re recorded a single demo and spread it on MySpace. Surprisingly, the acceptance is huge. So we’re playing from gigs to gigs. Our music evolving as our influences richen. So we’re thinking to have a bass player and I just focus on vocal. Then we’re being 4 player Metalcore/Post-Hardcore band. We’re record 3 more songs plus 1 song at the brink of our breakup. Our fans base growing bigger, we’re lined up in a big league gigs, and one of major Radio enlisted us as one of must watch indie band. So, it was a really fuckin 4 years of awesome time.

I took on college a year after I graduate from HS. I get a diploma program in state university in Bandung. I took Broadcasting major. It’s clear then I get on that major because of my “serious passion” in music industry. I thought, if I work in broadcasting company it’ll easier to “spot lighting” my band. But it’s not going well academically. My grade is average. It’s because soon I realize that I actually not into Broadcasting. At 20 I started to blown by books and thoughts. So that’s when the pseudo-criticize dimension of me started. One of my lecturer said that I suppose to took Political Science major. That’s be my battery to get off. Luckily my mom accepted it and get me into PolSci related Bachelor program in one of mediocre university. Although then financially we’re kind of broke. But that’s my mom, she push herself and eagerly sacrifice her life just to ensure her son not fail.

I start my second Uni almost 21. In contrary with what happened in primary, there my age are 2-3 years above average. So I always think it’s a setback. I try not to waste it since this is my second chance. Then I accelerating everything, my time overly consumed by reading books, writing paper, seminars, and other academic things. It’s obvious I left almost other thing behind. That’s moment I no longer dealt with music and band stuff. The path that seems like been written, the other player focus chasing their own project. So that left me with 1 thing, my girlfriend whom struggling enter a new life phase, college. At that point of life we’re destined to get along, our life line walk side by side. Struggling to graduate from school and find a decent job. We’re also financially not sufficient, so we take any after school job. I work for my Uncle as tour guide to pay my semester. From 21 to 24 my old social life melt into thin air, instead I make new friends with people in academic and activism circle. Which then I realize has huge contribution to shape my thought and mental.

Entering new social sphere shocked me mentally that time. I really change into someone I don’t even know. A skeptical and over-thought pseudo-academic person. You know, that asshole kind of person who ultra assuming their thought being original and super right. At that time I don’t feel comfortable hanging out with my music circle friends. So I totally left them. As a replacement, I’m diving deep into books and activism. Which I believe they are my “true” passion and moronically my life path. I really mean it that time, my writing published at prominent activism web site, presenting my thought at seminars and discussion, being part of mass demonstration, etc. With that load of activity I still finish college just in 3,5 years. And rightaway I don’t thinking about get a “formal” job anymore, so I decide to get a Master degree at the best state Uni in Indonesia. With my saving from part time job as tour guide I pay the administration. My mom doesn’t know that I already accepted at Master degree. Till when the school calendar is coming I tell mom that I going to Jogja for 2 years. My mom shocked. Not only by the fact that I choose to extend my school year, but also by the fact that I’m going to live away from home for a quite long time. So I say sayonara. I leave mom in confusion.

The Master year been super well for me, I got almost Suma Cumlaude at my first semester. My paper presented at Bangkok and Rangoon. Though, unfortunately I don’t get there to present them by myself. The problem is classic. I broke. My saving run out fast. Thanks to unplanned budgeting and excessive drunk habit. Plus I only got a little amount of money from writing project. So in the brink of the second semester I don’t have any money on my pocket. So that was my first experience being financially broke.

Somehow although with my academic achievements I don’t get any of scholarship. Even I mail my Rector then to ask tuition fee postponed, and no answer. So with that condition, at that time I don’t see any reason to stay in Jogja. So I back to Bandung with head facing down like the losing army march back from devastating battlefield. I already knew what I’m going to face, thousand mock. And that come from my own family. But I knew, I was wrong been took some huge decision spontaneously without any plan ahead. So I swallow the pills.

It’s been quite a time to stand on my feet once more. This is the second time I fail at college, the different is this time I fail not by my academic issue, but a god damn run out of cash. My heart break and I fall so deep haunted by my failure. But whatever it takes I should rerun my life. Fortunately one of my friend recommend me to his boss. He just built a research institution, so he hire people to work with him. And I got the job which is suits me. Not only the job, but also the office location, it’s in Bandung. So I work like a year there, until some shit happened again. The company declare bankruptcy!. For brief of time I still can live by some cash I save. But it doesn’t take long till I got broke, once more. So in such devastated time I randomly throw my CV to any open vacancy. I visit every job fair, I sent bunch of mail. What I get is nothing. It’s understandable now why it is happened. I am 26 then. While I wait for job interview, I took any work that I able to do. In example, I’ve been working as part time primary school teacher in my mom office. I teach Social. Then I begin to accept my condition. Yet I know I can do better. So I still connected with activist and academic circle. From the same circle, I met with the second girl I declare as a “serious” relationship. Actually she is not from that circle, but more like friend of my friend. We’re accidentally met at one café when I have a meeting about an event we’re going to run.

Friend of mine greets me with her, who eventually is one of that café share holder. I don’t know, but somehow we’re so easily connected. Our conversation last till the café close. And that is the start. From then we’re regularly meet and somehow our relationship up a level to “a relationship”. We’re thru a great days together. It is possible that our life line slightly different. She just graduate from college that time and I am a jobseeker cum part timer guy. That’s preconditioned us to can spend a lot of time together. But then I got the job in Jakarta and she work in Bandung. Even though we’re still regularly meet when she back her home in Jakarta, but our relationship start to tumble. It’s partly because I’m in adaptation phase with Jakarta and she just starting work in Jakarta. So our communication start dismissed. We’re lost in translation. And at 6 month of our relationship we’re decide to breaking up.

I get a quite decent and suit job in media industry. Since the break up I decide to focus on how to struggling in Jakarta, build my career Monday to Friday and have some reboot in Saturday and Sunday. At the same time I begin to fix my relationship with my family, one of the reason I start a worker life. But it’s not until the 6th month I work then I rethink about what am I wanted to achieve in Jakarta. So I start to redirect my life. And I thought I should save some cash to prepare my future. Yet I still don’t know what am I going to do with that cash. Then I remember one of line in an Indian clan movie, if I not mistaken it is Appache. At the closing, the main actor had a convo with his counterparts. They’re talking about land property ownership.

The whole movie highlighted the conflict between Indians and the invader to claim a land. One of the line got stuck in my head ever since, the chief Appache tell a young brave warrior that “ain’t a men without a land”. Thus when it comes to saving, I always thought that I should save my cash in property not a mere virtual digit in Bank Account. So I tell my mom and she support my idea. Then I went to developer and bank, they accepted my mortgage proposal. At 27 I mark a monumental decision to pay credit to bank for long years. So I start my 28 with years of credit on my back but property on my feet.

Now I’m 28. What does it means by being a 28?. That question keep buzzing me days before I turn a year older till now when I officially 28. Honestly I still don’t know the answer. But I just knew that it is the time that I should continue step my feet to the next phase of life. I should be more stabile, mentally and materially. So when the time to settle comes, I’ll be ready or at least prepared. How to do that?. Simply by fix a once broken thing back then and set timeline goals. So I set it up. Now I got my 2 year plan. If that realize, and it should, it would be another monumental life decision. I wish. May the lord open.*** Bandung 26 January 2018 Ps: Sorry if my grammar sucks. It’s unedited and I don’t give a fuck, tho!

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ramajmedia · 5 years

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Peter Jackson's Movies, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes | ScreenRant

Peter Jackson is one of the most renowned directors working in Hollywood today. He might be most famous for bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth to life on the big screen (in true George Lucas fashion, he did it perfectly with one trilogy and then divided fans with a prequel trilogy), but he’s directed a bunch of movies besides that.

RELATED: 7 Things in Lord Of The Rings Canon That Peter Jackson Ignored

He actually got his start in the “splatter” subgenre of horror as a young filmmaker in New Zealand. Some of his movies have fared well with critics; others haven’t done so well. So, here are Peter Jackson’s Movies, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes.

14 The Lovely Bones (32%)

Peter Jackson has only ever made one major misstep in his career, and The Lovely Bones is it. It’s about a teenage girl who is lured into a weird shrine by a pedophile (who couldn’t look more like a pedophile with the thick-rimmed glasses, greasy hair, and creepy smile) and then murdered.

She then wanders the Earth as a lost soul, watching her family as they reel from her death. It could’ve been a powerful work of teary-eyed young-adult coming-of-age drama in the right hands, but Jackson just didn’t strike the right tone and the movie failed as a result.

13 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (59%)

It spelled trouble the second Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema decided to adapt The Hobbit as an eight-hour Lord of the Rings-style trilogy, because the book isn’t suited to that. It’s basically a fairy tale.

The Lord of the Rings encompasses three giant volumes, but The Hobbit can be read in an afternoon – where did the producers get the idea to adapt both of those to the same length? (Well, of course we know where: the promise of billions of dollars.) The third Hobbit movie focuses on “the Battle of the Five Armies,” an event that has absolutely nothing to do with any of the main characters, leaving them to be sidelined.

12 The Frighteners (63%)

In this horror comedy, Michael J. Fox plays an architect who finds himself able to communicate with ghosts and spirits following his wife’s death. This leads to a run-in with the specter of a mass murderer and the Grim Reaper himself.

One critic has described The Frighteners as a cross between Ghostbusters and Twin Peaks, but it doesn’t have the heft of either of those projects. Tonally, that description is right on the money, but whereas those two can be watched over and over again and never become tiresome, this one runs out of steam before the end of the first viewing.

11 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (64%)

It wasn’t too long after The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey hit theaters that fans started calling it The Phantom Menace of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth saga. As the first installment of a prequel trilogy to a beloved and almost perfect cinematic saga that overuses CGI effects, has too many cheesy comedic characters, and ultimately fails to live up to the original, it’s fair to say that that’s an accurate description.

RELATED: 5 Reasons Why The Hobbit Trilogy Wasn't As Good As The Lord Of The Rings (And 5 Why It Was Better)

Sitcom star Martin Freeman has too much of a cynical, wink-to-the-audience quality to carry the weight of one of these trilogies on his shoulders. The Fellowship of the Ring, this ain’t.

10 Bad Taste (68%)

Peter Jackson’s directorial debut certainly lives up to its title. It combines horror, science fiction, action, horror, and a healthy dose of its titular tastelessness for a delightful, if gut-wrenching romp.

Like most first-time directors tackling an indie feature, Jackson leaned into his low budget and made a big-budget movie on a low budget for a rough, messy, but endlessly fun moviegoing experience. The plot sees an alien fast food chain coming to Earth to grind up human beings into meat for their burgers, and it only gets more absurd from there. Surprisingly, Bad Taste put Jackson on the film industry’s radar.

9 Meet the Feebles (71%)

Moviegoers enjoyed the novelty of Jim Henson-style puppets appearing in an R-rated movie with tons of swearing, sex, and graphic violence a couple of years ago in The Happytime Murders. However, Peter Jackson had reveled in this gimmick – and with much more effective results – years earlier with his film Meet the Feebles.

The black-comic tone of the film might not be to every viewer’s tastes, but with catchy musical numbers and a perverse puppeteering style, Meet the Feebles expertly uses juxtaposition to its favor. It’s an adult-oriented delight for people who grew up on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.

8 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (74%)

If The Hobbit had been adapted as a two-part film as Guillermo del Toro intended and not stretched out to a trilogy, it would’ve been another story.

In The Desolation of Smaug, scenes that last a paragraph in the book and never should’ve been included in a film adaptation in the first place, due to their lack of consequences and relevance to the plot, are dragged out into half-hour set pieces. In Peter Jackson’s quest to make The Hobbit films as grand and epic as The Lord of the Rings films, what we got are movies that don’t feel grand or epic, but are really lo-o-o-ong.

7 King Kong (84%)

Since the original King Kong is one of cinema’s most revered classics, Peter Jackson took on a practically Herculean responsibility when he signed on to remake it. Jackson has said that he was struck by how much the original made him care about the titular ape, so that’s what he strived to do with this remake.

And it’s fair to say, since he used the motion-capture technology he pioneered with The Lord of the Rings trilogy and cast his Gollum, Andy Serkis, to play Kong, he managed it. We’re never on Carl Denham’s side – we see that the ape is just a fool in love.

6 Braindead (86%)

In his early days as the “splatter” king of New Zealand, Peter Jackson made this hilariously gory horror comedy about a man living with his mother who gets into trouble when he beds the wrong girl and a rabid rat-monkey turns the town into a horde of the undead.

Although it wasn’t a big box office success on its release, Braindead quickly became a cult classic, and in Time Out’s survey of the horror genre’s foremost actors, directors, and writers, Braindead was determined to be the 91st greatest horror film of all time. Simon Pegg also noted it as a huge influence on Shaun of the Dead.

5 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (91%)

Peter Jackson was shooting all three Lord of the Rings movies back-to-back, so if the first one didn’t hit, he would’ve been in a lot of trouble. The first chapter had to make such a strong impression on audiences that they’d be willing to commit to two more movies over the next couple of years.

Thankfully, The Fellowship of the Ring made that impression. It introduced audiences to characters they could root for – Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, the whole gang – and successfully sold the weight of what was at stake with a stunning prologue and an ensuing narrative to back it up.

4 Heavenly Creatures (92%)

Heavenly Creatures was Peter Jackson’s cinematic dramatization of the Parker-Hulme murder case, which rocked Christchurch in 1954 and has continued to echo throughout the New Zealand consciousness – in books, plays, novels, and of course, movies – ever since. The shocking case saw a 16-year-old girl and her 15-year-old friend murder the 16-year-old’s mother.

Until then, Jackson was known as the “splatter” guy – this movie proved he was a real filmmaker. This was the movie that gave Kate Winslet and, to a lesser extent, Melanie Lynskey (best known as Charlie’s stalker Rose from Two and a Half Men) their big breaks, and earned Jackson and his co-writer Fran Walsh an Oscar nod for Best Original Screenplay.

3 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (93%)

The closing chapter of Peter Jackson’s big-screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy ended things in such a satisfying way that the Academy gave it a record number of nominations, and then when it won every single award it was up for, it also set the record for most wins.

RELATED: Everything We Know (So Far) About Amazon's Lord Of The Rings Series

And bear in mind that it’s unheard of for the Academy to even consider awarding a fantasy movie. Shooting the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy back-to-back was a monumental and ambitious undertaking, but it’s clear from The Return of the King that Jackson was up to the task and then some.

2 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (95%)

The second part of a trilogy tends to be the best – The Dark Knight, The Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather Part II, The Road Warrior, the list goes on – because it doesn’t have to set anything up and wind anything down. It’s a stepping stone; it’s all action.

However, most Lord of the Rings fans would consider The Return of the King to be slightly better than The Two Towers, because it’s the epic finale and, against all odds, it’s actually a satisfactory conclusion to the story. But then again, The Two Towers has the breathtakingly cinematic Battle of Helm’s Deep sequence that the MCU attempts to top three times a year.

1 They Shall Not Grow Old (100%)

The most impressive achievement of this World War I documentary is the colorized imagery. Peter Jackson took grainy, black-and-white photographs from 1914-1918 and gave them a splash of color and a touch-up to make them look like they were taken today by an HD digital camera.

As a tribute to all the young men who fought in the First World War, many of whom gave their lives, They Shall Not Grow Old is a powerful and poignant study that more than earns its rare 100% rating. The fact that the doc was released in 2018, exactly 100 years after the conflict ended, is the icing on the cake.

NEXT: David Fincher's Movies, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes

source https://screenrant.com/peter-jacksons-movies-ranked-rotten-tomatoes/

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thefinalcinderella · 7 years

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DIVE!! Book 2 Chapter 1-WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?

Full list of translations here

Previously on DIVE!!: Something’s going on with Shibuki.

The next day was a boiling-hot midsummer day.

Anyone who received the reflected heat of the unbearable, overhead sun from the asphalt beneath their feet would want to dive into a pool on such a day, especially as they stood beneath the scorching sun. Though, no one would go so far as to say that they wanted to dive from the summit of the diving tower.

A height of ten meters.

A speed of sixty kilometers per hour.

A flight time of one-point-four seconds.

At nine in the morning, the MDC members who were ready to take on this reckless battle gathered together at the Sakuragi High School pool. They trained their bodies until two, then they all got on the wagon bus (1) that Ooshima was driving. The MDC didn’t have its own bus, so usually they used a vehicle from the Mizuki Sports Club to pick and drop members up.

“If we send someone from our club to next year’s Olympics, will Mizuki buy us our own bus as well?” Ryou asked sarcastically amidst the tense pre-competition atmosphere in the bus.

“Well, if we don’t send someone to the Olympics, this time next year we won’t even have a place to practice everyday, much less our own bus.” Kayoko reciprocated Ryou’s snark.

“Stop it,” Ooshima said from the driver’s seat, trying to hold Kayoko back. “You’re putting strange pressure on everyone before an important competition.”

“An important competition, huh. It’s good that someone is aware of that.”

Even more snark bled into Kayoko’s tone. Everyone in the bus knew that she was implicitly criticizing Shibuki. He had the back-row seats all to himself, and was even stretched out across them as he dozed.

Shibuki had been like this since this morning. Although he showed up on time with Ooshima, during practice the only thing he did was to sprawl out on the poolside, and wouldn’t move no matter what Kayoko said to him. When the time finally came to set off, he never even once got onto the diving tower, and he became all the more daring for continuing to sleep on the wagon bus.

And now, one seat ahead of Shibuki, there was a boy who attracted a different kind of attention today.

Sakai Tomoki.

When Tomoki, who had disappeared just two days before the competition, finally returned to practice this morning, his clubmates gave sighs of relief. However, when they watched how he practiced, their feelings of relief turned into feelings of intimidation.

What on earth happened to this boy?

Asaki Kayoko saw potential in Tomoki, and everyone saw how quickly he grew in the past recent months. But today, he had something beyond that.

Even Shibuki, dozing on the poolside, widened his eyes at Tomoki’s sudden change. As he lay on his stomach on the hot concrete like a sea lion, he felt as though something like a mass of burning resolve fell down on him.

“I was so nervous while waiting for this day to come.”

He heard Youichi said when he passed by him with his wet feet.

“The day that he becomes serious—is the day when a sleeping lion awakens.”

Sleeping lion—

Shibuki followed that lion after practice, and caught him in the locker room.

“Are you doing the 3½ today?

Ever since he met Tomoki, who had been going nowhere with the 3½, in that park a month ago, Shibuki had been casually concerned about him. No, he might have already been on his mind ever since he heard Kayoko utter the words “diamond eyes”.

“Yeah, I’m doing the 3½.” Tomoki said immediately.

Hearing him speak with no trace of hesitation, Shibuki unintentionally hit him with a mean-spirited question. “What’s the success rate?”

“There is none.”

“What?”

“There is no rate. I’m just fired up.”

When Tomoki laughed while saying that, for the first time since he came to Tokyo, Shibuki was jealous of someone.

He was jealous that Tomoki didn’t have a burdensome past or circumstances, just a pure white future spreading out before him.

Tomoki could run up those towering steps as many times as possible, not because of a contract with someone, but only for his own feelings, and because he simply loved diving. To be honest, that made Shibuki jealous.

The Tokyo Tatsumi International Swimming Center towered on reclaimed land surrounded by a canal. It was around two when everyone arrived at the stage of their decisive battle, where they were all used to going to it for practice during the winter months.

Today, the girls’ high diving competition was scheduled at eleven in the morning, and the boys’ competition would be at four. The next day will be reversed, with the boys’ springboard diving in the morning, and the girls’ competition in the afternoon. The selection of the training camp members will be based on the results from all of the competitions, but for Shibuki and Tomoki who were only focusing on high diving, it was in no way an exaggeration to say that today’s results were everything.

Nonetheless, it was a little unreliable to have to bet everything on today’s tournament. It was common for diving competitions to have the preliminaries and finals on the same day, but this time, the JASF had decided to cut out the preliminaries in order to reduce time and expenses.

If they were doing the preliminaries, then in order to go ahead with the program that had preliminaries in the morning and finals in the afternoon, even just one event would take up the whole day. Four days would be required to get through the high diving and springboard diving competitions for both boys and girls. Despite being an important competition that would pick out members to go to Beijing from among middle and high school students from across the country, there wasn’t a lot of participants who gathered this time, and in the background, there was also distrust towards the management side for trying to cut down the four days to two.

It’s an ominous story, but just a few months ago, the chairman of the JASF, who always said that “sports are fun”, hurriedly announced his resignation due to bad health. The new chairman who succeeded him was a person of very ill-repute. He was rumored by some to be a medal ghoul, by others someone who would do anything for a medal, and someone who didn’t do anything other than for medals. For this Asia Joint Training Camp, the new chairman had succeeded the former chairman’s idea for it, but in fact did not put any efforts into events like minor diving competitions. He made one wondered if he had any spirit for training an Olympic representative from these training camp members. Such a rumor had been flying between the people concerned.

As a result, there were sixteen middle and high school students participating in the boys’ diving section of today’s tournament. About thirty percent of the strong contenders put off their participation. Rather than participating in the joint training camp, they chose to secure their rankings at the Junior High Championships and Inter-High, which would without doubt remain in their career.

When she had learned of those numbers, Kayoko wondered if she had made a mistake in her judgement for betting on the qualifying trials…and for a moment, her self-confidence wavered. However, on the other hand, it didn’t seem that there was another choice.

Youichi. Shibuki. Tomoki. Reiji. Ryou. Though the MDC members that she led had potential, they were still quite young. They had no careers or records, and were all unknown except for Youichi. In order for them to get the position of Olympic representative, they had no choice but to launch themselves into high-stakes, do-or-die competitions, with full awareness of the risks.

The joint training camp where the top juniors from all over Asia will gather. Regardless of the recent trend of the JASF, if they joined the training camp that was being directed by Coach Sun, the representative of the Chinese diving world, and experienced the level of the world for themselves, they’d definitely get something to take home. In America, Kayoko herself had witnessed some divers who accomplished several months of growth by going to a training camp for just a few weeks.

But, what if they lost that gamble?

Even if they couldn’t participate in this camp, or even if they did participate in it, if they couldn’t seize the representative position for the next Olympics as promised…the Mizuki executives, who saw deficit-riddled MDC as a burden, will force the MDC to shut down. The dream of developing the Japanese diving world, which the former chairman had exhausted so much money and labour in, would scattered, and the club members would subsequently lose the place where they belonged.

In such a critical time, it was not unreasonable at all in Kayoko’s eyes to express her irritation that Shibuki was carefreely sleeping like a log just before the competition.

Shibuki was still yawning as he got off the wagon bus and entered the Tokyo Tatsumi International Swimming Center. Kayoko’s expectation that he would tense up a little if he stood on the stage was shattered by the too-calm atmosphere on the premises, which did not give any feeling of tension to him.

Though they were going to start the fight for their fates from here on out, Tatsumi’s main pool was crowded with people escaping from the overripe summer. JASF only borrowed the diving pool for the competition, so that the very ordinary public could enjoy their very ordinary summer vacations on the other side. Of course, there was no excitement or tension from waiting for the beginning of the competition. The bleachers, which could accommodate three thousand and five hundred people, were only scattered with mothers waiting for their children swimming in the main pool. There was no sign of a cheering party (2) for diving.

“It’s still almost empty now, but I don’t think the stands will get filled up quickly as the start time gets closer.”

When Shibuki sprawled out on the poolside and was looking up at the stands before the competition, he suddenly heard a voice in his ears.

He looked and saw Ooshima sitting cross-legged by his side.

“Diving competitions are like this. If there are no cheering parties or brass bands, then there are no loud cheers or applause. When the occasional sports reporter comes, they’d just take a few pictures and leave. Just the coaches and the families of the divers are watching until the end. If you aren’t happy with that, you can even think of the people in the main pool as the spectators.”

Shibuki laughed scornfully. “So, we’re risking everything to dive in front of these people who just came here to swim for fun, for their hobby, or for making up for their lack of exercise?”

“Nothing wrong with the people who are just having fun, since they’re quiet.” Ooshima replied without laughing. “It’s really miserable when it falls on the same day as a swimming competition. Though over there they have huge crowds of cheering parties yelling intensely, the stands over here are as silent as a grave. You’re desperately trying to concentrate on one thing, it’s going well, and in the moment that you’re about to take-off…a huge fanfare suddenly breaks out for the best record set for the two-hundred meters freestyle.”

Shibuki’s smile disappeared.

“You’re diving under those conditions?”

“We’re diving through all of that.”

“That’s…”

“Only those who can do it are left. Diving is that kind of sport. We’re not as weak as you think we are.”

“…”

“Well, it’s fine. You’ll understand soon enough.”

Ooshima ruffled Shibuki’s bangs, an announcement from the speakers of the venue told the divers to gather.

Right before his very first competition, Shibuki understood less and less about diving.

“The boys’ high diving competition will start from now.”

It was four p.m. The battle began with a brief address from a JASF executive.

The divers, who had entered the venue in a line, straggled halfway around the poolside, and stopped at a predetermined position. They marched without BGM or keeping time by clapping. The stands were still bare, and even when the divers’ introductions began, there wasn’t a single cheer that could be heard.

The sixteen people who were fighting on this lonely stage were lined up based on order of entry, which was predetermined by a lottery. Youichi was third, making him the first MDC member in line. After him was Ryou in fourth, Reiji in eighth, Tomoki in twelfth, and Shibuki in fifteenth. As the names of the divers were read aloud in this order, this plain opening ceremony was already coming to an end, and twenty minutes of practice time were given to the divers before they compete.

As the divers went up the stairs of the diving tower one by one, even at this last minute, Shibuki was as unmoving as a rock. He did not move his feet, even as he noticed Kayoko’s face in the front row of the stands turning stormier and stormier. His lower back was heavy. His head felt sluggish. The noise from the main pool was too annoying.

“You don’t look so good.” Youichi called out to Shibuki, who was standing by himself. He had already finished practicing several times, and his skin glistened with water droplets.

“Today, Sagittarius will be in bad shape due to the influences of Saturn and Jupiter.”

So leave me alone, Shibuki seemed to say as he turned his back, but Youichi called out to him, as though he was extremely dissatisfied. “You don’t want to admit it, but you have stage fright.”

“Stage fright?”

“Yep.”

“Me?”

“For sure.”

He wasn’t joking!

Shibuki was about to protest almost at same time that Youichi said “look” and lifted his right hand.

Even the nails of his fingertips were slender and beautiful. He pointed at the soaring diving tower before them.

“That’s the concrete dragon.”

Concrete dragon?

“Tomoki often said that when he was little, he thought that it looked like a dragon made of concrete when he saw it. Now that I say it, it really does look like one, doesn’t it? It’s a concrete dragon that always looks down on us as we’re spinning around doing somersaults, trying hard to dive without making splashes, and having the water strike us when we fail. That dragon is also looking awfully cold for today.”

While Youichi smiled, his eyes were welling up with fighting spirit.

“Because even a dragon is like that, it’s not unreasonable for us humans to get stage fright or tremble.”

Indeed, the diving tower that looked down on them from far overhead looked somewhat more formal than usual for today. Though the dragon was just a simple mass of concrete, it changed its expressions frequently depending on the day, looking calm on good days, and severe on bad days. It’s true that it probably sees beings like us as tiny pebbles, Shibuki thought. However…

“Hey, when was I having stage fright and trembling…”

“Okay, okay. Having stage fright is proof that you have potential as a diver. Those who don’t get nervous before a big game don’t have any sensitivity. Those who don’t have any sensitivity cannot do beautiful dives. You passed. Be happy.”

“So…”

“Well, isn’t that good? If you’re nervous, you should undergo that nervousness thoroughly. It’s better to not practice if you’re not feeling well. Coach Asaki looks angry, but if you fail while practicing your diving unwillingly, your crucial performance will be messed up. Plus, it’s still better to learn about the backgrounds of your rivals.”

“Rivals?”

“Come. I will teach you about your rivals today, in order to make you more nervous.”

Of the two second-year high schoolers, even though Shibuki was much bigger in terms of body size, once Youichi opened his mouth, Shibuki was way too easily drawn in by that compelling pace. That skill for reading other people’s minds, and for tempting and pulling them towards himself, was a sort of psychological warfare that was perhaps linked to diving somehow.

Youichi placed his hand on Shibuki’s shoulder, took him to the side of the pool where they were able to take in the practice all at once, and began the introduction of his rivals that he did not ask for.

“The first is Matsuno Kiyotaka of Tokushima.”

The twenty-five square meters diving pool.

The platform that overlooked that blue noise.

Youichi pointed out Matsuno Kiyotaka, who was standing on ten-meter platform, where he could see everything from the stands that were full of empty seats, to the main pool that was filled with the ordinary patrons, to the sub-pool that could be seen behind the glass.

He had stiff, chivalrous features. His body line was firm and solid. As he kicked off from the platform with well-muscled feet, Matsuno traced two circles in the air with his precise form.

“Not bad, right? At last year’s Inter-High, Teramoto Kenichirou swept first place, and I of course was in second place, but Matsuno took third place after me. He has a long career, he’s used to competitions, and his performances are stable and solid. Because’s he’s devoted to the basics, he’s popular with the judges.”

“But,” he added gleefully, “unfortunately Matsuno’s performances aren’t as brilliant as Teramoto’s or mine. It’s precise, but it lacks height and speed. Well, in a word, it’s plain. And the one who was competing for third place with Matsuno at last year’s Inter-High was…”

Next, Youichi pointed at a fair-skinned, delicate-looking boy wearing a shocking pink speedo.

“Pinky Yamada from Ibaraki. His real name is Yamada Atsuhiko. His nickname came from his elementary school days, when he started to wear a pink speedo as his trademark.”

The slender Pinky Yamada leaned forward from the stairs of the diving tower, constantly posing like a bodybuilder. Following his line of sight to see what he was trying to do, they saw three high school girls in a corner of the bleak stands, which was the only place that smelled like a flower garden from all of the perfume. Every time Pinky posed, they squealed and went crazy with lighting up their cameras.

“He’s an idiot, but his talent at diving is okay. Since he took classical ballet lessons, his nerves run from his performance to his fingertips. His sense of rhythm is exceptional. He has excellent muscle strength, flexibility, and proportions. He might have better qualities than me…no, maybe even better than Teramoto Kenichirou. But,” Youichi added happily, “not all gifted people could become gifted divers. Pinky is a perfect example of that. He has lots of potential, but he doesn’t have the power to master it. He hates practicing since he doesn’t know patience. He must be pretty weak mentally as well, since whenever he’s in the middle of a competition he always has to go and dig his own grave.”

“Grave?”

“He always breaks down in the middle of a competition. He can’t concentrate until the end, and he makes big mistakes for no reason at all and out of nothing. He’s at the top after the first half finishes, but by the end of the second half he’s at the bottom, always. In the end, he couldn’t leave any notable records behind, so that flashy speedo is the only thing that remained.”

Next, Youichi’s eyes fell on the seven-meter platform.

“That’s Tsuji Toshihiko from Fukushima. He used to be an artistic gymnast, but when he was in fifth grade he got scouted and moved into the world of diving.”

He had a small and balanced build. He had a pretty face, like an idol’s. Tsuji Toshihiko, who looked like a girl at first glance, made the best of his body to speedily dive from the seven-meter platform.

“Matsuno and Pinky are third-years in high school, but Tsuji is a second-year like us. He can be called a veteran compared to us, and he dives in a calculated, cheap way.”

“Cheap?”

“For example, if you’re doing 2½ somersaults, your flight time will be shortened if you dived from seven meters instead of ten meters. It’ll be even shorter if you dive from five meters. The shorter the flight time, the more difficult it is to finish the rotations. The harder it is, the higher the degree of difficulty will be. The higher the degree of difficulty, the higher the score.”

“Is it better to dive from a lower platform?”

“It depends on the dive, but it’s mostly for 2½ somersaults and above. But, even though everyone knows this, they still go up to the ten-meter. Because the ten-meter is still the tallest, the most exciting, and the coolest. Usually, there’s opposition to the idea of diving more compactly from a lower platform just for earning cheap points, right? But Tsuji can do it without backlash, which is also a kind of talent. But,” Youichi proudly added, “For Tsuji, who keeps on diving so cheaply, there’s a fearsome man who has pulled away from him by a wide margin in any competition. It’s me.”

“…”

Shibuki looked seriously embarrassed at the extremely confident thoroughbred who had former Olympic divers for parents. But, as he was casually trying to get away, Youichi gripped his wrist, and forcibly continued on to introduce the last person.

“That’s Hirayama Jirou of Osaka. Also known as Flaming Jirou.” (3)

Following Youichi’s line of sight, there was a single diver standing still on the poolside, fixated on the shammy (4) beneath his feet. It was image training where you pretend that the blue shammy. with which you wiped off water drops, was the pool.

“Flaming Jirou’s a high school first-year. I’ve met him many times at competitions, but he stood out the most at every one of them. When it comes to standing out, he’s the only one I’ll admit defeat to.”

He was a little on the fat side for a diver. His round face looked more suited for a bread eating contest than diving. He also had suspicious-looking sideburns. Where did Youichi lose to him?

Youichi explained it to the puzzled Shibuki. “Did you see the entry table for the competition? All of the events that Flaming Jirou chose for free-choice diving are all super dives with ridiculously high degrees of difficulty. Forward 3½ somersaults pike. Reverse 3½ somersaults tuck. Forward 2½ somersaults 2 twists free (5)…if he succeeds at all of them, he could aim for the top of the world, much less Japan. But,” Youichi added contentedly, “Jirou had never succeeded.”

“Huh?”

“He had never been successful in any tournament, ever. Even so, he still continues to challenge the super dives with a failure rate of a hundred percent at every competition, and as expected, he fails and gets beaten up by the water hard. Many, many times. And as he continues on with the competition, his body swells up and turns red, like flames.”

“‘Flaming Jirou…’”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“Really.”

“There’s a bunch of different guys here.”

Indeed, there did seem to be various divers here.

Matsuno Kiyotaka.

Pinky Yamada.

Tsuji Toshihiko.

Flaming Jirou.

They were unusual rivals that were awaiting Shibuki in his first competition. However, he didn’t forget that he wasn’t just competing against those four, but those who were more familiar to him.

MDC’s Tomoki. Ryou. Reiji. And now, including Youichi who was right in front of him, everyone was his rival.

The Asia Joint Training Camp. Only three of them will gain the right to participate at the camp that will connect them to their dream of the Olympics.

“How’s your head feeling right now? Confused?”

He suddenly looked into his eyes, and Shibuki reflexively nodded.

“Great, I succeeded. I’ve already crushed one of my rivals.”

Laughing loudly like Mito Koumon (6), Youichi left.

As Shibuki stared after his retreating back in shock, an announcement came, signalling the end of the practice time.

“Divers, please line up in numerical order.”

Shibuki’s very first competition was about to begin, right now.

Translation Notes

1. Pictures of wagon buses

2. Wasn’t going to put a note here, but since cheering parties (Ouendan) have a Wikipedia page, I thought I’d put it here

3. Jirou’s nickname in Japanese is 炎のジロー (En no Jirou). I spent some time trying to come up with a nickname that sounded nicknamey. I know the subs say “Fire Jiro” but I came up with a nickname way before they did so ha

4. A shammy is a towel used by divers to dry off before dives.

5. Free position is a combination of straight, tuck and pike positions when the dive involves a twist(s).

6. Mito Koumon is a long-running period drama about title character Tokugawa Mitsukuni and co. This is how he laughs so yeah Youichi is being pretty obnoxious here lol

Next time on DIVE!!: A (belated?) diving lesson.

#dive!!#dive novel translation

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tbogost · 6 years

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REVIEW: The Technomancer

Published June 28, 2016, on ICXM.net

When I first started playing The Technomancer, I was struck by how it reminded me of other literature, movies and games that I had already experienced before. Weaving in and out of the fast-paced combat like I did with Geralt in The Witcher 3, navigating through menus and searching for loot similar to BioWare gems Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect, and exploring the sands of Mars in a complex world evocative of Frank Herbert’s Dune all brought back good memories. The Technomancer manages to echo each of these masterpieces while also creating its own unique atmosphere and setting. Although plenty of quirks and a few pacing issues make it less than perfect, The Technomancer is a great old-school role-playing game that any fan of the genre will enjoy immensely.

You play as Zachariah Mancer, a young man who at the start of the game is undergoing the final steps of a rite of passage which will allow him to become a true brother of the Technomancers, pious and wise warriors with cybernetic implants that grant them electrical powers. Your final test sees you learning the secret origin story of the Technomancers along with their aspiration for the future, which will set in motion an adventure throughout all of Mars itself.

The story begins quite complex as you’re almost instantly thrown into a world full of tense situations between two governments fighting over water, the scarcest resource on the planet, rogue gangs searching for power by means of intimidation and coercion, mutants terribly altered by the effects of the sun and hated by ordinary humans, plenty of alien creatures, and of course, the Technomancers. The lack of in-depth exposition at the beginning of the campaign makes it hard to follow along with everyone’s motives at first, especially when the game claims that a karma system is constantly affecting your relations with each of these groups, but things become more clear, even fascinating, after a few hours playing. I enjoyed the story almost the entire time, and felt that it only truly faltered towards the middle of the game when I was forced to spend several hours running errands for an uninteresting ruler of a foreign city for no particular reason or purpose.

Although the cutscenes suffer from some lighting errors and dreadful lip syncing, they occur rarely, and are not that important to a game like The Technomancer anyway. I never observed any performance issues outside of the cutscenes, and the writing, voice acting, and environments are great throughout.

The game is not technically open-world, but rather takes place in several different hub areas across Mars. You gain access to more regions as you progress in the story and are eventually able to fast travel between some of them, but still need to trek across massive amounts of space often. One of my favorite games, Knights of the Old Republic, takes you from location to location in a linear pattern; after completing the missions on one planet it was likely that you would never return there. In The Technomancer however, it is essential to backtrack to locations that you’ve already visited over and over again in order to complete side missions and main missions, especially during the middle portion of the game. This takes away from a lot of the fun and is far more tedious errand-work than I’ve experienced in other role-playing titles. Furthermore, enemies constantly respawn in these places and cannot be avoided, so you may find yourself anxiously dreading combat encounters while already spending unnecessary amounts of time running through the multiple hubs just to reach an objective marker at a final destination. After that, guess what? You’ve got to fight your way out all over again.

Yet this isn’t at all to say that I didn’t enjoy exploration in The Technomancer. Although travelling is monotonous, observation is engaging. Every hub area is distinct. The underground city Opis is dank and ominous, with tension between soldiers and gangs always present and a steady, electric soundtrack keeping things suspenseful. Other regions are extremely colorful, with beautiful lighting and contrasting styles of electronic music creating an entirely new sense of wonder. I enjoyed taking in each of these atmospheres and going out hunting for crates of gear or side missions the first three or four times through, just not when I was forced to return more times than is reasonable. It’s silly that you cannot set custom waypoints, but holding the right trigger brings up a slightly opaque thumbnail of the map, which I found handy as I traversed the environment.

Combat may seem unfair at the start of the game, (I had to play the first few hours on easy difficulty before ramping up to normal) but once you get used to the controls and learn the techniques required for success, it becomes enjoyable. By holding the right bumper and pressing X, Y or B while fighting, you switch between three stances: warrior, rogue, and guardian. Warrior wields a staff and is focused on strong area attacks, rogue uses a gun and dagger and is based on agility and critical hit damage, and guardian has you flourishing a mace and shield and is centered on health and defense.

Most games would force you to pick a single playstyle at the start of the game, but Technomancer encourages you to switch between all three styles mid-fight, although it does take some practice remembering which keys bind to which stances and what situations are best-suited to each. In addition to physical fighting you can also employ your Technomancer powers at any time, shooting enemies with beams of electricity or stunning them with high-powered punches packed with voltage, just to name a couple options.

All four methods of combat have their own intricate skill trees, and while it takes ages to max out multiple trees, it is doable. Every three levels you get access to additional traits as well which affect your physical and intellectual capabilities. These grant you passive bonuses such as the ability to craft more complex upgrades for your weapons or to convince computer-controlled companions to follow your commands.

Combat itself is most unique because of the disruption mechanic. Weapons and skills have various stats associated with them: increase damage, critical hit chance, chance to poison and more, one of which includes the chance to disrupt enemy attacks. Since there isn’t a symbol to point out that an enemy is about to strike and should be avoided like in, say, the Batman: Arkham games, it’s up to you to watch each of your enemies’ movements and to time your attacks proficiently. If you manage to disrupt an enemy, knocking them off balance or stunning them, you’ll have a major advantage and will be able to inflict loads of damage in the short seconds before they comes back to their senses.

Sometimes the game will go into slow-motion for a split-second as you or an enemy begins to carry out an attack. During this short time period you have the option to either continue with your current plan or to execute a different tactic entirely. Not only does this feature allow for last-minute changes to your battle strategy, but it also looks neat visually, and the animation is so brief that it never slows down the pace of the brawl.

You come across plenty of different companions during your adventure in The Technomancer, each of whom assists in battle and offers insight and advice about the world, including judging the morality of your actions. You share equipment with companions, so it’s important to manage your inventory rationally in order to make sure everyone has optimal gear. I enjoyed the company of my allies and the ability to switch between any two of them for slightly varied fights and passive boosts.

Unfortunately, I ran into several issues that should not be present in any game. For example, I once asked a character if he had ever been to a location called [i]“The Underworks”[/i] before as we stood directly inside of it. He replied in past tense, describing in great detail the time when he had been to The Underworks long ago and what it looked like. It was an odd conversation that clearly wasn’t thought out very well and that I didn’t expect to come across in an otherwise cohesively written game. While experiences similar to this one are not common throughout the game, they are present in several places.

Another problem is embedded in the karma system, which affects how your companions and other characters respond to your actions throughout the world. Although I appreciate the changes in dialogue proportional to your endeavors both good and bad, I never felt like my actions had a major impact on the world as a whole, and if they did, the game didn’t do a good job of illustrating that. I found myself questioning the purpose of the karma system often and wondering whether it was a necessary addition. Sometimes it isn’t even logical. At one point I lied to a character, telling him that I had successfully completed a task he had previously assigned me. My lie seemed to go off unnoticed; I was applauded for a job well done. Nevertheless, a notification warned me that my relationship with said character had declined a significant amount. So which was it? Did he actually appreciate what I had done? Did he know that I abandoned his orders yet pretended otherwise? Occasions like this aren’t immersive, but plain frustrating. I want to know why my decisions matter and what incidents they lead to. The karma system doesn’t appear to be central to The Technomancer, but it’s hinted at enough that I think it could have been improved upon much more.

Summary

The Technomancer is a very solid game that seems to be almost a mixture of an old-school role-playing title and a modern third-person action game. It features classic customization options through skill trees that affect how you play, companions with genuine personalities, and a good main plot overall. However, it also remembers to implement complex and rewarding combat mechanics that encourage multiple different playstyles of fast-paced fighting. Although peculiar nuisances like the faulty karma system are irritating and bigger issues like the suddenly-sluggish experience halfway through the game make it less than perfect, there’s plenty of satisfaction in this title. While the “cause and effect” mechanics may not be as fleshed out as in modern titles like The Witcher 3, The Technomancer blends enough new qualities with vintage attributes in order to create an authentic world and a whole bunch of electric fun.

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