#knockabout personal

[knockabout-pigeon]

i need to learn how to suppress my gag reflex so i can reach into my own throat and scrape everything out of it

#im fucking dying im so tired of hacking #its not even involuntary its just i can feel shit in my throat and i have to clear it out #and hacking doesnt even work #i cant sleep bc im so nauseous from it and my stomach hurts #knockabout personal

[moonshine-nightlight]

Don’t Shoot the Messenger: Part One

Despite how it might seem, being a messenger for the feared sea-demon pirate, Admiral Satrasi, infamous far and wide for having an entire fleet of raiding vessels  who answer to him alone, is a relatively safe job. After all,  no one knowingly crosses the Admiral. However, it seems the most recent captain looking to join his fleet hasn’t gotten that bulletin yet.

Fantasy, pirates, male monster x female reader, male demon, M/F, Part 1 of 9

Warnings: violence (choking), misogynistic insults

Story Status: COMPLETE

AO3: Don’t Shoot the Messenger Chapter 1

Part One [Part Two] [Part Three] [Part Four] [Part Five] [Part Six] [Part Seven] [Part Eight] [Part Nine - NSFW]

It’s been years since your life shifted from the land to the sea, but how unbalanced those first few steps on land are now still always manages to surprise you. Usually, you hurry off about your business, pushing through the wobbles in your legs, but tonight isn’t so urgent so you take your time heading down the dock.

Despite this island being little known to the rest of the world, it's bustling with life and business and you feel as comfortable here as you on any of Admiral Satrasi’s ships. You easily amble along, staying out of the way and silent as a shadow more out of habit than a need for secrecy. After all, it's hard to stop a messenger you don’t know is there. And even when you were younger, it was harder for someone to object to you if they didn’t know you were there either.

Satrasi had only asked for an answer by tomorrow morning since he was occupied for this evening so you take your time to look at the wares of the stalls in the rambleshack marketplace. Captain Bartholomew Critchley, the person you are to find, is at the tavern up the road, easily the most established and structurally sound building here despite it being frequented primarily by a crowd known for their ability to get rowdy. You suppose that's a testament to both Juanita’s ability to keep people in line as it is to her knockabout wife’s ability to patch the place up. 

Snacking on something fried as you glance over the flasks on display, you keep an eye out for any other bits and bobs that might draw your interest. Travel is an intrinsic part of your job as one of Satrasi’s personal messengers–nicknamed ‘Marlins’ due to the speed you pride yourselves in–so you keep your possessions on the lesser end, but you did have permanent rooms on his carrier. 

The carrier was originally some government’s solution to sustaining long voyages out into the Unbroken Sea. It had its own gardens and water purification system—a magnificent beast of machine and magic that had made it worth its weight in diamond. They tried to protect it, but they should have known it was only a matter of time before someone more skilled took it out of their hands. 

Once he took it over—that’s when Satrasi became known as the Admiral by everyone, not just other seafarers. Even if they liked to say “the Sea Demon Admiral” instead of just the Admiral—they could no longer deny just how much power he commanded over the seas. Between the carrier, the island waystations, and the fleet of ships under his command, Satrasi was the most feared name on this side of the Unbroken Sea.

And those who don’t try to sink him, want to join up—Captain Critchley is no different. He’s new to this more northern part of the Sea, but he’s scrounged together enough of a reputation to warrant a meeting with Admiral Satrasi to hear his petition to become one of his captains. So here you are, on your way to arrange that meeting on Satrasi’s behalf. 

It’s a week into your current stay on the carrier, having returned from a much longer trip and therefore performing some light work nearby until you are sent out abroad next. As much as you like traveling, it's good to be home again, to be near Satrasi again. While you’re happy to do whatever he requires, you miss him when you’re away. 

You met him shortly before he acquired the carrier, after you saved each other’s lives, and are one of the few people from back then to still be around to this day. Some might think, with your personal connection to satrasi, that this message to a small fish might be beneath you, but nothing Satrasi asked of you could not be worth your time—besides any new captain is always seen to personally by him. If it's worth his personal attention, then the message to arrange it is certainly worth the attention of one of his elite personal messengers.

You end up selecting some ribbon, a vibrant color for your hair and duller colors for hemming and trim on your clothes, and a new book before seriously eyeing the sky. Deciding it was late enough that Captain Critchley must be at the tavern by now, you head for it. Perhaps you’ll even stay for a drink or two. You didn’t drink overmuch—never comfortable with the feeling of not being in control of yourself when someone might take advantage—but you like the Saucy Siren. 

It is easy enough to get a drink you trusted, tuck yourself in a corner, and people watch among folks that wouldn't try anything on you. You aren’t one for talking to people or big groups—you certainly couldn’t count off on more than one hand the people you would go out for a drink with, but you like simply existing with other people, at least occasionally. You like cities and crowds and the ability to get lost among them far more than you ever felt comfortable in the small town you came from. You feel safer here on these islands under Satrasi’s control than you do anywhere else on land—safest ever on the carrier, or wherever Satrasi himself is.

You slide in a side entrance out of habit rather than necessity, giving a nod to a cook you recognize, but moving purposely otherwise—the trick to getting everywhere you need to get is either for no one to notice you’re even there or too make sure you act like you belong, and often one lends itself to the other. The tavern is more than bustling with multiple ships in port and the carrier so nearby. 

You survey the scene before you from the largest center bar, managing to get a spiked twilsey from the barmaid into your mug as you do so. You head up to the next level to get a better view and try to spot the captain you’re here to see, as well as pick a spot to claim after you get his reply. 

Luckily, it's early enough in the night that the majority of the patrons aren’t too drunk and various groups seem to be sticking with who they came with. Since each ship’s crew is loosely still together, you’re able to go through the rooms, dismissing whole sections when you recognize someone there. 

The Deliverance crew on the first floor, you mentally cross them out first, having had to push through a number of them to get the bar. You spot the Lioness’ Capitan easily by her bright red hair and her unusually well armored crew, some with plate armor even at the tavern. It takes some minutes of study to recognize the Grey Mary’s crew, but you are able to spot Grey Mary herself after her new first mate, some sort of very tall demon with even taller horns who’s even greyer than she is, moved and stopped blocking her from your sight.

You’re able to follow Peggy, known for her missing leg and other proclivities, to the rest of Captain Red’s New Moon crew. You’re glad it's early enough into the night, and the lunar cycle, that none of them is any hairier than usual yet. They are starting to mingle with the crew of the Brazen Flame—although you can't tell who their current captain is, the tiara of rubies they pass around to denote the position is nowhere to be seen amongst their colorful skin the identifies them as fire demons, an unusual type of demon to be pirates. You follow one of the whip thin lads with yellow skin up to the second floor, where he joins some of those you know the best—all full time veterans of the carrier.

Unfortunately, that means you’ve looked over the majority of the first and second floor without spotting the crew of the Lux Lady, let alone the Captain himself. That means they must be in one of the add-ons. As the Admiral’s fleet grew, so did those stopping off at the island wanting a drink and additions had been made to the original building. Some of these were sturdy and well-built—others were not. Besides, you might be comfortable enough in the open drinking areas of the bars, but you hate gambling dens—too full of the drunk, delusional, and desperate than you can stand—and never go near games unless you have to.

“Looking for someone, Marlin?” One of the barmaids, Rea, asks as she clears off the table you’re near. She’s been here over a year, sister of someone from the carrier and has sharper eyes than most. She’s struck you as a kindred spirit of sorts because she’s always watching just like you used to have to do. Takes more than a year here to lose that instinct—not that you’re sure how long it does take because you haven’t managed to turn it off anywhere besides in Satrasi’s holdings and even that’s only some of the time.

You nod, finishing off the last of your drink and hanging the mug back on your belt. “New captain who wants to join. Captain Critchley of the Lux Lady.”

Rea straightens a bit at that, and really, in retrospect, you should have taken that as the sign it is. “There’s some new folks around back—near the tables. Cel’brating some big score, or so they think—” she rolls her eyes, “not that it's encouraged them to share the wealth.”

You frown, but you’re not surprised. Pirates are either the tightest fisted misers you’ve ever seen or they like to make it rain coin—never much in between. It’s why half the Admiral’s edicts are on how to split bounties.  “Something must have convinced Captain Jack to vouch for them—big score might do it for him, he’s all about coin.”

“Aye,” Rea agrees. “They’re making friends with the Hungry Serpent crew that are ashore, so like calls to like.”

That was an odd crew, but their flag of a two headed serpent fit them a T—half of them loved nothing more than booze and fighting and the other half never drank and sent all their coin home to family. However they all managed to stay on together for years was a mystery. 

“Looking for a refill?” Rea asks, interrupting your thoughts. You notice she’s done wiping down the tables near you and is probably itchin’ to get back to work.

You shake your head and slip her a bronze coin for the tip. You know she wasn’t looking for one for such a simple scrap of information, but what was the point of having money these days if you didn’t spend it?

She accepts it before she even fully realizes what you gave and flashes you a smile before heading back to the bar. You make your way around the center bar and duck into the largest of the game halls. Cards and dice are played down below, but every game that needs a table is up top where it’s harder to make off with it. The Saucy Siren is respected, but it's a pirate tavern—no sense in dangling fresh meat in front of a bear by making theft easier than it needs to be. Besides, everything that can be bolted down is—and probably even some things that shouldn’t be. Honestly Juanita lucked out when she hired that demon with the tail that can climb because half of what’s worth any value is up in the rafters.

Still, the billiard tables up here aren’t too bad, more for casual fun and less for betting. The room isn’t nearly as filled with smoke and half of it is at least sweet smelling from the hookahs rather than pipe smoke that tends to come with dice. As the doorway opens on to a platform by some stairs down into the room, you can get a good view before you get down to the main floor, which allows you to spot the Lux Lady’s group almost immediately. 

Now, spotting the gorgon with them from the Hungry Serpent is a bit of tell, but whatever gets the job done. As you head down the stairs, you automatically adjust your navy overcoat, using part of your sleeve to polish one of its silver buttons, which help mark you as one of the Admiral’s messengers. Pirates are, on a whole, opposed to uniforms, but there are only so many ways to clothe oneself out on the sea’s that's practical and affordable.

All the messengers are given the navy overcoat with the Admiral’s flag insignia on the breast when they start—it’s up to you how you make sure the right people see it and the wrong don’t. Silver buttons are earned after significant jobs are completed—you have the most of any other, but many are hidden on the inside of the coat, rather than the outside. Wearing that much silver is just asking for trouble the rest of the time, but you couldn’t bring yourself not to sew them into the coat—some of the others kept them in boxes or fashioned them onto other garments. You hold too much pride in them for that. They’re symbolic of the life you now have, of how much you have gained and stand to lose. 

You unbutton and rebutton the sturdy navy woolen panel to the side that usually keeps the insignia out of sight. Truthfully you can have it showing anywhere around here—anywhere in the Admiral’s territory—but you find it confuses people and makes you more noticeable. Folks tend to think you’re there for a reason with it out, even if they wear theirs plainly. You don’t mind overmuch having to cover it—it's good practice so you don’t forget when you leave the territory where one slip-up could mean arrest and the noose.

You identify Critchley once you closer—newer captain’s are always the ones with their hat still on and shiny new jewelry. He’s got a gold bauble on one ear with a large pearl and the other ear has a dull gray bar through it. There’s a heavy golden compass around his neck that looks too bright to be anything except new. There’s also the way his crew is arranged around him, how a few glance his way when he raises his voice. 

He’s also well on his way to properly plastered, so it's a good thing you found him before he can’t even remember enough to give you a real answer. 

While you prefer not to be noticed, you are a personal messenger for Admiral Satrasi, demon commander of the largest pirate fleet in a thousand years and for a thousand miles. You let that knowledge seep into you, remember the faith he has in you, and pull that confidence into your bones. The sound of your boots on the wooden floorboards isn’t loud, but it is audible in a way it hadn’t been before. You’re no taller, but your spine is straighter. Your facial expression hasn’t gone from a smile to a frown or vice versa, but it's harder, sharper.

Subconscious or not, everyone gets out of your way the last few yards to the table. “Captain Critchley?” you ask clearly, enunciating so your voice filters through the noise easily enough.

He turns lazily at the sound of your voice, a looseness to his bones that can only come from strong drink. He looks up the short distance from his seated position to your standing one. “Mayhap. Who wants to know?”

“Messenger from Admiral Satrasi,” you say by way of introducing yourself—your name isn’t what he wants to know. It's not what matters, so you don’t give it.

His eyes brighten at that and he sits up straighter. Despite having to look up at you, he still tries to angle himself so he’s looking down his nose at you instead. It doesn’t really work, but you’re used to how people try to puff, as if they want to show they’re important enough for Satrasi’s attention. “About time,” he says with a smirk. “I was beginning to wonder if coming here was a waste of my time.” 

You resist the urge to raise an eyebrow at that and don't bother to say anything yet—he won’t need your input to continue. “We docked yesterday,” he tells you, as if that means something. “Jackie-boy said the Admiral would talk to us once we got to this little island hideaway—not that we haven’t appreciated the time to enjoy ourselves.” His smirk widens as he nudges the man to his left and a number of the other crew members who are paying attention to your conversation laugh.

“The Admiral received Captain Jack’s letter vouching for you as well as your own petition and would like to arrange a meeting in the next few days,” you say formally when he seems to have said his piece. You don’t like the narrowing of his eyes at your words, but you continue on regardless, “He has a certain amount of availability, although he knows you might also be occupied with repairs, appraisal, and supply matters. Do you have any particular time in mind? Or I could tell you when the Admiral is available over the next few days and you could say which time and day you’d prefer? Up to you.”

“Is it now?” he sneers a little, leaning over to murmur into another man’s ear who snickers. “Very well, important men have important things to see to—of course I am the picture of understanding,” he gives a little mock bow from his seat, accentuating the move with a flourish that made his crew break out into guffaws. “When’s the earliest his majesty can see us?”

You frown at that. He can fool all he wants, but you’ll take no disrespect to the Admiral, even if he is gin-soaked. “The Admiral can see you in three days time, at high noon, at the earliest. He has two other times free that day and then two the next day.”

Captain Critchley’s whole demeanor darkens at your words, offense and wounded pride come to sit heavy on his face. “Pardon me, girlie, but did you say in three days time? I must have misheard you. We’re not waiting days for some attention. You say he'd gotten our missives, ‘e knows we’re here—now what? He’s resting on his laurels? Tryin’ to waste our time, like it don’t mean as much as his?”

You know saying that Admiral Satrasi’s time is in fact more valuable than this green captain’s won’t get you anywhere. “I only know that he said he couldn’t meet with you until noon in three days time at the earliest. Is that acceptable to you?”

“No,” he scoffs and his men murmur disgruntedly around him, a chorus of drunk seagulls he clearly keeps around to flatter his own importance. “It’s not acceptable. I’ll meet with him tomorrow at noon, thank ya kindly. How do we get up on that massive raft he’s got?”

You hate when people refuse to listen to the message you’re communicating. Not that it will stop you from saying it. “Can’t get on the carrier until three days at noon at the earliest,” you say, as if he’s hard of hearing and not hard in the head. Sometimes if you push past complaints they manage to realize what they need to do. “When you tell me which time the Admiral is available, I shall tell him in the morrow and he’ll arrange to have a boat come to bring you to him.”

“You know what? I don’t think I like your attitude, you uppity doxy.” You finally do raise a brow at him calling you a prostitute, if only because its such a reach. Even men drunk under tables don't normally assume such given your manner of dress and knowing you come from the Admiral, even if they think they might convince you in bed what they can’t with their words. “Since you can’t seem to understand what I’m sayin’, why don’t you fetch a different messenger with an actual brain rattlin’ about in his noggin?”

You’ve tried to give him a chance to pull himself together, but you’re done holding his hand. “No, you’re the one who ain’t listenin’. Admiral said three days at noon. Or two after or three after that. He was quite clear and it’s on his word I’m here, so that’s who I’ll be listenin’ to. And it's who you’ll be listening to if you wanna meet with him. So are you tellin’ me one of those times in three days or do you want to hear about the fourth?”

Captain Critchley leans off the back of the bench for the first time and points his bottle at you with a glare that might have scared you when you was ten. “And I’m tellin’ you I’ll meet with him tonight.”

“That ain’t possible,” you reply bluntly, already done with this conversation and not caring that he’d had the audacity to move the timeline up even further–not that it’d be any sort of coherent conversation tonight given how sloshed he is. You don’t know who this rat thinks he is, but you have the Admiral’s ear and he doesn’t. Everyone else knew to be polite to the ones carrying their words to the Admiral. If he hadn’t the sense to work that out, you aren’t gonna help him. 

You’ll be sure to tell Satrasi how he acted when you give him the meeting time and you might just pen a letter to Jack yourself for sending along a captain with his head so far up his own ass. “The Admiral is not to be disturbed tonight—he made that very clear. I’m not even to bring him your reply until the morning.”

“Well, I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen, wench,” he says through gritted teeth. He leans forward on the table, setting his bottle down heavily and bracing himself with one large splayed out hand. “You’re gonna take me to the self-important pirate now. He’s not any better than the rest of us just because he nabbed a daft oddity you can’t even raid from. I’m no third rate cabin boy to be brought to heel by skinny bitches who don’t know when to listen instead of yap.”

“No,” you snap, the last of your patience gone at the insult to Satrasi. “You’re a natterin’ child, here on the Admiral’s generosity asking for his favor but refusing to listen and wait your turn.”

Before your eyes can track it, he’s on his feet and a large hand is closing around your throat in an iron grip. You’re so shocked that’s he’s dared to strike you here, that you don’t even react, letting him lift you to the tips of your toes. His hot, alcoholic breath reeks as he breathes it into your face saying, “If anyone here is a child, it’s you—playing above your pay amongst those stronger and more important than you. I don’t know who lets you get away with that lip, but I’ll not stand for it.”

Your left hand closes around the fingers he has at your neck, trying to pull them from where they’re digging into your skin, cutting off your air when he gives a harsh squeeze to emphasize his point. Your mind needs another second to come to terms with the reality of the impossible. Once you verify this lowlife piece of shit dare assault you while on official business from the Admiral in his territory, you only have one thought.

He’s gonna regret this.

[Part Two]

#my writing #story: don't shoot the messenger #don't shoot the messenger #story part #terato #exophilia #male monster #male demon #reader #monster bf #osha compliant #today has been crazy #this weekend has been crazy #but we're here #this story is here #pirates #demon pirates #this story is not about the fluff #its about a demon wrecking anyone who disrespects you #and you being super into that lol #different type of self indulgence #hope you like it!

[magxit]

Every time Matty Healy opens his mouth, somebody gets annoyed. Long before his rumoured relationship with international sweetheart Taylor Swift, Healy, the lead singer of the massively irritating pop band The 1975, had mastered the art of winding people up. He has a supple singing voice and is a decent songwriter: but his true vocation, across his decade-plus career, has been treading on strangers’ toes. He’s the Bob Dylan of raising your blood pressure.

Until recently, this was an accepted fact, and nobody cared that he was a bit of an idiot. It was his calling card. You went to see The 1975 because you were partial to their slick, saxophone-fuelled pop – imagine if Radiohead woke one morning and decided they wanted to be a Level 42 covers band – but also because there was a fair chance Healy might do something ludicrous. As he did when he brought his tour to Dublin earlier this year and, in response to an annoying audience chant of “Olé, Olé, Olé,” told 14,000 Irish fans that they were “a simple people”.

Nobody booed; if anything, the crowd lapped it up. Later in the show, Healy, 34, had a slight meltdown and started swinging the mic stand around. In a world where many male rockers want to be a variation of Chris Martin – the colour beige in human form – how refreshing to see a vast, preening ego imploding for our entertainment.

You were reminded that Healy grew up in an acting family: his father, Tim Healy, starred in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Benidorm, and his mother, Denise Welch, is best known as Natalie Barnes from Coronation Street. She’s also done panto – and clearly, some of that knockabout energy has filtered down to her son.

What a rollercoaster ride it was watching him in concert. In between these two extremes of sneery git and man-falling-to-pieces, Healy had briefly addressed the audience. “There’s a story [in the papers] calling me a Nazi tomorrow,” he said. “This is true.”

It was indeed true. Healy had been waving his arms earlier in the tour, and a few tabloids had decided he was giving a Hitler salute. The controversy was ludicrous and flamed out. But another online storm has followed Healy around - and has been intensified by his supposed romance with Taylor Swift. It concerns the New York rapper Ice Spice, whom Healy is accused of mocking in a podcast.

He addressed these claims in a new interview with The New Yorker, which seems to have been commissioned not because of The 1975’s streak of decent albums but because he’s been in the audience of Taylor Swift’s US tour (with Swift having joined The 1975 in London in January).

The singer hadn’t insulted Ice Spice but had laughed when the podcast hosts described her as an “Inuit Spice girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady”. The 23-year-old rapper is, in fact, of African-American and Dominican heritage. The details are obviously irrelevant: it’s self-evidently unacceptable to turn someone’s ethnicity or appearance into a punchline.

Healy had, as was only proper, later apologised publicly – saying he didn’t want Ice Spice, real name Isis Naija Gaston, to think he was a “d---”. But that horse had bolted.

He’s shallow, then – but he has depths. Healy is blisteringly honest about his mental health on The 1975’s 2022 LP, Being Funny In A Foreign Language album as well as reflecting on his years of heroin addiction and his romantic split from singer FKA Twigs.

“Oh, I don’t care if you’re insincere / Just tell me what I want to hear,” he sang on All I Need To Hear, a ballad about his need for human support and connection following a reported breakdown. Later, the Cheshire-raised singer said that it was easier “as an English northern person, to be sardonic in the face of something sincere”. The argument he makes on the new LP is that it’s okay to be corny and fake, if your motives are pure.

He has also gleefully played with ideas of masculinity. On the group’s latest tour, Healy sings against briefly projected images of Prince Andrew and of controversial kick boxer-turned-influencer Andrew Tate, whose toxic machismo Healy appeared to skewer.

But in the New Yorker interview, Healy made the broader point that most of the online controversy he has whipped up over the years has been illusory. In an uncharacteristic display of humility, he explained that people don’t think about him that often.

“It doesn’t actually matter,” he told The New Yorker. “Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy.’ That doesn’t happen.”

What about those people who were genuinely offended, wondered The New Yorker? “You’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar. You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am.’ And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level.”

Swift and Healy have yet to go on the record with their romance – though Swift has gone public with her admiration for Ice Spice, with whom she recorded a new version of her single Karma. But even without confirmation, the very idea of Swift being with an unreconstructed wind-up merchant of Healy’s calibre has vexed a segment of her fanbase, who have urged her to “actively engage in this process of personal and social transformation”.

This touches on the wider issue of how much say fans should have in the personal lives of pop stars (answer: none at all). It also confirms that Healy is a throwback to an older kind of pop star. There was a time when being outrageous wasn’t a career killer – it was part of the job description. Whether it was Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head of a bat or the Gallaghers launching jibes at Blur (before they turned their artillery on each other), part of the fun of being a pop fan was waiting for your favourite artist’s next outrageous outburst.

Healy understands this is part of his job and hasn’t been found wanting. He’s good at it too. In an age where pop is increasingly a story of the bland leading the bland, it is a talent for which he should be praised rather than pilloried.

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Doctor Who: The Star Beast- A Reasonably Watchable Mess

You may have noticed that, despite desperately positive, brittle reviews in the mainstream media, the last few years of Doctor Who went down like a lead balloon with actual fans and ordinary viewers. Turns out that a patronising gender-flip that served no plot purpose followed by a series of episodes in which the Doctor shilled for Space Amazon, murdered innocent giant spiders and delivered completely unearned straight-to-camera speeches like a fucking after-school special weren’t popular moves. The show’s viewing figures plummetted (despite contrary claims from the BBC that turned out, very simply, to be lies) and its review score aggregate on Rotten Tomatoes plunged, at one point, to literally 0%. Hilariously, the review aggregate from the mainstream media was around 90% at the time, once again demonstrating that the average critic can be bought for less than I spend assuring the silence of my past victims (the joke is that all my past victims are dead and I don’t spend a fucking thing on their silence). The abject failure of the Whitaker/Chibnall era was inevitable and any normal person could have predicted it. The BBC, however, didn’t and had a bit of a panic when they realised just how fucked their ratings were. Not that they admitted that, of course, but the fact they brought back the dream-team of showrunner Russell ‘The’ Davies and David Tennant for the 60th Anniversary Specials instead of letting the current incumbents stick around until after the anniversary kinda speaks volumes. So, now we’re getting three Anniversary specials, starring Tennant and helmed by Davies. The first one’s out, and it falls on me to review it as fairly as possible. So… how is it?

Well, put it this way: it’s not terrible, but it’s not the confident, unapologetic return to form I was hoping for either. It concerns a minor villain from the old DW comics called Beep the Meep who poses as a cute, furry critter while secretly plotting the genocide of the entire universe, a reunion with Catherine Tate’s always-delightful Donna Noble and a resolution to the Human/Time Lord meta-crisis that nearly straight-up killed her last time she was on-screen. And, in fairness, the stuff that works works pretty well. The jokes are funny, Tennant and Tate are excellent in their respective roles, the Meep is gloriously fucking psychotic (though the voice actor does sound like they’re phoning it in a bit) and Yasmin Finney, playing Donna’s trans daughter, is a lot less insufferable than she would have been if Chibnall had written her lines. I actually thought the bit where Donna threatens to “descend” on some kids who dead-name her in the street was well-handled and pretty accurately captured the protective instincts of a parent with a trans daughter. Mainly, she’s just there for the representation, though, and does the square root of bugger all to advance the plot. That’s probably a mercy, since I suspect the show would have had a hard time disguising the fact that this fifteen year old kid is being played by a twenty year old woman (who seems to have borrowed David Bowie’s cheekbones) if her part was any more prominent. But yeah- it’s a fun, knockabout adventure that doesn’t overstay its welcome and doesn’t try to outdo the entire show up to that point just because its been a completely arbitrary 60 years since the first episode. It’s basically fun and basically fine. It’s destined to be lauded to ludicrous excess by a mainstream media who are terrified of offering a proper critique because it’s got a trans person in it, while simultaneously being shat upon by online reviewers who know they can win easy points with the fans by challenging the suffocating ubiquity of the Standard Approved Opinion. In truth, though, it’s neither great nor awful- it’s just an hour of television that’s worth watching once but only once. It contains some good stuff… and some shite stuff.

Ah yes, the shite. That’s what you came to read about, isn’t it? Nobody in their right mind shows up at my blog-step for kind words and understanding: you come here because you know I have the pithiest insults and pissiest hot-takes. And yes: there’s some real fucking garbage to dunk on here. First of all, the Human/Time Lord meta-crisis gets resolved in the dumbest fucking way possible. For those of you who don’t remember, the ending of Modern Season 4 of DW was one of the most heartbreaking things ever attempted in a show designed for family viewing. Donna took on the consciousness of a Time Lord in order to save the universe but nearly burnt out her synapses in the processes. The Doctor wiped her mind to save her life, and then had to leave, because if she ever remembered him or the adventures they’d shared together, the crisis would reassert itself and her brain would overload, killing her. And the way they get around this, initially, is alright. Because Donna had a child, part of the meta-crisis got passed onto her, allowing two minds to take a strain that would kill just one. It’s a sweet and perfectly acceptable way of sorting a complex problem and something that legitimately wouldn’t have occurred to the Doctor at the time, because he had to come up with a solution that would work in the moment, not something that would require a nine month gestation period. But then, for some stupid fucking reason, they took it one step further and had Donna and her daughter simply relinquish the power of the meta-crisis, handwaving the obvious bullshit-ness of this move by claiming it just wouldn’t have occurred to a male-presenting Time Lord. The Doctor’s not an idiot. If that was an option, it would have occurred to him. Fuck, it did occur to him that one time Rose Tyler absorbed the Time Vortex and he had her give it up, channelling it into him to save her life at the cost of forcing a regeneration. It’s simultaneously contrived and slap-dash- a hasty right-on girl-power moment that fails miserably to play by the rules and cheapens the original story of the meta-crisis retroactively. It also brings us, neatly, to the phrase ‘male-presenting Time Lord’.

There’s a line in the excellent It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wherein Charlie describes himself as “a straight man who poops transgender”. The phrase ‘male-presenting Time Lord’ sounds weirdly similar to me. It’s too specific and technical, while also including a wildly silly element (‘Time Lord’ is a vaguely ethereal, grandiose title that doesn’t gel with earthly, human discussions of gender identity). People just don’t talk like that. Sometimes people write like that, seeking an economy of phrasing that looks good on the page… but nobody actually talks like that. I mean, the context in which it’s used is stupid, but the phrasing itself is stupider. It’s also emblematic of a problem with the script as a whole. It feels like a first draught.

What do I mean by that? Well, there’s just a lot of instances where conversations feel slightly stilted or opportunities are missed. Case in point, there’s a bit where Donna’s discussing her kid growing up with her own mum, and it feels like it was meant to be a poignant discussion of the trials and tribulations of raising a child and then realising that they’re not what you were expecting but their own, completely separate person. What we get is just a placeholder where a couple of jokes occur but nothing of import is really said. Similarly, there’s a line where the Doctor muses that he doesn’t know who he is any more, which feels like it was meant to be developed into a meditation on his sense of identity after so many regenerations, metatextually addressing the show’s loss of a coherent, inter-regenerational identity for its lead character. Absolutely fucking nothing comes of it. There’s even a bit where a UNIT scientific advisor in a wheelchair encounters a flight of stairs and the way it’s shot makes it feel like there should have been a joke there. Maybe there could have been a really slow lift that she has to use while her soldiers rush up the stairs, or maybe she could have made one of them carry her. I’d have taken a lazy, low-hanging quip like “stairs…. My old nemesis” to be honest. But all we get is “sorry about the stairs,” and that’s it. My point is that there’s a superficiality to a lot of the scenes and lines that yells ‘PLACEHOLDER’, and areas that desperately need polish.

Speaking of polish: London is once again too fucking clean. I wish TV shows would stop doing that- making London look like the MCU’s version of fucking New York- all glass skyscrapers and clean streets. The real London is a bizarre, dystopian mix of impersonal steel monuments to capital, crumbling baroque architecture from the middling-glorious past and slumping, poverty-stricken housing from a fucking Dickens novel. The city has a really specific, slightly nightmarish character that most telly shows and films fail miserably to capture. It’s inexcusable in this case, because Doctor Who actually used to do a pretty good job of showing London as it is. Which is mental, since it used to be filmed in Swansea in cocking Wales.

But I digress. My final major issue is that the message of the show’s text is wildly at odds with the metatextual message of the specials’ mere existence. The whole reason the BBC re-hired Tennant and Davies onto the show was to announce a return of the Who everyone loved; a tacit admission than the last few years of lazy virtue-signalling and shoddy script-work had been a mistake that they were keen to move on from. There is literally no other reason to take such an obvious backward step in the show’s development. Yet the episode The Star Beast keeps bringing up Whitaker’s tenure as the Doctor as though it’s something to be celebrated. We get lines like “The Doctor’s a man and a woman. And both. And neither. And more,” (again, nobody fucking talks like that) that feel like an attempt to fold the previous three years into the acceptable canon, when the whole reason the specials are happening is to renounce them and leave them in the cold. Then again, that’s the Beeb for you- it's amazing if the left hand knows what the left hand's doing. If someone's bothered to inform the right hand, it's so surprising as to be frankly suspicious. Add to that the extra layer of complexity that comes from getting Disney to part-fund the show and you’re bound to end up with a confused mess. Also, why did they bother getting Disney to part-fund this? The Special Effects look like something a fourteen year-old could whip up in his bedroom. Which is fine- I never mind the sets wobbling in Who: I just can’t figure out where all the fucking money went.

I think the root problem is two-fold. First, as much as I loved Russell T. Davies’ original time as showrunner, it’s really obvious he’s gotten old. It’s only been fifteen years since his time in charge ended, but sometimes, the ageing process kicks a guy’s arse really suddenly (ask me about waking up one day to discover I now have man-boobs sometime). There’s this interview he did recently about how Davros represents an offensive portrayal of wheelchair users, and it’s clearly just the ramblings of a confused old man. Nobody looks at Davros, creator of the Daleks, and thinks ‘yup- there goes a typical wheelchair user’. Part of the point of his character is that he’s kind of admirable on paper, overcoming age and sickness to achieve the impossible… but he perverts and subverts those expectations by doing something fucking appalling. It’s a nuanced, complex take on the way pain and suffering can make a person sympathetic without necessarily redeeming them. And Russel T. Davies, a once-talented writer who should understand this stuff, just doesn’t get it any more. He’s well-meaning, but he’s clearly just not up to the job any more. I mean, he still has talent- his renewed tenure will be better than Chibnall’s… but maybe it would have been a better idea to let the poor schmuck retire on a high note.

The other problem is deeper and more intractable. The world has changed since Doctor Who was the best thing on television, and it might be that it just can’t work any more. The modern era of Who was born from a place of hope yet, also, a place of marginalisation. It was 2005. The government of the day had dome some pretty fucked up things, but they were nowhere near as evil as the governments who were to succeed them. Sci-fi was still a niche thing allowing for experimentation and weirdness. There were definite good guys and bad guys on the world stage and in domestic politics: there were genuine victims on one side and hateful bigots on the other, and it seemed like it might actually be possible for the underdogs to win for a change. 2023 is a different world. We’ve seen the worst UK governments since Thatcher in the 80s (and people kept voting for them) and the worst US President in history (a Savaloy-orange freak with the hair of a sexually-confused Nazi). On the cultural level, the lines between victims and villains have blurred, with the arrival of the never-ending Oppression Olympics birthing a generation of dead-eyed bullies who hide behind nominal ‘oppressed’ status in order to tear down genuinely nice people (like that time a load of wankers piled onto a scientist who landed a probe on a moving comet FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY because he did while wearing a T-shirt with a stylised naked lady on it). Identity has replaced solidarity as the go-to discussion in progressive (or allegedly progressive) circles. The sci-fi genre itself has become popular- meaning it’s infested with normies who don’t understand it but do want to own it. Doctor Who was never built for this world. The change in culture and society over the last just-under-twenty years is more significant, in some ways, than the changes that occurred between its original outing in the 60s and its reboot in 2005, and I don’t know if it can survive those changes. We inhabit a world where actual heroism and even basic decency seem less important than the performance of those qualities in ways that a mass audience can understand and where nuanced solutions, informed by kindness, are verboten because everyone’s supposed to pick a side. There’s no room for a genteel, British/Alien gadabout with two hearts and a silly sonic screwdriver in a world where the battle-lines are drawn and performative virtue has become a universal aspiration. In order to fit our tawdry world, Doctor Who would have to stop being Doctor Who. And, to be blunt, our culture doesn’t really deserve any form of Doctor Who at the moment.

So yes, The Star Beast is pretty good. It’s a nice slice of television that fails on many fronts, but still manages to entertain. But what next? Where can we possibly go from here? Personally, I intend to watch the specials and- if they’re okay- Ncuti Gatwa’s era after that. Then I think I’m done. By rights, the show should face cancellation while it’s still strong enough to bow out gracefully, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ll still have to pick a point to stop watching. Sooner or later, all good things must come to an end, and if the BBC isn’t big enough to admit that, at least I am. I suggest you pick somewhere to draw a line, too.

#Doctor Who #The Star Beast #Review #TV review #Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer #Secret-Diary-of-an-FA

[likeniobe]

The history of the Gilles is as inscrutable as the expression on the clown's face. The picture is undated, no drawings exist, and it was never engraved. Compared with Watteau's habitual scale it is gigantic, and the handling is broad and matt. All these factors reinforce something suggested by the subject matter––namely, that it was probably a theater billboard, painted for one of those small French companies which set up in emulation of the Italians. Although they followed the main outline of the Commedia dell'Arte repertory, the French players created variations of their own, including a character named Gilles, a modification of the original Pierrot, whose existence is first noted in 1695. The character, whose final incarnation was as Pagliacci, was the natural unfortunate of the troupe, the butt of its most brutal comic sallies, but protected by an armour of innocence which was eventually seen to triumph. To the keen appetites of the eighteenth-century audience the whole point of Gilles was his thick-headedness, his ability to resist instruction. In a popular performance attempt would be made to knock some sense into him; he would be giving a dancing master, a fencing master, a drawing master––all to no avail. At this point of the action a donkey would be led across the stage to underline his ineffable stupidity. This is the moment painted by Watteau. But as well as recording a moment of theatrical history, Watteau has again given the situation a colouring of his own. For his Gilles belongs in a more contemplative setting than that of the knockabout farce. The impassivity of the face suggests that the ability to survive continuous if light-hearted cruelty is not only potentially tragic but at all times heroic. This is a concept worthy of Watteau, who has given rise to comments, from Voltaire among others, that he never painted anything serious. The Gilles is not only one of the most serious pictures to be painted in the eighteenth century, it is perhaps the most truly personal of all Watteau's works.

anita brookner, watteau, 1967

#anita brookner #watteau #texts #18 #surviving continuous if light-hearted cruelty as not only tragic but at all times heroic = anita brookner's 1983 novel look at meeee

[jesse-eisenberg-interview]

Jesse Eisenberg interview: Holy Rollers, Zombieland 2, and working with Wes Craven

We caught up for a chat with Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg to talk about Holy Rollers, out this week, and much, much more...

Back in February, on the day before the BAFTAs, we had the chance to speak with Best Actor nominee, Jesse Eisenberg. He’d been nominated for his stunning performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, but the interview was in anticipation of Eisenberg’s starring role in another, much smaller film, which is out this week. Produced on a shoestring budget, Holy Rollers retells the real-life story of a group of Hassidic Jews, who operate a drug smuggling operation in late-90s New York.

We spoke with Eisenberg (who’s every bit as hyperactive, nervously energetic, and smart as his on-screen turns would have you believe) about Holy Rollers, working with directors from Wes Craven to Fred Durst, and whether we should expect Zombieland 2 anytime soon…

When I spoke with Greg Mottola and we were talking about Adventureland, he said that Paul was a much bigger film, and he had a much bigger budget for that. And he realised that it’s more fun, and much more challenging, to make big budget, mainstream films. You’ve worked on both sides of that indie-mainstream divide. Is that a conflict, or a thought process that you can empathise with?

For me, it’s a bit different, because I’m just focusing on my role, whereas he’s focusing on everything in the movie. And a role can be really interesting in a big movie. Like The Social Network is such an interesting role that you don’t often see in big Hollywood movies. And by contrast, a role can be very uninteresting in a small indie.

So, for me, I just focus on what the character is, and good characters can transcend any budget level. For example, when I read Holy Rollers, I assumed that it would be a $25 million movie, the premise seemed to me so intriguing. I didn’t realise that the intention was to make it in a very New York, authentic, indie way, because it seemed to me that the premise lent itself to a major Hollywood movie. So, maybe I just don’t have a good sense for that thing.

What attracted you to the film? Hearing the title and the set-up, it sounds like it could be a knockabout comedy, but it’s actually quite a tragic crime drama. Is that what interested you?

Yeah, I thought the premise was really intriguing. And the fact that it was based on a true story was a great surprise. But what I liked about it most was this character who I felt was very real, and also something I wanted to explore over an extended period of time.

I was interested in Hassidic Jewish lifestyle, because I’m Jewish, but I’m secular, but I would ride the subway every day with Hassidic Jews, and pass them in the street. I always felt both a simultaneous connection to them as well as a real distance. A connection, because I’m Jewish, and we probably have the same ancestry; but at the same time a great disconnect, because our lives are so different. So, I was interested in that, but also in the journey that he takes throughout the movie, of falling into this underworld of drug dealing, and how do you, as an actor, maintain that initial character in this very new world. The initial character’s naive, and innocent, and wants to do good in these very different circumstances.

You’ve appeared in a handful of films which are either set in a distinct time period, or are based on real characters. The Social Network was set in the early 2000s, based on true events, while Adventureland and Squid And The Whale were placed in very particular 1980s contexts. Do you find having a focus on period, community or person helps you build the role?

Yeah. My sense with those movies that you mentioned, because they take place in such a defined period of time, is that the movie has a greater personal quality to it, and I think the movies are better for it.

Greg didn’t have to set his movie in 1987, but he did, because it was real to him, and the movie is better for it. The movie has a very personal quality to it.

I think there was pressure with that movie to set it in the modern day, because it has the potential to be a very commercial comedy, but the more he resisted that, and kept it true to his experience, I think the better the movie is.

Holy Rollers takes place in the late 90s, and it’s very important that it takes place at that time, a) because it’s a true story, but b) for the fundamental reason of airport security being different. This smuggling took place at the last time it could have taken place. It was before September 11th, before security was heightened. And these Hassidic Jews smuggled in over one million pills.

It’s also important to note that airport security weren’t looking in Hassidic Jews’ prayer books for ecstasy pills. Not that they would do that now, but I guess it was probably easier to do it then.

It’s interesting that this film is coming out now, because did you make it inbetween Zombieland and The Social Network?

Actually, right before Zombieland. This was made two years ago. And Zombieland we filmed right after that, and Social Network was filmed last year.

So, your career must have changed quite a lot in that period, with the popular success of Zombieland and the huge amount of attention lavished on The Social Network. Is that something you’ve noticed in the roles you’re being offered?

No. I mean, it really hasn’t. The next movie I’m doing is the same size as Holy Rollers. It’s taken the same amount of time to raise the money, two years. It’s nice to be in things that people like, but it hasn’t really changed for me. My career, I guess, hasn’t changed.

I’m attracted to a very certain type of movie that doesn’t get made based on prior success. I like personal stories, and I like smaller movies, in general. The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don’t have characters that I feel as personally connected to. Even a movie like Zombieland, I liked the humour of it. But even the humour of it feels very personal to me, even though the movie is so big in scope.

Zombieland was quite a hit for a movie of its type, and it managed to find quite an audience, who are already highly anticipating a sequel. Is there anything you can tell us about that?

No, unfortunately. I haven’t read the script, if there is one. I’m not sure. I hope it gets made. Everybody who worked on it had such an affection for it. But I’m concerned that the longer it takes to make, the less chance it will have, because you get farther away from the thing that people liked, and maybe they won’t want to see it anymore.

It seemed that when The Social Network was coming out, people were surprised to see you in such a serious role. I find that a little odd, because the first film I saw you in was The Squid And The Whale. And, looking back at your career so far, you’ve been in horror films, thrillers, and so on. Do you consciously go for different genres or kinds of films?

I just auditioned for all these movies and have received different parts, but I haven’t really been in control of it. Zombieland, I had auditioned for many times. The Social Network, I had auditioned for many times. The Squid And The Whale, I had to audition for, like, seven times. So, that I’ve wound up in movies that look different is not by virtue of me choosing them. It’s by virtue of them choosing me.

In the process, you’ve worked with such an amazing span of directors. Quite a list. And I’d like to ask you about Cursed, the Wes Craven movie. A lot of people I know saw you for the first time in that movie. And that was such a hugely anticipated film, because it was the same creative team as Scream. What was it like working with Wes Craven?

It was good. I liked him very much. We filmed the movie two times, because we shot the movie and then they scrapped the whole thing. So, it was a terribly disappointing experience. I don’t know what happened, but we were forced to reshoot the thing. And Kevin Williamson is a wonderful writer, and I thought he wrote a great script, the initial script. And he was asked to change the whole thing.

But Wes Craven was a great director. He has a great sense. He’s good with actors. He’s got a good sense of what’s scary, which is what he’s mastered. And I liked doing it.

Ultimately, it’s an unfortunate experience, because they spent a lot of money on it, and I think they didn’t wind up with the product everybody was happy with.

Another director you’ve worked with is Fred Durst, on his debut movie The Education Of Charlie Banks. That’s a real spectrum, from seasoned pros to artists moving from one medium to another. How did he compare?

Fred did an incredible job. In fact, this movie was set in 1986 as well. He made just a classic, beautiful story. A lovely looking movie, and the acting is incredible. Jason Ritter is phenomenal. Fred did a wonderful job. And I hope he continues to direct.

We were all surprised to see what he made, based on what people have known him for. But in his music, he built this great empire, and he did that from nothing. So, it’s ultimately not surprising that he’s able to move into another genre and succeed as well.

Is there much difference as an actor when you’re working with a first time director, as to when you’re working with someone who’s made many films?

Not really. Fred Durst was very confident in the style that he wanted to shoot it in. And we were made aware right away that this was somebody who was in charge of the thing. And it didn’t seem to me different from David Fincher, who’s assured as well.

Kevin Asch, who directed Holy Rollers and did a wonderful job, he was more collaborative. We would discuss the look of the movie. This is not typically a discussion I would have with the director. He was very sweet. He had his own vision for it, but also brought everybody into the conversation.

Finally, an awards season question. I’m always surprised when talking to people from the film industry, to hear that they’re too busy to watch the films that they’re going up against at the box office or in award nominations. Is that true in your case? Have you seen the films that were nominated alongside The Social Network?

I haven’t been able to see everything, unfortunately. But what you said was exactly right. The scheduling oftentimes doesn’t allow you to see them. And it’s strange, because there’s so much happening, and in such a concentrated period of time.

Whereas every other year I would watch everything that was up for awards, and be so excited to be an actor in the industry and be involved in some tertiary way, now I’m involved in a direct way, I don’t have the same opportunity to watch everything.

Which have you seen?

I’d feel bad saying, because then it highlights the ones I haven’t. I’m embarrassed to say!

Jesse Eisenberg, thank you very much!

Holy Rollers is released this week.

SOURCE

#jesse eisenberg #2011 #holy rollers

[poemsformondaynights]

Chaos and order

I think I have flawed perception of love 

I think it means a vast, meaningful, consistent knowledge of who that person is 

Always talking 

about the Most Intense things 

Always knowing 

about how they feel/how much they want you 

Always reassured that they too love you too 

Love is a prize you must prove worthy of 

Always having interesting, inspiring things to say 

Always looking good enough to excuse feminine downfalls

Always surprising them with humour because you have to

Constantly trying 

Constantly trying to be that girl 

And that’s a good version of me, because I like that girl 

Just as much as everyone knows me to be 

But when I search for love 

It is a rope fraying in the to and fro 

And not the cloying confusion of romance and sex and intimacy 

This is the love I deserve from the world and the beautiful people in it 

I don’t think I deserve that freely, 

The same way I don’t think I deserve the heavy fuel we require

Because I have to earn it, the approval, the acceptance 

do I not?

Love is a mystery to me 

It is a feeling I know I feel and others feel for me 

But inside my knockabout skull are the bullet bombs of doubt

And that love gets squashed and warped and confused and lost and turned-

And what ive realised is that love is not one swirling mass 

It is not a prize, it is not a game, and it certainly 

Is not something you must prove 

If it was, it would lose entirely what it is, 

Hence the simultaneous destruction and construction of ourselves 

Every exhausting day in our minds 

But we, comically and classically, are not machines 

Our hearts are not chaos and our minds not order 

Because we do not live in such divisions; 

The oceans that surround us teach us that 

You can allow love to flow through you, 

You can allow it to cascade like the eternal water 

Without drowning in the expectation of what to say next

You can allow it to soar and lift you 

Without flailing in the falling of silence 

You can allow it to comfort you like the warmth of the car beneath you 

Without burning through the foundation that holds you 

Essentially, what I and everyone else has ever tried to say,

Is be at peace with what you have and what you are 

Just, be, as best you can 

And let chaos and order coexist in the knowledge we will never know what love is 

But I now know what love is not 

[westophere]

random headcanon: yes the twins are terrible little brats, but they hardly ever do pranks or tease someone who is going through a difficult situation, in fact they would use all their talent of knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, tight-rope walkers and acrobats to cheer that person up!

#mungojerrie cats #mungojerrie and rumpleteazer #rumpleteazer cats #Mungojerrie #rumpleteazer #cats 1998 #cats the musical #My posts

[anonymoushouseplantfan]

Tina Brown in The Spectator, 6 March 2021

"Hollywood can’t believe Harry’s dissed Queen Oprah"

Santa Monica is a soothing place to be locked down. I moved here from New York for four months in November with my two adult kids after I lost my beloved husband, Harry Evans [HE died in Sept 202]. I couldn’t face the task of finishing a book in our empty country house where for years we’d shown each other our pages at the end of the day and laughed over chicken pot pie. Meanwhile in Manhattan, I was tired of pretending that freezing outdoor dining, with buses barrelling past, was like sitting on the sidewalk at Les Deux Magots in Paris. With the California sun on my back at breakfast, and the orange trees in my garden, I have the calm I need to reflect on happy times with Harry.

The theft of Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs sent a chill through the serenely ensconced household. Just before Christmas, my daughter Izzy took possession of a three-month-old English bulldog, acquired from Linda’s Klassy Kennel in Oklahoma. I was dubious. Izzy is a documentary producer who travels a lot, I’ve always been a cat person, and a red-state bulldog would surely bark for Trump. But as a flow of snaps arrived of a splotchy pink-snouted puppy — a runty number four in the litter — I started to feel the excited stirrings of cross-species motherhood. Three days before Christmas we got the call. An RV van driven from Oklahoma would meet us in the car park outside an Anaheim 7-Eleven at 8 p.m. There, a bearded dude emerged and handed Izzy a small bundle.

What else could it have been but love at first sight? Gimli, as Izzy has called her (after the wise dwarf in Lord of the Rings) is a ‘bulldoglet’ from heaven. Her soft corrugated nose immediately burrowed into Izzy’s shoulder. Every day starts with what we call Storming the Capitol. Gimli’s crate door opens and she bursts out, furiously wagging her stump of a tail and hurling herself at my bed. We have decided that she was sent to us by my husband. She has so many of his characteristics: dogged (literally) tenacity; fearless when wrestling with dogs three times her size; and never more content than when chomping through a manuscript.

It’s amazing how differently the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are perceived in America. In Hollywood there’s been much consternation about how the timing of (ex-Prince) Harry’s larky bus trip stunt with James Corden once again dissed the Queen — not his grandma (for a change), but America’s Queen, Oprah Winfrey. ‘Who does that?’ went the text messages. Who gives an exclusive heart-to-heart to Oprah, then goes off before it’s aired and does a knockabout with Corden, when Her Media Majesty’s much-touted scoop is still in the can? No doubt it was supposed to be ‘just fun’, but Corden was sly enough to slip in news-making questions that rained on Oprah’s parade. Harry and Meghan, it’s very clear, want to be all-conquering celebrities. But there are rules of the game in Hollywood — just as there are at Buckingham Palace. The Oprah solecism apart, Harry aced the Corden show. He was self-deprecating, funny and hot. British hand-wringing about letting down the immutable dignity of the royal family is greeted here with snorts. Americans see the much-touted Windsor version of ‘public service’ as posh people being made to do boring things they hate every day, usually in bad weather. Harry’s version of it sounds way more fun. Netflix deals, podcasts, lolling barefoot in the garden of an 11-bedroom mansion, a Zoom here and there… What’s not to like? In Harry and Meghan’s real estate circles, Frogmore Cottage would be marketed as a tear-down.

The larger question they have to answer is whether Harry is a celebrity royal or a royal celebrity. He seems to have picked the latter. There’s less job security that way, but more money. But I suspect he still believes he’s the former — a royal prince somehow disaggregated from the duties of the Crown. And this makes things awkward. How can he then talk with a straight face to Oprah about ‘public service’, even as his grandmother, the real Queen, faces the loss of her husband, who for 70 years upheld his coronation oath to be her ‘liege man of life and limb’? Perhaps Harry is simply ahead of the curve. After all, in politics, disaggregation from any recognisable legislative platform is now a way of life for the Republican party. The annual CPAC conference in mask-free Orlando showed how policy, like public service, is a fusty old concept for doddering throwbacks like President Biden. Trump is now literally, as well as figuratively, the pouty blimp who hovers over the party. The tedious business of governing — another kind of public service — goes on without him. And for that we are thankful, all of us — our bulldog Gimli included.

[oddcoupler222]

Do you have any book recs like yours and w. epic love scenes like yours?

I appreciate anything I’ve written being called epic in any way :) 

I don’t really know if I could accurately compare any books I’ve read to my own but I do have some book recs that I adore! I’ll give you my top ten lesfics for some variety

- Behind the Green Curtain by Riley LaShea (my ultimate fave romance)

When Caton’s sleazy boss offers her a position as his wife’s personal assistant, she accepts the job with reservations, certain Jack Halston has ulterior motives. After meeting Jack’s wife Amelia, though, it’s Caton’s motivations that begin to unravel. As vicious as she is beautiful, Amelia threatens Caton’s position and her sense of decorum. As the attraction between the two women spirals into a torrid affair, Caton is drawn deeper into Jack and Amelia’s world of privilege and prestige, where everything is at stake and nothing is what it seems. 

- All That Matters by Susan X  Meagher

Life is going damned well for Blair Spencer. She's a very successful real estate agent, happily married to a man who encourages her to live the independent life she loves; and they're actively working to have a baby. The wrench in the works is that Blair favors adoption, while her husband David desperately wants to have a biological child. The fates are against them, and they finally seek the help of a group of reproductive specialists. One of the doctors, a surgeon named Kylie Mackenzie, eventually becomes a good friend to Blair. And she needs all of the friends she can get when things start to go horribly wrong at home. As her marriage teeters on the brink of collapse, she relies more and more on Kylie's friendship. Kylie's happily gay; Blair's happily straight. But the way they structure their relationship leads friends and family to privately question whether the pair is setting themselves up for heartache. They eventually come to a crossroads, which could either destroy their friendship or turn it into what each of them has been seeking. The question is whether each woman can change her view of herself and her needs. The answer is all that matters.

- Alone by EJ Noyes 

Half a million dollars will be Celeste Thorne’s reward for spending four years of her life in total isolation. No faces. No voices. No way to leave.

Since Celeste has never really worried about being alone, the generous paycheck she’ll receive for her participation in the solitary psychological experiment seems like easy money.

When she finds an injured hiker in the woods bordering her living compound, her strictly governed world is thrown into disarray. But even as she struggles with the morality of breaking the rules of the experiment, Celeste can’t deny her growing attraction to the kind and enigmatic Olivia Soldano. Still, how much can you really trust a stranger? And how much can you trust yourself when you know all the faces you’ve seen and voices you’ve heard for the past three years have only been your imagination?

But what’s real? Celeste’s reality may lie somewhere between the absolute truth and a carefully constructed deception. (the concept of this is just INcredible. and the execution as well - perfect)

- The Goodmans by Clare Ashton

The lovely doctor Abby Hart lives in her dream cottage in the quintessential English border town of Ludbury, home to the Goodmans. Maggie Goodman, all fire and passion, is like another mother to her, amiable Richard a rock and 60s-child Celia is the grandmother she never had. But Abby has a secret. Best friend Jude Goodman is the love of her life, and very, very straight. Even if Jude had ever given a woman a second glance, there’d also be the small problem of Maggie – she would definitely not approve. But secrets have a habit of sneaking out, and Abby’s not the only one with something to hide. Life is just about to get very interesting for the Goodmans. Things are not what they used to be, but could they be even better? (there are not one but TWO perfectly written romances intertwined in this *chef kiss*)

- Pretending in Paradise by M Ullrich

When travelwisdom.com assigns PR specialist Caroline Beckett and travel blogger Emma Morgan to cover a hot new couples retreat, they're forced to fake a relationship to secure a reservation. Ten days in paradise would be a dream assignment, if only they'd stop arguing long enough to enjoy it. Reputations are Caroline's business. Too bad she was forced out of her previous job when an ex smeared hers all over the office grapevine. She's never getting involved with a coworker again, especially not one as careless and unprofessional as Emma. Emma knows that life is too short to play by the rules. But when she goes too far and a defamation lawsuit puts her job in jeopardy, she has to make nice with Caroline, the image police, and deliver the best story of her career.

Only pretending to be in love sure feels a whole lot like falling in love. When their story goes public, ambition and privacy collide, and their chance at making a fake relationship real might just be collateral damage. (there’s just SOMETHING about this that is super freaking cute)

- The Brutal Truth by Lee Winter

Australian crime reporter Maddie Grey is out of her depth in New York, miserable, and secretly drawn to her powerful, twice-married, media mogul boss, Elena Bartell, who eats failing newspapers for breakfast. As work takes them to Australia, Maddie is goaded into a brief, seemingly harmless bet with her enigmatic boss—where they have to tell the complete truth to each other. It backfires catastrophically.

A lesbian romance about the lies we tell ourselves.

- The Red Files by Lee Winter (kudos to her for being the only author that makes it to this list with two separate books)

Ambitious Daily Sentinel journalist Lauren King is chafing on LA’s vapid social circuit, reporting on glamorous A-list parties while sparring with her rival—the formidable, icy Catherine Ayers. Ayers is an ex-Washington political correspondent who suffered a humiliating fall from grace, and her acerbic, vicious tongue keeps everyone at bay. Everyone, that is, except knockabout Iowa girl King, who is undaunted, unimpressed and gives as good as she gets. One night a curious story unfolds before their eyes: One business launch, 34 prostitutes and a pallet of missing pink champagne. Can the warring pair work together to unravel an incredible story? This is a lesbian fiction with more than a few mysterious twists. (as someone who is usually pretty bored by any plot other than the romance, I actually enjoyed this mystery)

- Tricky Wisdom/Tricky Chances by Camryn Eyde

(for tricky wisdom)  Darcy Wright is a closeted lesbian who has been infatuated with her best friend, Taylor, since junior high. Leaving her small northeast Minnesota town for Harvard in a quest to become a doctor, she moves in with med-student Olivia Boyd, a neurotic, anal, gigantic pain in the backside. The first year of juggling medical school is grueling, but it’s nothing compared to living with Olivia.

Coming out to her friends and family with an anti-climactic flop, Darcy uses her newly publicized sexuality to try and win Taylor’s affections through an ill-hatched scheme that crosses uncomfortable lines. The result is as unexpected to Darcy as Darcy’s affinity for medicine is to Olivia.

The first year of medical school is a nerve-wracking encounter in medicine, learning lessons the hard way, and finding what her heart desires.

Tricky Chances is the sequel to Wisdom, but it’s the only lesfic sequel that i truly felt added to the first one and was just as gripping! Plus, the first book is only 48k words so the followup is perfect to come right after

- Who’d Have Thought by G Benson

Top neurosurgeon Samantha Thomson needs to get married fast and is tightlipped as to why. And with over $200,000 on offer to tie the knot, no questions asked, cash-strapped ER nurse Hayden Pérez isn’t about to demand answers.

The deal is only for a year of marriage, but Hayden’s going into it knowing it will be a nightmare. Sam is complicated, rude, kind of cold, and someone Hayden barely tolerates at work, let alone wants to marry. The hardest part is that Hayden has to convince everyone around them that they’re madly in love and that racing down the aisle together is all they’ve ever wanted. What could possibly go wrong? (this book comes in 9th because i don’t love it QUITE as much as i do all the others, but it was the one that got me into lesfic so! it’s good stuff)

And in a guest pick from the only other voracious lesfic reader i know, @debbie-eagan - 

Beautiful Dreamer by Melissa Brayden - 

Philadelphia real estate broker Devyn Winters is at the peak of her career, closing multimillion-dollar deals and relishing it. She’s pretty much blocked out her formative years in Dreamer’s Bay, where the most exciting thing to happen was the twice a year bake sale. Unfortunately, a distress call hauls her back home and away from the life she’s constructed. Now the question is just how long until she can leave again? And when did boring Elizabeth Draper get so beautiful?

Elizabeth Draper loves people, free time, and a good cup of coffee in the warm sunlight. In the quaint town of Dreamer’s Bay, she’s the only employee of On the Spot, an odd jobs company. She remembers Devyn Winters as shallow in high school, but now everything about Devyn makes her lose focus. Though her brain knows Devyn is only home temporarily, her heart didn’t seem to get the memo (I’m personally not a huge Brayden fan but a lot of other lesfic readers are so I reached out for a second opinion on this matter)

I hope you enjoy!

#lesfic #book recs

[bkthegreatstoneface]

There’s no end of opinions about Buster Keaton’s work & whilst I’d place him on the highest pedestal, other critics are little more grounded.  Here’s what Paul Rotha had to say in his 1930 book, ‘The Film Till Now; A Survey of the Cinema’

“Apart from the comedies of Chaplin it is necessary only to mention 

the more recent work of Buster Keaton and the expensive knockabout contraptions of Harold Lloyd. Keaton at his best, as in The General, College, and the first two reels of Spite Marriage, has real merit. His humour is dry, exceptionally well constructed and almost entirely mechanical in execution. He has set himself the task of an assumed personality, which succeeds in becoming comic by its very sameness. He relies, also, on the old method of repetition, which when enhanced by his own inscrutable individuality becomes incredibly funny. His comedies show an extensive knowledge of the contrast of shapes and sizes and an extremely pleasing sense of the ludicrous. Keaton has, above all, the great asset of being funny in himself. He looks odd, does extraordinary things and employs uproariously funny situations with considerable skill. The Keaton films are usually very well photographed, with a minimum of detail and a maximum of effect. It would be ungrateful,perhaps, to suggest that he takes from Chaplin that which is essentially Chaplin's, but, nevertheless, Keaton has learnt from the great genius and would probably be the first to admit it.” 

Amusingly, he also mentions Donald Crisp, whose efforts on ‘The Navigator’ were almost entirely reshot because Buster was unimpressed with the result.  He pretended it was a wrap & sent Crisp home!

“Donald Crisp is a director of the good, honest type, with a simple go-ahead idea of telling a story. He has made, among others, one of the best of the post-war Fairbanks films, ‘Don Q’, and Buster Keaton's ‘The Navigator’.”

#buster keaton #the great stoneface #paul rotha #donald crisp #charlie chaplin #the navigator #1920s #silent era #silent movies #vintage hollywood #harold lloyd #the general #college #spite marriage #critique

[knockabout-pigeon]

wish demons were real so i could blame my whole physiological condition rn on them

#knockabout personal

[papermoonloveslucy]

SUPERSTAR CLASS

July 13, 1973

By RICK DU BROW, HOLLYWOOD (UPI)

Television executives take for granted Lucille Ball's hold on the viewing audience, and you sometimes wonder if the network people genuinely appreciate the miraculous nature of her video longevity. 

The trouble with being the kind of superstar that Miss Ball is with ceaselessly solid ratings and a long-held reputation as queen of the home medium is that people do, indeed, take her, and perhaps even her talents, for granted. I sometimes think that if she took a season off and then came back, she would be regarded with fresh appreciation upon her return, and might well acquire even more fans than the countless number she already has. 

Miss Ball will be back on CBS-TV again next season with her situation comedy series, which has undergone various alterations over the years but which has basically been a succession of shows set up to allow her to display her unique and often remarkable talents. (1)

It really doesn't matter much whether the individual episodes of Miss Ball's series are always up to snuff what matters is to watch this amazingly commanding artist take charge. It seems a simple thing: ask a star to take charge of the proceedings for a while proceedings that have been constructed to show you off at your best. But consider how many name performers have been unable to carry off this task on video even for a short while. And yet here is this zany redhead who has done it week after week, year after year. 

The fact is, though, she can do just about anything in show business and with the authority, the presence, that only the truly great stars can radiate. Not merely a marvelous knockabout comedienne, she can sing, dance and act and her acting has a broad range, although my personal feeling is that she registers most effectively when she appears in witty movie roles with a touch of romance to them. If you haven't seen a Bob Hope-Lucille Ball movie, you've missed out on some crackling professional entertainment. 

There are a lot of name performers I wouldn't walk across the street to see. But Lucille Ball is something very special to me. The episodes her video series are not always exceptional, but she delivers enough delightful moments overall to make show worth tuning in.

#   #   #

FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) Ball was then preparing for a sixth and final season of “The Lucy Show,” which started off as a sitcom about two single mothers raising children in a small New York suburb, to a show about a bank secretary makin her way in Hollywood. 

#Lucille Ball #UPI #Rick DuBrow #The Lucy Show #1973

[cartoonfangirl1218]

We're Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer.

We're a notorious couple of cats As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians Tight-rope walkers and acrobats We have an extensive reputation We make our home in Victoria Grove This is merely our centre of operation For we are incurably given to rove.

Was it Mungojerrie? Or Rumpelteazer?" And most of the time they leave it at that Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer have a wonderful way of working together And some of the time you would say it was luck And some of the time you would say it was weather We'd go through the house like a hurricane And no sober person can take his oath "Was it Mungojerrie? Or Rumpelteazer? Or could you have sworn that it might have been both?" And when you hear a dining room smash Or up from the pantry there comes a loud crash Or down from the library there comes a loud ping From a vase which is commonly said to be Ming. The family would say: "Now which was which cat? It was Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer And there's nothing at all to be done about that!"

#edric blight #emira blight #the blight twins #the owl house

[bluewatsons]

Joseph A. Harriss, The Elusive Marc Chagall, Smithsonian Magazine (December 2003)

With his wild and whimsical imagery, the Russian-born artist bucked the trends of 20th-century art

David McNeil fondly remembers the day in the early 1960s his father took him to a little bistro on Paris’ Île St. Louis, the kind of place where they scrawl the menu in white letters on the mirror behind the bar, and masons, house painters, plumbers and other workingmen down hearty lunches along with vin ordinaire. Wearing a beret, a battered jacket and a coarse, checkered shirt, his father— then in his mid-70s—fit in perfectly. With conversation flowing easily among the close-set tables, one of the patrons looked over at the muscular, paint-splotched hands of the man in the beret. “Working on a place around here?” he asked companionably. “Yeah,” replied McNeil’s father, the artist Marc Chagall, as he tucked into his appetizer of hard-boiled egg and mayonnaise. “I’m redoing a ceiling over at the Opéra.”

Chagall, the Russian-born painter who went against the current of 20th-century art with his fanciful images of blue cows, flying lovers, biblical prophets and green-faced fiddlers on roofs, had a firm idea of who he was and what he wanted to accomplish. But when it came to guarding his privacy, he was a master of deflection. Sometimes when people approached to ask if he was that famous painter Marc Chagall, he would answer, “No,” or more absurdly, “I don’t think so,” or point to someone else and say slyly, “Maybe that’s him.” With his slanting, pale-blue eyes, his unruly hair and the mobile face of a mischievous faun, Chagall gave one biographer the impression that he was “always slightly hallucinating.” One of those who knew him best, Virginia Haggard McNeil, David’s mother and Chagall’s companion for seven years, characterized him as “full of contradictions—generous and guarded, naïve and shrewd, explosive and secret, humorous and sad, vulnerable and strong.”

Chagall himself said he was a dreamer who never woke up. “Some art historians have sought to decrypt his symbols,” says Jean-Michel Foray, director of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message Museum in Nice, “but there’s no consensus on what they mean. We cannot interpret them because they are simply part of his world, like figures from a dream.” Pablo Picasso, his sometime friend and rival (“What a genius, that Picasso,” Chagall once joked. “It’s a pity he doesn’t paint”), marveled at the Russian’s feeling for light and the originality of his imagery. “I don’t know where he gets those images. . . . ” said Picasso. “He must have an angel in his head.”

Throughout his 75-year career, during which he produced an astounding 10,000 works, Chagall continued to incorporate figurative and narrative elements (however enigmatic) into his paintings. His warm, human pictorial universe, full of personal metaphor, set him apart from much of 20th-century art, with its intellectual deconstruction of objects and arid abstraction. As a result, the public has generally loved his work, while the critics were often dismissive, complaining of sentimentality, repetition and the use of stock figures.

A major retrospective of Chagall’s unique, often puzzling images was recently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, following a highly acclaimed run at the Grand Palais in Paris. The first comprehensive exhibition of Chagall’s paintings since 1985 brought together more than 150 works from all periods of his career, many never before seen in the United States, including cloth-and-paper collages from the private collection of his granddaughter Meret Meyer Graber. The exhibition, says Foray, the chief organizer of the show, “offered a fresh opportunity to appreciate Chagall as the painter who restored to art the elements that modern artists rejected, such as allegory and narrative—art as a comment on life. Today he is coming back strong after a period of neglect, even in his home country.” Retrospectives are planned for 2005 at the Museum of Russian Art in St. Petersburg and at the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.

Movcha (Moses) Chagal was, as he put it, “born dead” on July 7, 1887, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, near the Polish border. His distraught family pricked the limp body of their firstborn with needles to try to stimulate a response. Desperate, they then took the infant outside and put him in a stone trough of cold water. Suddenly the baby boy began to whimper. With that rude introduction to life, it’s no wonder that Marc Chagall, as he later chose to be known in Paris, stuttered as a boy and was subject to fainting. “I was scared of growing up,” he told Virginia McNeil. “Even in my twenties I preferred dreaming about love and painting it in my pictures.”

Chagall’s talent for drawing hardly cheered his poor and numerous family, which he, as the eldest of nine children, was expected to help support. His father, Khatskel-Mordechai Chagal, worked in a herring warehouse; his mother, Feiga- Ita Chernina, ran a small grocery store. Both nominally adhered to Hasidic Jewish religious beliefs, which forbade graphic representation of anything created by God. Thus Chagall grew up in a home devoid of images. Still, he pestered his mother until she took him to an art school run by a local portraitist. Chagall, in his late teens, was the only student who used the vivid color violet.Apious uncle refused to shake his hand after he began painting figures.

For all his subsequent pictorial reminiscing about Vitebsk, Chagall found it stifling and provincial—“a strange town, an unhappy town, a boring town,” he called it in his memoirs. In 1906, at age 19, he wangled a small sum of money from his father and left for St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in the drawing school of the Imperial Society for the Protection of Fine Arts. But he hated classical art training. “I, poor country lad, was obliged to acquaint myself thoroughly with the wretched nostrils of Alexander of Macedonia or some other plaster imbecile,” he recalled. The meager money soon ran out, and although he made a few kopecks retouching photographs and painting signs, he sometimes collapsed from hunger. His world broadened in 1909 when he signed up for an art class in St. Petersburg taught by Leon Bakst, who, having been to Paris, carried an aura of sophistication. Bakst indulged Chagall’s expressive, unconventional approach to painting and dropped names, exotic to the young man’s ears, such as Manet, Cézanne and Matisse. He spoke of painting cubes and squares, of an artist who cut off his ear.

“Paris!” Chagall wrote in his autobiography. “No word sounded sweeter to me!” By 1911, at age 24, he was there, thanks to a stipend of 40 rubles a month from a supportive member of the Duma, Russia’s elective assembly, who had taken a liking to the young artist. When he arrived, he went directly to the Louvre to look at the famous works of art there. In time he found a room at an artists’ commune in a circular, three-story building near Montparnasse called La Ruche (The Beehive). He lived frugally. Often he’d cut a herring in half, the head for one day, the tail for the next. Friends who came to his door had to wait while he put on his clothes; he painted in the nude to avoid staining his only outfit. At La Ruche, Chagall rubbed shoulders with painters like Fernand Léger, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani and Robert Delaunay. True to his nature as a storyteller, however, he seemed to have more in common with such writers as French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who described Chagall’s work as “supernatural.” Another friend, Blaise Cendrars, a restless, knockabout writer, penned a short poem about Chagall: “Suddenly he paints / He grabs a church and paints with a church / He grabs a cow and paints with a cow.”

Many consider Chagall’s work during his four-year stay in Paris his most boldly creative. Reconnoitering the then-prevalent trends of Cubism and Fauvism, he absorbed aspects of each into his own work. There was his Cubist-influenced Temptation (Adam and Eve); the disconcerting Introduction, with a seven-fingered man holding his head under his arm; and the parti-colored Acrobat, showing Chagall’s fondness for circus scenes. At La Ruche he also painted his explosive Dedicated to My Fiancée, which he tossed off in a single night’s feverish work and later submitted to a major Paris exhibition. It took some artful persuasion on his part to convince the show’s organizers that the topsy-turvy mix of hands, legs and a leering bull’s head was not, as they contended, pornographic.

Returning to Vitebsk in 1914 with the intention of staying only briefly, Chagall was trapped by the outbreak of World War I. At least that meant spending time with his fiancée, Bella Rosenfeld, the beautiful, cultivated daughter of one of the town’s wealthiest families. Bella had won a gold medal as one of Russia’s top high-school students, had studied in Moscow and had ambitions to be an actress. But she had fallen for Chagall’s strange, almond-shaped eyes and often knocked on his window to bring him cakes and milk. “I had only to open the window of my room and blue air, love and flowers entered with her,” Chagall later wrote. Despite her family’s worries that she would starve as the wife of an artist, the pair married in 1915; Chagall was 28, Bella, 23. In his 1914- 18 Above the Town (one of his many paintings of flying lovers), he and Bella soar blissfully above Vitebsk.

In 1917 Chagall embraced the Bolshevik Revolution. He liked that the new regime gave Jews full citizenship and no longer required them to carry passports to leave their designated region. And he was pleased to be appointed commissar for art in Vitebsk, where he started an art school and brought in avant-garde teachers. But it soon became clear that the revolutionaries preferred abstract art and Socialist Realism— and how, they wondered, did the comrade’s blue cows and floating lovers support Marxism-Leninism? Giving up his job as commissar in 1920, Chagall moved to Moscow, where he painted decorative panels for the State Jewish Chamber Theater. But ultimately unhappy with Soviet life, he left for Berlin in 1922 and settled in Paris a year and a half later along with Bella and their 6-year-old daughter, Ida.

In Paris, a new door opened for Chagall when he met the influential art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned him to illustrate an edition of the poetic classic the Fables of La Fontaine. Chauvinistic French officials cried scandal over the choice of a Russian Jew, a mere “Vitebsk sign painter,” to illustrate a masterpiece of French letters. But that blew over, and Chagall went on to do a series of resonant illustrations of the Bible for Vollard.

Increasingly alarmed by Nazi persecution of the Jews, Chagall made a strong political statement on canvas in 1938 with his White Crucifixion. Then 51 and in his artistic prime, he por- trayed the crucified Christ, his loins covered with a prayer shawl, as a symbol of the suffering of all Jews. In the painting, a synagogue and houses are in flames, a fleeing Jew clutches a Torah to his breast, and emigrants try to escape in a rudimentary boat. Not long after, in June 1941, Chagall and his wife boarded a ship for the United States, settling in New York City. The six years Chagall spent in America were not his happiest. He never got used to the pace of New York life, never learned English. “It took me thirty years to learn bad French,” he said, “why should I try to learn English?” One of the things he did enjoy was strolling through Lower Manhattan, buying strudel and gefilte fish, and reading Yiddish newspapers. His palette during these years often darkened to a tragic tone, with depictions of a burning Vitebsk and fleeing rabbis. When Bella, his muse, confidante and best critic, died suddenly in 1944 of a viral infection at age 52, “everything turned black,” Chagall wrote.

After weeks of sitting in his apartment on Riverside Drive immersed in grief, tended to by his daughter, Ida, then 28 and married, he began to work again. Ida found a French-speaking English woman, Virginia McNeil, to be his housekeeper. A diplomat’s daughter, and bright, rebellious and cosmopolitan, McNeil had been born in Paris and raised in Bolivia and Cuba, but had recently fallen on hard times. She was married to John McNeil, a Scottish painter who suffered from depression, and she had a 5-year-old daughter, Jean, to support. She was 30 and Chagall 57 when they met, and before long the two were talking painting, then dining together. Afew months later Virginia left her husband and went with Chagall to live in High Falls, New York, a village in the Catskills. They bought a simple wooden house with an adjoining cottage for him to use as a studio.

Though Chagall would do several important public works in the United States—sets and costumes for a 1942 American Ballet Theatre production of Tchaikovsky’sAleko and a 1945 version of Stravinsky’s Firebird, and later large murals for Lincoln Center and stained-glass windows for the United Nations headquarters and the Art Institute of Chicago—he remained ambivalent about America. “I know I must live in France, but I don’t want to cut myself off from America,” he once said. “France is a picture already painted. America still has to be painted. Maybe that’s why I feel freer there. But when I work in America, it’s like shouting in a forest. There’s no echo.” In 1948 he returned to France with Virginia, their son, David, born in 1946, and Virginia’s daughter. They eventually settled in Provence, in the hilltop town of Vence. But Virginia chafed in her role, as she saw it, of “the wife of the Famous Artist, the charming hostess to Important People,” and abruptly left Chagall in 1951, taking the two children with her. Once again the resourceful Ida found her father a housekeeper— this time in the person of Valentina Brodsky, a 40- year-old Russian living in London. Chagall, then 65, and Vava, as she was known, soon married.

The new Mrs. Chagall managed her husband’s affairs with an iron hand. “She tended to cut him off from the world,” says David McNeil, 57, an author and songwriter who lives in Paris. “But he didn’t really mind because what he needed most was a manager to give him peace and quiet so he could get on with his work. I never saw him answer a telephone himself. After Vava took over, I don’t think he ever saw his bank statements and didn’t realize how wealthy he was. He taught me to visit the Louvre on Sunday, when it was free, and he always picked up all the sugar cubes on the table before leaving a restaurant.” McNeil and his half sister, Ida, who died in 1994 at age 78, gradually found themselves seeing less of their father. But to all appearances Chagall’s married life was a contented one, and images of Vava appear in many of his paintings.

In addition to canvases, Chagall produced lithographs, etchings, sculptures, ceramics, mosaics and tapestries. He also took on such demanding projects as designing stainedglass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah-HebrewUniversityMedicalCenter in Jerusalem. His ceiling for the Paris Opéra, painted in 1963-64 and peopled with Chagall angels, lovers, animals and Parisian monuments, provided a dramatic contrast to the pompous, academic painting and decoration in the rest of the Opéra.

“He prepared his charcoal pencils, holding them in his hand like a little bouquet,” McNeil wrote of his father’s working methods in a memoir that was published in France last spring. “Then he would sit in a large straw chair and look at the blank canvas or cardboard or sheet of paper, waiting for the idea to come. Suddenly he would raise the charcoal with his thumb and, very fast, start tracing straight lines, ovals, lozenges, finding an aesthetic structure in the incoherence. Aclown would appear, a juggler, a horse, a violinist, spectators, as if by magic. When the outline was in place, he would back off and sit down, exhausted like a boxer at the end of a round.”

Some critics said he drew badly. “Of course I draw badly,” Chagall once said. “I like drawing badly.” Perhaps worse, from the critics’ point of view, he did not fit easily into the accepted canon of modernity. “Impressionism and Cubism are foreign to me,” he wrote. “Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. . . . Let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular tables!”

Notes veteran art critic Pierre Schneider, “Chagall absorbed Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Expressionism and other modern art trends incredibly fast when he was starting out. But he used them only to suit his own aesthetic purposes. That makes it hard for art critics and historians to label him. He can’t be pigeonholed.”

When he died in Saint Paul de Vence on March 28, 1985, at 97, Chagall was still working, still the avant-garde artist who refused to be modern. That was the way he said he wanted it: “To stay wild, untamed . . . to shout, weep, pray.”

#art #images #biography #marc chagall #jewish artists #painting

[back-and-totheleft]

Romantic, freewheeling, containing fathoms

IT'S early in the piece but maybe the best way to explain the allure of Oliver Stone’s romantic, freewheeling autobiography is to tell you how one of my best friends took on the experience.

My mate, a self-confessed Stone nut, downloaded the audio version of Chasing the Light - as read by the author - and then proceeded to drive around Cork city with the Oscar-winning director and screenwriter for company. “Love how he paints a picture of post-war optimism in New York circa 1945-46,” he messaged me. “Take me there...” Throughout his storied but turbulent career, Stone has certainly taken us places - the steaming jungles of Vietnam, the (serial) killing fields of the American heartland, the fervid political theatre of El Salvador, the grassy knoll. Even if we didn’t always like the destination, more often than not it was worth the journey.

Reading Stone's words in Chasing the Light, it’s impossible not to hear that coffee and cognac voice. The words roll from the page, sentences topped off with little rejoinders, just about maintaining an elegant flow. Drugs are mentioned early and often, while the word “sexy” features half a dozen times in the opening chapters alone. As in his best movies, Stone displays a positively moreish lust for life, at one point referring to how the two parts of the filmmaking process, if working well, are "copulating".

The book tells the story of the first half of his life, up to the acclaim and gongs of Platoon, and it’s clear that his own sense of drama was underscored by his family background, which is part torrid European art flick, part US blockbuster. His mother, Jacqueline - French, unerringly singleminded - grew to womanhood during the Nazi occupation of Paris. She downplayed her striking appearance as the jackboots stomped the streets but quickly scaled the social ladder, becoming engaged to a pony club sort. Enter Louis Stone.

Considerably older than Jacqueline, Louis quickly zoned in after spotting her cycling on a Paris street. In no time Jacqueline has jilted her fiancée (who, remarkably, appears to have turned up as a guest at the wedding), Oliver is conceived and one ocean crossing later, William Oliver Stone is born.

This family contains fathoms, Stone's father straight-laced and Commie-hating on the surface, yet a serial adulterer (even threesomes are mentioned) and positively uxorious towards his own mother. "It was sex, not money, that derailed my father," he writes. Louis's infidelities nixed Jacqueline's American dream, and Oliver’s with it. Jacqueline ultimately cheats on Louis, not simply via a fling but a whole new relationship, and with a family friend to boot.

What’s even more interesting is Stone’s reflections on *how* it was dealt with. Already dispatched to a boarding school, he learns of the disintegration of his family down the phone line. It has the coldness of some of the best scenes from Mad Men, children of the era parceled off to the side even as momentous events in their home life detonate in front of them. As things veer ever more into daytime soap territory, Louis then tells his son he's "broke", echoing the impact of the Great Depression on his own father's business interests.

By now, Stone is unmoored. He has secured a place in Yale but blows it off for a year and heads to Saigon to teach English: "I grew a beard and got as far away from the person I'd been as I could." On his return he decides he is done with academia; he'll be a novelist in New York, much to the distaste of his father. "That's why I went back to Vietnam in the US Infantry - to take part in this war of my generation," he writes. "Let God decide."

And here we are at the pivotal moment in Stone's adult life. Plunged into the strange days of 1968 in the jungle, he recalls a scene in which his patrol group comes under attack, imagining itself surrounded. Time elides and a metre may as well be a mile, explosions going off everywhere and bullets flying amid paranoia and uncertainty that borders on the hallucinogenic. "Full daylight reveals charred bodies, dusty napalm, and gray trees."

Tellingly, Stone focuses on this arguably cinematic episode while other incidents in which he is actually wounded don't receive the same treatment. By the time he leaves Vietnam he has served in three different combat units and has been awarded a bronze star for heroism. So many of his peers were drafted, yet he had decided to go. You never get a direct sense that his subsequent career is in any way a type of atonement, yet it is never fully explained. "Why on earth did you go?" he is asked. "It was a question I couldn't answer glibly."

From this point on, Chasing the Light mainly becomes a love letter to the redemptive power of the cinema, pockmarked with acerbic commentary on Hollywood powerplays. Stone's firsthand experience of jungle combat gives him a sense of perspective that no amount of cocaine or downers can ever truly neutralise, and it also imbues him with a sense of derring-do. At NYU School of Arts, his lecturer is Martin Scorcese, an educational home run. Watching movies is a place a refuge, writing them a cathartic outlet. It leads to visceral filmmaking, beginning with his short film Last Year in Vietnam. That burgeoning sense of career before anything else brings an end to his first marriage - "'comfortable' was the killer word". The seeds are sown for the plot that would germinate into Platoon.

As he moves past the relative disappointment of his first feature, Seizure, the big break of writing Midnight Express, and then onto the speedbump of The Hand, his second movie, Chasing the Light becomes a little more knockabout, though no less enjoyable. Conan the Barbarian, for which he wrote the screenplay, became someone else's substandard vision, Scarface a not entirely pleasant experience as his writing efforts move to the frosty embrace of director Brian de Palma. Hollywood relationships rise and fall like scenes from Robert Altman's The Player. His second marriage, the birth of his son, the slow-motion passing of his father, and all the time Stone is chasing glory on the silver screen.

By his late thirties it feels like he's placing all his chips on Salvador, a brutal depiction of central American civil war based on the scattered recollections of journalist Richard Boyle and starring the combustible talents of James Woods and John Belushi. His own high-wire lifestyle is perhaps best encapsulated in his reference to Elpidia Carrillo, cast as Maria in Salvador: "Elia Kazan once argued against any restrictions for a director exploring personal limits with his actresses, and I wanted badly to get down with her," he writes with delightful candour. Yet ultimately "I convinced myself that repression, in this case, would make a better film." Note: in this case.

Salvador was a slow burner, not an immediate critical or commercial success, but then in the style of a rollover jackpot, it started climbing the charts just as Platoon is about to announce itself to the world. Despite some loopy goings-on, that shoot in the Philippines had never gone down the Apocolypse Now route of near-madness, the drama mainly confined to warring factions within the production team. Ultimately, Platoon was the movie mid-Eighties America wanted to see about Vietnam. The book finishes in triumph, Stone clutching Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.

There are piercing insights and inconsistencies dotted throughout. Stone lusts after good reviews but rails against the influence wielded by certain writers, such as Pauline Kael. He makes frequent reference to his yearning for truth and factual accuracy, yet hardly raises a quibble with The Deerhunter, the brilliant but flawed movie by sometime ally Michael Cimino which - particularly in the infamous Russian Roulette scenes - delivers an entirely concocted depiction of North Vietnamese forces. But then again, Stone revels in what he says is the ability to "not to have a fixed identity, to be free as a dramatist, elusive, unknown."

We've come to know him more in the decades since - through the menacing Natural Born Killers, the riveting but wonky conspiracy of JFK, the all-star lost classic U-Turn, even the missed opportunity that was The Putin Interviews. As my friend, who is the real authority, correctly observes, Chasing the Light is also weighted with nostalgia for a time when political dramas and anti-war films were smashing the box office, something hard to imagine today.

The second volume, if and when it arrives, will surely make for good reading - or listening. Buckle up your seat belt and take a spin.

-Noel Baker, “Oliver Stone’s freewheeling autobiography tells the story of the first half of his life,” Irish Examiner, Jan 17 2021 [x]

#chasing the light #oliver stone #reviews #book reviews #books #irish examiner