poeticmythos

[poeticmythos]

#laws of eating chinese food

[poeticmythos]

THERE IS A PREQUEL, Y’ALL

original tweet

#it’s her damn well

[poeticmythos]

i decided all plays are time loops btw. it’s true because they keep getting performed over and over and over and the ending never changes and they can never escape it. if you even care.

#performed over and over and over

[poeticmythos]

“After a performance, I came out into the lobby where a middle-aged Dutch woman was waiting to see me. She politely inquired, “What is Hans doing now?” I responded, “Who do you mean by Hans?” “Hans Buruma, my husband,” she said. As she explained it, Hans Buruma was once in charge of mail delivery at the Amsterdam Central Post Office. Three years before, he had attended Heretics (Jashumon), a guest production from Tokyo presented by my theatre troupe at the Mickery Theater. Just after the play began, two men masked in black leaped down into the audience area, grabbed her husband by the arms, and forcibly dragged him up onto the stage. Once onstage, Hans was dressed in a costume and made up, and before he knew it, he had become a character in the play. At least two times during the course of the play, she clearly saw her husband joining other characters who together pulled the ropes. He seemed to be enjoying himself. But when the play was over, Hans never returned to his seat in the audience. The wife waited for two hours, then went to the dressing room, but the members of the company had already returned to the hotel. That night, Hans failed to come home. After two more nights, he still hadn’t returned. By then, the company had left Holland and moved on to West Germany. She thought he had joined the company, that “they hired Hans for his acting skill.” She thought, “My husband is in the play.” Now. after three years had passed, she was pleading with me, “Please give me back my husband.” I had to tell her that I had never heard this story before. Neither I nor anyone in the company knew a middle-aged Dutchman named Hans Buruma. There was no evidence indicating that such a person had been with us during the past three years. When I told her that I didn’t know him, she was on the verge of tears. “Then where is Hans?” she asked. Three years ago–one middle-aged male post-office delivery worker evaporated into our play. In this case, we cannot distinguish where the drama ends and reality begins.”

— Shuji Terayama, The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea: My Theatre, translated by Carol Sorgenfried in Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji

#my husband is in the play

[poeticmythos]

It’s time to read-again my bad but correct essay about Vampire Weekend’s lyrics from 2010:   ‘Just give it to us straight, Ezra Koenig. Are you saying rich girls deserve their money, or are you saying rich girls are dumb whores? Do you taunt the 57% of America that can’t take real summer vacations, or do you mock the 43% that go on holidays? Was “Mansard Roof” an endorsement of roofs or an anti-roof satire? The Vampire Weekend wars are about class, maybe, but they are also about classification: the lyrics in Contra keep trying to do things we don’t allow pop lyrics to do. We can all adore Jean Renoir (prepschool kid, Popular Front activist, had a rags-to-riches dad) for making films that treat the rich with worship, scorn, anger, affection and grief, but apparently we’re not gonna let a pop album get fancy on us like that. Books and films are supposed to confound us with layers of ideas and conflicting emotions; pop lyrics need to fess up or shut up. So Koenig pleading that his lyrics “aren’t ‘about’ anything but have levels of meaning” can come off like someone yelling “Checkmate!” in the middle of a poker game – obnoxious or confused or both at once.  There’s Ezra Pound and then there’s Ezra Koenig and the whole way that we talk about pop lyrics is about not getting these mixed up. But if I have to choose between Vampire Weekend and the logic of our pop-talk I choose the Vampires. Partly because Vampire Weekend can be kind of great, and mostly cause really I hate the logic of our pop-talk: outside pop-talk, in the actual reality of writing, listening to, and reading language set to popular music, artsy lyrics are as much a part of pop as the distortion pedal.

Since at least the ‘60’s (early Kinks, late Beatles, “The Velvet Underground And Nico’) pop songs have been awesomely and miserably Warhol-damaged, Joyce-Damaged, Brecht-damaged and Dada-damaged. If you love these damages you call them avant-garde and if you hate these damages you call them Art School, which is fair enough— people do become artsy in Art School. But the point is that the last 150 years of trying out new ways to make meanings in art made a big impression on a lot of kids, and a lot of these kids started bands. And other, younger kids who couldn’t care who Gertrude Stein was get the virus listening to Patti Smith and Bowie and the Pixies, and sometimes one of those kids turns out to be Kurt Cobain and then weird abstract lyrics infect the entire pop bloodstream. And the Wu-Tang Clan weren’t nothing to fuck with either. But the way that we talk about pop lyrics never caught up. Because pop-talk is lazy about lyrics, and discussing lifestyles takes a lot less effort than discussing writing styles. It’s easy to profile the Godard-affectations of liberal arts youths, and it’s harder to ask what a “Week End” fixation might say about a band’s approach to sense and nonsense and ideas and images. And if you hate Godard films in the first place, then the easy way is better—but I love Godard films so I’d love to find a little bit of “Week End” in my pop.

Most of what Contra is up to owes more to traditional novels (Waugh, Fitzgerald) than to weird films or experimental poetry, but the whole thing lives or dies on the natural liberties of avant-damaged lyrics: abstraction, collage, contradiction, self-reference. Koenig doesn’t string his crisp, descriptive sentences into narratives but stacks them in layers. Which is beautiful and resonant and complex, and also means that Contra can’t do anything to stop you if you want to believe it’s a country-club anthem. So music critics Googled for the price of Wolford Tights and compiled lists of vacation destinations, but never asked themselves why does this pool-party-album keep compulsively referring to The Clash. Or why do songs that start with “every dollar counts, and every morning hurts” end with a trust fund, and songs about holidays flash to Iraq. Or why it’s called “Contra.”

“Contra” talks about conflicts a lot—small and comfortable ones at first, like wanting to be rich so you can buy the modern art that you don’t want rich people owning (‘White Sky”), or loving your self-made-man father but hating the cultural myth that this kind of success represents (“Dad was a risk taker/ his was a shoemaker”). We also get all sorts of breakups between Koenig and rich girlfriends, and arguments with girls and music-critics about class, and a couple of political and sexual identity-crises. But what really puts the “contra” in Contra is the things that Koenig does with words: On “Horchata” it’s the way that Koenig rhymes “drinking horchata” (road trips, multicultural culture, left-liberal college kids) to “foot on Masada” (Birthright Israel trips where they tell Jewish kids to marry Jewish). On the break-uppy “I Think Ur a Contra,” it’s accusing the ex “you’re a contra” (you’re a hater), and then accusing the ex “you’re not a contra” (you’re not a revolutionary), and then defending —from the ex? from critics?—with “don’t call me a contra” (don’t call me anti-revolutionary). All throughout Contra words fight it out with each other or divide against themselves. Even the punk song “Cousins” is a hissy fit that self-destructs with wordplay: everything Koenig is yelping works both as a rant against posh music critics with self-righteous attitudes and as a hysterical caricature of the Vampires themselves. Koenig sings “You, greatest hits 2006, little listmaker” and you can’t tell if it’s an insult for a critic that made the list (wrote the list) or for a Vampire that made-the-list (got listed).

Which is kind of the point that the repeating chorus of “Me and my cousins and you and your   cousins…” is trying to make—that personal animosity requires a whole lot of common context. Vampire Weekend can get pretty bitchy when it comes to critics who demand to hear them tell rich people to go fuck themselves, but Contra is obsessed with punk and politics in its own terms. You don’t call an album “Contra” and then pack it up with references to The Clash unless you’re aching for a face-off with Joe Strummer’s angry ghost. And every time the shadow of The Clash shows up to haunt the lyrics (“Taxi Cab,” “Diplomat’s Son,” “I Think Ur a Contra’) Koenig gets dead serious and apologetic, and melancholically tries to explain why he can’t do heroic political anger. Koenig is in love with being in the middle— all “You’re not a victim, but neither am I” and “Never pick sides, never choose between two, but I just wanted you”—and honestly he’s doing a good job there. If you’re going to occupy a middle ground in life, then it’s a great idea to use it for creating nuanced, fragile songs about how politics and love and money interact while also constantly reminding us about The Clash.’

#words fight it out with each other or divide against themselves

[poeticmythos]

one of the reasons why "what if people went on a road trip and it was weird" is one of the oldest story types is that a lot of sense of personhood has been, historically, tied to place. the weird road trip says "what if we went somewhere else, where no one knows us, and tried out being a different person".

Odysseus, the famous liar, goes on a weird road trip & over the course of it becomes several different people, and then comes home & is all those people as well as himself, wearing the echoes of those other people

#who rush across the sea

[poeticmythos]

i was actually just thinking about that the other day, again, how probably for my entire life the most important movie i’ve ever seen will be iron man 3. and like if you say something like that people assume you haven’t seen many movies and have terrible taste and i mean both of those things are true of me but like, i’ve seen movies. i’ve seen real movies, that are just about human beings being complicated and fucked up in normal ways, and are also good at cinematography. i’ve loved some real movies, a lot. i am neutral to negative on at this point the majority of mcu content in existence and don’t keep up with any other franchises. i’m not making the argument that iron man 3 is “as” “good” “as,” like, idk, what’s a movie there’s consensus on, um, parasite. or, hell, silence of the lambs, which i just watched and am still not even thinking about so much as quietly vibrating in appreciation of its awesomeness. i know that silence of the lambs is better than iron man 3, okay? and i’ve read, like, yeah, i read fucking books. i’ve read fucking, i don’t know, dostoyevsky. eliots george and t.s. morrison. i’m reading woolf right now. i’m naming shit i love here. i know greatness is out there, and at least sometimes i have the capacity to enjoy it. it’s just that iron man 3 literally changed me as a human being in unbelievably profound ways at a point in my life where high on pain and low on ideas. like that’s not an opinion i hold about iron man 3. it’s an objective description of an event that happened in my life. and it’s not something that had ever happened with any other movie, with any other anything, and it’s something i can’t imagine happening again precisely because of how one way to cleave my life in two is before iron man 3 and after iron man 3. obviously this makes me feel a little fucking crazy. but, well, you should have seen me in 2013!

#not something that had ever happened with any other movie

[poeticmythos]

i understand where this post comes from but as a lover of sitcoms and procedurals i do feel the need to stand up for TV shows that are just wandering around forever. sometimes they are awesome! also they are almost all TV shows in the history of TV and again i get that the tides are shifting but it just is a little funny to read. anyway you couldn’t pay me to watch the mandalorian so idk if that’s a show where you really fucking want them to have a plan (like severance, which will be so fucked if it turns out they’re fully winging it) or a show where it’s cool to vibe (like… ok again like literally almost all shows ever created in history). maybe the second season was bad and they’re shading jon favreau or whatever. also this is not serious nor is it a complaint. i am simply here to defend the right of TV not to have a plan!

#the right of TV not to have a plan

[poeticmythos]

The many faces of Aidan Wilde ❤️

The multiple shades of charisma by my beloved Sammy Rocks 😍

In love with this puppy face since 2001 and never stopping! ❤️❤️❤️

#argylle #aidan wilde

[poeticmythos]

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

#what is your objective

[poeticmythos]

Reasons we need more queer villains:

a) it would be sexy

b) the “queer characters should never be allowed to die in any media” discoursers and the “bad people should never be redeemed” discoursers could mutually annihilate each other and let the rest of us enjoy nuanced narratives in peace

#enjoy nuanced narratives in peace

[poeticmythos]

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

#imitate the trappings of another book

[poeticmythos]

OKAY, LIKE, you gays remember the 1989 hit horror-comedy film Heathers, right? And you remember that our heroes attend the funeral of a dude they murdered, which they get away with by staging his death to look like a gay suicide? (If you haven't seen it, it's a great movie, perhaps my favorite of all time! But of course you've seen it, you're cool.)

So they're at the funeral of this dim-bulb jock, and his meat-headed dad makes a somewhat meat-headed but impassioned speech about his family's loss that ends with him bellowing I LOVE MY DEAD GAY SON! And our villain-hero cynically whispers "How do you think he'd feel if his son had a limp wrist with a pulse?" and our hero-hero laughs at first, then immediately realizes that the whole thing is insane and sociopathic, that she has so fully dehumanized everyone involved as a defense mechanism that she's now able to hold herself smugly superior to the bereaved family of the dude she literally murdered. (Seriously, it's a great movie!)

The point is, she does laugh at first, out of the recognition that JD is quite probably right: that Kurt is granted as a dead gay person a kind of heartfelt, vocal generosity that he would not have received from his family and community if he had legitimately tried to come out as a young man in love with his football teammate, asking people to support his happiness and his future.

And to me that scene sums up so powerfully why Bury Your Gays is insidious. It's not that I want to wrap all queer characters in cotton bunting and never have bad things happen to them ever. It's that edge of bitter laughter that's always there when I think about how much easier it is for people to like a safely buried gay than one who might continue to exist, making uncomfortable demands.

It's that 30 years after I first saw the 1989 hit horror-comedy film Heathers, it's relevant that so many shows are so willing to assert their love and tolerance at a funeral, when they're still so timid about extending either one when it comes to a limp wrist with a pulse.

I mean, there is something funny about it. I laugh every time, just like Veronica does. I suppose that's my defense mechanism.

#limp wrist with a pulse

[poeticmythos]

sometimes I get so angry thinking about ‘The Imitation Game’ that I have to go in a little ‘upset big tantrum room’ in my head for a calm down

like, Benisnatch Cumberque played the same character he’s always plays as an asshole genius and we were all supposed to be okay with it, but it’s basically character slander

at different parts of the movie Turing is described as ‘arrogant, “inhuman,” “narcissistic,” and even “a monster,” in the film he goes against those around him and is shown to periodically ignore and belittle his colleagues

And. I. Am. So. Angry.

Alan Turing was described by his friends and people that knew him as “intensely shy and kindly”, he was said to “inspire loyalty and affection among those who appreciated his unusual gifts” and was “unfailingly generous with his time and expertise, especially toward younger recruits”

He was kind, he was kind, HE WAS KIND, he was kind

he was kind and geeky and awkward and gay, I don’t care if the whole of society doesn’t find that compelling, I don’t care if we don’t value kindness as an attribute in men, he deserved to be loved and respected as he was, not as we wish he was

I am so sorry Alan Turing, I am so sorry your story was not told with care and thoughtfulness, I am so sorry you didn’t get to be shown to be deeply in love with the men you loved, I am sorry your great and terrible tragedy was never unfolded as a kind and brilliant man abused by a horrible homophobic system

You are a hero that turned the tides of history like no other and I am so sorry

#if the whole of society doesn't find that compelling

[poeticmythos]

that ‘when mcr say they want to be dangerous they really mean gay’ post is hilarious but also like. yes. exactly. that’s what they were going for. that was on purpose.

#the math is just a little different

[poeticmythos]

LOVE failed chosen ones. Chosen ones who failed and chosen ones who aren’t special and never were and chosen ones by chance and chosen ones by a choice not their own and chosen ones who succeeded at what cost

#chosen one #unchosen one

[poeticmythos]

To find out if someone is a true Internet denizen, you don't need any fancy tricks. Just watch.

Blue or gold?

Feudal lord or handmaiden?

Fairy or walrus?

#words words words #a walrus on a doorstep is naught but a fairy that we cannot recognize