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lumelii · 3 years

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BREAKING IN ~|~ FUSHIGURO TOJI X FEM!READER

Summary: Your business partner and you are celebrating the end of a difficult project. Lucky you.

Content Warning: nsfw, smut, fwb situation, FEM!READER established "relationship", dilf!Toji, face fucking, slight degradation, face slapping (just once) (if I forgot any let me know)

Note: Big thank you to Moni and @shokami for being my guinea pigs on this one.

Word Count: 5.1k

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There were few things Toji liked about traveling for work. He liked seeing new places. He hated long plane rides. Hotels were nice, but sleeping on the mattresses for too long wreaked havoc on his back. He enjoyed making new business connections. Most importantly, however, he hated leaving his kids for long periods.

They were on his mind now, as he checked his phone periodically through the business party he was attending, celebrating the completion of another building Fushiguro Design Group had planned and engineered, this time in New York City. It was almost time for them to go to school in Tokyo, usually one of them called before they left so he knew they were up. His finger paused over the home phone contact for a moment before he put it away with a sigh. Megumi and Tsumiki were both teenagers now, almost in high school. They didn’t need him hovering all the time.

“Congratulations on another success, Mr. Fushiguro.” One of the executives of the company who contracted the firm came up to shake his hand. “You really outdid yourself this time.”

“It was a group effort.” His eyes searched the room, hoping to find a distraction to get him out of this conversation before he put his foot in his mouth. He didn’t deal with clients, he had employees who did that. He wasn’t great at curtailing his frustrations when in conversation. Especially with this client, who changed their design at least four times, which meant he had to redo all the math. Four times.

Luckily, his distraction came just a few seconds later as his phone began to ring. Looking at the caller ID, he felt a wave of relief seeing his home phone number. At least that meant one of the kids was up. He wasn’t counting on Gojou.

“Please excuse me.” Toji stepped away and walked out onto the balcony just off the ballroom, closing the door securely behind him before answering.

“DAD!” He held the phone away from his ear just slightly when Tsumiki yelled even before he said hello. He brought it back to his ear once he was sure his eardrum wouldn’t be ruptured.

“Good morning to you too, princess.” He answered sarcastically. “How are you? Getting ready for school?”

“Megumi stole my notebook again!”

“I did NOT!” Toji heard Megumi yell in the background.

“It had my homework in it! If I don’t get it back, the teacher is going to dock points!”

“Did you already look in your backpack? Everywhere in your room?”

“No, because Megumi took it!”

“Princess, look in your backpack and your room first. If you can’t find it, have Gojou help you. Now give the phone to Megumi.”

He heard her huff and set the receiver down, yelling for Megumi to get on the phone. A few moments later, the receiver was picked up again. This time, Megumi’s voice. “Hi Dad.”

“I swear to god, Megumi, if you have her notebook and you’re lying about it just to bother her—” Toji warned.

“I’m NOT!” He yelled again. “I was over at Yuuji’s house last night anyway, why would I need her homework when we did ours together?”

“Why weren’t you home last night?” Toji’s eyes narrowed even though his son couldn’t see him. “It’s a school night.”

“Yuuji and I were working on homework. Plus his neighbor made sweets. She sent some home with me. I’ll save you some. Are you coming home soon?” His tone was hopeful. It made Toji’s chest hurt. He missed his family.

“I’m going to be on the first flight back tomorrow morning, I promise.” Toji told him. “Are you ready for school?”

“Not yet. I can’t find my slacks.”

“Look on the right side of your closet, they’re probably in there. Where’s Gojou? Can you put him on the phone?”

“I think he’s still sleeping.” The phone was set down again, and Toji had to wait what felt like forever until he finally heard Gojou grumbling on the other end of the line.

“G’morning sunshine.” He yawned. “What’s up?”

“Are you aware the kids are ready to tear each other’s throats out?” Toji frowned. “And why are you still sleeping? They’re almost ready to leave for school.”

“Kento was on the phone late last night freaking out, I had to calm him down.” Gojou stifled a yawn again. “I made sure they have their breakfast and their school stuff is ready.”

“Tsumiki’s missing her notebook.”

“It was in the living room last I saw, I’ll make sure one of the dogs didn’t take it.”

“I KNEW IT!” Tsumiki screeched in the background.

“Shit, I have to go, Toji. Call later.”

The line went dead before Toji could ask any questions. He looked down at his lock screen with a frown, debating on calling back but ultimately deciding against it while he put his phone away. He would call later once both kids were at school, and keep an eye out for breaking news of fratricide in Tokyo.

He looked to the balcony doors when they opened, relaxing slightly when he saw his preferred distraction walking out with two drinks in hand.

You closed the door behind you before walking up to him, holding out his favorite, an Old Fashioned. “I thought I’d find you out here.”

He took the proffered drink and downed it in one gulp while you sipped your Gibson carefully. “Am I that predictable?”

“When it comes to these kinds of parties, yes. Either you were about to lose your temper and needed a breather, or you had to take a call.” You answered. “Problems at home?”

Toji shook his head. “Just wish we were back.”

“It’s been a month. I can’t wait to get back to Tokyo. No matter what anyone says, no one can beat Tokyo ramen.” You leaned your elbows on the balcony railing. He leaned next to you, copying your pose while you both looked over the glittering New York skyline in silence.

“Why don’t we focus on projects at home for a while?” You offered. “Or in Japan, at least. That way we wouldn’t have to be gone for too long, you’d still be able to go home at night.”

“We have some pretty big clients lined up in Dubai and Europe. I don’t think they’d want to wait until we felt like traveling again.”

“You’re the boss. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.” You reminded him with a smile. “I can take someone else with me, then send the specs once we’re done. I’ll even let you pick your stand-in.”

“I’ll pick my stand-in whether you like them or not.” He smirked before continuing. “I’m the boss.”

You rolled your eyes and took another drink. “Just don’t make it fucking Ren. I can’t stand that asswipe.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He promised.

The conversation wasn’t typical between a boss and employee, but you were more than that. You were partners at the firm, Toji was just the one in charge. You’d built the firm together from the ground up, making it the success it was today.

He had come to you, needing an architect for his own firm back when it was only an idea, offering two-hundred million yen out of his personal coffers as an incentive. But it wasn’t the money that had made you say yes. It was the almost maniacal determination in his eyes. He had something to prove, and he would burn the world to the ground to do it.

You learned later his wife had just died a few weeks prior, and it was part of his promise to her on her deathbed that he follow through with his plan of opening his firm. You’d been with him since the beginning, in the early days where you both spent countless sleepless nights completing projects other firms only dared to take on, through the intervention staged by his two closest friends Nanami Kento and Gojou Satoru, as Toji became consumed by his work as a way to suppress his grief, to the point where his son almost didn’t recognize him when he came home. You’d been by his side through the boom of success that befell the firm just a few short years after its founding, along with the money that soon flooded both your pockets, and his second “marriage” to a model he met at a film festival, who promptly disappeared after moving her daughter into his home. He had been surprisingly calm through the whole ordeal, submitting the paperwork to make Tsumiki his own once they were completely certain her mother was never coming back, with a hefty cash incentive and NDA to tie it with a nice bow.

He’d been through a fair amount with you as well, dealing with toxic family that had come out of the woodwork as the company started to increase your wealth, demanding money for so-called “investments” they had made into you by providing basic care until you finally left at fifteen. Through the sudden death of your fiancé, where Toji was the only one who could understand and help you navigate through the unending darkness that consumed your life for almost a year afterwards. He’d ignored some of your questionable choices as you tried to adjust to your new normal, but also was not afraid to step in when necessary if the choices turned destructive. You had thought it was just to protect the interest of the firm, but when he had come to your apartment after a sobbing phone call on the anniversary of your fiancé’s death and held you so you wouldn’t feel so alone, you knew it was because he cared about you.

“Are you ready to go back inside?” You asked after watching the sunset sink below the horizon, breaking you both out of your reflection.

“I’d rather drive an ice pick through my skull.” He admitted.

You laughed, the sound echoing off the glass windows and empty air around you. “We could always dip.”

“Wouldn’t they be offended, us leaving early?” He turned to face you with one hand on the railing. You ignored the way his suit jacket strained against the hard planes of his chest.

“Mari’s in there, it’ll be fine.” You said, referring to your project manager. “She loves people. She’ll have them eating out of the palm of her hand.”

“If you say so.” He took the empty glass from you, setting it on the railing before taking your hand to thread it through his arm. “Shall we?”

“Lead the way.”

You made a hasty exit from the party, repeating your excuse of an early flight at least a dozen times so no one would hinder your escape. No one bothered to ask follow-up questions. If they had, they might have found out you were flying private back to Tokyo, and the plane could leave whenever you goddamn pleased, obliterating your excuse.

Luckily, the lie held until you were safely in the cab of an elevator, heading up to the floor that held your two hotel rooms. The company had offered the two massive adjacent suites to you both, taking up an entire floor of the newly constructed hotel. Toji probably could have brought his kids if he had wanted, but he didn’t want to pull them out of school for that long. You were happy to have the entire suite to yourself. It meant you didn’t have to listen to neighbors through all hours of the night, and you didn’t have to worry about keeping anyone up when working late at night.

“The flight leaves at six tomorrow morning.” Toji told you as you stepped off onto your floor. “There’s going to be a car to pick us up an hour before.”

“Did you already send your bags with the service?” You stopped just outside your door, directly across the hall from Toji’s.

He nodded. “I saw yours were ready, I had them sent as well.”

“Thank you.” You looked behind your shoulder to your door then back at him, his hands in his pockets, watching you like he was expecting you to say something else. He looked downright sinful in his all-black designer suit, his normally straight hair styled back with hair gel but still looking soft to the touch. The watch that cost more than most people’s houses glinted in the warm light of the hallway as he played with his cufflinks, also worth a small fortune. You would know. You bought them.

He quirked his eyebrow at your examination, almost like a challenge. Damn him.

“Do you want to come in for a nightcap?”

A slow smile spread across his face. “I thought you would never ask.”

You smiled back and turned to the door, inserting your keycard to hear the small click of the lock disengaging, slipping inside with him closely following. “We haven’t broken in this one, yet.”

He was on you before you had the chance to slip out of your shoes. Maybe it was the alcohol that gave him a sense of urgency, the sweet bourbon still on his lips as they slid over yours with a practiced ease, or that you had an early flight in the morning and needed as much sleep as possible to prevent jet lag. If it were the latter, this was definitely not the activity to be participating in.

These liaisons only happened on trips, or late nights at the office or your apartment, where there would be no prying eyes. You both didn’t need questions. It was fulfilling a primal desire, one that burned within you even as both your hearts were locked by grief. There was an understanding. You cared for him, and he for you, but not in a romantic way. You were making sure the needs of a friend were met.

The “breaking in” was also a tradition as well, ever since your first major deal had been completed. When the building was finally complete for a major project, you and Toji would sneak off somewhere to do the deed, christening the building like a bottle of champagne before a ship’s maiden voyage. It had started as a joke, a way to release the pent-up stress that resulted from design and construction but eventually became a tradition. As the business grew over the years, you and Toji had christened well over a hundred completed projects with none the wiser.

You pushed his suit jacket off his shoulders before moving your hands between your fused bodies to start undoing the buttons of his shirt, working quickly in the tight space as Toji didn’t allow you any room to pull away. You struggled to focus while his kisses moved down to your chin and then your neck, licking and sucking the skin with reckless abandon. You let out a breathy moan as he bit your pulse point with a low growl feeling your heartbeat thrum beneath his teeth. Toji pushed your hands away when his shirt was finally on the floor behind him. He grabbed your face between his hands bringing your attention back to him to kiss you. Ever the multitasker, his tongue explored your mouth while he began his task of getting you naked.

“Don’t rip the dress.” You warned under his kiss while his large hands grappled for the zipper. “I borrowed it, it has to be in perfect condition.”

“I’ll buy Mei Mei a new one.” Gripping the top of the dress with a hand on each size of the zipper, he yanked hard, the fabric splitting like he had just ripped a sheet of paper as it fell off your body. His eyes went wide as the dress pooled at your feet, revealing the matching black lace set you had underneath. The cups barely contained your breasts and did little to cover your most delicate areas, nipples peeking through the sheer fabric.

“Fucking hell.” He breathed.

You grinned and kneeled in front of him, starting to undo the buckle of his pants. “Paris paid off, then?”

A sigh fell past his lips as you finally pulled his pants and boxers down, wasting no time to wrap your hand around his thick cock, pumping languidly. His breath hitched as you licked his angry red tip slowly, pulling back to prevent him from pushing past your lips when his hips moved forward. His hand went to the crown of your head, tangling his fingers in your hair. “Shit. You’ve been saving that since Paris?”

“I’ve worn this plenty before. You’ve just never seen it.” Your smirk was devilish. His grip on your hair tightened as you took him to the base, neatly trimmed hair tickling your nose while you forced your throat to relax. You tried to gather as much spit as you could to make the glide easier as you bobbed your head. Toji was a large man with an equally large and impressive dick, almost too much for you to take in. Through years of practice, both on him and several inferior specimens, you had learned just how to hollow your cheeks, how to move, and how to swallow to have a man cumming in minutes flat.

“Fuck, you okay?” He panted when he thrust involuntarily, hitting the back of your throat and making you gag slightly. Once you composed yourself, you hummed around his cock and nodded. Grabbing his other free hand, you placed it on the back of your head with his other one before taking him back down your throat. A silent invitation.

He wasted no time responding, beginning to thrust into your mouth with no reserve. You grabbed his hips to steady yourself as you relaxed and remembered to breathe through your nose. Tears ran down your cheeks while he choked you with his massive cock, mixing with your mascara and staining your skin black. The salty tang of precum hit your tongue, mixing with the saliva that fell from your lips the faster he moved. You smiled around his cock when you cupped his balls, squeezing just enough for him to let out a loud groan.

“Stop.” He growled, pulling you off him and tilting your chin up. He took in your tear-streaked face, your chin and neck covered with a mix of saliva and pre-cum. When he dragged his thumb over your bottom lip, you caught it between your teeth, sucking him in and lavving the digit with your tongue. He chuckled darkly, hooking his thumb in your mouth and using it as a guide for you to stand up in front of him.

“Messy doll.” He crooned. You had to admit, you were shocked as he leaned forward and licked up your neck, tasting both of you on your skin. While you were distracted with his sinful lips, you heard another distinct ripping sound before you felt the cool air of the room against your bare ass. You broke away and looked down to see your panties in tatters on the ground.

“Can you at least leave one piece of my clothing intact tonight?” You frowned at him, your voice slightly hoarse from his antics. “Those were expensive. I know we’re made of money now, but I’d prefer not to spend it all.”

He ignored you and reached around to plant a firm smack on your cheeks. “In the bedroom. On the bed.”

You knew exactly what he meant, but you decided to have a bit of fun as you walked through the massive suite. You could feel his eyes on you, almost predatory when you entered the bedroom and caught sight of the king-sized bed, made with fresh linens and piled high with pillows, accented in the light greys and blacks that matched the rest of the suite. You flopped down on the bed with a giggle, back down, and propped yourself up on your elbows to look at him.

He frowned at your position as he walked forward. “I said on the bed.” He rumbled.

“I am on the bed.” You played dumb and cocked your head to the side. “What did you mean?”

He shook his head and stopped at the edge, towering over you. “You’re such a brat sometimes, you know that?”

“It’s a nice break from those girls that call you daddy, isn’t it?” You purred.

The growl that ripped through his chest made your heart jump and another wave of arousal coat your lips as he surged forward, gripping your hips to flip you onto your stomach and pull them up so you were on your knees, your throbbing center level with his cock. He ground against you, slipping his length along your drenched labia to coat it, the glide easy as your spit mixed with your slick. He was more than ready to pound into you.

When you tried to prop yourself up on your elbows, he put a hand on your neck and pushed you down so your face was pressed into the mattress. A shiver ran down your spine when you felt his hot breath on your back and trailing up as he bent over you to whisper in your ear.

“You know, I was going to be nice, maybe take it slow at first so you wouldn’t be absolutely wrecked sitting for fourteen hours on our flight tomorrow.” He hummed. “But now, I think I’m going to like seeing you squirm.”

It wasn’t even a second later before he slammed into your pussy, the stretch almost painful as you wailed at the intrusion and he began a brutal pace that rivaled his speed while he was fucking your face just moments before. You were already sopping wet from sucking his dick earlier, turned on beyond belief as you thought about what lay in store for you after he was done with your mouth being his personal fleshlight.

“Shit, you’re so tight.” He hissed, spanking your ass to feel you clench around his dick. “No one can stretch this cunt as good as I can, can they? You need a fat cock to satisfy you, those skinny dicks can’t even get you wet.”

You moaned an affirmative, playing along with his narrative as he pistoned his hips into you. You could feel every vein on him as they dragged along your walls, his tip hitting that soft spot inside you with every thrust. There were plenty of other dicks that had gotten you wet, but it was true his was the most impressive, and the one that had more knowledge of just how to make you scream, monster dick or not. He had that advantage over every other man you slept with.

The slap of his hips against yours echoed through the cavernous room as Toji grabbed your upper arms, pulling them behind your back and forcing your back in arch, his thrust becoming more shallow but no less punishing. You bit your lip to control the noises you were making, but whines still escaped.

When the new position didn’t produce his desired response from you, he released your arms without any ceremony causing your upper body to fall limp back to the bed. You gasped as Toji pressed his hips flush to yours, curling his body on top of yours with one powerful arm wrapped around your waist to keep you from pulling away while his tip continually massaged your g-spot with every roll of his hips into you.

“Tell me how it feels.” He murmured in your ear, his voice steady without any sign of effort. His stamina was something to marvel.

“You know how it feels.” You moaned back, unable to control yourself. You were so close, just ready to reach that peak if he would only speed up. You reached back with one hand and gripped his hip hoping that would encourage him to resume his previous pace.

He took your hand from his hip and put it back near your head, delivering a harsh smack to your ass. The sharp sting of pleasure was what you needed for your back to arch, squeezing around him while you fucked yourself back onto his cock to prolong your climax as much as you could.

Toji pulled out as you finally slowed down, his heavy cock bouncing against his leg as he sat up against the headboard and patted his thigh, signaling for you to climb on. You wasted no time in doing so, raising yourself on shaky legs to straddle his lap. His hands moved to cup your ass as you settled over him, taking his length in hand and sinking down onto it with a sharp exhale through your nose. You could almost feel him in your throat in this position, the stretch still borderline uncomfortable even after he had already stretched you out, coupled with the sensitivity of just having orgasmed.

His gentle grip turned hard just as you were about to start bouncing to stop your movements. You gave him a confused look but understood when his hands started to guide you in grinding on his lap. The added friction on your clit against his pelvis made you sigh in pleasure, just a tinge of overstimulation creeping through the tightness already building in your stomach again. In this position with the lack of harsh movements he was able to play with your breasts, which he always gave proper worship.

His large hands made your breasts look small as he covered the left, slipping your nipple between his fingers and rolling it while he cupped the other, pushing it up and licking at the flesh. You sighed at the rough texture of the scar marring his lips against your sensitive skin and wrapped your arms around his head, tangling your fingers in his hair to hold him close. He loved to tease, licking and sucking all around your breasts until you were about to beg, arching your back further into his touch. You hated begging him, hated admitting how well he could affect you. But you had known each other for so long, you knew each other better than anyone else.

You whined as his lips finally closed around the pert bud, laying the flat of his tongue over the sensitive skin. You felt his lips stretch into a smile against your skin at your vocalizations before he moved to your other breast, immediately latching onto the nipple to produce a breathy moan. You knew he was enjoying himself from the way his hips matched each roll of your own, driving deeper as he got lost in the feeling.

“I got your milkies.” You whispered, part of your sinister trick to bring him back to earth. You were starved for actual friction, grinding not providing the drag on your insides you craved.

He pulled back with a soft pop and frowned, though his pupils were still blown out. “You did not just say that.”

You shrugged. “I thought it was funny.”

“Way to kill the mood.” He mumbled, pushing your breasts together to bury his face between them, licking through your cleavage and up your chest.

“Then why are you still hard?” You squeezed down on him deliberately. His eyes grew dark as he looked up at you through thick lashes and you knew you were in for it.

With one quick movement you were under him, back pressed into the pillows while he kneeled between your legs still holding your waist so he could stay buried inside you, your hips tilted so you were at an angle. You struggled to sit up trying to resume your previous position, but his strong hold on you didn’t allow you any room before he continued burying himself in your velvet walls. You could barely breathe from the force of his thrusts, twice as hard as before but just as fast.

You could have killed him from how composed he looked as he watched you slowly lose control. He watched you with an almost curious expression, studying how your brow drew together and short gasps fell past your lips while he was barely breaking a sweat. You refused to give him the satisfaction of hearing your moans. If he wanted them, he’d have to earn them.

“I know you like taking it from the back, but I think I like this better.” He mused, voice even like he wasn’t balls deep in your cunt. “I can see the look on your face when you lose control.”

“Fuck you, Toji.” You gasped, your words stuttering with each of his thrusts.

“No, that’s your job.” He grinned devilishly and bent down over you, resting on his elbows. “Scream for me, little slut. Let the floors around us know how good I fuck.”

You opened your mouth to retort but a loud scream came out instead as Toji sneaked his hand between you to roll your clit between two fingers. You barely felt his breath on your skin as you shattered beneath him, screaming just like he wanted as your orgasm crashed over you, ten times as intense as the one he had just given you. You gripped the pillow under your head and turned your face into it so he couldn’t see just how much you were enjoying this.

In an instant, you felt the pillow ripped from beneath your head and his hand come into contact with your cheek. The sting of his slap was dulled by the pleasure still running over your body as he gripped your chin tightly in one of his large hands, forcing you to look in his eyes, your noses almost touching. Your eyebrows knit together and mouth open on a silent moan made him finally push as far in as he could on a final thrust, painting your inner walls white with his cum as he groaned loudly. The roll of his hips didn’t stop until he deposited every last drop within you, until you could feel his cum leaking out the sides of his dick. How could he cum so fucking much?

His hands turned gentle as he pulled out, smoothing your hair off your sweaty forehead and tracing his fingers over the hickeys he’d left on your neck. He bent down to ghost his lips on your hairline before hauling himself off the bed and walking toward the bathroom. You could faintly hear him rummaging around through your post-coital fog, coming back with a warm damp towel and starting the task of cleaning you up.

While he did, he grabbed the phone from the room and dialed room service, ordering two meals, along with ice cream at your insistence, billing it to his room. Not that it mattered, you were staying here on your host’s dime. When he was done cleaning you, he laid on his side next to you, smiling down fondly as you still tried to catch your breath.

“You did good.” He whispered, caressing your face. You managed a weak smile and laughed.

“Don’t get soft on me now, Fushiguro.” You sighed. “I might just lose respect for you.”

He smiled down at you, basking in the afterglow of your liaison. “Wouldn’t dream of it, doll.”

Tags: @oikawaandkuroostan, @gummy-dummy

#growing pains #fushiguro toji #fushiguro megumi #fushiguro tsumiki #toji x y/n #jujutsu kaisen #jjk #jjk fanfic

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mcmansionhell · 4 years

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Announcing the Winners of the 2019 McGingerbread Hell Competition

Wow! It was another great year for the McGingerbread Hell Gingerbread House Competition! The judges had their work cut out for them selecting between so many fine selections. Congratulations and great job to everyone who submitted an entry in this year’s contest. However, only six houses could make the cut.

Let’s start out with announcing the winners for Honorable Mention.

Honorable Mention: Priced to Sell! by Tina B.

The judges were wowed by the impressive nub, the tumorous turret, and the fantastically mismatched windows.

Quote from the Project Description: A true GEM of a house! 6,738 SF beautifully set on .23 parklike acres. Mediterranian villa in front, stately Federal in the back; it's the mullet of houses!...Entertain in your beautiful backyard featuring a real StoneTek(TM) patio! The heavily pruned weeping cherry tree will be a real showstopper in 30-40 years! The largest roof in the neighborhood has Chex shingle roof in molasses brown. 4 BR / 5.5 BA / $899,000 / Days on market - 923

Honorable Mention: Festive Roofline Soup by Jessica C.

The judges LOVED the complexity of the roofline, the absurd gabling, and the 3 car garage.

Quote from the Project Description: Features include: • Flaked almond shingles covering a roofline so complex that it required trigonometrical expertise from my math teacher father to work out measurements...[and] A low maintenance yard as the house takes up almost the entire block! Now accepting offers; the sellers are motivated as the couple are in the middle of divorce proceedings.

Honorable Mention: Vinyl Vanity by Joseph & Kayla S.

The judges were impressed by the impressive garage to roof ratio, the roof detailings, the candy-cane columns, and excellent lawyer foyer.

Quote from the Project Description: This 2 square foot, two and a half story Craftsmen Tudor Post Classical Revival estate is the luxurious home that your friends and neighbors never wanted...The car is truly the heart of Tudor England, so we put the garage proudly up front, where the yawning chasm of the door greets the outside world with disdain...Be sure to schedule your private tour soon, this edifice is sure to not last long. On the market. If you're curious about the price, you're probably too economically responsible for this property.

And now, our top 3:

Third Place: A Jersey Thing by Nùria O.

Judges were impressed by the size, shape, and meticulous detailing of the project, which is reminiscent of a truly terrible McModern. Anjulie, seeing the size of the huge roof said “this is some sustainable sh*t.” This project captures the true McMansion ethos in truly making us say “what the hell is going on here?”

Project Description: Inspired by a beatiful RealLife™ McMansion™ in Beach Haven, NJ, this year’s featured McGingerbread mansion is a modern 5-bedroom, 16-bathroom home made entirely in construction-grade gingerbread and held together with royal icing made from free-range egg whites. The nonpareil- and sugar-crystal-covered walls provide both isolation from stormy weather and give a vintage air to counterbalance the futuristic lines of the design...On the back of the house, you can walk out to a large deck (perfect for entertainment) boasting a valuable one-piece handrail. From there you can access the beautiful mediterranean garden, set in candy charcoal and stones, environmentally friendly as it’s practically maintenance free. Don’t miss your chance to visit this unique home—feel the sugar rush!

Second Place: Victorian Opulence by Beth & Tina C.

Reigning McGingerbread champs Beth & Tina C. returned to the scene this year with yet another gorgeous gingerbread. Judges were wowed by the complexity and scale of the project. Sarah was impressed by the intricate piping and lots of frilly details, and the homage to the traditional Victorian gingerbread form. Anjulie described it as “unbearably neat” - she loved the uncantilevered bay window, the detached garage that makes entryway irrelevant, and the hilarious-front balcoiny with half-wall (not code compliant). Kate was impressed by the detailing and the extensive cantilevers which too serious structural engineering to pull off.

Project description: New from the creators that brought you a true monstrosity last year: The Victorian Opulence! Featuring a lovely wrap around porch, adorable detached garage, and a truly magnificent waterfall in the backyard, this monolith of a house features thee decks overlooking somewhat patchy but still rescueable landscaping. Other features include an outdoor patio, a tower for all your princess capturing needs, and a truly cursed facade featuring a curved roof of all things! With several nubbins featuring windows, there is no angle on this house you can't see out of! Standing at nearly 2 feet tall and with an approximate total floor area of 550 square inches-excluding outdoor seating area-this Victorian style home will surely be the envy of all the gingerbread men in your country club. (Snow removal not included as part of HOA membership fees.)

And finally...

First Prize: Simply Having a Wonderful Building Crime by Erin E.

The judges all agreed: this house was outrageous - its execution was fantastic, and its design was full of so many delightful, humorous details. Sarah remarked: “This one is perfectly McMasion-scaled, with weirdly placed windows and gratuitous features to boot.” Anjulie couldn’t sing the praises enough: “I was particularly taken with the garage that is so far detached it makes the front door totally irrelevant...it's a castle of grand sadness. The Pete Buttigieg sign is the literal icing on top.” Kate loved the details: the Pete sign, the ridiculously diverse selection of windows, the piped on invasive plants and basketball hoop, and the glass and siding effects. Part of the competition lies in its absurdity and humor, and in that particular category, this house took the cake.

Project description: This home Defies the Ordinary. Located on a 2.3 acre lot, you'll be the envy of all your neighbors--and can watch from the top of the turret to be sure they're suitably jealous! Enjoy sitting al fresco under the portico above the garage, or on the hand-laid M&M stone patio! The two-story entryway accounts for just a few of the more than 60 sugar glass windows! All of the walls join up exactly where the architect expected them to, and no windows were covered up on accident!!!

Constructed over two weeks, out of ten pounds of flour, four pounds of powdered sugar, and more than half a gallon of corn syrup, this modest four-story house will surely stand the test of time. It’s been meticulously decorated with royal icing vines, wreaths, and Christmas lights, and landscaped with gingerbread boulders, definitely-naturally-this-green icing grass, and coconut macaroon topiary. The roof stands at 17 inches high, and is crafted from waffle cookie shingles over gingerbread rafters. For sale for just $1,895,000, this house is just perfect for new families or young professionals just starting out!

Special thanks to everyone who entered this year and to our judges Sarah Archer and Anjulie Rao for their contributions in pulling off yet another successful entry our search for the Gingerbread McMansion Hall of Fame!

See you next week with this month’s 1970 McMansion.

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#architecture #design #gingerbread #gingerbread house #mcmansion #mcmansion hell

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lisarichardsonbylines · 3 years

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How to Tell Your Husband You’re a Witch

Witches we need you. Now more than ever. In the time of COVID-19 we can find respite in place-based reverence, plant magic and the divine feminine. So writes Lisa Richardson, who came to witchiness with nothing but white hetero straight-lacedness and a crush on a yoga teacher.

Lisa Richardson | Longreads | April 2020 | 15 minutes (4,084 words)

On a Friday afternoon, pre-COVID-19, my husband dropped some ice-cubes into glasses, ready to make us screwdrivers and cheers to surviving another week of working/parenting/wondering where the hell the years were going, only, the vodka bottle was empty.

“Oh yeah,” I said, my eyes sliding sideways, trying to not cause a fuss, “I used it for medicine.” The previous week, the kitchen counter had been cluttered with a giant mason jar full of oily plant matter. “Balm of Gilead!” I explained, brightly, as he wiped away the breakfast crumbs around it.

“But what is it?”

“Cottonwood tips in oil.”

His eyes had flicked, then, over to the brand-new bottle of extra virgin olive oil that was now nearly empty, as I enumerated the medicinal benefits of this old herbal remedy (and all this from a tree in our backyard!). Twenty-four years together means I could hear the abacus in his brain clicking, as he wordlessly calculated the cost per milliliter of a gallon jar of plant matter masticating in top-shelf olive oil, against the cost per unit of a bottle of generic aspirin tables, overlaid with the probability of me losing interest in this project.

First the olive oil. Now the vodka for dozens of little jars of tinctures — garden herbs and weeds soaking in now-undrinkable booze. My midlife quest to attune more deeply to the rhythms of the natural world was starting to incur unexpected, but real, costs.

He was quiet, as he opened the fridge and pulled out a beer instead.

* * *

In my defense, I could have pointed my finger at Natalie Rousseau, a yoga teacher living in my 5,000 person village, who I’d first encountered leading a solstice yoga class billed as a way to survive the madness of the holidays (in slightly more gracious language). Thanks to her offerings of insight I did survive the commercial horror of the “festive” season, and a few months later, as the new moon entered Aries (whatever that actually means), I plonked down $200 to subscribe to her online 13 Moons course — my foray into “slowing down and being more present,” as I pitched it to my husband when he inquired about the strange entry on the credit card statement.

But I did not deflect the simmering tension between us by naming Natalie as the instigator of these “kitchen witch” experiments. Even though I am not a member of any kind of coven or cult, (I don’t think book club counts), I know deep in my bones to never throw another woman onto the fire for helping you. That has been done too many times.

But there it is. The word. Witch. The wound.

* * *

Every day, after COVID-19 entered our world, Natalie Rousseau has responded with an offering, a teaching — a meditation, an ancient mantra of protection, a yoga practice for managing anxiety, a how-to video on harvesting poplar medicine. It’s as if she’s been resourcing herself for this moment to develop the richest arsenal imaginable, to navigate, not the public health crisis, but the billion personal crises each of us is forced to confront as life as we know it slams into pandemic mode. It’s not what I thought a witch would do, if I ever thought about them at all.

Natalie doesn’t look like a witch either — not in the way I conceived it for last year’s Halloween costume, with my long black skirt, dollar-store pointy hat, and heavy black eyeliner, walking alongside my 6-year-old vampire-werewolf. Natalie is petite, just a few inches over five feet, her long blond hair still evoking the decade she spent living in a west coast surf town, her chest and lean muscled arms bright with full sleeve flowery tattoos and Mary Oliver quotes. She moves like a dancer, demonstrating yoga poses as if she’s transcending gravity. As a teacher, she speaks exactly, even in Sanskrit, and guides movement precisely, padding gently and soundlessly through the room, making an adjustment here, offering an instruction there.

So, I was surprised when she used the word “witch” to launch her new online offering, The Witches Wheel. The lure was irresistible. Natalie was claiming the word “witch” without flinching, without anger, without provocation, not as a way to reclaim feminine power and stick it to the men, warranted as that may be: It was essentially an invitation to observe the cycle of the seasons.

A threshold beckoned.

* * *

Natalie, a recent empty-nester, lives with her husband Paul and two dogs in a modest townhome, with a creek and a dozen rogue gardens installed by various residents running behind it. The garage is full of motorbikes. The porch is swept clean on the day I visit, six months into the 13 Moons program, wanting to talk with her about this radical word and why, in a world still unsure what to do with powerful women, she’s not afraid that she’s exposing herself to pitchforks and fires, haters, and trolls.

Even though I am not a member of any kind of coven or cult, (I don’t think book club counts), I know deep in my bones to never throw another woman onto the fire for helping you. That has been done too many times.

A tea blend of her own mixing — vanilla chaga chai — is brewing on the stove in an open saucepan. She tends to it, as I settle in, sneaking glimpses around the room, looking for evidence of witchcraft — pentagrams, cloaks, bottled frogs. Nothing. The space is uncluttered, a throw-rug on the armchair, a couple of stark white deer skulls are mounted, European-style, on a wall against a reclaimed barn board — definitely more Soho chic than occult-goth. Her husband returns from town, where he has picked up fresh croissants for us. He’s tall and strong, with a tightly cropped red beard — he looks like a guy you’d run into at the gym, at the surf break, at the hardware store.

“So, what’s it like living with a witch?” I ask him as Natalie attends to our tea, a light-hearted question sprouting out of the great compost of fears I am thinking. Is it impossibly hard to be with a woman who comfortably claims her own power, magic, cycles, voice? What kind of a man can love and honor a witch? And lurking deep beneath it all: Will my husband be one of them?

Paul rolls his eyes, overly-dramatically, pointing up to the light fixture in the kitchen — light bulbs housed in mason jars of all sizes, evoking summer cabins and fireflies and Kinfolk magazine dinner party lanterns. “I made this for her because everything ends up in jars. Have you seen inside these cupboards?” He walks around the house, in faux-exasperation, opening doors to reveal neat stacks of jars, full of dried petals, leaves, syrups, tonics, salves, salts. “And there’s more upstairs!” If it hadn’t been for the dinner party they’d hosted the previous night, most of their apartment’s horizontal surfaces would be covered in jars, he tells me, and the front porch would have housed a dead raven and a dead Cooper’s hawk.

“She’s always sending me out in search of dead things,” he jokes. He picks up roadkill in case she can salvage feathers or skulls.

“When he first met me, I was already a skull collector, and now he goes and finds them for me and brings them back,” says Natalie. “He’s gotten really good at living with witchy stuff.”

The two of them are remarkably self-sufficient — an animal lover (“he loves animals more than people”), Paul realized veganism left him tired and undernourished, so took up hunting to procure his own meat humanely; one of the deer skulls mounted on the wall was harvested this fall, its meat now fills their freezer. They grow a garden, wildcraft, eat well. There is an ease between them — a tidal push and pull as they navigate their modest shared space and the morning routine, without evidence of fake niceness, of power trips or struggles.

Witchcraft, in Natalie Rousseau’s mind, is too non-dogmatic and non-hierarchical to submit to a single all-encompassing definition. “As a practice, it’s so highly individual,” she says, “but across the board, it is very place-based, land-based and body-based. For me, it’s about cultivating a relationship with your own body, your own mind, your emotions, and subtle sensing faculties. It’s learning how to trust your intuition. It’s about reclaiming your own instincts, but also being able to feel: this is what stress feels like in my body, this is what relaxation feels like, this is what it feels like to say yes to something out of a sense of obligation or pressure, this is what it feels like to have a boundary. This is what it feels like when I’m safe. These cues come to us from our bodies. It has to be, for it to work well, otherwise, you’re always reaching outside yourself for another authority.”

This is what she wants to help women, particularly, to reclaim: their sense that they are the first authority on themselves, that they can trust their bodies’ wisdom.

“The biggest thing I want to share with people,” says Natalie of her teaching and online courses, “is how to trust themselves. Everyone can very easily make the medicines that their household would need for common household complaints — colds and flus and chest colds and menstrual cramps — so many basic things that anyone can make very simply, quite affordably. I’m not anti-pharmaceutical. There are many medications people have to take daily to live. And if I have a serious infection, I’m going to take antibiotics; if I am seriously ill, I am going to go to the doctor; if I have any kind of trauma, I’m going to be so grateful for that form of medicine. But I believe the role kitchen medicine has is in the maintenance and prevention of illness.”

One of her biggest laments, though, as she makes videos and handouts and shares them with her online community, is that even people who have paid to do her course don’t feel that they have the time to take it into their kitchens. “Making a tincture is literally pouring vodka over plant materials and leaving it on your counter for four weeks!” she says. But it is easier for most people to just buy one online and have it delivered to their doorstep. “I am saddened by how easily women give their power over. This is the biggest thing I’ve noticed as a teacher in the past couple of years — how quickly women will say, ‘but how do you do this? I don’t know how to do this! I’m afraid to try this because I might not be good at it, I might be doing it wrong. I’m an imposter.’ I really struggle with this. Where is it coming from?”

But she knows. We have relinquished our power, over a thousand years or more, of wounding, of witch-burnings, of patriarchy either convincing us we have none or forcibly stripping it away, (hello Harvey Weinstein), until all we feel empowered to do, now, in 2020, is consume. And we’ve been doing that with all our might.

We override the listening, we ignore the nudges, we push through, like good soldiers. “Most people are running so hard,” observes Natalie. “Our culture is so focussed on productivity. We are so overly heroic — it’s all or nothing. I can’t do something unless I’m an expert. I don’t want to try. But this is a craft. It’s a path of education.”

Natalie’s invitation is gentle, and she’s crafted her online course to serve that: Start with one plant and learn its taste, its smell. Spend five minutes a day on meditation or in conscious ritual and begin to notice what’s going on in your nervous system, in your mind, in your body.

“When he first met me, I was already a skull collector, and now he goes and finds them for me and brings them back,” says Natalie. “He’s gotten really good at living with witchy stuff.”

Don’t get so distracted by the word witch, that you fail to notice that it is connected to craft. Witchcraft, for Natalie, is a path of learning “how to trust and problem solve, from within, knowing that we are in a system of power that, for better, for worse, will strip us of any ability to trust ourselves and to always feel empty so we have to keep buying more stuff.”

When she says this, a deep thrill of recognition hums in me, accompanied by a shiver of fear. Those are revolutionary things to say out loud, to cast into the open air. I recognize it viscerally as the kind of talk that gets people in trouble.

* * *

Last summer, before I met Natalie, I had stepped from my backyard patio stones onto freshly cut grass and spied the sinuous form of a wandering garter snake. I leaned in quickly, excitedly, about to call my 6-year-old over to glimpse the garden visitor before it shimmied away. But it was eerily still. Ugly slash wounds marked its body. It was dead. Innocent victim to the ride-on lawnmower. Obliterated by our oblivion.

“Oh no,” I muttered. “I’m so sorry!”

I had already begun to wake up to the natural world, it’s rhythms, it’s offerings of medicine, it’s otherness, but it had come with a shadow side, a growing despair at what we were doing to the world. Even without a malicious intention, I was causing death and destruction — just mowing the lawn, drinking my coffee, wiping my ass: My actions, all our human activity, had compounding impacts that were destroying the snakes, the ocean, the atmosphere, the forests, the icecaps — beyond repair.

I wanted my garden to be a habitat. I wanted the bees to waggle-dance directions to my sunflowers to their hive-mates, I wanted the wandering garter snakes to nest in their hibernacula through the winter and bask in the long grass in the summer, I wanted to lie on my back and watch butterflies dance through the flowers and the hummingbirds zoom in and out, I wanted to inhabit innocence again.

I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. My penitence froze me in place, scared to make a move for fear of ruining something else. Then, regret overriding my squeamishness, I fetched the flat-bladed shovel and edged it under the dead snake. I carried her body over to the vegetable patch, and in a space between the beds, where the mower never goes, I laid her down. I picked marigolds and calendula from around the garden, where they’d been planted to keep the snails away, and lay the bright orange blossoms in a circle around her.

Grandmother snake, I whispered, hoping that some force that exists beyond the definitively dead snake at my feet, might spread the word among the entire species, “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean it. I will try to be more careful.”

It was a made-up ritual, the kind that a kid might perform deep in her dream world at the bottom of the garden, and it made my 44 year-old-self feel a little bit better. At least I’d made a gesture of repair, had expressed my desire to return into balance with the living world around me. If it had any effect, I’d never know. I went back inside, said nothing.

A few days later, out in the garden, my husband tripped over the skeleton of a decomposing snake, ringed by wilted flowers, half consumed by ants.

“That was spooky,” he confronted me. “What’s going on? Are you some kind of witch?”

* * *

Natalie has always been comfortable with the word. Now she’s having fun inviting people to consider the archetype, circle it, unpack it, stumble upon some kind of recognition: Wait a second! Maybe I am a witch!

“It’s cool how people in the western world can take a description that has been used mostly as a slur, and turn it around to use as something empowering,” she says.

For thousands of years, witch was a term used to incite violence against women. By the most conservative estimates, half a million people, mostly women, were executed in the European witch craze between 1300 and 1650. Accusations of witchcraft were used against women, says Rousseau, “in ways that were extremely dangerous and terrifying. It was really about getting power from them, and getting land back. So, to use a word like that in an empowered way, even today, you have to know you’re safe to do it. And it’s important to realize that in many places in the world, it’s still not safe for women to say that. But if we can, in safe places, take that word and turn it around, that, to me, is extremely powerful.”

I wanted the bees to waggle-dance directions to my sunflowers to their hive-mates, I wanted the wandering garter snakes to nest in their hibernacula through the winter and bask in the long grass in the summer, I wanted to lie on my back and watch butterflies dance through the flowers and the hummingbirds zoom in and out, I wanted to inhabit innocence again.

Natalie herself embodies empowerment. Not in the traditional way I have come to recognize power — as someone standing over, dominating someone else, her source of power comes from within.

She doesn’t need to take any from her partner.

“Do you find this relationship at all emasculating?” I joke to Natalie’s husband.

“I don’t. Not at all. No,” he replies.

“We’ve always given each other space to be ourselves.”

But that’s not always a guarantee of safety.

If it is dangerous to be an empowered woman in the world, then it’s dangerous, too, for the men who love them.

Lyla June Johnston is an author and activist of Diné and European heritage. Her inquiry into her disowned European heritage led to a realization: The millions of women burned alive, drowned alive, dismembered alive, beaten, raped and otherwise tortured as so-called, “witches,” were not witches at all. They were the medicine people of old Europe. Her lens, as a contemporary indigenous woman, and as a survivor of sexual violence, helped her identify that those were the women who understood the herbal medicines, the ones who prayed with stones, the ones who passed on sacred chants. And the all-out warfare of the witch burnings didn’t just harm the women. It had a profound effect on the men who loved them, their husbands, sons, brothers. She recognizes the echo of this in the story of her own time, of her own people. “Nothing makes a man go mad like watching the women of his family get burned alive. If the men respond to this hatred with hatred, the hatred is passed on. And who can blame them? While peace and love are the correct response to hatred, it is not an easy response by any means.”

How many men have kept their women down, tried to keep them at home, have become the handcuffs that the women fought against because they were answering to their own unarticulated primal instinct to keep them safe?

Natalie Rousseau speculates, “I am sure historically you had lots of husbands telling their wives to tone it down, not because they didn’t respect their power, but because they were genuinely afraid. I’d apply that to any women described as uppity — getting involved politically, or getting involved in local stuff that’s happening, fighting for the environment: Stop getting noticed so much. This could be dangerous.”

Some dangers are too great to be able to protect each other from. And so we turn the fight on each other — little domestic power-trips that distract us from the fact that we’ve relinquished all our power any way to the Great Machine.

* * *

My tentative inquiries into witchcraft, becoming fluent in my own moods and emotions, and paying attention to the seasons, barely prepared me for the abrupt slow-the-fuck-down order that came when COVID-19 landed in British Columbia, in my village, as school broke for spring break. The emergency handbrake was pulled. Everything came to a squealing stop — all my plans, canceled; all the stores, closing; the whole damn world, under house arrest and in a panic. The whiplash from the stunning speed of that shift has left my whole being hypersensitive to any sudden movement, to being jerked around. But the first things I have staked my trust in, in that space of uncertainty, were Natalie’s teachings: First, trust your body. Pause. Listen.

In self-imposed isolation with my husband and just-turned-7-year-old, I dance with anxiety and curiosity and disconnection and too-much-information. The well-trodden pathways we have all been racing along, flexing our power and exercising our entitlements as consumers, are suddenly bordered up with emergency tape. This invitation that Natalie has been dripping out, month after month, takes root. There is far more potency available to us, than shopping, driving, holidaying, consuming, endlessly moving around the planet.

There is potency in all the feelings that have been showing up at my door. Oh, good morning frustration. Ah grief, yes, I suppose you’d like a cup of tea. Hello there, existential terror, I wondered when you’d pop by. There is potency in sitting with my back against a huge cedar tree and listening, in slowing down so much that I can give my 7-year-old my full attention. There is potency even in my words, when I soothe him down from a tantrum by saying, “you know, this is a really hard time for everyone in the whole world right now because no one knows what’s going to happen and no one can play with their friends. I’m really proud of you.” And I can feel his body relax into this space of being acknowledged in his struggles and his efforts.

I don’t know if there are any medicinal properties in the tincture of St John’s Wort and valerian that I drop into water and hand my husband, to gentle his nervous system. Or in the jar of immune-boosting oxymel, that I brewed up with grated ginger and turmeric and orange peel, and shake every day. But even if it’s a placebo, there’s a relief for me in feeling I can do something, can offer my people some kind of healing intention in a little glass, that I can acknowledge that this is hard for my husband too, and that acknowledgment isn’t a concession that takes away from my own sense of struggle.

For decades, we’ve bought into the illusion that our power is as consumers. Now that stores are closing and the shelves are emptying and we have to stay home and not immediately indulge every whim that arises, we all feel powerless. But that was never our truest source of power. There’s another source that we can all plug back into, our deep relationship and interbeing with the life force. Maybe, this is our threshold moment. Maybe, this is a chance to craft a few little spells, to speak the words of the world we long to inhabit — a place where the currency of kindness and wonder flow, where humans return to a deep memory of belonging among the plants and creatures, and to brew up a cup of tea, light a candle, and dream it into existence. Maybe it’s an invitation to say, “I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to, I will try and be more careful,” and to build a little altar, even if you feel kind of cray cray doing it. Let your nervous system settle as you invent some small ritual, (just ask your inner 5-year-old for guidance, she probably remembers exactly what to do), and make a gesture of repair.

“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have on my Apocalypse team,” I tell my husband, the night the global virus countertops 400,000. He’s been chopping wood, auditing the pantry, getting our kid across the finish line of the LEGO project that has absorbed him for four days. My husband was a farm kid. He’s always been practical, my polar opposite. Even when we have battled each other, (am I giving up too much of my power to him? If I acknowledge his pain and his needs, will that cancel mine out?) I’ve always known he would do anything to keep me safe. “Not that I can request an upgrade now,” I joke. “But I bet you’re glad to be stuck with me. One always wants a daydreamer at your side in a pinch.”

“Oh yeah,” he spoofs me: “’ The stock market is collapsing, let me just go check my Tarot cards.’”

We laugh. And hold each other. We can’t buy our way out of this. None of us. Our entire species, our global community, is being vividly reminded that we are all in this together, inextricably connected, epidemiologically entwined, in our vulnerability and our sweet potential. We didn’t need Amazon and airlines and online shopping to know what the witches have been telling us all this time. All the power we need is right here — between us, around us, within us. We just have to remember it.

* * *

Lisa Richarson

is a senior contributor to Coast Mountain Culture magazine and a columnist for Pique newsmagazine and edits the hyperlocal websites,

TheWellnessAlmanac.com

and

TracedElements.com.

She’s deep into a decade-long mission to slow the fuck down, but still optimize life for happiness and productivity. Born and raised in Australia, she has lived as a guest on the unceded territory of the Líl̓wat Nation since a ski vacation went rogue 20-odd years ago.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Posted by

Lisa Richardson

April 8, 2020

https://longreads.com/2020/04/08/how-to-tell-your-husband-youre-a-witch/

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dustedmagazine · 3 years

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Bill Meyer: Lockdown pickers 2020

You don’t need me to tell you that it’s been a hell of a year. The pile-on of environmental disaster, the COVID pandemic, people being blasted with teargas for having the temerity to suggest that living while Black shouldn’t be a shooting offense, 70 million-odd Americans endorsing and abetting buffoonish fascism, and the virtual evaporation of live music — and that’s just off the top of my head.

Still, 2020 has been a great year for recorded music. Working from home and not going out at night has meant more time to play it, and while the supply and production chains have been undeniably wonky (oh yeah, I forgot to mention our departing president’s efforts to drown the US Postal Service in the bathtub and the Apollo Masters factory fire; really, fuck you, 2020), a lot of good records have made it into my house. The year has also yielded creative musical responses by creative music makers to the loss of live performances. Chicago Experimental Sound Studio provided a platform for The Quarantine Concerts, a series of live-streaming and prepared video performances that took us into performers’ homes, basements, back yards and pottery studios (I’m talking about you, Terrie Ex). No, live-streaming is not the same as attending a concert. The experience of community and shared space can’t reach you through a screen. But hearing Joe McPhee send a shout-out from his basement Batcave to Peter Brötzmann, seeing Arto Lindsay struggle with the orientation lock on his phone and getting drawn into the layered environment that Olivia Block created with film projections, played sounds and no help from an intruding cat delivered some of the same authenticity, disaster and wonder that concerts at their best can provide. And if you have had the chance to attend some concerts since March (I’ve seen three; two appearances by improvising ensembles involving Dave Rempis in a park on Chicago’s north side, and an all-outdoor edition of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival on the south side), you probably already know that live music events aren’t the same, either. The feelings of communal trust and safety, the internal shift that says “yup, this is where I’m supposed to be,” is gone. We have a lot to recapture and rebuild once the pandemic passes.

The sales and streaming platform, Bandcamp, became a hero simply by virtue of simply treating musicians like people who need a hand rather resources to be sucked dry and discarded. The monthly Bandcamp Fridays, when the company refrained from taking its cut and passed that percentage along to the artists and labels, afforded fans a direct way to help out folks whose work was getting them through the day, and allowed people who had lost all their performing opportunities a chance to make a little money. Some players took the opportunity to release music solely through Bandcamp. English soprano/tenor saxophonist John Butcher has issued seven titles collectively dubbed The Memory of Live Music. They are a sequence of previously unreleased, archival concert recordings monthly, all splendid musical statements, but also reminders of what we have been missing. Chicago saxophonist Dave Rempis’ Aerophonic Records likewise posted live recordings of short-lived ensembles like the Outskirts that he’d never gotten around to documenting, as well as one-off encounters, such as a marvelously wooly 2012 concert with guitarist Terrie Ex and drummer Tim Daisy at Milwaukee’s Sugar Maple.

But Bandcamp also gave some musicians an opportunity to create outside the frameworks of physical recordings and performance in physical proximity. Soprano/tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and her husband, drummer Tom Rainey, used her Bandcamp page as a conduit for Stir Crazy, a semi-weekly series of home recordings. Each installment lasts 15 or 20 minutes, and it might be a free improvisation, a run through a friend or inspirational elder’s compositions, or a topical commentary, such as the loving, skeletal performances of tunes from the American Songbook that they offered a few days after the election. And jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg has kept a Plague Diary of nearly-daily sketches for clarinet and electric keyboard. Some celebrate friends, colleagues, family members, and historical figures; others simply work out an idea. It feels a bit like an invitation to look over the guy’s shoulder and see how his notions come into being.

Other parties made the circumstances of the time into a premise for new work. Mary Staubitz (Donna Parker) and Russ Waterhouse (Blues Control) reached out to fellow musicians to contribute to Distant Duos. Each candidate’s mission was to improvise for five minutes while thinking of another player, who would likewise improvise for five minutes while thinking of their counterpart. Then Waterhouse and Parker would combine the tracks. The circumscribed duration and prior acquaintance kept collaborations by the likes of Kryssi Battalene / Jayson Gerycz and Jeb Bishop / Joseph Mauro charged and focused. And the Swiss label Insub instituted Distances, for which it enlisted eight composers (including Michael Pisaro-Liu, Ryoko Akama and Sarah Hennies) to devise pieces to be performed by two physically remote musicians (such as Mike Majkowski & Cyril Bondi, or Cristián Alvear & Violeta Motta). Each contribution consists of two videos, one a sequence of interviews with the composer and the players, the other a split-screen projection of the music being played. And if you want to take the music home, you can always buy it on Bandcamp.

But the response that compelled me most is AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, an online festival of new work initiated by Estwhile Records’ Jon Abbey. On March 12, as concert seasons canceled and countries went to lockdown, Abbey and a circle of associates invited sound artists to contribute newly recorded pieces. Over the next six months they posted 240 pieces to Facebook and Bandcamp. Most were solo works, but several were blind duos for which musicians with shared histories and separate addresses submitted solo pieces with the understanding that they’d be mixed together. At the end of the festival, Taku Unami combined sounds from all 240 pieces into a final entry, “All Together Now.” The works encompassed paint-stripping noise, solemn études, field recordings, electronic music, musique concrete, improvisations, compositions, and works that combined several of the aforementioned methods. The contributors included people you probably know (Tom Carter, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sarah Hennies, Vanessa Rossetto), others I certainly didn’t (Fangyi Liu, Asha Sheshadri), and one who also writes for Dusted (Michael Rosenstein). They made diaries of their circumscribed days, laments for lost experiences and memorials for friends who died during the festival’s duration. There are too many good ones to name, so I’ll just single out a couple performers whose work especially touched me. Reinier van Houdt’s first piece, “drift nowhere past (22 march 2020),” marvelously captured the still loneliness of life that had shrunk to what you could perceive through a window or a screen. Five subsequent monthly instalments came to feel like notes of progress from an ongoing search for purpose and grace. And the radio captures that make up Keith Rowe’s “GF SUC,” recorded as Black Lives Matters protests arose around the world, imparted sadness beyond words; I’ve heard no music that was truer to the tragedy of this time.

Bill Meyer

#yearend 2020 #dusted magazine #bill meyer #experimental sound studio #dave rempis #hyde park jazz festival #bandcamp #john butcher #aerophonic records #stir crazy #plague diary #distant duos #distances #live music #improvised music #jazz #quarantine concerts

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crasherfly · 4 years

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What I’m Up To

Taking a brief pause from my fantasy screenplay to talk a bit about what I’m playing/reading/listening to these days.

VIDYA GAMES

Cities: Skylines- Still working on my shithole city in all its glory. San Cruz has expanded to over 100k residents and in the past week I’ve built a level 3 park, extensive monorail system, and even extensive helicopter pickup lines. It’s still a terrible place to live, but it’s also fun to grapple with the challenges of a desert map.

Yakuza 0- I’m gonna post this take here, since we’re not on twitter and I’m safe from the mobs- Yakuza 0 is the experience everyone promised me Witcher 3 would be. Thrilling combat, a fascinating game world, and lovely, meaningful side quests. If this sounds like I’m digging at Witcher 3, I promise I’m not. I personally didn’t enjoy that game. But obviously, many, many people did and would disagree with my critiques. That’s totally fine! I’m just saying I’m enjoying Yakuza 0 for merits similar to what I’ve heard in connection with the Witcher franchise- and I could also see people having similar gripes, too! I’ve been on a well documented single player drought over the past couple months. Yakuza 0 finally broke me out of that, and it’s been a thrill. Getting out of the COD grind cycle has been a joy. This is a lovely experience that rewards curiosity by sparking yet more curiosity. I can’t wait to see how it continues to open up. Expect my Twitter account to go on about this for a while.

Mario 64- I have 8 stars! I’m told I have like, 113 more to go, a number which makes me groan. So far, Mario 64 has felt like an obligation that is occasionally fun. It’s very dated, but it has the DNA that would go on to make later games like Odyssey an absolute joy. Games like these feel more like an exercise in filling in my gamer history gaps than they do labors of love. Like most retro games, I have a hard time getting into Mario 64 for longer than 20 minutes at a time. So this will likely be a long-running project.

Star Wars: Squadrons- I probably should have known better, but I picked this game up ‘cuz the reviews were decent and the price felt right. Good news is that in the couple of hours I’ve spent with it, the gameplay is mostly solid and the graphics are beautifully rendered. It feels like both Rogue Squadron AND X-Wing, which is a hell of an accomplishment. Bad news is several of the missions appear to be badly broken, requiring numerous restarts. The game is generous with checkpoints, so it’s not a huge deal, but it is annoying. Hopefully they patch that stuff. I also haven’t tried multiplayer yet. None of my friends have bit on picking this up, so I’m not sure when or if it will happen. Assuming I can power through the hammy story, I’ll at least finish the campaign sometime down the line, even if I can’t be bothered to care how any of this fits into the larger world of Star Wars.

Warzone- Still doing that Season 6 thing! Subways have been mostly a disappointment for me so far, and the new marksman rifle has made the current meta a veritable hell for anyone with underdeveloped quick scoping skills, but I still get a couple matches in every day.

ANIME

God of High School- To say God of High School moves fast is an understatement. True to form, it sprinted its way through the finale. It’s got some lovely sequences, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the OST, but beyond a couple of choice battles, it didn’t leave a strong impression on me. I’m glad I saw it, but I’m not thirsting for a new season.

Dragon Ball- I switched over to the English dub of this show. I don’t usually do that, but I was struggling to keep my attention. I think in a way it helped? The English dub actors are far more cartoonish and silly, which really plays to the absurd animation and story turns. I’m on S1E13, and the first summoning of the dragon just happened. I won’t spoil except to say...this show has a deeply specific sense of humor, and I’m starting to dig it?

Fire Force- Season 2 is finally taking off for me. I’m on ep 14, and the focus has shifted over to the mysterious Joker. The battles have been compelling, as have been the mysteries placed by his storyline. I was struggling with feeling invested in S2 thus far, but the past few ep’s have reminded me of why I found this show special in the first place- when it gets serious and stays focused, it’s one of the tightest active shonen stories.

Manga

I’ve been on a bit of a manga break lately. Today I did take time with another chapter of Fruits Basket, which continues to be a lovely delight. I also recently received Master Edition copies of both Fairy Tail and Berserk. This week, my goal is to finish both Fruits Basket and my latest volumes of One Piece so I can dive into my new Master Editions.

Music

I haven’t had much change in my music tastes lately. I’ve been listening to a lot of Kompany and other dubstep artists, mostly ‘cuz I find the deep bass and variety of sounds soothing to me while I’m writing and zoning out during sessions of Cities: Skylines. I also enjoy its tempo while I’m running. Anything that helps the time pass, really.

Tabletop Games

I played 6 hours of DND this weekend. It was mostly a free-form improv session where I let the players do basically anything they wanted to within the gameworld we established during The Lost Mines of Phandelver. It was very heavy on roleplay, without a single instance of combat. While I was personally exhausted after the session, the players expressed that they had a very good time. We’ll be looking to finish up what they started in a bonus session for October!

Wrastlin!

My WWF Discord group just finished 1999 King of the Ring. Mr. Ass won! One of our folks actually got her bracket right. I had predicted Kane winning, so I was obviously out of luck on that. In the last RAW, Stone Cold Steve Austin just won the Heavy Weight Title from the Undertaker in an unlikely win! We’ll see how long that stint lasts...

Streams

I tried streaming from my personal Twitch using a schedule last week!

It...had mixed results.

My Warzone streams were my most popular, which is funny, ‘cuz I’m not that good at Warzone. My least popular were my Dungeon of the Endless and Yakuza 0 streams, which is not a big surprise. Those games aren’t that fun to watch.

I wanted to do the schedule as a an attempt to see if I could get a small audience or find some new meaning in games I was working through by presenting them as content.

I found the answer to both was more or less “not really”.

And that’s okay!

I also learned streaming, even just for an hour a night, is hard work. We should all be kinder to our content creators and in awe of the friends we have who do it even when on one is watching. Content creation is so unforgiving. Maybe if I stuck with it longer I’d have found my niche, but honestly, I just enjoy games for the games, and turning them into content just isn’t my speed.

I’ve been doing the whole SpriteClub thing per usual. I’m a paid subscriber now! And I even am on a greeting basis with some folks. That’s been really cool. We had debuts this weekend too, where creators submit new fighters. The system matches them with other fighters to determine ratings. It’s a lot of fun, and the event always has this festival atmosphere to it.

I’ve also been watching a lot of streams from the gals over at hololive-EN. Specifically, I’ve been watching Gawr Gura, Amelia Watson and Mori Calliope. It’s become nightly viewing in my household. I’ll save the debate on V-Tubers for a different place, suffice to say I have enjoyed the games they’ve presented and the personalities they’ve developed, and I think the success they’ve found is well earned. There are some talented folks behind these projects, and I find the streams to be relaxing, enjoyable, and at hours I can actually tune in for.

Personal News

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty down. This can be easily correlated with the shift in temperature, for sure. I know a lot of people really dig fall, and I used to be a SPOOKY SEASON guy myself, but as I get older, fall has shifted into this period of mourning as I recognize the shortening days and the coming winter, which has always played hell with my body.

I’ve been struggling with a number of phantom symptoms that seem to pop up this time of year- bad digestion, terrible sleep (likely resulting from mild apnea), fatigue and heart palpitations. In turn, my mental health has been seriously flagging.

At the suggestion of my therapist, I’ve started up a new vitamin regimen including a multivitamin and magnesium. I’ve also focused on finding potassium enriched foods and have cut back significantly on my drinking and caffeine. So far, this has actually resulted in me gaining weight ‘cuz I’ve been indulging in a lot of sugar as a coping mechanism, but I’m working through getting back to a healthy place where I can both track my intake but also be content with where I’m at. Right now I’m doing my best to try and fight the urge to become a Nap Guy.

Last week I took several naps, even on my off days, and I’ve had a hard time sustaining my energy throughout the day, so I’m doing a better job of getting the sleep my body asks for while also structuring my day with more purpose so I’m left with less time just lying around wondering what to do.

Last week I broke my personal best for a 5K, breaking 24 minutes. For today’s run, I plan to try and break my 7:30 time on my mile run to the gym.

For weights, I’ve gotten into a rhythm of 3 times a week, with Mondays and Fridays focusing on my core exercises- presses and curls, with Wednesdays focusing on pulls that are centered on working out my back, as well as bodyweight exercises such as dips and pull ups. This variation has given my limbs more time to heal up, which is welcome. Now if only I could be kinder to my body AFTER the gym, I might see some actual progress!

Work continues to be what it is. I’m at 30 hours now, which continues to be a huge positive. I don’t think I could keep at it with 40 hours. Change is a constant, and they seem to find new ways to make our jobs more convoluted every day. I have a quarterly review coming up with my new supervisor, but I have a feeling it won’t be nearly so traumatic as the last one, as I’ve done a good job of straightening up and flying right.

As I get more distance from August, I’m starting to recognize it- the events of my workplace disasters, my unplanned vacation, my off the rails spending and drinking- for what it was- it was a breakdown. And I’m still recovering from it. I was deeply unwell, and I took on some trauma- some of it wasn’t stuff I was looking for, some of it was stuff I brought on myself. I’m working through it. I wish I could say things like therapy have made a huge difference, but frankly, most of the work comes from stuff like this, where I’m just writing and being transparent with myself. That’s where I find the most healing work happens.

I still have a lot of my social media muted. When I need news, it typically filters through into my Discord, or Yahoo dings my phone or I see it on my Facebook feed. It’s fair to say that lately it’s felt like everything just Happens So Much.

I feel for my friends who are directly impacted- by the election, by the supreme court, by...just, everything. It all makes my own personal journey and endeavors feel...deeply small. At the same time, I just don’t have the emotional capacity required to house this perpetual crowd of events or constantly process everything in real time. I’m not sure when, if ever, I will have that again. I struggle to read ANYTHING- even friendly sites like Defector or The Discourse, without feeling an immense downswing.

I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I could just gut up and stay constantly plugged in for the sake of pals who might need to openly hash this out or draw attention to their causes or needs, but based on the past few months, I’m not sure I can take care of myself, let alone others. As I often tell close friends, my priorities these days are this small and in this order- Stay Healthy, Stay Kind, Stay Employed, Stay Productive- anything that goes right beyond that feels like a bonus in 2020.

At any rate, thanks for reading the update, y’all!

I’ll try and post these more regularly. I just wanted to check in with everyone and let y’all know how everything is going these days. Stuff like this helps me keep honest, as lately I’ve had a hard time sussing out what my direction is these days. Stay safe and well, and hit me up with what you’re up to, when you find a moment!

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pravasichhokro · 4 years

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Schooling Then & Now...

During the closure of schools due to pandemic from March 2020 till date (End Oct 2020), I have heard how classes are being held and attended from home at least in Metros. I am reminded of my school days during1954-66 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

My first school was a family run primary school in the residential complex that we lived. I studied there as it was convenient to attend and my elder sister also went to the same school. It was housed in a bungalow with four to five rooms, each housing one standard. It was from 11 am to 5 pm. It was a traditional school with standard syllabus. The school was co-ed and we sat on floor. Our school bag had a book or two and a slate (black stone) and white chalk. We walked to the school. The medium of instruction was Gujarati

Then I went to a special primary school run by Sarabhais (Vikram Sarabhai’s family). The school had four classes, one each for one standard. Each class had 10-12 students only. The school started at 8.30 am and till 4 pm. On arrival all children would be given a glass of milk and then academic lessons would start till lunch at 12 noon. The children brought roti/chapati from home but all else was served by the school-Dal, Rice, Vegetables, Papad, pickles etc. Children from class 4 normally managed the lunch service, though food was cooked by others. School was co-ed and we hardly carried any books or other items in the school bag except a box of roti/chapati. I travelled by the city bus to commute to school. The medium of instruction was Gujarati.

After lunch, the non-academic activities were the main focus. These included music (mainly folk), folk dance (garba/dandiya), painting, carpentry, stitching/tailoring etc. the teachers of high caliber came to teach these special skills or hobby. Our music teacher was an AIR (All India Radio) artiste. We also undertook projects of a long duration. For example, in carpentry class we built Sam’s Cabin on the treetop (the school had a large area). We also staged plays in open air once a year. Each and every student must participate in the play and hence they were selected accordingly. One was “Alibaba and Forty Thieves”, and another was “Gulliver’s travel to pigmy land” (a shadow play).

The school also imparted general knowledge in the most effective way. We once slept in the school so that we could be taken to an observatory at 3 am to see the sky and the stars. We were once taken to the Municipal office to see the model of Nehru Bridge under construction (before1960) followed by a visit to the riverbed to see the construction. Children were encouraged to explore and most of us would sit on the wall (on the riven bank) just watch the Sabarmati river in flood. We were allowed to climb trees and play with our teachers. I found it to be a good place for an all around development.

Then I was admitted to a popular Gujarati medium school which boasted of the large area (I think 300 acres or more) and it followed Gandhian philosophy. Our uniform was from Khadi. The trust was Jain. The school was co-ed and I commuted by city bus or walked the 3 km short route on some days with other students and a teacher. Theschool was from 10.40 am to 5.10 pm with two short breaks. Saturday was half day- 7.30 am to 11 am.

The middle school (std 5 to 7) was in a separate building about 500 meters from either entry. We sat on floor with a wooden stool in front. The school bag had textbooks, notebooks and a pencil box along with a snacks box. In addition to academic classes we had optional selected non-academic courses. Music was compulsory and my weakest subject. One could choose from music, painting, stitching/tailoring or agriculture. I opted for agriculture. I was given a piece of land (5 x 10 ft) and allowed to grow vegetables etc. The vegetables were available for sale and I used to take some home.

The high school (std 8 to 11) was in a larger building near the main gate. The compass box was added to books and notebooks. We used to write with an ink pen.The classes had a bench. Between these buildings was a huge playground for volleyball, kho-kho and kabaddi etc.We had a prayer hall covered but open from sides where all students would gather first thingin the morning and pray. At this gathering, we were also able to enjoy cultural programs based on the festivals and some speeches by leading persons- politicians, writers, thinkers, and ex-students.

During the entire school years, I attended classes regularly and was not permitted to attend any private tuition, In any case private tuition was not so popular then, My father insisted that I asked all my doubts to the teachers in the class or after class in the teachers (staff) room. I hardly recall any parents’ teacher meeting. Strangely I had not spoken to any girl student at my school or class throughout the eleven years, though it was co-ed. I loved outdoor games and in the eight standard I joined a hockey coaching center (outside) run by an ex-India player. This led me to go for state school level hockey tournament and participated in all India school meet in Shillong in Feb,1966.

My daughter went to an international school in Japan and her experience was different than schooling in India. She walked to school everyday for 20 minutes and carried only an umbrella and lunch on some days. She played basketball, hockey, and volleyball. She would go ice skating or on over night trips to gain knowledge not just from textbooks but from experiences. When she came back to study in India, she found the education system hard and competitive and teachers had minimal interest in teaching except for scoring high marks.

I now will attempt to compare the above school life with present day school life in metros before COVID-19 (March 2020). Though I have no first-hand experience of it, I have gathered it from parents of school going kids. Most of these go to a private school and not municipal or govt school in various parts of the globe.

Before COVID-19 struck, the school time was 8 am to 2 pm and probably five days a week. Kids must carry a huge/heavy school bag containing water bottle, books, notebooks, compass box, lunch box (for two breaks). Kids do use ball point pen or gel pen. The school bag weighs a lot and there are complaints of kids, but no solution seems to be in sight. Most kids go to school by school bus or auto-rickshaw or dropped by parents. Hardly anybody walks to school. A lot of focus is on academic work and homework. Most schools lack a playground. Some schools do encourage extra-curricular activities, but most kids take up extra-curricular activities because of the parents or peer pressure. Some govt or municipal schools run two shifts to make maximum use of the infrastructure- school building. Most classes have 50 children in each room.

Many of the schools have annual day and they are a huge burden on parents both in terms of time and expenses. Most items on annual day celebrations lack heritage or folk influence on dance or music or singing. Most kids (also their teachers) do watch tv and are influenced by its content. Many kids have the luxury of travel domestically or internationally with their parents on holidays. I do not see many activities among school going kids in residential complexes. Rural schools might still be following the historical timing (11 am to 5 pm) and the syllabus with almost poor teachers.

After March 22, 2020 the schools were closed, and students and teachers were encouraged to attend online classes. In last six months (till Oct end) the schools are closed and online classes have become the routine.

In metros, many private schools are actively following the online class concept. I understand the online class can be attended provided one has a laptop or a tablet or a smart mobile with adequate data and speed for Wi-Fi connection. The classes are for four hours a day. The homework is also given online and submitted online. In most cases projects given seem to be done by parents and not children which is not the best way to learn. While writing exams adults at home keep prompting the child to ensure high score /marks are achieved. Teaching a child short cuts or to cheat is not beneficial in the long run. Parents forget that getting marks above 90% should not be the only aim for the child.

Many families are facing the shortage of hardware as the parent or parents attend office from home (WFH) and they need the same hardware- laptop or tablet and a strong WiFi connection. If there is more than one child attending class/school from home the shortage of hardware and infrastructure is felt more and is also a financial burden too.

Poor people are finding it hard to attend classes online. My domestic help has three children going to school and that is either municipal or govt school. They also hold classes online. But the poor family has only two mobiles and only one is smart. Her husband is a driver but has lost his job.

I dare not imagine what is happening at rural schools and their classes with no infrastructure like WiFi connectivity or smart mobile at home. Some may not have even electricity at home. I hope that large IT firms instead of running schools in rural India under the name of NGO’s should have ensured a good e-learning system but that seems like a dream. This would have been helpful during these times and need not depend on poor quality teachers.

In all the above activities the major problem is that children have lost physical touch with school, class, and teacher. They surely miss outdoor activities (sports etc.) with their classmates. They also must be missing the cultural activities on the festivals.

The mental stress of being confined to a residence for so long must be very real and parents must be finding it difficult to attend to it among their children and themselves.

Conclusion…….

I do believe that old time classes at school and freedom to mingle/play with classmates and children from neighborhood were great contributors to develop a child’s all faculties. The emphasis was outdoor activities and non-academic interests to be followed. The child was not stressed with pressures from parents, siblings, or peer day in and out.

Prior to lockdown due to pandemic, the metro school going kid was stressed with many issues- get up early, catch the bus or transport or do homework or dress properly with or without makeup for girls, etc. Parents were also stressed to see that their child is not lagging only in academic pursuit but also otherwise.

After lock down the situation has worsened for the child. The child is confined to the four walls of the residence with same family members and has no chance to go outdoors. (recent relaxation may permit going out but many parents do not want to take the risk). Outdoor activities are almost none and 24x7 the child is using handheld devices –Laptop, tablet, or smart phone to do schoolwork and to play games, also to see cartoons or other entertaining content on TV.

I pray for early release of restrictions due to COVID-19 and restoration of schools to normal working in general and in rural areas in particular.

#school #online school

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition May 8, 2020 – CLEMENTINE, SPACESHIP EARTH, BLUE STORY, VALLEY GIRL, ARKANSAS, HOW TO BUILD A GIRL and more!

And the summer that never was continues with no new movies in theaters unless you include a number of select drive-ins scattered across the country. There’s a lot of new stuff out this weekend, some good, some bad, but we’re getting to a point where every distributor big or small is dumping their movies to VOD in hopes of making money. But I guess that means there’s a lot more options of things to see, right?

The Virtual Oxford Film Festival continues this Friday with the virtual premieres of Steve Collins’ comedy I’ve Got Issues and the unrelated doc feature, I Am Not Alone (Note: both of these are only available for folks in Mississippi!). Also, the Hello, Gorgeous Shorts block (love the names they come up with to put these shorts together!) will debut with 8 new shorts, including Bad Assistant. You can get tickets to all of these things at the festival’s Eventive page.

For the next few days only, you can also win the Oxford Film Festival award-winning short Finding Cleveland right here for free! The film directed by Larissa Lam that follows husband Baldwin Chiu’s journey to Mississippi to investigate his roots will have its feature version, Far East Deep South, premiere as part of Oxford’s virtual festival in June.

One of the better films I watched this week (I guess that makes it this week’s “Featured Film”) is Lara Gallagher’s feature debut CLEMENTINE (Oscilloscope), a seemingly simple two-hander indie drama showcasing two fantastically talented actors in Otmara Marrero and Sydney Sweeney (HBO’s Euphoria). Marrero plays Karen, a young woman looking to get away after ending a relationship with a significantly older woman, deciding to break into her lover’s isolated lakeside home. There, she encounters Sweeney’s Lana, a mischievous younger teen of indeterminate age who Karen befriends. The two of them get closer as Karen is still in mourning for her previous relationship, but as she learns more about Lana, things clearly aren’t what they seem.

Gallagher has written a sweet and subdued character piece that at times veers into thriller territory but never goes so far across that line to take away from the drama. At the film’s core is the mystery about the two young women and their respective pasts, because we don’t even learn that much about Karen before heading to the lakeside house.

where there’s a lot of mystery about both of the young women at the story’s core, There were aspects of the movie that reminded me of the recent dramatic thriller Tape, where there’s also an aspect of sexual abuse and revenge, but it really never goes to places that might be expected. I’m a little bummed that I missed this at Tribeca last year, and part of that can be blamed on the enigmatic title which doesn’t really give a sense of what the movie is about at all. But Gallagher and her cast have done a fantastic job with a film that’s not necessarily easy to define or describe but leaves you with a warm feeling that films like this can still be made. (See Never Rarely Sometimes Always as another example of this.)

Now might be the perfect time for Matt Wolf’s new doc, SPACESHIP EARTH (Neon), which is all about the eight people who locked themselves into Biosphere II in the early ‘90s with the plans to live inside the ecologically self-contained environment for two years. Neon had two amazing scientific docs in 2019, Apollo 11 and The Biggest Little Farm, both which were in my Top 10 for the year, so imagine my disappointment when neither of them received Oscar nominations. Wolf previously directed 2013’s Teenage and last year’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, the latter being a decent doc using archival footage, and Spaceship Earth mixes all of the amazing archival footage with interviews with many of the key characters. In case you weren’t familiar with Biosphere II, it was an experiment set up where 8 individuals would spend two years inside an environment that’s meant to be fully self-sufficient. Wolf’s film goes back to the start of what was essentially a theater group who put together a number of global projects before tackling Biosphere II, a project that wasn’t taken very seriously by the scientific community because there were no scientists among the group. It was seen as “ecological entertainment” by some and a cult by others, and those feelings increase when it was discovered that not everything is what it seems. When an accident causes one of the “biospherians” to have to go outside, she ends up sneaking things back into Biosphere II, which is against the rules set up by the group. It’s a fairly fascinating doc if you were around during this time but only heard about it filtered through the news and the PR, but Wolf’s film goes deep into the project and the controversy surrounding it, as well as when it inevitably goes wrong. Wolf manages to get many of those involved, including the group’s leader, John Allen, and there’s even an appearance by another figure from U.S. politics who had their own documentary just last year! This is a really strong doc that is getting a digital release and apparently, it will even be screened on the sides of some buildings, which is a cool idea in this time where there aren’t many theaters.

A relatively big hit in the UK, BLUE STORY (Paramount), the directorial feature debut of British rapper Rapman, adapted from his own YouTube series, is now available via digital download, having originally been planned to get a US theatrical release in March. It’s about the friendship of two young British teens, Timmy and Marco, from the Peckham area of London but from opposite sides of what’s become a violent street gang feud. I saw this movie way back on March 11, and I had to rewatch it more recently since I had forgotten whether I liked it or hated it. I’m probably somewhere more in between, as I thought the young leads, Stephen Odubola (Timmy) and Micheal Ward (Marco), were both terrific in a movie that generally had some storytelling and pacing issues.

Honestly, I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on due to the heavy accents (even with the necessary subtitles), but it also didn’t really stand up to last year’s Les Miserables, a film set in a similar setting in France, but that one was nominated for an Oscar after being submitted by France. Besides writing and directing, Rapman also acts as the film’s ad-hoc narrator through a number of raps that gives his film a bit of a hip-hop musical feel. I’m not sure I was crazy about this decision since a lot of the time he is recapping something that we just saw take place.

The film definitely has a unique energy, as the first half alternates between youthful innocence and faux machismo, neither which generally does very much for me. I did enjoy the film’s romantic underpinnings as it shows young love between Timmy and a classmate named Leah (Karla-Simone Spence) , but that storyline comes to an abrupt and shocking halt about 45 minutes into the movie before the story jumps forward three years into something very different. (To be honest, the romantic aspects were handled in a far more interesting way in the recent indie Premature.) The movie does get far more dramatic and tense in this last act, while it also shows what a talented cast Rapman has put together in order for them to shift gears into the very different tone the movie then takes. It’s a jarring change, but it adds to what Rapman was trying to do in making Blue Story an almost-Shakespearean coming-of-age story set against an authentic urban landscape. I’m not 100% sure Blue Story will connect with young urban Americans in the same way as it clearly did in the UK, because the dialect and slang that pervades the film often makes it difficult to follow, but it’s quite a striking debut from the rapper/filmmaker.

Next up is VALLEY GIRL (Orion Pictures), a musical remake of Martha Coolidge’s 1983 movie that introduced many people to one Nicolas Cage. The new movie is directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg (A Deadly Adoption, “The Mindy Project”), and it stars the wonderful Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day) as Julie Richman, the valley girl of the title who is going to high school with her valley girl friends but becomes enamored with the punk kid Randy (Josh Whitehouse), who comes from a very different world. I’m not sure what else I can tell you about Valley Girl, since I’m under embargo on this one until Friday, so I’m not sure if I can tell you if it’s good or bad. I will say that if you like popular ‘80s groups like Modern English and others, the movie may give you a smile. It also stars Alicia Silverstone as the older Julie, telling her own daughter this story in a framing sequence, as well as Judy Greer as Julie’s mother and others, such as Mae Whitman, who can really belt it out in her role as Randy’s bandmate, “Jack.” This is supposed to open in some of those aforementioned drive-ins, as well as being available digitally.

Getting away from this week’s musicals, Clark Duke co-wrote and stars in his feature film directorial debut, ARKANSAS (Lionsgate), based on John Brandon’s novel. I haven’t read the novel, but Clark plays a lowlife named Swin, a drug-runner along with his partner Kyle (Liam Hemsworth), both of them pretending to be park rangers. Kyle is particularly interested in learning more about their enigmatic boss, the Arkansas-based drug kingpin known only as “Frog,” but their business arrangements get more complicated.

I had a few problems with this movie, much of it coming from the relatively weak writing that comes across like it was made by someone who has watched way too many Scorsese or Tarantino movies without really understanding why those filmmakers’ movies are so brilliant. I hate to say it, because I generally like Duke as an actor, but casting himself in the role of Swin without doing much beyond growing a moustache to make himself look sleazier really didn’t much for the material. He was a very odd pairing with the rugged and tougher Hemsworth.

The best part of the film is when it flashes back to 1985 West Memphis and we meet the actual “Frog,” played by Vince Vaughn, and we see him interacting with Michael K. Williams’ “Almond,” who he betrays to take over his drug business. I liked this bit of the movie even if Vaughn’s accent wasn’t great, but then we’re back to Duke and Hemsworth in present day, and that doesn’t hold up as well. Clarke overcomplicates things by creating a non-linear narrative that jumps back and forth in time and between two storylines – again, like Pulp Fiction – but the storytelling and dialogue doesn’t do enough to make up for the confusion this cause.

Clark certainly has brought on some decent actors, such as John Malkovich and Vivica A. Fox, but making himself the focus of much of the movie compared to the far more charismatic Hemsworth, hurts the movie more than helps it. I didn’t hate Eden Brolin as Swin’s love interest, Johnna, but they really didn’t enough chemistry to make them believable as a couple. Don’t get me wrong. I definitely commend Clark on taking on such a big project as his directorial debut, and it definitely grew on me, but it’s an erratic piece that pays tribute to far better films and that is its biggest detriment. Originally planned for a theatrical release on May 1, Arkansas will instead hit Apple, Amazon, On Demand platforms, DVD and Blu-Ray on Tuesday.

Beanie Feldstein from last year’s Book Smart stars in Coky (“Harlots”) Giedroyc’s HOW TO BUILD A GIRL (IFC Films) as Johanna Morrigan, an ambitious 16-year-old from Wolverhampton, England who gets a job at music magazine “D&ME.” She creates an alter-ego pseudonym for herself in Dolly Wilde, and quickly learns she has to be mean in order to succeed and earn the respect of her peers as one of the UK’s most hated music journalists, even after falling in love withs (and then betraying) rock star John Kite (Alfie Allen, who also was on “Harlots”).

Based on British journalist Caitlin Moran’s 2014 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, I definitely should have liked this movie more, having been a regular reader of the Melody Maker around the time Moran would have been writing for it. The screenplay she’s co-written adapting her own book isn’t great, and everyone involved just seems to be trying too hard to be funny and failing miserably.

I guess the biggest issue, once you adjust to Beanie Feldstein’s British accent, which falls somewhere between Harry Potter and the Beatles, is that it’s hard to care about her character even a little, since she’s acting all quirky one second and then becomes a monster as the film goes along. Johanna is just annoying and when she transforms into “Dolly,” she becomes even worse.

Paddy Considine plays Johanna/Dolly’s father, who still has aspirations of being a rock star after giving birth to a huge brood of children. There’s a few other small roles from other actors like Emma Thompson, Michael Sheen and Gemma Anderton, many of them portraying Johanna’s author inspirations talking to her from her wall of idols.

How to Build a Girl is just another example of the sad state of British comedies, although there are a few shining stars like last year’s Yesterday, which was in my top 10, and this year’s Emma. This one just isn’t particularly funny, and there’s a general feeling of been-there seen-that, as it tells a fairly typical rise and fall story where Dolly’s debauchery turns into an awful human being, and it’s not like I liked her much to begin with. She isn’t as funny as intended and then she gets awful, and it’s impossible to feel bad for her when things ultimately go wrong. Anyway, five minutes later, everything is fine.

It’s the type of autobiographical thing that a writer writes to make themselves look like some kind of hero, and it reminds me a bit of last year’s Blinded by the Light in some ways. h I know a lot of people liked the movie, but I wasn’t really a fan at all. This movie is even less funny and not particularly original, making it feel about as pretentious as the British music press became in the ‘90s. Either way, it will be available to watch at home via VOD as well as in some open drive-ins where applicable.

There are a ton more movies this week, and unfortunately, I didn’t get to fully watch many of the movies below, though I still hope to watch more of these over the next few days and may add a few more reviews.

I heard good things about Christophe Honoré’s comedy ON A MAGICAL NIGHT (Strand Releasing), particularly about Chiara Mastroiani’s performance as Maria, which won her an acting award at last year’s Cannes. She plays Maria, a woman dissatisfied with her marriage of 20 years, who moves into a hotel room across the street after getting into an argument with her husband (singer Benjamin Biolay). I haven’t gotten through it yet as it seems, like so many French movies, to be very talky, but I’ll try to get to it. It will open virtually as part of Film at Lincoln Center’s virtual cinema, following its debut at the “Rendezvous with French Cinema” series that was unfortunately cut short midway this year.

Also continuing this weekend is Cinema Tropical’s “Cinema Tropical Collection” of Brazilian films, this week’s being Caetano Gotardo’s YOUR BONES, YOUR EYES, in which the filmmaker stars as João, a middle class São Paulo filmmaker who has long conversations and monologues with the people around him.

There are a few other docs available virtually this week, including Sasha Joseph Neulinger’s REWIND (FilmRise), a collection of home videos from 20 years ago, when his father would film family gatherings but also documenting a family secret that would lead to a media firestorm and a court battle. The film will be available to stream and download on iTunes, Prime Video, GooglePlay and Microsoft this Friday, and then will air as part of PBS’s Independent Lens on Monday, May 11.

The Maysles Cinema in Harlem is continuing its virtual cinema with Alex Glustrom’s MOSSVILLE: WHEN THE GREAT TREES FALL, which will be available for a 48-hour VOD rental for $12 from Thursday through April 14 with a Zoom QnA with the filmmakers on Saturday at noon Eastern. The film centers around Mossville, Louisiana, a community founded by former African-American slaves that has been overrun by petrochemical plants and toxic clouds that have forced residents from their homes. Glustrom’s film focuses on Stacey Ryan, a man who refuses to abandon his family’s land and fights for his own human rights.

Apparently, William Nicholson’s HOPE GAP (Screen Media) is getting a second chance to be seen on VOD after a rather half-hearted theatrical release on March 6. It stars Annette Bening as Grace who is dealing with her husband of 29 years (Bill Nighy) leaving her and how that break-up affects their grown-up son (Josh O’Connor).

Following its premiere as part of the virtual Tribeca Film Festival, Emily Cohn’s sex comedy, CRSHD (Light Year), will get a virtual theatrical release in New York, LA and other regional markets. It stars Isabelle Barbier as college freshman Izzy Alden who goes with her best friends (Deeksha Ketkar, Sadie Scott) on a journey to help Izzy lose her virginity.

Also in select theaters, on demand and digital this Friday is José Magán’s The Legion (Saban Films/Paramount), starring Mickey Rourke, Bai Ling and Lee Partridge. It takes place during the invasion of Parthia where two Roman legions are brought to a standstill in Armenia’s snowy mountains where they’re dying from the cold. Their only hope against the cold and the Parthian patrols is half-roman soldier, Noreno, who must cross the mountains to find the men who can help them change the course of this losing battle.

On VOD starting Thursday is Spa Night director Andrew Ahn’s Driveways (FilmRise), starring Hong Chau from HBO’s “Watchmen” and Alexander Payne’s Downsizing as Kathy, a single mother who is travelling with her 8-year-old son Cody (Lucas Jaye) to her dead sister’s house with plans to clean and sell it. There, she befriends a Korean war vet named Del (played by the late Brian Denneny), who quickly bonds with her young son.

Also in theaters and On Demand is Tom Wright’s Walkaway Joe (Quiver Distribution), starring David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, a film about an unlikely friendship between a young boy and a wandering loner, who helps the boy look for his father in pool halls across the country.

STREAMING AND CABLE

This week’s Netflix offerings including the comedy special, Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill, presumably taped at one of his nights in residency at the Beacon Theater. The hour-long special is now available and has been said might be Seinfeld’s last special. The Michelle Obama doc, Becoming, will also be on Netflix by the time you read this. It’s the first feature length doc from Nadia Hallgren, and its produced by the Obamas, much like the recent Sundance opener, Crip Camp, and last year’s Oscar winner, American Factory. The second season of Dead to Me also debuts on Friday as well as a number of other series.

In case you missed it earlier in the week, you can now watch last year’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on Disney+, which means the entire nonology is now on Disney+. You can also watch a new docuseries about the making of last year’s hit, The Mandalorian, called Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, which has Jon Favreau doing roundtables with some of the creatives with the first episode, “Directing,” now on the service and the second episode, “Legacy,” premiering on Friday.

The new Hulu animated series, Solar Opposites, will premiere on the streaming service this Friday. It’s the new series co-created by Justin Roiland and Mike McMahan (respectively the co-creator and former head writer of Rick and Morty), and it features a voice cast that includes Roiland, Thomas Middleditch, Mary Mack and Sean Giambrone with a huge line of guest voices, including Alan Tudyk, Alfred Molina, Christina Hendricks, Tiffany Haddish and many, many more!

The final film in Lionsgate’s Friday Night at the Movies will be Keanu Reeves’ John Wick, which will show for free on the Lionsgate website on Friday night starting at 9pm Eastern.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #Arkansas #BlueStory #ValleyGirl #HowToBuildAGirl #Clementine #SpaceshipEarth #Streaming #VOD #Digital

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bryonysimcox · 4 years

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You've Got to Look for the Good Stuff: Week 14, Spain

Like light is to darkness, this week has been an antidote to the last. My mood has lifted and the days have flown by, as lockdown continues and we do too.

Sunshine is a simple remedy. Each day this week has been warm and dry, if not bright and sunny too. It’s allowed us to live more inside-outside, which not only makes life easier but lifts my mood. It’s been a stark contrast to the constant rain and cold which dominated last week’s blog post.

I’ve also loved seeing pictures of children out in the streets and parks again, as Spain slowly lifts its coronavirus measures. It’s almost incomprehensible to imagine what it must be like for all these youngsters, many of whom have been cooped up in city-centre apartments with their siblings and parents for weeks and weeks. Even with the generous garden we have here and our weekly walks to the supermarket I’ve been going borderline insane, so I shudder to think how isolation has affected kids and their mental health.

Gaba Podcast live streams continue to punctuate my week. Adam Martin, whose podcast I mentioned in Week 10’s post, shares breathwork and meditative practices that have really helped me ease my busy mind. One of the things Adam talked about this week was what we consider to be ‘exercise’, in light of zealous Brits moaning that people sitting in the park, standing still in public and seemingly staring into space are breaking government-imposed controls around exercise. Adam argues that we consider sport and movement in open space an essential part to looking after our physical health, whilst ignoring the ‘exercise’ or psychological nurturing that our mental health deserves.

While this pandemic takes lives, we need to keep in mind the impact that social distancing is having on our psyches.

I titled this week’s digital diary entry ‘You’ve Got To Look Out For The Good Stuff’ because I’ve realised that there’s plenty of good stuff around, but quite simply, you’ve got to look for it. That might sound pretty obvious, but in comparing this week to the last, I can see that the main thing that’s changed isn’t my situation, but more so my mindset. Admittedly, the sunshine has made a huge difference, but apart from that, we’re still stuck in lockdown in Spain in the same physical, geographical and financial situation that we were in last week.

What’s caused this shift in mindset? Honestly, I don’t know. I think life in lockdown is making us act in all kinds of strange ways, cycling through an emotional spectrum so extreme we’ve rarely experienced it before and yet now feels like the norm. Tears, laughter, smiles and frowns easily paint my face in a matter of hours. So maybe my mood this week has just been luck. But as my shifted mindset has worked its magic, somehow I’ve seen and experienced little nuggets of ‘good stuff’. I hope that some of you have seen and enjoyed those nuggets too, wherever you are.

After rain left the road to the supermarket blocked, we finally made it to the shops this week, when the water subsided.

Perhaps fearful of another rainfall, this time we piled the trolley high in the local Aldi and returned home to stock up the cupboards. A plentiful fridge has resulted in some more cooking adventures - this week including George’s new specialty, Spanish omelette, and a new fave of mine too, veggie paella.

We picked and podded the final batch of broad beans this week, and helped to dig up the patch where they were growing to make way for the vegetables of the coming season: tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers and peppers. One of the inadvertent blessings of being ‘marooned’ here in Catalunya has been to see and enjoy the changing of the seasons, and my interest in food growing and land management increases with them. George and I have always said we’d like to live in Spain in a self-built tiny house with a bit of land, and somehow we’ve landed in a situation right now that’s not far off! In addition to the vegetables we can get from the garden, I’ve been buying fresh eggs from the neighbour (often still warm from the coop!) which is a real treat.

(images, left to right) ‘Why simple changes [like growing food] are really profound’ a lovely illustration I discovered from Brenna Quinlan, George prepping the soil for tomatoes, and my new favourite thing to cook, veggie paella.

Food isn’t the only ‘good stuff’ to be grateful for. Since I mentioned Simon Mair’s article in my post from Week 11, I’ve been researching ‘Ecological Economics’ and its potential to lead us towards more just and sustainable ways of living. That research finally came to a head this week, when I had the pleasure of interviewing not only Simon himself but also friend and futures thinker from Mumbai, Mansi Parikh.

Making a video about alternative economic futures which address some of the challenges posed by Covid-19 is turning out to be a bit of a challenge in itself!

The interviews with Simon and Mansi were utterly fascinating, and I was so grateful to be able to talk to two super knowledgeable folk, who like me, are passionate about the future and how we can make it better. They shared their time and their insights, and now I’m left with over 150 minutes of recorded zoom calls to make sense of!

I want to use these interviews to make a video which engages people who perhaps wouldn’t usually be interested in economics, without ‘watering down’ the message or intent of the film. It’s such a hard balance to strike, to create something which is at once accessible and engaging but also rich with ideas. As the week progresses, I’ll start editing the footage and hopefully the narrative of the video will reveal itself.

One of the best things about making a new video is the chance to do loads of research! There have been so many articles which have got my brain buzzing, from ‘no-growth’ economics to deliberative democracies, and I’ve also just started reading ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ which is a manifesto for a post-Capitalist future. Even if this research doesn’t directly inform the video I’m working on, it serves to inspire me. I’ve actually found myself a few times this week almost overwhelmed by how much interesting media there is out there to consume, and often just resort to adding thing to my ‘read later’ list, or quoting my favourite gems on Twitter.

(images, left to right) Recording interviews with Mansi and Simon, and my latest reading project...

The realisation of a project we began in January, ‘Place Portraits: Episode 1’ was finally released this week.

George had the idea a while ago to create a video series exploring cities and places through analogue photography. Whilst it was a super simple idea, we thought these short, laid-back videos would contrast with some of the longer-format stuff or more informative films we’re hoping to upload on the Broaden YouTube channel.

Back at the start of our trip we shot on a roll of Kodak Portra 400 and Fujifilm C200, using the trusty Pentax that was once George’s dad’s camera. We’d had the photos back from the processing lab for a while, but have only just completed the edit and got the film online, which is such a nice feeling. We’ve had some lovely responses to the resulting four-minute video, and I’ve especially valued constructive feedback so we can start to think critically about what Episode 2 might look like.

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(video) Place Portraits: Episode 1 - Paris

Since ‘The Hundred Miler’ hit 90K views this week (which in and of itself is pretty nuts), I knew I had to temper my expectations about how many views we’d get with Place Portraits. Even though it’s not far past 200 views, each and every one of those views counts and I’m chuffed to see it finally online. Watching Broaden’s audience slowly grow has also served as great motivation to submit The Hundred Miler into film festivals, a process which we started this week.

There’s probably plenty more good stuff which deserves to be celebrated, but the one which can’t go unmentioned is of course the company of others.

Embracing what has become a routine activity for many of us these days, I’ve spent some cheerful hours on phonecalls and videochats to others across the globe.

This week included a three-way call between Ireland, Australia and Spain with dear friends that George and I used to live with catching up on career plans, cats and newfound hobbies. I also enjoyed a game of movie charades (which involved some impressive commitment from some people!) and even attended an evening of ‘drag queen bingo’. These digital hangouts leave me asking ‘Would I be connecting with friends and family this much if the world wasn’t in a global pandemic?’ and I think the answer would be no.

(images) Just some of the beautiful humans that feed my soul.

I’m grateful that these human connections are now much more of a priority. In being restricted to a simpler and more isolated way of living, we’re certainly reassigning value to the things that matter. That’s something which I’ve found from making the economics video and learning about the idea of value, but also something I’ve felt in a visceral way when a phone call with my parents or a friend leaves me beaming.

There’s so much good stuff out there, you’ve just got to be open to it.

#hiacevan #digitalnomads #COVID19 #coronavirus #lifeinlockdown #quarantinegratitude #goodstuff #BryonyandGeorge #Broaden #PlacePortraits

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itscoldoutsidefilmsthings · 5 years

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A 3rd year film festival retrospective.

Scumdance (Reno’s premiere underground film festival) has just completed its third year. As such, this would probably be a good time for a little retrospective and as the festival’s sole proprietor/curator I would be glad to let a little light shine into the inner workings of what it takes to start a film festival, what it takes to keep it running, why I do this in the first place, and the lessons learned along the way.

How did we get here? In late 2016 I was having conversations with friends, co-workers, bandmates and fellow film nerds about how there was real lack of local film festivals geared towards horror, exploitation, underground, B-movie, etc. types of films. At the time our band’s practice space was in a warehouse on the edge of town where a loose artist’s community of sorts had taken shape. Pottery studios, sculpture gardens, graffiti murals, custom hot-rod builders, welding shops, theaters, antique dealers and so much more was all happening in this row of warehouses. One particular spot became hugely inspirational. Next door to our practice space was an event location (for lack of a better term) called the Black Rock Drive-In. A novelties collector had taken several old cars cut them down, installed benches within and parked them in front of a movie screen like an old-time drive-in movie theater, complete with a western setting sun mural painted on the warehouse’s interior. Combine this with his collection of Airstream trailers, mid-century furniture and appliances, and WWII memorabilia and you had the makings of a great film set.

Standing outside that warehouse on a chilly evening, post band practice, and musing with our bass player Perry Disgrace, the thought was born… “We should totally put on a mondo-bizzaro film day with crazy movies and bands and just throw a party.” In the true DIY spirit of punk rock, the idea was born and efforts were put in place to manifest this reality. When mentioning the idea to co-worker and fellow film nerd Gilbert Leiker, he responded “You should call it Scumdance and have the skanking guy from the Circle Jerks albums carrying a camera.” Boom. Done. Within 20 minutes I had the logo and artwork in place. I have a habit of taking ideas and running with them, even if they are not my own. As Pablo Picasso is reported to have said “good artists borrow, great artists steal”… most likely he “borrowed” this from T.S. Eliot.

As for the details of what it takes to put on a film festival, it’s honestly not all that hard. All you need is a laptop, a projector, a screen, a sound system of some sort, some chairs, a venue, a Film Freeway account and a website. Having submitted a good number of my short films to a variety of film festivals and having received all manner of rejection (more on that later), the drive to experience critical evaluation of films from the other side was also a strong motivator in bringing this festival about. I already had a website devoted to my filmmaking endeavors. Adding a page listing the event details and linking it to a Film Freeway account was straight forward. Acquiring the necessary hardware and physical assets was just a matter of pooling resources and gathering items that I already had. The matter of finding a venue has at times proved challenging. The aforementioned Black Rock Drive-In closed. Our favorite dive-bar, in which we hosted the event’s first year, has closed. Finding the right venue that has a bar, allows outside food to be brought in, while having the right mix of size, space, seating and availability hasn’t been easy; but we have been fortunate enough to work with some fantastic bar owners who have been very accommodating.

The festival itself, wouldn’t be what it is without the amazing filmmakers who have submitted some truly incredible films and the ever enthusiastic judges. The panel of judges was built from a pool of friends some of whom I’ve worked with on previous film projects, some just having shown an overwhelming interest in film and some asked to join the panel after having submitted to previous year’s festivals. It is this last group with whom I am most excited to work.

So why would anyone do this? It’s a question I ask myself every year. Does it pay off when you consider: The countless hours spent watching, rating, and reviewing the films; scheduling a date, finding and coordinating with the venue ,updating FF and the website, attending local meetings to be included in Reno’s Arttown, writing press releases to be distributed on horror sites, selecting the films, sending out acceptance and rejection letters, scheduling a run of show, setting up all the equipment, running the festival, bringing food and snacks? By the time I finish up the event I find myself exhausted. It wouldn’t seem that sitting in dark room watching movies all day would be that taxing, but mentally, and emotionally it takes a toll… hoping nothing goes wrong technically, hoping that everyone (or at least most attendees) find something enjoyable in the films, hoping that the venue owner and bar staff are not completely annoyed with the films and are making a decent amount of tips, and hoping that there is enough attendance to make it all worthwhile. While it might be “easy” to put on a festival, putting on a quality festival takes effort. That’s effort I’m willing to put in. I want to make it the kind of thing I would be delighted to attend.

Of the benefits that come from running a festival, the number one has to be the relationships established. This is the reason we make films in the first place. It’s all about human connection. As I was saying above it has become our practice to ask previous year’s submitters to become next year’s judges. George Sukara, a producer from a film submitted in the first year (HELL! The musical), has become an instrumental part of the festival. His critical insights in judging and undying support have been phenomenal. It was great to have him at the festival, hosting one of the Q&A sessions, and bringing with him a crew of folks from San Francisco. One of the other connections made that first year was a gentleman by the name of Michael Joy who brought us a film (Red Christmas) with Dee Wallace of Kujo fame. I’ve been working with Michael on spreading the word about Scumdance through his connections with Artsploitation Films and Horrornews.net. The second year brought us some great filmmakers from Canada and Indiana, in Grace Mathisen and Adam Laughlin respectively. Their films were superb, and it was great to have them there in person. They too have gone on to become valued Scumdance judges. This last year, brought us filmmakers from Toronto, Houston, and Los Angeles. The Audience favorite, Llamageddon (it’s exactly as it sounds) was written and directed by a young woman who was going by the name “Howie Dewin.” Her astonishment at winning overrode even her astonishment at being entered in the festival at all (apparently someone on her production team entered the film without telling her as a fun prank). Even after having a breakfast coffee and a decently long discussion with her, I never did find out her real name. We’ll be stoked to have her as part of the judging staff next year, that is if she responds to her “howiedewin” email.

One of the other great benefits of running a festival (or being a judge) is the experience gained by viewing so may films, of all quality levels. You learn all the things not to do when making a film. You see time and again, the overused tropes, the stock and often pointless dialogue, the desire to shock without attention to narrative, and films that are far, far longer than they need to be. After all this one quickly gains an appreciation for audible dialogue, well thought out story lines, character development, motivated camera movement, inspired score/soundtrack, and tightly edited scenes.

Another wonderful discovery has been the insight into cultures and communities throughout the world that one would not have accessed otherwise. It has been amazing to see films submitted from the US, Canada, The Netherlands, India, the UK, Austria, Iran, Italy, Mexico, and even Belgium. In particular the films we receive from Iran have been nothing short of mind blowing. There is something so special about those films. They tend to be intensely creative, original, inspiring, and chock full of touching humanity in a way that almost makes me reluctant to place them amidst our other less wholesome faire. Also of note, are the LGBT films we receive. This year we had a film dedicated to trans-persons from Nepal, that was a rare insight into portions of the world not ordinarily seen.

As previously promised, I think it’s worth mentioning the feedback process. One common thing that I noticed from festivals I was submitting to, was a lack of quality feedback. For way too many festivals, it doesn’t seem they could even be bothered to change the judging status on Film Freeway… or if they did, it wouldn’t be changed until well after the event date. For other festivals, they would change the status and send out the standard generic rejection emails. While they were intended to soften to the blow of rejection, they would do little to inform or provide one with any sense as to what could have been improved on the film…. no information on what exactly about the film caused it to fall short of the mark. It was with this experience in mind that I personally made the decision to include judge’s commentary in both the acceptance and rejection letters. I feel it’s the least we can do to provide the filmmaker with meaningful feedback.

This decision has mostly been met with appreciation, but in some cases the feedback was viewed as “arrogant, presumptuous, and dismissive.” I can certainly understand how after spending the enormous amount of time, energy and effort that it takes to make a film how one would be incredibly protective of the work. One exchange with an initially upset but later apologetic filmmaker, gave me clear cause to stop and think about my intentions and motivations. Was I intentionally levelling overly harsh criticism against those who submitted to my film festival, as a way of feeling superior for the failings of my own films? It’s certainly something I need to be cognizant of going forward. In the future, I hope to continue providing the judges commentary, but will most likely do so after an explicit opt-in scenario.

In regard to my own films, I’ve come to realize with much more clarity than ever that my films were being rejected for completely valid reasons. I’ve seen what it takes to make a good film and the number one rule is to be entertaining. In the age of short attention spans and a bajillion choices, it’s difficult (but more important) than ever to gain and hold someone’s attention.

So what’s next for Scumdance? One exciting possibility discussed with the San Francisco crew is the idea of taking Scumdance on the road. Perhaps we select the best films from the past 3 years and do a screening in SF or LA. At some point it would be nice to get Scumdance into a proper movie theater as well, a but the lack of any historical or art house theater in Reno limits our options. Another exciting possibility is the idea of bringing in a real host… someone with real entertainment value... someone like the subject of this year’s winning documentary, the Phantom Troublemaker.

Of course, I couldn’t do this without the love and support of my wonderful wife Amelia. In all it’s been a great experience that has promoted growth in me as a filmmaker and as a person. It’s been the impetus to build meaningful relationships that I otherwise would not have done and has given me cause to provide much needed exposure to small films. This is something I want to keep doing, while growing the festival in organic and manageable ways.

Viva Le Scumdance!

Travis Calvert

#film #film festival #indie Film #diy projects

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thesinglesjukebox · 6 years

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ROSALíA - MALAMENTE

[8.23]

This song won Best Alternative Song and Best Urban Fusion/Performance, and based on this score, probably should have won everything else too.

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Flamenco-pop, flamenco-tinged R&B, even flamenco rap and flamenco-reggaetón, are nothing new -- past heroes like Rosario, Bebé, Chambao, Papá Levante and fusion legends Ojos de Brujo all have enjoyed international projection and can be considered Rosalía's natural predecessors in that aspect. Rosalía gladly and effectively acknowledges that tradition while contributing to it with her empowered R&B-flavored chants, and the latin urban sensibilities in El Guincho's productions. "Malamente" establishes an interesting dynamic between the modern synths and pads and the traditional palmas a compás, which work in counter-rhythm to her cante, for a track that offers a glimpse into the percussive complexities of rumba while feeling at home in one of those alt-pop playlists. It's a new step in flamenco's legacy. [8]

Crystal Leww: My introduction to Rosalía was her feature on J. Balvin's latest album, a quiet, downtempo, fluttering track among an album of reggaetón bangers. At the Latin Grammys, she beat his monster of a tune "Mi Gente" for Urban/Fusion performance with "Malamente." It's easy to see why: this is slinky and sensual with plenty of interesting flourishes in the production as well as her very own vocal performance. It's perfect critic bait, as it stands out as driving towards a very specific sound, a re-imagining of a largely left behind musical genre in flamenco. The handclaps, the asides, the breaking of the glass, the reverb, the "tra! tra!" -- all of these should take you out of such a quiet song, but Rosalía does just enough without crossing the line. Enric Palau, director of Sónar music festival in Spain recently said that she could be the Rihanna of flamenco. And don't get me wrong, I love Rihanna, but she never had the vision to do something like this. [7]

Alfred Soto: Relistening to Radiohead is not an experience to which I often submit myself, but their use of hand claps, programmed or otherwise, loosened me up for what Rosalía attempts on "Malamente," complete with mournful keyboard. [7]

Nortey Dowuona: Twirling, circular drums wind up around the soft synths, with Rosalía's gentle, short singing and claps carefully herding them together into the field. [8]

William John: We don't have any Andalusian writers on the Singles Jukebox roster, as far as I know, which is a shame in this instance because I've been desperate to read something in English about Rosalía from that perspective that isn't a garbled translation derived from Google software. Rosalía is Catalan, but has sent shockwaves through Spain that are slowly permeating into other Western markets (I confess to learning of her from a Dua Lipa tweet); the shockwaves are in part due to her striking videos, overseen by CANADA (also responsible for that memorable El Guincho video a few years back, who incidentally handles production here), but also for her use of gitanx imagery and accents as a non-gitana. She's addressed these matters with defensiveness and naivety in interviews, and thus in Spain is the subject of some controversy. To her credit, she has worked with Las Negris, a group whose members are part of the Montoyita flamenco dynasty, on this song and elsewhere on her album El mal querer, and she seems to be both a devoted student of flamenco tradition and aware of her place in its world. Her designation as a pioneer, as someone revolutionising a centuries-old artform, seems to have come from media outside Spain more than anywhere else, and it's important to acknowledge that though she presents a perspective that may initially strike Anglo listeners as unusual, she's not the first and likely not the last flamenco artist to add personal flourish to this esteemed cultural institution. But when you watch her in "Malamente," with its portentous murmuring and dramatic "tra TRA!" hook -- one of the year's most insidious -- as she variously claps with menace leaning over the steering wheel of a truck, is raised up by forklift like a martyr to the pyre, and sits atop a frozen motorcycle, flagged down by a matador, with an expression of incredible intensity, isn't her baptism as a revolutionary, future world conqueror the most obvious conclusion? [9]

Iris Xie: Something about this song is instinctual, velvety, and haunting, like it will grab you by the chest and then dare you to explore what lies in the world that it came from. Inside of its vortex, it conjures up the perfect environment for being audacious enough to dance on a cutie that you see at the club, and there's enough breathing space in between the instrumentals and vocals to cultivate a chemistry and charisma after. There's a stunning pre-chorus from 1:34 that reminds me of the high, dreamy vocals in some Bollywood sequences, before it drops back low into a whispered chorus that undulates with a mesmerizing repetition. You can't help but dance along to that. It's a siren's song, remixed for 2018 and creeping along to a venue near you. [8]

Stephen Eisermann: Growing up, I was always enthralled by (what I thought was) gypsy culture. Clearly, the problematic media portrayals in both Disney movies and novelas my mom had playing in the background gave me a limited and exoticized view of gypsy culture and even now as I've taken the time to learn more, its hard to shake predispositions if the past. This song, very clearly R&B but with Latin tinges and seemingly Arab pop phrasing, is a culmination of all sounds that feel mysterious, as if the sound coming from my speakers form together to make that image of a gypsy from my past. All at once I'm enthralled and embarrassed, knowing that I should move past negative media portrayals yet entranced by the imagery this song brings to mind. [8]

Pedro João Santos: By releasing "Malamente," Rosalía achieved that moment of conquering the pop sphere all at once, in the span of 2:30. Aong with co-author El Guincho, Rosalía never relinquishes control, and they distill flamenco into sleek, diligently-precise soundscapes. That sonic mesh, differing from the traditional approach taken on her last album, has been the subject of controversy. I highly recommend reading from all points of view on the matter of cultural appropriation and, although that of the Andalusian community prevails, it's hard to grasp everything. This is a single that defies expectations of what an inaugural moment of pop domination is -- its foreboding edge, the multilayered sound, the conceptual richness (most evident if its parent album) -- and takes other expectations to an extreme -- vocal prowess is conspicuous, but my favorite part is how hooks are thrown relentlessly at the forefront and into the background. Within just ten seconds: "Así sí? Tra tra! Mal, muy mal, muy mal, muy mal... Mira! Toma que toma." Instant yet disorienting, seamless yet complex. In any measure other than cultural sensibility, as Rosalía's use of flamenco will continue to be the center of debate: it's bulletproof. [9]

Will Adams: The handclaps alone would have convinced me, but it's Rosalía's steely confidence that makes "Malamente" worth revisiting. [7]

Edward Okulicz: It's a short song, but it's so packed with intoxicating and instantly gratifying hooks and smaller, subtle details that make it so satisfying to dive deeply into. Rosalía's voice embodies so many moods in such a short time that one can't help but be impressed at her performance and composition. She sings, she whispers, she interjects her catchiest lines with other catchy parts. The clapping rhythm is infectious, and the song generates so much heat I'm sure my blood raised the temperature of my body a couple of degrees after having it on repeat for an hour. After that, I put it on for another hour. [9]

Juan F. Carruyo: Some friends of mine hyped Rosalía to me by claiming she was "inventing a whole new genre," which is probably a disservice to the successful fusion she and her co-conspirator El Guincho manage here: a bare bones production that's rescued by a sultry flamenco melody and lots and lots of attitude. This is the one that blew up because it's her most global, retaining just enough of an exotic touch to draw people in -- the handclaps, the slang that gives the song its title -- but also holding back from her virtuous pipes. [9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Rosalía's sophomore album was inspired by a 13th century fable entitled The Romance of Flamenca, a classic love triangle story that centers on Count Archimbaut's jealousy-fueled transformation toward insanity. He eventually imprisons his wife -- the eponymous Flamenca -- in a tower, allowing her to leave its confines for no more than two reasons: bathing and mass. He was meant to represent the very opposite of courtly behavior to the story's readers, and yet, this portrait of a powerful man restricting a woman's life is just as necessary today. There's consequently no greater statement that could have started El mal querer than its lead single, "Malamente." The interaction of its flamenco palmas with minimal percussion and synth pulses pits listeners in a space between the traditional and contemporary. Even more, the spacious world that she and El Guincho create is simultaneously anxious and impassioned. Rosalía's vocalizing glides smoothly along the beat before sharply piercing listeners with jaleo in the form of "illo!" and "tra, tra!" adlibs. In the album's narrative, "Malamente" prefaces Archimbaut and Flamenca's wedding, and the track's subtitle indicates that the song is an omen. What is it foretelling, exactly? Well, it warns of the tumultuous relationship that's to come from the Count and his wife, but it's also a declaration that Rosalía is putting forth regarding her music, that it's going to be charting unfamiliar territory. Critics may, and have, decried "Malamente" as being disingenuous to flamenco's roots, positing that Rosalía is a mere cultural appropriater. This is despite her time spent at the Catalonia College of Music, a school where only one student per year is admitted to studying flamenco, and whose flamenco teacher commented that Rosalía was their most memorable pupil. She also has been vocal in wanting to collaborate with people outside the world of flamenco, and has already met with artists such as Pharrell and Arca. In a sense, Rosalía's critics try to force her into her own proverbial tower, but it's clear that she won't stay inside. With "Malamente," she delivers that very message to whoever will listen, reimagining new stories for Flamenca and flamenco in the process. [9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The way "Malamente" worms into your brain, dancing in as this amorphous thing pulsating polyrhythmically and working in tones just barely within the boundaries of pop music, is deeply compelling. Even more compelling is what Rosalía does with it: over the funhouse-mirror flamenco-R&B palace she builds, the Catalonian singer's precisely sung portrait of fractured fate and consequences feels real and haunted in a way that few pop songs truly are. [9]

[Read and comment on The Singles Jukebox]

#Rosalia #pop #flamenco #Latin pop #music #music review #writing #Latin Grammys

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dylan38sanders · 5 years

Text

Do I Need Haze For My Event? – Whiteboard Wednesday

In today’s episode, we’re tackling haze for events. As an event planner, you’re always wondering how to make the experience better for attendees. Obviously, there are tons of things to take into consideration! It’s easy to let a couple of details slide by you, and you might not ever contemplate certain aspects until it’s showtime. And by then, it might just be too late.

How to use haze at events is a question that pops up frequently. However, how much thought do you actually put into it? Do you even know where to start? Well, worry no more! On this week’s Whiteboard Wednesday, Will Curran answers all of your questions about haze at events. Join him as he walks you through what it is, why you should use it, and the best ways to go about it! https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/pnf851fvab.jsonphttps://fast.wistia.com/assets/external/E-v1.js

Video Transcription – Do I Need Haze For My Event?

What’s going on, Endless fans? It’s Whiteboard Wednesday. We’re dropping some more knowledge bombs, and today we’re talking about the most common question to get around lighting is do I need haze at my event? The question is usually, yes, you want haze, but we’ll talk about what that involves and why you want it really, really briefly.

What Is Haze?

If you don’t know what haze is, it’s basically a very thin particulate of fog, but it’s not the same thing as fog. If you’ve ever been to your Halloween party where the DJ pumps on the fog and this big plume of smoke come out and it’s super-thick, that is not haze. Haze is actually so thin that you can barely even tell it’s there most of the time. It’s just there to make the lights look better, which I’ll explain kind of how that works.

Essentially, the way it works is as a very thin, essentially mist, I will call it, in the air, of this haze. What it allows is that when light passes through it, it bounces off of all these little particulates of vapor and basically creates the look of the beam of light. Have you ever been out on a foggy day and you’ve ever seen headlights and how you can see the beams of headlights? Same concept when it comes to haze.

Should I Use Haze In Events?

How can we recreate that effect and why do I want it for my events? Well, let’s talk about it. Well, when you have haze for your event, particularly it’s good when you have what is called moving headlights. These are the lights that spin in 360 degrees, probably seen them at a club or concert, a lot of them have a very nice, cool tight beam so then, in that way, when you add haze to them, you can get this nice little beam of light.

Now, you probably think to yourself, “Yeah, that’s really cool, but why isn’t the moving headlight cool on its own?” Well, if you do no haze, these beams of light disappear, and you don’t actually see anything between the light and where it projects. Instead, let’s say, for example, if this is projecting a circle gobo before it would show this nice big fat beam of light, but now, it’s only going to show a circle gobo. No beam of light. It’s just going to show where the gobo is.

This is totally fine, but to be honest, not really worth the money. You spend all this money on nice lights, if you’re going to have moving headlights, you might as well do haze. So, again, my recommendation, no haze, you get just this gobo, whereas, when you get haze, you get this nice, cool beam of light. It allows you to fill the air and, to be honest, adds a lot of energy to an event as well.

What Should I Know About Using Haze In Events?

First thing is there are two different types of haze. You have oil-based haze and water-based haze. The difference is that oil-based haze tends to stay in the air a little bit longer than water-based haze. It can actually stay out a little bit further, it usually gives you a bit more bang for your buck, but it has this oily texture to it. It leaves kind of I’ll call it an oil spill around the haze machine, the hazer, whereas, water-based haze doesn’t stay in the air as long. However, there are some good machines that do last a long time, which your AV company should recommend to you, but it is more friendly to venues. It doesn’t leave any sort of residue, it doesn’t hang in the air, it can’t get on carpet or anything like that. It’s a lot cleaner.

With that being said, most venues are going to require you use water-based haze, so if you are asking to do haze for the event, just make sure the AV company is bringing water-based haze. Almost everyone has a water-based hazer for their event. So something to keep in mind, oil versus water, usually you want to stick with water. That’s the best way. If you’re doing an outdoor festival, though, and the sky is the limit and you need to stay in the air as long as possible, you can do oil-based all day long.

What About Venue Restrictions?

First thing they’re going to have to do is because you are putting particulate in the air, is that they can trigger fire alarms, specifically, the sprinkler system, the smoke detectors. It can basically make you think that it’s smoking inside the room and the last thing we want to do is cause a fire alarm to come up and the fire department shows up. What a venue will do is actually forcibly turn off a fire alarm. You might be thinking to yourself, “Well, that could be dangerous, right, what if there’s an actual fire?” It’s a great point.

Well, that’s why a lot of venues will require you to bring down a fire watch. This is when they’ll contact the local fire marshal, and they’ll actually have a fire representative come be onsite for your event. This is basically someone who helps monitor to make sure there’s no fire. If there is, it can be handled all right. To be honest, I’m not a firefighter, so I don’t know exactly what they do, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re going to use haze.

So, What Does This Mean For Costs?

It’s not just the cost of the haze machine, which can be real cheap. It can be $100, $200 to rent, but the cost comes in with bringing this fire watch down. They can charge somewhere $50 an hour, $100 an hour, $200 an hour, just to be there with, keep in mind, sometimes minimum calls as well. They might require you that they be there for five hours, for example. So keep in mind that you might have to bring a fire watch to replace basically turning off the fire alarm system.

Well, what that also means as well in some cases as well is that they also have to submit a permit and get approved as well. So the thing to keep in mind is not only you have a financial responsibility or financial commitment, but also a little bit of a time commitment as well. You can’t make this decision a week out for an event a lot of the time because these permits sometimes take a couple of weeks to get done.

That’s why it’s important to make sure that you submit your permits early on and that you talk to your venue early on about doing haze, even before your contractor AV company even know if you’re going to do haze or no haze. Because the best thing that you can do is always say, “Nope, at last minute, we don’t need the permit, we don’t need the fire watch because, guess what, we’re not going to do haze.” But if you are going to do it, you don’t want to be caught behind the times.

Conclusion

That’s it. Basically, do I need to use haze for my event? It’s obviously up to you and what you’re looking for. Obviously, there’s lots of videos on YouTube that show the difference between haze and no haze, feel free to google those. But the big thing is it makes your lights just look better. The answer is up to you in whether you want to have it, whether these are the headaches that you kind of want to deal with and the things that you want to execute. Sometimes it can be pretty easy. Or if it’s worth it to make your lights look a lot better.

We would love to hear your story and examples about how your event looked a lot better with haze, or maybe an example of how you got around using haze for an event. Let us know in the comments below!

Don’t forget to hit subscribe and the bell icon so you can get notified every single Wednesday when we post Whiteboard Wednesday videos!

Resources:

Beware! AV Fees and Infrastructure Costs You Absolutely Need To Know

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from Endless Events https://helloendless.com/haze-at-events/

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bokaishu · 5 years

Photo

Practice 2: Welwyn Garden City - festival of light event (History research)

When thinking about the festival, I have a general idea of the three projects. I hope that they are a big combination. Although their positions are relatively independent, I think that extending from a historical perspective will give me a clearer idea. So I investigated the history of Welwyn Garden City. And made a timeline to make my ideas as clear as possible.

I found a book and a few pages about the history of Welwyn Garden City, which helped me a lot.

Welwyn Garden City is the 2nd Garden city in the world, with Letchworth Garden City the first , only 20 minutes drive away. The town was designed and built on open fields in the 1920's and 1930's. Incorporating many tracks and farm roads in place and naming areas of the town after local farms covered over in the building process. Handside Farm, Peartree Farm and Hatfield Hyde to name a few. With wide open spaces and gardens and green land built into the designs the town became popular and continued to grow.

There’s very little-to-none evidence that can shed some light on the history of Welwyn Garden City during centuries after the Domesday Book of 1086-87. Welwyn Garden City’s history started in 1920 when Sir Ebenezer Howard laid the foundation of a new city and filled it with nature. Welwyn Garden City was said to be a perfect place to live with scenic greenery, stable political system and amenities to provide a good living for everyone.

One of the key themes of the garden city ideal was self-containment: providing jobs, services, leisure facilities and housing all within one town in a high quality, green and open setting. This has some parallels with modern ideas about sustainable development in the sense that providing a mixture of land uses in close proximity reduces the need to travel.

The town’s historic significance in the field of town and social planning is global, attracting study and visits from tourists and representatives of civic organisations from abroad to visit. Its success led directly to the creation of other new towns such as Harlow, Stevenage and Milton Keynes in the UK. It is often held up as the best example of civilised, sustainable new settlements and a model for others to follow.

By choosing the young architect de Soissons, Howard and his fellow directors had ensured the success of the town’s development. Louis de Soissons was barely thirty when appointed as architect and town planner in April 1920. He submitted his masterplan for Welwyn Garden City less than two months later, and it is this plan (available by clicking here) that over the years has been modified here and there, but has remained the essential backbone for its future development. It remains one of only two garden cities in the UK.

Louis de Soissons chose a red brick Neo-Georgian style for his building design and was keen to conserve as many hedgerows and trees as possible, exploiting the landscape to its fullest extent. But he truly excelled as a street designer and there is no doubt that his finished plan is a masterpiece of town planning. It is still regarded so some ninety years later. In planning terms its significance is global. It is featured in most – probably all – university architectural and urban design courses around the world.

Welwyn Garden City was designated as a New Town shortly after the end of World War II and the fact that its original designer, Louis de Soissons, was in charge of its development from its inception until his death in 1962, was able to maintain its unique status.

However, the ability to maintain its unique status has become more difficult over the years. It remains one of a number of Section 19 towns. This includes Letchworth Garden City, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Bourneville, Port Sunlight and Poundbury but Welwyn Garden City remains unique in being the only Section 19 town not to be controlled by an independent trust.

The fact that a trust was not set up at the dissolution of the Commission for the New Towns was probably a grave mistake. The role of a trust for Welwyn Garden City is essentially born by the local authority planning department which it administers through an Estate Management Scheme – an almost impossible task due to its own conflicting interest as a planning authority.

The uniqueness of the town within the borough has been somewhat compromised over the last few decades but it is hoped that this issue has been recently addressed by the Council re-launching the Estate Management Scheme.

Architecturally, although much of Welwyn Garden City is Neo-Georgian, it is a very simple, pared down Neo-Georgian version, free of too many features and, therefore, eminently suitable for the twentieth century. Although Neo-Georgian revival architecture was not uncommon elsewhere during the 1920s and 30s, the planned, singularly controlled concentration here is unique. On the whole, individual buildings of all styles, public and private, form a collection of the finest domestic architecture of the early twentieth century that is of the highest significance, defining the character of the garden city and vital to its integrity.

Ebenezer Howard’s vision of a Garden City was one that would combine the benefits of living in a town with those of living in the country. It would be a place in which people would both live and work in beautiful surroundings; in a city that would be not only a “city in a garden”, but also a “city of gardens”: an example of good civic design and architectural harmony.

During the war years 1939-45 many local industries were involved in the war effort, Murphy Radio ,building radios and landing beacons for D-Day, and De Havillands (in nearby Hatfield) building aeroplanes and parts. Nabisco have had a factory in Welwyn Garden since the town was built and have been making Shredded Wheat there since they started.

In 1948 The Times newspaper said: "Welwyn Garden City made The New Towns Act possible". The Cambridge professor of architecture Andrew Saint said: "Welwyn Garden City is one of modern Europe's greatest success stories in town-making". The problems of metropolitan and Regional development and urban sprawl, and the need for harmony and ecology are prompting a current resurgance of interest in the 'Garden City ethos' and the kinds of neighbourhoods and communities Howard advocated.

Amalgamation of City and Countryside:

A New Town of Hertfordshire:

In 1948, Welwyn Garden City was given the status of an ‘a new town’ under the New Towns Act 1946. The Welwyn Garden Company (responsible for planning a city in 1919), handed over the ownership, assets, and rights to the Welwyn Garden City Development Corporation. Several stores and markets were opened in 1984 onwards (including Howard Centre, a shopping centre in Welwyn Garden City) after receiving a green signal from Welwyn Hatfield District Council for green spaces, neighbourhood shopping and housing stock.

Historical photos displayed at Welwyn Garden City (photo by zeyu)

Reference:

Filler, R. 1986, A history of Welwyn Garden City, Phillimore, Chichester.

Tripadvisor.co.uk. (2019). Welwyn Garden City: Background - TripAdvisor. [online] Available at: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Travel-g190740-s2/Welwyn-Garden-City:United-Kingdom:Background.html [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].

Harpendentaxis.net. (2018). Welwyn Garden City: History, Facts, and Interesting Information. [online] Available at: https://www.harpendentaxis.net/blog/?p=443 [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].

Welwyn Garden City Heritage Trust - History. [online] Welwyngarden-heritage.org. Available at: http://www.welwyngarden-heritage.org/history/item/123-history [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].

Welwyn Garden City History (2009). [online] Available at: http://welwynhatfield.co.uk/wgc_society/?page_id=33 [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].

WELWYN GARDEN CITY'S BEGININGS.(2009). [online] Available at: http://welwynhatfield.co.uk/wgc_society/?page_id=33 [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].

#Practice #Research And Enquiry

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citizenscreen · 7 years

Text

I’m sure you know by now that Buster Keaton started his movie career a century ago, in New York City in 1917. There have been – and probably will be – several projects commemorating this special anniversary given Keaton is one of the greatest talents to ever appear on screen. I want to give a shout out to one of those celebrations, The Third Annual Buster Keaton Blogathon hosted by Silent-Ology a few weeks ago. You’ll find terrific entries on all things Buster there so be sure to visit. I had all intentions of submitting this entry to that event, but life interfered.

When I learned about the Silent-Ology Buster Keaton celebration I decided to watch three of Buster’s short subjects, rather than a feature because I watch the shorts less often. I mean…not that I go around watching his shorts. Um…anyway, of all the possible entries to choose from – and Keaton made a lot of shorts – I went with two I’ve enjoyed immensely in the past and one I’d never seen in hopes of encouraging all of you to give them a look. So here goes…three cheers for our Buster!

The Cook (1918) – Roscoe Arbuckle, director

The first cheer goes to The Cook, the last film starring Buster Keaton released in 1918, his second year in movies. This is one of the many shorts Keaton made with friend and mentor, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle who’d began his own career in 1909. Arbuckle was the first star in America to systematically direct his own films from 1914 forward and in 1920 became the first actor to be paid $1 million a year with a contract he signed with Paramount Pictures. Needless to say, Roscoe played a big role in helping Keaton fully develop his own genius, a talent yet unequaled. Arbuckle was no slouch in the funny department, however, and it’s important people know that given the notoriety he is (sadly) best remembered for today.

In The Cook Roscoe Arbuckle plays the title character, a short order cook to Buster Keaton’s assistant chef/head waiter. Arbuckle directed, wrote and stars in this gem of a short, which was thought lost for decades until its discovery in 1998. Also in The Cook are Al St. John, Alice Lake, Glen Cavender and Luke the Dog.

Arbuckle, Luke the Dog and Keaton in THE COOK

The premise of The Cook entails little more than I’ve already mentioned, but as far as a vehicle to spotlight the physical prowess of both Arbuckle and Keaton it’s tops. The two exhibit extraordinary juggling abilities as they maneuver the orders in the kitchen. Some of the magic comes by way of perfectly orchestrated camera trickery, but it’s supremely entertaining fare.

As the story progresses, the cook and the waiter are merrily doing their jobs with dancers’ precision when things start going awry. Distracted by the music the band’s playing all hell breaks loose as the cook and the waiter join in the festivities with full-blown dance routines that result in havoc throughout the restaurant.

There is a lot to enjoy in Arbuckle’s kitchen. I am particularly partial to a running gag where the same hot liquid serves as coffee, soup and dressing for all manner of dishes. Arbuckle also manages to pull all sorts of different food from the same vat. Buster in turn is enjoyable as a ladies man in several instances although his efforts are hilariously catastrophic. In other words, if you want 20 minutes of silent fun delivered by two masters you can’t go wrong with The Cook.

One Week (1920) – Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton, directors

The second cheer goes to 19 minutes of unadulterated fun, rather than 20. One Week is one of my favorite Buster Keaton shorts, his first effort after his work with Arbuckle concluded. This movie is testament to Buster’s extraordinary physical talent and the sweetness that accompanied it. Keaton co-wrote and co-directed One Week with Edward F. Cline, but it’s Buster’s brand of charm that you get from start to finish.

The premise of One Week is simple. A newly married couple is given a vacant lot and a house as wedding gifts from the groom’s uncle. The problem is that the house has to be built from scratch, by the numbers, if you will. It’s sort of like Ikea furniture would have been in 1920. Buster, who plays The Groom (Buster), is sure he’ll have no problem putting the pieces together given the straight forward directions available in the box. Except…that the jilted ex-boyfriend of The Bride (Sybil Seely) re-labels the pieces to get back at the couple for marrying. The outcome is pure silent bliss.

I had the good fortune of watching One Week at Grauman’s Chinese Theater as part of the last night’s program when I attended my first Turner Classic Movie Film Festival in 2013. One Week was followed by Buster’s The General and I couldn’t tell you which I enjoyed more. Although the short doesn’t have the powerhouse, signature Buster Keaton physical attributes the longer movie exhibits, the special effects are charming and quite impressive with plenty of pratfalls to go around. I call them “special effects,” but they’re really stunts, which were done with a full-house and sets, not miniatures as one would think. The precision it took to make a few of these stunts come off without a hitch is astounding to think about.

One Week is the one I usually recommend to people who have not seen a Buster Keaton movie before because it has heartwarming qualities as well as his special brand of comedy. The simplicity of the plot lets Buster newbies enjoy the magic while Keaton aficionados stare in wonder at the details that surface during repeated viewings. My mother laughed heartily when The Groom bolts his car to the house in hopes of pulling it over the train tracks and again when she saw a hand come over the camera when The Bride is bathing.

At least a few accolades for One Week must go to Sybil Seely who at 18 years of age (when she made the film) is a perfect match for our star. Seely starred in 18 movies in her short, 5-year career several of which she made with Buster. It’s really too bad she made so few films because hers was a substantial talent as well. Seely retired from films in 1922 after marrying and died in 1984 at the age of 84.

The Playhouse (1921) – Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton, directors

I chose to include The Playhouse in this post because I’d never seen it, but it turned out to be the loudest cheer I have to offer. Well, in the sense that I think it’s an astounding piece of filmmaking. In this vehicle Keaton plays multiple Keatons in a series of sketches in a playhouse. While The Playhouse falls short in the traditional, acrobatic Keaton stunts we know and love, there is a lot here that’s new as far as gags go. The concept of The Playhouse came about after Buster busted his ankle during the filming of another short. Worried about not missing his monthly release schedule, Keaton conceived of this movie in which the laughs come by several other means other than pratfalls. The result is as innovative a movie as I’ve ever seen.

Several Keatons can be seen on camera at once thanks to nifty trick photography. While this is perhaps a fairly routine gimmick, the fact that it is done so seamlessly in 1921 is a great accomplishment. Buster also plays a variety of characters in The Playhouse. He is every member of the orchestra, several members of the audience of all genders and ages, he is a monkey, the leading act and the stagehand to name a few. The Playhouse is essentially separated into two distinct stories after we find out the first half is but a dream. In short, this is a terrific vehicle for all to be reminded that Buster had quite the vast acting talent, which is often overlooked.

With the completion of The Playhouse Buster Keaton fulfilled his original 8-picture contract with Joseph Schenck. The movie was such a hit that he was immediately signed for another dozen movies.

Before I go, a little side note – My mother stayed with me for a month during which time we watched several silent movies together. Silents are perfect for people of all languages for obvious reasons and my mom enjoys them immensely. As you may know she doesn’t speak English and these vehicles allow me more time to actually watch the movies with less translating interruptions. In any case, my mom’s a big Charlie Chaplin fan having seen many of his movies in her youth in Cuba. I was quite surprised to learn, however, that she was not familiar with either Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd. She’d never even heard of them. I find that so interesting. And sad. You can bet I’ll be doing a little research to find out why Keaton and Lloyd movies may not have made it to her small home town. If you know anything about the travels of Keaton and Lloyd movies versus the travels of Chaplin outings leave me a comment below. Thanks!

Three Cheers for Buster Keaton I'm sure you know by now that Buster Keaton started his movie career a century ago, in New York City in 1917.

#Al St. John #Alice Lake #Buster Keaton #Edward F. Cline #One Week #Roscoe Arbuckle #Silent Shorts #Sybil Seely #The Cook #The Playhouse

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thunderheadfred · 7 years

Text

Red Streak: Growing Pains

I’m not sure where this scene will even wind up in the final narrative, but I suddenly, desperately wanted to share this. Why? I don’t have the slightest idea. Lack of emotional regulation, probably. *shrugs*

Other explanations:

it’s been burning a hole in both my hard-drive and my soul

to reassure you the story is far from abandoned, even if I’m currently obsessing over Mordin?

to reassure myself that this crazy AU plot and its associated characters have value?

to give you an update even though there’s been no chapter this month???

This was one of the inception moments for the fic - it’ll probably never end up in the story at all, maybe it just matters as a jumping-off point for me? Mysteries.

I wrote this the first week I conceptualized Red Streak, way back in my other life, before I sold my soul to this fandom. I don’t think it’s the first thing I wrote for it, but if it isn’t, it’s very, very close. (ETA: please keep that in mind, because the writing in this drabble is ahaaaa... rough. Happy to say I’ve improved much since then)

Minor spoilers (regarding Hannah, also Jane’s BFF) but nothing that hasn’t been hinted at very obliquely already.

3,100 words, approximately, and enough emotion that I abandoned my entire life to write this goddamn epic piece of space trash after this... *mumbling intensifies*

Albacus Mindoir Colony April 4, 2169 AD - 0230 hours

Albacus heard the tell-tale bumping and heaving of a poorly inebriated body as it fumbled blindly through the access vents above the warehouse, and he sighed quietly through his mandibles. Jane was even later getting back than he had anticipated, and he had come to expect a certain level of tardiness from her in recent weeks.

The sloppy noise of her scuffling in the ceiling was sure sign that her system was full of some addlebrained teenager poison.

After the mid-season harvest festival last month, he had caught Jane and a half-dozen barely respectable farmer children trying to abscond with some of his storage barrels in the middle of the night. Later, Jane confessed that they had hoped to establish a crude distillery in the office of the old abandoned copper mine. Spirits only knew what they’d been plotting to brew using last year’s corn and rice, but Albacus had hoped that bringing down the underage speakeasy and scaring most of them half out of their minds in the process would have put an end to it. No such luck, apparently.

In the shadowy darkness of the warehouse’s back corner, a ceiling panel wiggled tentatively before swinging open with a steely clap. He could hear his daughter feebly trying to shush the rusty old hinge as it swung free and echoed through the room, but her efforts were in vain. One of her feet poked out, a scuffed high heel dangling precariously from her toe. The impractical footwear gave a few warning tugs before slipping off completely, bouncing down across a stack of boxes and finally meeting the floor with an embarrassing plastic splat.

Really, he would be fully justified to confine her to quarters just for the embarrassing sloppiness of this attempt at covert infiltration.

Her other leg emerged from the access panel and fished for unsteady purchase, then Jane slid out of the vent completely, clinging like an overgrown pyjak to a shelf stocked with decades-old transport batteries and power converters.

Jane had been climbing through storerooms since her mother’s time and had never quite kicked the habit, though she was getting much too tall for it now. The too-short, too-tight, too-little-of-everything dress she was wearing only complicated her descent. In all his life, he had never seen her dressed like this, had never guessed her capable of such obvious, deliberate underage promiscuity.

Had he finally let himself fall victim to the short-sighted idealism of a parent?

No, he decided. This wasn’t his Jane; all of this was recent, and hopefully impermanent.

He forced himself to wait until both of her feet were securely on solid ground before spooking her. She tiptoed over to her fallen shoe, and just as she was bending over to retrieve it, he finally growled, loud enough that she squealed in panic and let fly the only weapon at her disposal.

He caught the shoe an instant before it struck him square between the eyes, forced to admit that her aim was true, even in the state she was in.

“Pari!? Holy shitballs!”

Albacus let the curse go unremarked upon, though he filed it away for later. Plenty of time for that, once the first few rounds of discipline had softened her resolve. He turned her cheap plastic shoe over in his hand and saw that a clearance sticker had been clumsily ripped from the sole. The glossy material was muddy all over, and littered with telling green smudges. A cheap, recent acquisition then, and not a treasured one. Good.

“How was the glider maintenance? I trust Mr. Cortez is coming along well with his project?”

He asked the question knowing it would force her into some lie or other. The real question was how long she would take to crack.

“Yeah, the glider. It was… cool. We decided to paint it black.”

A likely enough story, given that Jane and her friend had been working on that glider together for the better part of the season, but that had not been the only thing his girl had done that night. Not in that outfit.

The Cortez family’s youngest boy was a good kid, one of the few on the colony. He had been a reliable assistant around the spaceport, a natural at taking stock orders and processing the dense inventory. Plus, he was a far better student than Jane - she would have flunked out of introductory calculus if he hadn’t come to her rescue. Yes, Cortez would have made an infinitely preferable match for her poorly-conceived attempts at sexual deviance. Unfortunately for Albacus’ peace of mind, Cortez was hardly the type to chase after girls.

Why did Jane have to reduce herself to the dregs instead - the unworthy bullies who sat glowering at her from the shadows?

Because she was a teenager, he reminded himself patronizingly. A lonely one. Thanks to you.

When she failed to elaborate, Albacus prompted her unkindly to continue.

“After you left Mr. Cortez? What happened then?”

This was unfamiliar territory. Though he was perfectly comfortable disciplining Jane when necessary, his trusted methods had yet to amputate the rebellious streak that had recently started festering in her.

In the past, even when she had acted foolishly, or made the sorts of poor choices that children often did, it was rare that she failed to see the error of her ways, and even rarer for her to continue on a bad path once she knew it was wrong. Whether it was a dangerous weapon misfire or a poorly handled customer, she had always been contrite before, eager for forgiveness, ready to try harder.

He could scarcely bear to watch her slip into angry, libidinous behavior now. Not out of boredom. Not out of loneliness. She was so much worthier than that.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she said with barely contained snottiness. “I’m fifteen next week. Once I’m the age of majority, I’ll only have to answer to myself.”

Ah. With her fifteenth birthday looming, he had long suspected they might be forced into an awkward conversation about turian coming-of-age rituals - and the fact that most of them were meaningless in the face of his exile. It did not please him to have to begin tiptoeing over that delicate minefield early.

“The age of majority? I see. Maybe next week you will wake up a full-grown tarin. At this moment, you remain fourteen years old, and still a human being.”

She opened her mouth to complain, but he silenced her - holding up her ugly little shoe, stiletto drawn like a threatening finger. He pointed to a crate (one half gross order of flame-retardant hull sheeting) and waited silently until she submitted. She was quite a sight: hobbling peg-legged to the crate on one clicking heel, finally plopping down with a tiny, rebellious hiss.

Whomever she had been tousling with had left her hair all lopsided, and her dress was riding up over a pair of ripped stockings. The idea she may have been intoxicated or somehow unwilling during those fumblings made his every parental instinct flair into a blood-rage of protectiveness. She was still woozy with the unknown drug, her sentences streaming together and her movements uncoordinated.

“Are you injured in any way?”

She shook her head, but didn’t look entirely sure of herself either.

“Did you give your consent and use appropriate protection?”

“No.”

When he shot her a look so forceful that it could have decapitated a regenerating krogan battlemaster, she shifted uncomfortably and then corrected herself.

“I mean, I didn’t need to. I - I left.”

“Jane, putting yourself willingly into that kind of situation… this is unacceptable behavior.”

“I’m old enough to be with anyone I want!”

“You are coming into your own, Jane. I won’t... disrespect you any further by pretending as though you are not.”

As if he were testing a whip, he slapped the heel of her shoe against his open palm before continuing. He appreciated the guilty height of her flinch.

“It may surprise my fool child to learn this, but I understand the complications inherent in puberty - in fact, I understand them a far sight better than you do. I am not afraid of you exploring the urges that come naturally to young people - or at least I was not, until you started behaving like my own personal morumplacus. All I ask is that you stop lying to me, and stop associating with lowlifes who have no respect for you.”

“They’re not lowlifes! They’re my friends!”

“If that is true, then why have I yet to meet a single one of them?”

Jane refused to answer, but the red glow that bloomed across her face said more than enough.

“As I thought. Why waste your time with anyone who takes advantage or makes you feel ashamed?”

“Maybe I should be ashamed! I’m a total freak!”

He held fast, her shoe squeaking under the renewed pressure of his grip. He would lose the last scrap of authority he wielded, if he let her see how deeply those words had cut.

Jane wasn’t finished with her self-hating tirade, not by a long shot.

“What the hell am I, anyway? I don’t belong here.”

“What you are is my fool child. But you have one thing right: you do not belong here at all. At the moment, you belong in your bed. Asleep.”

“Your child? I’m not yours at all! How could I be? When I was a kid, I thought it didn’t matter, as long as we loved each other. Hell, you act like it’s no big deal, but that’s not how the galaxy works, is it?!”

She had never armed such a tone against him in her life.

“Jane-”

“NO! I’m not stupid! Ever since I was little, I thought I could be just like you. I thought maybe if I worked hard enough and showed I was good enough I could go to the Military Academy on Palaven and fix everything. I could take back your honor, or win a great battle in your name, or found a colony for you or something crazy like that, and the whole war would be forgiven and we’d be family for real.”

His heart stopped. She had always shown an interest in turian language, tactics, martial forms, whatever he taught her. Still, he had never once allowed himself to slip into the sentimental dream that Jane might want an official position in his family. The realization that she did left him so raw that his response was far more brutalizing than it had any right to be.

“Impossible. You would have no place.”

“I know! I’m not a stupid kid anymore. I’m just some human orphan, I can never be your heir, or your real mahir - or - whatever. I can’t even wear your familia notas.”

“Listen to me, that is not -”

“SHUT UP! I can’t stand it anymore! I know I’ll never be good enough! I don’t know why you even waste your time with a stupid human freak like me!”

She balled her hands against the sides of her head and squeezed her eyes shut as if willing him to vanish into a black hole. He lacked the fortitude to be angry; her self-rejection left him too wounded, shamed him to the core.

“So… if I couldn’t be a turian, then I thought maybe I should join the Alliance, and be a some tough-ass Marine like Mom was. Steve is the only other person on this worthless colony who wants to join up, and for a while it seemed like it might be an okay plan, as long as we stuck together. But what if they take him and not me? What if I don’t act human enough - or they say I’m the kid of a traitor?”

The stream of self-annihilation droned on with increasingly meaningless angst.

“It’s like I don’t have any parents at all - Everyone here hates me - I don’t belong anywhere - What good am I - Why was I even born?”

Her arms fell from the sides of her head and fisted in the hem of her skirt. The material there had started to fray, and she picked stubbornly at the threads.

“So… then… I figured Ripper has a cousin in the Blue Suns, and he acted like it was cool that I knew all this turian warrior stuff. The mercs don’t care - they’ll take anybody. He said if I was a merc, it wouldn’t matter if I thought I was a turian, or a batarian, or even a wild varren, as long as I could kick ass and blow things up. Nobody would care that I was a worthless bastard, or that my mom was just some alien-loving whore-”

“JANE!”

His voice ripped through the storeroom like a concussive grenade, the anger and shock of it was so explosive that he was sure there would be shrapnel embedded in the walls come morning. Jane stiffened for a brief moment, and then she quailed in deep crimson shame.

He barked: “Never repeat such hideous filth about your mother. Or yourself. Ever. Do you honestly believe a single word of that to be true?”

Too stricken to make a sound, she just sank further into the crate and shook her head. After a long fight with herself, her shoulders heaved and she pathetically began to cry.

In the face of her infantile trembling, he relaxed by degrees, then finally gathered up his wits and went to comfort her. He tossed aside her garbage-pile shoe and pulled up another crate (twelve dozen boxes of expired thermal clips ready for recycling.)

Gently mustering the last exhausted, patronizing supply of fatherliness he had, he surrounded one of her small shaking hands with both of his own.

“Jane, enough of this. Master yourself. Never allow jealous, bloodthirsty vermin to make you feel ashamed to be Hannah Shepard’s daughter. Or mine.”

In a tiny voice, she mumbled: “I never should have listened to Ripper anyway. He’s not even that good of a shot.”

He laughed bitterly, without mercy.

“As for him, if you honestly believe you can run off to join the Blue Suns without my catching up with you, then by all means, get on the next shuttle to Omega.

“Just remember: if you ever discharge a weapon without carefully considering the honor behind each bullet, I will personally break every one of your fingers and make sure you can never hold a gun again.”

He raised her hand to his mouth and gave it a human-like kiss, emulating the ridiculous princes in the vids she had watched over and over again as a child. A prince who wouldn’t hesitate to break every bone in her body if she chose to behave like a thug.

“I hate the gangs,” she spat drunkenly, voice full of simple rage, her earlier rebellion instantly forgotten.

Jane had always been transparently pure-hearted. No simple boy with a merc cousin was ever going to change that.

“Mercs are sloppy idiots with no ideals, and you are not that.”

She nodded and swallowed thickly with guilt. Thank the spirits, he finally had his girl back.

“If you keep your head down until your birthday and convince me that you’re ready to start being responsible again, we’ll commence advanced bellixiatum. I can teach you anything you want to know about being a fearsome and honorable combatant, but only if you forget about these predatory wannabes and start acting like my mahir again.”

“Pari…” She was whispering so quietly that he almost didn’t hear. “I’m sorry for bringing up the turian stuff. I know I have no right.”

He sighed and squeezed her small, pink hand.

He found himself wondering, and hardly for the first time, just how the two of them had gotten to this place. The last heir of Regidonis, living a life of lonely obscurity on a human farming colony and raising a stubbornly ferocious child so alien that she couldn’t even share his meals.

His life was so perpendicular to the one he had been groomed for since birth that he occasionally felt impaled by the hard, spare destitution of their daily reality. If he dwelled on the things he had lost - the Tenefalx, the Blackwatch, even a future flirtation with Primacy - it could nearly get the better of him. Most haunting of all was the constant, enduring nightmare: finding Hannah alone on the floor, cold and unprotected. Losing her forever, before ever getting the chance to tell her…

Then he would remind himself that despite everything, he was hardly alone. For all that he had dearly paid, he had won something remarkable. He had his diume.

He would remember how it felt to hold a sleeping child in his arms for the first time. Back when she was still a terrified wreck, as they clung together through those early, tragic nights. Humming broken old melodies against her forehead until her nightmares dissolved. When he had first begun to consider her his own.

How could he hate this life, when he thought about the way his daughter’s lopsided smile never quite stretched across her face the same way twice?

“Fool child,” he said, pronouncing the words more meaningfully than usual. “Have I ever told you what diume means?”

Her head shook a silent no.

“Look at me.”

She didn’t budge. He pulled her hand to the dark red marks on his face, encouraging her fingers to follow the ancient familia notas of the Regidonis clan, a once proud symbol that that no longer meant anything at all.

“My joy.”

She finally met his gaze, and the dark wet smear of her eye makeup started to stream down her cheeks.

“Diume, exempting these few weeks of temporary insanity, you have made me proud with your every breath. If I could rearrange the stars and allow you to become a true Regidonis Gloranumis, I would.

“But this…” he jostled her hand as it traced his notas, “Is no longer mine to give. You and I must find something else, something all our own.”

He wiped the tears and filth from her face, then slowly touched his crest against her forehead.

“Never doubt that I love you. I love you as surely and completely as if you were my natural child. I may not be able to give you my place in the Hierarchy, but we can make our own way, somehow.”

“I love you too, Pari.” Her voice was ragged with a dozen unvoiced emotions, and he curled both hands around the back of her head and held onto her like something precious.

Then she burped quietly, the alcohol rancid on her breath.

“You’re confined to quarters for a month.”

“I know…”

#mass effect #red streak #femshep #turian oc #drabble #Fred writes

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