#the social narrative and its take on idealism?? insane

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

Welp ok so I generally don’t care about differing fandom opinions (unless they’re egregious misreadings specifically related to Jon Snow’s arc/character), but this article right here is absolutely BONKERS. Like in ways that I can’t even begin to explain. So the title right away is just so…

Why GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire is Bad Literature

Ok whatever, fantasy has traditionally had a hard time being regarded as literature. So this is nothing new. And I don’t particularly care about this argument so moving on…

I love that the first sentence is also just so factually incorrect

Nearly half a century has pasted since Billy Shakespeare has picked up his pen, and bibliophiles are still reading his plays.

Sis probably meant to say millennium but ok 😭 lowkey makes me think this is a joke but parts of this doesn’t read like that ansbjanan

And then the author proceeds to make a pretty bold claim

Traditionally, page-turners are not masterpieces. And that rule still stands when it runs by GRRM’s works. Yet legions of his fans sprout ridiculous praise, such as GRRM revolutionizing the fantasy genre and the diversity of his characters.

But…he kinda did. ASOIAF has had a great impact on the genre (good and bad). Plus, it is really important to acknowledge the sheer diversity of characters presented to us in the series. Characters who would traditionally not get the big focus that they do. Two of our main characters are disabled, and a big part of their arcs is how they navigate a world that is so horribly ableist. He upends the return of the king trope by shifting it to his sister who starts out a child bride/sex slave forced to take on the mantle of a dead dynasty. We have two female characters whose arcs revolve around how gender nonconforming they are but how they are so rooted in ideas of justice and compassion, especially towards the disenfranchised. He upends the revenge of the glorious and noble king by putting the focus on his mother. Et cetera, et cetera. Now GRRM is not without his faults (and he has many), but one cannot in good faith act like he hasn’t given us a different spin on a lot of what fantasy offers. There’s no need to be contrarian for the sake of it.

GRRM, being the revolutionary monster he is, rejects the romanticism of fantasy in favor for realism. He eschews the wonder, the ideals, the heroism, the chivalry, and the subtle social commentary. Congrats, you’re very innovative, GRRM. What did you replace them with?

I just vastly disagree with this and idk where to start.

Case in point. Throughout the series I masturbated to rape scenes, lovemaking scenes, and even a lesbian scene in which a vagina is described as a “Myrish swamp.” Yet in the aftermath of my orgasms, I was left to wonder: where’s all the pederasts? GRRM addressed this curious phenomenon by explaining none of the viewpoint characters were homosexual; “Sorry, none of the characters chose to be gay. Nothing I can do about it.”

Ok the beginning of this section is INSANE. Might just be me but idk why you would even add this to an essay that’s apparently about literary criticism. But I anyway…it is a fair critique that none of our POVs are explicitly non-heterosexual (and we can also criticize some fetishization with female-female relationships), but like the “myriad swamp” thing…isn’t it about power? Like there’s something in that scene that gives us glimpse to who Cersei is and what she craves…idk

Which goes to show, GRRM doesn’t use sex for verisimilitude; he exploits it so degenerates such as I can buy his books. Sure, heterosexual rape happens in war. So does homosexual rape, but its complete absence in the books ought to raise some eyebrows.

The second sentence makes a good point but it’s preceded by what is honestly just a mind blowing statement I- 😭

Additionally, not every graphic sex scene in the books contributes to the narrative. Sometimes it is absolutely redundant. In Dance of Dragons, Asha Greyjoy fucks Qarl the maid, which serves to… Show Asha’s feminine side? Reveal her disdain for her arranged marriage? It obviously didn’t supplement the plot; ten minutes post-coitus, a fucking battle occurs. I don’t understand why it needed to be so explicit as well. Its short appearance in the chapter was awkward, almost entirely random. Yes, sex happens in real life. That doesn’t mean portrayals of real life have to be so ridiculously pornographic.

Wait, this is satire right? Did I fall for it?

Eh, I can tolerate violence. At the age of five, I remember watching from the passenger’s seat as my dad pulverized his colleague by repeatedly smashing his head into the car’s hood and fender, spraying blood all over the windshield. But there’s a distinctive difference between sensational violence and artistic violence. Sensational violence is violence for the sake of violence, for the sole purpose of evoking shock and disgust. It’s tasteless. As bipolar as he is, even my ex-convict padre didn’t attack strangers without reason.

I’m so confused this has to be a bit, right?

No literary devices such as symbolism, metaphors, even the fucking pacing. While there is a climax, the scene does not build itself up to it: there is no intensity in the air, and time is not manipulated. Catharsis is missing, and the only feelings a reader has for Oberyn’s death is shock due to the element of hero invincibility. Don’t people get it? GRRM’s writing is boring.

One of the most confusing aspects of this scene was the death of the stableboy. It’s a great example of sensational violence, because his death seems entirely random and unnecessary. His life was so dispensable, the reader could barely register what they’re supposed to feel: sorrow, terror, or shock? What if the killed bystander was someone important? Violence for the sake of violence, and it comes off as tacky.

No way did I fall for a satirical piece on literary analysis?

This is essentially what GRRM does with Brienne of Tarth. She’s incredibly ugly and described as androgynous; her life was filled with scorn and pity for the lack of her feminine social graces, and contempt and resentment due to her violation of gender norms. But if I was a biologically female transsexual in a patriarchal medieval world, I’d have no fucking reason to dress up and act like a knight, especially if I was an aristocrat (which Brienne is). I don’t understand why Brienne couldn’t stay at Evenfall Hall and be her father’s Castellan or Captain of the Guard. She’s the only surviving child (and heir) of Lord Tarth, so I’m confused why her father would let her roam Westeros as a hedge knight. It’s also never explained why Brienne wanted to be a knight in the first place. She idealizes the concept of true knighthood but you can be just as courageous and conscientious as a lord. Brienne acts like a knight just for the purpose of being a female knight.

I feel like this is a joke 😭

If it isn’t a joke, why does it feel like the author is hating on Brienne for being a good person?

Yet readers claim Jaime Lannister underwent a character arc (approximately 3M words into ASOIAF), since he became easily likable. I personally do not believe Jaime has a redemption arc because his mindset, behavior, and opinions do not change. Jaime is still an arrogant prick, and just because he was written agreeably does not indicate his growth as a character.

I’m dying rn

What passes off as “character development” is actually “perception development.” Instead of putting effort into developing his characters, GRRM decides to warp the reader’s perceptions instead. To make Jaime a sympathetic character, GRRM develops Jaime’s backstory (completely justifying Jaime killing the Mad King) and makes Jaime’s actions more approvable (executing a rapist). The former completely nullifies Jaime’s prospective redemption arc, since it reveals that Jaime was just as “well-intentioned” in the past, and the later does not have noble intentions — as a military man, Jaime expects more discipline from his men than Ser Gregor Clegane did.

?

The way Jaime is written, however, suggests that GRRM intended to build Jaime as a flawed character who matured over the course of the story. Instead we get an impulsive character whose personal inspirations are derived on those who he associate with — Cersei in the past and now Brienne. The same Jaime who would throw Ed Stark’s son out a window for Cersei would encourage Brienne to search for Ed Stark’s daughters. Not because he feels he owes more than an apology to House Stark, but because Jaime befriends Brienne after his relationship with Cersei becomes strained. What’s worse than a misunderstood character is a a character misunderstood by its own creator.

Nah this author’s having a laugh, aren’t they? Like no way they said this with a straight face.

1. Ending a plotline at the climax only leaves the reader unsatisfied and bitter for wasting their time.

A brilliant example is Quentyn Martell, who traveled all the way to Essos to get burned by a dragon. Unlike Ned Stark’s execution and the Red Wedding, Martell’s death did not open any new plotlines. He was a POV character who is completely irrelevant to the narrative. Seriously, George… you chronicled Quentyn’s entire journey to Essos just to bring Quentyn’s two companions to Essos? What’s the fucking point? There were no new characters or locations unveiled to us throughout that entire episode, and Quentyn and his friends could have been introduced later, when they arrived in Astapor

This is a criticism I’ve seen since I joined this fandom over a decade ago. Now it’s definitely understandable to be annoyed with a cliffhanger, especially one that involves a character introduced so late isn’t he series, but there are Doylist and Watsonian reasons to Quentyn’s inclusion. His death has an impact on Dorne and Dany, plus he’s a meta deconstruction of the hero’s journey which we also see with Aegon/Young Griff (who is also, by very much on purpose introduced in the same book) and also Jon, Dany, Bran, etc. We don’t know the conclusion yet, but it’s easy to see why GRRM added Quentyn into the mix.

Writers have all the power when they weave a story, and if they thread the eye of the needle they’re expected to sew up the buttons. GRRM clearly doesn’t know how to sew, because he doesn’t know how to resolve conflicts that he has created. His solution? Kill off the characters with narratives too complex to unravel or too boring to write about. This conveniently creates a vacuum of absent characters to sew together, so when the textile inevitably becomes tangled again GRRM commits another literary genocide. Rinse and repeat.

Idk this doesn’t hold up, like at all? Name one major character killed for the sake of it? Ned is the father figure whose death is meant to push the arcs of his children. Robb’s death is meant to push those of his siblings. Now GRRM himself has stated that he regrets killing character he needed, but this seems like a bizarre criticism. It doesn’t help that the author provides no examples to back up their claim.

The repetitiveness of this ploy just demonstrates to me how GRRM cannot tell a story beginning to end, because he doesn’t have the perseverance and the patience.

Now let’s be fair (and truthful). ASOIAF is not GRRM’s first book. It’s certainly his biggest series but he has written award winning stories before, to completion.

Myrcella Baratheon: “Are you the Sword of the Morning now?” Gerold Dayne: “No. Men call me Darkstar, and I am of the night.”

I can see what GRRM is trying to accomplish, but it’s incredibly cringeworthy. Although readers can see the direct contrast between the two characters, the symbolism is not comprehendible. Hence it also sounds very stupid.

Myrcella Baratheon: “Are you a good guy?” Gerold Dayne: “Nah. Men call me epic evil badass, and I am evil.”

HELP

In On Fairy-Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien argues the fantasy genre ultimately fulfills three purposes: to challenge a reader’s perspective of his or her own world, to provide escapism from reality, and to provide moral and emotional “Consolation of the Happy Ending” which he calls eucastastrophe.

Tolkien delves into his third point more into his conclusion, where he focuses how a true representative fantasy tale is manifested by joy. This does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure. But a happy ending emphasizes the final closing in the universal outcome of the story that provides gratification and catharsis to the reader.

ASOIAF and LOTR are two different stories. Tolkien and Martin had different goals. GRRM is not trying to one up Tolkien. Not sure why this take is so pervasive but it is, and it’s annoying.

So after reading all this I have to ask, is this satire? Have I been had? I’m not on twitter so idk if people have talked about this yet but it seems so out of pocket and incorrect, like no one could’ve seriously sat down and written this with a straight face, right?

#asoiaf #grrm #idk parts of this read like satire #because how can you miss the point so completely? #if this is satire then pls forgive me but #YIKES

[fuckinglovemanga]

Yes, I hate Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.

Ok this is a bit random for my blog but I just have to say this shit somewhere cause since I first saw this film last year I have yet to find anyone with my take on it who has reviewed it.

Ok so a common criticism of this movie is that it’s misogynistic. And it definitely is. But not for the surface level reasons that people seem to think. I don’t see a lot of people trying to engage with the thematic core of the film. Lots of feminists have criticized it for depicting fgm but it goes way deeper than just that. The reviews I have seen seem to take one of two routs: 1) This film is a masterpiece of cinema, a mystery that we will never know the answer to or 2)The film is weird and gross and I don’t like it.

Nature

So what’s the movie about? Well, here’s my interpretation, and I think it makes quite a bit of sense given what the Trier presents us with. I think this film is trying to make a statement about “human nature”, and the nature of men and women. Eve’s road towards insanity begins when she prioritizes her orgasm over her child. That starts a downward spiral of insanity, which culminates in her castrating her husband, and then herself. This demonstrates an inability to reconcile a woman’s sexual desires with her motherly instinct. Also, the famous scene in which Eve becomes “one with the green” is symbolic of her letting her natural instincts take over. What follows is her spiraling into insanity and acting completely irrationally while her husband’s attempts to reason with her fail. So women= irrational and men=rational. And then Adam sees a fox that tells him “chaos reigns”. In the end of the movie, chaos (aka the natural instincts of humans) does end up taking over, as Adam kills Eve by burning her (we’ll come back to that). If all that talk of humans’ biological instincts reminds you a bit of Freud, that’s intentional. The film namedrops him at some point, saying that he has been debunked. However, the film’s narrative seems to be in support of his ideas. Unless of course the whole thing is being sarcastic. We’ll come back to that too.

Witches

During Adam and Eve’s stay in the cabin, Eve is working on a paper on the burning of witches, which she calls “Gynocide”. For context, there are a number of academic writings, most notably Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and The Witch” claiming that the witch hunts were in a way, the beginning of modern misogyny, as they set traditional gender roles in stone by marking everything women did that wasn’t related to breeding and child rearing as immoral and “satanic”. The witch, as a figure in our culture, represents a woman out of line, grotesque, insane, the opposite of what a woman ideally should be. Not only is the witch infertile (old, unattractive and generally disgusting), she also murders babies (see?) and uses their blood in satanic rituals that allow her to fly. The broom is a symbol of domesticity used in a twisted and unnatural way. I think it’s safe to say that, within the contest of “Antichrist”, Eve is the witch. As the name Eve suggests, the character is meant to be an avatar for all women, her witchiness an underlying element of all women. But Trier doesn’t present this in such a one- dimensional fashion.

Eve’s internal struggle

Eve seems to have two sides to her. Her sexuality is demonstrated as contradictory to her motherhood, a contradiction she herself cannot reconcile. She hates herself for putting her sexuality over her child. In fact, the sheer amount of self- hatred leads her to cut her own clitoris. Notably, she says: “The witches deserved to die”. Now, this is where the core of the film’s misogyny lies. Trier is projecting his own misogyny onto the character of Eve. It is men who are unable to reconcile sexuality with motherhood, because they perceive women in general based on their perception of their mother. Preforming fgm on women, is a result of the patriarchy, of man’s desire to castrate women, to remove their sexual pleasure, in order to control them. There never were any witches, men created the concept of the witch, and killed millions of innocent women in the process. Eve’s self hatred doesn’t make sense if we go with this interpretation, as it’s not internalized misogyny. It comes from her, not from male influence. Essentially, Trier absolves himself of misogyny by projecting it onto his female character.

Freud

So, the reason why Freud’s theories are no longer considered legitimate is because they take societal things (such as women's’ desire to escape a misogynistic society by adopting male social roles) and attribute it to “nature” (women have a subconscious desire for a penis in order to sexually subjugate their mother the same way their father does). Freud took social roles for granted and tried to explain them with some bonkers conflict between instincts (id) and society (superego). But humans’ biological instincts are a load of bullshit, as they have are not acknowledged by sociologists and social anthropologists, and there is zero scientific proof for their existence. This narrative is actually pretty dangerous because it leads us to believe that opressive social roals are fundamentally unalterable, a product of nature. 

Conclusion

The film ends with a bunch of modern women walking in the woods after Adam’s burning of Eve. The whole thing is meant to signify that, after Adam and Eve followed their “natural” paths, the modern woman was born. And the critics gasp “Oh my how unbelievably deep and profound”. So, as I have hopefully demonstrated, it is none of the above. Rather, it’s shallow, stupid and dangerous in terms of its messaging. But is Trier trolling everybody and being sarcastic throughout the whole film? He did say he enjoyed seeing people get angry at the film. I did some digging, and fond out that Trier actually wrote the film during a time of depression, while he was struggling with various mental illnesses. That doesn’t seem like a state of mind that produces a sarcastic work for trolling the masses. Also, the filmmaking echoes serious emotion to me.  But hey, I don’t know. In fact, we’ll never know. But I had to say all this, someone had to. We must redeem the witches.

#antichrist #lars von trier #horror #analysis

[paradiselostbythedashboardlight]

Quarantine, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Wrote 430,943 Words of Prose in a Year

As we are coming up terrifyingly fast on a full year of quarantine with no end to the pandemic yet in sight for most people, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on the last year of my existence in a state that most people now refer to as quarantine. Since March of 2020, I, like most other sane people in my country, have stopped traveling, going to stores, seeing all but a limited group of other humans, and begun having recurring nightmares about being in crowds without a piece of cloth over my nose and mouth.

Suffice to say, it has been a bit stressful.

The other thing that I have done since COVID-19 began rapidly spreading across the globe last year is write over 430,943 words of fiction. 

The number seems insane to me still. That is (approximately) one Gone With The Wind, one entire Lord of the Rings series, or the first four Harry Potter books. That is still sadly not yet War and Peace (but who knows… the pandemic isn’t over yet).

So now that I am looking back, I find myself with one question: how did this happen? Why did I do this? What does this mean about my life this year?

Since apparently I answer best by writing a lot, let’s begin at the beginning. Let me tell you a story. I’ll keep it short, I swear.

Part 1: Blast From the Past

In March of 2020, I was still in the midst of an academic semester. There was a long academic document to write and a class to teach. However, as quarantine abruptly robbed me of most of my usual commitments, I was suddenly thrust into the position of having more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. Consequently, I decided to break out the Nintendo Switch I’d gotten for Christmas and revive a childhood interest in video games.

And boy did I. I played the games I owned for all they were worth. I played them during the evenings when I had no social engagements to attend. I played them during the Zoom meetings I was already struggling to pay attention to. By the end of March, I had finished one game, and it had set the wheels turning in my brain.

Here’s a fact about me: I don’t usually tend to write or read a lot of fanfiction about things that I consider really really good. Basically, fanfiction for me has always been an impulse born from incompletion or imperfection. I see no need to add to a perfect story (although I happily consume and create fanart). But for something enjoyable and yet slightly unsatisfying? That’s fanfic territory, bud.

So by April, I had developed a sort of epic fanfiction for this video game I was playing. It was one of those magnum opus kind of ideas, a grand retelling of the story with a huge sprawling plot and Themes (™). 

At first, it was merely a thought experiment that lived only in my head, a sort of entertainment to ponder in the hours before falling asleep. What changed? Well, a friend of mine decided to also write a fanfiction on the same video game and she kindly consented to let me read it.

Suddenly, I was ravenously hungry to read and to write and to share and to consume. I wrote a hundred thousand words of this fanfic in April and into early May, sending each chapter to my friend and being spurred onward by her kind comments. 

The fic became a gargantuan endeavor full of strange little challenges I set for myself. It was a canon-divergence, requiring plotting, worldbuilding, a darker and grimer tone. For some reason, I decided to write each chapter from a different character’s perspective, making the final product into a series of essentially short story character studies which together formed a plot.

By the end of May, the story was published for the world to see. It was well-received, although not particularly popular by fandom standards. And that was the end. I had gotten out my pandemic crazies, the semester was over and now I could move on. I had made my peace with the source material, plumbing all of the little details that I wanted to examine and creating a narrative that I found satisfying.

It was over.

Part 2: Summer Lovin?

Except that it wasn’t.

Confession: as I had been posting my giant fanfiction, I had also begun to explore the fan community itself, mostly curious to see some nice art and gather a bit of demographic info about what was popular within the community. As a result, I found a fanfic recommendations page. Among the recommendations was one author who kept popping up and i finally decided to give the fic a read.

Woah. It was good. Like, really good. Like, professional quality writing and themes that seemed designed to appeal to me. I devoured everything that the creator had posted in a week and then subscribed to eagerly wait for more.

As June rolled around, I realized that I had a problem on my hands. My great big gen masterpiece was finished, but this author had gotten me hooked on something else, something with a nefarious reputation online: shipping.

The term du jour for this seems to be “brain worms” so let’s just say that reading other fanworks had given me some brain worms. Inspired this time not just by the source material of the game, but now the fan community itself, my mind began to develop another idea.

I wrote the fic, about 11k, in a single afternoon of frantic writing. When I finished it, I knew it was one of my strongest pieces. It had just come together, a combination of all the thought that I’d been brewing up and a stylistic execution that just worked with the story I wanted to tell.

I posted it on a new account. Shipping seemed vaguely shameful to me still and my mom reads the other account.

To my surprise, the fic blew up. It got so much more attention than my long fic ever had. Even more significantly, a fan artist actually drew a gorgeous comic of the pivotal scene, completely out of the blue! I was essentially thunderstruck. Honestly, it was probably the first time in my life that I’d ever received so much positive reinforcement from a piece of writing.

While I’d written short stories for undergrad workshops, they’d never been particularly good and I’d never gotten particularly great feedback on them. I’d applied and been rejected by more MFAs and literary magazines than I could count. I’d pretty much resigned myself to writing for an audience of me and me alone (which I don’t mean to sound tragic about, writing for you is great and fun!)

But receiving so much support and praise and feeling like I’d made other people happy or sad or moved? There’s nothing better.

This makes my decision to write another fic for the ship sound vaguely cynical, the action of a person driven by an addiction to praise. I mean, no lie, aren’t we all a little addicted to approval?

But my next fic was another long one, an 80k passion project modern AU that I dreamed up while spending a slow summer alone with my books and only able to leave the house for long rambling walks in the woods. The premise was essentially about characters attending a five year college reunion, something that I myself had missed due to COVID in May of the same year. The fic quickly became a way for me to process thoughts on a lot of topics in my life ranging from relationships to politics to mental health to classical literature.

This fic was also received with far more attention than I was used to and, as a result, I finally joined the notorious Twitter dot com where I found people talking about my fic unprompted, eager to follow me and like my every random thought.

I can’t say that this process was not without its ups and downs. Fandom has changed, in many ways for the better, since my last engagement with it during the 2013 Supernatural days on Tumblr. While fan friendships are often idealized or demonized, they are pretty much like any other human friendship (okay, maybe a little bit more horny on main). There is potential for amazing connection as well as pettiness. But in a year where many people suddenly had no social spaces that were safe anymore, I’m glad that I found a new line of communication with the world.  

So I kept writing fics for the ship, producing a lot of work that I am genuinely proud of and making connections with other people who enjoyed it enough to leave a comment.

To conclude this section, I was in fandom again. While I had not seriously engaged with a fan community since around 2014, I was back with a vengeance. And I had discovered an important truth about what unlocked my ability to write more than I ever had before: community support.

Not simply the kudos and the views. It was the comments. The discourse. The discussion. To add and contribute my thoughts and ideas to a greater network of thoughts and ideas that fed off of one another.

Often I had seen people complain about there not being enough fanworks for particular media or characters. Now I knew the secret. The comments and the community created the works. If I commented on other people’s fics, the more likely they were to write more. I made a resolution I have tried to keep, to comment on any story that I legitimately enjoyed reading, even if I had no particularly intelligent thing to say about it.

Part 3: A Novel Idea

By late October, I had produced a considering oeuvre for my ship of choice and was enjoying slowing my pace as I planned a few future projects.

Remember, though, how I mentioned not having engaged with fandom for the past 5 years? Well, that didn’t mean I hadn’t been writing.

For the past 4 years, I have won NaNoWriMo and completed 4 novels of over 100k each in length. These projects have been massively fun and improved my confidence with executing stories at the scope that I desire.

And so in November 2020, I settled down to write another novel. November is always a sort of terrible time write a novel if you work in academia, but this year, I had more time than usual. I set out to write a comedy fantasy novel, something mostly lighthearted and full of hijinks in order to pretend away some of the quarantine blues (which by this point were well established in my psyche).

This year in particular, I was reminded that writing a novel is… harder than fanfic. That seems like a very obvious point, but I’d written novels before. Suddenly, though, I was realizing how much a novel requires you to set up the world and the characters, while fanfic can be pretty much all payoff all the time.

While the fanfic flowed in wild creative bursts of energy, the novel required diligence of another sort. I wrote 2,000 words every day for two months. It was a grind. Sometimes, it was a slog. 

And sometimes it just wasn't good. The thing about writing your own novels is that the first draft is way more likely to be not good. You’re balancing a lot and it’s easy to let a few balls that you have in the air drop for a chapter or two, with no recourse but to go back and edit later.

I finished the novel by writing a final speedrun of 6k on new years eve, ending my 2020 with another project under my belt. No one has read it. Not even I have reread it.

I’m still glad that I wrote it. I’ll write another one next year. No one will read that one either.

Sometimes, we write for ourselves and no external validation is necessary.

Part 4: Where are they now?

January of 2021 is somehow now behind me, which is terrifying. I’m still writing. Mostly fanfic, although occasionally I go doodle around with some original ideas that are more conceptual sketches for the next novel.

As for the fanfic, I think I still have a few more good ideas left in me, but  I will probably leave it behind before the year is out. That feels a little bittersweet, a sort of temporary burst of fun and friendship that I wonder if I’ll ever experience again.

Coming to the end of this reflection, I suppose I should make a summative statement about what it all means.

In the end, it might not mean a lot. There are some small takeaways. 

It turns out that encouragement makes you write more! Who knew? Also, more free time makes you write more! Wow!!!!

The point that I think this reflection exercise has shown me, the point that I think matters more than any other, is that writing is a way to process my thoughts. Even if it is through the lens of ridiculous video game fanfic or novels about sad wizards, my writing is my way to make sense of my own mind. 

And sharing that is special. If you share it with online strangers, with your family on Christmas Eve, with your close friend who has become even closer and dearer to you since she let you read her work, or just with your mom (the one personal legally required to read your damn novel if you want to share it). To share writing is to give someone a little peek at your beliefs about the world.

And right now? When we’re still isolated and bored and scared and in desperate need of distraction? Binge some TV, play Nintendo, read a book. Take in other people’s thoughts.

But put down your own somewhere as well. It’s a conversation.

And for once, it’s a conversation that doesn’t have to take place on fucking Zoom.

#writing #personal rambling #fanfiction

[tlbodine]

A Brief History of the Slasher

Is there a more iconic face for the horror genre than the knife-wielding psychopath? Many would say no. Although the tried-and-true slasher formula is so played out as to be a cliche -- and fresh examples played straight are tough to come by in the modern age -- for many, slasher films are the heart and soul of horror movies. 

How did that happen? What do they say about us on a cultural level? And where should you start when it comes to a formal study of the topic? Let’s delve deep and find out! 

Murder and mayhem are evergreen topics of fascination for humans, and we’ve been telling stories about murderers since Cain killed Abel. But these stories didn’t become what we would formally call “slashers” until the 1970s. 

So what is a slasher? 

Slasher films are defined by a few shared characteristics: 

A high body count (multiple victims) 

Murders are shown on-screen and often from the POV of the killer 

The murders happen one by one, incorporating pursuit, struggle, and finally death

The killer may have a supernatural influence, but it will have the physical appearance of a human (and may often simply be a human)

In almost every instance, the killer is portrayed as being insane or rendered deeply troubled by a past trauma which had triggered the murderous impulse. The killer is frequently dehumanized, and the victims are usually young. 

Slashers often adhere to their own sort of moral logic, more closely resembling Medieval morality plays than perhaps any other modern genre of storytelling. By utilizing a cast of archetypes, various virtues and flaws can be represented among the victims. 

These traits are what differentiate slashers from other murder-focused horror, thriller and mystery tales. 

Consider, for example, the narrative structure of an Agatha Christie murder mystery like And Then There Were None. In this book, a group of strangers are brought under mysterious circumstances to a remote location, where they are systematically murdered as an act of vengeance. In concept, this seems like it should be a slasher -- but its execution is quite different. In the book, the murders are a backdrop; the characters (and reader) are confronted with bodies rather than scenes of overt violence. 

The First Slasher

In 1974, two films came out that gave birth to the modern slasher. 

The first, released in October, was Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The second, released in the USA in December of that year, was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre tells the story of a group of friends who run afoul of a family of cannibals living in a rural farmhouse. Black Christmas is about the systemic murder of sorority girls during Christmas break. And both left an indelible mark on horror history. 

It’s important to put some context on the world these films were created in: 

The recent dissolution of the Hays production code meant that movies could be more graphically violent and morally depraved than ever before

The Vietnam war was raging, and for the first time in history, televised footage of the battle was piped into living rooms on the evening news

Multiple serial killers were active in the country, and their exploits also graced the daily newspapers and nightly news to sow terror 

Richard Nixon’s presidency was marked by an as-then unprecedented level of corruption and scandal

Gender politics provided both sexual freedom and career ambitions to a generation of women, and the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade case legalizing abortions played a massive role in both gender relations and the way we would think about life and bodily autonomy. 

The 1970s provided, in other words, a perfect storm of circumstances that collided to give birth to slashers, and neither Hooper nor Clark are shy about citing these as their inspiration. Texas Chainsaw was billed in theaters as a true story as an act of political defiance against newscasts that spread misinformation; Black Christmas is at its heart a film about abortion and a woman’s right to leave an abusive relationship. They were undeniably films of their time. 

Texas Chainsaw inspired a wave of sensationalist "ripped from the headlines" murder movies loosely based on real killers, such as Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), which was based on the Sawney Bean legend or Charles B. Pierce's The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), which was based on the Texarkana Phantom Killer.

And Black Christmas, of course, served as the thematic springboard for a little film called Halloween.

Halloween and the Final Girl 

In 1978, a little-known small-time director named John Carpenter was hired to make a movie with the working title, The Babysitter Murders. It would be about -- you guessed it -- babysitters who got murdered. The idea was later adapted to take place on Halloween, likely for commercial reasons: People like watching scary movies in October, so setting a film on Halloween night would surely help with popularity.

John Carpenter certainly did not wholly plagiarize Black Christmas with his holiday-themed slasher, but the earlier film's influence is visible all the same -- from a shared lineage of "the call is coming from inside the house" babysitter folk legend, to the perspective work on establishing shots of the house and the ambiguously bleak ending.

But compared to Black Christmas, Halloween is horror with its edges filed down so it'll be easier to swallow. Both films have predominately female casts, but the sorority girls in Black Christmas have sexual agency and outspoken opinions that are nowhere to be found in Carpenter's work. In fact, Halloween so aggressively fails the Bechdel Test that it seems to do so on purpose -- there is not a single scene with two girls where they are not talking about a boy. And while Black Christmas deals with complex topics like abortion, domestic violence, and the unreliability of the police, Halloween simplifies its formula down to the utterly basic: Michael Myers kills because he is pure evil, and that is simply what evil does.

Despite its flaws -- or perhaps because of them -- Halloween became an immediate and enormous hit. It also introduced several clever storytelling techniques that were crucial to the advancement and development of the slasher genre:

The introduction of a Final Girl, the lone survivor who holds out against the onslaught of terror. (Carpenter denies that Laurie Strode’s virginal innocence has anything to do with her survival, but “final girl as virgin” would persist as a trope for a very long time) 

A masked killer. Although we’d seen masked murders in many films before (I’ve talked in the past about the trope of the mask-wearing murderer, and the way it is both thematically and logistically useful in storytelling: https://tlbodine.tumblr.com/post/189658195609/the-masked-knife-wielding-psycho), the “look” of Michael Myers is so iconic that it inspired a need for future killers to have a similarly thoughtful design, decking them out almost like comic book superheroes. 

Franchising opportunities. Although earlier movies had spawned sequels, Halloween exploded as a franchise thanks in large part to the iconic design and the simplistic good-vs-evil storytelling formula. Future slashers would latch onto this killer-centric franchise formula for over a decade. 

Halloween became the most profitable independent film, holding the record for 16 years, which goes to show just how successful the formula truly was. 

The Golden Age of Slashers 

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the advent of VHS and Betamax formats created a market for low-budget straight-to-video films. Because slashers are so cheap to make (you don't need any famous actors, can film entirely in one location, and practical effects can be as simple as a few gallons of stage blood), they were ideal candidates for the job. On the big screen, horror was enjoying an unusually high level of popularity, a proven money-maker, simultaneously commercial and subversive in a decade of opulence and social conservativism.

So onto that stage walks Sean S. Cunningham's gory slasher, Friday the 13th, where a group of teenage camp counselors are brutally murdered, frequently wile having sex. The film spawned a widely successful franchise, which swiftly began borrowing elements of Halloween -- a silent and indestructible masked killer, a signature musical score -- to become a pop culture mainstay. The 1983 Robert Hiltzik film, Sleepaway Camp, cashes in on the "death to camp counselor" plot in the same way that Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls touched on babysitter murders in 1979.

A whole slew of less-successful films would follow, most of them lost to the history books but still living in dollar-bin DVD collections. Some, like Prom Night and My Bloody Valentine, would earn a cult following. One noteworthy cult favorite is Slumber Party Massacre, directed and written by women (Amy Holden Jones and Rita Mae Brown, respectively), which turns some slasher tropes in their head.

A glut of films, most of them instantly forgettable, led to a decline in slasher popularity -- until Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984.

Cracking Wise and Slashing Teens 

A Nightmare on Elm Street introduces Freddy Krueger, a different sort of horror villain than audiences had seen before. Krueger is a supernatural killer who stalks his victims in their dreams, bringing a fresh supernatural twist to the slasher genre. And, unlike Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Freddy is anything but silent. Thanks in part to the charisma of lead actor Robert Englund, the character's darkly comedic personality became utterly riveting.

Plenty of dream-related horrors would follow, none of which would make much of a splash. But one film franchise did latch on to a similar formula: Child's Play, directed by Tom Holland in 1988, introduced another supernatural wisecracking killer in the form of Chucky, a murderous doll possessed by the soul of as serial killer.

These major film franchises -- Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Child’s Play -- would go on to spawn numerous sequels and become such a thoroughly pervasive part of pop culture that you can find their likeness everywhere. But despite the many imitators, there was little in the way of innovation in the genre until the mid 90s. 

Do You Like Scary Movies? 

Wes Craven toyed with the idea of self-referential horror in New Nightmare, a Freddy Krueger film that was itself a meta-analysis of Freddy Krueger films. But he would revisit the idea with far greater success in 1996 with Scream. 

Created by horror lovers, for horror lovers, Scream is designed to be the most quintessential slasher film ever created. Relying on a hip, young cast to draw in a fresh audience, Scream works by combining nostalgia, meta-analysis, humor, and buckets of blood into a single film. The opening scene is a direct homage to When a Stranger Calls, and the masked killer is a deliberate call-back to earlier films. 

Unsurprisingly, Scream was a huge hit that ushered in a brief but furious wave of slashers, like the star-studded I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legend (1998), and Scream itself had several sequels and even a TV series. But the 1990s were something of a dark era for the slasher film, seeing the release of some spectacularly lackluster franchise installments. One exception to that was the fan-favorite Freddy vs Jason, which pits the two killers against one another -- a delightful premise, but one that had strayed far from the slasher roots. 

Modern Slasher Films 

The 1990s slasher reboot was short-lived and mostly forgettable, and by the 2000s filmmakers had mostly turned away from the genre entirely, except for a slew of nostalgia cash-in reboots of every popular franchise. 

The one exception was meta-analysis -- building on Scream, these films began to deconstruct the genre in a way that would combine horror, humor, and criticism. 

The Final Girls (2015), directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson, takes this sort of meta approach. The Cabin in the Woods (2012), directed by Drew Goddard but bearing the fingerprints of co-writer and producer Joss Whedon, takes it to even further excess, providing both a thorough deconstruction of horror gropes and an entirely new mythos to give it a fresh framework.

But the problem with deconstructions is that, once a few truly successful ones have been made, it becomes essentially impossible to create the original thing in earnest anymore. And so the slasher as a sub-genre has reached its bloody end. 

Where Did All The Slashers Go? 

With dozens of slashers spanning more than 40 years of film history, it’s pretty hard to create something new with the format. Which is not to say that people aren’t still making them -- they are -- but there is less room to innovate within the notoriously rigid and simplistic slasher formula. 

Culturally, we’ve moved on a lot from the 1970s as well. For one, serial killers are no longer the threat they once were. Babysitters and camp counselors are rarely teenagers, either -- in fact, teens aren’t leaving the house as much in general. And a rise in information technology, communications and surveillance has made it harder to isolate victims and commit murders over a long period of time -- our mass murders tend to happen in shooting sprees instead these days. For another, that same information technology has made us extremely jaded and hard to impress with gore. 

The 2000s delivered violence at levels utterly beyond anything in history. The rise of the so-called torture porn -- a genre that dispenses with the stalking and killing of multiple victims in favor of lingering on the painful mutilation of a small handful -- delivered gore unlike any seen in earlier slashers. Cable television series like The Walking Dead deliver graphic violence with unprecedented regularity -- you no longer need to pick up a “video nasty” to indulge in some gruesome gore. 

And, well, unfortunately, the internet has made it easier than ever to see real violence, from terrorist beheading videos to medical gore to live-streamed murders. 

Gore for gore’s sake is simply not as compelling in the 21st century, and that takes away much of the slasher’s appeal. 

Slashers have had to morph and adapt to find a foothold for survival. In the 2000s, we saw their metamorphosis in real time: From torture porn to home invasion to a cornucopia of more innovative horrors dwelling on fears both large and small. 

We’ve probably seen the last of masked knife-wielding, babysitter-killing psychos...but the horror genre is richer for it. 

#horror movies #slahsers #slasher films #horror #horror analysis

[nerdywyrds]

MGR vs AC mini rant

I know no one is going to read this but I’ve been thinking about it and what else can I do but post my thoughts into the void that is tumblr?

So watching Metal Gear Rising gave me really strong Advent Children vibes-- both feature wildly over the top battle scenes that don’t so much ignore the laws of physics so much as take the laws into a back alley and shoot them before running over them with a bulldozer. Prominent examples include Loz riding his motorcycle up a cement column while the column is actively falling to the ground, and Raiden using missiles as stepping stones to get to a helicopter so he can chop it in half with his katana. The only hard rule is that fight scenes need to Look Cool.

Now I’m going to be critical of Advent Children; I’ve owned both the official original and the bootlegged versions, and I’ve seen the extended/uncut Japanese version. As much as I loved FF7, my feelings towards AC are more complicated because I largely don’t enjoy it. And the reason that I largely don’t enjoy it is because it takes itself extremely seriously. All of the fights are just-- woohoo! wow! awesome! look at this!! so cool!! but Cloud approaches everything with the same stoic grimness that he does when he’s grappling with his grief and guilt over Aerith and Zack’s deaths. Loz, Kadaj, and Yazoo are having fun, but in a bloodthirsty kind of way, and outside of Loz, they’re treated seriously by the narrative.

I do enjoy the Reno and Rude parts because they’re the only ones where the narrative is like “they’re stupid, what they’re doing is stupid, but it’s still awesome and fun” and it is fun. They’re allowed to be funny.

(I also think that Advent Children does Cloud a huge disservice because in FF7 he’s fucking hilarious. But I’ll get to that.)

Meanwhile, Metal Gear Rising is extremely self-aware and it owns its stupidity. You start the game by slicing a Metal Gear in half with a fucking katana, then someone fires some missiles at you so you run up them to chop a helicopter in half, then you fight an eight-armed woman who uses a literal polearm, then you fight whatever the fuck Monsoon is, you run up an exploding building twice, you throw around robots twenty times your size, you duel one of the robots by stealing its sword and just use that damn sword like you’re the world’s angriest ant... It’s like with every level the writers got together and said, “Okay let’s think of the most insane thing in the world, and amp it up.” I was constantly on the edge of my seat thinking they couldn’t possibly top the latest stunt, and then they would.

I think the main difference is MGR is very funny throughout the game while AC really only has a couple of humorous moments. Both feature a protagonist with a history of serious mental illness and a tendency to get caught up in their own angst. In FF7, Cloud gets plenty of fun poked at him (the Don Corneo sequence, “Let’s mosey!”, Rufus’ parade, etc.) and we get lots of time to see that he’s actually a socially awkward dweeb, and that balances out all the SOLDIER-related trauma and his break from reality mid-game. In AC, they strip all the humor from him so it’s just Cloud’s demons and how he’s failing to deal with them.

And in MGR we watch Raiden lose faith in his ideals, develop (regain?) a split personality to cope with his trauma, and jump fully into anti-hero status at the end. But he also buys a mariachi costume to “blend” in Mexico, jokes with his support team, gets literally punted like a football by Armstrong, gets bossed around by his robot dog buddy, etc. Like Cloud in FF7, he has serious issues, but he’s fun to watch and root for because the narrative makes sure to alleviate the angst with some humor.

So yeah. Not really a point to this other than MGR reminded me of Advent Children, except I liked it more. I wish we’d gotten FF7 Cloud in AC; that would have been a lot of fun to watch.

#metal gear #final fantasy vii #advent children #cloud strife #raiden #posting into the void #my complicated relationship with advent children #I wish MGR had a sequel #I'd watch it #I'll just have to watch the other raiden games instead

[arecomicsevengood]

Self-Released Comics from 2020

A bunch of zines came out this year that I liked but haven’t written anything about because I’ve been working under the assumption that my liking the artists involved is unsurprising. But I might as well, I like them more than much of what’s offered by larger publishers and they’re probably doomed to some degree of obscurity. I should excerpt images but don’t feel like doing that. All of these would be in consideration for a theoretical “best of the year” list, but I generally get conservative with those and limit it to five books that are widely available as a concession to an imagined general audience.

Gonzales, by Matthew Thurber and Ric Royer, available through Matthew’s online shop

The parties involved in this comic’s creation would probably prefer I not mention that Ric, the writer, was “cancelled” and made a pariah in Baltimore (and I believe Providence too) due to his behavior in relationships, which had a marked pattern of manipulation and psychological abuse. I don’t know how many people outside these places, in the broader comics community, are aware of such things, but certainly some people are probably buying this comic not knowing anything about it who would be uncomfortable with the concept if they knew. I support Matthew’s willingness to support his friend as an artist by collaborating with him in a context where it’s unlikely women would come into his orbit (this isn’t to imply there aren’t women in comics, only that there aren’t festivals happening right now) but not so much so I can look the other way entirely. If I had to have hand-wringing conversations with Baltimore friends, you have to have them in your head: Heads up for those who don’t like it when authors are creeps.

The comic itself is pretty good! It’s a satire about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s that basically works as a kid’s comic, where a superhero named Gonzales teaches kids to overcome their parents’ fears. Thurber’s a great cartoonist, and I don’t think he loses too much working from a script here. There’s less improvisatory surrealism and more general storytelling economy.

Everglide by Carlos Gonzalez, available through Wasp Video Roadhouse

This kinda feels like Carlos’ eXistenZ, by which I mean it’s about humans “jacking in” to video game worlds where they can run around. Also I think eXistenZ is the best Cronenberg movie, and who knows how good this comic will turn out? I like the serialized minicomic format. I do feel like the ideal format for this would be typical comic proportions, sold in retail stores monthly, and Carlos’ thin line that delineates the shape of a figure but none of its weight or texture could confront readers with its seeming amateurism. But alas! No one can afford to put out black and white genre comics in stores regularly these days. As a minicomic with so many pages in each issue, the focus on the narrative, and each issue feels satisfying on those grounds, building out its world.

Detective Double Digest by Drew Lerman and Pete Faecke, available at The Stink Hole

Drew Lerman takes his Snake Creek characters out for a detective caper with gags about pissing and a plot about cryogenic freezing. Pete Faecke, who I’m unfamiliar with, but is in the new Bubbles writing about the horse sequence in Jimbo Adventures In Paradise, does a comic where multiple people huff gasoline. It’s great. There’s plenty of jokes, an interesting tone, but also a good deal of narrative space being covered in a short amount of pages. The contrast between art styles works to the advantage of each, with Faecke sort of approximating a stiff “golden age” style while Lerman works in a scribblier cartoonier form, closer to a comic strip like Barney Google. Faecke also did a similar format split with A.T. Pratt of western comics that looks pretty good too.

Whisnant by Max Huffman, available at Motion Goods

I loved reading this comic as pages would pop up on Max’s social media feed. Honestly considered buying a page of the original art to finance the printing of the minicomic version. Improvised goofball comedy, tells a story, interrupts that story, then comes back to it, the way the gags and callbacks work is insane in this. I kinda hope he continues with it but maybe it won’t work if it attempted to function like an ongoing comic and not just a stream of consciousness thing that’s disinterested in resolution. On any given page, it feels either like Huffman is going for some weird gag or he’s exploring the form and abstracted geometry of page layout and shape. The amount of panels per page is generally pretty low, so it makes for a breezy minicomic, but reading it online a page at a time I always imagined it at classic comic book size, feeling like part of the point was the subversion of expectations of a classic “teen” comic like Archie.

Hubert by Elijah Brubaker, available at his Patreon

Elijah put up a few issues of this for free as PDFs somewhere but that might’ve been a limited time thing, and it’s worth tossing him some small amount of money to get these. They’re comedies about being an obnoxious dumbass who’s dumb and horny, sorta sitcom-y, sorta weird indie movie vibe, but with a cartoon’s sense of freedom from consequences. Strange and likable, uncontrived, honest to its world of slackers. Would be a good alt-comic in the tradition of Hate or any number of forgotten Slave Labor comics. Hubert the character’s abstracted cartoon shape is kinda like Ben Jones’ Alfe but he ends up in a house full of women and there’s a flirtatious chemistry in his interactions as opposed to Jones’ sexless goofball shenanigans. Since Brubaker’s I think most known for his Wilhelm Reich bio-comic and is currently working on a Charles Manson thing, this feels more “accessible” to a certain alienated pandemic brain looking to live vicariously through fiction while maybe the other stuff is more saleable to libraries. That may sound more cynical than I intend, I mean this comic is fun and it would be nice to encounter it on someone’s coffee table when you’re at the house getting drunk and stoned in a different era. The artist is unemployed and currently only making money from his Patreon, he deserves people kicking in donations for this thing.

Dog Biscuits by Alex Graham, viewable at Instagram for the time being

For a fictionalized document of the pandemic times we’re living in, currently being serialized on Instagram, running in sequences of panels you click through, I like this better than Crisis Zone. It seems close to wrapping up, at which point Alex will collect it into a self-published book I think will make a worthwhile purchase. As time has gone on, and the strip’s moved away from discussing protests and the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone overtly, settling in with the romantic drama of its small cast as they try to find their way in a world where it feels like every stupid asshole might have exposed themselves to COVID already and now thinks nothing of exposing you as well feels fraught as any editorial cartooning, a sense of desperation to find joy underlies a multipage XXX sequence of characters boning. The Instagram comments are lit up with people seemingly familiar with only reading YA getting really emotionally invested and being extremely judgmental of the characters, with maybe the weirdest moment from my vantage point was someone asking the author what a character’s astrological breakdown was. These reactions do bring home how thought out, alive, and well-observed these characters feel.

[trad-masculine]

A Specific Critique of Our Politics

There is growing sentiment that our current political system is broken & needs fundamental change. This to me is both obvious & necessary, but we need to figure out how to navigate the problem of changing fundamental power structures. Here's what I think is the single most elegant & specific critique of both sides, hopefully in a way that provides the eventual clarity necessary to solve our shared problems together.

Both the right & left, individuals, ideologies & political parties are a mess & frankly embarrassing to participate in, hence the record turnout of this year, is still lackluster in any direct analysis. There is much broken to fix, but starting point is important.

The right needs to recognize a deep failure within its moral & psychological framing of people & events. There is a type of 'moral' double bind social dynamic I despise. 'Holier than thou' is one way to describe this double bind game. Another way to phrase it, popularized by Bret Weinstein, is the Personal Responsibility Votex. It works by framing another person such that all their possible decisions appear to be either direct moral failing, or make them powerless. In a large social dynamic this allows the deceptive public figures who use it to blind their audience to the social & moral critiques applied to them by those attempting to constrain their ruthlessness.

This is a common dynamic used by the establishment on the right against their audience, & I believe one of the social forces driving the right into wildly overblown conspiracy theorizing instead of toward the most effective & elegant criticisms of our current social system provided by conscientious objectors on the left, & 'center'. I want to call it something with an egoic sense, beyond the specific tactics used. "I don't need to pay attention to anyone's worldview & ideas except my own because anyone different from me is either weak or a hypocritical liar."

A good concrete & meaningful example is a situation which my own family is in, & a decision tree I have faced myself. I am a staunch environmentalist, although my perspective is far more nuanced than the common tropes of the popular narratives. #solarpunk & others do a good job of popularizing more generally correct ideals closer to my own.

To the point, my family owns oil properties. Oil is clearly a dysfunctional primary energy source going forward, far beyond carbon dioxide, but deeper into how the industry impacts the world in which we all live. Global politics (war & conflict over who profits from oil), finance (who oils & controls society through oil), transportation (asphalt is oil), plastics, farming (fertilizer is oil), pharmaceuticals (organic chemistry can be oil) are all fields of society deeply disturbed by the power structures of oil.

I don't want to participate in that, but I cannot sell my property. If someone else owns it they will build far more pumps & extract far more oil than I do or ever have, or plan to do. I also would be foolish & insane & counter productive to my goals in their pure form if I took a purist stance & went bankrupt via halting all pumping on my property. I would still loose everything to the ruthless oil magnates, but I would also be incapable of doing any good in the world.

Either I am a hypocrite or too weak to do anything useful or meaningful in the world. The situation is systemically broken. Only legislation that stops oil extraction allows the rational approach of my situation to result in an outcome I can accept as good. Until then my moral duty is best served by pumping oil to invest in environmental causes. Which is an absurd situation to find oneself in, but from a sane perspective there is actually no more moral or correct option available to me. I've considered all possibilities at length.

This is a double bind, that traps me in technical hypocricy as the most morally & ethically optimized stable position I can hold. All other positions make those who would harm the earth more powerful at my expense. This is not my failing, but a tragedy of the wise. Understand this, find & respect people who hold positions similar to mine out of moral duty & necessity, despite the tragic self-contribution to the very process which I find necessary & right to end.

*

The left equally has a grave error.

I find it a laughable failure of the intellectual & media elite of the left do not possess & destribute as common knowledge the game theoretic conclusions ones reaches upon an analysis of our voting system. Plurality Voting or (first past the post) #EndPluralityVoting, is an awful system of selection for solving any democratic problem. You will know it as "Choose One Candidate" on a ballot sheet. This voting method itself, as opposed to any other reason, is the specific direct reason we have a two party system. This is a certain & abject truth, that with depth, is inarguable.

The direct, most elegant & most superb alternative system is called #ApprovalVoting, & it is what you would know on a ballot as "Choose One, Or More, Candidate[s]."

Many social media polling systems have this as an option, always use it, it should be the universal voting process default.

Approval Voting has one challenge that prevents it from being common place across democratic systems, it requires a well crafted Parliamentary system to be used at the political stage above it. The two systems integrate together exceptionally well, for deep, nuanced & powerful technical reasons. Of primary import is that Approval Voting most accurately represents the true values & views of the demos, the people, at the cost of some stability & of having an electoral majority. The Parliamentary system handles greater volitity & also non-majority leadership situations better than other political systems.

This is all clear & obvious to me after analyzing political processes, but because this knowledge does not serve the self interest of collecting power, it is not the well destributed understanding of political systems that it should be.

(I will quickly note the popular alternative voting system of #RCV or ranked choice voting. This is a cludge, I support it as better than plurality voting, because anything is, but the only reason it is the voting method of choice is because it's compatible with our current very broken political system, not because it has any superior qualities to approval Voting. It's complicated and less useful. Approval Voting is superior at every angle of analysis except how easy it is to achieve in our current dysfunctional moment.)

*

The sources of dysfunction that are most are fault for neuroticizing us on whichever side, I lay foremost at the feet of these two problems in our approaches to addressing problems in the political/intellectual sphere.

It is time to start applying ourselves with astute, well rounded & careful analysis of broad human systems using the tools of Game Theory & of evolutionary process analysis, which some might know as market forces.

I could go fard deeper into more problems, ad infinitum in fact, I think & write at length on these topics elsewhere, but posting some thoughts on the dysfunctional mess that is our ongoing political moment is a necessary duty I feel is apt & appropriate here.

Thanks for reading.

Take care & keep your soul.

🌳♂️ Masculine Way of Life!🧔🥊

#Election #2020 #Voting #Politics #Economics #Solar punk #environment #Environmentalist #solarpunk #Economy #Eco #cottagecore

[relationshipsandpolitics]

Part 3

Since I last posted, we’ve gotten word that a certain rich asshole is going to enter the race.  Now, I could do 500 words on why this guy is awful, but it would sort of go against my belief that just because someone is really rich does not mean we need to pay extra attention to them and their thoughts.   This guy is not winning the nomination, won’t even poll about 3% in most states, and overall is not worth the amount ink that will surely be spilled on his campaign.  Next.

Joe Biden. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders

So we are down to the final 3.  One of those 3 objectively should have been culled much earlier.  If I was doing this purely based on the level of support for each candidate, this guy would have been cut about 8 candidates ago.  But Joe Biden is still the front runner, consistently leading national polls and absolutely killing it in several early primary states like South Carolina.  Biden remains popular among black voters, who serve as the lifeblood of the Democratic party. Even though his policies and personality suck, he is unique from all the other shitty centrist candidates.  So he gets his own takedown.

Joe Biden is a very old man hoping to blind the voters with his connection to President Obama.  And for the most part, it’s working like a charm. Forget the fact that he is a rambling, incoherent mess during campaign stops.  Forget his abysmal views on race, including his support for segregated busing and racist colleagues.  Forget the fact this guy railroaded Anita Hill and still can’t sufficiently apologize to her.  Forget all the bad parts of Joe Biden.  That’s what he is banking on.  Biden is trying to win not based on policy or his strategy for improving the lives of everyday Americans.  No, he is trying to win by painting a false image of who he is and how electable he would be.  Biden is basing his entire campaign on appealing to low-key racist white suburbanites who don’t want to pay more taxes.  That’s his base.  And it’s not an awful strategy.  But it highlights something terrible about the Democratic voter.

The average Democratic primary voter appears to support progressive causes.  They want to see Social Security expanded.  They support a $15 minimum wage and gun control.  They support paid family leave and some form of universal health care.  But the average Democratic voter of a certain age, race and class level doesn’t want to fight for those things.  Because while they agree with those policies in principle, they won’t be that affected by them, and more importantly, would have to pay more in taxes.  So they say they support these goals yet refuse to put any skin into the game to achieve them.   The other possibility is that they would support enacting these policies and paying a bit more, but they don’t think anyone else would and thus think we need to support the least-controversial candidate.  No one really likes Joe Biden, or if they do, no one can really identify what exactly he is running for.   Even though health care remains a joke in this country, Biden isn’t arguing to make it better.  He isn’t supporting a wealth tax.  What is this man running on except a vague idea about returning dignity to the American worker.  Yet voters still support him, either because they know he actually won’t change anything (except make it ok to be gay again) or because they think not changing anything is the only way for a Democrat to win.

The American voter (not just Democratic voters) collectively is a stupid person.  They personally want a politician to enact massive change to better their lives, yet believe the ideal candidate is a moderate who won’t do anything major, and still someone in doing nothing substantial, will improve their lives.  Then, just to double down on that stupidity, they will vote the opposition party into power in Congress to ensure nothing happens, all because they love compromise. Of course, the last thirty years of politics have shown that bipartisanship is a myth.

The American voter is both very ignorant and very naïve.  We accept that.  But it’s tougher to accept that from our politicians.  At a recent fundraiser for millionaires, Biden touted his sincere belief that when Trump goes, Republicans will have an epiphany and start working with him to make our country better.  Folks, this is disqualifying.  The sheer insanity of that belief needs to be a deal breaker.  Biden, in the very same speech to the very same contingent of rich assholes, said that he personally called dozens of Republicans to get Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.  The Republicans said no and pulled a move so disgusting and unprecedented that we will never see something worse in our lifetimes.  And this was all before Trump was even nominated.

Joe Biden is an idiot. He also is in the bag of the rich. He regularly attends fundraisers hosted by lobbyists for some of the most nefarious industries.  His campaign is mostly funded by Wall Street and Health Insurance.  And how do you think he’ll govern once in office?  Will he go after these bad actors?  Or will he appoint them to his Cabinet?  Remember, this is the guy who worked in an administration that wanted Larry Summers as Fed Chief.  He appointed Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury.

Joe Biden would continue the worst aspects of Obama’s administration without all the good stuff. He’d be in his late 80’s by the time his second term ended, too.  For the love of all that we hold holy, we cannot nominate Biden.

It is now time for the top two candidates.  I would happily vote for either of these candidates, so my choice for one is not a slight on the other.  Each candidate has issues, but they are minor compared to what they bring to the table. So I urge you to vote early and often for either of them.

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders

A presidential candidate should make you excited to vote for them.  It can’t just be “I can’t vote for the other guy so I guess you’ll do.”  It’s a recipe for disaster.  People need a reason to take a couple hours of their day, find parking, wait in a long line, deal with eighty-year old volunteers who yell at you to close the curtain more, and then go into work and deal with their daily amount of shit.  People need a reason to see the process of voting as exciting.  

I think Bernie and Elizabeth are the only two candidates one can reasonably get excited about.  I’m not saying everyone will be excited by them because a lot of people don’t support their policies.  I call these people assholes.  But can anyone honestly say they are excited to vote for Amy Klobuchar or Joe Biden? Even if you support their bland policy proposals which consist of “we need better jobs but fuck if I know how to do that.”

But which one to choose?

I’m going to start with Bernie.  The negatives against him are one of perception rather than reality, but in politics its not the truth that wins out but what you can convince people the truth is. And Bernie will definitely be portrayed as an out-of-touch Socialist.  While the youngins like the word “socialism” the majority of the electorate is still scared to death of the term because they equate social democratic government as the Soviet Union and bread lines.  In other words, most people are stupid.   Sanders best hope would be to hammer home how amazing European countries are, the benefits they enjoy without all the negatives that Republicans conjure up in places like Venezuela. Unfortunately, Republican messaging still rules the day.   Even if you could strap a person in a chair and explain point by point why Sweden and Denmark work as social democracies, they still wouldn’t get it.

Trump will absolutely attack Bernie for being a socialist, and the problem compared to the other candidates he would attack for being a socialist is that the suburban Democratic voters would actually believe him.  Bernie absolutely will upend the system, and a lot of people are still benefiting from that system.  People like my parents.  They have a good amount of money but are not rich.  Taxes going up on them will impact their daily lives, and most of the benefits Bernie is advocating for would not benefit them.  There is a lot of good research out there that suggests the key for Democrats to win across the board is to get the suburban moderate vote. And there is a legitimate argument that Bernie will not get that vote.  Now, one can say that those voters would never vote for Trump. But you must remember a very important thing about politics: white people can get pretty racist when they think you’ll take money away from them.

But here’s what I love about Bernie.  He is entirely genuine in his advocacy for the poor and working class. Most politicians say they care, of course.  They give a speech supporting raising the minimum wage or not cutting Medicaid. But they also tie themselves with rich donors and businesses whenever they can.  They support the poor until there is a good reason not to.  Not Bernie.  He’s been singing the same tune since the sixties.  He doesn’t care if it isn’t popular. He’ll make it become popular. Bernie almost single handedly shifted the conversation on universal health care.  We are talking about paid family leave and free college because of him. And the man deserves credit for that.

Bernie has been hit a lot from the Democratic establishment.  People are still sore that he had the audacity to challenge Hillary Clinton.  Even though he endorsed and campaigned heavily for her after dropping out in 2016, there is still a narrative that he sabotaged her campaign.  Let’s be clear, though.  The reason why the establishment Democratic contingency dislikes Bernie is because he thinks they are just as corrupt as the Republicans.  Which is true.  Democrats work out of the same bubble as Republicans.  They rub shoulders with the same Wall Street donors. Try calling up your Democratic Senator to get an in-person meeting.  Now look at who does get those meetings.  I support Bernie because he actually is trying to change our corrupt political system.  A politician can’t work within the given system without being corrupted by it. The system is a cancer that needs to be destroyed.  

Bernie has said some dumb things and has held some dumb positions.  This can’t be denied.  He’s been accused of being a racist, sexist and homophobe.  Some of this is absolute bullshit and some of it is based on dumb things he’s said.   But judging by the policies the man has supported, the votes he has taken, and what he has said during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, does anyone honestly believe him to be a racist, sexist or homophobe?

If you are having a tough time getting behind Bernie, I’d ask yourself the following questions:

Do you honestly believe he would pursue anti-women and anti-reproductive rights policies?

Do you think a more robust paid family leave policy, along with a policy promoting affordable childcare, would significantly benefit women?

Do you think Bernie would restrict LGBTQ rights or would he expand protections for this group?

Do you genuinely believe Bernie would support or champion policies that would discriminate against black people?  

Do you think health care is a crisis in this country and everyone should have access to it? If so, do you think Bernie makes the situation better or worse?

Do you think a president should fill his administration with people from the financial and insurance industries?  Do you think Bernie would do this?

Do you think millionaires and billionaires should be taxed more and more money should go into programs that help the poor and middle class?

Should college be free or at least much more affordable?

Ask yourself these questions.  Don’t worry about whether he can get them passed.  Truth is it will be tough for any Democrat to get anything passed.  I’d be looking at which candidates are most willing to use executive orders (hint: it’s Bernie).

We can’t keep hedging our votes on what’s practical because the truth is everything is doable with enough willpower.   Think about how insane Social Security is as a legislative success.  We taxed everyone, rich and poor, to provide money to senior citizens for the rest of their lives.  That’s insane, and we did it.  Same with Medicare.  If you think are country needs massive changes to secure our future, vote for the candidate who is advocating for massive changes.  That candidate is Bernie Sanders and…..

Elizabeth Warren.  Everything good about Bernie can also be said about Elizabeth Warren.  This is a person who literally created an agency designed to help consumers go against corporations.  Warren has correctly diagnosed the problem for wealth and income inequality and a lot of the bad shit that’s been happening to the American worker. Corporations suck. Rich people suck. They both need to be taxed way more and we need to use those funds to give benefits to the poor and working class. Warren has a plan for pretty much everything, and that is a great thing.  She doesn’t talk in platitudes about restoring dignity to the working class. She identifies the problem and comes up with an actual solution.  

And for her efforts she gets skewered by her opponents and the media.  When Pete Buttigieg says we should invest more in affordable housing, no one pushes back on exactly what that means.  But when Warren releases a comprehensive plan to pay for Medicare for All, she is eviscerated.  Her plans should be critiqued, but they should also come with the acknowledgement that she has put in the work and is way more open with the American people than the other candidates.  The media and voters need to start making candidates pay a price for not articulating actual plans for their policy goals.  

Warren is fucking smart and driven.  She has the brain and energy to do the job.  She’s not a crackpot; she’s an advocate for the little guy.  Honestly, there isn’t much to criticize Warren on outside of how she will pay for her policy proposals.  But the media will attack what little they have while giving Trump and the more moderate Democrats a pass.  When Trump or Biden talk about strengthening the military, no one will ask what that means and how much it will cost.  But when Warren comes up with a tax plan to pay for free childcare, every single pundit will pounce the second some study comes out that her funding is off by a few million.

Of course, the dumbest part is the idea Warren needs to fully fund any proposal.  Right now, the economy has been doing great for about five years.  And in that whole time, we’ve been running huge deficits.  Maybe government spending without offsets isn’t such a big deal. Warren can’t say that because the media won’t allow her to.  It would be great if Warren could just say “things are going great now despite a trillion-dollar deficit, so why not get free healthcare for a $2 trillion-dollar deficit?”

That’s what I love most about Warren.  The lines of attack against her are so shitty.  Bernie has legitimate concerns that the Republicans will easily exploit. The best they can do with Warren is attack her policies, which are broadly popular.  And with Warren, you get a bunch of different contingencies that will come out for her.  You have women and those who want to see our first female president.  You get progressives excited about finally having a candidate who advocates for them with a fighting chance.  And because she is being so careful not to raise middle class taxes, I think you get a lot of the suburban vote.

I think Warren can win this thing.  She articulates the message well, she lacks genuine baggage and when compared to Trump, she comes off even better.  

So who is my final pick? I’m going with Elizabeth Warren. Not only does she hold most of the same policy positions as Sanders, but she also is fundamentally opposed to the corporate interests that got us to this point.  And I think she can better cajole moderate Democrats to support her agenda.  Finally, I think she comes with less baggage.

What I would love to see, based on the polling, is for Warren to either win or come in second by a close margin to Biden or Buttigieg.  Sanders would drastically underperform, at which point if New Hampshire was also going poorly, he could drop out and swing all his support to Warren.  That would make her the clear front runner. Let’s see what happens.

  Elizabeth Warren

#elizabeth warren #bernie sanders #joe biden

[anjumkhanna]

Anjum Khanna- Top 8 Best Places to Visit India

I’m Anjum Khanna and sharing with you the most famous places of india. India is a full-size and numerous vacation spot. Bordered by way of Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar, not to mention the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, there are many unique aspects to this country.More than 20 legit languages, more than one religion and a spread of cuisines exist inside India’s borders. To truly experience the breadth of Indian culture and history, tour is prime. Head to as many of these satisfactory places to go to India as your itinerary lets in.India, a land of many diverse cultures and languages and is full of many surprises. It has many tourist places to visit in India that are worth your time. Here’s a list we have created to help you decide the 10 best places to visit in India!

1. Srinagar

In the event that there was paradise on Earth, it would unquestionably be here. Packed with rich regular excellence, plantations, houseboats, ethereal lakes and a huge amount of insane things that you ought to do before you pass on, Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir is the occasion objective for you. From the snow-secured tops to the Mughal nurseries and lakes, this Venice of the East will blow your mind.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Srinagar:

In the event that you are arranging an outing with your family, the best time will be among March and October. What’s more, on the off chance that you are searching for experience and need to encounter the snowfall, December and January are the months for you.

Activities in Srinagar:

Housetop visit through Srinagar (and other city visits)

Appreciate a Shikara ride on the Dal Lake (for as modest as 400 bucks!)

Investigate the legacy by circumventing the galleries and workmanship focuses.

Appreciate Camping by the Sindh riverside

Water boating (and different games) in Sonmarg

2.Varanasi

Varanasi is one of the world’s most established living urban areas. Situated in North India on the banks of the River Ganges, Varanasi has been a significant focus of learning for a long time just as a central journey objective for some Hindus. Varanasi is viewed as a sacrosanct city among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists since it is accepted that withering here delivers an individual’s spirit from the pattern of rebirth, and that washing in the River Ganges purges one’s wrongdoings.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Varanasi:

Varanasi offers sights and encounters obscure anyplace else on the planet. It is nicknamed the “City of Temples” on account of its huge number of sanctuaries. The absolute most critical are the Kashi Vishwanath Temple of Shiva, the Durga Temple and the Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple, which is known for lodging various monkeys.

Activities in Varanasi:

Visit Jantar Mantar

Visit Manikarnika Ghat

Visit Dashashwamedh Ghat

Eat Apple Pie in Vatika Cafe

Monalisa Cafe for its Iranian food

Visit Ramnagar Fort

Visit Sarnath

3.Leh-Ladakh

With a large group of the most astounding journeys in the whole world, Leh-Ladakh is really probably the best spot to visit in India before you kick the bucket. Take in and let its captivating cloisters, tranquil and total excellence and quiet mountain ranges carry harmony to you.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Leh-Ladakh:

The most favored opportunity to visit is among May and October since climate can get entirely harsh here in winter.

Activities in Leh Ladakh:

Boating from Choksati to Sangam

Traveling (Indus Valley, Snow panther, Nubra Valley, Stok Kangri)

Be an aspect of the Hemis celebration

Plunge into the serenity of Pangong Lake and the horde Buddhist Monasteries.

4.Delhi

In case you’re investing any energy in Northern India, you will more likely than not visit the capital city of Delhi. The colossal rambling objective is home to a few locales, and it is viewed as perhaps the most established city on the planet. One of the top sights in Delhi is the Red Fort, or Lal Qila, which was underlying the seventeenth century. The Red Fort is produced using sandstone, and you will have the option to stroll through its Lahore Gate, into the bazaar, through the gem castle and even into the previous home of the ruler. While in Delhi, you ought to likewise set aside a few minutes for the numerous galleries and strict structures that make up the city.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Delhi:

The best and ideal opportunity to visit Delhi is from October to March when the climate is at its best. During this period blossoms are at their sprouting best, the climate is pleasant and charming to encounter Incredible Delhi.

Activities in Delhi:

Gaping at the Qutab Minar

Find Inner Peace at Lotus Temple

Taj mahal

Go for a stroll to India Gate

Pay abeyance at the Akshardham sanctuary

5.Munnar, Kerala

Depicted as God’s own nation, Kerala is very mainstream among explorers. It will deliver you astounded with its vivid social experience and the lavish abundance of nature. On the off chance that you are searching for a spot to visit in india with family where you can kiss pressure farewell, here’s the spot for you.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Munnar:

To vibe in with the travelers, the pinnacle season is between September to March however on the off chance that you might want to encounter the rainstorm, June-August will be incredible.

Activities in Munnar:

Visiting tea ranches and plantations

Reviving Ayurvedic back rubs and spas

Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary

Social encounters at the Kathakali Center

Riding the backwaters and unblemished sea shore insight

Kolukkumalai Safari

6.Jaisalmer, Rajasthan

Set in the midst of the immense stretches of the Thar Desert, Jaisalmer brings to you a vibe like no place else. With the rich social legacy and loaded up with fabulous castles of imperial Rajput gharanas, the narratives from this spot will blow your mind.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Jaisalmer:

The best and ideal opportunity to be here would be among November and March.

Activities in Jaisalmer:

Parasailing

Camel safari; Barna desert visit

City Tour to Tanot and Longewal

Jeep safari

Outdoors

Investigating and touring around Sonar Quila

Be a piece of Jaisalmer Desert Festival

7.Mysore

In the southern tip of India, you’ll discover the city of Mysore. When the capital of the Wodeyar administration, Mysore is most popular for lodging the great Mysore Palace. The royal residence is the encapsulation of plushness, and a visit through the structure will uncover upscale contacts like cut rosewood entryways, roofs beautified in ivory and endless works of art on the dividers. In case you’re in Mysore, you won’t have any desire to miss the unbelievable Devaraja Market, an open air insight on Dhanwanthri Road where you can get some chai tea and afterward peruse slows down contribution produce or sandalwood carvings.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Jaisalmer:

Sightseers visit Rajasthan consistently however the best and ideal opportunity to visit Rajasthan is during winter, a long time of November to February, when the temperature isn’t excessively high. During December and January, there can be a serious variety in temperatures during the day and the night.

Activities in Jaisalmer:

Jaisalmer Fort

Jain Temple

Bada Bagh

Gadi Sagar Lake

Housetop Cafe

8.Lakshadweep

How does an escape to a gathering of 36 islands with the most quieting feel actually solid to you? Sandy sea shores, coral reefs, kelp, and all-things-ocean, Lakshadweep is a treat for any individual who needs a separate to simply lie in the sun and laze around. The newness and abundance of nature enhanced by stunning hotels guarantees an extravagance excursion.

Best an ideal opportunity to visit Lakshadweep:

Lakshadweep has the most wonderful climate around the time of October to March as the ocean is more settled at that point.

Activities in Lakshadweep:

Journeying with companions at Tadiandamol journey, Chelavara, Nishani Mote journey, Karkette journey, Chomakunda journey

Jeep safari to Mandalpatti, Mallali cascades and Kabbe slopes

Fishing at Minicoy Island

Appreciate sentimental night at Kavaratti Islands

Visit wonderful Virgin Beaches

Shopping at Amindivi Island

Remote ocean fishing and scuba jumping

Go for yacht trip

Appreciate drifting in speed pontoons, sail vessels, kayak and kayaks and the sky’s the limit from there

#anjum khanna #top 8 best places to visit india

[templarhalo]

Templarhalo reviews Birds of Prey. (It’s pretty fantabulous)

HERE BE SPOILERS YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Ok without this movie, I would have not been a Cassandra Cain fan.  I would have not four, yes four ongoing fics with her as the main character.  I would not be emotionally and financially invested in the DC cinematic universe or the comics side of things. 

Which baffles me because this movie is perfect in almost every aspect,...   Except how they treated Cassandra Cain.   Which  is a fucking shame because her actress is perfect, her chemistry and relationship with Harley is perfect, and the idea of Cass growing up as this pickpocket foster kid, taken in by Harley is unconventional, but I fucking love it. 

Here’s a brief summary. After breaking up with the Joker  Harley Quinn has to make her own way as the strong, badass, indepent woman we all know she is, while dealing with the fact that without Mistah J’s  fell reputation as his significant other to shield her, a lot of people want her raped, tortured, killed and left for the crows…  Not necessarily in that order.    

To get these people off her back and save her own skin, from one of them, the infamous Black Mask. Harley agrees to recover the Bertinelli Diamond, a diamond encoded with the info for a source of 30 million dollars, Black Mask needs to fiance his take over of Gotham. Which was pickpocketed from one of his associates by our Lady and savior Cass.   

The problem is, Cass kind of ate it( (I shit you not) and Black Mask’s guys would rather cut it out of her than wait for the poor kid to take a dump   Not to mention Detective tReene Montoya (played by her Gotham Actress, which would have been a nice bit of world building if Gotham was actually in the movie continuity) building a case against Black Mask, with the aid of Black Canary   Plus Huntress is indirectly gunning for him and Harley in her own quest for revenge.   All these plot points converge into  a very satisfying climax and fight scene with a somewhat  emotionally satisfying ending. 

From  a technical standpoint this film is a spectacle.   Gotham in the day is colorful but rundown, with markets, suave evil bad guy clubs, dilapidated Chinese restaurants and abandoned amusement parks.   The fight scenes are AMAZING  with a wonderful tension and energy that makes them incredibly visualising satisfying.  Everything flows, the ladies move with an enthralling  grace that makes them breaking bones, crushing legs,and tearing through people visceral and heartstopping.  (And arousing. Like goddamn Jurnee Smollett-Bell could kill me with her legs and I’d thank her)

The problem, is none of this applies to  Cass, and this is the films major flaw besides how short it is. (One hour and forty five minutes).  If you had problems with how Harley was handled in Suicide Squad, the movie fixes it.  Black Canary gets a short but satisfying emotional arc that feels natural. She goes from a cynical, lethargic woman, content to be Black Masks “Little Bird”; A singer at his club, driver and symbol of his power/dominance over other women until her own conscience kicks in at Harley and Cass’ predicament.  Huntress also has a short but satisfying arc in which she gets her vengeance on the people who murdered her family and clearly finds a new one to fill the hole in her life, in the form of the Birds.  Reene and her portrayal is a love letter to the 80s cop/hard boiled detectives, a pure, simultaneously complicated/uncomplicated woman seeking to do good for Gotham.       

But Cass… Doesn’t feel like Cass and is criminally underutilized except as a walking mcguffin by dint of eating the Mcguffin.   She’s introduced to us a snarky tween, stuck in a cycle of shitty foster homes and a pickpocket to get by.  And that’s it.  T

here are moments where you think she'll get a cool fight scene.  Moments where you think she’ll have an emotional heart to heart with Harley,   moments where you think…she’ll do something besides run from the bad guys and get saved by the Birds of Prey/Her four moms. 

 In the end she drives into the sunset with Harley and Bruce the Hyena, but it doesn’t feel earned, satisfying as the scene is.  There is nothing implying or hinting she’s the daughter of two of the deadliest assassins in the DC universe, nothing about her running away from David Cain, nothing on her learning disabilities/selective mutism  and NOTHING, setting her up to be adopted by Batman and become Batgirl 

And this is a fucking shame, because Ella Jay Basco has a real chemistry with Margert and the rest of the cast.  She’s adorable, funny, snarky and wonderful as Cass. She brings energy and spunk and I would cut off my left hand, to see her act as Cassandra Cain, not this  generic punk kid with the name.

And I feel like this is  a HUGE problem because the movie sets up this Mother/daughter relationship, with Cass being Harley’s motivation to be a better person.  She goes from willing to hand her over to Black Mask to taking the kid under her wing.   Cass is the glue that bands the Birds of Prey together.   These lovely, dangerous, women coming together to keep a little girl safe,  doesn’t feel as emotionally satisfying as it should because Cass isn’t Cass.

While I will praise the movie for Harley’s arc of seeking her own emancipation and agency outside her abusive relationships and life of crime,  I feel like Harley’s arc should have been a question of redemption.    Cassandra’s motivation to become Batgirl was her refusal to kill again.  (Hey WB remember how in Batman Begins Bruce refused to kill a man because “I will not be an executioner.”)  

Here Cass is fine with killing. She chucks a bomb at some goons chasing her and  she kills Black Mask with a grenade in the end.

Yeah… Cass “I refuse to kill because my dad made me kill an innocent man at eight years old and killing is wrong” kills people.  

*head meet desk*

Sucide Squad, set up Harley and the squad, for an unconventional redemption arc, spite motivated it may be, yet Harley despite her line to Cass “You make me want to  be a less terrible person”  isn’t seeking to make amends for what she did as the Joker’s henchman.  (Like being an accomplice to Jason Todd’s murder).   

.Cass pickpots and steals to survive, because she’s a kid with no family passed from foster home to foster home, Harley steals because she can, steal a truck to blow up a chemical plant because she can.  Kills because she can.   (granted she does use an M79 grenade launcher with bean bag shells for one scene but besides that.) 

I like the idea of Harley taking Cass under her wing, its an unconventional but fresh idea, but it doesn’t feel entirely satisfying, and Cass not being Cass, not having an arc beyond “Go along with Harley as her apprentice” really undermines the excellent themes and message the movie is trying to convey.

Now maybe in the Suicide Squad reboot with James Gunn or a future DC film , Cass is going to leave Harley because that life of crime and killing doesn’t suit her and she realizes she’s trying to be something she’s not and I’m just being overly critical, but I still feel like “Harley and Cass seeking redemption and moving past their abusers together”  should have been where this movie left off, and it baffles me that it doesn’t from a narrative perspective.

Anway the overall themes and message of Birds of Prey are represented in Evan Mcregor’s Black Mask, a walking talking example of repressive toxic masculinity and misogyny.   A flamboyant, all but stated to  be a repressed Bi, crime lord seeking to take control of Gotham, Black Mask moves with confidence in his loud suits, and charming quirkiness,   He’s cruel, sadistic and repulsive  His mannerisms ooz terror,and insanity. He moves like a love child between Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix’s take on the Joker, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and Joffery Baratheon from Game of Thrones.   He’s a control freak, trying to  be a badass. 

 One minute he’s the Godfather, the next he’s a brat.  He views Harley as nothing without the Joker, telling her that she needs him to protect her.   He enjoys asserting his dominance over Harley during her brief capture by having his men beat her while he eats popcorn.  He objectifies Black Canary for her singing voice and beauty..   

Black Mask asserts his power and authority over the underworld by  his control over women.  In one  frightening scene, he believes one of the women at his club is laughing at him for his failure to capture Cass, so he orders her  to stand on a table, then for her boyfriend to rip open her dress with a knife because he finds it ugly.

In summary he represents the patriarchy.  He represents sexist, abusive men.   He’s a representation of social norms and ideals that are repressive and disgusting, and rob women of their agency, and self-worth. He represents the use of violence, not for noble reasons, but as a means to control women and lash out at those that defy him and supposedly wronged him .

Furthering this line of thought are  the costumes. Black Canary’s costumes represent the amount of control, Black Mask has in her life.  When we first see her, Dinah is wearing a long black netted evening gown that accents her legs as she sings “It’s a Man’s Man’s World”. Later she wears  a blue tank top and gold, tightfitting pants clearly meant to draw our gaze to her ass and thighs. When she’s Black Mask’s driver, she’s wearing a Bra/crop top that bares her midriff under a short blue blaze, but when she decides she’s going to defy him, she wears a yellow tank top and jeans with  a gold belt.

Harley’s costumes are as eclectic as she is, with her DIY caution tape shawl, stamped tops and cut up shorts.  Huntress’s outfits are all black leather and punkish athletic wear, utilitarian and elegant in their simplicity while Reene wears  a  “I shave my balls for this” t-shirt reflecting her uncouth, blunt demeanor, as well as button down  dress shirts and slacks for the climactic asskicking montage .  

Cass is a kid,who clearly doesn’t have the funds for super nice clothes. She;s running around in ratty shorts and a worn out hoody with  a red windbreaker, with an orange bandanna askew on her head.  At the end, when she rides off with Harley, she copying Harley’s style.

Speaking of costumes, one thing I appreciate is that instead of the male gaze and sexualisation, we get what I like to call “passive fan service”  What I mean is that instead of tracking shots on Harley’s ass or boob shoots, like in Suicide Squad  the camera just lets these women’s beauty do the talking. 

 Huntress is wearing a sports bra and tactical pants for the climax, but the camera doesn’t linger on her boobs.  A primary example of this is a lot of Padme’s scenes in Episodes II and III of Star Wars.  Lucas knows Natalie Portman is a gorgeous woman and he doesn’t need to remind us by deliberate camera shots.  He lets Natalie herself and Trisha Biggar’s excellent costumes do it for us. 

Also one thing I really… really liked was how in the big penultimate fight, Harley actually passes Dinah a hair tie so she can get her hair out of the way. So for like a minute, she’s beating the ever loving fuck out of goons with her legs as she ties up her hair.  A very nice case of reality ensures.

In conclusion Birds of Prey is another notch in the belt for the DC cinematic universe, a solid, fun film with  an excellent cast with clear chemistry, hampered by character derailment that undermines its sorely needed themes and message it's trying to convey.   The plot is  fast paced, but doesn't feel rushed even though it’s only a little over an hour long.  It’s uncompromisingly  bold, bloody and hilarious. The lack of a proper post credits scene is somewhat annoying and I'm very disappointed how Cass was handled , but this is by no means a terrible film. 

Overall I give it a 8.9 out of 10.  Highly recommend you go see it. Drag your friends, smuggle in as much candy and drinks as you can.  Buy it when it comes out on DVD.   If you’re a Cass fan, reread the Puckett run or pick up her new graphic novel Shadow of the Batgirl to wash out the bittersweet taste this will give you.  Speaking of Kelley Puckett, he was actually listed in the “Special thanks to…”  in the credits, which i’m sure many will appreciate.

These following posts and thoughts on the film I recommend.

https://dcwomenofcolor.tumblr.com/post/190693985900/how-would-you-fix-bop-cass

https://wits-writing.tumblr.com/post/190718974642/birds-of-prey-movie-review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YeFJjoQoec

#birds of prey #cassandra cain #templarhalo rambles #Templarhalo reviews books

[creativity-is-rebellion]

My Love of the Southern Gothic Horror Genre

I’ve always been drawn to the Southern Gothic Horror Genre, with anything from Flannery O’Connor’s Short Stories, to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, and Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat Series. It’s a genre I want to dabble with for my next story idea, but am concerned that I won’t nail it right, as I am not from the South, let alone from the U.S. For those of you who do not know, Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of Gothic fiction in American literature that takes place in the American South, and includes deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime or violence. Southern Gothic writing is thus an extension of Gothic fiction, which originated in England in the 18th Century, and includes novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1794), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). These novels all contained elements of horror, death and romance, often revolving around events that appear to be supernatural, but which ultimately have a natural explanation. Furthermore, the word ‘gothic’ can be taken as an historical reference to the Goths, the people responsible for the first known example of Germanic language during the 4th to the 6th Centuries AD. It denotes the Dark Ages, and the brutality, horror, and decadence associated with this period. It also refers to Medieval architecture; location is very much a character in itself in these novels, which often take place in castles, manors, and monasteries. 

The popularity of Gothic fiction could also be seen across Europe: Germany’s Schauerroman (shudder novels) were much darker than their English counterparts, and stories such as Carl Friedrich Kahlert’s (writing as Ludwig Flammenberg) The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) and Carl Grosse’s Der Genius (1796) contained a greater focus on necromancy and secret societies. European Gothic fiction was used by authors to delve deeply into their history, allowing its audience to experience the thrilling terrors of the dark past, which was naturally echoed in the American Southern Gothic tradition.

Elements of a Gothic treatment of the South were apparent as early as the 19th Century, in the grotesques of Henry Clay Lewis and the de-idealised visions of Mark Twain. However, the genre came together only in the 20th Century, when dark romanticism, Southern humour, and the new literary naturalism merged into a new and powerful form of social critique. The thematic material was the result of the culture existing in the South following the collapse of the Confederacy, which left a vacuum in both values and religion that became filled with poverty due to defeat in the Civil war and reconstruction, racism, excessive violence, and the theological divide that separated the country over the issue of slavery.

The Southern Gothic style employs macabre, ironic events to examine the values of the American South, thus, it uses the Gothic tools not just for the sake of suspense, but also to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South, with the Gothic elements often taking place in a magic realist context rather than a strictly fantastical one.

Warped rural communities replaced the sinister plantations of an earlier age, and in the works of leading figures such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, the representation of the South blossomed into an absurdist critique of modernity as a whole.There are many characteristics in Southern Gothic Literature that relate back to its parent genre of American Gothic and even to European Gothic. However, the setting of these works is distinctly Southern. Some of these characteristics are exploring madness, decay and despair, continuing pressures of the past upon the present, particularly with the lost ideals of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy and continued racial hostilities.

Southern Gothic particularly focuses on the South's history of slavery, racism, fear of the outside world, violence, a "fixation with the grotesque, and a tension between realistic and supernatural elements".Similar to the elements of the Gothic castle, Southern Gothic gives us the decay of the plantation in the post-Civil War South. Villains who disguise themselves as innocents or victims are often found in Southern Gothic Literature, especially stories by Flannery O'Connor, such as Good Country People and The Life You Save May Be Your Own, giving us a blurred line between victim and villain. Southern Gothic literature set out to expose the myth of old antebellum South, and its narrative of an idyllic past hidden by social, familial, and racial denials and suppressions

The term "Southern Gothic" was originally used as pejorative and dismissive.  Ellen Glasgow used the term in this way when she referred to the writings of Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner. She included the authors in what she called the "Southern Gothic School" in 1935, stating that their work was filled with "aimless violence" and "fantastic nightmares." This is a sentiment that has been expressed less and less, as it’s seminal authors, such as Flannery O’Connor, become lauded as being some of the most important icons in American literary history.

Of course, the genre also exists in film and television, with movies such as The Gift, and TV series like American Gothic and Season One of True Detective, the latter being one of the greatest TV shows of the last 10 years. The first series of True Detective, in addition to its Southern Gothic setting and characters, incorporates many of the core aspects of Gothic fiction, as well as drawing on the work of specific American horror authors, notably Lovecraft, Chambers and Ambrose Bierce. The setting is truly breathtaking and depressing in it’s dilapidation, and it’s clearly poverty-laden surroundings, as well as it’s troubled but fascinating key characters. Every time I watch the series, I imagine what it might have looked like if it was in the form of a written novel instead of a television series.

But I digress. As much as I love this genre, my personal experience of the American South is restricted to visiting Florida on holiday for three weeks when I was 10, so I think that I might steer clear of writing the next great American Gothic horror novel for the moment. Instead, I might focus on a writing project centring around European Gothic horror, as I lived in Norway for 6-and-a-half years. Norway, with its bitterly cold autumns and winters, and sweeping fjords and mountains creating great chasms between communities seems like an ideal setting for writing a good Gothic novel. I am even privy to the fact that Norway is home to an infamous, long-since abandoned mental asylum, which housed the criminally insane and where lobotomies and mysterious, unsolved deaths involving patients were commonplace. So, this will be the setting for my next novel, and my American-style Gothic horror story will have to wait. Stay tuned.

#novel writing #bayou stories #american gothic #european gothic #just write #gothic age #norway #livinginnorway #living in europe #leir #history lesson #history of the south #origins #novel ideas #flannery o'connor #william faulkner #mary shelley #the gift #true detective #carson mccullers #ludwig flammenberg #carl grosse #the necromancer #the castle of otranto #frankenstein #shudder novels #the dark ages #the dark ages history #goths #anne rice

[script-a-world]

Any tips on creating a planet that is 100% ocean. Yes, there are lots of rocks and mountains but none break the surface. The planet has a moon too. I've got to think of atmosphere, storms, earthquakes, gravity, tides, flora and fauna, etc...

Saphira:  

Step 1. Trim the Fat. 

Think about your project. If its a novel, think about your plot line and characters. If its a game, think about your End Goal and mechanics. The places you want to work on first are where the experience meets the world. What characters are important (where would you want them to be?) Start there. If you start with "oh god how does the moon affect tides") then you're going to be halfway through a box of Oreos and a gallon of Kool-aid before the hour's done. Don't do it to yourself.

Step 2. Envision the Ideal

Chances are that when you chose this environment, you had an idea in mind. It might have been the mental image of a coral reef, or the love of Disney Mermaids, or how unfathomably insane sea creatures can be. Go back to that. What about it got your attention? What about it got your imagination going? "I want to live in that much colour." "I could have done a better job than Disney in representing Ariel's life." "I love the horror of Earthly Sea Aliens." Write it down. Pin it up. Put that in the center of your world building graphs. That's the heart. Tether everything to that.

Step 3. Research 

Start from your Chart Heart. Take that Step 2 concept and start your research there. Research what Disney studied to make their world, or how coral reef biomes work, or the “Top Ten WTF is That Sea Animals”. Whatever it is. Then let the research web flow. You'll find something interesting. Read about that too. If you're getting something really exciting, see if you can find another reliable source for it. Write down your web of research around your Chart Heart. Jot down exciting details. Be careful. You can get utterly lost in this phase. Remember to come up for air, food, water and socialization.

Step 4. Connect the Dots

Your notes on your research will paint a picture. It will paint an idea. The notes, the chart you've made, will start to take on life and character. Put the research down and take a good look at your notes. If they're good inspiration points, they will start to tell you what your world is. You may start to see ecosystems. You may start to see mythology. You may see challenges for your characters to come across. Important: once you have started to get into the groove of your notes, bring back up your Project Plan from Step 1. Your narrative and your world need to work as one. As you go over the notes, go over your plot. Jot down or highlight points where the world and the plot REALLY GO TOGETHER. Celebrate those points!!

Step 5. Do it again 

Yup! It's a cycle. Take your winning points of your world that really resonate with your plot. Make those the hearts of your new charts. Start research again. Make notes again. Connect the dots again. The point of world building is to provide a more living experience. Do not let the mechanics of your world building get in the way of your audience's experience. Also, have fun with it.

Tex: I'm gonna make a lot of assumptions here that you might think are superfluous, but they're important to narrowing down topics to what I think you're presuming.

When you say "100% ocean", you mean something along the lines of "surface covered with liquid water", yes? This is a surprisingly rare phenomenon in astronomy - Earth is the only planet that we know of to contain not only water on its surface, but liquid water that is stable and in significantly large quantities.

There are several celestial bodies that are very close to these parameters: Europa has a water-ice crust; Enceladus is covered by more solid ice than Europa; Ganymede  is a mixture of water ice and silicate rock; Callisto has a surface composed of "water ice, carbon dioxide, silicates, and organic compounds". While their surfaces technically contain water, it's in a solid or mostly-solid form that's inaccessible for use to most life forms.

There are two main theories of how water comes to be on a celestial body, extraplanetary and internal. Extraplanetary sources rely on "Comets, trans-Neptunian objects, or water-rich meteoroids (protoplanets)" (Wikipedia), which impart only so much water due to factors such as the body's gravity and water-containing or water-inducing objects on a collision path with the body. It's not a particularly common method for producing water on a body's surface, unfortunately, and makes up a non-majority percent of surface water.

Internal water is both a more popular idea and a more common occurence. A liquid water ocean beneath the crust is possible, as in the cases of Dione, Pluto, Triton, and Ceres.

Frozen water, as in the case of ice, could be either purely water, or water and silicates (see: hydrate minerals ). It's possible that radioactive decay could have pushed subsurface water up, where it could have melted into liquid water and formed bodies of water such as oceans - this is especially possible if ammonia is present (Wikipedia). The heating of aluminum-26 could provide enough heat, also to force water to the surface (Phys.org), which brings up the important point that there needs to be enough heat for the water to remain a liquid.

For a body that contains water ice and is composed of primarily silicates, the contact of water with silicates will provide the hydrothermal and chemical energy to not only turn the ice into liquid water but also to maintain a temperature necessary to stabilize bodies of water as liquid. Radioactive decay as mentioned previously, tidal heating, and cryovolcanic activity all participate in the introduction and maintenance of surface water.

It is, admittedly, more difficult to find liquid water on the surface of an extrasolar planet, mostly because the "free" heat of the closest star is an easy way to defrost a celestial body. It's possible, but that would mean a greater reliance upon the internal heating and radioactive decay of the body itself, something that doesn't always pan out.

To elaborate on the idea of geological features of your planet, mountains  are a function of tectonic activity and/or volcanic activity, and an indication of how active the core is of your planet. The higher the mountains, generally, the more active. Rocks are formed from pressure, magma, or a combination of both (Wikipedia), wherein mountains are usually metamorphic (Wikipedia). If you decide upon how your planet's surface water came to be, it'll feed into how your landmasses are created, as well as how high they'll generally be. I do recommend reading up on geomorphology, too.

Further Reading

Extraterrestrial liquid water - Wikipedia

Ocean planet - Wikipedia 

Origin of water on Earth - Wikipedia 

Hydrology - Wikipedia 

Water - Wikipedia 

Nebular hypothesis - Wikipedia

Ocean Currents and Their Role in the Biosphere  by A.Ganopolski (chapter preview)

Insights into global diatom distribution and diversity in the world’s ocean  by Shruti Malviya et al. (PDF)

Grazers and Phytoplankton Growth in the Oceans: an Experimental and Evolutionary Perspective  by Simona Ratti et al. (PDF)

Life (Cells) - Wikipedia

Biota by sea or ocean - Wikipedia 

Marine Biota Exchange — The Biologic Pump - EARTH 103: Earth in the Future, Penn State University

Synth: Okay, yes, you do need to think about all of that eventually, but it doesn’t all have to be at once. Some things will follow logically after others.

Tides do affect ocean currents to an extent, but so far I haven’t found anything that gets into how they might affect the flow of deeper currents, instead of just the shallower areas. Tidal effects are most noticeable along shorelines, so if all of your “land” is very deep under the water, you might be able to get away with not dealing with this at all.

Being in the water is the closest we can come to a microgravity environment without leaving the ground, so, again, you can probably get away with filing gravity under "I'll deal with this later". (Did you know that gravity isn't uniform across the planet? You'd think it would be the same all over, but no. There are high spikes and weaker spots and all kinds of variations. It's wild.)

Undersea earthquakes and volcanoes could definitely cause problems for your marine inhabitants, although earthquake-spawned tsunamis tend to ruin the day for land-dwelling organisms way more than they do for ocean-based critters.

Yeah, you will need to figure out atmosphere, but at this point just having one is the important bit. Prevailing wind direction plays a large part in the flow of surface currents, but the composition of said atmosphere can take a back seat for the time being.

Get your planet and decide which direction it rotates. Looking at maps of prevailing winds  and ocean surface currents shows how the Coriolis effect from the planet’s rotation comes into play, affecting the direction of both the air and water currents: they travel predominately clockwise in one hemisphere, and counterclockwise in the other. 

Then it’s on to topography.

Tex had a bunch of suggestions to look into for planning your world's geologic formations. Lay out your geography, your valleys and mountains, shallows and trenches just as if it was above sea level. The “normal” rules for placing settlements on land (waterfront real estate is The Shit), kind of goes out the window for a completely submarine world, but it isn’t time to think about building cities yet anyway.

So you’ve got your landscape. Now submerge it. Decide just how far under the surface your highest points will be.

The nice thing about water and air is that they're both fluids, and they behave similarly when they encounter obstacles like, say, massive mountain ridges. If air wasn't transparent we would be able to see how it eddies and flows around objects the same way water does. Well, to an extent we can sometimes see it, when it picks up bits of detritus and blows it around. Wind tunnels pump in streams of smoke to make the airflow visible.

https://www.ventusky.com/ and https://www.windy.com/ are great for visualizing air currents. Not quite so good for water currents, but the "Waves" tab does provide a little bit of info to build off of. It's fascinating to see how wind at 10 metres above ground mostly follows the lay of the land, while wind at 1000 metres easily flows into low-lying areas, but does a hard stop at the Rockies and the Andes (and a few other places), and winds at 30000 just don't care about paltry geographic barriers like mountain ranges. The ocean currents on your planet will, to an extent, behave similarly in how they interact with the landscape, e.g. being deflected by very tall mountain ridges.

Airflow is the predominant driving force for the surface currents, but what about everything below that? Terminology to research deeper here are thermohaline circulation and hydrothermal circulation. Hydrothermal circulation is most apparent around the ocean floor near volcanic activity and deep-ocean hydrothermal vents (“black smokers”) and occurs due to temperature differences. Thermohaline drives pretty much everything else, and occurs due to changes in temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline). The motion of these major currents is vital to the submarine ecosystem, since it’s the main way nutrients and heat energy are transported (fun – and maybe slightly gross – fact: the abyssal depths of the ocean are subject to a constant “snow” of dead things and assorted other organic detritus sinking down from the higher levels. It’s an important food source down there).

Knowing how the oceans move on your planet will help with placing settlements, if your planet’s inhabitants have gotten to that point. On land cities often start near water sources, but obviously. when you already are underwater, that will change. Food sources and shelter (from predators, from too-strong currents) are still points that need to be considered. Who settles in the shallows, where the water is warm and sunlight allows for photosynthesis? What about deeper down, where several currents meet to create a good place for eating? Maybe it’s all chemosynthesis near deep-ocean fumaroles instead?

For flora and fauna, ooh lordy you have, like, so many options. So. Many. For inspiration just look at all the wild and wacky and downright creepy stuff that lives right here on our planet, especially the deeper regions. Some of it you’d swear was 100% alien in origin, but nope, born and bred right here on good ol’ Earth, where it seems like the deeper you go, the weirder the living things become. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_oceanography has more ocean phenomena and terminology (scroll all the way to the bottom to find it organized by category), to get familiar with and research.

#pylons #water #ocean #flora #fauna #alternate world #Anonymous

[saiyanhajime]

DBS: Broly - Review

I was excited to see “Dragon Ball Super: Broly”, obviously… It’s Dragon Ball! But I wasn’t expecting to be as blown away by it as I have been, to fall in love with it. For me, Dragon Ball has always been more about the fandom than the official media. When I first formed a love for the franchise, it was elusive and unattainable, so I had to get my kicks elsewhere.

I think DBS Broly might be my favourite piece of DB media, ever. It’s everything I ever wanted and everything I didn’t realise I needed from this franchise. I haven’t loved a piece of media like this in a long, loooong time.

Worth noting that, at the time of writing, I have only seen the English dub. I’ll wait for home release to see the subtitled Japanese audio version as I struggle to keep up with text and visuals at the same time!

The Cinema Experience

My first viewing was a small, packed screen on opening night here in the UK. The audience seemed to be mostly around 25-30 year olds, almost entirely fellow guys (my friend was one of maybe 5 women - seriously, where are you all??). But the ethnic diversity of Dragon Ball’s audience is something most movies could only dream of attracting. It was a great time, with people audibly laughing out loud and clapping at the end. The movie is genuinely so brilliantly funny, a surprise in itself.

My second viewing, the following night, alone, was a larger screening. Roughly the same audience demographics, but this time, the audience erupted into cheering with each transformation… It was so fucking incredible to be a part of. I was grinning the entire time. It’s hard to overstate just how important the social aspect of enjoying this movie in the cinema was.

It’s incredible to finally be living Dragon Ball “up to date” like this and the excitement shows.

Spoilers incoming...

Story Isn’t King

That's coming from someone who has always wished for more depth to DB, but what I've realised recently is that the level of storytelling the community plugs into this franchise is not something that belongs in the official media. We do it better, because we do it free of constraints the official releases require to be Dragon Ball, that it requires to be so widely popular. The official text is a framework, not a rulebook. I think one of the things that contributes to Dragon Ball’s insane popularity and ability to speak to so many people in so many cultures is how vague it can be. The snippets of depth are there for us to draw our own conclusions. DB doesn’t need canon absolutes in backstory.

Overall, I prefer the old “Bardock - The Father of Goku” telling of the prequel events that set up the Broly movie, though man it's been an age since I saw that. I wonder how much of my preference is just nostalgia? How much is knowing that Bardock: Father of Goku wasn’t “canon”, and so didn’t really matter? That is liberating. Now Dragon Ball Minus and DBS: Broly seem to demand that this is the way it actually happened with no room for headcanon and I feel a little turned off. There is plenty to like with this retelling. Gine is a delight, more of the saiyan homeworld is welcomed and just look at small details like Bardock actually moving his tail in this scene rather than it constantly being wrapped around their waists ready for combat. Ideally, I would like a perfect blend of the best elements from both tellings. And ya know what? That's the beauty of fandom... I can have that.

It is so obvious that huge chunks of story are missing here, yet it already drags for me a little... I’m not sure what the solution is, really. I’ve seen people suggesting it should have been two movies, but I’m not sure I agree.

Once the movie skips forward to present day, the storytelling revolving around the discovery of Broly, Paragus and their recruiting into the Freeza force is entertaining and I’m way more invested. So maybe it is just apathy for a prequel story retold a slightly different way…

But when the insane 30-40 minute non-stop action starts in the latter half, that’s when the movie comes into its own for me. This is Dragon Ball.

Overall, the narrative does something new for the series. It sets up, foreshadows and references back in a more conventional pattern than ever before. It feels, I dunno. It feels… Westernised? It feels, both narratively and in overall quality, more like a movie and not just a tacked on side-story. There’s no unnecessary inclusion of side characters irrelevant to the plot making cameos. Everyone is here for a reason.

Character Personalities

The characters behave like themselves again, and not just through exposition dumping monologues the series is famous for, but through visual storytelling! There is so much not said, so much told through the fight, through their expressions and movements.

From the moment Vegeta’s playful spar with Goku ends at Bulma’s vacation house, you get a very different Vegeta to the one we’ve seen through Super. His turn to listen to Goku and Whis's conversation is full of character. He's so on edge about something. And proceeds to tell us why with a humorous but genuinely livid jab at Goku for wishing Freeza back to life. Vegeta is worried. In the scene where Bulma is reviewing the CCTV footage of the Dragon Ball theft, Vegeta double takes and glares at Goku when it becomes obvious the thieves are Freeza’s men. They say nothing. It’s all character acting. It tells us so much.

Vegeta's anxiety continues on, affecting his fight with Broly… He barely has a chance to enjoy the fight at all. We get so little cocky Vegeta enjoying a battle and instead a very serious Vegeta who feels the need to to end this threat right now. What I take from all this is an example of quality character development - instead of Vegeta simply becoming more friendly, his personality that we all love is still there, but his morals have changed. His entertainment isn’t as important as protecting his family. And having witnessed Goku’ recklessly endanger their friends and families in throughout DB Super, Vegeta is not prepared to take any chances here, attempting to deliver a finishing blow very early on.

And Goku, who’s characterisation in Super felt so utterly insulting at times, is back on form here. His idiotic moments don’t feel so absurdly stupid that they’re unbelievable, but instead come across as cute and heartwarming. Moments like his talk with Broly mid fight, with Piccolo when he’s lying on the ground battered and bruised and when he’s simply watching Broly transform into a super saiyan for the first time convey Goku’s ability to be serious and regretful. It was so refreshing to see Goku back on form. The first half of his fight with Broly is incredible - going from excitement, to confidence that he could talk Broly round, to being put firmly in his place, on the ground. People who criticise the series for having no stakes fail to understand that the stakes are truly nestled in the characters personalities and their pride. The stakes are whether they will be able to overcome their flaws, both metaphorically through transformations, and literally.

Voice Acting (Dub)

Whilst on the subject of the characters, the voice acting is unbelievably good… Chris Ayres as Freeza steals the show, but the others are brilliant also.The line delivery is one thing, the ability to so brilliantly match that to the mouth flaps another, but the writing for a Western, English speaking audience is just superb. I cannot wait to see what differs in the original Japanese - I’ve heard that Freeza’s “Hello Monkeys!” line was a dub change from “Greetings!” for example, which in my opinion is so appropriate and elicits an uncomfortable, awkward laugh from the aforementioned ethnically diverse audience in the west in a such good way. Freeza as a tyrannical, racist, piece of shit, is an important character trait to a Western audience. The jokes that ride on line delivery alone are so numerous - one personal highlight for me is Whis’ ever-so-gay coded “Oh my…” when Gogeta bursts in. Took the words right out of my mouth, Whis. The voice acting is on a whole different level to anything before now from the American team. The scene I’ve already mentioned where Goku is contacted by Piccolo, Schemmel really sells the pain Goku’s in. And lets not forget Broly himself, played by Vic Mignogna, whose line delivery really conveys him as this Tarzan-like character in his sane scenes… But really shines in moments of mania when he’s flailing, yelling, crying as a cornered, manic, rabid ape who cannot control his emotions or immense strength. The scene where he’s just making noises at Goku, copying his fighting stance before he launches at him - wow. Even new side characters like Lemo have an outstanding quality to their voice acting that blows any previous English speaking Dragon Ball performance so far out of the water it’s insane.

Broly

Having a Dragon Ball story focus on so many characters who aren’t Goku is refreshing for a franchise that’s been so heavily criticised for being The Goku Show… For years we’ve wanted to see other characters step into the limelight. I still haven’t forgiven the last movie, Resurrection F, for stealing the win out from under Vegeta.

Vegeta still doesn’t get the long awaited limelight here… But this “new” saiyan, Broly, is something rather special. I wasn’t a fan of the original Broly. Loved the idea, but never liked the execution. His visual design I found personally off-putting, but more importantly it failed to convey his character very well. He looked so prestigious?  And the idea of being so affected by Goku crying as a baby next to him, that it sent him into uncontrollable rage whenever he heard the same “Kakarot” is so laughably stupid. I’m glad that’s not here.

The cool concept of the legendary super saiyan, though... I think most people dig that. Here that’s kind of gone too - but the idea of a freakishly strong saiyan from birth who is the embodiment of their animalistic heritage and rage-induced potential is beautifully executed. The great ape form, or rather Broly having found a way of accessing that power without transforming, is referenced more than once throughout the story. There’s this sense that the way Goku and Vegeta have learnt to control themselves has perhaps potentially hindered them. That maybe the ultra-instinct forms Whis has foreshadowed for so long is related, or could be used to tap into the natural potential of saiyans. Huh.

With a visually pleasing design to boot, Broly is absolutely awesome as the star in his own movie as a tragic menace. So much is done to sell this as Broly’s movie, from his sheer amount of screen time and characterisation in both his placid and manic states, to that awesome first person perspective part of his fight - incredible.

Animation and Aesthetics

You don’t need me to tell you this film looks gorgeous and I’ve already mentioned some scenes where the characters convey so much through movement alone. This looks like Dragon Ball never has. It feels nostalgic, but refreshing. It’s stylistically so unique and fluid and choreographed and magical. Impacts hit with such full-force conviction, the characters gracefully zooming around each other in dueling harmony, the electrifying ki beams piercing through the bleak environments with their vibrant colour and form. For once you really believe just how powerful and fast these superhumans are… Perhaps one of the reasons why the first half of the film is so much weaker for me is simply because there's less of this beautiful action. But the entire film is steeped in impressively bold and emotive colour pallets that sell the mood of each location so well.

But there’s a great big elephant in the room… The cgi.

It would seem I have a different opinion to most on this subject. I don’t mind the environmental cgi, but the character animation is jarring and I hate it. It is a blemish on an otherwise gorgeous piece of art. Now, I’m really funny about “bad” cgi. I also don’t know dick about animation. I just know when something looks really, really wrong. It’s as if the cgi characters have no squash and stretch applied that keeps them fluid. They’re stiff. There’s no elasticity, no umph. They move like someone just put strobe lights on. Their joints like that of action figures. I’ve seen so many people say it’s not bad or they even like these parts and I’m really glad it didn’t ruin it for most people, but my god does it ruin those scenes for me. Just look at the awkward mouth flaps and dead eyes, especially on Goky, in the Kamehameha/Galick Gun combo scene. Yuck.

Soundtrack

I love the score.

Before I saw the movie, I heard a lot of people talking about the chanting and how weird it was - but the second it started my first thought was how much it reminded me of Akira. And yeah, it’s kinda weird. And I love it. It hypes up this epic match and I don’t find it cheesy at all. I love it both in context and even when listened to in isolation.

The entire score is all over the place yet manages to feel whole as it attempts, and succeeds, to convey the atmosphere and emotion of each location, narrative beat and every swing of a fist or blast of ki. The only track I’m not keen on is the rendition of Chala Head Chala. I think it’s a pretty pants rendition of the song and is immensely distracting in an otherwise moving soundtrack. The movie totally needs a rendition of Head Chala right there, but not this rendition. I just don’t like it. The weird boingy sound is awful.

Final Thoughts

The success of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, especially in the west, is a joyful reminder what this 30 year old franchise means to so many people. Very few non-fans are going to have set foot in a cinema to see this movie, and yet the current total earnings at the time of writing on January 29th 2019 is $98,584,176 according to Box Office Mojo.

That is truly insane.

It feels like this movie was made especially for me and for that I am eternally grateful. Speaking to fellow fans and reading their reviews, it’s so clear that everyone has different things to love about this movie. There’s so much content here for every fan to find something they love. I cannot wait to get hold of a home release and I cannot wait to see what’s to come, ho-ly shit! What a time to be a Dragon Ball fan.

#dragon ball super broly #dbz broly #broly #dragon ball super #dragon ball #dragon ball z #dbz #dbs #dragon ball movie review #saiyanhajime

[loveinlilies]

Taking pictures in the teapot as a Yanfei main hits perfect with the lighting in this one <:)

#Man I'd love to talk abt genshin in depth more #the social narrative and its take on idealism?? insane #genshin impact #yanfei #lapin's loves

[bluewatsons]

Neil O’Connor, Anti-Hero - Life, Love and Death in Gainsbourg’s L’Homme à Tête de Chou (1976), Conference: Serge G. An International Conference on Serge Gainsbourg, Sorbonne University: Paris

Abstract

This paper explores Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 album L’Homme à Tête de Chou (1976). The concept album allowed Gainsbourg to explore, transverse and peruses the anti-hero. The albums musical imagery provides to us a collection of mini tome’s that revolves around madness, murder, sex, infidelity and ultimately, death. These themes are, and would become, central too much of Gainsbourg’s lyrical palate, but take a much sinister route on this album. The album took Gainsbourg on a deeply personal quest for expression - to the darker side of baroque pop music. This paper presents the background and setting for the album, followed by both a thematic and compositional analysis of the albums title track Flash Forward and Lunatic Asylum and ultimately examines the albums identity Gainsbourg’s use of tone and timbre to map the anti-heros adventures and mishaps in life, love and death.

I. Background - Rebellion & Modernity

Popular music is intimately embedded in mechanisms of power and ideology. In Noise, a political economy of music, Jacques Attali’s addresses, something that Adorno refuses to do, is to regard popular music vehicle for transforming society;

‘Music is a credible metaphor of the real. It is neither an autonomous activity nor an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure... Undoubtedly music is a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded and distorted. If we look at one mirror, we see only an image of another. But at times a complex mirror game yields a vision this is rich, because unexpected and prophetic’ [1].

This ‘metaphor of the real’ lies in poplar’s music reliance mass reproduction and the stockpiling of commodities. The construction of musical identity within musical expression can be perceived as a form of ritual in that, as Simon Frith points out in Performing Rites, ‘it describes one’s place in a dramatized pattern of relationships’ [1]. In France, like elsewhere, the locale where popular music’s difference is shaped has of course been intensely variable, ranging from the ‘imagined village of tradition, through seedy café and variety hall, the cabaret of nostalgia and regret, the political theatre of national and proletarian anthem, to transatlantic images of modernization and rebellion, in jazz and hip hop’ [2]. During the 1970s, popular music expression and ideology was shaped by the changing mainstreams in American musical styles. Funk, soul and electronic music, via disco, were now becoming part of the ever-changing mainstream. Youth culture during the 1970’s was rooted between the rural-urban split, the degree of educational qualification and the socio- professional status of individuals.

Two musical forms – the copains and two auteurs within the chanson tradition, shaped part of Gainsbourg’s identity: Léo Ferré and George Brassens. Johnny Hallyday created a new cultural form that imagined their social relationship based on camaraderie and equality. This identity failed and ignored to identity the divisions in French society. Ferré and Brassens were more successful. Both expressed resistance to the bourgeois, the Catholic Church and the French state. Ferré’s Les Rupins [The well-off] (1960), examines the empty values of consumerism and questions the French republics ideals, considering them as having lost of meaning. Ultimately, they laid the foundations for future musical anarchists, establishing non-conformity identities on margins of social and cultural fringes.

II. Thematic Analysis

Conceptually, Gainsbourg had already broken the mold with Historie de Melody Nelson in 1971. Gainsbourg created an album that’s focus was narration and that of the narrator, the musical contact seems merely as a supporting act at times. Popular music expression and identity politics are inherently linked, linked to the social and cultural trends of the time. Musicologist Phillip Tagg defines this as:

In this sense, a most effective way of comprehending identity is by disconnecting it from an essence and perceiving it as a dramatic effect rather than an authentic core [2].

The sculpture, The Man with the Cabbage Head, by Claude Lalanne, sat in the courtyard of Gainsbourg’s Parisian home. Gainsbourg’s obsession with the immoral anti-hero dances and exists, in some degree, within most of his discography. It’s only on L’Homme à Tête de Chou (1976) that this obsession truly comes to life. The tail, of Marilou, is of a girl the narrator falls in love with. The ensuing album goes on to describe their love affair and untimely, the death of Marilou, a death that leads to the narrators decline into madness. Not only are the lyrical and musical elements convey this macabre love story but also so does the cover itself. It portrays the darker elements hidden within the grooves. The opening title, of the albums name, begins with Gainsbourg stating that:

‘I am the man with the cabbage head, half vegetable, half guy’ [3].

The confession begins. The opening tracks lyrical theme is almost like a police statement report; how he fell for Marilou, that fateful day in Mac’s Men’s Hairdressers, where he first met the ‘bitch of a shampoo girl’. The narrator continues to open up an inner dialogue. He is at the ‘bottom of his depths’, lost everything to her, including his mind and his job – at ‘cabbage leaf’ – slang for either money (he was a banker) or a newspaperman. It points more so towards the printed matter, as a more reveling line comes as ‘where scandals equal beefsteak’, indicating that he was indeed, a tabloid man. This job allowed him to spend his money aimlessly, for the entertainment of this femme fatale – ‘I was finished, fucked, checked mate in the eyes of Marilou’ [4]. In the end, he is ‘stuck on a beach in Malibu’ or indeed, in the within the beaches of an approaching insanity.

Flash Forward sees the protagonist reach towards the beginnings of lunacy – he catches Marilou in sexual encounter with some rock musicians. The accompanying music allows this encounter to unfold, crashing and bashing about, following the narrator as he lurks towards his lovers misbehaving:

I move forward in the black-

Out and my kodak

Impresses onto the sensitive

Plaques of my brain the vision of a bordel

I feel my cardiac rate

Go briskly to mach

Two tic tac tic tac

Like from an electroshock

He sees this and wonders, is he paranoid? Surely not as he reminds himself that all that he does, all that he sees, will be stored in memory and will come back as flashbacks, until he croaks.

Lunatic Asylum, the albums epilogue, revolves around a trance like didgeridoo motif, like call to the wild, to the insane. In the previous song, Meurtre à l’extincteur, the act of murder had been committed – Marilou’s life ends, her head beaten in with a fire extinguisher, battered under white foam.

Here in the psychiatric ward, he wonders, ponders, on the ‘scrambled messages’:

The little Playboy rabbit gnaws my plant skull

Shoe shine boy

Oh Marilou little cabbage

That rolled me between his fingers like corporal

Sucked me like a kittty

The anti-hero is born; bewildered, deluded, a misfit. His head now truly turned to cabbage, punished and exiled in mental hell. Its sense of morality is cinematic or as Sylvie Simmons in Serge Gainsbourg – A Fistful Gitanes refers to the album as:

Menacing, atmospheric and marvellously mad, part Dostoevsky, part Kafka, part film noir, quite surreal [6].

The albums song cycles are masterfully put together. For the next section of the analysis, the same three songs are discussed, compositionally. Gone is the grandeur used in Historie de Melody Nelson, instead, its musical palate is a wide and varied as the lead characters state of mind. In such, the shifting styles of the album (rock, jazz, country and Caribbean) help define the wild variations of life itself.

III. Compositional Analysis

An intra-musical framework has been implemented in this case to decompose the compositional design and musical organization of L’Homme à Tête de Chou. This process has been referenced and adapted from Stan Hawkin’s Setting the Pop Score and involves examining the following:

Formal Properties: the sections within the song’s overall structure that supports the general progression;

Recording and Production Techniques: manifested in the mix, which is responsible for shaping the compositional design;

Textures and Timbre: colors and patterns that arise from vocal and instrumental gestures within the arrangement and finally;

Rhythmic Syntax: the recurring groupings and metric patterns that communicate ‘beat and groove’ [7]. –

Formal Properties

Formally, Gainsbourg decided that a selection of genres would sufficed toward the many states of mental conditions that our anti-hero goes through; ecstasy, bliss, ignorance, remorse. The song structures are somewhat uncoordinated, stemming from somewhat shorter pop song standard duration – the titles average at 2 minutes 30 (Opening Title) while others act as narrative interludes, barely achieving time to talk or discuss out their content as in Transit a Marilou. Meurtre a L’Marilou, the albums shortest title at 47 seconds, allows Marilou’s death not to linger on; it’s short, sweet, and abrupt. Variations sur Marilou is the album longest title and structurally, the most interesting, as a motif is repeated, built upon and only develops toward its crest seven minutes in. The album concludes with Lunatic Asylum, the most diverse and experimental composition, likes its theme, its formal structure is intense and confessional but in some ways progresses towards a sense of optimism.

Recording and Production Techniques

Shifting production styles are used to map the different scenarios the anti-hero finds himself within. Perhaps not as important as structural or thematic ideas contained with the album, the recording and production techniques utilized in any album can help define its ethereal nature and ambience, what lies beyond theme and aesthetical concept. Recorded at Mercury Studios in London and Paris, English rock themes are played out of the last time, but the production sees Serge for the first time, a reggae song. The production sees an extensive use of synthesizers for the first time. Alan Hawkshaw and Serge carried out arrangements. Hawkshaw had previously worked for KPM in the UK who wrote music for television and film. His arrangements can be heard on songs like Flash Forward in that they employ similar sounds to early radiophonic electronic music. The soft rock and production touches on Aeroplanes make this a standout song. A more common production technique on the album is its little or no cymbal usage – toms and snare drums help propel, like the clock of life itself, pushing and guiding the musical ideas along. This allows the lead vocal to take center stage, as there is limited high-end frequency content to compete with.

Textures and Timbre

There are some very interesting uses of texture and timbre on the album. In Meurtre a L’Marilou, the cymbals signify the sound of the fire extinguisher while the kick drum allows for the pounding heart to bounce toward her death. Life returns and air of optimism prevails in Marilou sous la neige. Here, Serge, lyrically, paints a dark picture of her burial under the snow. In a bold venture of contrast, the music is light, upbeat. The most interesting use of textures and timbre lay within Lunatic Asylum and Première Symptoms. Here, the albums epilogue, the sounds revolves around like a trance through a didgeridoo motif, like call to the wild. The texture and tone of the female vocals at the end of the song envisage and suggests Marilou raising from the dead, coming back to life to haunt our anti-hero for one more time. Textural and rhythmical analysis is summarized here as core musical themes:

Life: L’Homme à Tête de Chou – aggravated, downbeat, strange and surreal.

Love: Marilou Reggae – upbeat and optimistic, bright synthesizers used in major key.

Death: Meurtre a L’Marilou – tense, unknowing, frantic drums.

Rhythmic Syntax

Rhythmically, the album is a rewarding experience. It spans rock, country, disco, jazz, reggae, and funk. What’s evident more so is that some rhythms are used to support themes further. In Marilou Reggae caribbean rhythms allude toward the exotic sexual worlds of far way places. The drum tracks act as bedrock for the narration. Meurtre a l’extinguisher provides the most dynamic rhythmic analysis. It begins with hi-hats suggesting the sound of foam, then is replaced by a beating heart of a kick drum beating towards death, then, ultimately, the rhythm completely falls apart, settling again in the hi-hats, the narrator lost and quiet in his remorse and or satisfaction.

IV. End Note

L’Homme à Tête de Chou demonstrates Gainsbourg’s skill at integrating contemporary influences into chanson; highlighting the fact that it could be global, more far reaching. He allowed it to connect with young generations who understood the rhythms and sounds of international pop music. Gainsbourg’s omnivorous cultural tastes allowed the album to showcase the unstable nature of chanson was during the early 1970’s, ‘illustrating the effects of globalization on so-called traditional genres’ [6].

In classical mythology, the hero tended to be confidant intelligent, with few, if any flaws. In such, a hero tends to exude idealism, courage and morality. The classical anti-hero then, as the title suggests, is a flawed and conflicted character. The anti-hero, on the other hand, is plagued with self-doubt. Our characters hindrances made him prisoner of the mind, his imperfections of thought, of ideals of life, love and death, took him on a journey, full of sensual intentions with the end goal of lust and companionship.

What Gainsbourg has masterfully laid out for us is the story and journey of an anti-hero who completely lacks the skills and capabilities to perform such a feat and ends up failing in the most spectacular and morose fashion. Gainsbourg, furthermore, uses and indeed, manipulates the power of shifting rhythms, instrumental tone and timbre to help supplement and support our anti-hero’s transition into insanity. It’s perhaps the perfect concept album, one where the musical ideas support the extensions as documented above, all swimming in harmony, in the echoes of an untamed sexuality.

References

J. Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

H. Dauncey & S. Cannon, Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno, Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 2003.

S. Frith, Performing Rites, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

P. Tagg, Black Music, Afro American Music and European Music, Popular Music, 8/3 pp.285-98, 1989.

S. Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score, Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 2002. [6] J. Briggs, Sounds French – Globalization, Cultural Communities & Pop Music 1958-1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

#music #art #analysis #music theory #critique #serge gainsbourg #chanson #review #anti-hero #adventure #musical composition #themes #thematic structure #lunatic asylum #popular music #1960s

[skepticaloccultist]

The St Cyprian Scholar

An interview with José Leitão.

José Leitão is an author and scholar as well as a Portuguese Saint Cyprian devotee. Besides a PhD in experimental physics from the University of Delft, the Netherlands, his current research focuses on using ethnographic and folkloric methodologies to map the concepts of folk magic, sorcery, and witchcraft as described in the records of the Portuguese Inquisition.

The translator of "The Book of St Cyprian: The Sorcerer's Treasure", and the Bibliotheca Valenciana", both on Hadean Press as well as his collection of Portuguese folk tales related to the Cyprian Book "The Immaterial Book of St Cyprian" on Revelore Press and numerous articles he is developing a considerable body of Portuguese language works translated for the first time into English.

In my travels to Portugal for field research I cross paths with José in the university town of Coimbra, where he is currently conducting research. Over a handful of coffees I managed to get him to give me an interview about his work and research. He is almost as much of a recluse as I am!

  +++

For a man with a background in physics you are making a considerable mark on the history of occult literature in the early 21st century. Is there some long term plan or are you more of the wandering academic/perpetual scholar type?

Let’s not start making history before it happens… you’re not the only skeptic around here. From what I’ve observed occult literature shifts its focus often and in unpredictable ways. I may yet be a one hit wonder.

That being said, I suppose it might be a bit of both, or perhaps neither… at least in regards to my written material. To be honest I had no plan behind my first book, it was something that just kind of happened due to a number of circumstances in my life and at the time I really didn’t think I would be writing anything else besides that.

It’s hard for me to describe this in detail at this point, because it’s difficult to tell what where my genuine feelings then or what are later rationalizations. The fact that I have a physics PhD is largely circumstantial, it barely has anything to do with anything I’m doing right now and I’ve turned my back on that world probably permanently. There’s likely no real point in going into details here, but after a very long time in that world I simply came to the realization that that life was not conducive to my happiness; a reflection which was very much aided by my work and translation of The Book of St. Cyprian. Once I figured that out I started doing everything I could to walk away from where I was, and that’s what I’m still doing. So, it’s not so much about being a wandering or perpetual academic, it’s really about the path of least emotional resistance and unpleasantness at this point.

But, of course, I could have chosen to go down the purely ‘practitioner’ way, but I chose academia instead. I’ve also come to realize that I can’t function properly outside of a university or a university-like environment, so I fully identify as an academic at this point, and indeed there is a lot of wandering involved in that.

When we talk about the myths and folklore of the people of the Iberian peninsula very little of the primary sources have made their way into English translation. Why now, what do you think is driving the growing interest in Iberian folk magic?

I think there are a number of issues at play simultaneously, and I don’t ascribe a necessarily ‘supernatural’ origin to any of them. It reads a lot like regular human geography and white people taking their heads out of their asses (btw, Iberians aren’t white; we simply think we are because we’ve always had somebody darker to compare ourselves to).

I read this as the reality that the major trendsetting countries (USA mostly) have had an increasing immigrant population from Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries for years now, but what makes this moment different is that the white people living there, due to contemporary political reasons, have started to pay them attention (and not always in the good way). This means that, right now, a lot of new concepts are being brought into cultural visibility which were exclusive to Iberian and South and Central America until very recent, not because they were hidden, but rather because no one gave a fuck.

You need to also remember that besides the long standing white disdain for anybody south of the American border, in Europe we still suffer the stigma of the Black Legend. The narratives of accepted modernity have always been historically presented, firstly, by Protestantism and, secondly, by the Enlightenment, both of which were (and are) ultimately profoundly hostile to Catholic Iberia, so the situation wasn’t (or isn’t) much better here. We have a European stigma associated with emigration and typical association with menial labor in central and north Europe. Iberians are still exotic and given to stereotyping as under educated simpletons (think Manuel from Fawlty Towers); a nice place to visit during the summer and be entertained by our quaint non-Europeaness.

So, a reappreciation of both these cultural spaces is happening right now, but I see this as happening mostly for mundane reasons. But also… regarding the Iberian aspect in itself in America… I’m going out on a limb here, so feel free to call bullshit on what follows, but I also think that there might still be some extra racism involved in this. ‘Iberian’ sounds old and ennobled; you get images ancientness, castles, knights errant, good food and wine and beautiful dancing gitana girls. For a white American, it removes the source of the practice from your immediate (brown) neighbors and places it in an old (assumed white) Iberian no one really knows anything about.

Lusitanian culture specifically is of particular interest to me personally. Remnants of pre Roman cultural ideas seem to be scattered within the larger dynamic of Portuguese culture. Do you think that forms of folk magic practice found in say the 2nd or 3rd century have continued down through the ages?

Interesting you mention the Lusitanian. One of the major (unintentional) overarching themes of my next book is actually Portuguese cultural identity, and I offer some criticism on the Lusitanian problem from a contemporary practitioner perspective.

This is really the sum of it: the identification of the Lusitanian as the par excellence pre-historical Portuguese (the Portuguese before there was Portugal) is a politically motivated construction of the Estado Novo for identity and cultural control. The Lusitanian continuity thesis was one of Vasconcelo’s babies, but this was far from being universally accepted and during its time it received very heavy criticisms, mainly from Alexandre Herculano, one of the greatest and most cursed Portuguese historians. However, due to this and other difficult issues regarding the, at times, overly romantic Portuguese historiographic tradition, Herculano was for a long time largely ignored, and Vasconcelos pretty much became the regime’s scholar of choice.

I’m not disparaging Vasconcelos, he was good at what he did, but scholars need to be given the right to be wrong. His work has, in the past, been used for sinister purposes and that shouldn’t be ignored anymore. You see, if you are a heavy paternalistic right wing clerical regime and you do a hard streamline to the Lusitanian, a people we still don’t really know that much about, as the ‘archaic’ Portuguese, you are able downplay every other major population influx into Portugal and fashion our ‘archaic’ identity in whatever way you see fit. This means that you get to downplay Neolithic dolmens and standing stones, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Jewish and Muslim/North African influences, and construct an idealized and racially pure Christian Portugal. The Lusitanian, as an identity, are essentially nothing.

But obviously I can’t say that there aren’t Lusitanian influences in what Portugal is or that this doesn’t exist in Portuguese folk magic. That would be another form of insanity, mainly because we simply don’t know what the Lusitanian did. But to isolate the Lusitanian like that is historically problematic. So… no, I don’t think 2nd or 3rd century practices are particularly visible, at least not more than Roman, Jewish or Muslim ones.

The idea of "Lusitanian" culture being used as a kind of nationalist symbol in which to rally people in support of a regime is fascinating. Years ago I studied kaballah with Lionel Ziprin in NYC and he had a whole theory about the "publicly accepted kaballah" that was presented by Gershom Scholem. How the texts that get translated and the things that are accepted as truths were part of a broader narrative meant to occlude certain aspects of historic kaballah. How involved do you think the church was in the utilization of this "Lusitanian" national identity?

That’s hard to say… one thing that also needs to be understood is that, even if the regime guided itself by Catholic morals and ideals, and the Church did draw immense social advantage from this, the Catholic hierarchy actually had very little power to influence the political decision making. Ultimately, by the accurate manipulation of words and an irreducible concordat, Salazar could instrumentalize the Church for political gain and identity and behavior control, and it ended up becoming as much a prisoner of the state as anybody else, leading to Catholic dissension in the 50s. So, probably the Church didn’t really have an active role in the utilization of the Lusitanian, it was simply another tool the regime could manipulate and fit together to selectively construct a useful identity and narrative of itself. Although I’m sure many within the religion didn’t really mind this.

In reading your "The Book of St. Cyprian: The Sorcerer's Treasure" on Hadean one concept that really interested me was this idea of the "mar Coalhado" or Curdled Sea. It struck me as both an afterlife in the model of the Norse Hel, but also some kind of purgatory or abyss. Though I have been unable to find much in English! Is this concept still common in Portuguese culture?

That’s also one of my favorite concepts, interestingly. This is something which is pretty much still in the air for me.

Ultimately, on a general or ‘global’ scale, I don’t think I can give you any actual answer to what this concept might be… or any such concept to be frank. If we’re going back in time to look for such ideas we must remember that we’re going into circumstances when the circulation of information had its limits. Most researchers tend to bypass this problem by implicitly assuming that such folk concepts are ‘ancient’ or ‘archaic’, which meant that they should have had time to spread homogeneously across large geographical areas. I tend to avoid this approach because it removes active agency and imagination from the non-contemporary, non-educated, or non-white individual practitioner. That being said, a few other scholars have noted the occurrence of mentions to the ‘Mar Coalhado’ or something of apparent equivalence in a few procedures. Most often nobody ever offers anything on it except its occurrence, but I recently ran across a particular book by a fellow Coimbra researcher called António Vitor Ribeiro, O Auto do Místicos, which seemed to shed some light on the matter. It’s a cool text, exploring ideas, descriptions and practices of mysticism in Portugal from the clerical and literary circles down to the folk and rural levels. It’s a very ambitious work, but he tend to do really clumsy simplifications and linearization via some sneaky moves using Ginzburg or Eliade, and he uses words of complex meaning and implicit significance very frivolously… I like my methodologies to be more hygienic. Anyway, in one of the many interesting Inquisition documents he finds there is a mentioning of something referred to as the ‘Aguas Salgadas’, or ‘Salty/Salted Waters’. It’s not a perfect fit, but it does seem like somewhat similar to what we’re discussing. But what’s more interesting is that this isn’t in an actual Inquisition processes and this wasn’t mentioned as part of a particular folk magic procedure.

You see, there is a secondary collection of Inquisition documentation in Portugal called the ‘Cadernos do Promotor’, or the Prosecutor’s Notebooks, collections of denunciations, confessions or observations taken by Inquisition prosecutors that never made it into actual processes. There are several reasons for this, most often no crime was actually identified for a prosecution to be mounted, and other times it was because the reports and accusations are so outlandishly bizarre that the Inquisitors couldn’t make any theological sense of them in order to determine if what was being described actually constitutes heresy.

In this case, what was being reported were apparent visions, visitations and possessions by Mouras. Thus, a woman called Maria Leamara would fall into possession ‘rolling on the ground making it quake and making great arches with her feet’, saying while in this state ‘Let us go, let us go, let us go, let us go to the burrow of the moura, let us go, let us go, let us go, let us go across the salty waters, let us go, let us go, let us go, let us go to the Boulder of the See’. Then, when questioned about what any of this meant, she would only say that ‘they’ wanted her to deny Christ, and that the ‘salty waters’ meant outside of Christianity.

This whole thing then seems very akin to an anti-world, or ante-world, particularly evident by this apparent connection with Mouras, who apparently live across the Salty Waters and potentially the Curdled Sea. If Mouras are described and interpreted as these strange being of extremely remote existence, echoes and inhabitants of a bygone time, the banishing of something to this space would be akin to banishing it to somewhere outside of creation; this cosmic-now, or Christianity as that which created and defines the cosmic order we currently inhabit.

But in truth you have a number of varieties of this type of concept all across Europe. Very common formulas for the banishing of illnesses, bad weather or evil spirits into this type of space usually go along the lines of ‘go to where no baby cries, no roster sings or no dog barks’, for example, and I do see these as being somewhat equivalent concepts, as they both seem to describe a place removed from a humanly conceived cosmos, but these punctual examples of Moura crossovers do give it a particular local flavor.

If you think about it this is actually an extremely violent form of banishing. You’re basically casting something out of creation itself (as an anthropocentric concept). I think Jonathan Roper (one of my favorite folk magic scholars) has some material on this if you’d like to look him up.

But if you want to talk about actual application… even if some people might still use this concept (and it is quite common), I don’t think that what it actually signifies really is of much concern, even if it might be understood as significant. When you’re talking about magical formulas you always need to admit that there might be an aspect of simple habit or ‘tradition’ in the use of certain words and expressions. The impulse to break down an idea like that into tangible and rational concepts is pretty much a ‘learned’ and contemporary preoccupation. In all truth, a much more common occurrence in inquisition processes and documentation is that when an accused is questioned about a particular procedure he was witnessed as using, and which apparently calls upon a variety of spirits and characters, if asked who these characters are he will most likely answer that he simply don’t know. My reading of this is that it’s not their job or preoccupation to know; the words don’t have to have a rational meaning, which is something also supported by the observation that these types of traditional magical formulas frequently use nonsensical expressions, onomatopoeias or forced alliterations. The complete understanding of every single words and expression used beyond the cultural meaning of the procedure itself as a whole is a preoccupation which is mostly non-existent in the environment where these procedures occur. Both contemporary scholars and contemporary occultists are descendants from this overly analytical mentality, and it seems to me that the first step in actually understanding these is to admit that we are ultimately alien to this form of thinking.

You brought up the ‘Cadernos do Promotor’, or the Prosecutor’s Notebooks, which seem like a massive untapped resource in the folkloric study of witchcraft belief. Do you know if these types of records are only found in Portugal? How extensive are these documents?

To be honest, I’m still pretty new to that particular database and I’m not that familiar with the bureaucratic functioning of other Inquisitions in order to answer that question. However, in terms of how extensive… I’ve counted 352 volumes, some of which are 14 centimeters thick.

These are it. The thousands of processes everybody likes to talk and fetishisize about are just the tip of the iceberg; this is the real deal. Pure, uncut, unadulterated, untortured, uninterrogated words. No leading the witness, no feeding the answers to the accused, no theological projection, no nothing; just people voluntarily and spontaneously saying the crazy shit they saw, crazy shit they did and the crazy shit that was done to them.

The amount of work needed to work this source is soul crushing, but the potential is just breathtaking. Even beyond just the information in them… I’ve only scratched the surface on these, I’ve so far mostly been reading what other people have written about the reports in the Notebooks, but the things in there are dangerous on a cognitive level.

This goes back to the whole issue of the contemporary analytic mind, you need to remember that this is a window into a whole cosmology, worldview, understanding and interaction with the universe we simply don’t understand and are irreducibly alien to. Reading a few snippets has been enough for me to start to question reality… the ease and apparent normality which some things are described is just disturbing. And it gets Lovecraftian at the drop of a nickel… like ‘I was making a sandwich when all the sudden a door opened on the dark corner of my room. A Mouro with a red hat and shiny shoes walked out and lead me into a palace where the other Mouros were dancing and I met the Virgin Mary, who had the face of a monkey, her sister Saint Quiteria and King Sebastian and his five children. This has been happening every night and my husband complains that he wakes up when the Mouro takes me away during the night’… it’s stuff at this level and worst (or better).

With your recent complete translation of Jerónimo Cortez's "Bibliotheca Valenciana" you break into a realm of seeing and understanding the cosmological context in which much of the Cyprian magical traditions are rooted. A point before hard science, where the role of magician/scholar/alchemist merge and formed a kind of proto-scientist. What in Cortez's opus do you see as the most valuable content for those trying to understand the context of Cyprianic magic and early modern Iberian cultural beliefs in general?

Well… there’s a point in your question I can’t let slide. There is no such thing as a ‘proto-scientist’. The only way you can say that is if you root yourself in the contemporary time, take the definition of ‘scientist’ as it exists currently and project back in time to where it didn’t exist nor did it make sense (that’s the way most scientists think and why you can’t trust them to write their own history). So, the Cortez books don’t describe proto-science, they describe the science of their time, which is just as valid in its time as ours is in our time.

But regarding your question, there are a few points I wanted to make with the Bibliotheca Valenciana. The first of these is pretty straightforward: the Cortez books are not only one of the major sources for some of the later forms of the Cyprian Books, but they are themselves one of the major resources for your average Portuguese (and Brazilian) folk practitioner. While the reference to Cortez is actually fleeting in The Book of St. Cyprian I translated, as you move along the literary tradition of Cyprian Books, the repacking of material from the Physiognomy and the Lunario becomes ever increasing, particularly in Brazil. This by itself, in my own conception of what the work I’m supposed to be doing is meant to be, not only justifies the writing of that book but actually demands it.

The second point is probably more on the line of what you are alluding to. Besides the immediate relevance these books would have for someone interested in St. Cyprian related practices, they very efficiently describe what would be the early modern Catholic cosmology in purely functional terms and straight across social classes, even if this might at times not be completely explicit in the text. Note that there isn’t a distinction here between science and religion. Those are western academic categories and a person placing herself in the environment from where those books come from would not make this distinction in any way.

So, the point was not to simply offer context for St. Cyprian practices, but really to try to open up early-modern Catholicism as a still functional magical worldview and to offer the chance to approach the spiritual structures of the Church with an eye for (a rogue) practicality. If, as you say, Iberian folk magic is in fashion, if you try to reframe many of these practices into a Protestant cultural background (which is where Anglo-American occultism is based at), and if you’re serious about what you’re doing, you’ll run into more than a few bumps on the road. So the point was to offer a cosmology for when (or if) a cosmology is necessary.

And my final point with that book was part of a personal issue I’ve been working around regarding the nature of grimoires. I’m sure there are some purists out there who will vehemently disagree with me, and they might have a point; but I’ve come to think that that title cannot be solely given to a book by its author. If you analyze the way, historically, certain books are reacted to by the environments they enter you start to realize how arrogant it is to claim that one book is a grimoire in exclusion of another. ‘Grimoire’ should at times be a behavior description. It shouldn’t be about ‘this book is a grimoire’, but rather ‘I act towards this book as if a grimoire’. Once again, I believe that the denial of this is a ‘learned’ issue, a thing of high society and a claim of authoritarian elitism. So, to me, the Cortez books looked like Catholic grimoires in form and function, and they were certainly treated as such by people over here for hundreds of years, and logically they overlap with The Book of St. Cyprian. This is a line of work I intend to keep on exploring, and I’m actually right now planning on putting together something else further articulating this; some 18th century Catholic books I’ve recently fallen in love with.

When you talk about the Cortez books being used like grimoires, were his books perceived in Iberian society as "dangerous" or otherwise taboo in the way that Cyprian's Book was? Or do you mean more from a practical standpoint that the material in the book was used in much the same way one uses material in a grimoire?

I mean it from a practical standpoint mostly. This is something I’m still trying to figure out completely, but the construction of fear around the Book of St. Cyprian seems to be quite more recent than the Cortez books.

Overall I haven’t found that many references to Cyprian in the 17th-century, so it’s hard to say for certain what the image of The Book was for people familiar with it back then. But anyway, the emotional reactions to the two were probably very different. Although Cortez was a pioneer in the general prognostication literary genre, books of that sort weren’t particularly new or persecuted. They could at times be frowned upon (which lead to many being given false publication cities), and used as circumstantial evidence to prosecute someone accused of illicit practices, but they were never a particularly fearful thing in anyone’s eyes.

Witchcraft in Portugal is very under researched. It's my understanding that the history of witchcraft and its persecution is very different in Portugal than in neighboring Spain due to lack of an Inquisition in Portugal. What facets have shaped what we would call witchcraft practices that separate Portuguese and Spanish traditions?

First of all, a correction: Portugal did have an Inquisition. It started off slightly later than in many other countries, in 1536, but it lasted into 1821, so we had plenty of it over here. Now, what usually distinguishes it from many other such similar institutions was the absence of witch-hunting. While the practices perceived as witchcraft were still very much against the law, and if found these would be persecuted, there was no major active effort by any institution to actively search and persecute ‘witches’.

The only period where we do have anything close to a witch-hunt is actually in the 18th century, when you have a marked rise in related accusations. This instance had, for a long time, been somewhat of a mystery, but Timothy Walker in his Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition has very efficiently related this to an active effort by Coimbra trained doctors to eliminate folk healers and New Christian competitors from the market by becoming Inquisitional snitches. But overall, the number of witchcraft cases (and we can throw ‘superstition’, ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’ in there) on the Portuguese side of things are actually quite reduced, seeing as the Inquisition was much more preoccupied with the persecution of hidden Jews (real or imaginary).

One other side of this is that the narratives of diabolical witchcraft popularized in other European countries didn’t find a very strong foothold here, leaving many of the descriptions of practices and ‘folk magical’ procedures free from learned projections, interpretations and prosecution. And finally, one other important particularity here was that witchcraft accusations didn’t seem to have a very pronounced female persecution aspect to them, with the divide being 40% male and 60% female… which really throws a wrenched into essentialist feminist witchcraft narratives.

What must be remembered is that witchcraft image construction is always culturally located, and to weave a Pan-European narrative is to fall into historical fallacies and anachronisms. Over here the typical targets of persecution were individuals who had no clear connection to any ‘public’ or ecclesiastic institution and had an uncertain source of income. In this category you then have widows, beggars, vagrants, Jews or day to day swindlers and small fry businessmen… and there are no significant Sabbat descriptions.

Comparing the case with Spain (of which I’m not an expert in by the way), it should also be noted that the usual portrait of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, in regards to witchcraft persecution, are inaccurate… that is another echo of the Black Legend. In Spain there were actually three parallel tribunals with authority to persecute witchcraft and related practices: the Secular, the Episcopalian and the Inquisitorial (mostly active in urban centers), and out of all of these the Inquisitorial was actually the most lenient. This has to do with the very Inquisitorial process, which tended to be extremely bureaucratic (leaving an immense paper trail which can be followed today, contrarily to the other tribunals which didn’t keep much of a record and consequently become less historically visible) and it was actually quite complex in terms of finding anyone guilty of such ‘immaterial’ crimes… again, against popular opinion and whatever savage nonsense was happening in Protestant Inquisitions. In order to condemn anybody to death for witchcraft, there needed to be proof of an explicit satanic pact, which was nearly impossible to achieve. Consequently, what we see with the Spanish Inquisition is that people accused of witchcraft or magical practices in rural areas would frequently flee to a city in order to be judged by an Inquisitional court because, even if they could end up condemned of something, the chance that they would be sentenced to death was much smaller. Maria Tausiet has a nice book on this actually, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, although she makes some horrible mistakes in her dealing with magic and folklore in general, going as far as quoting the Libro Magno de San Cipriano (from the 19th century) to explain spirit summoning in the early modern period…

The same thing is true of Portugal. Magic and witchcraft cases very rarely ended in death. It was much more common to give the accused a tap on the hand, give him or her a fine, have them make a public abjuration and them ship them off to one of the colonies or some forsaken place in the country. But you do start to find more common death sentences in relapse trials, but this once again wasn’t related to witchcraft itself, but rather because this implied that your original confession and abjuration had been a lie, which constituted sacrilege and was a considerably worst offense.

Ultimately, what in my opinion would distinguish both countries in terms of witchcraft narratives is something that goes beyond this straight duality of Portugal and Spain. True, we have had our borders nicely established for many hundreds of years and there are indeed certain distinctions that can be made between one side of the line and the other, but the error that this carries is that it is often assumed that whatever exists on either side of the border is itself homogeneous. There are some clear overarching motives and witchcraft narratives both in Portugal and Spain, but given the particular persecution circumstances, there are probably much stronger regional distinctions than national distinctions. There’s a very interesting book by Gunnar Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons, which very clearly demonstrate how ethnical and cultural differences between Northern and Southern Spain actually give rise to different forms of witchcraft narratives. I believe this should also be detectable in Portugal, and you could expect clear narrative distinctions between the North and the more Muslim influenced South.

Witchcraft image construction and narrative distinction is a very subtle field of work, and why I usually avoid talking about these issues with self described witchcraft practitioners. Contemporary witchcraft narratives tend to be monolithic and essentialist, and these are all pseudo-historical construction. I don’t mean this as an offense in any way; contemporary witchcraft has its own real history, and this is not in any way less ‘noble’ or worthy, but it’s most often not the history it tells of itself.

Contemporary feminist witchcraft, for example, while having a concrete and positive purpose in today’s society needs to be understood as being constructed over a particular narrative which is entirely local and politically motivated. The general tendency to want to apply this particular narrative, constructed by characters such as Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardener based on flawed and biased reading of historical documents, is a violent form of colonialism (curiously, a Patriarchic mode of behavior), frequently using anti-intellectualism claims in order to deny concrete historically observed practices and traditions that don’t fit a particular worldview.

Established religious traditions, be them Christian or Pagan, tend to have the same responses to what they perceive as attacks on their theological legitimacy and power monopoly. It’s the same mentality with a different opinion.

That was a bit of a tangent to your question I suppose… but as far as a distinction goes, that’s my position. I think a clear blind spot in Iberian Inquisition and witchcraft studies (and not just Iberian) is the common disregard for folklore and local culture to help frame and contextualize the several different practices being placed under the same category of ‘witchcraft’. This is once again a reflection of the ‘learned’ position of academic culture which is still a direct descendent of the actual Inquisitors who created this category in the first place (Wouter Hanegraaff has some nice material on this… although he doesn’t explicitly deal with the Inquisition and certainly not Southern Europe).

What projects do you have coming up?

I have a few things in the air right now. First and foremost, I spent most of last year traveling and researching for a new Cyprian book, and I’m hoping to have that published before the end of this year. This is one I’m very proud of and I think it’s safe to say that I found documentation that probably nobody had ever looked at (people have surely seen it, but not really looked).

It’s going to be something quite big I think, in the literal sense… it’s about 400k words long.

Other than this I have a few things on the drawing board. Like I already mentioned I’m playing around with a few 18th-century Catholic books from which I can make a very cool compilation of very pragmatically practical procedures involving Saints, exorcism and blessings. I think a thing like that would work very well with the Bibliotheca Valenciana, since the Bibliotheca is all about describing a Cosmology and this other one is all about practicality.

I have also a good list of papers and essays I’m working on, both as part of my current academic studies and my general writing. Most of these are based on particular selections of Inquisition processes of interest. There isn’t much of a study of magic and esotericism in Portugal, so this is the type of work that needs to be done in order to bring attention to understudied intellectual and religious currents over here. And, logically, in about four year I hope to have a thesis on folk magic and religion written.

  José has organized a spectacular one day conference, "Colóquio Peculiar: Transdisciplinaridades improváveis", on occult and esoteric subjects to take place 8 June, 2018 at the University of Coimbra.

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