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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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By Barry Grey

26 September 2019

On Monday night, the New York Metropolitan Opera opened its 2019-2020 season with a new production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This production has a particular distinction in that it is the first ever based on a critically researched and authoritative performance edition of Gershwin’s score, the product of 20 years of work led by musicologist Wayne Shirley, who is currently at the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative.

There is no doubt that the poignant love story of the crippled beggar Porgy and the beautiful but abused and addicted Bess, and the suffering and struggle of the African American working class community of Charleston’s Catfish Row, is among the world’s most beloved operas and Gershwin’s masterpiece.

Yet the fact that the current production is the first in 29 years to be staged by the country’s most prestigious opera house is indicative of the trials and tribulations that have confronted the work since it premiered on Broadway in October 1935. These have come not from the broad public, which has embraced the opera (and many of its numbers) since its inception, thrilled by its glorious and complex music and moved by its deeply democratic ethos, but from within certain more privileged constituencies—the American classical music establishment, academia, sections of the black professional upper-middle class, including certain African American artists, composers, writers and actors.

Gershwin, the prolific composer—along with his lyricist brother Ira—of hit Broadway musicals and dozens of memorable songs that have become part of the Great American Songbook, rejected the artificial separation of popular music from “serious” or “classical” music. He wrote concert classics that incorporated elements of jazz such as Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F and An American in Paris, which have become part of the symphonic repertoire the world over. He called his Porgy a “folk opera” and deliberately had it debut on Broadway in order to appeal to a broader audience. But what he wrote was a musically dense and dramatically powerful opera in the full sense of the word.

One example of the dismissal of Porgy by much of the American music establishment was a savage review of a production at the New York City Opera written in March of 1965 by the then-music critic of the New York Times Harold C. Schonberg. He wrote:

“Porgy and Bess”—Gershwin, you know—seems to have taken root as an American classic, and everybody accepts it as a kind of masterpiece. It turned up last night as given by the New York City Opera Company. All I can say is that it is a wonder that anybody can take it seriously.

It is not a good opera, it is not a good anything, though it has a half-dozen or so pretty tunes in it: and in light of recent developments it is embarrassing. “Porgy and Bess” contains as many stereotypes in its way as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

In more recent decades, with the domination of racial and identity politics on the campuses and within what passes for the American intelligentsia, its promotion by the Democratic Party and elevation as an ideological bulwark of bourgeois rule, the opera has been repeatedly accused of denigrating and exploiting black people. It is, according to the terminology of African American Studies departments and a well-funded industry that—with the aid of pseudo-left organizations—churns out racialist propaganda, a prime example of “cultural appropriation.”

We will deal with the retrograde concept of “cultural appropriation” further on. First let us examine how this racialist approach to Porgy and Bess is reflected in the media reception to the new Met production.

The table was set, so to speak, by the New York Times, which led its Sunday arts section with a full-page photo of the two leads, Eric Owens and Angel Blue, and the headline “The Complex History and Uneasy Present of ‘Porgy and Bess.’”

Taking pains to raise the standard racialist arguments against the opera and its composer, while simultaneously acknowledging the greatness of the work, the author, Michael Cooper, wrote:

More urgently, is “Porgy” a sensitive portrayal of the lives and struggles of a segregated African-American community in Charleston, SC? (Maya Angelou, who as a young dancer performed in a touring production that brought it to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1955, later praised it as “great art” and “a human truth.”)

Or does it perpetuate degrading stereotypes about black people, told in wince-inducing dialect? (Harry Belafonte turned down an offer to star in the film version because he found it “racially demeaning.”)

Is it a triumph of melting-pot American art, teaming up George and Ira Gershwin (the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants) with DuBose Heyward (the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family) and his Ohio-born wife, Dorothy, to tell a uniquely African-American story? Or is it cultural appropriation?...

Or is the answer to all these questions yes?

The first wave of reviews published Tuesday (the WSWS will publish its own review of the Met production at a later date) have generally been highly favorable. All of the reviewers, however, feel obliged to qualify their enthusiasm for the performance by cataloging the opera’s supposed “baggage,” viewed from the standpoint of race. It seems they allow themselves to be moved by the piece only reluctantly, and sense its humanity and truth despite themselves.

George Grella, for example, writes in New York Classical Review:

Since its debut, Porgy and Bess has been consistently hectored by two questions: is it an opera and is it some combination of condescension and racial exploitation (lately termed cultural appropriation)?

The debut of a new production of Porgy and Bess, which opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera Monday night, could leave no objective listener with any doubt as to the answer to the first question. And based on the excited responses from the audience during the performance, and the rapturous applause and shouts at the end—from the kind of patron mix one sees in everyday life in New York City but rarely in a classical music venue—the work has gone quite a ways toward settling the latter in a heartening and beneficent way.

There are charges of stereotyping and caricature of the inhabitants of Catfish Row, but the real problem of the opera, the irredeemable original sin of Porgy and Bess that every reviewer is duty-bound to raise, is the fact that its creators were white. (Even worse, three of the four—George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward—were men.)

Thus, the Washington Post ’s Anne Midgette writes: “Like so many operas, ‘Porgy’ is dated: written by white men and rife with stereotypes of its time.”

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times writes: “But ever since its premiere in 1935, the work has divided opinion, and the debate lingers. … ‘Porgy’ was created, after all, by white people. … That ‘Porgy and Bess’ is a portrait of a black community by white artists may limit the work.”

Justin Davidson of Vulture.com notes: “True, the only depiction of African-American life that makes it to the opera stage with any regularity was written by three white guys.”

The very fact that the race, gender or nationality of the artist is today uncritically presented as a central issue in evaluating a work testifies to the degeneration of bourgeois thought in general and the terrible damage inflicted over many years by identity and racial politics. The use of such criteria in past periods was associated with the political right, which employed them to promote anti-democratic and racist agendas.

While today the attack on Porgy and Bess on grounds of the “whiteness” of its creators is cloaked in the supposedly “left” trappings of Democratic Party politics and post-modernist (that is, anti-Marxist) criticism, the earlier practitioners of such an approach were more frank in giving vent to its ugly sources and implications.

Reviewing the premiere of Porgy and Bess in 1935, the prominent American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson wrote:

The material is straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles. … [Gershwin’s] lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources. … I do not like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor gefilte fish orchestration.

Most critics and professors who attack the opera for the “whiteness” of its authors are not anti-Semites, but, whether they like it or not, there is an objective link between their approach and that of Richard Wagner, one of the pioneers of anti-Semitism in the field of music. In 1850, he authored the infamous tract “Das Judentum in der Musik” (“Jewishness and Music”), in which he denounced Jewish composers in general and Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in particular.

A racial approach to art has a definite logic. It leads in the end to abominations such as the Nazis' Aryan art, with its book burning and banning of Jewish- and black-infected “degenerate art.”

It is a historical fact that the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled tsarist persecution composed an opera that expressed in a powerful and beautiful way both the poverty and oppression of blacks in the segregated South and their nobility of spirit and burning desire for genuine freedom and equality. What is so strange or problematic about that?

George Gershwin was a genius and without doubt the greatest American composer of his time. That is an important factor to reckon with. There were and are many talented black composers—Duke Ellington and William Grant Still, to name just two—who produced great music, but none has to date produced a musical piece about the black experience in America that compares to Porgy. Unfortunately, in the attacks on the opera by some black artists—initially including Ellington, although the great jazz composer later changed his opinion—there was an element of jealousy. The same applies to composers of the academy who dismissed Gershwin’s work as technically deficient and low-brow.

How many jazz greats have performed and improvised on Gershwin tunes, including his opera? Miles Davis produced an entire album based on it. The list includes Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday and many more. It also includes country and pop artists such as Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson.

More than 80 years after its premiere, history itself has demonstrated the universality of Porgy and Bess. It is about black people, but, more fundamentally, it is about the human condition. Its basic themes are universal. It is a love story. It is a story about oppression, community, struggle, loss and the will to fight.

Do not songs such as “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and the exquisite love duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” express the most profound and universal of human aspirations and emotions? Those who attack the opera for its “whiteness” generally avoid discussing the music.

Nor can there be any doubt that Gershwin’s own background, in the context of the convulsive social and political conditions of the Depression 1930s—the spread of fascism in Europe, revolutionary upheavals internationally and mass struggles of the American working class, and the approach of the Second World War—played a significant role in inspiring him to write Porgy.

During the summer of 1934, Gershwin stayed on Folly Beach, located on a barrier island near Charleston, South Carolina, collecting material and ideas for his opera and visiting revival meetings of the Gullah blacks who lived on adjacent James Island. He wrote to a friend: “We sit out at night gazing at the stars, smoking our pipes. The three of us, Harry [Botkin], Paul [Mueller] and myself discuss our two favorite subjects, Hitler’s Germany and God’s women.”

Dubose Heyward, who spent part of the summer with Gershwin on Folly Beach, published an article in 1935 in Stage magazine in which he described Gershwin’s interaction with the people who became the prototypes for the characters of his opera. “To George it was more like a homecoming than an exploration,” he wrote. “The quality in him which had produced the Rhapsody in Blue in the most sophisticated city in America, found its counterpart in the impulse behind the music and bodily rhythms of the simple Negro peasant of the South.

“The Gullah Negro prides himself on what he calls ‘shouting.’ This is a complicated rhythmic pattern beaten out by feet and hands as an accompaniment to the spirituals, and is indubitably an African survival. I shall never forget the night when at a Negro meeting on a remote sea-island, George started ‘shouting’ with them. And eventually, to their huge delight stole the show from their champion ‘shouter.’ I think that he is probably the only white man in America who could have done it.”

Gershwin himself was not overtly political, at least in his public life, but his sympathies and associations were with the liberal and socialist left. He penned Broadway shows of a broadly anti-war and socially dissident character, such as Strike Up the Band, Of Thee I Sing and Let ’Em Eat Cake. The impact of the Russian Revolution, only 18 years prior to the debut of Porgy, contributed to the generally optimistic and democratic impulse behind his music. The sister of Ira Gershwin’s wife Leonore, Rose Strunsky, translated Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution into English.

The singers who worked closely with Gershwin on Porgy, including the original Porgy and Bess, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, spoke with affection of their interactions with the composer, insisting he never evinced the slightest prejudice or condescension. They were always among the most ardent defenders of the opera.

The Gershwins insisted that the singing roles go only to black performers, in part because they wanted to break down the exclusion of African American artists from the concert hall and because they did not want the opera to be performed in blackface.

As for the element of caricature in Porgy and Bess, what opera does not have caricatures? The vengeful dwarf in Rigoletto, the seductive gypsy in Carmen, the tubercular seamstress in La Boheme, the rascally but clever servant in The Marriage of Figaro. One could go on and on. The issue is: Do the inhabitants of Catfish Row transcend their “types” and express genuine humanity? The opera’s audiences all over the world have answered in the affirmative.

And what of the charge of “cultural appropriation?” Could there be a more banal, reactionary and anti-artistic concept? What is art, if not the interaction of multiple influences of many origins, conditioned by social and historical development and distilled in the creative imagination of the artist to produce works that have universal significance?

Should we denounce Shakespeare, a male, for inventing Ophelia? Should we reject Verdi for writing operas about Egyptians? Should we ban blacks from playing white characters? What about that racist Mark Twain who had the impertinence to create the escaped slave Jim?

The balkanization of art is the end of art.

Here is how Gershwin, who aspired to create a genuine American idiom, described his own development. In an article titled “Jazz is the Voice of the American Soul,” published in 1926, he wrote:

Old music and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, ragtime ditties combined in a mighty chorus in my inner ear. And through and over it all I heard, faint at first, loud at last, the soul of this great America of ours.

And what is the voice of the American soul? It is jazz developed out of ragtime, jazz that is the plantation song improved and transformed into finer, bigger harmonies. …

I do not assert that the American soul is Negroid. But it is a combination that includes the wail, the whine, and the exultant note of the old “mammy” songs of the South. It is black and white. It is all colors and all souls unified in the great melting pot of the world. …

But to be true music it must repeat the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today.

#wsws #porgy and bess #opera #american opera #gershwin #george gershwin #wagner #broadway #broadway musicals #identity politics #racism #racialism #cultural appropriation #gullah

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andreasweaver-blog · 5 years

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Improvements AND RENOVATIONS TO Ancient BUILDINGS USING Modern STYLE

Should you foolishly ignore beauty, you may invariably find yourself without them though if you put money into beauty, it's going to remain along with you every one of the era of your health - An artist. Precisely what is simple a shape to it's possible to be described as a masterpiece to another. Get an architect to generate the total amount between what used to be as well as what something must become is naturally a challenge as they design addendums to and rehabilitate historic properties. It might be is not only challenging and also exhilarating with an architect. The Palm Beach architects, Boca Raton architects and Palm beach gardens architects’ guidelines for preserving, rehabilitating, restoring and reconstructing historic buildings are discussed from the Secretary of Interior Standards for the Historic Properties. Those to blame for developing and promulgating preservation standards and guidance, specifically because it pertains to historic buildings, is the office of Technical Preservation Services (TPS) from the Cultural Resources Directorate from the Park Service. There is no formula for designing a fresh addition or related new construction with a site, nor is there generally just one design approach. Due to the task to make a new addition or add on to a preexisting structure the architect must take into account the proportions between your original historical building along with the current new addition. Dresden’s Military History Museum in Germany, developed by Daniel Libeskind, is an excellent example of how the architect considered the massing scale and detail with the original building however the new addition is clearly unlike the main neoclassical structure.

Rex Nichols, the chairman of historical preservation board in Boca Raton, says “one from the tougher facets of a design is always to will include a fresh, clean, minimalist, contemporary style that is certainly compatible to the historic building. Portion of an architect’s responsibility since they plan their design is to bear in mind the use of current technology and sustainable materials and practices for example impact doors and windows with low E glass, maximum insulation and solar power panels for energy conservation”. The topic of sustainability shaped by Florida architects are also offered at length from the Secretary of Interior Standards for the treatment Historic Properties. New additions and related new construction that fulfill the standards may be any architectural style, traditional, contemporary or a simplified form of the historic building. To keep the historic character and also the identity with the building being enlarged many architects would believe that there should be an equilibrium between how different the newest addition is as well as compatibility on the original historical building. The danger with this approach could be the possibility of there not any among the old and the new design producing predictable, dull solutions. Together looks around at many contemporary buildings, the excitement in the design may be the expression of the architectural proportions and forms that don't necessarily relate with the function from the building. Through the use of contemporary architecture the architect gets the freedom to produce a less predictable plus much more exciting design solution while still making the most of probably the most current and up to date intelligent materials and technology available. The last design of the new construction is really a clearly distinct piece of architectural style that stands since it's own and both compliments the initial historical building yet simultaneously doesn't distract from or hinder the integrity of the original. By Michael Hutchinson and Rex Nichols To learn more about West Palm Beach architects check out the best website

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neriad13 · 5 years

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Best of the Best - Media Consumed 2018

Books - Fiction

The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

I devoured the entire series in a series of months this year and what I’m about to say holds true for all of them (probably more than for the latter two than the first)...but I have a particular soft spot for the plot twists and humor of the beginning. So, it’s my choice for the year, though it is representing the series as a whole.

This is the series that showed me what inclusive fantasy can be like. It’s a story predominantly about straight white dudes written by a straight white dude (a comfort zone I am struggling to break out of) and yet, it is one that purposefully skirts the tropes of the genre and plays with them in such a way that it makes the world feel welcoming to a reader who is neither straight nor male. There’s lesbian pirates, multiple queer characters, copious well-written women and non-white characters as major players in the narrative. This was a book that gave me hope and help as I struggled to bust out of my old patterns of thinking and writing. And yet, it was familiar enough that it was enough of a comfort zone to retreat to in times when I needed to seek comfort in fiction.

And it’s so much good fun. Half a year later and I’m still cracking up at “Nice bird, asshole.”

Books - Nonfiction

Dictator Style - Peter York

This book was weirdly heart-wrenching. There’s something so melancholy and strange about surveying the living spaces of these paragons of human misery and trying to figure out what they were thinking through medium of their wallpaper choices. That, and the knowledge that even the seemingly all powerful are far more tacky and slipshod than commonly believed, stuck with me.

Fic

Batya - Valya

I didn’t read a whole heck of a lot of fic this year and only counted those that were above a 30k word count. There were plenty of short fics that I loved, but alas, I did not write them down. Goals for next year!

So, Batya, BioShock fic - AU in which Ryan discovers Jack far earlier than intended and decides to adopt him as his son. Once this fic gets going, it’s intense. And sad. And beautiful, all of which apply heavily to the relationship between Jack and Kyle. The final scene between them is pure poetry and had me thinking of them dancing as Rapture fell apart around them for days afterward.

Film

I saw so many hecking good movies this year. I’m just barely able to pare it down to a top three.

Black Panther - Ryan Coogler

This movie was exhilarating. The design, the energy, the acting, the humor, the primal drama of two types of activism duking it out in the bowels of the earth...I walked out of the theater in a daze, hardly believing that I’d seen what I had.

When Marnie Was There - Hiromasa Yonebayashi

This movie contains the most accurate portrayal of social anxiety I have ever seen in fiction, period. It hit especially close to home for me, as this year was the one in which I faced and struggled with my own lifelong anxiety. I watched it wondering how on earth filmmakers half a world away got the details of my own childhood down so precisely on film. When the credits hit and “Fine On the Outside” played, I bawled at my computer screen.

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse - Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

This movie was a staggering technological accomplishment. It pushed the boundaries of animation and filmmaking in ways I have flat-out never seen before. It was joyful, it was dramatic, it was tragic, it was gorgeous. It was a celebration of everything animation is capable of. And the fact that a brown kid is at the center of it?

Stunning.

Comics - Webcomics

Alethia - Kristina Stipetic

This is beautiful world in which the characters are forced to make terrible choices, as the main character struggles to find the meaning in such things.

Also, it’s all lesbian robots. The artist drew the comic specifically because she wanted more women in fiction that she could relate to. It’s a fascinating, meditative piece of work.

Comics - Fiction

Akira - Katsuhiro Otomo

This manga is a masterpiece of destruction and resurgence. The art is stunning, the characters are charming and the action is absolutely unbeatable.

But my favorite section was the one which focuses on Chiyoko - an unapologetically masculine woman with an arsenal of heavy weapons - while she’s on desperate rescue mission in hostile territory. My eyes were glued to the page as she blew away her foes and struggled against them in turn, her plight given the gravity and intensity that is so rarely bestowed on female action heroes.

For that alone - best fiction comic of the year.

Comics - Nonfiction

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me - Ellen Forney

I read so many fantastic comic memoirs this year. It was difficult to choose from among them - almost all of them were highlighted as among my favorites of the year. But there’s something about a seasoned artist drawing and talking about her own battles with mental illness after a long (and ongoing) war that stood out to me.

It’s a tale of seemingly endless medication adjustment, therapy and the breaking down of personal stigmas surrounding mental illness and the drugs used to treat it. Though I don’t share the artist’s diagnosis, it was a book that gave me confidence in choices about the treatment of my own mental illness.

Shows

A Series of Unfortunate Events S2 - Barry Sonnenfeld, Bo Welch, Mark Palansky, Allan Arkush, Loni Peristere, Liza Johnson, Jonathan Teplitzky

What can I say about something that is perfect? Every joke hits. Every bit of wordplay makes me burst out laughing. The absurdity and surreality of the situations are a sight to behold. The acting is phenomenal. The writing improves upon the books in every possible way. And in all of this, not an inch of the story’s darkness is ever given up.

Games

This was the year I played the first Fallout (the ending destroyed me), That Dragon, Cancer (very much hit home), 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (can you make a historical game that both teaches, entertains and reveals the human cost of a complex conflict? Yes. Yes, you can.) Pillars of Eternity (A well-written Atheist in my video game? It’s more likely than you think.) and Tales From the Borderlands (the humor! The art! The voice cast! The rock-solid writing!). All of them were top contenders and yet...there was really only one choice for me.

Papo and Yo - Vander Caballero

This is a game about the relationship between a boy and his alcoholic father. It is heavily based on the lead developer’s own experiences. It’s a fraught relationship - torn between the sober moments when the hero’s father loves him, protects him, takes care of him, plays with him - and the moments when drinking turns him into a monster of rage.

The hero sets out to find a cure for his father’s addiction and after great trial discovers…

*spoilers, though the answer is probably pretty obvious, though no less painful for its obviousness*

...that no such cure exists and that the only thing he can do is let him go.

I sobbed uncontrollably at the ending of this game and sniffled long after. The message stuck with me months after I’d played it.

All of the hurt, confusion, anger and grief of letting go of my own toxic person - there it had been, on the screen right in front of me. This game helped me come to peace with that decision in my own life and for that, I am astounded and humbled by the simple artistry of this game. If you have your own toxic person in your life - be the problem alcohol, religious fundamentalism, intolerance or any other form of abuse - play this game and know that it’s okay to leave them behind.

#gentlemen bastards #studio ghibli #black panther #spiderverse #akira #asoue #papo and yo #my writing

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ifuckinglovestvincent · 6 years

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NEWSTATESMAN: “It’s cool that some people hate my show”: St Vincent on fan backlash and Chinese massages

The singer messages me on Twitter the next day. “Dude!” she says, “I’m sorry I was a cock.”

By Alexandra Pollard

9 November 2017

Maybe if St Vincent and I had got massages together, things would have been different. If we’d gone for a hike in the scorching midday sun of Burbank, California, or sat in a small pink box getting high off paint fumes, perhaps we’d have had a better time. She’s done those things with other journalists during this press cycle, in an effort to disrupt the stale dynamic of interviews – of which, she told BBC Music from inside that newly painted box, she’s done “a million”. As it is, we’re sitting in her room on the 12th floor of a London hotel, and things aren’t going well.

St Vincent, AKA Annie Clark, is in the early stages of a 37-date world tour in support of her new album, Masseduction. The shows – which she’s doing without a band, opting instead to accompany her own fearsome guitar with rearranged backing tracks – are fascinating, sometimes exhilarating affairs. She doesn’t throw herself around the stage in a self-flagellating fervour, as she did a few years ago on the Digital Witness tour, nor this time has she employed the shuffling, robotic choreography of Annie-B Parson.

Instead, Clark exposes herself in a different way – by carrying the show alone. As a blue curtain gradually pulls back to reveal nothing in particular, she places herself in various positions across the stage. Sometimes she faces the audience, sometimes she stands side-on as if utterly unaware of their presence. At one point she curls up in the foetal position on the floor. The idea, she says, is to plot the trajectory from fear to freedom.

“Some people loved it and were brought to tears and thought it was the best thing they’d ever seen, and then some people were incensed by it,” Clark explains. She was in Manchester last night, London the night before. Now, she’s draped over a black chaise-longue, demonstrably exhausted, her feet spilling on to the armchair beside her (when I ask if she’s tired, she says flatly, “I don’t care, my emotions are irrelevant.”)

Does she mind that the shows, particularly her decision to play without a live band, have received such a polarised response? “Whatever,” she says. “I think it’s cool that some people hate it.” She rolls her neck around to glance at me – the semi-horizontal position she’s taken has thus far meant minimal eye contact. “Did you hate the show?”

Not at all, I tell her. I really liked it. Then I add, in an effort to avoid bland effusiveness and because she’s still looking at me with a sceptical eyebrow raise, that perhaps I found it more intriguing than moving, and anyway it would have been hard to beat the experience I had seeing her at End Of The Road festival a few years ago. I realise too late that my words have landed with a leaden thud.

“Great,” Clark says. “It’s the third show. I mean, when I played End Of The Road, that was one of the last dates I did. Tours take a while to alchemise.” She pauses. “Also, if a rapper got up on stage and didn’t have a live band, which most of them don’t, no one would be bummed at all. Why is the assumption that I need to have a live band onstage for something to be authentic? It’s about the management of expectation, and I think it’s similar to people thinking that they have a glass of milk, and then they drink it and it’s Sprite. ‘I don’t like this.’ Actually you like Sprite too, you just weren’t expecting it.”

St. Vincent has made a career out of giving people something they weren’t quite expecting. Her music is bold and melodic – but only if you catch it at certain angles, like a magic eye book that only makes sense if you squint the right way. With each album since her chamber pop debut Marry Me a decade ago, she’s pushed her sound further towards a place between beauty and ugliness, aggression and vulnerability, adding scuzzy synth layers, distorted guitar riffs so heavy they drag half a second behind the beat, and lyrics both profoundly moving and a little grotesque – images of severed fingers, for example, that anchor a tale of drunken heartbreak.

Masseduction, her fifth LP (or sixth, if you count her David Byrne collaboration Love This Giant), is a poignant, kinky masterpiece. It’s a work of staggering frankness, with anthemic pop melodies that float atop crunchy riffs and gasping synths, as Clark’s fingers wring out every peculiarly arresting sound a guitar can make. She has a pithy tagline for each of her albums. 2011’s Strange Mercy was housewife on pills; her self-titled record was near-future cult leader; this one is dominatrix at the mental institution.

She sings of loss and depression, of BDSM and pill popping, vacuous cities and self-destructive urges. Her voice is pure and resplendent, but it also creaks, stretches into a sigh or plummets to a growl. On “Hang On Me”, as she pleads with someone, “Please, oh please don’t hang up yet,” a million unsaid things pour into the cracks in her voice.

“If you want to know about my life,” she told fans in a statement when the album was announced – aware both of her historic inscrutability and of the increased thirst for personal revelations her relationship with supermodel Cara Delevingne had prompted – “listen to this record”.

Clark performing this Summer. Photo: Getty

In the past, Clark has recoiled at the suggestion that her songs are diaristic, saying that such an idea “presupposes – in a kind of sexist way – this idea that women lack the imagination to write about anything other than their exact literal lives.” Still, this record is a little different to the others. “It’s very close to my heart. It’s not literal, because if it was literal it wouldn’t be art, but you know, it’s very heart on sleeve.”

Is there a particular way she hopes people interpret it? “No,” she says, exasperated. “There’s not. I’m happy to be misunderstood. It’s not even about being ‘misunderstood’, it’s just up for interpretation. Any interpretation is fine, as long as it’s not, ‘She’s a racist, sexist or homophobe’. I’d be bummed if someone thought that. I’m not the one writing the think pieces on it. That’s not my job. My job’s to make a thing, it’s not to do all the interpreting and explaining. That’s didactic, and shows a profound lack of respect for the audience’s intelligence.”

Hoping she might be open to at least a small amount of explaining, I put it to Clark that there’s a restless quality to the album. She’s quite often leaving, or being left, or wanting to leave. On “Slow Disco”, a plaintive orchestral waltz and one of the most beautiful songs she’s written, she asks, “Am I thinking what everybody’s thinking? I’m so glad I came, but I can’t wait to leave.” Did she notice that theme running through the album’s veins? “Yes.” I wait for more, but instead she pulls her phone out of her pocket and starts typing. “Keep asking away.”

I do as she says, but the air in the room is uncomfortable. I wonder if I should clarify what I said about the show, but I think the moment’s passed. I forge on instead. In a previous interview, Clark said that “Slow Disco” was about how “the life you’re living, and the life you should be living, are running parallel.” Is there a life she feels she should be living? “Yeah,” she says, phone still out. “I should be in Turks and Caicos with a fucking pina colada coming out of a coconut, just getting a sick tan.”

“I mean, I don’t even think I should be living,” she adds, before puffing air out of her lips. “Hilarious joke. No, I feel super lucky that I’m living the life I am. Everything I’ve ever done, every person I’ve ever met, every experience I’ve ever had, is because I got good enough at moving my fingers at micro-movements across a piece of wood and steel. That’s bonkers.”

That’s a fairly self-deprecating assessment of how St Vincent got to where she is. Her inimitable skill at moving her fingers at micro-movements across a piece of wood and steel – more commonly known as playing the guitar – is part of it, but there’s an intrigue and charisma to her music, and the persona she presents, that goes far beyond technical skill. It’s an intangible talent, one that has steadily drawn her into the limelight – though it was her self-titled fourth album that really thrust her into the big leagues, topping a handful of Albums of 2014 lists, and earning her a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.

Clark with ex-girlfriend Cara Delevingne. Photo: Getty.

Then she fell in love with someone unthinkably famous, and was thrust into a more insidious kind of limelight, the kind where paparazzi followed her around, where tabloid journalists tricked her relatives into revealing painful personal information, the kind that fuelled her anxiety and depression. Though being on the road for endless stretches of time didn’t help with that. In an appearance on the New Yorker’s podcast, she said that between her self-titled album and this one, she needed to do a “radical reorganising of my life in order to fulfil my destiny as a creative person”.

“Oh my god! Who am I, Jim Jones?” she says laughing, when I quote this back to her. “Wow. I said that? It’s like a Paulo Coelho meets Jim Jones inspirational talk. I think I meant that I was just in a monastic period, I just wasn’t drinking or having sex or really doing anything that you’d consider fun.” The only pleasure she allowed herself was getting Chinese massages in New York City. I’ve never had a massage, I tell her. Perhaps I have a lifetime of tension. She looks aghast. “You probably do. You carry it with you, you know?”

Did she find it helpful, this monastic period? “Oh it was so generative. I got so much done. Completely eschewing certain things that can otherwise take up a fair amount of time left so much time to be productive. I really loved that time. Being on tour is just a different kind of energy. It’s performance all the time. Obviously I’m not putting on my best performance for you today.” She laughs again. The icy atmosphere is starting to melt, but our time’s up.

I bid Clark goodbye. She would get up, she says, but she’s too tired. I’m glad we managed to drag the encounter towards conviviality, but – though I’m sure she won’t spend another second dwelling on it – I don’t think either of us had much fun.

The next morning, my phone buzzes. Clark’s messaged me on Twitter. “Dude!” she says, “I’m sorry I was a cock.” She explains that she was exhausted, “which is not an excuse”, but that she’d felt especially defensive because she’d been getting negative tweets about the show all day, and had thought my comments were an attempt to go for the jugular. “I really misread the interaction,” she says, “and have been feeling horribly guilty ever since. I thought you were just there to tell me my show sucked and I got real defensive and yeah, it went downhill from there.”

As it turns out then, her emotions aren’t irrelevant. She feels things deeply, all the time. You can hear it in her music, in every riff, every crack in her voice, every line about loss, or leaving, or wanting to leave. Those negative tweets were sprinkled amongst a litany of praise, but – though she wore an insouciant armour when we met – she clung to them anyway. “You carry it with you, you know?” I hope she carries the good things too. I hope she gets some sleep.

Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2017/11/it-s-cool-some-people-hate-my-show-st-vincent-fan-backlash-and-chinese?amp

#st vincent #annie clark #interviews #SENSITIVE LITTLE PEA #▱

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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What the Mank Ending Leaves Out About Orson Welles and Citizen Kane

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This article contains Mank spoilers. You can read our review here.

It’s like the climax of a Western. Two men stare across from each other in a showdown of ego and calculation. And Gary Oldman’s Herman J. Mankiewicz (or “Mank”) has just told Orson Welles (Tom Burke) he wants writing credit for the Citizen Kane screenplay. This is not going to end well.

Before this moment, Welles had been conciliatory to Mank, feigning concern for his health and offering to take sole rewriting duties on the gargantuan script. He’s even providing $10,000 from RKO Pictures as a consolation. It’s of course more bribe than bonus. Yet as Welles realizes that he might have to share credit, or worse have no credit at all for a screenplay we just watched Mankiewicz write alone for two hours, the budding director throws a temper tantrum worthy of Charles Foster Kane, and Mankiewicz uses it as inspiration for exactly that—hubris run amok.

In the end, Welles is unmasked as a bully and an opportunist: a charlatan who wants to claim credit for a masterful screenplay that is all Mank’s, at least according to Mank. Yet the movie’s “Boy Genius from New York” wasn’t smart enough to see the writing on the wall about how the newly formed Screen Writers Guild would arbitrate this, nor did he predict that when Mank finally accepted his eventual screenwriting Oscar from his front lawn he’d say, “I am very happy to accept this award in the manner in which the screenplay was written, which is to say in the absence of Orson Welles.”

Is all this true? Did Welles put his name on a screenplay he didn’t help write a word of? It’s a question that has bedeviled the legend of Citizen Kane for 50 years, and even longer if you consider how many decades before that most people just believed the “Boy Genius” created everything substantial in Kane out of whole cloth. That myth is perhaps why Pauline Kael created one of her own when she published her 50,000-word essay “Raising Kane” across two volumes in The New Yorker in 1971—an account of Citizen Kane’s creation that suggests Mankiewicz alone wrote the script.

The Influence of Pauline Kael and “Raising Kane”

Kael’s essay, which is the clear basis for Mank, has been discredited in the ensuing years as inaccurate, unfair to Welles, and at best sloppy (or at worst intentionally misleading). But it makes for a hell of a story, which five decades on still finds life in David Fincher’s new Netflix film.

“Orson Welles wasn’t around when Citizen Kane was written, early in 1940,” Kael emphatically stated midway through the first volume of “Raising Kane.” Rather, she’d eventually elaborate, he was too “deeply entangled in the radio shows and other activities and a romance with Dolores Del Rio” to be bothered to do anything at Victorville’s dude ranch but stop by to have dinner once with Mankiewicz. In his absence, Kael paints a picture of a disabled Mank dictating the masterpiece of his script, more or less fully formed, to secretary Rita Alexander—and with the good support of Welles’ one-time business partner and now increasingly estranged middleman, John Houseman.

In Kael’s telling, “Welles probably made suggestions in his early conversations with Mankiewicz, and since he received copies of the work weekly while it was in progress at Victorville, he may have given advice by phone or letter. Later, he almost certainly made suggestions for cuts that helped Mankiewicz hammer the script into tighter form, and he is known to have made a few changes on the set.”

Basic key facts that Kael had access to while researching her essay would call this account into question, including how Welles and Mankiewicz spent five weeks in consultation, hatching out the general story of the film, as well as Welles simultaneously penning his own rough draft while Mank was in Victorville. But the blind spots turned out to be even bigger than these oversights.

So why the omissions? In part, as with Fincher after her, Kael clearly wanted to shine a light on one of Hollywood’s forgotten talents, as well as his entire generation of early talkie screenwriters. Unlike the playwrights and script doctors who came after him, Mankiewicz arrived in Hollywood as part of a singular era in the New York literary world, a member of the fabled “Algonquin Club” who came to Tinseltown for easy work and fat paychecks.

As Mank famously telegraphed to his buddy Ben Hecht, “MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS.” But as Kael sharply illuminated, writers were one of the least valued cogs in the machinery of Golden Age Hollywood’s assembly line. They gladly took the money, but disdained the business as much as themselves.

“The vacation became an extended drunken party, and while they were there in the debris of the long morning after, American letters passed them by,” Kael opined. Mankiewicz, a journalist who wrote (often drunkenly) for The New York Times and The New Yorker, came to Hollywood and sold his soul—but then got little of the credit he deserved for doing so. That includes his immeasurable contributions to Citizen Kane.

Mank highlights elements from Mankiewicz’s own personal biography that became essential to crafting the 1941 masterpiece. Obviously Mankiewicz’s friendships with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance in the film) and his movie star mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) informed much—though crucially not all—of the biography of Charles Foster Kane (Welles) and Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) in Kane. Other episodes in the ’41 film were also lifted from Mank’s own life. Kael underlines a good one where Mank fell asleep drunk at his typewriter while writing a scathing theater review for The Times. It was so toxic his editor refused to publish it, similar to the experiences of Joseph Cotten’s Jedediah Leland in Kane.

These contributions had been obscured in the 30 years between Kane and Kael, with most only remembering Welles’ multi-hyphenated talent. And as the late ‘60s and early ‘70s rolled around, a new generation of film critics like Peter Bogdanovich and Andrew Sarris emerged with an almost worshipful reverence for the contribution of film directors. Sarris even coined “auteur theory,” and Kael became one of its biggest skeptics. It seems likely that “Raising Kane” was as much about tearing down “auteur theory,” and going after one of its adherents’ biggest idols, as it was meant to raise Mank up.

The problem, of course, is that for as much as Kael got Mankiewicz, she missed Welles—and the actual making of their picture—by miles.

What Mank Misses

Backlash to “Raising Kane” was fierce, with Sarris and Bogdanovich among its most vocal early critics. Indeed, both wrote pieces criticizing Kael, and Bogdanovich’s Esquire article, “The Kane Mutiny” published in 1972, proved to be the first major yank at unraveling Kael’s (and now Mank’s) version of events. Hardly an uninterested party—Bogdanovich was a protégé and friend of Welles, who likely had input on “The Kane Mutiny” from Welles himself—Bogdanovich nonetheless did something Kael failed at: legwork that could corroborate her story.

For starters Bogdanovich unearthed much of the research for “Raising Kane” was not done by Kael but UCLA film professor Howard Suber. “Raising Kane” was originally intended (and eventually published) as the introduction to a screenplay book on the movie titled The Citizen Kane Book (1971). Kael agreed to write an introduction in part so she could publish it as an excerpt elsewhere, but she also agreed to co-author the introduction with Suber, who’d been researching Kane for years. In the end, she wrote her epic alone, but with Suber’s treasure trove of material. Yet she failed to mention his name once in 50,000 words.

Bogdanovich interviewed Suber about these events and the professor came to a very different conclusion than Kael, saying, “After months of investigation… I regard the authorship of Kane as a very open question. Unfortunately, both sides would have to be consulted, and Miss Kael never spoke to Mr. Welles, which as I see it, violates all the principles of historical research.” For that comment, Kael declared she’d never return to UCLA until Suber apologized. He waited until after her death to speak publicly in detail about how he was supposed to co-write the original introduction.

Movies

Mank and Amanda Seyfried’s Quest to Save Marion Davies from Citizen Kane

By David Crow

Movies

David Fincher’s Joker and Orson Welles Criticisms Shouldn’t Matter

By David Crow

The vision Mank offers of the screenplay’s origins existing exclusively in Victorville seems based primarily on the accounts of two people who were there: Houseman, Welles’ bitter ex-partner who spent much of the rest of his life criticizing Welles on all matters, and Rita Alexander, whom Kael described as saying, “Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of ‘Citizen Kane.’”

That might be Alexander’s account, but Bogdanovich reached out to Welles’ own secretary, Kathryn Trosper, who likewise typed out much of Welles’ version of a script written concurrently with Mank’s, as well as the subsequent drafts that Welles worked on. “Then I’d like to know what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles!” Trosper responded.

More convincingly are the accounts of major third party figures Kael referenced but never interviewed, like Charles Lederer. As another screenwriter who was good friends with Mank, and nephew to Marion Davies, Lederer is played in Fincher’s film by Joseph Cross as a man loyal to both his aunt and pseudo-mentor. He also is the go-between who Oldman’s Mankiewicz gives a copy of American (Citizen Kane’s original title) to, in order to decide if Marion would be upset. The fallout of letting the script into Hearst-friendly hands nearly derails Kane’s release. This is also how Kael described events in her essay, even though she never reached out to Lederer. Bogdanovich did.

“That is one hundred percent, whole-cloth false,” Lederer said in 1972, revealing he received the script from someone else within the industry. “I gave it back to him. He asked me if I thought Marion would be offended and I said I didn’t think so.”

Regarding authorship, Lederer said, “Manky was always complaining and sighing about Orson’s changes. And I heard from Benny [Hecht] too, that Manky was terribly upset. But you see, Manky was a great paragrapher—he wasn’t really a picture writer. I read his script of the film—the long one called American—before Orson really got to changing it and making his vision of it—and I thought it was pretty dull.” He would go on to add, “Orson vivified the material, changed it a lot, transcended it with his direction.”

As early as ’72, Bogdanovich picked apart Kael’s essay, from finding a 1941 affidavit by Richard Barr, executive assistant on the film, where he stated Welles made revisions that included dialogue, changing sequences and characterizations, and creating new scenes, to also citing Lederer’s claim that Kane never had its writing credits arbitrated by the Screen Writers Guild. This contradicts Kael’s assertion that the guild forced Welles to accept Mankiewicz’s name on the screenplay—and first above his own.

However, it has since been confirmed that Mankiewicz did lodge a protest with the Screen Writers Guild in 1940 before withdrawing it. He clearly worried about receiving credit because he had genuinely agreed to go uncredited on the script. The primary reason for this arrangement was because RKO’s contract stipulated that wunderkind Welles was to write, direct, produce, and star in his own movies. The studio didn’t want the mystique impugned by a co-writer. Whether Welles personally orchestrated this is unknown, but after Mank made noises and RKO decided (without the guild’s intervention) to give Mank credit, it was Welles’ decision to give Mankiewicz first credit. Assistant Richard Wilson recalled Welles circling Mankiewicz’s name and drawing an arrow to move it in front of his own for the end credits.

Beginning in 1978, film professor Robert L. Carringer offered the definitive rebuttal to Kael, and therefore Mank’s, story. First with “The Scripts of Citizen Kane” and then The Making of Citizen Kane, Carringer analyzed all seven drafts of the script, from the original 266-page behemoth Mankiewicz turned in from Victorville to the 156-page shooting script, with Welles being held chiefly responsible for most or all of the changes after the third draft.

Among Carringer’s discoveries, significant lines like “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a great man” are attributed to Welles, as are several of the film’s most significant sequences, such as Kane’s loveless first marriage being conveyed through a series of dissolves at the couple’s breakfast table over the decades.

Carringer concluded, “[Mankiewicz’s] principal contributions were the story frame, a cast of characters, and a good share of the dialogue… Welles added the narrative brilliance – the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity, and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table sequence. He also transformed Kane from a cardboard fictionalization of Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence.”

Reconsidering Orson Welles and ‘Auteurs’

The truth is Welles wasn’t there when Mank wrote his first draft—though even that occurred after more than a month of story meetings between the two men—but he did write many of the later drafts; and he wrote enough to deserve co-screenwriting credit.

It’s easy to understand the frustration for many about Mank being overlooked, including Mank’s own resentment. After the Citizen Kane premiere, where attendees were greeted to a program declaring Welles the author, director, producer, and star, Mankiewicz wrote to his father, “I’m particularly furious at the incredibly insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact is that there isn’t one single line in the picture that wasn’t in writing—writing from and by me—before ever a camera turned.”

Yet this resentment, which in turn eventually fueled Kael and now Fincher, is divorced from reality.

Auteur theory is flawed and certainly not perfect. While some directors can clearly leave a signature on their body of work that is distinct, filmmaking is still a collaborative process, and emphasis on the director too often cultivates neglect for many other talents. But Kael, and now Fincher after her, seem so determined to undermine the concept that they created an ideological prism of their own, which is separated from the actual truth.

In a recent interview with Premiere, Fincher said, “Sure, there is genius in Citizen Kane, who could argue? But when Welles says, ‘It only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography,’ pfff… Let’s say that this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have Gregg Toland around to prepare the next shot.”

This is a fair critique of Welles’ boast in the 1970s on The Dick Cavett Show that “technically the whole bag of movies can be learned in a day and a half.” This was braggadocious late night TV blather, then and now, which undervalues talents like Toland and Mank. And it informs Fincher’s vision of Welles as a Mephistophelian figure who slithers up to Oldman’s hospital bed to make a Faustian bargain. But it’s not the whole picture of Welles or his legacy.

After all, Welles was the first (and still one of few) directors to place cinematographer Toland on the same title card as himself in the end credits of Citizen Kane, giving the man equal due for the visual wonder of the film.

And in a more thoughtful interview Welles had with Bogdanovich in 1969, he said, “It’s impossible to say how much I owe to Gregg. He was superb… Up until then, cameramen were listed with about eight other names. Nobody those days—only the stars, director and the producer—got separate cards. Gregg deserved it, didn’t he?”

And as for Mank? In the same interview, Welles said, “I loved him. People did. He was much admired… [A lot of Hollywood writers] were pretty bitter and miserable. And nobody was more miserable, more bitter and funnier than Mank… A perfect monument of self-destruction. But you know when the bitterness wasn’t focused onto you—he was the best company in the world.”

While he additionally gave Mank credit for “rosebud” in that interview (his least favorite aspect in Kane), Welles also heaped praise on Mank writing the scene where Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) recounts seeing a girl on a ferry in 1896 and thinking about her every day since.

“That was all Mank,” Welles said, “it’s my favorite scene… If I were in hell and they gave me a day off and said what part of any movie you ever made do you want to see, I’d say the scene of Mank’s about Bernstein. All the rest could be better, but that was just right.”

Late in Fincher’s Mank, Herman insists the Susan Alexander character is not really based on his pal Marion Davies—just the idea people have about her. It’s an act of betrayal, but it doesn’t undermine how great Citizen Kane is. Similarly, Fincher’s devilish vision of Welles doesn’t undermine the quality of his superb film, even as the 21st century filmmaker is playing into Kael’s false, hatchet job of a portrait of him.

Later in life Welles regretted how people got the wrong idea about Davies from Kane, saying she and Hearst had a “right to be upset about that.” And if he were alive today, maybe he’d have a right to be upset about his portrayal in Mank.

Both inaccuracies make for good stories, and both are pure fiction.

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deathbyvalentine · 7 years

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Yet Another Prompt Collection - Nosebleed Club Edition

Your Cousin’s Singed T-Shirt

There was blood on his shirt, a tear, and ash smeared down the back. There were only no tear stains because they haven’t fell from his cheeks yet. He won’t say what happened, but his knuckles are reddened, and his cheek is blooming in shades of purple.

It’s the third time this summer.

This town is too small for him. He works all day at the diner, flipping burgers for a few dollars an hour. He’s not going to college. When I ask him what he’s saving for, he says a rainy day with a wry smile. It never rains around here. The ground is nothing but dust and longing. It doesn’t even remember rain.

He is less fragile than he seems. People see his sloping shoulders, the beautiful hands, the eyes that are almost green, and assume he is made of paper, and will fold under pressure. They haven’t seen the way he takes a punch, the way he holds his little sister. He doesn’t even flinch when the grill spits oil at him, when the car engine burns. He is roughly hewn, and he endures if not succeeds.

He kisses boys in secret. He kisses boys in leather jackets, and boys in flannel shirts. He kisses boys with soft pink lips, and boys who only scowl. He kisses shy boys until they blush, and bold boys until they blush too. He loves them, behind the boatshed by the green green lake. Nobody knows, but they know. They see it on him, all the kisses he’s had. They punish him for it.

He has his bags packed and hidden underneath the stairs. His car is hidden behind the billboard outside the town limits. He is done, but not gone, not yet. He’s waiting for something, a final push, somewhere to run to, not just away from.

Meditative state in the hotel pool

The bright turquoise water rippled as she twitched her fingers, the only parts of her body actually touching the water. The sun beat down, relentless - it was only ten o’clock. By noon, the ground would be sizzling, and anyone brave enough to walk on the ground barefoot would regret their mistake instantly. Lucinda readjusted her sunglasses, and flicked a few droplets of water onto her dark skin.

It was midsummer, almost exactly, and there was a weight hanging in the air. Soon, the days would be shortening once more, the autumn drawing closer. There would be sorrowful about it, somehow. Something sad.

But then, the house had been sad for a while now. The halls, always large, now seemed empty, though nothing had changed on the surface. The white walls had taken on a tomb-like quality, and the floorboards were quieter than they had ever been.

It had been three weeks since her best friend had died.

It was odd though. She had felt nothing, nothing at all when she had been told, the gaping emptiness a condemnation as much as anything else. She didn’t cry, she didn’t even flinch, she only stared. She wondered if it all would hit her later, at some point she would wake in the night weeping for Kate, but the moment never came. Was she broken? Or was she just smart?

She had never been someone that got attached to people. Her mother had remarked she was a cold child - she never had asked for kisses, or hugs, or comfort. When she had nightmares, she comforted herself, whispering quietly in the darkened room. She’d never expressed a desire for pets, or indeed, seemed to notice animals at all. When her baby sister had been born, she was neither disturbed by the new presence nor fond of it.

The hotel pool boy paused by the side of the pool, dragging his eyes over Lucinda. pile of towels wobbling in his arms. She didn’t glance over, but the side of her mouth twitched. She liked to be watched, to be admired. What was the point of having a form at all if people did not gaze at it? People were art, and she had tried to sculpt herself into a masterpiece.

Her parents would be frantic while now, but it was a pilgrimage that had to be made, and she would make it in her own good time. Lucinda, historically, could not be rushed on anything, and she did not intend to start now. She was visiting the site of the crash where Kate had breathed her last breath, where her blood had spilt like coke across the tarmac, where her life had ended. Lucinda was partly going out of sick curiosity (surely the ground where someone had died had to look different?), partly out of escapism, and partly to see if she would finally feel something.

“I couldn’t answer and you couldn’t hang up the phone.”

It was late, but that odd spell of summer had left the last of the light clinging to the sky, so you could still see the ghost of your silhouette outlined in haunting blue. My phone lay on the bedside table, silent, out of battery. I could have charged it, but instead I sat on the edge of my bed and watched it, hands clasped beneath my chin.

Elsewhere in the house I could hear my brother shutting the front door and clattering into the kitchen, undoubtedly tracking mud the entire time. My mother’s low murmurs travelled from room to room, the blare of the TV static. If I closed my eyes, I could still picture them all perfectly. I knew this domesticity by heart.

If I turned my phone on, it would be disturbed, or lost. I would either have to tell them I was leaving, or her I didn’t love her enough to value her company over simple comfort. Fundamentally, I was a coward - I liked simplicity, I liked swimming with the tide, not against it. So my phone would remain black and lifeless, all those texts ignored, all the calls missed.

Act of Vengeance

The room was a shade of pink she had not chosen for herself. It had been this colour since she could remember, painted when she was too young to know the word for the colour that splashed the walls. Nowadays, she barely noticed it.

She curled the curled phone wire around her fingers, that position that thousands, if not millions of teenagers had adopted. Balancing on her windowsill, cigarette left unlit in her other hand. On the phone her best friend was chattering about plans for prom. She had spent hours agonising over matching the petals of the corsage to her dress, to her boyfriend’s suit. She was a girl that liked everything perfect. She obsessed over details, unable to let even the smallest imperfections pass without comment.

Cecilia was fucking her boyfriend.

It was not about him of course. Cecilia had long since learnt that making boys the point of things was in of itself a pointless and painful endeavour. It wasn’t because of anger. It wasn’t a moment of lust or love. It was out of a sort of fascination. Abigail liked perfection and the boys she chose to associate with were no different. If they weren’t perfect to begin with, she would shape them into something beautiful.

Cecilia took a savage pleasure in corrupting, secretly, a small part of that image. In creating a bubble of lies and filth that was invisible to the untrained eye. She didn’t want her to find out, she didn’t want to hurt her. She just liked this, cradled close to her heart.

Bedroom forts and everything alight

Most people don’t wake up during a housefire. The smoke creeps under the doors, curling around sleepers in a deadly embrace. The fumes fill their lungs, and keep them asleep. They burn to death while still dreaming. The house is quiet as it burns.

The flames lick at the patchwork duvets, balanced on wooden chairs and dressers. The fairylights were the source of it. Their electricity had overspilt, overheated. It was almost beautiful, the bright orange glow that now lit up the room. It was impossible to tell if there were sleeping figures in the forts constructed from duvets and beds and chairs, held up with string or pegs. It would be impossible to tell later too, amongst the mess of melted plastic and ash.

The witch’s son and the scientist’s daughter

His hair was blonde. Not like gold or dripping honey, but like a wheat field only just waking into bloom. His skin was dark. His eyes were bright. He smiled easily and lazily. He did most things easily, every movement relaxed and unhurried. She saw him every day on her way home from school, leaning in the doorway of his cottage, chewing on a long piece of grass. He smiled when he saw her, raising a hand in greeting. She found herself, once, raising a hand too before catching herself and lowering it. He seemed to be laughing at her as she scurried on.

There were rumours about him, as there were rumours about them all in this town. His mother had died last year, leaving a teenaged boy in an empty house with too many rooms and too big a garden. But he survived, and endured, and perhaps even flourished. It was scandalous, the town whispered, how little he seemed to mourn. How his cheerful demeanour never seemed to falter.

ABANDONED

“The concept of wolves will never get old.” The snow fell too early that year, smothering the still-bright grass and turning the air quiet and still. The lanterns that always lit the way through the woods didn’t swing - there was no wind, there was nothing but the whisper of snow touching snow. And with the snow, came the wolves.

They didn’t take chickens, or steal the weak sheep in their strong jaws. But they waited, at the edge of the village, eyes fixed on the little houses. Abbie said they were hungry. Anthony said they were curious. Whatever they were, their vigil was unceasing - there was no sun to chase them away.

Summer found herself staring back. When collecting wood, or water, she met the eyes of the leader, the one that came the closest, showed the least fear. There was an alarming intelligence in it’s eyes, something both animal and thinking. She thought of the stories of werewolves, of men trapped in an animal’s skin. Here, there was no path to wander from, but the danger was still present. Still close.

She reached out a hand, slowly, never moving her eyes from it’s. It did not step forward, but nor did it flinch when her palm met it’s head, and pressed fingers into the thick, thick fur there. It was coarse, and lush, and it had closed it’s eyes slightly, as though enjoying the contact.

A shot rang out, and it fell, the other wolves falling back out of the ring of light, and fading into the darkness. Scarlet splattered the snow, as Summer’s hand clasped at air, shock making it tremble.

“Phew.” The hunter wiped a gloved hand across his brow. “It almost had you there.”

Child from the marsh

The singing travelled across the sodden ground, seemingly without source or cause. The flickering bog lights seemed unaffected, keeping their overnight vigil with little pomp or fanfare. In some countries, these were bad omens, spirits of those who wandered and found themselves lost, and soon, found themselves dead. Here though, they were a unique comfort, the sole light when the sky was not cloudless.

But there were spirits here. Only, they were not filled with light. They were dark things, their eyes hollow and blank. Moss crawled over their unrotted skin, tinting it green. They seemed to be a feature of the marsh as much as the reeds, or the puddles. They stood, swaying in the breeze. There were not many of them, but there were enough. A silent, watching army, always turned northwards.

She was different. She was not a corpse possessed, rather a marsh personified. Her eyes were not black - they were lanterns lit from the inside, bright and luminous. Her skin was not tallow or sickly, rather, the green looked living and vital. Her hair hung limp, damp vines swinging with movement. A fox followed beside the child, underfed and skittish, cringing. Oh, and she walked. She was free to roam, and wander.

She guided travellers off the path and into the marsh proper, the wisps never interfering even as they drowned, kicking to free themselves of the clinging, watery mud. They were watchers - not protectors. She was not evil, she was not anything at all. She simply was, as much as the mountains that shadowed the small piece of land.

Objects we saved from the burning house

The photo album, obviously. Not that it contained photos of us, oh no. This was an album of the dead, grandparents, nieces, brothers and cousins. To qualify for entry, you had to be both cherished and lost. We had no other albums.

A teddy, not old, pink. It’s nose was made of a heart button.

Three rings, each with a stone of a differing type set in it. These would be ours when our mother died, and we were fascinated by them. We would play with them sometimes, holding them to the light and watching the filtered light come through.

The cat saved itself, sooty and resentful.

A birdcage filled with paperback books. Most of them had been salvaged from charity shops, stained with previous owner's’ tea, or curled from a past splash of water. Most of them were beatnik classics, and we read them a little too young, scandalised and fascinated by the sex, drugs and alluring rock and roll.

The record player, and the nearest records. Our family could survive a fire, but we could not live without art, without music. That perhaps explains how my father perished, in his hands clutched a series of childhood drawings from my sisters and I.

He had always been a fragile man, my father. Prone to fits of laboured breathing, or what mother called funny turns. I remember him best in his armchair, leaning back and watching our performative play with a little smile on his face. I like to think he was often content, but more likely, it was never worth bringing up what made his discontent. He accepted everything life threw at him with the resignation that could only come from a man raising three daughters.

I never once heard him raise his voice. Not even to call for help.

He didn’t burn to death is the irony. He died of smoke inhalation, the dirty fumes from our home turning to ash polluting his fragile lungs until there was no air left.

Dead swan on the riverbank

It was getting close to summer, the sky increasingly doing away with the heavy clouds and introducing those blindingly bright blue skies that seemed too gorgeous to be real. They were movie skies, not the type of thing that seemed to fit into the Surrey suburbs at all.

Every day Silas walked home along the riverbank. In Winter, it was full of mud and ice, treacherous. He had lost more than one book to it’s depths, the wind catching him off guard and carelessly tossing it into the water. In Summer though, it ran clear. Sometimes you could see quick, silver fish flitting to and from the reeds on either side. Further along, there were wide fields, sometimes occupied by disinterested cows, but more often, empty of everything but dandelions.

It was quiet. He walked holding his book with one hand, the other clasping the strap of his bag so it stopped banging against his hip. Occasionally he pushed his glasses up with a calloused thumb. His eyes kept flickering over the pages to check the path for obstacles or bullies, always ready to start running. His eyes flickered up, and then he stopped.

A spread of white feathers lay prone in front of him, unmoving. It was not completely white - dark, sickly blood painted the ground and stained the feathers. It looked as if the swan’s throat had been garrotted with a piece of old washing line. Not tangled, inconsequentially, but with force and intent. There was a glimpse of bone amongst the torn flesh.

It revolted him, the sight of death. It repelled him, the sheer wrongness of something so elegant splayed at an odd angle. It occurred to him that he rarely saw the bodies of animals, yet they surely died at a quicker rate than humans. Where did they go exactly? Did someone take care of them, or did they just crawl into sad, forgotten places to perish alone? He dropped his bag, carefully shutting his book and resting it on top.

He felt he should do something, anything. A burial was out of the question. He despised the feeling of dirt under his nails, and he had no other entrenching tools with him. Dropping it into the water didn’t seem right either - a viking burial for something that was not a warrior. Slowly, he bent the wings into something looking natural, and with only a little revulsion, moved it into the grass at the side of the path. It was still warm, it’s body not yet stiffened, the feathers soft where the blood had not matted them. As he straightened up, he realised his school trousers were now sticky and marred from where he had knelt.

On the river, another swan swam, a few cygnets following behind. He didn’t know if it was searching for it’s mate, or hunting, or even if it had another waiting in the nest.

The flowers have always whispered to me, for as long as I can remember. The children were often left in the garden to amuse themselves. The walls were high, there were no houses that overlooked the large area, and well, it was in a time where adults let their children roam a little farther, a little longer.

She sat close to the daffodils, clapping chubby hands together, laughing as the stems danced in the wind. Her father, sitting on the far-away patio, glanced up occasionally, checking his daughter had not strayed. Her laughter carried easily, though as most children’s can, it often could be mistaken for little screams, making him jolt before returning to his newspaper.

He couldn’t see the fairies occupying her. Nobody could. But there they were among the leaves, chattering and hiding, sometimes tweaking her nose but darting back among the foliage before they could be seen.

#prose #drabbles #prompts #writers on tumblr #nosebleed club

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lifejustgotawkward · 7 years

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365 Day Movie Challenge (2017) - #216: Dunkirk (2017) - dir. Christopher Nolan

Two weeks ago, I saw Dunkirk in a 70mm IMAX show at my favorite IMAX venue, the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 theater in Manhattan. As I have probably said numerous times in earlier reviews, that screen provides the definitive IMAX experience for viewers in New York City. I was doubly excited in this instance because I went to Dunkirk with a good friend of mine who did not grow up in New York and who had never been to this particular IMAX theater. (I am happy to report that she was indeed astonished by the immensity of the screen, even more so since we were sitting in the last row, almost exactly in the center.) I mention all of these details because they helped inform how I processed the overwhelming magnitude of Christopher Nolan’s latest film.

From the moment the film started, I was firmly ensconced in the narrative. I felt as though I were actually in the movie. Every heart-pounding tremor boomed out of the sound system and was transferred directly into my seat. It was easy to be captivated by the simple story of young British soldier Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) since his struggle is universal: to survive. The close-ups of Tommy were breathtaking in IMAX, although perhaps I was specially attuned to them because I often study and write about the impact of faces and bodies in cinema. It is for this same reason that I was also blown away by the performance given by Aneurin Barnard as another of the main soldier characters, Gibson. Barnard has marvelously expressive eyes, a real gift for him to have as an actor since Gibson moves through his scenes in silence.

Indeed, much of Dunkirk’s intensity relies on visuals and on the actors’ abilities to express themselves without dialogue, just like in silent cinema. The subtlest changes in a person’s face can shape a language of their own. You may hear from other viewers and critics that Dunkirk’s characters lack development and the story lacks the types of expected dramatic arcs that accompany traditionally fleshed-out characters, but I do not believe that filmmakers “owe” those details to an audience, nor do I need to know those aspects of a character’s life, either past or present, in order to care. I identified with Tommy as he fought his way through obstacle after obstacle; he felt fear and panic, and I know those emotions intimately. I have been fortunate never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but the fact that Christopher Nolan’s film allowed me to connect so strongly with its soldiers, sailors and heroic citizens is an extraordinary achievement.

Besides Tommy, Gibson and Alex (Harry Styles in a decent film debut), who are the soldiers we follow on the beach, the film also observes two high-up military officials, Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) and Colonel Winnant (James D’Arcy), as well as the valiant work done in the air by pilots Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) and by sea via the civilian vessel captained by Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), his Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and one of Peter’s schoolmates, George (Barry Keoghan, who will be seen as the young lead of Yorgos Lanthimos’ next film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in November). Another key member of the cast is Shivering Soldier (Cillian Murphy), the unnamed British serviceman who is found in the Channel by the Dawson boat and whose experiences at Dunkirk have left him shell-shocked. All of these performers do incredible work, but Murphy is especially affecting.

Don’t be fooled by reviewers who say that Dunkirk has no one protagonist, though. In spite of the tripartite storytelling created by Nolan (as we have seen throughout his career, he is obsessed with narratives about the manipulation of time), there is no doubt that Tommy is at the center of the action. He is the first character we pay attention to in the film, and the last person we see onscreen. Other characters carry their sections of the narrative, but Tommy is the beating heart of our viewing experience. Christopher Nolan has compared Fionn Whitehead to a young Tom Courtenay, and I absolutely agree.

It should go without saying - although I will say so anyway - that the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema (he has shot several big-deal movies in the last decade: Let the Right One In, The Fighter, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Her, Interstellar, Spectre) and the editing by Lee Smith (he has cut every Christopher Nolan film dating back to Batman Begins) are top of the line. Think pieces from the past few weeks have criticized various aspects of Dunkirk, including the lack of diversity and the fact that the characters refer to “the enemy” rather than Nazis or Germans, but one of the most crucial components of artistic license is the ability to tell a story from the perspective of one’s choosing. Firstly, Nolan’s choice of language does not negate the evilness of the Nazis, and second, I do not believe that Nolan intended to depict the entirety of the Dunkirk experience. We do not see the faces of every single person on the beach. Instead we concentrate on four soldiers, two pilots and three civilians. Their stories are their own, not anyone else’s (even though Tommy was evidently written as an Everyman figure). No film should be held to the same standards expected from a comprehensive, thousand-page textbook.

Tonally, Nolan’s film is closer to the mood of World War I stories like Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory or the Dalton Trumbo novel Johnny Got His Gun, rather than what we usually expect from modern films made about World War II. The brilliance of Dunkirk isn’t just in how it portrays the effects of psychological trauma on soldiers who are barely old enough to shave, let alone fight and die in battle; it is also in the knowledge that Tommy and his comrades must reckon with two opposing truths, the importance of the Allied cause versus the utterly cruel and harrowing realities of combat. World War II movies don’t have to show limbs flying everywhere, like in Saving Private Ryan and Hacksaw Ridge; we know that that happens in war. But Dunkirk still communicates the lows and eventual highs of this historic evacuation by showing pain, doubt, loss, but throughout it all the strength of the human spirit. I applaud the bravery of examining the grotesque nature of war seen through the eyes of young men while simultaneously acknowledging how necessary it was for World War II to be fought and won by the Allies; one does not cancel out the other. Therein lies the significance of the film’s final shot and the greatness of Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece as a whole.

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thehallofgame · 5 years

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Review - Tomb Raider (2013)

Enjoyability Score: 9

Gameplay Score: 8.5

Tomb Raider Review Series: 9/11ish

Tomb Raider is a series that loves a reboot. This time around it’s a hard reboot that aimed to change the essential feeling of the series and tell an origin story for Lara Croft. The game is almost perfect, with only the most minor of complaints marring the beautifully rendered blood and mud smeared masterpiece. The hard turn into a more adult-oriented, grungier aesthetic served the series well and somewhat offset the head-to-head competition the series was having with the Uncharted games. However, where it had drawbacks was in the game’s unprecedented, for the series, linearity, and the occasional awkwardness of the series’s characteristic high drama divorced from it’s original campy undertones.

The game centers around a very young, too smart for her own good Lara Croft on her first archaeological expedition. Lara, and the whole expedition, wind up marooned on the mythical Japanese island they were hoping to find. Things rapidly get very deadly, fairly grisly, and extremely implausible. While Tomb Raider games don’t shy away from melodramatic plots about ancient magic, lost civilizations, and world ending calamities only Lara Croft can prevent, this time the game takes itself much more seriously. The story of the game is good, taking the player through what is essentially a coming of age narrative alongside a fight for survival (but against a crazy god-queen worshipping cult, nothing so mundane as starvation or other shipwreck related ailments). The writing is quite heavy handed in that it leans on many American movie tropes that lands it somewhere between an action-thriller movie and the adventure movies that originally inspired the series. Additionally, the game’s characterization sometimes frustrates by repeatedly making Lara a universally and instantly competent person at whatever she puts her hand to, and also with a great deal of story-telling gameplay dissonance. The most famous example of this is the way Lara bemoans killing in cutscenes but then mows down enemies without a flinch during normal gameplay. Another thing that occurs is the fact that Lara is suddenly much less deadly during dramatic story events than during normal gameplay. Normally I’d handwave this as gameplay contrivance, but it is irksome in a game that’s so cinematic in nature.

Like the campy tone, much of the series’s flashier gameplay contrivances are gone. Lara’s signature dual wielding of pistols is over, replaced instead with a new signature weapon: a bow. Likewise, the over the top gymnastic feats of the earlier game have been pared down to more realistic scrambles and weighty-feeling leaps. However, this doesn’t drag the platforming down. It feels fluid and fun, with only the occasional hang-up on glitching collision mesh or when the game doesn’t properly register what the player is trying to do. The auto-save and checkpoint system is reliable enough that this is rarely an issue at all. It’s far less noticeable than the overwhelming fluidity of having Lara run up walls, leap across chasms, hurtle down zip lines, and use the climbing axe to traverse cliff faces.

It’s a shame, then, that the game often interrupts these sequences with quick-time events that are little more than button mashing and slow-motion segments. These choices weren’t well received in the previous two games, and their unfortunate removal of player agency is even more of a head-scratcher when compared with several segments of linear platforming across collapsing structures that leave the player in control. Perhaps there were simply too many instances in the game that called for dramatic, collapsing set pieces for all of them to be timed escape runs, but that indicates a bad design decision, not a good reason to put in flawed gameplay mechanics.

I’ve already mentioned the game’s linear nature, so I’ll get into it now. The island of Yamatai, on which the whole game takes place, is divided into a series of environments that basically follow one of two formulas: either a long winding corridor with puzzles and/or setpieces, or a large open area with narrow entrance and exit paths. The game feels like it’s funneling the player constantly forward, and it somewhat undermines the sense of exploration fostered in the earlier Tomb Raider games when a cutscene or a quick-time sequence interrupts the player’s wanderings to send them hurtling into the next level, unable to get back until they reach the level’s fast travel hub. It lends the story the sense of urgency it’s meant to convey and highlights the changes to narrative structure that came with the reboot, but it means that the game also feels a lot more like a 3rd person shooter than an adventure game.

Luckily, the over-the-shoulder combat is solid and feels pretty good. It uses a fairly standard aim button and fire button system that is familiar and comfortable. Lara finds four projectile weapons over the course of the game, and her climbing axe is used as a melee weapons. Each of the weapons is upgradeable through a series of salvaged materials and specific parts scattered around the levels. By the end of the game each weapon will have an alternate firing method that can be used to launch grenades or grapples, and some have multiple types of ammunition with different effects. There’s a stealth system in play that’s fairly optional, though the player is strongly encouraged to use it in certain sections.

The stealth system is largely dependent on the ‘survival instincts’ ability, which is new to this game. While standing still the player can hit a button which will render the world in grey-scale, highlighting interactable items in yellow, enemies who will cause an alarm if killed in red, and enemies who can be safely stealth killed in white. The yellow object act as a hint system, highlighting puzzle-solving objects, collectibles, and animals that can be hunted for extra experience points and salvage. The enemy coloration is supposed to help with the stealth system, and it does to a degree, though unreliably. Where enemies are mobile and moving around one another it’s easy enough to line up a shot with a silent weapon or to sneak up on them, but when enemies are stationary the mechanics meant to separate them don’t always work as intended and often triggers the alarm the player was trying to prevent. An alert causes at least one wave, often several, of enemies to appear and turn the fight into a bullet storm.

A limited level-based progression system exists, with some choice in the order Lara obtains certain bonuses, though with the fact that all the options will be taken in the course of the game there’s little real customization available. That said, these choices do allow tailoring to playstyle in the beginning to middle in the game. Basically, there are three types of skills: experience bonuses, item-collecting bonuses, and combat bonuses.

A big feature of the game is exploration and collectibles. Documents containing background information and boxes containing valuable relics are the flashiest rewards, with each relic having a unique look and some cultural/historical information for Lara to expound on when it’s discovered. While these kinds of goodies are always a delight, they make the game’s optional tombs all the more a disappointment. The optional tombs are really just a single platforming puzzle with a big box of salvage materials at the end. They’re more boring than the rest of the game and don’t provide new world-building information nor treasures. Which is, for lack of a better word, lame in a game literally called Tomb Raider.

Ultimately, I’ve been griping about a lot of small things. By in large the updates the developers made to the series revitalized it, differentiated it from Uncharted, and made the game accessible to a more mainstream audience. While a lot of the things that were hallmarks of the series are gone there’s a strong argument to be made that it was past time for some of them to go. Tomb Raider tells a good story that, while over the top at times, feels like an updated version of the action-scientist tropes that inspired the series in the first place. Further, Lara’s origin story concurrent with her discovery that unexplained phenomena exist in the world sets the stage for the games that were to follow.

#Tomb Raider review #Tomb Raider 2013 review #Tomb Raider Reboot Review #video game review #thehallofgame review

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group1stem1magiting-blog · 6 years

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Reel Feels

Rosewell Ray V. Cabusas

August 03, 2018 | 12:27am

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“That’s all that matters. The greatest thing is to have someone who loves you and—and to love in return. People who haven’t got it—or had it—don’t believe that, but it’s the truth.”

What’s with the quote, you ask? Well, I may not be as engrossed as everybody else when it comes to chick flicks and such but hey! Everybody has their soft and weak spots. I may not be interested by the very first time I lay my eyes on a piece but soon you’ll find me sitting hunched at the edge of the room – crying and reflecting on what I have just watched or read. Oh, the sentiments in the literature and films we’ve indulged ourselves with.

Today, I will be sharing my favorite scene from a British historical drama I’ve been patronizing since season 1. Hey hey hey! Don’t leave me just yet! I ,myself, was really not into historical genre long before I came about but trust me, it gets better once you've widen your boundaries! So lemme start with my looooong erratic remarks about my favorite drama scene. *cue jazz music*

Entitled as Poldark, it is based from Winston Graham’s book with the same title. This all-new version of the vintage Masterpiece series stars Aidan Turner as Capt. Ross Poldark. Yes!! Aidan Turner! Who portrayed a character from Jackson's The Hobbit adaptation named Kili- the youngest of the thirteen dwarves who set out on Thorin Oakenshield's quest to conquer Erebor. (Let me put a brake on that before I begin to fantasize about Tolkien beings).

Going back!! The story begins In the late 18th century, Ross Poldark returns from the American War of Independence to his home in Cornwall after three years in the army. Upon his return home, he discovers his father has died, his estate in ruins and in debt, and his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth is engaged to his cousin Francis. Wow, a warm homecoming surprise for a soldier returning from war. Yet, Capt. Poldark stood firm. Ain’t nobody is bringin' my man downnn. While in quest in saving the family’s long running mine business; In town, he encounters a young woman named Demelza, dressed as a boy. After learning that her father beats her, Poldark offers her lodging and work as a kitchen maid. He then strives to help his father's tenants and the people of the village while attempting to run the copper mines he inherited, sought after by his rival, the greedy and arrogant George Warleggan.

•Ross Venor Poldark•

•Elizabeth Chynoweth Warleggan•

•Demelza Carne Poldark•

Its fourth season is currently airing this year!! With fast paced jawdropping revelations, thrilling scenes and unexpected turn of events, Poldark always keeps me at the edge of my seat.... or bed. Even though are more than 30 episodes released, there's only one scene that I’m totally diggin and will share. After seeing this drama I've came to ask myself, what is it like to live in the 18th century where romantic love letters and songs are a norm? Where love is expressed through exquisite art--to feel every stroke of letters they write; that every words they speak and sing are music to their love one's ears. What does it feel like?? Welp!! Fast-forward to Season 1 Episode 4 where Demelza is already wed to Capt. Poldark. Too soon? See here why. <--tis a link

Now, where do I start? I don’t even now where to begin to describe how utterly perfect every single millisecond of this scene is. I thought it impossible to choose a favorite scene from this episode because it’s been an unadultered Demelza/Ross relationship, however, then came this and I forgot about everything else. It was Christmas Eve when Demelza and Ross are invited in a small feast at Nampara. While chillin (cause its cold) near the fireplace, Elizabeth plays a harp for the guests. As they clap after Elizabeth's graceful performance, a guest provocatively asked Demelza to play something- with the idea that Demelza is just a scullery maid. Ross intervenes saying that Demelza rather sings. With no other choice, Demelza- who don't even play instruments, walked towards the harp then unexpectedly plucks the right string out of nervousness. Then she began to sing. There was none which could compete with Demelza singing her soul-stirring love song. It resonates across the whole room and deeply moves everyone. Demelza’s clear voice full of unsaid feelings makes an impact on the listeners (I would like to be included too thank you very much); and Elizabeth immediatelly realizes that her harp could never compare this.

[Video link here!!!]

The Wild Red Rose

“I’d pluck a fair rose for my love;

I’d pluck a red rose blowing.

Love’s in my heart a-trying so to prove.

What your heart’s knowing.

I’d pluck a finger on a thorn,

I’d pluck a finger bleeding.

Red is my heart a-wounded and forlorn

And your heart needing.”

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Everyone is listening to Demelza, but it’s clear that there is is only one man to whom the song is for. Everybody is moved by the performance because Demelza’s song touches the hearts of those who know how to feel love and even those who don’t, because its message is so strong and clear and beautiful in its frankness - it’s HER LOVE CONFESSION to her husband. It’s as close as she dares to voice her love in front of him. She bewitches him and it’s as if everyone else in the room vanished and he truly saw her for the first time. When she looks up and watches him, Ross can’t keep his eyes from her and he feels every note and word and it makes him tremble. And in that moment, as the comprehension dawns he finally realizes the meaning of her song and it takes his breath away - that HIS WIFE doesn’t need to learn to LIKE him at all because SHE ALREADY LOVES HIM! Awww, the loving and proud smile! I also love the fact that Ross actually suggests that Demelza sings because he is indirectly admitting that he loves her signing and thinks it beautiful - remember when he secretly listened to her at the beginning of the episode.

In this moment, for the first time I truly believe that Ross loves her in return. For him, Elizabeth has been a regret and a wound of the past; something that could have been and he is not yet able to let go nor to stop asking himself how it could have been. And I think the reason why it’s taking him such a long time to indentify his feelings for Demelza as love is because they are completely different from what he’s felt for Elizabeth - stronger, deeper, more profound, raw and intense. This is no longer the first naive and hopeful love but the love that lasts a lifetime and endures everything.

So there we have it!! A very huge kudos to Aidan Turner, Eleanor Tomlinson, the whole Poldark cast and crew for successfully bringing to life one of Graham’s timeless masterpiece. I still can’t deny the fact that this scene will be haunting me forever. A very short verse yet the lyrics! Wow. Beyond being frankly a confession-- it also clearly suggests that even though there’s a feeling of pain and sorrow, she would still do whatever it takes to give everything what her love desires. Demelza is quite aware that her husband is still suppressed to the first woman he loved with the society never failing to remind Demelza what her stand is. It makes her think that she could never compare to Elizabeth's, but then she has nothing more to offer than only herself to the man she loves- who ,too, is broken. Then rolled the ending credits. I admit I was left in awe for a moment thinking what could’ve possibly happened in the succeeding episodes...

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nancydhooper · 6 years

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The Supreme Court Cares About Religious Animus — Except When It Doesn’t

Just weeks ago, the Supreme Court emphasized the importance of religious neutrality. If only it applied that standard today.

In a pair of religious freedom rulings this month, the Supreme Court took dramatically different approaches to a basic constitutional question: When does anti-religious hostility by government officials violate the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment?

The wildly divergent results in those two high-profile cases — Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and Trump v. Hawaii, the Muslim ban case — send troubling mixed messages, which threaten to undermine religious freedom, fairness, and equality for all.

In a deeply divided 5-4 decision handed down on Tuesday, the court upheld President Trump’s Muslim ban, allowing the federal government to target Muslims worldwide based on unfounded fears and bare religious animus. In the face of Trump’s repeated, unambiguous statements condemning Islam and Muslims, the Supreme Court essentially gave the president a free pass to vilify an entire faith and enshrine that bigotry into national immigration policy.

The short and stormy history of the policy is, by now, well known: On the heels of Trump’s central campaign promise of a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration, he issued a series of travel bans, using territory as a proxy for religion and imposing severe, indefinite entry restrictions on individuals from certain Muslim-majority countries. In upholding the latest version of the ban, the court effectively ignored the overwhelming evidence of unmistakable anti-Muslim bias underlying the policy, crediting superficial changes the president made in response to court rulings that blocked earlier versions of the ban. As a result, the ban will continue to upend people’s lives, tear apart families, and send a disgraceful message that Muslims are not welcome here.

The Muslim ban decision comes only weeks after the Supreme Court, in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, bent over backwards to find religious hostility, despite a much weaker factual record. In Masterpiece, the court ruled in favor of a Christian-owned bakery in Colorado that had refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple on the same terms as all other customers.

In that case, the court found religious animus based on three pieces of flimsy evidence: First, it noted that in public hearings on the bakery’s discrimination, one of the seven Colorado civil rights commissioners said that “it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to — to use their religion to hurt others.” The court also cited another commissioner’s statement that the bakery’s owner can believe “what he wants to believe,” but he can’t act on that belief “if he decides to do business in the state” — a statement that even the majority opinion conceded was “susceptible of different interpretations.” Finally, the court saw evidence of religious hostility in the state commission’s refusals to pursue complaints against three other bakeries that had declined to make cakes with anti-gay messages.

Taken together, those three examples amount to very little. The commission’s dismissal of complaints against the other bakeries merely reflected the fact that, unlike Masterpiece Cakeshop, those businesses didn’t violate the state’s civil rights law, as the bakeries would have declined to make the requested anti-gay cakes for any customer, regardless of the customer’s faith. As for the commissioners’ statements, the use of the term “despicable” was unfortunate, but it’s well-settled constitutional law that religion can’t be invoked to harm others and that businesses can’t use religion to avoid complying with neutral anti-discrimination rules.

In any event, even if the commissioners’ statements had demonstrated some religious hostility, the statements cited by the Supreme Court were made by only two of the seven-member civil rights commission, and they occurred in only one stage of an extensive, multi-layered process that also included independent decisions by the Colorado Civil Rights Division, an administrative law judge, and the Colorado Court of Appeals. As Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sotomayor in dissent, explained, “Whatever one may think of the statements in historical context, I see no reason why the comments of one or two Commissioners should be taken to overcome [the baker’s] refusal to sell a wedding cake” to the same-sex couple.

Fortunately, the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision rested on extremely narrow grounds, with the court focusing heavily on the supposed evidence of bias against the bakery owner’s Christian faith. The bakery — with support from the Trump administration — had sought a much broader ruling, one that would have created a new, sweeping First Amendment right to discriminate in the marketplace. But the court declined the invitation, basing its decision on the unique facts of the case and reiterating the “general rule” that “religious and philosophical objections ... do not allow business owners ... to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services.” So, while the business won the battle in Masterpiece, it lost the larger war over discrimination in public accommodations.

Still, the court’s aggressive efforts to root out anti-Christian animus by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission were notable, especially in light of its decision today to ignore far more compelling and egregious religious hostility in the Muslim ban case.

In contrast to Masterpiece Cakeshop, the evidence of anti-religious animus in the Muslim ban case is unambiguous and consistent. And it all flows from President Trump, the person singularly responsible for the policy. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump explicitly and repeatedly disparaged Muslims and Islam — saying, for example, that “Islam hates us” and “we’re having problems with Muslims coming into the country.” He also formally called for a “shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in a statement that remained on his campaign website well into his presidency.

Just one week after his inauguration, the president put that call into action with an executive order that targeted Muslim-majority countries and included thinly veiled attacks on Muslim communities at home and abroad. Trump confirmed that countries were simply used as a stand-in for religion in the ban, explaining that he had moved to “talking territory instead of Muslim” because “[p]eople were so upset when I used the word Muslim.” Lest there was any doubt about his intent, Trump proudly proclaimed on a national Christian broadcast network that the order was crafted to favor Christian over Muslim immigrants. Indeed, nearly all — over 97 percent — of the hundreds of millions of people affected by the initial version of the ban were Muslim.

Later versions followed the same basic blueprint, and the president has continued to demean Muslims and their faith throughout the process. Among other statements, he endorsed a false story involving General Pershing and the supposed massacre of Muslims dipped in pigs’ blood. More recently, the president personally retweeted a series of flagrantly anti-Muslim videos, which his administration then expressly connected to the Muslim travel ban. Throughout the entire process, whether discussing the ban or Islam in tweets or in the press or defending it in court, Trump has never retreated from or apologized for any of his blatantly anti-Muslim rhetoric.

In Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Supreme Court relied on meager evidence of bias to hold that government disparagement of religion is “inappropriate for [an official] charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement” of the law. If the thin record in Masterpiece supports a finding of impermissible hostility, then the mountain of unapologetic, cruel statements from the president in the Muslim ban case surely do, too.

Remarkably, in upholding the Muslim ban, the court didn’t even try to reconcile the two cases. In fact, neither the majority nor concurring opinions even cited the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision (though the dissents certainly did). Instead, a majority of the court merely declared that because the Muslim ban arose in the context of immigration and national security, it enjoys the most deferential level of judicial review. In other words, once the court concluded that the government’s claimed nonreligious reasons for the ban were “plausible,” it treated the president’s explicit, unequivocal, anti-Muslim animus as irrelevant. But as Justice Sotomayor explained in dissent, not only is the majority’s application of a different standard in this context wrong, but the Muslim ban fails to meet even the low bar of the “rational basis” review that a majority of the court purported to apply.

In Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Supreme Court emphasized that fundamental religious freedom “bars even subtle departures from neutrality on matters of religion.” The First Amendment, the court explained, “commits government itself to religious tolerance, and upon even slight suspicion that proposals for state intervention stem from animosity to religion or distrust of its practices, all officials must pause to remember their own high duty to the Constitution and to the rights it secures.”

If only the Supreme Court had applied that standard a few weeks later to the president and his Muslim ban.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/supreme-court-cares-about-religious-animus-except-when-it-doesnt via http://www.rssmix.com/

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pakkiyick · 7 years

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Trip to Spain and Portugal (5th – 17th Sep, 2016)

A Tale of Two Countries

Though Europe is only one-fourth the size of Asia, the number of countries in Europe is more or less the same as in Asia. As everyone knows, the more the countries, the greater the diversity of civilizations, which makes Europe a place where is full of mesmerizing history and multifacted culture. Europe is not merely a geographical expression of forty-something nations, but also a symbol of western civilization with thousands of years of history. For many years, Europe had been regarded as the leader of the world until the USA took the leading role after World War One. Until now, the European Union (EU) is still the second largest economy in the world after the US. The contemporary international order is established mainly based on the political, economic and legal system of Europe. It is no surprise to find that the life style of the citizens in modern westernized countries have been greatly influenced by European traditions and customs. It is quite obvious that European literature, music, cuisine, fashion and even fairy tales can be easily seen in every aspect of our daily life.

Among all European countries, Britain, France, Germany and Italy may be recognized as the four far-famed tourist destinations in Europe. As is well known to us all, these four nations are the key members in the European family with resplendent culture, enthralling history and charming scenery. Having visited the above four major European powers in the past few years, I furthered my expedition to the far west of the European continent. Two minor nation states with the same time-honored history and engaging culture are to be found in the western end of Europe. Spain and Portugal are two independence countries lying on the Iberian Peninsula, the westernmost section of the European continent.

Not many Hong Kong people have paid much attention to these two Iberian nations since Spain and Portugal have never been regarded as traditional imperial powers like Britain nor technological advanced countries like Germany. In recent years, Spain and Portugal have even been categorized as two of the members of PIGS, which indicate their relatively poor economic performance in comparison with other member states within the euro zone. The derogatory term PIGS has made some people have a negative image towards these two middle power European nations. But when dated back to the Age of Discovery, these two southwestern European states would never be neglected in any history textbooks. Spain and Portugal were pioneers in exploring the world outside the European continent when their European counterparts still kept busy doing small-scale sea trade within the Mediterranean Sea. As early as in the 15th century, Spain and Portugal turned to be two vital European naval powers and started writing a new page of their glorious history in sea voyages and colonialization.

Although modern Spain cannot be considered as the same European power as 500 years ago, it has been one of the core member states in the EU since 30 years from now. According to the US News and World Report early this year, Spain was ranked the 19th best country out of 80, followed by China. With 45 heritage sites recognized by the UNESCO, Spain comes the third in the World Heritage Sites after Italy and China. Based on the survey conducted by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in 2015, Spain was the third most visited country in the world after France and the USA. Spain is around one-twentieth the size and approximately one-thirtieth the population of China, but its GDP (nominal) per capita is roughly double China’s. It reveals that the Spanish economic productivity is still in a comparatively high level compared with other developing countries, even though the European economy has been in recession in recent years.

Portugal, as the neighbor country of Spain, is obviously the next tourist destination if one comes to the Iberian Peninsula. Similar to the case of Spain, though Portugal is no longer a naval power as the same as half a millennium before, it is one of the important member states in the European family and joined the EU in the same year as Spain. According to the US News and World Report early this year, Portugal was ranked the 24th best country out of 80, after South Korea. Portugal is less than one-fifth the size and less than one-fourth the population of Spain, but its GDP (nominal) per capita is just a little bit lower than that of Spain. Based on the data above, it shows that the Portuguese economy is not as worse as some pessimistic financial analysts thought it to be.

The total territorial area of Spain and Portugal is roughly the same size of France. Dozens of tourist-favoured cities are scattered across the area. From bustling big cities to iconic small towns, there is always something interesting to explore on this peninsula. In autumn 2016, a fortnight trip was scheduled to ten different cities in these two southwestern nations. Each of those destinations has their own unique characteristics and is worth everyone to pay a visit.

Day One - Barcelona: Basilica de la Sagrada Familia (Sant Antoni, 3-star hotel)

Among the cities found in Spain, Barcelona should be the first city come to everyone’s mind. When it comes to Barcelona, soccer game should be the first thing come to most people's minds. For most Hong Kong people, the football team FC Barcelona could be the first impression and probably the only impression of this harbour city. However, once you step on the soil of Barcelona, you may find there are many other aspects of this city which deserves to be admired of.

Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, is Spain’s second biggest city and one of the most visited destinations in Europe. With a population of five million inhabitants in the metropolitan area, Barcelona is the largest cosmopolis on the Mediterranean Sea and the sixth most populous urban area in the EU. In order to explore this hectic city in an easy and comfortable way, first-time visitors are recommended to get a Barcelona Card once they reach the city. Cardholders can enjoy unlimited usage of the public transport and discounted access to some of the tourist spots within a certain validity period.

Some may refer Barcelona as the City of Gaudi since all the most significant architectures you can find in the downtown were designed by the world famous Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Amongst all the priceless masterpieces designed by Gaudi, Basilica de la Sagrada Familia must be regarded as the most astonishing one. The Sagrada Família is an immense Roman Catholic basilica which has been under construction since 1882. Although the whole project is expected to take another ten years to complete, Sagrada Família has been registered on the list of UNESCO World Heritage over thirty years ago. Though this architecture may not be the largest cathedral in Europe, it will be the highest religious building by the year 2026 when the whole construction works is finished. This basilica may not be the most well-known in the world, but should be the most bizarre one. Its prominent spires and magnificent facades make it standing out from the surrounding area. Judging from the outer appearance of this colossal edifice, Sagrada Família looks more like a fairy tale castle rather than any kinds of religious structures. Its captivating interior design creates a sense of peace and tranquility for the visitors. Today, Sagrada Família is not simply a landmark of the city, but an iconic symbol of Spain as well. No trip to Barcelona is complete without a visit to this prestigious gothic basilica. It is a must-go tourist hotspot for everyone who comes to this harbour city.

The Parc Güell is another Gaudi’s masterwork which is equally important to the Sagrada Família. The park has been serving the local citizens and overseas tourists for more than 90 years. It was declared as a World Heritage Site of UNESCO under "Works of Antoni Gaudi" in 1984. Located on a high hill overlooking the city of Barcelona, Parc Güell is an extensive public park in modern Catalan style composed of fairy tale gardens and distinctive architectonic features. The most eye-popping piece found in the park should be the vibrant multicolored mosaic salamander, also known as "el drac" (the dragon), which is unquestionably the best-known symbol of the park and is always surrounded by a large amount of tourists.

Casa Museu Gaudi (Gaudi House Museum) is a small museum inside the park in which Gaudi lived for nearly twenty years. It is now a historic home museum featuring a collection of furniture and other artworks designed by Gaudi.

In late 2013, the entire park was divided into two sections, the paid zone and the free zone. All the most noteworthy monuments are well-protected inside the paid area. I was regretted that I missed the chance to go inside this monumental sector since the tickets for that portion had been sold out by the time I got to the ticket office. I could have entered this secured area of the garden if I had reserved the advance ticket online.

Leaving the celebrated Parc Güell, I came across a four-dimensional movie theatre just around the corner. The G Experiència is a 4D cinema offers every visitor an opportunity to admire Antoni Gaudi's architectural accomplishments in an entertaining and enjoyable way. With the help of state-of-the-art 4D technology, audiences are allowed to enter Gaudi's magical world and experience his life and work in a fascinating way. Although it was not my first time to watch a 4D movie, it was the best one I have ever seen. Everyone who holds a Barcelona Card can enjoy a ten-minute 4D movie for half price. Sitting on a special designed shaking seat, one can enjoy a 4D animation with 7.1 surround sound. It was quite a spectacular experience to learn the remarkable works of this modern Catalan architect.

Even after seeing Gaudi’s two most impressive architectural accomplishments as mentioned above, there is still much to appreciate of the works of this talented architect. Casa Milà, popularly known as “La Pedrera” or “the stone quarry”, is probably the largest surrealistic building found in the city centre. This mysterious apartment building was designed and constructed by Gaudi over a hundred years back. By its distinctive artistic and heritage values, Casa Milà was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1984. The most interesting part of this building is the building itself. Since not a single wall was built perfectly straight, the whole structure is not supported by load-bearing walls but by pillars and arches. This unconventional building structure captures everyone's attention. The biggest attraction there is undoubtedly the wavy stone façade with iron-wrought balconies. Its peculiar exterior design stands out from any other buildings on the street. Another highlight every tourist should not miss on a visit to Casa Milà is the soldier-shaped chimneys on the rooftop. Standing on the roof of this building, you are just like watching a Sci-fic movie.

Just before nightfall I decided to head to my last destination of the day. Casa Batlló, is probably Gaudi's second most popular building in Barcelona after the Casa Milà. From the outer design of Casa Batlló, it looks like a cute candy house rather than a momentous building with over a hundred years of history. Similar to the Casa Milà, the facade of Casa Batlló was adopted an undulating style with large oval-shaped stained-glass windows and stone columns. The roof terrace is designed in a colorful dragon-like sculpture together with a few inimitable chimneys. Making use of cutting-edge technology, visitors can explore this historic building with a video guide. It is not an ordinary video guide you can find in other tourist hotspots, but a latest model of tablet computer with augmented reality functions. It is definitely an incredible experience to see through the life of the people hundred years ago by using a brand new electronic device.

Day Two - Barcelona: L'Aquarium de Barcelona (Sant Antoni, 3-star hotel)

After appreciating the modern European art and culture on the very first day in Barcelona, I would like to spare a whole new day for exploring the natural beauty of this city. Compared with an artificial park, like the Parc Güell mentioned above, Parc de Montjuïc is a fairly sizable natural area consisting of botanical gardens, museums and even a castle. There is a funicular railway which connects a metro station with the hill of Montjuïc. On reaching the hill station, visitors can take a cable car up to a further high point of the garden and enjoy a breathtaking panoramic view of the entire city from a bird's-eye perspective. It is certainly an urban green lung that offers every city dweller an opportunity to escape from the bustling city life. Regrettably, I had no time to take the cable car up high to enjoy the fantastic scenery of the park since my travelling schedule was too tight for visiting every place within one morning.

Since Barcelona is a harbour city located in the Mediterranean Sea, the life of local citizens is related to the ocean to a certain extent. L'Aquarium de Barcelona (Barcelona Aquarium) is the world largest Mediterranean-themed aquarium and the best place to learn more about marine life in the city. There are 35 aquariums at the facility in which display over ten thousand sea animals representing 450 species. The immense Oceanarium is surely the most imposing one among all the aquariums. It is home to different kinds of awesome aquatic creatures, including a large collection of sharks, eels and stingrays. Visitors are allowed to walk through an 80-metre-long transparent glass tunnel to see a wide variety of sea creatures from the viewpoint of the sea floor. This aquarium is absolutely an unmissable sight for anyone who is interested in marine ecosystem.

Although visiting a zoo may not be on everyone’s top travel priority list, spending a leisure sunny afternoon to get close to wildlife is quite an enjoyable thing to do. Parque Zoológico de Barcelona (Barcelona Zoo) could be a good choice for every animal lover. More than 4,000 animals from over 400 different species have found their home in this facility, including some most-recognizable creatures like elephants, lions, hippos and giraffes. In addition, this zoo also houses animals around the globe, such as Iberian wolves, European bisons, California sea lions, Chilean Flamingos and Galapagos tortoises.

Day Three - Valencia: Ciutat de les Arts l de les Ciencies (Mediterraneo, 3-star hotel)

After finishing sightseeing in the hustle and bustle city of Barcelona, I headed to another harbour city on the sun-saturated eastern coast of Spain. Valencia is lying on the western coast of Balearic Sea and is situated almost 350 kilometres to the south of Barcelona. It takes more than three hours to get to Valencia by express train. Valencia is the third largest city in Spain and the busiest container port on the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, the city soccer team Valencia CF is one of the most well-renowned Spanish football clubs among Hong Kong fans. Just like many other thousand-year-old European cities, Valencia is deemed as an art and cultural city offering splendid cathedrals, sophisticated museums and romantic gardens. As far as I am concerned, the most exhilarating part of modern Valencia may not be the above-mentioned cultural heritages, but the extraordinarily futuristic architecture found in the city.

If you are only able to manage to have one day staying in Valencia, I bet Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias in Spanish; the City of Arts and Sciences in English) is indisputably the best place for every first time traveler, especially for anyone who is interested in marine science and forward-thinking technology. The City of Arts and Sciences is of course not a city, but a cultural and educational architectural complex built on a dry riverbed consisting of six idiosyncratic architectures. Instead of using traditional red clay bricks, the entire structures were made of transparent glass and metal frame. The main concept of the whole construction project is to build up a future-like entertainment-based theme park for education and tourism purposes. Once entering the area, you may find yourself staying an alien world as described in some science fiction.

Getting off the bus on the way to the main entrance of the museum complex, a mega dazzling white cable-stayed bridge came into view. El Pont de l'Assut de l'Or is certainly the most eye-catching structure before entering the paid area. This suspension bridge has a total length of 180 metres and is 125 metres high. Together with its 29 parallel cables stays, the whole structure just looks like a colossal harp erecting in front of you.

Walking past the immense white bridge, another stunning edifice was found. By appearance, L'Àgora resembles a huge navy blue seashell. It is a multifunctional covered plaza in which concerts, exhibitions and international sports meetings are held.

Amid these striking buildings, Oceanografic is positively the most fabulous one. It is the biggest open-air oceanographic park in the whole of Europe and the fourth largest aquarium in the world. With a land surface area of 110,000 square meters and a water capacity of 42 million liters, this huge marine park houses over 45, 000 sea animals of 500 various aquatic species from different habitats all around the globe. A wide variety of marine life from the Polar Regions to the Tropics is shown in nine underwater towers for exhibition including some tiny sea creatures such as seahorses and some gigantic ocean predators like Sand Tiger Sharks. Among all oceanic creatures, the beluga whale is rated as the superstar in the aquarium. This sea mammal is colloquially known as “sea canary” and is found in the Arctic Ocean. This ocean park is a must-go spot when you travel to Valencia.

Passing through a 320-metre-long landscaped walk called L'Umbracle, you will reach the centerpiece of the complex, L'Hemisfèric. It is an eminent building surrounded by a large water pool with both aesthetic and practical functions. If it is seen from the distance, this white oval shape construction looks like an alien space ship which you can find in the Star War movies. If you look at it closer, with the reflection on the water’s surface creating a complete image of a gigantic eye, it makes an astounding scenery. L'Hemisfèric serves as an IMAX Cinema, planetarium and laserium. With a giant digital 3D screen, audiences can enjoy some educational movies under the roof of this “Eye of Knowledge”. By the time I visited there, the 3D movie “Walking with Dinosaurs” was put on the screen. It was a quite a good film for learning the life of prehistoric animals.

Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe (Prince Philip Science Museum) is a three-storey interactive science museum with an exterior structure of a dinosaur-like skeleton. Visitors are allowed to touch most of the exhibits and learn sciences through experience. Besides the permanent exhibits that feature a wide diversity of subjects on science and technology, seasonal exhibitions and scientific activities of all kinds are held to stimulate curiosity and critical thinking of the members of the public. A temporary exhibition about dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures was presented at the time when I came to visit this museum last year. Visitors are welcome to take photos alongside with the skeleton models of the ancient giant beasts.

The City of Arts and Sciences is a scientific-educational wonderland for all ages. It is the best science theme park I have ever visited. Just imagine this avant-garde science complex is just like a combination of the aquarium of the Ocean Park, the Hong Kong Space Museum and the Hong Kong Science Museum. Sightseers are permitted to access all the above mentioned places on their own time schedule with a single ticket. It is a without doubt a destination worth spending at least a half day to explore.

Day Four - Toledo: Alcazar de Toledo (Mediodia, 2-star hotel)

Toledo is a name of a Spanish small town which most Hong Kong people may have never heard before. It is located about 70 kilometres southwest of Madrid, a train journey of roughly half an hour. This medieval town had an intriguing history a few hundred years ago when it was the capital city of Spain. In the Middle Ages, Toledo was commonly known as the “City of Three Cultures” since Islam, Judaism and Christianity peacefully coexisted for centuries. Although this historic town can no longer play the role as a political city, it is still one of the most popular tourist destinations in Spain today. The city contains a dense and diverse monumental heritage, including Muslim mosques, Jewish synagogues and Christian cathedrals. The city was inscribed on the World Heritage List as a cultural heritage site by UNESCO thirty years ago.

Plaza de Zocodover can be the starting point of a day trip exploring this town. It is a public square of the city. During the Middle Ages, this lively square was an important market place where people could enjoy bullfighting show. Legend has it that, Plaza de Zocodover was the place where some prisoners were burned to death publicly by the Inquisition.

Alcázar of Toledo is a square-shaped fortified castle with four prominent watch towers locating on the highest hill of the city. The history of castle can date back to the 3rd century when it was used as a Roman palace. The Alcázar was once the symbol for Spanish nationalism during the Spanish Civil War. Today, this stone fortification houses the Museum of the Army featuring a wide range of firearms, artillery, uniforms, medals, etc.

Located smack dab in the city centre, an imposing Roman Catholic structure was found. Catedral de Toledo (Toledo Cathedral) is the second largest cathedral but the most significant church in Spain. It is seat of the Archdiocese of Toledo and is consistently regarded the magnum opus of High Gothic style in Spain. This enchanting Gothic edifice was built between the early 13th and the end of the 15th century. Constructed over the remains of a former mosque, which was originally a Visigothic church before the Muslim invasion, the entire construction project took over two and a half centuries to complete. The cathedral contains several important masterpieces of Baroque paintings and a notable Baroque high altar. Today, the cathedral is considered a one-of-a-kind architectural treasure in Toledo and one of the main attractions of the city.

The Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes (Monastery of Saint John of the Monarchs) is a Gothic-Spanish-Flemish-styled monastery founded by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. This historic monastery was built to commemorate the Spanish triumph over the Portuguese at the Battle of Toro in 1476. The monastery is notable for its gorgeous double cloister with a lovely courtyard.

Synagogue of Santa Maria la Blanca (The Congregational Synagogue of Toledo) can be considered as the most exclusive monument site found in the city. Seven large horseshoe arches are the most distinctive features found inside the synagogue. The building was constructed on the orders of a Christian king and designed by Mudejar architects but used as a Jewish synagogue. It could be regarded as the best example of collaboration of three religions in medieval times. This Mudéjar construction was first build in the late 12th century and is said to be the oldest synagogue building in all of Europe. In the early 15th century, the synagogue was once converted into a church. Today it is cautiously restored and is open to the public as a historic site.

Museo del Greco (El Greco Museum) is an art gallery honored the illustrious mannerist painter El Greco. El Greco was a Greek painter who spent most of his life in Toledo. The museum houses a number of his artworks. With a lovely small garden outside, this museum offers a soothing ambience to everyone who visits. Visitors can also buy a combined ticket for this gallery and the museum just around the corner, Museo Sefardi.

Sinagoga del Transito was once an important place of worship for the Jewish during the Medieval times. This religious structure was first built in the mid-14th century and was once converted into a church in the late 15th century. Today it forms part of the Museo Sefardi. With intricate Mudéjar decoration and stucco Hebrew inscriptions, this museum is the ideal place for studying the Spanish Jewish history on the Iberian Peninsula.

Iglesia de Santo Tomé may be considered as a centuries-year-old small church by its size, yet it is still one of the most popular tourist sites in Toledo. The church is best-renowned for containing one of the most famous masterpiece, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.

After admiring the scenic walled city of Toledo, I hurried back to the city centre of Madrid by taking an express train. By the evening, I arrived at the train station of Atocha. After having a short break in my hotel room, I headed to my final stop of the day.

If you only have time to tour one museum in Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado (Prado Museum) is undeniably the one you should go to. This Spanish national art museum is irrefutably the most well-renowned museum in all of Spain, featuring a wide range of art collections from the medieval period to the modern times. Ever since it opened nearly two hundred years ago, the museum has been home to thousands of world’s finest European artworks, including numerous masterpieces by illustrious artists such as Francisco de Goya, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez. The most-treasured piece of collection on display at the museum is Las Meninas by Velázquez. The Three Graces by Rubens, The Third of May by Goya are other key highlights of the collections.

Day Five - Segovia: Alcazar de Segovia (Mediodia, 2-star hotel)

Segovia is another UNESCO world heritage town located less than a hundred kilometres northwest from Madrid. By express train, it takes around half an hour from Madrid to Segovia. This picturesque walled city contains a multitude of historic architecture, including medieval castles, Gothic cathedrals and Romanesque churches. Once getting off the shuttle bus, I saw an imposing ancient Roman bridge standing at the entrance of the city. The Aqueduct of Segovia is the landmark of the city and the first thing tourists can see when they come to Segovia. Walking through this aqueduct is like stepping back in time to ancient Roman Empire two thousand years ago. It is regarded as one of the best-preserved elevated Roman aqueducts in Spain.

Among all the medieval architecture found in the city, Casa de los Picos must be the most distinctive one. The façade of this centuries-old Renaissance building is covered entirely by granite blocks carved into pyramid-shaped reliefs.

The Alcazar de Segovia (Segovia Fortress) is the most magnificent piece of medieval architecture of the city by virtue of its fairytale-like appearance. Rumor has it that this stone fortification was the prototype of the Snow White’s Castle of Disneyland. Dating back to the early days of the 12th century, this construction was originally built as a fortress. Since then it has served for different purposes, including a royal residency, a state prison and a military academy. Walking up to the tower of the castle, a stunning view of the medieval town is guaranteed. It is a must-see place for anyone visiting Segovia.

Catedral de Segovia is a Gothic-style Roman Catholic cathedral located in the main square of the city. It was first constructed in the early 16th century and was not consecrated until late 18th century. The interior of the cathedral is just like the one you can find in other European countries, but its delicate late Gothic style with multiple pointed spires make it stand out from the others.

Leaving the historic city of Segovia, I travelled back to the city centre of Madrid by express train late in the afternoon. Before my night time museum visit, I spent some quality time to appreciate the natural beauty which the city offers. Real Jardín Botánico (Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid) is a tranquil botanical garden found in a central location close to the famous Museo Nacional del Prado. This city green belt is populated with thousands of various kinds of flowers and plants from all over the Iberian Peninsula. Two sizable greenhouses imitate different climate zones featuring some exotic vegetation which are seldom found in European continent. The most fascinated of which must be a fine collection of cacti from tropical regions.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Queen Sofía Museum) is the second best-known national museum after the Museo Nacional del Prado. This modern art gallery has a considerable collection of Spanish and global artworks covering the period between the late 19th century to the present day. It is a paradise for any art enthusiast. The single most represented artist is undeniably Pablo Picasso. The painting “Guernica” is his greatest masterpiece and is crowned as the jewel of the museum. The other key highlights include “Visage du Grand Masturbateur” of Salvador Dalí and “Hombre con Pipa” of Joan Miró Ferrá.

Day Six - Madrid: Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Mediodia, 2-star hotel)

Madrid is the state capital of the Kingdom of Spain and is larger than all the other cities in Spain. Although Madrid is not as well-known as other European capital cities, like London or Paris, it is still the third largest city in the European Union (EU) and a cosmopolitan with over six million population. As the city was first founded over a thousand years ago and has become the capital city for more than four hundred years, Madrid has undergone a long and turbulent history that makes it an important political centre which is full of cultural and artistic treasures. Besides the two foremost national art galleries mentioned above, some more attractions are deserved to visit.

Madrid Card is a traveler’s smart card which allows the cardholder free access to a wide range of cultural and heritage hotspots within a certain tourist district for a consecutive period of time. The card also offers considerable discounts in hotels, restaurants, retail shops and entertainment shows. The Madrid Card provides a good way for city exploration and saving travel budget.

Though the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Museum of Natural History) is only a medium-sized natural history museum, it is large enough to house almost eight million specimens of animals from prehistoric period to modern times. The museum offers a wide diversity of exhibits from tiny insects like beetle specimens to colossal creatures like dinosaur skeletons. A metre-long squid specimen stands out among all the exhibits gathered by the museum. Primeval beings such as trilobites and ammonites are also on display. In addition to the models and fossils seeing through the glass boxes, visitors can make use of newly developed augmented reality technology to see some lively prehistoric creatures on a TV screen.

Palacio Real de Madrid (Royal Palace of Madrid) is a relatively new style of palace constructing in the mid-18th century, representing a combination of the Baroque and Neoclassical architecture. Taking over a quarter of century to build, the Royal Palace is the largest and probably the most splendid building in Madrid. This palace is not inferior to any other royal residencies in Europe in terms of size and magnificence. Today, no royal family members reside in this palace. Instead, the palace is open to the public and is reserved for state ceremonies only. Of all the rooms found in the palace, King Charles III's Apartments, the Throne Room and the Royal Armory are key highlights of the building.

Day Seven - Córdoba: Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos (NH Córdoba Califa, 4-star hotel)

Córdoba is a thousand-year-old town with a mixture of diverse cultures that deserves its declaration as a Word Heritage Site by UNESCO. This historic town is situated nearly four hundred kilometres south of Madrid. It takes less than two hours’ railway journey to get from Madrid to Córdoba. The city was first established by the Ancient Romans over two thousand years before. In the early 8th century, the Muslims conquered the city and made it the capital of the Moorish kingdom. The Christians retook Córdoba during the Spanish Reconquista in the early 13th century. Struggling under a long and turbulent history, Córdoba has become a historic-artistic centre with a combination of cultural elements from Ancient Romans, Islamic Muslims and Christians Spanish.

Mezquita-Catedral (Great Mosque of Córdoba) is unarguably the top tourist attraction of the city. Until now, it is the largest and the most important mosque in Europe. The Great Mosque was not merely a sacred place for Muslims, but also a national monument which witnessed the history of Córdoba from Middle Ages to present times. The site was originally a Visigoth basilica in the mid-6th century. After the Muslims took over the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century, the Christian structure was demolished and replaced by a grand mosque. In the following four centuries, the mosque had been enlarged and remodeled several times. The most attention-grabbing architectural highlights found inside the mosque must be the red-white striped horseshoe arches and the exquisite mihrab. During the period of Reconquista in the early 13th century, the Spanish reconquered Cordoba. The mosque was converted back to a Catholic church again. A royal chapel was later constructed and the original Muslim minaret was integrated into a bell tower. Today, this exceptional religious complex is the best example to show the harmony of Muslims and Christians.

Puente Romano (Roman Bridge of Cordoba) is a well-preserved Roman-style stone construction that dates back to the reign of the first Roman emperor Augustus. The bridge has served as the landmark of the charming old town of Córdoba for over two millenniums. With the passage of time, several renovations and reconstructions have been taken place. Nowadays, the Roman Bridge has a length of over 200 metres with 16 arches. Since the present structure seems to be one of the best models of medieval architecture, the popular HBO TV series “Game of Thrones” even shot the scene in this bridge before.

Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos (Castle of the Christian Monarchs) is neither the largest nor the oldest castle in Spain, yet it is still a remarkable medieval architecture for witnessing a series of significant historic events since it was first built in the early 14th century. In the 15th century, the Queen Isabella I of Castile and her husband Ferdinand II of Aragon used the castle as their residence and as the headquarters for the military campaign to re-conquer Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula. It was the place where the great explorer Christopher Columbus explained his grand plan for the discovery of the New World to the Queen Isabella. This historic meeting not only made Columbus’ exploratory voyage happen, but also marked the beginning of Spanish global status as a strong naval power. The Spanish Inquisition also maintained a tribunal in the citadel for over three hundred years until the early 19th century. In 1810 the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte converted the fortress into a garrison for his troops. The Alcázar has been a major city attraction and national monument for decades.

Inside the castle, a series of invaluable Roman mosaics and sarcophagi are the most intriguing artifacts. But the true beauty of the palace is the terraced gardens and the evergreen courtyards surrounding by some delightful fish ponds, landscaping fountains, perennial flower beds and fragrant orange trees. Climbing up to the top of the Tower of the Lions, the oldest tower of the fortress, tourists can enjoy a panoramic view of the old city and also the Roman Bridge.

Plaza del Potro is a public square with a Renaissance-style fountain at its centre, topped by a figure of a colt. The Museo de Bellas Artes de Córdoba (Museum of Fine Arts of Córdoba) and the Museo Julio Romero de Torres (Museum Julio Romero de Torres) are two art museums found near the square. The collection of the Museum of Fine Art consists of an extensive number of paintings mostly by Spanish artists from the medieval period up to the beginning of the 20th century. The Still life of oranges by Rafael Romero Barros is the representative piece of the collection of the museum. The Museum Julio Romero de Torres is dedicated to Julio Romero de Torres. The life and works of this talented painter are very well presented in this art gallery. The Naranjas y limones (Oranges and Lemons) is his best-known masterwork in the museum.

Museo Arqueologico de Córdoba (Archaeological Museum of Córdoba) is a newly furnished modern museum located in a historic old town. This museum preserves a wide archaeological collection of pieces ranging from prehistoric period through to the late medieval times. The whole museum is divided into three sections: the first floor, the ground floor and the archaeological site on the basement level. The first floor features the Prehistory and Protohistory of Córdoba; the ground floor displays the ceramics used by ancient Iberians and Romans; the archaeological site shows the remains of the Roman theatre constructed two millennium ago. All those exhibits have priceless historic-artistic value and of huge importance for local cultural heritage.

Day Eight - Granada: La Alhambra (Abba Granada Hotel, 4-star hotel)

Granada is located approximately 130 kilometres southeast of Córdoba. Since there was no direct train connection between two cities, travelers needed to first take a bus from Córdoba to an interchange station, and then took an express train to Granada. The total travelling time between these two cities is more than two and a half hours.

Although Granada is just a mid-sized historic walled town with a total population less than half a million, its political importance in Spanish history cannot be ignored. The city's glorious past can date back to the early 8th century when the Moorish first took control the Iberian Peninsula. Before the Spanish reconquered their home country in the late 15th century, the Muslims had established a powerful Islamic dynasty and ruled an originally Christian owned territory for nearly eight hundred years. The cultural and historic atmospheres of Granada over the ages are very well preserved by a number of grandiose architectural heritages, including a sumptuous castle, an ever-changing garden, an exquisite cathedral and many others.

La Alhambra is absolutely the gem of the city and the single reason why tons of tourists come to Granada from all around the world every year. The Alhambra is a Moorish-styled fortress-palace complex built in the mid-13th century. The entire Islamic architecture can be divided into four distinct sections: Alcazaba, Nasrid Palaces, Partal and Generalife. Alcazaba is one of the oldest part of the site, which served as the military stronghold of the complex. Nasrid Palaces and Partal used to be the residence of Moorish sultans. Generalife was the summer palace with gorgeous gardens. Besides a number of Muslims kings, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte left their footprints in this castle. Even now, the images of the Alhambra can be seen in many modern mass media, such as in the movie “Assassin’s Creed (2016)” and the video game “Civilization V and VI”. By its far-famed popularity, this citadel has become one of the top most tourist hotspots in Granada.

Catedral de Granada is a Roman Catholic Church which was started to construct in the first half of the 16th century and took nearly two hundred years to complete. The successful mishmash of architectural styles of Gothic, Baroque and Renaissance makes the Cathedral one of the most impressive religious structures in Spain. But the main attraction of the site is the Royal Chapel, which is situated behind the Cathedral. This Gothic-style chapel is the mausoleums of the two most influential monarchs in the history of Spain, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon.

Day Nine - Sevilla: Alcazar (Hotel AACR Museo, 3-star hotel)

Sevilla is situated some 250 kilometres west of Granada. As no direct railway link between these two cities, one may first need to take a bus to reach an interchange station, then take an express train to Sevilla. It takes around three hours and a half from Granada to Sevilla.

Unlike other cultural rich cities described above, Sevilla was once considered to be a magical place since legend states that the city was founded by ancient Greek demigod Hercules. The medieval Sevilla seems to have a notorious past because it was the place where the first permanent tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition was set up and the first case of religious execution was taken place. The city’s golden period can date back to the late 15th century following the great discovery of the New World. Since the sea-trading route between the Americas and Iberian Peninsula was opened, Sevilla became a trans-oceanic trading hub of two continents. With monopolistic trading status, Sevilla turned to be a main economic centre of the Spanish Empire. Present-day Sevilla is still a cultural-financial centre of southern Iberian Peninsula and the fourth largest city of Spain.

Among all the alcázars I have visited in Spain so far, the Real Alcázar de Sevilla is the most spectacular one I have been to. The current structure of the castle was constructed on an originally Moorish fortress in the second half of the 14th century. The Mudejar-styled structure with Renaissance elements helps to make this Islamic palace stand out from the others. The royal gardens are lavishly decorated with lovely fountains, amiable ponds and exquisite labyrinths. Peacocks are allowed to wander freely around in the courtyard. The Alcázar is one of the settings for in the HBO’s fantasy epic, “Game of Thrones” (Season Five).

Built on the ground of a damaged mosque, Catedral de Sevilla (Cathedral of Seville) is the third largest church and the biggest Gothic cathedral in the world. Groundbreaking of the cathedral commenced in the early 15th century and took over a hundred years to complete. The interior is lavishly ornamented with flamboyant altarpiece and opulent stained-glass windows. This cathedral can be regarded to be a true national treasure not because of its sheer size and grandiose décor, but because of its dedication to some significant historical figures, including a world-renowned explorer. It is the site where the great discoverer Columbus found his final resting place.

No visit to the Catedral de Sevilla is complete without climbing to the top of the La Giralda (Giralda Bell Tower) to enjoy the stunning views of the city. A hundred-metre high bell tower was a former minaret during the Moorish period. Sightseers today can reach the top of the tower comfortably by walking up a series of 35 gently inclining ramps. The bell tower has been serving as an iconic landmark of the city for centuries.

Not only is Sevilla famed for its brilliant medieval architectures, but also for some jaw-dropping contemporary constructions. Metropol Parasol, commonly known as Setas de Sevilla, is a large mushroom-like structure located at an open public plaza called Plaza de la Encarnación. Since the original site was not more than an obsolete parking lot, the local city council decided to undertake an ambitious plan of renovation in order to revitalize the entire region to be a new fashionable urban centre. The whole redevelopment programme took up to seven years to complete and the building cost was over €100 million. In 2011, an enormous waffle-like crown structure was erected at the heart of the city and has become a new icon of Sevilla.

The Metropol Parasol is judged to be the world’s largest timber-framed structure. The whole construction project was highly praised by the public not only because it is a huge-sized multifunction infrastructure, but also because it is a fine example of cultural conservation programme. In order to preserve the Roman and Moorish subterranean remains excavated on site during the construction period, an archaeological museum was created on the underground level. Many invaluable historical articles are undisturbed and displayed to the public. Strolling on the terrace rooftop on a sunny day is quite a pleasant experience. Furthermore, every visitor can enjoy a free drink and get a free postcard with the image of this new city landmark.

Day Ten – Faro: Border City (Hotel AACR Museo, 3-star hotel)

After finishing my journey in Spain, I continued my trip to further west of the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal was my next destination. There are a few ways to cross the border from Spain to Portugal, either by air or by land. Considering the travel budget and time consumption, taking a long-distance bus and an express train seemed to be the best option. Faro is a border city of Portugal lies about 200 kilometres west of Sevilla. Because there is no railway line to connect these two places, taking a long haul bus is the only way to get to Portugal from the southern Spain. Even though driving on a highway with light traffic, it still needed to take around two hours and a half from Sevilla to Faro.

On my arrival to the Portuguese territory, I had a lunch at a local McDonald. After a light meal, I took an express train heading to the capital city of Portugal. It took me three hours and a half to get to my final destination of the day, Lisboa.

After settled down at my hotel early in the evening, I hurried to the local tourism office to buy the Lisboa Card. It is a kind of an all-in-one traveler card which offers visitors unlimited access of all public transport (including a returned ticket between Lisboa and Sintra) and some discount on major tourist attractions within a certain period of time.

Day Eleven – Sintra: Palacio da Pena (Hotel Americano Rossio, 2-star hotel)

The city name of Sintra is derived from “Cynthia”, the Roman goddess of the moon. It was a place of moon worshipping during the Roman reign. Recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, Sintra is a cultural rich municipality that is best-renowned for its fantastic castles, fabulous palaces, flamboyant royal residences and fascinating gardens. Surrounding by mesmerizing natural scenery and historic monuments, Sintra is a true fairyland with a magical atmosphere. Celebrated British poet Lord Byron even described Sintra as a Glorious Eden in one of his epic poems. Lisboa may be regarded as an internationally renowned capital city, but Sintra is the true jewel of Portugal.

This charming medieval town is less than 30 kilometres northwest of Lisboa. It only takes up to 45 minutes from Lisboa to Sintra. As there is only a short travel distance between these two cities, it is an ideal destination for day trippers who travel from Lisboa. Of all top rated tourist sights, Palacio da Pena, Palacio Nacional and Castelo dos Mouros are three unmissable sites.

One building alone is enough to put Sintra high on your travel itinerary: the Palacio da Pena (Pena Palace). It is a mid-19th century Romanticist castle stands on the top of a hill in a fairytale landscape. On a beautiful sunny day, the hilltop citadel can be seen in the clouds from miles away. Standing on the high point of the fortification, one can enjoy unobstructed views in every direction overlooking the whole town of Sintra. Although this fortress may not be as magnificent as other European castles I have visited, it must be the most colourful one I have ever seen. A Yellow palace, a red monastery and a purple façade are all amalgamated into one single entity in harmony. This dreamlike architecture is one of the most striking examples of royal summer residence with different types of building styles, including Neo-Gothic, Neo-Manueline, Neo-Islamic and Neo-Renaissance. The whole castle is embraced by extensive greenbelt with numerous exotic plants. The breathtaking natural beauty of the park with fresh maintain air makes people feel completely relaxed and joyful.

At first sight, Castelo dos Mouros (Castle of the Moors) is nothing but a ruined building. But like all other grandiose castles, the Moorish Castle has its historical layers. The history of the castle can be dated back to the 10th century when the Muslims occupied the Iberian Peninsula. Built on a high ground as a defensive outpost, this military fort is situated on a strategic point overlooking the entire region of Sintra. In the mid-12th century, the Moorish Castle was captured by the first king of Portugal, Afonso the Conqueror. Since then, the military functions of the fortress has declined and it was eventually abandoned by the early 16th century. Worse still, the castle suffered a devastating damage caused by an earthquake in 1755. Though the site now is more like a medieval ruin than a majestic castle, it is still worth climbing up the fortified stone walls to enjoy the uninterrupted views of the whole town. From a distance, the remaining structure is a little bit like a mini-version of the Great Wall in China.

Judging from the exterior of the building, Palácio Nacional de Sintra (Palace of Sintra) is more like a huge mansion complex instead of a palatial palace. The thousand-year-old palace is an aggregation of several decorative styles, including Gothic, Manueline and Renaissance. With freshly whitewashed external walls and two huge white conical chimneys, this medieval construction has become the icon of Sintra. Until the early 20th century, it served as a royal residence and summer retreat of Portuguese royal family. The palace is considered to be the best-preserved medieval royal residence in Portugal and it is now a present-day historic house museum.

The palace is renowned for its world largest collection of Mudéjar Azulejos (*Azulejo is a form of Portuguese painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework). Among all the painstakingly decorated state rooms, the Swan Room and the Magpie Room are the key highlights. With a ceiling adorned with 27 gold-collared swans, the Swan Room was dedicated to the king’s 27-year-old daughter. Legend has it that the queen caught the king kissing one of her ladies-in-waiting. The rumors among the court women looked like magpies chatting. The king showed his anger by decorated the ceiling with a flock of magpies.

After admiring the hillside national monuments for hours, I got back to the city centre of Lisbon before nightfall. There was one more stop I would like to pay a visit before call it a day.

Elevador de Santa Justa (Santa Justa Lift) is beyond doubt the most compelling ironwork structure in the downtown. This Neo-Gothic style iron elevator was designed by Raul Mesnier de Ponsard, an apprentice of the world-known iron craftsman Gustave Eiffel. Gustave Eiffel is the one who was responsible for the construction project of the Eiffel Tower of Paris. The hundred-year-old lift was originally powered by steam until it was converted to electricity powered in 1907. Since iron was a new building material and electricity was a new power source at the time of its construction, the completion of the grand elevator marked a major breakthrough in building technology of modern age. Go up to the 45-metre high top viewing platform of the iron architecture, a dazzling city night view is just under your feet. Nowadays, the Elevador de Santa Justa becomes the most beloved city landmark and hot tourist attraction.

Day Twelve – Lisboa: Oceanário de Lisboa (Hotel Americano Rossio, 2-star hotel)

Compared with other European capital cities, Lisboa only has a limited number of national cultural heritages. Neither reputable castles nor conspicuous gardens can be found in the downtown district of Lisboa. However, present-Lisboa has paid much effort in preservation of natural environment. Just like other harbour cities, such as Barcelona and Valencia as mentioned before, Lisboa offers an opportunity to locals and foreigners to learn more about the global marine life. Oceanário de Lisboa (Lisbon Oceanarium) is the best place where promotes awareness and conservation of the marine environment.

Oceanário de Lisboa is the second largest aquarium in Europe, after L'Oceanogràfic in Valencia. With a total seawater volume of five million litres, this underwater universe is home to 8,000 living organisms from 500 various species in four oceans. The water volume of the massive central aquarium is equivalent to the size of four Olympic-sized swimming pools. It houses about one hundred different kinds of sea animals from four oceans, including sharks, stingrays, octopuses, spider crabs and so on. The main attraction of this aquarium is of course the Ocean Sun Fish. Sun Fish is a type of rare marine species which is seldom found in aquariums. It was my second time to see a Sun Fish. The first time I saw this unique sea creature was in the Sea Paradise in Tokyo in 2011. Surrounding the enormous central tank, four oceans’ ecosystems were recreated. Several sorts of seaside animals can be seen, like sea otters, penguins and seabirds. By the time I visited the aquarium, a temporary exhibition named “Forest Underwater” was on display. I was lucky enough to see the amazing masterpiece made by the world-known aquascaper, Takashi Amano. Amano successfully introduced the Japanese gardening techniques into aquarium design. His masterwork creates a new balance between artistic beauty and natural wildlife.

Besides taking efforts to preserve the most-treasured marine animals, many endangered land species are also well protected by offering them a sanctuary whose environment is closed to their natural habitat. Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa (Lisbon Zoo) is a zoological garden with over 130 years of history. It was the first park with fauna and flora from Iberian Peninsula. There are approximately 2,000 animals of more than 330 species which reside at the zoo on 16 hectares of land. Some most-welcomed animals can be found inside the zoo, including flamingos, lizards, primates, sea lions, zebra and many more. Apart from the common animals, this facility is also home to some rare species, such as white rhinos and white tigers. Visitors are allowed to take a sky tram to explore the zoo in a different perspective.

Outside the paid zoological area, there is a free zone called the Animax. It is an amusement park which offers some recreational facilities, restaurants and shops. Sightseers can buy some souvenirs of the Lisbon Zoo from its Zoovenir Shop.

If you agree with the slogan of this museum stated, “Discovering the city begins with an understanding its history”, please consider this place to be one of your must-visited spots in the city. Different from many other traditional national museums, Lisboa Story Centre is an interactive history museum which adopts an innovative way to present the two-thousand-year history of Lisboa from mythological past to modern times. Just simply take an hour journey, visitors can have a quick review of the most momentous historical events and dramatic scenes happened in Lisboa. The most intriguing content comes with a mini-movie about the Great Earthquake of 1755. This story centre offers every visitor a sensory experience by using state-of-the-art multimedia technology. With the help of the automatic activated audio guide, visitors can receive instant exhibit descriptions corresponding to the location change within the museum. It was an adorable experience to learn history in an interesting and entertaining way.

Arco da Rua Augusta (Rua Augusta Arch) was erected to commemorate the capital’s recovery from the devastation of the Great Earthquake of 1755. Spending a hundred years to build, this marvelous triumph arch-like monument symbolizes the rebirth of a new capital city after the miserable tragedy. Climb up to the top of the building, one can enjoy a panoramic view of the coastal line. The structure is now the iconic landmark of Lisboa.

Day Thirteen – Lisboa (Belém): Mosteiro dos Jeronimos (Hotel Americano Rossio, 2-star hotel)

Mosteiro dos Jeronimos (Jerónimos Monastery) is undisputedly the most elegant and striking architecture in Lisboa. It is the best example of late Gothic Manueline style monastery with five hundred years of history. To celebrate the successful Vasco Da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to India in 1498, King Manuel I ordered to build a great monastery three years after the successful Portuguese expedition. After a prolonged construction process, a gargantuan religious architecture was completed in 1601. The monastery is also a burial site of many significant historical figures from Portuguese history. It not only contains the mausoleums of King Manuel I and his successors, but also tombs of some notable explorers and poets. The internationally-known navigator Vasco da Gama found his final resting place inside the monastery.

Located on the northern bank of the Tagus River estuary, Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument of the Discoveries) is a massive contemporary monument to commemorate the Portuguese Age of Discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries. Inaugurated about a half century before, it is a comparatively new state memorial with a total of 33 national heroes from the history of Discoveries, over a third of which are seafaring adventurers, including the great explorers Vasco da Gama and Fernão de Magalhães. Since the exterior of the monument was under renovation by the time I got there last year, all 33 limestone sculptures are covered by scaffolding. Though the sightseers missed the chance to see the Portuguese figures, they could still climb up to the lookout terrace where offering an undisturbed sea view towards the Atlantic Ocean.

Constructed a half millennium ago at the mouth of the Tagus River, Torre de Belém (Belém Tower) is a defensive tower to guard the entrance to the port at Belém from pirates and enemy attacks. This outpost was also the starting point for the voyages of discovery. The beige-white limestone turret was built in Manueline style with ornate sculptures. Visitors are allowed to explore this four-storey fortified tower, from the dungeon to the rooftop. Standing on the viewing platform of the watchtower, you can overlook the surrounding waterfront area and admire the spectacular sea view of Belém. This former military fortification is now the most symbolic landmark of the parish.

Inheriting the Legacy from Past to Present,

Passing the Heritage from Present to Future

During this fortnight-trip to Spain and Portugal, dozens of world heritage sites from ten cultural-rich cities had been briefly explored. The southeastern Europe is absolutely a wonderland for every history and culture lover. A lot of ostentatious castles, sumptuous palaces, spellbinding gardens, opulent cathedrals, illustrious museums, awe-inspiring aquariums and time-honored monuments are dotted all over the Iberian Peninsula. Some of my destinations are even categorized as Twelve Treasures of Spain and Seven Wonders of Portugal. As far as I am concerned, travelling to different countries is not only an amusement activity, but also a good way to learn some other cultures different from our own. May the European cultural heritages continue to play an active role of handing down the knowledge from the past. As defined by the UNESCO, the word “Heritage” means “The legacy we receive from the past, in which we live in the present and which we hand on to the future”.

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